I found the concept of “aesthetic care” versus “authentic care” very interesting. After learning about this topic, it was very easy to understand that my teachers could have such a big impact on their students because they genuinely cared about us. The American public school system was not designed to genuinely care for its students, specifically students of color. It was designed to aesthetically take care of its white students.
They prioritize high test scores, attendance, and graduation rates, and when they don't get that from their students, they just leave them behind instead of finding out the real reasons behind these actions. Sometimes a simple “how are you today?” goes a long way. What does it mean to describe care as “beautiful”? Caring is an art, and if so, what would “ingenious” care (and careful art) look like? And how could the aesthetics of care transform our way of thinking, not only about interpersonal care, but also about wider social relationships? In Kant's aesthetics, the human faculty of aesthetic judgment to feel the beautiful and the sublime has essential implications for aesthetic attitudes when carrying out caring actions in human relationships. In his book, aesthetic attitudes are validated through reflective aesthetic judgment, which is the ability to judge an object reflectively feeling it as pleasure.
It does not emphasize the aesthetic judgment of the object of appreciation, but rather on the ethical and aesthetic life of the agents. In the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment”, Kant analyzed how aesthetic attitudes are possible and how they can be distinguished from other attitudes, namely, the immediate affective attitude, the scientific attitude and practical and pragmatic attitudes.
