KANT:

THE AESTHETIC JUDGEMENT AND THE BEAUTIFUL IN MUSIC

Abstract

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant states that, as an art that expresses the play of sensations, music must employ the “language of affections” and, thus, belongs more to the art of the pleasant than to the fine arts. In this way, music could not properly be considered a superior form of art. As an art expressed in the language of affections, music would be irremediably linked to emotions and sensations that, as individual experiences, can never be universalized, as required by the judgment of aesthetic taste. Not being able to access universalization, the judgment of taste in music would then be more a judgment about the pleasant than a judgment about the beautiful. However, at the same time, Kant develops, also in the Critique of Judgment, other arguments in which he attributes to music the character of art as a “beautiful game of sensations”, suggesting a hesitation regarding its status as an art form. We will examine this assessment of music as art formulated by Kant in the Critique of the Faculty of Judging, in order to understand the position that Kant assigns to it among the fine arts.