1 Misunderstanding Kant
Heidegger thinks that Kant’s aesthetics has been misunderstood, from Kant’s time to Heidegger’s. I want to venture to add Heidegger also thinks understanding Kant matters. See pp. 107–108.
The question has to do with the meaning of Kant’s claim that judgments of beauty are “disinterested.” Schopenhauer interprets aesthetic comportment—the attitude we adopt toward, or that makes it possible for us to perceive, the beautiful—as disinterested in the sene of “pure repose,” “sheer apathetic drift.” See p. 108.
Nietzsche takes the other side: “The aesthetic state is rapture.” See p. 108 green. Heidegger thinks Nietzsche is mistaken. See p. 108 blue.
2 Understanding Kant
See p. 109 for the posing of the question.
What’s Kant’s answer? See p. 109 green.
Consider §2 in the Critique of Judgment:
Interest is what we call the Liking we connect with the presentation of an object’s existence. Hence such a liking always refers at once to our power of desire, either as the basis that determines it, or at any rate as necessarily connected with that determining basis. But if the question is whether something is beautiful, what we want to know is not whether we or anyone cares, or so much as might care, in any way, about the thing’s existence, but rather how we judge it in our mere contemplation of it (intuition or reflection).
He then goes on to say: If someone asks whether a palace is beautiful, and the response comes in the form of an objection to the existence of palaces, then the responder didn’t understand the question. Kant continues:
We can easily see that, in order for me to say that an object is beautiful, and to prove that I have taste, what matters is what I do with this presentation within myself, and not the [respect] in which I depend on the object’s existence. Everyone has to admit that if a judgment about beauty is mingled with the least interest then it is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste. In order to play the judge in matters of taste, we must not be in the least biased in favor of the thing’s existence but must be wholly indifferent about it.
The misunderstanding of the palace question, we might say, is that the responder answers as if they are being asked whether they would like to build a palace.
Notice in particular the way that Kant describes the misunderstanding in terms of a “dependence on the object’s existence.” The Rousseauean criticism depends on the existence of the palace. Heidegger reads this dependence in terms of ‘possession’ and ‘control’; the Rousseauean criticism of the palace is a rejection of that possession and control; a desire to be free of palaces, as it were.
Heidegger suggests that the misinterpretation of Kantian “disinterest” stems from its taking disinterest merely as a lack of involvement, when in fact Heidegger sees it rather as a sort of generosity toward an object, a manner of engagement that is akin to a sort of deference. See p. 110.
Heidegger moreover claims that, had he understood Kant, Nietzsche would have found in him his own idea of beauty. See p. 111.
But note how Heidegger insists that his point is not merely historiographical. It is rather as a way of clarifying Nietzsche’s conception of beauty. And first see Heidegger’s recasting of the question of the pleasure involved in the experience of beauty; see pp. 111–112. He cites Nietzsche as exemplary of this renewed view, and then describes Nietzsche’s view as similar to Kant’s; see p. 112 throughout.
And then he says “Kant grasps more keenly” the question of “interest” than Nietzsche does. See p. 113.
Quick final question: What does Heidegger get out of this retrieval of the meaning of disinterest in Kant? Narrowly, we might say that it is as a way of clarifying the meaning of Nietzsche’s understanding of beauty as rapture, despite Nietzsche’s rejection of Kant. The commentary work here—the clarification of what’s going on in Kant—does, therefore, fairly complex work for Heidegger. And I think it’s worth mentioning: It’s not the most straightforward read of Kant either. But that isn’t to say that I think Heidegger is ‘wrong about Kant’, only that his reading already moves somewhat beyond the narrow confines—or anyway the perhaps merely apparent confines—of the third Critique, reading as it does the concept of disinterest from a phenomenological perspective.