In Kant’s Critique of Judgment he thoroughly deconstructs how we, as humans, judge the objects around us. He discusses aesthetics and pleasurable sights as something we must be detached from to fully appreciate. Kant states, “If we judge objects merely according to concepts, then all representation of beauty is lost.” This sentence is particularly interesting due to the subject matter of the rest of his work. He contradicts himself several times on this point. Kant claims for several paragraphs that “The beautiful is that which apart from concepts is represented as the object of a universal satisfaction.” This directly contrasts the former statement by implying that there is something universally aesthetically appealing about beautiful objects. He goes on to address the ideas of objective and subjective universal validity, which, in my opinion, addresses this contradiction. The objective is based on a subject whose beauty is always valid under the same conditions, while the subjective is based on something aesthetic, something whose beauty is subjective.
These thoughts on beauty can be compared to Kant’s idea of ‘purposiveness without a purpose’ addressed in Cynthia Freeland’s book. By judging something as beautiful or not beautiful based on its usefulness or its purpose, we are denying its true beauty. Pure beauty must be appreciated in a detached manner, seeing only what is in front of you rather than what it means or represents. Kant gives a perfect example when he is discussion the concept of sensation:
“ Flowers, free delineations, outlines intertwined with one another without design and called (conventional) foliage, have no meaning, depend on no definite concept, and yet they please. The satisfaction in the beautiful must depend on the reflection upon an object, leading to any concept (however indefinite), and it is thus distinguished from the pleasant, which rests entirely upon sensation.”
Judging an object based on the concepts associated with it turns the judgment into a logical assumption rather than an observation based on aesthetics.