Hanne Appelqvist: "Why Kant Had to Be a Formalist"

Hanne Appelqvist, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies: "Why Kant Had to Be a Formalist"

Abstract
According to the standard story of the history of aesthetics, Immanuel Kant is one of the main protagonists of musical formalism. This is to say that, for Kant, the mere formal purposiveness of the pattern or shape of the musical object is enough for its beauty insofar as the subject reflects upon that pattern in a disinterested and non-conceptual manner. In recent years, the standard story of Kant as a formalist has been challenged. Scholars like Samatha Matherne and James O. Young have argued that Kant’s formalism has been greatly exaggerated and that certain remarks betray Kant’s commitment to an expressivist and/or representationalist account of music. I disagree. In my understanding, it’s not just that Kant happened to be a formalist. He had to be. Given the role that Kant assigns for the judgment of beauty in his overall philosophical system, he had to limit the objective side of the judgment to spatio-temporal form only. Or so I will argue.