Irony and Beauty

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Introduction

Kant Immanuel was a German well-known philosopher of his time, who lived between 1724 and 1804. The picture of Dorian Gray’s novel by Oscar Wilde portrays his aphorisms directly associated with critics, artists, art, and audience. The novel proves the author’s aesthetic mentality when choosing or making a comparison between personal sensing and objective fact. Oscar Wilde is more attentive to the subjective than objective reality because he is a staunch believer in acquiring knowledge through impulses. Through personal experience, the novella constantly involves the world of pleasure intuitively. Through the world of disconnected facts, Wilde’s expression, Lord Henry and Dorian Gray lead an aesthetic life. Dorian also experiences this world through subjective feelings without any purpose. His experience without a purpose conforms to Kant’s idea of impartial free beauty, which can only be perceived personally. Therefore, regarding Kant’s terms, free beauty and the concept of acquiring knowledge through senses seem to be Dorian’s trait because his judgments increase spontaneously. Such haphazard discernment prevails over Dorian’s sensory world as he gets addicted to aesthetic enjoyment. Wilde’s anti-Victorian morality character is revealed, and through his writing work, it is proven that he does not support the concept of Arts as instructive. It becomes clear that Kant’s theory of cognition influences Wilde and his work of art.  Concerning judgment theory by Kant, Wilde endeavors to separate various ways of understanding is demonstrated by portraying the outer and inner spaces, the attachment of Dorian to his portrait and work of arts, and disconnection from facts as demonstrated through the death of the artist, Sibyl, Basil, and the actress.

The Development of Gothic Beauty

Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful categorizes the judgment of taste on the bais quality into four sections.