Kant is killing me...

seriously.

Attempted summary:

It seems to me as if the overarching project of this text is to offer up some (often Greek influenced) dichotomies or trichotomies to help us better understand aesthetic judgement in a ways that draw (seemingly) quite rigid boundaries around subject/object distinctions in service of making an argument for the universal. However, as I re-read particular places in Kant's text, my current sense is that there is (albeit perhaps not much) flexibility in Kant's understanding of the universal. Kant does seem to push at the concept of the universal (particularly in terms of how it might actually play out through experiences in the social and cultural) in a few places throughout the text. I'm sure there is much more to say here...

Audience and issues to further consider:

The fact that Kant was writing to a very specific audience (white, male, middle-class academics) was quite apparent in his text. Because this fact was so clear to me as reader, it was easier to see the ways in which Kant's ideas supported the perspective of that group at the expense of other groups. When I read this, I was initially troubled by the ways in which Kant's ideas continue to resonate throughout our contemporary culture for exclusionary purposes; however, I think Kant may not be as overly deterministic as I initially believed him to be--or, maybe I'm just being to generous as I write this. For example, to Kant, true beauty is disinterested--our emotions, "charm" and, more generally subjective experiences get in the way of our "pure" perceptions. It would be relatively easy to make an argument that who we believe to be "emotional" would likely be those with less power and prestige. Hence, we could certainly understand Kant here to be reserving unimpeded judgement for those who already have social power. Yet, despite Kant's focus on universality and unimpeded judgements, he also seems to acknowledge the ways in which perceptions of beauty might (practically speaking) come into being in more of a social sense (situated in between the agreeable and the good). His discussion of culture and "subjective universality" lend some evidence to this idea. It was more difficult for me to pick up on this aspect of the text because of the ways in which universality seems to shut down the possibility of hope for subjectivity/intersubjectivity (and also, I think, because of the ways in which the nature of this text didn't leave me with much hope for expecting him to move beyond very self-interested position). Given all of this, I'd be interested in further discussing the room Kant leaves us to think about the inconsistencies and claims about what is beautiful cross-culturally and, more generally, how we might most usefully reconcile the notion of a universality with what is particular and subjective in the process of making judgments.

I was also interested in distinctions that Kant makes between the agreeable, the good and the beautiful (and later the sublime). I think these terms interestingly overlap (and fail to overlap) with our previous readings but it seems like the beautiful is an interesting concept that mediates that agreeable and the good. This reminds me of how beauty, to the Greeks, resided in recognizing a connection between the particular and the universal. I would love to talk about these concepts again, particularly in terms of how they might lead us to read Kant in ways that are less caught up in reifying existing power structures by cloaking them in what is deemed universal--which I don't believe is Kant's intention.

Anyway, these are my starting points for Kant...