Disinterestedness
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"Kant's famous definition of the beautiful. "That is beautiful," says Kant, "which pleases without interesting." Without interesting! Compare this definition with this other one [...] by Stendhal, who once called the beautiful une promesse de bonheur. Here, at any rate, the one point which Kant makes prominent in the aesthetic position is repudiated and eliminated—le désinteressement. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal?" --Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality "In treating of beauty in the Anthropology (Werke, vol. vii, p. 239 et seq.) Kant does not refer at all to disinterestedness and does not refer to necessity and universality as constitutive moments of the judgement of taste, but only as marks of the ]]a priori]] basis of taste. This work was published in 1798, but Kant must have taken the material very largely from the notes for his lectures. But in the Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals, published in 1797 ($&$, p. 266 et seq. ; Werke, vol. vf, p. 212^ the full importance of disinterestedness is recognized."--Kant's Critique Of Aesthetic Judgement (James Creed Meredith) |
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Disinterestedness (German: "Gleichgültigkeit" or "ohne interesse") is a key term in the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant.
In Kant's words: "Taste is the faculty of judging of an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful."
J. H. Bernard in the introduction to Critique of Judgment said that "[Kant] declares that the aesthetical judgement about Beauty is according to quality disinterested ; a point which had been laid down by such different writers as Hutcheson and Moses Mendelssohn."
See also
- L'indifférent, a painting by Watteau
- History of aesthetics before the 20th century
- Kant's aesthetics
- Interest (emotion)
- Indifference