Note 305 — Chapter III

Compare this with Kant’s Kritik der Urtheilskraft (herausgegeben und erlautert von J. H. v. Kirchmann); Berlin, 1869, p. 65: ‘All interest spoils the judgment in matters of taste, and deprives it of its impartiality, especially if it does not, as rational interest does, make the feeling of utility paramount to that of pleasure, but bases it upon the latter, which always happens in an æsthetic judgment in so far as a thing causes pleasure or pain.’ Modern psycho-physiology has recognised this notion of Kant’s as erroneous, and has demonstrated that ‘the feeling of pleasure’ in itself is originally a feeling of organic ‘utility,’ and that ‘judgment in matters of taste’ does not exist at all without ‘interest.’ Psycho-physiology makes use of the terms ‘organic tendency’ or ‘proclivity,’ instead of ‘interest.’ Moreover Wilde, who does not mind contradicting his own loose assertions, says (p. 186): ‘A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of the word. It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.’ Hence Hecuba must be something to the critic, that he may be able to criticise at all.