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Were there interactions between the development of Kant's aesthetics and the development of his moral philosophy? How did Kant view pleasure and displeasure and what role did they play in the formation of his system of the faculties? In this book, Alexander Rueger situates Kant's account of pleasure and displeasure in its eighteenth-century context, with special attention to Leibniz, Wolff, Crusius, and Mendelssohn. He traces the development of Kant's views on pleasure from the 1770s to his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment in 1790, and shows that throughout, Kant understood pleasure as the satisfaction of faculty interests. The significance of this theory for the completion of Kant's critical system in the third Critique is discussed in detail. Rueger's study illuminates both the role of pleasure and displeasure in Kant's thought, and their important connections to the power of judgment.

Summary

Recent affect theory has been wary of aesthetics. Critics challenge both the primacy of art in contrast with the lived complexities of affect and their philosophical subsumption under cognitive and moral interests. This synoptic ideology critique depicts aesthetics, from Leibnizian rationalism through the Kantian architecture, as a promise that discursively betrayed the sphere of affect even while restoring it to post-Cartesian attention. The charge truncates, however, the divergent and attentive questioning of affect that played out within the European field of eighteenth-century aesthetics. My argument moves backwards through the Kantian construction of aesthetic judgement to pursue one such exploratory line of questioning from Jean-Baptiste Dubos to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Nicolai, and Moses Mendelssohn and, finally, Jean Paul. Dubos’ account of art as life-affirming animation was contentiously rethought in arguments about the secondary, or sympathetic, affects engendered by complex representations.

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Kant on Pleasure and Judgment

Chapter 2 - Secondary Affect in Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Nicolai

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Kant on Pleasure and Judgment

Chapter 2 - Secondary Affect in Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Nicolai

Summary