Kant’s Aesthetics (Part 3)

Kant’s Aesthetics

(Part 3)

Arts are subdivided into mechanical and aesthetic. The former are those which, although not handicrafts, never-the-less are controlled by some definite concept of a purpose to be produced. The latter are those wherein the immediate object is merely pleasure itself. Finally, Kant distinguishes between agreeable and fine art. The former produces pleasure through sensation alone, the latter through various types of cognitions.

This taxonomy of fine art defines more precisely the issue for Kant. What, then, ‘goes on’ in the mind of the artist? It is clearly not just a matter of applying good taste, otherwise all art critics would be artists, all musicians composers, and so forth. Equally, it is not a question of simply expressing oneself using whatever means come to hand, since such productions might well lack taste. We feel reasonably secure that we know how it is possible for, for example, clockmakers to make clocks, or glass-blowers to blow glass (which doesn’t mean that we can make clocks or blow glass, but that as a kind of activity, we understand it). We have also investigated how it is for someone looking at a work of beauty to judge it. But it is not yet clear how, on the side of production, fine art gets made.

Kant sums up the problem in two apparent paradoxes. The first of these is easy to state. Fine art is a type of purposeful production, because it is made; art in general is production according to a concept of an object. But fine art can have no concept adequate to its production, else any judgment on it will fail one of the key features of all aesthetic judgments: namely purposiveness without a purpose. Fine art therefore must both be, and not be, an art in general.

To introduce the second paradox, Kant notices that we have a problem with the overwrought – that which draws attention to itself as precisely an artificial object or event. ‘Over-the-top’ acting is a good example. Kant expresses this point by saying that, in viewing a work of art we must be aware of it as art, but it must never-the-less appear natural. Where ‘natural’ here stands for the appearance of freedom from conventional rules of artifice; this concept is derived from the second sense of ‘nature’ given above. The paradox is that art (the non-natural) must appear to be natural.

Kant must overcome these paradoxes and explain how fine art can be produced at all. In sect. 46, the first step is taken when Kant, in initially defining ‘genius’, conflates ‘nature’ in the first sense above with nature in the third sense. He writes,

Genius is the talent (natural endowment) that gives the rule to art. Since talent is an innate productive ability of the artist and as such belongs itself to nature, we could also put it this way: Genius is the innate mental predisposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art. (sect. 46)

In other words, that which makes it possible to produce (fine art) is not itself produced – not by the individual genius, nor (we should add) through his or her culture, history, education, etc. From the definition of genius as that talent through which nature gives the rule to art follows (arguably!) the following key propositions. First, fine art is produced by individual humans, but not as contingent individuals. That is, not by human nature in the empirically known sense. Second, fine art as aesthetic (just like nature as aesthetic) can have no definite rules or concepts for producing or judging it. But genius supplies a rule, fully applicable only in the one, concrete instance, precisely by way of the universal structures of the genius’ mental abilities (which again, is ‘natural’ in sense one).

Third, the rule supplied by genius is more a rule governing what to produce, rather than how. Thus, while all fine art is a beautiful ‘presentation’ of an object (sect. 48), this partly obscures the fact that genius is involved in the original creation of the object to be presented. The ‘how’ is usually heavily informed by training and technique, and is governed by taste. Taste, Kant claims, is an evaluative faculty, not a productive one (sect. 48). Thus, the end of sect. 47, he will distinguish between supplying ‘material’ and elaborating the ‘form’. Fourth, because of this, originality is a characteristic of genius. This means also that fine art properly is never an imitation of previous art, though it may ‘follow’ or be ‘inspired by’ previous art (sect. 47). Fifth, as we mentioned above, fine art must have the ‘look of nature’ (sect. 45). This is because the rule of its production (that concept or set of concepts of an object and of the ‘how’ of its production which allows the genius to actually make some specific something) is radically original. Thus, fine art is ‘natural’ in sense two, in that it lies outside the cycle of production and re-production within which all other arts in general are caught up (and thus, again, cannot be imitated). This leads Kant to make some suggestive, but never fully worked out, comments about artistic influences and schools, the role of culture, of technique and education, etc. (See e.g. sect. 49-50)

Having made the various distinctions between the matter and the form of expression in genius’ work, or again between the object and its presentation, Kant applies these to a brief if eccentric comparative study of the varieties of fine art (sect. 51-53). According to the manner of presentation, he divides all fine arts into the arts of speech (especially poetry, which Kant ranks the highest of the arts), the arts of visual form (sculpture, architecture and painting), and the arts involving a play of sensible tones (music). The last pages of this part of Kant’s book are taken up with a curious collection of comments on the ‘gratifying’ (non-aesthetic but still relatively free activities), especially humor.

However, we have not yet clarified what kind of thing the ‘rule’ supplied by genius is; therefore we have not yet reached an understanding of the nature of the ‘talent’ for the production of fine art that is genius.

Genius provides the matter for fine art, taste provides the form. The beautiful is always formal, as we have already discovered. So, what distinguishes one ‘matter’ from another, such that genius might be required? What genius does, Kant says, is to provide ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ (‘Seele’, sect. 49) to what would otherwise be uninspired. This peculiar idea seems to be used in a sense analogous to saying that someone ‘has soul’, meaning to have nobility or a deep and exemplary moral character, as opposed to being shallow or even in a sense animal-like; but Kant also, following the Aristotelian tradition, means that which makes something alive rather than mere material. There can be an uninspired fine art, but it is not very interesting (pure beauty, mentioned above, may be an example). There can also, Kant warns, be inspired nonsense, which is also not very interesting. Genius inspires art works – gives them spirit – and does so by linking the work of art to what Kant will call aesthetic ideas.

This is defined in the third paragraph of sect. 49. The aesthetic idea is a presentation of the imagination to which no thought is adequate. This is a ‘counterpart’ to rational ideas (which we encountered above in talking of the sublime), which are thoughts to which nothing sensible or imagined can be adequate. Each is excessive, we might say, but on different sides of our cognitive apparatus. Aesthetic ideas are seen to be ‘straining’ after the presentation of rational ideas – this is what gives them their excess over any set of ordinary determinate concepts.

In the judgment of the beautiful, we had a harmony between the imagination and the understanding, such that each furthered the extension of the other. Kant is now saying: certainly that is true for all judgments of taste, whether of natural or artificial objects. And yet we can distinguish between such a harmony which happens on the experiencing of a beautiful form simply, or a harmony which happens on the experiencing of a beautiful form that itself is the expression of something yet higher but that cannot in any other way be expressed. (The notion of ‘expression’ is important: what Kant is describing is an aesthetic process, rather than a process of understanding something with concepts, and then communicating that understanding.) Inspired fine art is beautiful, but in addition is an expression of the state of mind which is generated by an aesthetic idea.

The relevant passages in sect. 49 are both confused and compressed. Kant seems to have two different manners in which aesthetic ideas can be the spirit of fine art. First, the aesthetic idea is a presentation of a rational idea (one of Kant’s examples is the moral idea of cosmopolitan benevolence). Of course, we know that there is no such adequate presentation. An obvious example might be a novelist or playwright’s attempt to portray a morally upright character: because, for Kant, an important part of our moral being transcends the world of phenomena, there must always be a mis-match between the idea and the portrayal of the character. Here the aesthetic idea seems to function by prompting an associated or coordinated surplus of thought that is directly analogous to the associated surplus of imaginative presentations demanded by rational ideas. (We saw a similar relation between the demand of rational ideas and imaginative activity in Kant’s analysis of the sublime. Indeed, arguably there is an analogy here to the concept of ‘negative exhibition’.) In practice, this will often involve what Kant calls ‘aesthetic attributes’: more ordinary, intermediate images: ‘Thus Jupiter’s eagle with the lightning in its claws is an attribute of the mighty king of heaven’.

Second, the aesthetic idea can be an impossibly perfect or complete presentation of a possible empirical experience and its concept (death, envy, love, fame are Kant’s examples). Here the aesthetic idea is not presenting a particular rational idea so much as a general function of reason: the striving for a maximum, a totality or the end of a series (as in Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime). And again, the effect is an associated ‘expansion’ of the concept beyond its determinate bounds. In either case, the aesthetic idea is not merely a presentation, but one which will set the imagination and understanding into a harmony, creating the same kind of self-sustaining and self-contained feeling of pleasure as the beautiful.

Kant’s theory of genius – for all its vagueness and lack of philosophical rigor – has been enormously influential. In particular, the radical separation of the aesthetic genius from the scientific mind; the emphasis on the near-miraculous expression (through aesthetic ideas and attributes) of the ineffable, excited state of mind; the link of fine art to a ‘metaphysical’ content; the requirement of radical originality; the raising of poetry to the head of all arts – all these claims (though not all of them entirely unique to Kant) were commonplaces and wide-spread for well over a century after Kant. Indeed, when modernists protested (often paradoxically) against the concept of the artist by using ‘automatic writing’ or ‘found objects’ it is, for the most part, this concept of the artist-genius that they are reacting against.

e. Idealism, Morality and the Supersensible

Let us return to the notion of beauty as tackled previously. Viewed from the position of our knowledge of nature, the supposed purposiveness of nature looks like nonsense. Not only does our scientific knowledge seem to have no room for the concept of a purpose, but many and perhaps all beautiful natural objects can be accounted for on purely scientific terms. Thus, any principle of purposiveness can only be understood as ideal. That is, such a principle says more about the particular nature of our cognitive faculties than it says about what nature really is.

But the principle of purposiveness is still valid from the point of view of the activities of judgment. This in turn means that, for judgment, the question is valid as to how this natural purposiveness is to be explained. The only possible account is that the appearance of purposiveness in nature is conditioned by the supersensible realm underlying nature. But this means that beauty is a kind of revelation of the hidden substrate of the world, and that this substrate has a necessary sympathy with our highest human projects. To this, Kant adds a series of important analogies between the activity of aesthetic judgment and the activity of moral judgment. These analyses lead Kant to claim that beauty is the ‘symbol of morality’.

Above, at the end of the section ‘Judgment of the Beautiful’, we saw Kant claim that his whole account of the transcendental possibility of judgments on the beautiful could be summed up in the notion of common sense. This principle of common sense is the form that the general a priori principle of the purposiveness of nature for judgment takes when we are trying to understand the subjective conditions of aesthetic judgments of beauty. That is, where the principle is taken as a rule governing the conditions of aesthetic judgments in the subject, then it is properly called ‘common sense’. But where the principle is taken to be functioning like a concept of an object (the beautiful thing), then it is to be seen as the principle of the purposiveness of all nature for our judgment (see sect. 55-58). But nature, understood scientifically, is not purposive. This strange situation gives rise to what Kant calls a ‘dialectic’ – merely apparent knowledge claims or paradoxes that arise from the misuse of a faculty. Just as in the ‘dialectic’ sections in the first two Critiques, he Kant solves the problem by way of an appeal to the rational idea of the supersensible. Dialectical problems, for Kant, always involves a confusion between the rational ideas of the supersensible (which have at best a merely regulative validity) and natural concepts (which have a validity guaranteed but restricted to appearances). This particular form of dialectical problem involves two contradictory, but apparently necessary, truth claims – Kant calls such a situation an ‘antinomy’. A similar dialectical problem will arise in the ‘Critique of Teleological Judgment’ where we will resume our discussion of these issues. For the moment it is enough to observe that the Antinomy of Taste seems to involve two contradictory claims about the origin of beautiful objects.

However, it could be the case that nature as the object of scientific laws (‘nature’, as Kant is fond of saying, according to the ‘immanent’ principles of the understanding), is itself responsible for the beautiful forms in nature (Kant’s example is the formation of beautiful crystals, understood perfectly through the science of chemistry). This possibility demonstrates the idealism of the principle of purposiveness. Kant thus writes, ‘we … receive nature with favor, [it is] not nature that favors us’ (sect. 58).

He writes,

Just as we must assume that objects of sense as appearances are ideal if we are to explain how we can determine their forms a priori, so we must presuppose an idealistic interpretation of purposiveness in judging the beautiful in nature and in art… (sect. 58)

But at the same time, this idealism also necessarily raises the question of what conditions beautiful appearances: if we are asking for a concept that accounts (on the side of the ideal object) for this purposiveness, it must be what Kant calls the realm of the ‘supersensible’ that is ‘underlying’ all nature and all humanity. As we know, no other concept (e.g. a natural concept) is adequate to grasping the beautiful object as beautiful. So, in forming an aesthetic judgment, which judges a beautiful object as purposive without purpose, we must assume the legitimacy of the rational concept of an underlying supersensible realm in order to account for that purposiveness. This assumption is valid only within and only for that judgment, and thus is certainly not a matter of knowledge. Thus, Kant can borrow the notion of aesthetic idea from his account of fine art and, speaking from the point of view of reflective judgment, say that beauty in general is always the expression of aesthetic ideas (sect. 51). From the point of view of judgment, everything happens as if the unfolding beauty of the natural world is like the product of a genius. This piques the interest of reason – for judgment has, as it were, found phenomenal evidence of the reality of reason’s more far-reaching claims about the supersensible. The profundity of beauty, for Kant, consists of precisely this assumption by judgment; it allows him to make further connections between beauty and morality, and (as we shall see) ultimately to suggest the unity of all the disciplines of philosophy.

The last major section of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment famously considers the relation between beauty and morality, which recalls the earlier treatment of the sublime and moral culture. Here, Kant claims that beauty is the ‘symbol’ of morality (sect. 59). A symbol, he argues, is to be defined as a kind of presentation of a rational idea in an intuition. The ‘presentation’ in question is an analogy between how judgment deals with or reflects upon the idea and upon the symbolic intuition. Thus, if ‘justice’ is symbolized by a blind goddess with a scale, it is not because all judges are blind! Rather, ‘blindness’ and ‘weighing’ function as concepts in judgments in a way analogous to how the concept of ‘justice’ functions. In showing how beauty in general is the symbol of morality, Kant lists four points: (1) Both please directly and not through consequences; (2) Both are disinterested; (3) Both involve the idea of a free conformity to law (free conformity of the imagination in the case of beauty, of the will in the case of morality); (4) Both are understood to be founded upon a universal principle. The importance of this section is two-fold: first, historically, Kant is giving a philosophical underpinning to the notion that taste should be related to and, through cultivation, also promotes morality. This is a claim that is often rolled out even today. Second, the link to morality is a detailing out of the basic link between aesthetics in general and the pure concepts of reason (ideas). First aesthetic judgments (both the sublime and the beautiful), and then teleological judgments will form the bridge between theoretical and practical reason, and (Kant hopes) bring unity to philosophy.

Critique of Teleological Judgment

The second part of Kant’s book deals with a special form of judgment called ‘teleological judgment’. The word ‘teleology’ comes from the Greek word ‘telos’ meaning end or purpose. A teleological judgment, on Kant’s account, is a judgment concerning an object the possibility of which can only be grasped from the point of view of its purpose. The purpose in question Kant calls an ‘intrinsic purpose’. In such a case, we have to say that, strictly speaking, the object was not made according to a purpose that is different from the object (as the idea of vegetable soup in the mind of the cook is different from the soup itself), but that the object itself embodies its purpose. Kant is talking mainly about living organisms (which he calls ‘natural purposes’), which are both cause and effect, both blueprint and product, of themselves. The problem here is that such a notion is paradoxical for human thought in general, and certainly incompatible with scientific thought.

This raises two issues. First, the paradoxical nature of any concept of a natural purpose means that our minds necessarily supplement judgment with the concept of causation through purposes – i.e. the concept of art, broadly speaking. In other words, for lack of any more adequate resources, we think natural purposes on an analogy with the production of man-made objects according to their purpose. Second, just as with aesthetic judgments, Kant does not claim that such judgments ever achieve knowledge. Kant argues that teleological judgments are required, even in science – but not to explain organisms, rather simply to recognize their existence, such that biological science can then set about trying to understanding them on its own terms.

The word ‘teleology’ comes from the Greek word ‘telos’ meaning end or purpose. A teleological judgment, on Kant’s account, is a judgment concerning an object the possibility of which can only be grasped from the point of view of its purpose.

The second half of Kant’s book (the ‘Critique of Teleological Judgment’) is much less often studied and referred to. This is of course related to the fact that Kant’s aesthetics has been hugely influential, while his teleology has sparked less contemporary interest; and also the fact that, in the Introduction to the whole text, Kant writes that ‘In a critique of judgment, [only] the part that deals with aesthetic judgment belongs to it essentially.’ (Introduction VIII). This is because, as we saw above, in aesthetic judgment the faculty of judgment is, as it were, on its own – although certainly the action of judgment there has implications for our faculty of reason. In teleological judgment, on the other hand, the action of judgment – although still reflective – is much more closely linked to ordinary theoretical cognition of nature. Judgment in its teleological function is not, let us say, laid bare in its purity. However, it would be wrong to ignore the ‘Critique of Teleological Judgment’ either on the grounds of its lesser influence, or especially on the assumption that its content is intrinsically less interesting.

The main difference between aesthetic and teleological judgments is the ‘reality’ of the purpose for the object. Whereas the object of aesthetic judgment was purposive without a purpose, the objects of teleological judgment do have purposes for which a concept or idea is to hand. There are, Kant claims, two types of real purposes: first, an ‘extrinsic purpose’ which is the role a thing may play in being a means to some end. An example would be an object of art in the general sense: a shoe for example, or a landscaped garden – something that was made for a purpose, and where the purpose is the reason behind it being made.

However, just as in the critique of aesthetic judgment, such ordinary examples are not (apparently) troubling and are thus not what Kant has in mind. So, Kant notes that there is a second type of real purpose, an ‘intrinsic purpose’. In this case, rather than the purpose being primarily understood as ‘behind’ the production of a thing, a thing embodies its own purpose. These are what Kant calls ‘natural purposes’ (also translated as ‘physical ends’), and the key examples are living organisms (sect. 65).

Such an organism is made up of parts – individual organs, and below that, individual cells. These parts, however, are ‘organized’ – they are determined to be the parts that they are – according to the form or ‘purpose’ which is the whole creature. The parts reciprocally produce and are produced by the form of the whole. Nor is the idea of the whole separate to the organism and its cause (for then the creature would be an art product.) A mechanical clock may be made up or organized parts, but this organization is not the clock itself, but rather the concept of the clock in the mind of the craftsperson who made it. The organism is such insofar as it intrinsically and continually produces itself; the clock is not an organism because it has to be made according to a concept of it.

But how does this principle relate to the sciences of nature? Such an account of organisms as teleological is not original to Kant. It extends back to Aristotle, and, despite increasing hostility to Aristotle’s physics since the Renaissance, remained a commonplace in European biology through the 18th century and beyond. Kant is very careful to distinguish himself from the rationalist position which, he claims, takes teleology as a constitutive principle – that is, as a principle of scientific knowledge. Importantly, Kant claims that such a teleological causation is utterly alien to natural causation as our understanding is able to conceive it. However, since natural mechanical causal connections are necessary, this means that a physical end has to be understood to be contingent with respect to such ‘mechanical’ natural laws. Reason, however, always demands necessity in its objects (the principle of reason here is akin to Leibniz’s notion of the principle of sufficient reason). Accordingly, reason provides the idea of causation according to ends (on the analogy of art being the product of a will). As we know, however, a purely rational concept has no constitutive validity with respect to objects of experience. Instead, Kant claims, teleological judgment is merely reflective, and its principle merely regulative. The teleological judgment gives no knowledge, in other words, but simply allows the cognitive faculty to recognize a certain class of empirical objects (living organisms) that then might be subjected (so far as that is possible) to further, empirical, study. In effect, Kant is saying that, were it not for the reflective judgment and the principle of its functioning here (the rational idea of an ‘intrinsic’ end or purpose), the ability to experience something as alive (and thus subsequently to study it as the science of biology) would be impossible. Ordinary scientific judgments will be unable to fully explore and explain certain biological phenomena, and thus teleological judgments have a limited scientific role.

Such judgments only apply (with the above mentioned constraints) to individual things on the basis of their inner structure, and are not an attempt to account for their existence per se. Nevertheless, even this suggests to reason by analogy the idea of the whole of nature as a purposive system, which could only be explained if based upon some supersensible foundation – although it is hardly necessary in every instance to take the investigation so far (sect. 85). In fact, the whole of nature is not given to us in this way, Kant admits, and therefore this extended idea is not as essential to science as the narrower one of natural purposes (sect. 75). Nevertheless, the idea may be useful in discovering phenomena and laws in nature that might not have been recognized on a mechanical understanding alone. (Recent ecological thought, for example, has often tended to think of whole eco-systems as if they were in themselves organisms, and whole species of plants and animals (as well as the physical environment they inhabit) are their ‘organs’. Such an approach may be fruitful for understanding the inter-connectedness of the system, but also may be dangerous if taken too far – when it begins to see as necessary what in fact has to be considered as contingent.

Thus Kant believes he has discovered a role, albeit a limited one, for teleological judgments within natural science. In fact, of course, the whole conception of biological science was moving away from such notions, first with the theory of evolution, and subsequently with the idea of genetics. Nevertheless, there is something fascinating about Kant’s conception of a natural purpose, which seems to capture something of the continuing scientific and philosophical difficulties in understanding what ‘life’ in general is.

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