Abstract
Aristotle famously said that we all by nature desire to know, or understand.1 He justifies this by appeal to the ‘delight’ people take in having perceptions, especially by means of sight, which ‘most of all senses makes us know’. So, he suggested, there is a pleasure in knowing, or at least in certain modes of knowing. I am interested here in Kant’s endorsement of the basic idea that there is pleasure in knowing, and that we all desire by nature to know. Examining this should, I think, shed fresh light on Kant’s interest in the judgment of taste, which is his technical term for our enjoyment of beauty.2 Since Kant was evidently no aesthete, it is unlikely that he devoted so much of the Critique of Judgment — indeed, its most important part (KU 5:169) — to the analysis of taste as an end in itself. Kant seems instead to have been propelled by the thought that he might unearth a hitherto elusive clue into the nature of our cognitive capacities. The judgment of taste, Kant gnomically proclaimed, ‘reveals a property of our faculty of cognition that without this analysis would have remained unknown’ (KU 5:213).
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πá vτες ἀv0ρωπoι τoυ ειδέvαι oρέγovται φύσει.
—Aristotle, Metaphysics A 980a21
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© 2014 Melissa McBay Merritt
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Merritt, M.M. (2014). Kant on the Pleasures of Understanding. In: Cohen, A. (eds) Kant on Emotion and Value. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137276650_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137276650_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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