Abstract
Kant's aesthetics is typical for its "mind-representation". Mind uses all kinds of cognitive faculties to represent the object as a representation through synthesis, and then the object is given subjectivity through representation. Thus the taste in mind makes aesthetic judgments by connecting the representation with the subject's feeling. Kant, however, has not elaborated on and clarified the relationship between feeling and taste, thus making his aesthetics mainly "a science of judgment" that is rational rather than "a science of feeling" that is perceptual. However, Kant also proposes "taste of the senses" against "taste of reflection" and occasionally mentions such sense organs as the tongue, the soft palate, the throat, the eyes, and the ears, all of which can be regarded as the soma dimensions of Kant's aesthetic theory. Today, it is acknowledged that all bodily senses have their own specific perceptual abilities, through which the objective world reveals itself to human beings. According to the principle of "suitability" proposed in Kant's teleological philosophy, there is a natural correspondence between human senses and objective things, with the latter revealing themselves through the former. Somaesthetics reflects and criticizes Kant's aesthetics, thereby going beyond it. In this way, somaesthetics transforms the aesthetics of "mind-representation" which ignores and conceals the thing-it-self into the aesthetics of "body-thing-it-self" which has an interest in thing-it-self and invites it to appear; and the latter one is the core concern of ecoaesthetics. From this perspective, somaesthetics is one of the best media to reverse the nonecological trend of Kant's aesthetics and then to reconstruct it as an ecological one.
First Page
22
Last Page
31
Recommended Citation
Cheng, Xiangzhan. 2019. "The Soma Dimension of Kant's Aesthetics and Its Significance for Ecoaesthetics." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 39, (5): pp.22-31. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol39/iss5/20
