UNKANTIAN NOTIONS OF DISINTEREST

Many recent aestheticians have criticized the notion of disinterest. The aestheticians in question take the notion to have a vaguely Kantian pedigree. And in attacking this notion, they think of themselves as attempting to remove a cornerstone of Kant's aesthetics. This procedure is hardly likely to be effective if what they attack bears little resemblance to Kant's original notion. In this brief note, I want to show how far these anti-Kantian aestheticians have missed their mark.

I need a characterization of Kant's notion if I am to distinguish it from the newfangled notions. In section 2 of the Critique of Judgement, Kant claimed that pleasure in the beautiful is 'disinterested'. In order to explicate this claim, he wrote:

The delight which we connect with the representation of the real existence of an object is called interest. Such a delight, therefore, always involves a reference to the faculty of desire, either as its determining ground, or else as necessarily implicated with its determining ground.[1]

Notice that Kant seems to be saying that interest is a sort of pleasure. This usage is somewhat confusing, since at other places, such pleasure is said to be related to an interest. If so, it would seem that interest is not itself the original pleasure. However, I don't think that this is very important, since Kant's notion of a disinterested pleasure is less confusing than the notion of an interest. In fact, the meaning of 'disinterested pleasure' can be analysed so that the word 'disinterest' no longer figures. Kant wrote that when one makes a judgement of beauty:

All one wants to know is whether the mere representation of the object is to my liking, no matter how indifferent I may be to the real existence of the object of this representation.[2]

The idea is that pleasure is disinterested when its existence is in no way bound up with desire (that is, a concern with real existence). We might put the point in more contemporary language by saying that disinterested pleasure has a desire-free 'causal-functional' role. Somewhat more exactly, pleasure is disinterested when the route from the representation of the object to the response of pleasure entirely by-passes desire. Pleasure in the beautiful is a response to the representation and to the representation alone. There are many subtleties and complications with Kant's idea. But fortunately for the purposes of this note, we do not need to pursue them. We already have enough to be able to spot a notion that is quite unlike Kant's.

If this is the good old notion, what are the bad new versions that I claim are being confused with the original?

The example on which I shall spend most time is the bad new 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. For example, in his influential paper "The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude",[3] George Dickie interprets the doctrine as saying that it is our purposes or motivations in attending to things which divide into interested and disinterested sorts. According to the doctrine, we sometimes look or listen disinterestedly. Dickie goes on to question whether our attitudes to works of art are in fact ever 'disinterested' in this sense.

Whether or not he is right about this, we should be aware that the notion of disinterest in play is quite unKantian. For our purposes or motivations are one thing, our pleasures are another. Attending is something we do, feeling pleasure is something which happens to us. Dickie is probably right if he is saying that it is not the case that there is one sort of attitude — 'the aesthetic attitude' — which we must adopt, in order to experience pleasure in the beautiful. But then pleasure in the beautiful might be disinterested in Kant's sense for all that. Whether or not there are desires operative in the activity of perceptual attention or contemplation is irrelevant to the question of whether the pleasures derived from such attention or contemplation are disinterested in Kant's sense. The existence of desires operative in attention or contemplation might be among the more distant causes of pleasure in the beautiful without being involved with its ground, which is what Kant requires for interestedness. We have a causal route from the desires motivating the attention to attention to representation to pleasure. Since the desires motivating attention do not intervene in the route from representation to pleasure, pleasure in the beautiful can still be a direct response to the representation. So pleasure in the beautiful can be independent of the desires which motivate the attention.[4]

There is something like the above distinction in Michael McGhee's paper in this journal "A Fat Worm of Error?"[5] — although he does not discuss Dickie. He sees that, for Kant, 'disinterestedness' qualifies pleasure rather than attention. But he is not so clear that disinterested pleasure is supposed to be the kind of pleasure in a representation which is distinguished by a certain kind of independence from our desires or concerns with real existence. Unless we see that disinterested pleasure is pleasure which is a direct response to a representation and which has no immediate connection with desire, we will have no explanation of how it is possible for disinterestedness to apply to pleasures and not to attention.

What goes for disinterested attitudes and disinterested attention also goes for various other unKantian notions. To mention two: Kantian disinterestedness has nothing to do with the conscious mental state of being interested or of finding something interesting which is opposed to being bored or finding something boring. And Kantian disinterestedness has nothing to do with what is in our self-interest. These notions have nothing to do with what Kant is talking about. Kant's notion of interest is best thought of as a technical one. The notions of an interested attitude or of interested contemplation, of finding something interesting, and of something being in my self-interest, are all quite different senses of 'interest' from the one that Kant has in mind.[6]

I am not saying that Kant's doctrine that pleasure in the beautiful is disinterested is beyond question. It may even have irredeemable defects. All I am saying is that we should take it for what it is. It is sophistry to change Kant's notion of disinterest and then hope to show that Kant is wrong to think that pleasure in the beautiful is disinterested in the new sense. That dialectic is skewed. How could it be an embarrassment to Kant? It would merely be to make a pun. Interestedness in some other sense may be compatible with Kantian disinterestedness. If we are interested in describing and assessing Kant's doctrine of disinterestedness, these other notions can be safely ignored.[7]



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[1] Kant, Critique of Judgement, Oxford: Clarendon, 1928, pp. 42-43. In this context a representation is a state with cognitive content — typically a perception.

[2] Ibid., p. .43. I defend the general idea that judgements of beauty are made on the basis of a felt pleasure in chapter 4.

[3] George Dickie, "The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude", American Philosophical Quarterly, 1964.

[4] Dickie may be right to attack Edward Bullough's notion of 'psychical distance'. But Bullough is not Kant. Neither is Jerome Stolnitz. In fact, Dickie does not mention Kant in connection with disinterestedness in the paper "The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude". But he does so elsewhere. Most aestheticians have seen the paper as a covert attack on Kant.

Concerning Dickie's argument in the above-mentioned paper, I cannot resist observing that the fact that one object or event — perhaps a work of art — can be viewed in many different ways, even at the same time and by the same person, does not show that one of the ways that we view works of art is not by means of an aesthetic attitude, or a Kantian disinterested pleasure, or whatever.

[5] Michael McGhee, "A Fat Worm of Error", British Journal of Aesthetics, 1991.

[6] There is more of an excuse for thinking that interestedness has something to do with what we have an interest in (such as collecting butterflies), since having an interest in something might be thought to be equivalent to desiring it. Donald Crawford seems to interpret Kant in this way at one point in his book Kant's Aesthetic Theory, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974, pp. 4O-41.

[7] I am grateful to Ingo Baumann and Ralph Walker for textual advice.

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