In the next few lectures, we'll turn our attention to psychic phenomena relating to beauty, in which sensibility and intelligence are both at play. The science that studies these phenomena is called aesthetics, from the Greek term ⍶ἴσθησις (sense perception), or sensation. Departing from its usual meaning, Kant also used the word to refer to that part of philosophy that deals with interior and exterior experience.

The goal of aesthetics isn't to give those who lack it a feeling and taste for beauty. Nor does it try to establish the rules to which artists should conform. Its goal, instead, is to define beauty, which it does first in an abstract and general way, then moving on to the study of the beaux arts, the concrete forms beauty can take.

So aesthetics tries to solve two problems – abstract beauty as well as its concrete counterpart.

What is beauty? It's extremely difficult to give a completely satisfying answer to this question. A number of contradictory solutions have been proposed, but most confuse beauty with some other idea. So we'll begin by trying to distinguish beauty from what it's not. From this negative definition, we'll then search out beauty's positive defining characteristics.

It was once common to define the beautiful as what's useful. Socrates, for example, saw beauty in every useful object. But this definition misunderstands one of the essential characteristics of beauty, which evokes no instrumental feelings within us. We don't care whether a beautiful object is useful or not.