Kant’s Aesthetics (Part 1)

Kant’s Aesthetics

(Part 1)

Immanuel Kant is an 18th century German philosopher whose work initiated dramatic changes in the fields of epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and teleology. Like many Enlightenment thinkers, he holds our mental faculty of reason in high esteem; he believes that it is our reason that invests the world we experience with structure. In his works on aesthetics and teleology, he argues that it is our faculty of judgment that enables us to have experience of beauty and grasp those experiences as part of an ordered, natural world with purpose. After the Introduction, each of the above sections commences with a summary. These will give the reader an idea of what topics are discussed in more detail in each section. They can also be read together to form a brief bird’s-eye-view of Kant’s theory of aesthetics and teleology.

Introduction

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The basic, explicit purpose of Kant’s Critique of Judgment is to investigate whether the ‘power’ (also translated as ‘faculty’ – and we will use the latter here) of judgment provides itself with an a priori principle. In earlier work, Kant had pretty much assumed that judgment was simply a name for the combined operation of other, more fundamental, mental faculties. Now, Kant has been led to speculate that the operation of judgment might be organized and directed by a fundamental a priori principle that is unique to it. The third Critique sets out to explore the validity and implications of such a hypothesis.

In the third Critique, Kant’s account of judgment begins with the definition of judgment as the subsumption of a particular under a universal (Introduction IV). If, in general, the faculty of understanding is that which supplies concepts (universals), and reason is that which draws inferences (constructs syllogisms, for example), then judgment ‘mediates’ between the understanding and reason by allowing individual acts of subsumption to occur (cf. e.g. Introduction III). This leads Kant to a further distinction between determinate and reflective judgments (Introduction IV). In the former, the concept is sufficient to determine the particular – meaning that the concept contains sufficient information for the identification of any particular instance of it. In such a case, judgment’s work is fairly straightforward (and Kant felt he had dealt adequately with such judgments in the Critique of Pure Reason). Thus the latter (where the judgment has to proceed without a concept, sometimes in order to form a new concept) forms the greater philosophical problem here. How could a judgment take place without a prior concept? How are new concepts formed? And are there judgments that neither begin nor end with determinate concepts? This explains why a book about judgment should have so much to say about aesthetics: Kant takes aesthetic judgments to be a particularly interesting form of reflective judgments.

As we shall see, the second half of Kant’s book deals with teleological judgments. Broadly speaking, a teleological judgment concerns an object the possibility of which can only be understood from the point of view of its purpose. Kant will claim that teleological judgments are also reflective, but in a different way – that is, having a different indeterminacy with respect to the concepts typical of natural science.

Reflective judgments are important for Kant because they involve the judgment doing a job for itself, rather than being a mere co-ordinator of concepts and intuitions; thus, reflective judgments might be the best place to search for judgment’s a priori legislating principle. The principle in question (if it exists), Kant claims, would assert the suitability of all nature for our faculty of judgment in general. (In the narrower case of determinate judgments, Kant believes he has demonstrated the necessity of this ‘suitability’.) This general suitability Kant calls the finality or purposiveness/ purposefulness of nature for the purposes of our judgment. Kant offers a number of arguments to prove the existence and validity of this principle. First, he suggests that without such a principle, science (as a systematic, orderly and unified conception of nature) would not be possible. All science must assume the availability of its object for our ability to judge it. (A similar argument is used by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason in discussing the regulative role of rational ideas). Second, without such a principle our judgments about beauty would not exhibit the communicability, or tendency to universality even in the absence of a concept, that they do. It is this second argument that dominates the first half of the Critique of Judgment.

As we shall see, Kant uses the particular investigation into judgments about art, beauty and the sublime partly as a way of illuminating judgment in general. Aesthetic judgments exhibit in an exemplary fashion precisely those features of judgment in general which allow one to explore the transcendental principles of judgment. But Kant has still higher concerns. The whole problem of judgment is important because judgment, Kant believes, forms the mediating link between the two great branches of philosophical inquiry (the theoretical and the practical). It had been noted before (for example, by Hume) that there seems to be a vast difference between what is, and what ought to be. Kant notes that these two philosophical branches have completely different topics, but these topics, paradoxically, have as their object the very same sensible nature. Theoretical philosophy has as its topic the cognition of sensible nature; practical philosophy has as its topic the possibility of moral action in and on sensible nature.

This problem had arisen before in Kant’s work, in the famous Antinomies in both the first and second Critiques. A key version of the problem Kant poses in the Antinomies concerns freedom: how can nature be both determined according to the laws of science, and yet have ‘room’ for the freedom necessary in order for morality to have any meaning? Ultimately, for Kant this would be a conflict of our faculty of reason against itself. For, in its theoretical employment, reason absolutely demands the subjection of all objects to law; but in its practical (moral) employment, reason equally demands the possibility of freedom. The problem is solved by returning to the idealism we discussed in previous section of the introduction. Every object has to be conceived in a two-fold manner: first as an appearance, subject to the necessary jurisdiction of certain basic concepts (the Categories) and to the forms of space and time; second, as a thing in itself, about which nothing more can be said. Even if appearances are rigorously law-governed, it is still possible that things in themselves can act freely. Nevertheless, although this solution eliminates the conflict, it does not actually unify the two sides of reason, nor the two objects (what is and what ought) of reason.

Judgment seems to relate to both sides, however, and thus (Kant speculates) can form the third thing that allows philosophy to be a single, unified discipline. Kant thus believes that judgment may be the mediating link that can unify the whole of philosophy, and correlatively, also the link that discovers the unity among the objects and activities of philosophy. Unfortunately, Kant never makes explicit exactly how the bulk of his third Critique is supposed to solve this problem; understandably, it is thus often ignored by readers of Kant’s text. Thus, the central problem of the Critique of Judgment is a broad one: the unity of philosophy in general. This problem is investigated by that mental faculty which Kant believes is the key to this unity, namely judgment. And judgment is investigated by the critical inquiry into those types of judgment in which the a priori principle of judgment is apparent: on the beautiful, on the sublime, and on teleology. We shall return to the grand issue of the unity of philosophy at the end of this article.

The various themes of the Critique of Judgment have been enormously influential in the two centuries since its publication. The accounts of genius, and of the significance of imagination in aesthetics, for example, became basic pillars of Romanticism in the early 19th Century. The formalism of Kant’s aesthetics in general inspired two generations of formalist aesthetics, in the first half of the 20th Century; the connection between judgment and political or moral communities has been similarly influential from Schiller onwards, and was the main subject of Hanna Arendt’s last, uncompleted, project; and Kant’s treatment of the sublime has been a principle object of study by several recent philosophers, such as J.-F. Lyotard. Kant’s discussion, in the second half of the book, of the distinction between the intellectus ectypus and the intellectus archetypus was an extremely important in the decades immediately after Kant in the development of German Idealism. And his moral proof for the existence of God is often ranked alongside the great arguments of Anselm and Aquinas.

The following entry is divided into two sections, which correspond for the most part to the major division of Kant’s book between the ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’ and the ‘Critique of Teleological Judgment’. Part A deals with Kant’s account of beauty, the sublime, and fine art. In the first two of these subjects, Kant’s concern is with what features an aesthetic judgment exhibits, how such a judgment is possible, and is there any transcendental guarantee of the validity of such a judgment. The treatment of fine art shifts the focus onto the conditions of possibility of the production of works of art. Part B deals with Kant’s account of teleological judgment, and its relation to the natural science of biology. However, if the discussion above of the ‘Central Problems’ of the Critique of Judgment is correct, a major part of Kant’s interest is less in these particular analyses, than in their broader implications for e.g. morality, the nature of human thought, our belief in the existence of God, and ultimately for the unity of philosophy itself.

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Critique of Aesthetic Judgment

a. The Judgment of the Beautiful

The Critique of Judgment begins with an account of beauty. The initial issue is: what kind of judgment is it that results in our saying, for example, ‘That is a beautiful sunset’. Kant argues that such aesthetic judgments (or ‘judgments of taste’) must have four key distinguishing features. First, they are disinterested, meaning that we take pleasure in something because we judge it beautiful, rather than judging it beautiful because we find it pleasurable. The latter type of judgment would be more like a judgment of the ‘agreeable’, as when I say ‘I like doughnuts’.

Second and third, such judgments are both universal and necessary. This means roughly that it is an intrinsic part of the activity of such a judgment to expect others to agree with us. Although we may say ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, that is not how we act. Instead, we debate and argue about our aesthetic judgments – and especially about works of art -and we tend to believe that such debates and arguments can actually achieve something. Indeed, for many purposes, ‘beauty’ behaves as if it were a real property of an object, like its weight or chemical composition. But Kant insists that universality and necessity are in fact a product of features of the human mind (Kant calls these features ‘common sense’), and that there is no objective property of a thing that makes it beautiful.

Fourth, through aesthetic judgments, beautiful objects appear to be ‘purposive without purpose’ (sometimes translated as ‘final without end’). An object’s purpose is the concept according to which it was made (the concept of a vegetable soup in the mind of the cook, for example); an object is purposive if it appears to have such a purpose; if, in other words, it appears to have been made or designed. But it is part of the experience of beautiful objects, Kant argues, that they should affect us as if they had a purpose, although no particular purpose can be found.

Having identified the major features of aesthetic judgments, Kant then needs to ask the question of how such judgments are possible, and are such judgments in any way valid (that is, are they really universal and necessary).

It is useful to see the aesthetics here, as with Kant’s epistemology and to a certain extent his ethics also, as being a leap over the terms of the debate between British (and largely empiricist) philosophy of art and beauty (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Burke) and Continental rationalist aesthetics (especially Baumgarten, who invented the modern use of the term aesthetics’ in the mid-18th century). The key ideas of the former group were (i) the idea of a definite human nature, such that studies of beauty could, within limits, be universal in scope; (ii) the assertion that beautiful objects and our responses to them were essentially involved in sense or feeling, and were not cognitive; (iii) that any ‘natural’ responses to beauty were generally overlaid by individual and communal experiences, habits and customs. The main disagreement with rationalist thought on the matter was in the second of these ideas. Baumgarten, following Leibniz, argued that all sense perception was merely ‘confused’ cognition, or cognition by way of sensible images. Thus, although beauty certainly appears to our senses, this by no means demonstrates that beauty is non-cognitive! Beauty, for Baumgarten, has more to do with rational ideas such as harmony, rather than with the physiological.

Kant asserted the basic distinction between intuitive or sensible presentations on the one hand, and the conceptual or rational on the other. Therefore, despite his great admiration for Baumgarten, it is impossible for Kant to agree with Baumgarten’s account of aesthetic experience. (By ‘aesthetic’ here we mean in Baumgarten’s sense of a philosophy of the beautiful and related notions, and not in Kant’s original usage of the term in the Critique of Pure Reason to mean the domain of sensibility.) In addition, Kant holds that aesthetic experience, like natural experience leading to determinate judgments, is inexplicable without both an intuitive and a conceptual dimension. Thus, for example, beauty is also by no means non-cognitive, as the British tradition had held.

Thus, Kant begins to analyze the experience of beauty, in order to ask as precisely as possible the question ‘how are judgments about beauty possible’. Kant’s initial focus is on judgments about beauty in nature, as when we call a flower, a sunset, or an animal ‘beautiful’. What, at bottom, does such a judgment mean, and how does it take place as a mental act? In order to begin to answer these questions, Kant needs to clarify the basic features of such judgments. On Kant’s analysis, aesthetic judgments are still more strange even than ordinary reflective judgments, and must have a number of peculiar features which at first sight look like nothing other than paradoxes. We will now describe those features using Kant’s conceptual language.

Taking up roughly the first fifth of the Critique of Judgment, Kant discusses four particular unique features of aesthetic judgments on the beautiful (he subsequently deals with the sublime). These he calls ‘moments’, and they are structured in often obscure ways according to the main divisions of Kant’s table of categories.

The First Moment. 

Aesthetic judgments are disinterested. There are two types of interest: by way of sensations in the agreeable, and by way of concepts in the good. Only aesthetic judgment is free or pure of any such interests. Interest is defined as a link to real desire and action, and thus also to a determining connection to the real existence of the object. In the aesthetic judgment per se, the real existence of the beautiful object is quite irrelevant. Certainly, I may wish to own the beautiful painting, or at least a copy of it, because I derive pleasure from it – but that pleasure, and thus that desire, is distinct from and parasitic upon the aesthetic judgment (see sect. 9). The judgment results in pleasure, rather than pleasure resulting in judgment. Kant accordingly and famously claims that the aesthetic judgment must concern itself only with form (shape, arrangement, rhythm, etc.) in the object presented, not sensible content (color, tone, etc.), since the latter has a deep connection to the agreeable, and thus to interest. Kant is thus the founder of all formalism in aesthetics in modern philosophy. This claim of the disinterestedness of all aesthetic judgments is perhaps the most often attacked by subsequent philosophy, especially as it is extended to include fine art as well as nature. To pick three examples, Kant’s argument is rejected by those (Nietzsche, Freud) for whom all art must always be understood as related to will; by those for whom all art (as a cultural production) must be political in some sense (Marxism); by those for whom all art is a question of affective response (expressionists).

The Second Moment. 

Aesthetic judgments behave universally, that is, involve an expectation or claim on the agreement of others – just ‘as if’ beauty were a real property of the object judged. If I judge a certain landscape to be beautiful then, although I may be perfectly aware that all kinds of other factors might enter in to make particular people in fact disagree with me, never-the-less I at least implicitly demand universality in the name of taste. The way that my aesthetic judgments ‘behave’ is key evidence here: that is, I tend to see disagreement as involving error somewhere, rather than agreement as involving mere coincidence. This universality is distinguished first from the mere subjectivity of judgments such as ‘I like honey’ (because that is not at all universal, nor do we expect it to be); and second from the strict objectivity of judgments such as ‘honey contains sugar and is sweet’, because the aesthetic judgment must, somehow, be universal ‘apart from a concept’ (sect. 9). Being reflective judgments, aesthetic judgments of taste have no adequate concept (at least to begin with), and therefore can only behave as if they were objective. Kant is quite aware that he is flying in the face of contemporary (then and now!) truisms such as ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. Such a belief, he argues, first of all can not account for our experience of beauty itself, insofar as the tendency is always to see ‘beauty’ as if it were somehow in the object or the immediate experience of the object. Second, Kant argues that such a relativist view can not account for the social ‘behavior’ of our claims about what we find beautiful. In order to explore the implications of ‘apart from a concept’, Kant introduces the idea of the ‘free play’ of the cognitive faculties (here: understanding and imagination), and the related idea of communicability. In the case of the judgment of the beautiful, these faculties no longer simply work together (as they do in ordinary sensible cognition) but rather each ‘furthers’ or ‘quickens’ the other in a kind of self-contained and self-perpetuating cascade of thought and feeling. We will return to these notions below.

The Third Moment. 

The third introduces the problem of purpose and purposiveness (also translated ‘end’ and ‘finality’). An object’s purpose is the concept according to which it was manufactured; purposiveness, then, is the property of at least appearing to have been manufactured or designed. Kant claims that the beautiful has to be understood as purposive, but without any definite purpose. A ‘definite purpose’ would be either the set of external purposes (what the thing was meant to do or accomplish), or the internal purpose (what the thing was simply meant to be like). In the former case, the success of the process of making is judged according to utility; in the latter, according to perfection. Kant argues that beauty is equivalent neither to utility nor perfection, but is still purposive. Beauty in nature, then, will appear as purposive with respect to our faculty of judgment, but its beauty will have no ascertainable purpose – that is, it is not purposive with respect to determinate cognition. Indeed, this is why beauty is pleasurable since, Kant argues, pleasure is defined as a feeling that arises on the achievement of a purpose, or at least the recognition of a purposiveness (Introduction, VI).

The purposiveness of art is more complicated. Although such works may have had purposes behind their production (the artist wished to express a certain mood, or communicate a certain idea), nevertheless, these can not be sufficient for the object to be beautiful. As judges of art, any such knowledge we do have about these real purposes can inform the judgment as background, but must be abstracted from to form the aesthetic judgment properly. It is not just that the purpose for the beauty of the beautiful happens to be unknown, but that it cannot be known. Still, we are left with the problem of understanding how a thing can be purposive, without having a definite purpose.

The Fourth Moment. 

Here, Kant is attempting to show that aesthetic judgments must pass the test of being ‘necessary’, which effectively means, ‘according to principle’. Everyone must assent to my judgment, because it follows from this principle. But this necessity is of a peculiar sort: it is ‘exemplary’ and ‘conditioned’. By exemplary, Kant means that the judgment does not either follow or produce a determining concept of beauty, but exhausts itself in being exemplary precisely of an aesthetic judgment. With the notion of condition, Kant reaches the core of the matter. He is asking: what is it that the necessity of the judgment is grounded upon; that is, what does it say about those who judge?

Kant calls the ground ‘common sense’, by which he means the a priori principle of our taste, that is, of our feeling for the beautiful. (Note: by ‘common sense’ is not meant being intelligent about everyday things, as in: ‘For a busy restaurant, it’s just common sense to reserve a table in advance.’) In theoretical cognition of nature, the universal communicability of a representation, its objectivity, and its basis in a priori principles are all related. Similarly, Kant wants to claim that the universal communicability, the exemplary necessity and the basis in an a priori principle are all different ways of understanding the same subjective condition of possibility of aesthetic judgment that he calls common sense. (As we shall see, on the side of the beautiful object, this subjective principle corresponds to the principle of the purposiveness of nature.) Thus Kant can even claim that all four Moments of the Beautiful are summed up in the idea of ‘common sense’ (CJ sect. 22). Kant also suggests that common sense in turn depends upon or is perhaps identical with the same faculties as ordinary cognition, that is, those features of humans which (as Kant showed in the Critique of Pure Reason) make possible natural, determinative experience. Here, however, the faculties are merely in a harmony rather than forming determinate cognition.

contd…