As to Kant: " (i) Dependent beauty appeals to the perfection of a type. The section immediately preceding §16 is entitled, "A Judgment of Taste is Wholly Independent of the Concept of Perfection." It is in part a direct response to Alexander Baumgarten,8 but it is also a powerful and sophisticated attack on an idea as old as Plato and current in the eighteenth century: that beauty is found in the perfection of a type. The free/dependent beauty distinction of §16 continues this line of resistance: to call something (dependently) beautiful is to situate it in relation to an ideal archetype of the kind of thing it is, and thus is an impure judgment.9 Thus one might call an orchid beautiful because it is a nearly perfect specimen of its species. This Platonic reading of the distinction would presumably make the concept of dependent beauty of practical value to the competition judges of flower and dog breeders' associations, who require check-lists of features against which to measure "aesthetic" quality. This sense of dependent beauty is unquestionably high in Kant's thinking, being much discussed both in §15 and in §17, "On the Ideal of Beauty.""
Article by Dennis Dutton on Kant's Aesthetics quoted from http://www.denisdutton.com/kant.htm _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
