Kant on Aesthetic Attention

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the role of attention in Kant’s aesthetic theory in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. While broadly Kantian aestheticians have defended the claim that there is a distinct way that we attend to objects in aesthetic experience, Kant himself is not usually acknowledged as offering an account of aesthetic attention. On the basis of Kant’s more general account of attention in other texts and his remarks on attention in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, I reconstruct Kant’s account of aesthetic attention. On his account, aesthetic attention is simultaneously directed at the form of an object and at the judging subject’s own mental states as she attends to the object. In the experience of beauty, we specifically attend to the harmonious relation between the faculties of imagination and understanding. My aim in this paper is to explore the role that attention plays in Kant’s aesthetic theory.1 The claim that there is a distinct way that we attend to objects when we experience them aesthetically takes centre stage in a number of broadly Kantian aesthetic theories in the twentieth century, in particular, aesthetic attitude theories.2 Consider Jerome Stolnitz’s well-known characterization of the aesthetic attitude as ‘disinterested and sympathetic attention to an object for its own sake’, which he contrasts with the kind of practical attention that characterizes our everyday engagement with objects (Stolnitz, 1960, p. 35). While the emphasis on disinterestedness is clearly inherited from Kant (and from eighteenth-century aesthetics more generally), Kant himself is not usually acknowledged as having an account of aesthetic attention. Nick Zangwill (1992) even suggests that the notion of disinterestedness in aesthetic attitude theories is ‘unKantian’, precisely because it concerns the motivations that drive attention, whereas for Kant, disinterestedness concerns aesthetic pleasure.3 One of the few scholars to highlight the role of attention in Kant’s aesthetics takes it to be continuous with the way we attend to objects in order to conceptualize them, which is thus, even if only implicitly, to deny that Kant endorses a notion of aesthetic attention (Zinkin, 2012).