Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Autonomy in Kant’s Aesthetics

Dominic McIver Lopes (University of British Columbia)

Aesthetic hedonism is the view that to be aesthetically good is to please. For most aesthetic hedonists, the normativity of pleasure sources the normativity of aesthetic value. I argue that Kant is an aesthetic hedonist with a non-hedonic account of the normativity of aesthetic value. Instead, Kant sources the normativity of aesthetic value in autonomy, tying his aesthetics into a key theme of his larger philosophy, also promising a neo-Kantian research program that promises to make sense of aesthetic value's deep importance.