Beyond the Pleasure Principle: A Kantian Aesthetics of Autonomy

Dominic McIver Lopes

doi:10.33134/eeja.251

Beyond the Pleasure Principle: A Kantian Aesthetics of Autonomy

Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics

Volume 58 (2021): Issue 1

By: Dominic McIver Lopes

Open Access

|Mar 2021

Abstract

Aesthetic hedonism is the view that to be aesthetically good is to please. For most aesthetic hedonists, aesthetic normativity is hedonic normativity. This paper argues that Kant’s third Critique contains resources for a nonhedonic account of aesthetic normativity as sourced in autonomy as self-legislation. A case is made that the account is also Kant’s because it ties his aesthetics into a key theme of his larger philosophy.

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