How Beauty Disrupts Space, Time and Thought: Purposiveness Without a Purpose in Kant's Critique of Judgment

Abstract

In this essay I explore the phenomenon of “purposiveness without a purpose” in Kant’s account of aesthetic judgments. I begin by considering what Kant means by purposiveness in general, and then I analyze the specific “purposiveness without a purpose” that belongs to aesthetic judgments. I analyze the purposiveness without a purpose of the beautiful first in terms of space and then in terms of time. The essay concludes with a consideration of how purposiveness without a purpose makes beauty resistant to thought.