KANT AND FINE ART An essay on Kant and the Philosophy of Fine Art & Culture

In his recent article, “Kant's Musical Antiformalism,” James Young (2020) continues to argue for a unitary understanding of art from antiquity to the nineteenth century. Young maintains that major writings on art from Plato and Aristotle to Charles Batteux and Immanuel Kant adhere to aesthetic cognitivism, the view that artworks are sources of knowledge of human life. Succinctly, aesthetic cognitivism is embedded in the ancient view of the “imitative arts” and it is embraced throughout the eighteenth-century's conception of the “fine arts.” However, a new understanding of art emerged in the nineteenth century and flourished during the twentieth century. A number of modern critics uphold formalism as the right perspective on art, roughly the view that artistic beauty is determined by the formal properties of the work rather than its representational or conceptual content. Young claims that some of these critics wrongly take Kant's theory of music in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (2000) [1790] to be the progenitor of formalism about music and formalism generally. Young's article is devoted to rejecting this interpretation of Kant's theory of music.1