Aesthetic Experience

Abstract

Immanuel Kant held that the judgment of taste bears on formal features that inhere in works of art as these inspire certain feelings in the subject. “Taste is the faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful” (Kant, 2000: 96). According to Kant, in matters of knowledge, it is the object that is primarily at stake; in the case of taste, it is the experience that counts. His Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) opens as follows: “In order to decide whether or not something is beautiful, we do not relate the representation by means of understanding to the object for cognition, but rather relate it by means of the imagination.