Feeling and System: The Developments of Kant’s Concept of the Feeling of Pleasure and Displeasure in Hermann Cohen’s Aesthetics

In this paper, I examine how Hermann Cohen, the founder of the Marburg School, interprets and develops—in his two books on philosophical aesthetics, Kants Begründung der Ästhetik (1889) and Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls (1912)—Kant’s theory of feeling, as expressed in the Critique of the Power of Judgement , and how this development is related to Cohen’s view of the system of philosophy. The evolution in Cohen’s view of the system between these two books is both a further distancing from Kant’s thought after the criticisms Cohendirected at Kant in Kants Begründung der Ästhetik and a further step in Cohen’s effort to purify Kant’s foundation of aesthetics both from its residues of psychologism and from its confusions between the properly aesthetic field and the field of knowledge.