Christina Pan

Understanding Austen’s Modern Relevance Through Kant’s Aesthetic Framework: The Importance of Disinterested Pleasure

Written for JASNA Essay Contest

“Beautiful things don’t ask for attention.” One might think that this sublime quote originates from a philosopher with authoritative reasoning on what is “beautiful” or worthy of attention, but this saying actually originates from a 2014 “feel good” movie, Finding Walter Mitty. Regardless of the origin of the saying, it is true: no truly great work of art that has lasted through history, be it literature, painting, sculpture, or music, has required a dedicated PR or marketing agency to ensure that its legacy reaches past one generation. “Beautiful thing” can also be translated into “beautiful work,” or in other words, a work derived from the talent of the artist or author who found inspiration from certain transcendent parts of nature and translated it into a specific form for humanity to interpret.

But why is this so? Why do we qualify certain works for their beauty and profundity, or for how they make us able to see the world anew, and tear apart other works for their shallowness or sentimentality and see them as fundamentally flawed? What is beauty, what is attention, and what is relevancy? Most importantly, we must analyze the relationship between beauty in the arts as opposed to sensational pleasure, and how viewing Austen through the lens of a Kantian framework of disinterested pleasure has the ability to hold an unflinching mirror to the developing mores of society — that of unshakable relevancy, revealing a consciousness that is more and more unwilling to question and learn, but instead enjoy and consume.

The renowned philosopher Immanuel Kant argued in his seminal book, Critique of the Power of Judgement, that the ideal form of objects exists within themselves; though it is possible that works of art can be made relevant by the sociopolitical circumstances surrounding its production and legacy, the fundamental brilliance and beauty of the work comes from nature synthesized into a certain art form. The beating heart of what makes art great is simply by virtue of the cornet that exists within it, not from what someone can gain from associating with that work.

Kant outlines a theory of aesthetics that distinguishes between the agreeable aand the beautiful. The beautiful pleases universally without an external concept and without prior interest or personal bias — coined “disinterested pleasure” — in the subject being depicted, implying a form of pleasure derived from the harmonious play of imagination and understanding, which are fundamental cognitive functions every human possesses and separates us from the animal domain. This disinterested pleasure is essential for an aesthetic judgment to claim universality and unite humanity.

According to Kant, the brain’s cognitive capacity switches between two operational facilities, that being understanding and imagination. Understanding consists of the concepts and rules we have learned through reason. This is a cognitive function that filters, catalogues, and recognizes the objects we experience through the faculty of imagination, the next cognitive function that involves the work of the five senses in creating a sensory memory bank, where everything we experience, in reality, in our dreams, are stored. We use these abilities to create different judgments, of which is the necessary condition for making a pure judgment to identify the beautiful. The judgments we make fall into two categories: determinate and indeterminate. It is only when our judgments are indeterminate, removed from our own egos and desires, that we move towards finding and discovering more beauty.

When something is truly beautiful, this delineation is based on the disinterested harmonious free play of our cognitive faculties. When we depend on the existence of the object in some way and attach our identities, have interest in it and it is what Kant calls merely “agreeable” to us. For agreeable things, our pleasure results from what “pleases the senses in sensation” (Kant 143). The object first pleases us and gains our approval, then gratifies us, thereby instilling in our psyche a desire for more objects like it, encouraging consumption over creation. Disinterested pleasure refers to the idea of appreciating art and nature for its true essence, as a pure derivative from how our cognitive functions interpret the world, rather than something that is merely agreeable from the surface level sense. True appreciation of art requires detachment from personal desires and gains.

The modern world has lost its touch in understanding and imagination. A large part of society has not only lost our touch in understanding and imagination but delved into a realm in which only the physical senses are being utilized and gratified. What type of books are popular nowadays? Books now seem to be focused on sensations: sex, power, and fame. Trends from #Booktok to the universality of social media marketing over genuine discovery seem to lead the modern-day literature market. There is a loss of subtlety that comes with a loss of patience and desire to learn. Kant’s way of categorizing his aesthetics are important in understanding this because society has essentially developed a culture that encourages judgement with no ability for detachment, or no ability to judge with a disinterested sense. There is an idea of immediate gratification rather than the slow subtlety and sense of discovery that literature like Jane Austen’s work provides.

Austen’s work takes time to uncover, and that is what makes it all the more rewarding. When we apply a Kantian framework and think of disinterested creation, we can note the stellar absence of a tone of personal bias or experience in Austen’s work. Like Shakespeare, Austen’s mind “consumed all impediments” (Woolf 48) — like a great androgynous mind, she transforms gender, writes with a calm, steady hand, never playing God with any of her characters and assigning them characteristics in their writing but placing characters gently in her worlds, like the construction of a minimalist stage set, and lets their interactions emerge organically from there.

Famous authors such as Ta-ha Nesi Coates write on Austen: “My Pride and Prejudice,” Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, “is truly mine.” Woolf famously wrote how she would read Austen “two words” at a time. The end effect of Austen's prose is one that creates boundless space for the new generation of inventors that follow her who take the leap of faith in disinterested pleasure and creation. As Mansfield Park elegantly states: “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid” (Austen 132).

Jane Austen may speak to today’s devout readers and scholar of her work, but intention of the work is perverted. when speaking to the popular interpretation of her work. Modern society divorced from scholarship depends on Austen like a childish balm; a fantasia world of domesticity, castles, sewing, painting, pianofortes, and the occasional martial heartbreak. There is an abstraction of Austen as only the domestic, as Rachel Austen writes in her essay, The Austen Memoirs: “The people I knew took it as a given that the domesticity of Austen was isolated from the wide world and its violence […] ‘Comfort reading,’ an intellectual briefly remarked” (Cohen 47). Lionel Trilling, in his unfinished essay on Jane Austen in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, wrote of the sort of trifling desperation that students had to take his course taught at Columbia on Austen: the students seemed less interested in the actual content of Austen’s writing but rather more dictated on the aesthetic of Austen: imagine being able to tell the family —“I’m taking a class titled Reading Jane Austen”— then comes the pats on the back for educating oneself on the classic, soft parts of literature.

There are few “great writers” today because the entire industry of publishing has transformed into one of a massive miasma dependent on attention spans rather than beauty and subtlety. The advent of artificial intelligence, too, has marked a troubling descent of the industry. Even critics have transformed, and news outlets too; there is no longer the same focus on art itself but the social conditions of which it has been produced from. Camus noticed this trend even by the 1900s before computers or artificial intelligence, as he writes in The Fall, where the Parisian lawyer laments:

“We no longer say as in simple times: ‘this is my opinion. What are your objections?’ We have become lucid. For the dialogue we have substituted the communique. ‘This is the truth,’ we say. ‘You can discuss it as much as you want ; we aren’t interested. But in a few years there’ll be the police to show you I’m right.”

A cynical interpretation of relevancy follows Austen is relevant to general consciousness simply because the public accepts her as “good” and “agreeable,” using her work as a personality trait or surface level adjective rather than as a work of art to improve one’s mind and self. Because there is also little contention behind accepting the pleasant nature of her universe, it is easy to dismiss the subtleties of how important it is to interpret Austen carefully. Cohen, when writing about her developing relationship towards Austen, only later realized the heavy research and intellectual powerlifting that Austen conducted:

“That the author might have read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that the author had read, with passionate attention, Thomas Clarkson’s abolitionist works on the slave trade, that she read the naval papers, delved into the worldly pages of historians and economists and travelers, and knew not only the works of Walter Scott and William Wordsworth and Madame de Staël but also the kinds of works that these worldly writers were themselves reading…” (Cohen 37)

When Jane Austen was born, less than half of England’s women could read or write. The fact that civilized society today is largely literate, however, does not guarantee that people are genuinely willing to think deeply or improve and critique society.

However, a more optimistic argument can contend that the very reason that Austen is relevant is because her work reminds people who truly care about bettering society and the intellectual work involved in doing so, and of the importance of disinterested pleasure and appreciating art for its existence rather than using art to justify one’s existence. Kant argues that in judgements of beauty, people exercise the same faculty of judgment as exercised in making moral judgments. Thus it is ever more crucial to remove personal biases. For Kant, the ultimate purpose of the moral law is not merely individual, but rather social. We cannot interpret art or the aesthetics for pure personal gain but rather for the final goal is to achieve a “systematic union of different rational beings through common laws.” This union, as Kant believes, would produce eventually harmonious interaction between the members of society.

However, Austen takes Kantian philosophy a step further; she transcends Kant’s rigid moral philosophy into an actionable sphere. Kant’s idealism may not necessarily be achievable. Characters in Austen’s novels take compromises and to a degree are selfish in order to act on self-preservation, rather than operating from a universal law that may or may not exist in practice. As Austen writes in Pride and Prejudice, commenting on Lizzy Bennett, “I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle,” (Austen 510). Even when commenting on the romance between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth, she once again uses: “I am a very selfish creature; and, for the sake of giving relief to my own feelings, care not how much I may be wounding your’s” (Austen 504).

Jane Austen is important because she is emblematic of the fact that great literature stands to be the force of empathy that can unite humanity with each person’s interpretation of the novel fusing with their personal histories. The majority of modern literature has been churned out for entertainment and profit purposes brings humanity together in a sinister way: uniting the masses by encouraging consumption and desire over disinterested pleasure that can lead to capacity for true cognitive creativity and growth. However, it is crucial to note that not all art must be great or stand the test of generational memory to be remembered or appreciated. This is another aspect of critical thought — to not become so scholarly or critical so that all only the select shining masterworks are to be enjoyed and understood. But it is crucial that we know why a certain piece of art is as great as it is, and how to utilize interpretations of the work effectively not for pure consumption but rather for critical thought in how it applies to not only our own small lives, but the social consciousness of our all encompassing humanity. We will conclude with Kant, who brilliantly observes: “All beautiful art lies in the culture of the mental powers through those prior forms of knowledge […] by means of which it distinguishes itself from the limitation of animals” (Kant 349).

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park, edited by Kathryn Sutherland, Penguin Classics, 2014.

Northanger Abbey, edited by Susan Fraiman, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.

Persuasion, edited by Patricia Meyer Sparks, 2nd ed., Norton, 2013.

Pride and Prejudice, edited by James Kinsley, Oxford, 2004.

Cohen, Rachel. Austen Years. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 21 July 2020.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgement. Cambridge, University Press, 2000.

Trilling, Lionel. "Why We Read Jane Austen." The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent. Northwestern University Press, 2008, pp. 510-535.