Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

Nature, Art, Freedom. Towards the conception of natural beauty of Kant and Schiller and its ethical and aesthetical meaning

Publication |
2009

Abstract

The study deals with the analysis of the Kant´s aesthetics of nature in the Critique of Judgment. It proves that Kant´s aesthetics revealed another possible attitude towards nature that was quite different from its scientific explanation.

Kant reflected nature from the point of disinterested delight that is presented in two fundamental aesthetic categories - beauty and sublime. If beauty enables the reflection of the hidden technique oh nature and its formal purposiveness without purpose (i.e. subjective form al finality) then the sublime opens the way to the transcendental world of super sensible rational ideas and thus to the highest attribute of modern man - freedom.

In the study there is also stressed that the topical significance of Kant´s aesthetics is in its non-metaphysical , i.e. postmodern account of nature without claiming the necessity to abandon its scientific explanation. Thus, Kant´s theory made it possible to avoid some consequences of the negative dialectics of the Enlightenment and compensate its failures.