Immanuel Kant's Beauty: The National Cathedral

The moment I stepped onto the dirty, rough, Washington DC concrete, I knew that I was in love. The city was something out of a movie, like New York City but less concrete jungle and more monumental preservation. Yet, from all of this sightseeing and wandering, one place seemed to stand out as the pinnacle of the city’s beauty: the National Cathedral. From the outside, the imposing structure rose tall enough to touch the sky, so white it was nearly blinding. The inside was not any less breathtaking. The stained glass, the wooden arches, even the catacombs underneath were stylistically magnificent. Any flaws only seemed to serve in making the design more stunning. This, I thought, is what real beauty looks like. The first moment of the Kantian experience of beauty that I felt when I took in the radiant building ahead of me was of disinterested pleasure. Kant describes this moment as one where the viewer is content in observing the object, without some sort of emotion or previous knowledge impeding the overall piece. In this case, the building existing in and of itself was

Though the National Cathedral has an eventual purpose in its creation, the reason for its beauty is not reliant on what it is used for. Each of the elements of the building work together to form an ultimate purpose, though it cannot necessarily be spelled out. The design of the arches are aesthetically pleasing to look at with both proportion and form coming into play, but there is not necessarily a certain purpose for their curvature, only the knowledge that it all works together. This follows for the stained glass as well. Each piece of glass works towards the common aim in creating a piece of art, but without presupposing its ultimate end, the stained glass is beautiful because it makes an intricate design in which the purpose for it is not the reason for its