Kant on the Pleasures of Understanding

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).

πá vτες ἀv0ρωπoι τoυ ειδέvαι oρέγovται φύσει.

—Aristotle, Metaphysics A 980a21