Gadamer, “The Relevance of the Beautiful”

PHIL 409, Kant and the twentieth century, Fall 2026

1 Why art?

“The great breakthrough of the seventeenth century” was to have discovered “the mathematical regularities of nature and its significance for the control of natural forces” (16).

But “in art and the beautiful we encounter a significance that transcends all conceptual thought” (ibid.).

2 Knowledge and art

Hence the paradoxical formulation: cognitio sensitiva

cognitio sensitiva means that in the apparent particularity of sensuous experience, which we always attempt to relate to the universal, there is something in our experience of the beautiful that arrests and compels us to dwell upon the individual appearance itself. (16)

3 “Kant’s great achievement”

Kant:

• “recognized for the first time the experience of art and beauty as a philosophical question in its own right” (18)
• “sought an answer to the question of how the experience in which we ‘find something beautiful’ could be binding in such a way that it does not simply express a subjective reaction of taste” (ibid.)

And see “Taste was also [by Kant]” etc. on p. 21.