The Aesthetic Disinterestedness Reconsidered : Baumgarten, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Duchamp

This paper reconsiders Kant's disputed doctrine of supposed "aesthetic disinterestedness," arguing that the concept of "aesthetic disinterestedness" that was never used by Kant himself misses the main point of the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) (hereafter abbreviated as the third Critique).First, I address Baumgarten's theory of disinterestedness in his Metaphysics (1739, 1757) as a background for understanding Kant's theory of disinterestedness.Second, I show that disinterestedness toward the beautiful is for Kant only a necessary condition for being aesthetically "involved" in it.Thus, I interpret Kant's doctrine of supposed "aesthetic disinterestedness" as composed of condition).Then, in order to verify this interpretation, I refer to Schiller and Schopenhauer's aesthetic theories.Finally, I attempt to make concrete "aesthetic disinterestedness" by taking Duchamp's description of the readymade as an example.