Music History Presents Form, Content, and Emotion in Kant's Aesthetics

Kant's famous formalism about the proper object of taste, exemplified by the cases of painting and music, seems to conflict with his account of aesthetic ideas as the spirit of fine art and of poetry as the artistic medium in which our capacity for aesthetic ideas is most fully revealed. I argue that the problem lies not in Kant's account of aesthetic ideas and but in a collapse of the distinction between the form of purposiveness, which can be manifested in many ways, and the purposiveness of form, particularly spatio-temporal form, which is only one way in which the more general idea can be realized.  Kant's account of aesthetic ideas, the contents of which are rational ideas that would seem to be associated with deep emotions, also seems to conflict with his claim that taste that involves emotion is "barbaric."  This too must be resolved to make sense of our responses to poetry, painting, and music.

About Paul Guyer

Paul Guyer is the Jonathan Nelson Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at Brown University, where he has taught since 2012, and the Florence R.C. Murray Professor in the Humanities emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught from 1982 to 2012.  He previously taught at the Universities of Pittsburgh and Illinois-Chicago.  He received his AB and Phd from Harvard University.  He is the author, editor, and/or translator of more than twenty-five books, including translations of Kant's first and third critiques and commentaries on Kant's theoretical philosophy, practical philosophy, and aesthetics.  His A History of Modern Aesthetics in three volumes was published in 2014, Kant on the Rationality of Morality in 2019, and Reason and Experience in Mendelssohn and Kant in 2020.  He is a past president of the American Society for Aesthetics and the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Society, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.