Kant’s Aesthetics and the Problem of Happiness

Kant’s anthropological lectures introduce scepticism about our psychological capacity to experience happiness conceived as gratification or contentment. Aesthetic experience is in a position to inform an alternative conception of happiness that not only is more adequate to the idea of happiness than either gratification or contentment but also may more easily conform to the moral law’s constraints than gratification. As an ‘ideal feeling’, pleasure in beauty serves as a model for how best to enjoy even sensual pleasures and otherwise ‘private’ sensations. In the end, the third Critique suggests that this alternative conception is more ‘appropriate’ to humankind (§60, 5: 355).