Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality

This collection of essays by one of the preeminent Kant scholars of our time transforms our understanding of both Kant’s aesthetics and his ethics. Guyer shows that at the very core of Kant’s aesthetic theory, disinterestedness of taste becomes an experience of freedom and thus an essential accompaniment to morality itself. At the same time he reveals how Kant’s moral theory includes a distinctive place for the cultivation of both general moral sentiments and particular attachments on the basis of the most rigorous principle of duty. Kant’s thought is placed in a rich historical context including such figures as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, Kames, as well as Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Schiller, and Hegel. Other topics treated are the sublime, natural versus artistic beauty, genius and art history, and duty and inclination. These essays extend and enrich the account of Kant’s aesthetics in the author\'s earlier book, Kant and the Claims of Taste (1979).

Preface; Note on citations; Introduction; Part I. Kant\'s Aesthetics in Historical Context: 1. Feeling and freedom: Kant on aesthetics and morality; 2. The dialectic of disinterestedness: I. Eighteenth-century aesthetics; 3. The dialectic of disinterestedness: II. Kant and Schiller on interest in disinterestedness; 4. The perfections of art: Mendelssohn, Moritz and Kant; 5. Hegel on Kant\'s aesthetics: necessity and contingency in beauty and art; Part II. Kant\'s Aesthetics and Morality: Topical Studies: 6. The beautiful and the sublime; 7. Nature, art and autonomy; 8. Genius and the canon of art: a second dialectic of aesthetic judgement; 9. Duties regarding nature; 10. Duty and inclination; Notes; Bibliography; Index.