KANT'S AESTHETICS (3)

KANT’S AESTHETICS (3)

The idea of purposiveness in itself and by itself is a creative notion that infuses meaningfulness into the processes of nature. It is borrowed from the purposiveness of our free will which is itself an expression of the essential fecundity of creative intelligence. Kant labours in vain to derive, to ground, to prove that which is itself the source, the ground, the evidence of all thought. Plato did not try to prove the reality or the necessity of the Form of the Good or of the principle of procreation in beauty. It was all simply creative intelligence in communion with its own reality, begetting true being and understanding. Until philosophers realize that they are creators of meaning and reality, they shall continue to mimic scientists and mathematicians and continue to be ridiculed by scientists and mathematicians. Philosophers, children of Plato, from the top of Parnassus proclaim to the world, you are not servants to truth; you are creators of the Truth!

The notion of imagination is one of the most fecund creative notions introduced by Kant in the third critique. I have somewhere blamed “Plato's strictures on poets and artists as being imitators at the third remove from reality” on his lacking the notion of imaginayion. (Plato : An Inhdfpretation, Ch. VII, “The Argument of the Republic). But I will not comment on Kant’s notion at this point.

I am having second thoughts about continuing these notes on the Critique of the Power of Judgment.

D. R. Khashaba

Cairo, September 18, 2015