Kant's Aesthetics
Kant (Prussian [before Germany became a nation state], 1724-1804)
The Critique of Judgment (instructor's notes)
First Book
Analytic of the Beautiful
First Moment
Of the Judgment of Taste, According to Quality
#1. The judgment of taste is aesthetical in the sense that it refers to the pleasure (or pain) in the subject—not to a quality in the object.
#2. Aesthetic satisfaction is disinterested (this is the quality of the judgment) in the sense that it prescinds from (takes no account of) my appetites or practical interests. “Disinterested” does not imply “impersonal” nor does it imply any distanced attitude when the person is involved in practical matters.
#3. If I’m responding to something as pleasant, some interest of mine is being gratified; but to find something beautiful is different from that. [But notice: the beautiful does please.] [Note the Helga paintings of Andrew Wyeth, which are both aesthetically appealing and also gratify sexual interest.]
#4. If I appreciate something as good, whether good as a means to something else or good in itself, I have some interest in it.
#5. The judgment of taste is contemplative, and is without interest in the existence of its object. Satisfaction in the beautiful is free in the sense that it is neither caused by a pleasant sensation nor obliged by moral reason.
Second Moment
Of the Judgment of Taste, According to Quantity
#6. To judge that something is beautiful is not merely to say that I happen to like it (because of some peculiar feature of myself that affects my personal preferences). When we say "beautiful" we are invoking something higher. We imply that everyone who beholds it should find it beautiful. (This is why Kant says the quantity of this judgment is universal.) Notice that this is not a prediction about what everyone in fact prefers. Kant is well aware that aesthetic preferences differ.
#7. People are content to find different things pleasant in the sense of personally gratifying. We do sometimes speak of taste in matters of what is merely pleasant. Aesthetic judgment pertains in the first instance to single objects (this flower, this painting), but the judgment of beauty does not apply a concept which could be spelled out in a universal criterion (such as harmonious unification of contrasts). “There can be no rule according to which anyone is to be forced to recognize anything as beautiful.” Of course one may generalize and say, “Roses are beautiful.” To make a clearly aesthetic judgment, separate off everything belonging to the sensory enjoyment of the pleasant and everything belonging to the moral respect for the good and see what satisfaction is left. “The beautiful is that which pleases universally without [requiring] a concept.” [Kant sometimes says that there is a concept, but it is not determinate (definite or specific in any way).]
Third Moment
Of the Judgment of Taste, According to the Relation of the
Purposes Which Are Brought into Consideration in Them
The aesthetic experience is enjoyable for its own sake—its purposiveness is fulfilled simply by the pleasure that we take in the free play of imagination and understanding. It has no purpose outside itself (no cognitive aim in the realm of truth, no practical aim in the realm of goodness). In this sense Kant can use the phrase “purposiveness without purpose.”
There is a second approach to interpreting the phrase, "purposiveness without purpose." No definite purpose is cognized in the flower that gives rise to an experience of beauty. The flower seems “preadapted to our judgment,” as if it were purposely designed to give us aesthetic satisfaction; but there is no objective purpose that reflective judgment can assert. Nevertheless, the flower might possibly be said to have “purposiveness" in the highly qualified sense that we could say that the flower is in conformity with an aesthetic purpose if we could know that there was an artist, e.g., an Author of nature, whose purpose was to give us this particular kind of satisfaction--to arouse a pleasurable play in our powers of imagination and understanding.
The term translated “purposiveness” is Zweckmässigkeit, which might be better translated “in conformity with purpose” or—in this context—“consistent with purpose (though science and philosophy do not allow us to affirm any real [e.g., divine] purpose implicit in nature).”
Fourth Moment
Of the Judgment of Taste, According to Modality
The judgment of beauty is necessary, since a person who judges correctly judges solely on the basis of capacities that every human being has, the capacities of imagination and understanding. Anyone who finds the same capacities activated in the same general way must make the same judgment: this is beautiful.
A colloquial approach to Kant's four qualities of the beautiful
“Ya gotta love it” captures a lot of what Kant wants to say. I like to take Kant as offering an analysis of language as much as anything. If A says, “I like it,” and B says, “It’s not my cup of tea,” there’s no contradiction between them. If A says, “It’s beautiful,” and B says, "It's just a sentimental appeal to emotion," there is a contradiction between them.
“Ya gotta love it”: “gotta” implies the necessity of the judgment. It’s not just, “Try it, you might like it”; it’s try it, you’ll like it.”
“Ya” (if said of an indefinitely large group) connotes universality—everyone’s gotta love it. That’s two out of Kant’s four defining predicates.
Now if this judgment is about what the speaker takes for beautiful, the speaker is implying that there’s some appeal here that’s not simply a matter of what happens to gratify our particular passions or our practical needs (moral and otherwise). (Not that there’s anything wrong about our passions or practical needs—just that beautiful adds something not included in predicates that refer to those satisfactions.) This is what Kant has in mind with his outdated word, “disinterested.” Don’t get hung up on the word. Get what he’s after. Here is where we find the limit to the usefulness of the phrase, “Ya gotta love it,” to help a student get an intuition of what Kant is up to. “Love” may very well connote a response to what gratifies the appetites or practical needs. For this reason, I don’t want you to use this phrase, “Ya gotta love it” in your papers. I simply use it as a ladder (pun intended). Yes, there are problems with Kant’s claims, but there is also an important core of intuitive plausibility to the claims, and that’s what I’m trying to convey here. First understand, then criticize.
Last (I’m obviously not following Kant’s four-point sequence here), Kant gives voice to a kind of free play that beauty releases. Don’t wrestle with the definitions of “imagination” and “understanding” so much that you fail to pick up intuitively what he’s getting at. You are free from cognitive striving. You are free from practical effort; therefore you're judgment is disinterested. You can "simply" enjoy this beauty in your mind. That’s the main thing.
Kant centers his philosophy on his insight into, and conviction of, universal humanity: in and through all our differences, we have the same basic structure of mind: the capacities of sensation, imagination, understanding, judgment, and reason. To map these out clearly and in their complexity, to recognize their limits, and to realize what they can and do accomplish, is the philosopher’s task.
Two types of sublimity:
A. The infinite (“mathematically sublime”) suggested by some natural phenomena.
The sublime is what is absolutely great, great beyond all comparison. This can be quantitative greatness, overwhelming, colossal size, mathematical sublimity. The understanding measures quantities, but the sublime surpasses the understanding. When we find ourselves in the presence of something whose size we could never measure, our feeling of being thus overwhelmed arouses our sense of a higher faculty beyond the understanding (which deals with sensory objects). The infinite is a concept of a sublime totality, but trying to think this concept is problematic (a progress which, as infinite, has no limit, but which, as totality, has nevertheless come to completeness). Therefore, rather than trying to think nature as an infinite totality, we shift gears and simply say that nature is sublime in those of its phenomena which, when seen, bring with them the idea of its infinity.
B. “Nature, considered in an aesthetical judgment as might that has no dominion over us, is dynamically sublime.” [In Greek, dynamis means power.]
Though not every thing that arouses fear is sublime, everything in nature that gives rise to the experience of the sublime in nature has overwhelming power so as to rouses some fear; but fear is transcended when the mind is not staggered by concern about being physically carried off by the tornado, hurricane, or waterfall. We can feel the soul powers mobilize their sublime dignity that shall not be overwhelmed by the power of natural forces. (Kant makes a comparison with religion: a faithful believer does not fear even an omnipotent God whose power he has no occasion to resist.) “Bold, overhanging, and as it were threatening rocks; clouds piling up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like—these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might. But the sight of them is the more attractive, the more fearful it is, provided only that we are in security; and we willingly call these objects sublime, because they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height and discover in us a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature.”
As a first approximation to the sublime, imagine someone saying, “Awesome!” (I’m not going to insist on the technical point that Kant mentions and then sets aside, that sublimity is about the human response, not about the, e.g., colossal or dynamic-powerful natural phenomenon.) The sublime is lofty in a special way. It overwhelms our sense of what is great; it may threaten us, but it does so in such a way that rouses a sublime resistance within us: our dignity is higher than what the forces of nature can bring against us. The human paradox is that we are a part of nature and we, in some measure, transcend nature.
One variety of stimulus to the experience of the sublime—e.g., the starry sky above me—staggers the imagination, leads the mind toward the notion of infinity.
Another variety of the sublime manifests power, dynamism, that would overwhelms the human scale of resistance; though in a moment of sublimity we are in fact not picked up and carried off by the tornado, but able to feel the stirring of that within us which is, in its way, even greater than a very big wind.
Exercise: Read Bullough’s description in the long paragraph on the middle of p. 459. Which Kantian classification would be more apt here—beautiful or sublime? Why?
Note: to understand Lyotard’s identification with the sublime and his political critique of integrated, “beautiful” totality, it helps to know of the thought of his contemporary, the French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95). Expressing convictions from his Jewish heritage in the concepts of philosophy, Levinas criticized the tendency of European philosophy as a quest for total comprehension, including total comprehension of the Other [the person], who, as infinite, has a [sublime] height of dignity that compels our utter respect and is always beyond our ability to comprehend. The tendency to dominate the Other, who breaks through our self-satisfaction, culminated in National Socialism. The face of the Other is not an object, nor a representation for thought.
Recommended: the article on Kant's aesthetics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Hans-Georg Gadamer's excerpt from Truth and Method, is excellently summarized in Stephen David Ross’s introductory paragraphs preceding the selection. There is a social-historical-shared-human dimension essential to art that Kant’s abstract approach mostly misses, which enables understanding across cultural historical space when we become aware of one another’s presuppositions (it’s not possible to interpret anything without bringing some assumptions, “prejudices,” “bias,” some pre-comprehension, into play).
Back to Kant. Main ideas: The purposiveness without purpose (Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck) that characterizes a natural beauty is this: the flower has no purpose or intention to please by setting our cognitive powers into play, but it, as it were, conforms to such a purpose (Zweckmässigkeit is translated purposiveness—or finality—but it really means being measured or trimmed to . . . it’s as if there were a purpose shaping it). Teleological judgment cannot pretend to know what the first Critique concluded that it is impossible to know—that “nature” or, in another word, more to the point in this context, God has arranged nature as a purposive system whose sole end in itself is man as a rational being. Since natural beauty points to our status as ends, it is a symbol of morality; this is because moral reason, the capacity for rational self-governance, requires that we treat persons not merely as means to be used for this or that purpose, but rather as ends in themselves. Morality lifts us beyond the realm of mere nature, beyond being totally determined by cause-and-effect chains.
The function of Kant’s doctrine of genius in his philosophic system is to keep art within the realm of nature, since genius is a natural gift, whose “rule” can never be set forth by the understanding as a law or an algorithm for the production of beautiful works.
Finality=purposiveness (Greek, telos, = Latin, finis, end, goal).
Teleology=the doctrine explicating a purposive system.
Sensus communis=common sense
Transcendental=in this selection, it refers to Kant’s systematic, philosophic enterprise; he sought the conditions of the possibility of true scientific judgments (first Critique), the conditions of the possibility of an unconditional moral command (second Critique), and the conditions of the possibility of discerning reflective judgment (third Critique). In his terminology, asking how something is possible is a “transcendental” inquiry. The term is not to be confused with “transcendent,” as in the concept of a transcendent God beyond creation.
Idea=an idea of Reason; it’s beyond a concept of the understanding, which can be experienced as a phenomenal appearance in space and time. Examples of Ideas are God, the freedom of the immortal soul, the cosmos as a whole, and history as an evolutionary process leading toward an advanced planetary civilization.
Spirit=Geist, mind or spirit (in German, French [esprit], and some other languages, there is just one term for these two concepts which are significantly differentiated. Do not automatically assume any religious overtones; the term can also mean culture; it tends to have social connotations.
Beziehung=relation
The aesthetic judgment of taste can take examples from nature as well as from art. What’s crucial is “the playful facility of one’s mental powers, the expansion of vitality which comes from the harmony between imagination and understanding, and invites one to linger before the beautiful” (354).
OK, Kant, now prove it!
[I. The warm up.]
#31. How can it be possible for a judgment of taste to require the necessary accord of everyone else? A sufficient answer will come from comparing the structure of aesthetic judgments (“Yosemite Valley is beautiful”) with the structure of objective judgments (“Yosemite Valley is in California”).
#32. The judgment of taste is like an objective judgment in demanding the assent of everyone. And we must judge for ourselves, not merely imitate others’ judgments, though we follow and build on others’ achievements. There is the young poet who falsely attributes beauty to his own poem, in spite of its rejection by others. The classics do indeed point the way, giving examples to educate taste, which does not mean that it reduces later artists (in the broad sense) to the status of mere imitators, though it does imply that if we neglect to school ourselves in the great achievements of the past, we will revert to crudity and have to begin all over again. “Art stands still at a certain point; a boundary is set to it beyond which it cannot go, which presumably has been reached long ago and cannot be extended further” (#47, 129).
#33. The judgment of taste is like a subjective judgment in that it cannot be proven. No one can be compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful by any consensus of authorities or any reasoning from principles or rules. The judgment of taste is singular: “Niagara Falls is beautiful,” not the universal (“logical”) judgment, “All waterfalls are beautiful.”
#34. Since I must immediately feel something as beautiful, not follow a line of reasoning to discover it to be so, no objective principle of taste is possible, though critics can contribute many interesting things—see the rich, second paragraph in this section! To find something beautiful, “I must immediately feel pleasure in the representation of the object”; nevertheless, critics may help “correct and extend” taste, though not by reducing art to a matter of rules (124.2).
#35. The free--not law-governed--interplay of imagination (which presents to the intellect what is taken in through perception) and the understanding, which thinks with concepts is what is essentially involved in taste. The essential aesthetic pleasure is precisely the pleasure we feel in the interplay of these two “powers” or “faculties.” The feeling of the free play of imagination and understanding is the way we grasp the beautiful.
#36. The effort to demonstrate the possibility or legitimacy of the aesthetic judgment as set forth here is part of a larger project of showing how synthetic a priori judgments are possible. A priori judgments are ones whose truth does not depend on anything empirical (e.g., every event has a cause). Synthetic judgments are ones whose predicate (in this case, “beautiful”) is not already implied in its components (the perception of the flower, the particular concept(s) (concepts, say, of vitality, gracefulness, evanescence, lush extravagance) that may happen to be in play in a particular aesthetic experience).
#37. The judgment of the beautiful is about individual things, not classes of things, since aesthetic pleasure does not come from a concept.
[II. The proof]
#38. If the (pure case of the) aesthetical enjoyment of beauty judges the object not in terms of its sensuous qualities but only in terms of its form, which sets into play faculties which everyone has, then the judgment of taste can require universal assent—which is what we needed to show.
Remark. The fact that we may readily err in judging something beautiful does not compromise our result, any more than making a mistake in logic brings logical principles into question.
#46. Beautiful art is the product of genius. Definition: “Genius is the innate mental disposition through which nature gives the rule to art.” It is “a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given”; and therefore since the genius cannot learn to create beautiful art by learning and following rules, the work must be marked, first and foremost, by originality. (2) Its products must be models, i.e., they do not merely imitate but give examples to others. (3) The genius produces not merely at will or by any method that he could teach to others so they could make something similar; “he does not know himself how he has come by his ideas.”
#47. “Art stands still at a certain point; a boundary is set to it beyond which it cannot go, which presumably has been reached long ago and cannot be extended further.” [The idea of the end of art is a side-comment, picked up by Hegel and much discussed in the 20th century]. There is no production of beautiful art by rule, but “the rule must be abstracted from the fact” [cf. Hume]. In any beautiful art, however, there is some “mechanical element that can be comprehended by rules and followed accordingly,” something that can be taught in a school. Artistic creation must be purposive. “Shallow heads believe that they cannot better show themselves to be full-blown geniuses than by throwing off the constraint of all rules; they believe, in effect, that one could make a braver show on the back of a wild horse than on the back of a trained animal. Genius can only furnish rich material for products of beautiful art; its execution and its form require talent cultivated in the schools . . . . (130).
#48. Definition: “Artificial beauty is a beautiful representation of a thing.” One can represent as beautiful even terrible things [cf. Aristotle], so long as they are not simply disgusting. Once the act of genius has launched the beautiful representation, the work of taste takes over to adjust the form suitably. “By taste the artist estimates this work after he has exercised and corrected it by manifold examples from art or nature, and after many, often toilsome, attempts to content himself he finds that form which satisfies him. Hence this form it not, as it were, a thing of inspiration or the result of a free swing of the mental powers, but of a slow and even painful process of improvement, by which he seeks to render it adequate to his thought, without detriment to the freedom of the play of his powers.” Judging a thing according to the perfection of its fulfillment of its maker’s purpose in bringing it into existence is not a judgment of aesthetic taste, but we do use it, e.g., in valuing the effective artistry of the Creator. We like all sorts of products (silverware, books, sermons) to be artistic, without any show of artistic effort. Art may show genius without taste or taste without genius.
#49. Genius has spirit [Geist], the animating principle of the mind. All kinds of activities may have various excellences, and yet lack spirit, which alone gives the vigor, acceleration, drive, momentum. But just what is spirit (Geist)?
Definitions: Spirit is the faculty of presenting aesthetical ideas. An aesthetical idea is a “representation of the imagination which occasions much thought, without however any definite thought, i.e., any concept, being capable of being adequate to it; it consequently cannot be completely compassed and made intelligible by language.” This is “a counterpart to a rational idea, a concept to which no intuition or representation of the imagination can be adequate” [e.g., God, the free and immortal soul, the idea of history with its destiny in an advanced civilization, and the cosmos]. Examples of poetic imagination are representations of heaven and hell, angels, and the like.
Imagination=Einbildungskraft, the power of forming an image [whether by perceptually synthesizing the data given in sensation or by in the way that we normally would call “imagination”—as a productive faculty]
#56. There are disputes about taste, but no cognitive, conceptual grounds [in the understanding] for such. How can this be?
#57. The fact that judgments of taste can claim universal validity points to their basis in a different kind of concept: a concept of a “supersensible substrate of humanity”—it transcends anything we can grasp by the senses (to which we may apply our empirical concepts [rational, animal] and our categories [thing (“substance”), event]). This is a concept that we can’t use to gain the knowledge that the understanding is good at seeking (Newton’s physics and ordinary understanding of things and causes); it’s a concept of something we share as humans that forms the basis of judgments of taste.
#58. We use symbols to illustrate certain concepts (e.g., God is our father or “a monarchical state is represented by a living body if it is governed by national laws, and by a mere machine . . . if governed by a [despot]”). “The beautiful is the symbol of the morally good.” In making a judgment of taste, we call for universal agreement, thus appealing beyond what happens to attract or charm someone on a sensuous level; the beautiful addresses something higher in us—and that’s why it’s a symbol of the moral, and why we use terms for character qualities to express what we find beautiful.