Description: 

In the Analytic of the Beautiful, Kant famously defines beauty as “the form of the purposiveness of an object, insofar as it is perceived in it without representation of an end”. 

Jensen Suther argues that Kant simultaneously requires purposiveness to function as a norm of success while denying it any determinate role in the constitution of experience. If the harmony of our faculties in representation of the beautiful is to be understood as the successful unity of an activity, then it must be governed by a normative criterion. The norm governing such aesthetic self-maintenance—whereby success can be distinguished from failure—proves to be neither any external theoretical or practical end, nor the end internal to rationality, our “moral vocation,” but must instead be sought in the form of life expressed in our cognitive-affective activity itself.

Kant’s own analyses require this insight but fail to pursue it. Once purposiveness is required to distinguish success from failure in judgment, it cannot remain merely formal or regulative.

Bio: 

Jensen Suther received his PhD from Yale University and is currently a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. His first book, True Materialism: Hegelian Marxism and the Modernist Struggle for Freedom, was published by Stanford University Press in September 2025.