Kant’s Aesthetic Ideas

Abstract

Abstract In the third Critique, Kant offers an elusive discussion of what he calls ‘aesthetic ideas’, claiming that ‘beauty’ is ‘the expression of aesthetic ideas’ and that ‘genius’ is the power to ‘exhibit aesthetic ideas’. In this essay, I distinguish two theses to which Kant appears committed: the ‘indefinability’ thesis, which says that aesthetic ideas convey much that is indefinable in words; and the ‘unformulability’ thesis, which says that the genius’s creative activity is one for which no rule can be ‘set down in a formula’ so as to ‘serve as a precept’. I give the most charitable readings of these theses that I can, and then ask (a) what, as aestheticians, we should want to say about them, and (b) to what extent Kant himself can say the same. I conclude that he is unable to meet us much more than halfway, however valuable his discussion might otherwise be.