Enjoying the Unbeautiful: From Mendelssohn's Theory of “Mixed Sentiments” to Kant's Aesthetic Judgments of Reflection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The development of the philosophical discipline of aesthetics in the eighteenth century has sometimes been characterized as an attempt to acknowledge that in the enjoyment of beautiful objects we experience something that cannot be captured by the discursive tools of reason. Aesthetic experience, according to this view, is the refuge of the irrational, the particular, the ineffable individual.1 But—another view holds—by the very attempt to establish aesthetics as the science of the analogon rationis in Alexander Baumgarten's Aesthetica, beauty was in fact integrated into the domain of the rational: aesthetics in this sense effectively meant a “colonization” of an area outside of reason's domain by reason itself.2 This applies, of course, in particular to rationalist attempts to integrate the experience of beauty into a philosophical framework in which the relevant pleasure has to be accounted for as a consequence of the perception of some perfection or other. The aesthetic experience of the unbeautiful—the sublime, the tragic, the horrible—by contrast, seemed to be more recalcitrant to such colonization and has hence been taken by many scholars as philosophically more interesting and significant than the experience of beauty. Jean‐François Lyotard, for instance, has tried to show in the case of Immanuel Kant how problematic the integration of the sublime into a philosophical system is.3
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".