ABSTRACT
In his Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant focuses on the nature of the “judgment of taste” (CPJ, §1, 5:204), the kind of judgment we make when calling something “beautiful.”1 According to Kant, we do not make such a judgment on the basis of applying a determinate concept to the representation of an object, as we do when making a cognitive judgment. We make it on the basis of feeling a specific kind of pleasure or delight (§1, 5:204). What Kant takes to be unique about this kind of delight is not a particular phenomenal quality, but an independence from all interests: “One can say that among all . . . kinds of delights only the one of taste for the beautiful is a disinterested and free delight; for no interest, neither that of the senses nor that of reason, extorts approval” (§5, 5:210). Disinterestedness, then, is the defining feature of the kind of delight that serves as the determining ground for making judgments of taste. Even though Kant officially explicates disinterestedness as such, and never explicitly speaks of a disinterested attitude, I will argue that Kant takes the adoption of such an attitude to be constitutive for making judgments of taste. Such a reading has been contested by some commentators. Nick Zangwill, for instance, writes: “The example on which I shall spend most time is the bad twentieth-century notion of disinterested attention or of a disinterested attitude. Aestheticians who have discussed this idea are concerned with whether or not there are interests operative in the activity of contemplation. . . . [T]he notion of disinterest in play is quite unKantian.”2 Against Zangwill, I will show that the notion of a disinterested attitude is a good eighteenth-century notion and, indeed, quite Kantian.
