6 Does Kant have anything to teach us about environmental ethics?

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2007 by Marc Lucht

Kant's thinking about the beautiful stands at the capstone of his system, for by showing that we have grounds for hope that there is a continuity between nature and freedom, it provides the required transition between his theoretical and moral works. His account of the beautiful is important for our purposes insofar as it points to certain kinds of experiences in which we are conscious of ourselves as connected with the natural world--and precisely these kinds of experiences are the desideratum of thinkers who claim that more dualistic attitudes make possible the exploitation of nature. The human sense of estrangement from the world is felt because the world seems alien to us, and we think of ourselves as striving against it in order to make a place for ourselves. When the world seems amenable to our needs. however, this sense of duality fades.

What this means, in Kant's view, is that the very same consciousness that offers so much to the refinement and development of human sociability and culture also can orient us within--rather than pitting us against--the natural world. He thinks that taste contributes to culture in several ways. He tells us that the consciousness of the beautiful "contributes to culture, for it teaches us at the same time to be mindful of purposiveness in the feeling of pleasure"; thus in taste we learn that certain pleasures have more than a merely subjective or hedonistic significance and can attune "the spirit to ideas, and so [make] it receptive to more such pleasure and entertainment." (40) In aesthetic experiences we see that certain kinds of pleasure are more than just trivial. Taste enhances our receptivity to moral ideas and, as it involves pleasure, prompts us to seek out and enjoy more opportunities for such attunement. Thus taste reinforces our moral fortitude and orients us within the social world of art and creative life. The aesthetic consciousness also disposes us toward moral feeling and, as we have seen, to the disinterested state of mind required by morality, helping us to cultivate a more noble bearing with regard to other people. What is more, the enlivening of our cognitive powers involved in aesthetic appreciation facilitates social communication. (41) Perhaps most importantly, Kant tells us that when making aesthetic judgments, I expect others to agree with me, and thus in aesthetic reflection, I take account a priori "of everyone else's way of representing [something] in order as it were to compare [my] own judgment with human reason in general and thus escape the illusion that arises from the ease of mistaking subjective and private conditions for objective ones." (42) Taste helps us to "broaden" our thinking, for in this comparing we are encouraged to transcend the particularity of our own idiosyncratic perspective and adopt the "standpoint of others." (43) Thus aesthetic sensibility helps us to resist our narcissistic propensity to retreat into the isolation of our own individual subjectivity by situating us within both the social and natural worlds. In each case, the self-absorption that too often enables us to reduce everything and everyone around us to mere instrumentality is undermined, and we feel as if we are a part of something larger than ourselves. The aesthetic consciousness checks our egocentric presumption that our own point of view is the only one, habituates us to disinterested thinking (thereby subverting our selfishness), facilitates our entry into society, and prompts us to feel that we are responsive parts of a natural world that transcends us. The aesthetic consciousness seems to reduce the antagonism between nature and culture by strengthening the connection I feel with each.