Beauty as an Encounter between Freedom and Nature: A Romantic Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment

Abstract

This essay presents a possible interpretation of the concept of beauty in Kant's Critique of Judgment, which was itself suggested by Kant in the two introductions to the text and gained force among the Early German Romantics and Idealists, introducing an alternative point of view into the concept of beauty and the role it plays in the relationship between reason and sensibility, man and world. Through the analysis of the four moments of the Analytic of the Beautiful, beauty will manifest itself as the realm in which a special encounter between human freedom and nature takes place. Therefore, and as an alternative to some traditional interpretations of Kant's aesthetic investigation,which understand Kant's judgment of taste exclusively on the basis of its subjective conditions, the judgment of beauty will present itself also in the relationship it establishes with the objects of nature.