Conclusion

Abstract

I have insisted from the start that Kant’s analysis of aesthetic contemplation rehabilitates a pre-platonic conception of theōria as the judging of appearances. I also showed that Kant radicalizes the disinterestedness traditionally attributed to aesthetic contemplation and that his analysis of disinterestedness provides the phenomenological basis for the idea of a sensus communis. While the construal of contemplation as the judging of appearances leads Kant to the idea of a sensus communis, the tradition of Latin humanism anticipates the general connection between aesthetic leisure and the idea of a shared human sensibility. Also, the question of the relation between the solitude of the vita contemplativa and the shared human sensibility cultivated through humanistic study emerges in the Latin humanist tradition. In order to understand how Kant’s aesthetics retrieves certain aspects of Latin humanism, let us consider Petrarch’s De vita solitaria. The Roman conception of contemplation as otium is explicitly connected with literary study, and Petrarch, citing Cicero and Seneca, seeks to revive this very conception: “And indeed isolation without literature is exile, prison, and torture; supply literature and it becomes your country, freedom and delight.”²⁵⁵ For Petrarch, otium signifies not only the humanistic study of Latin literature, but a special vision of humanity itself discoverable in contemplative life: