Taylor Macina - Reading 4

Book: Art as Communicable Pleasure: Immanuel Kant

Kant believes that all acts of mental cognition are essentially judgments. That saying something like “the sunset is beautiful” does nothing to enhance your understanding of it but simply just explains your feelings and interpretation of something. By making statements like this it shows our perception of how the object or situation is affecting us. Kant questions how this judgment about our feelings can have objective validity. He further explains this by arguing that saying “the sunset is beautiful” is “saying more than it appeals to me, claiming also in effect that the sunset’s beauty is there for all to see” (Wartenberg 47). Unlike Hume’s belief that certain qualities elicit pleasure in all humans, Kant argues that this does not justify the belief in objects have normative force. He says that by saying the sunset is beautiful we not only expect people to agree with us but rather believe that they should.