It’s me again. Can you help me understand Kant?I’m stuck with his notion of “purposiveness without a purpose.” What significance does it hold for Kant’s claims about the human value of aesthetic judgment? I read this many times, but the more I read it, it confuses me more.
As far as I know, that’s Kant’s definition of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, to Kant, should be non-utilitarian (spelling). A knife is utilitarian-you use it to cut something with, but a poem is not utilitarian-you don’t use it to “do” something practical.
To put it differently, a work of art is not something that has a (utilitarian) function or “purpose.” But, that does not mean that the work of art does not have a purpose within its non-utilitarian realm.It has a purpose within the purpose-less (non-utilitarian) context. Take a beautiful tie for example. Its beauty lies, first, in the fact that it does not have a utilitarian purpose (I don’t have to wear a tie). But in the sense that the tie is carefully designed and produced, it has its purpose: it is meant to be beautiful, aesthetic.
Another example. Many students, English majors or non majors, ask me: What can literature do for me? They are thinking: how can literature help me get into a more profitable career? I tell them-if that’s what you are thinking, literature is useless. Can people live without the experience of music, painting or literature? The answer is: There are some people who live their lives without that experience.
The ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang Tze (or, Zhuang Tze) once said: “The great Tao appears useless” (da dao wu yong). That’s similar to what Kant tries to say.Art-or philosophy-appears useless if we look at it in the utilitarian sense.
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