The Dialectic: the Antinomy of Taste

The first part of the Critique of Judgement is divided into two sections:

1. Analytic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgement (§§1-54)
2. Dialectic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgement (§§55-60)

The second of these, the dialectic, is much shorter, at a mere 18 pages to the Analytic’s 124. Why does Kant choose this method of organisation?

What is a dialectic?

The terms analytic and dialectic are subdivisions of logic whose roots go back to Aristotle.

By ‘analytic’ (Analytik) Kant means he is going to analyse or dissect something, such as the notions of the ‘beautiful’ or the ‘sublime’, to discern its basic elements or forms of operation and draw some positive conclusions.

A ‘dialectic’ (Dialektik) on the other hand is an attempt to detect judgements which might seem true but in fact are illusory – a critique of the way reason can fall into error by overstepping its own limitations. Kant’s concern is that philosophy should not step into metaphysical speculation about unknowable things like the soul or God, ideas that are created solely by reason without any grounding in experience. Reason can get in a muddle when trying to handle ideas that can’t be empirically investigated, resulting in conflicting statements called antinomies that appear correct yet contradict each other. This is the sort of thing that can undermine reason and open the door to scepticism.¹ So in the dialectic, the analytic is put to the test. Problematic arguments are meant to partake in a dialogue to try and resolve their problems.

Kant applies this analytic and dialectic approach in all three Critiques, but it sits less comfortably in the CoJ, leading to suggestions that only Kant wants a dialectic in the latter because he has a mania for his architectonic, i.e. for having the same structure. In the first couple of sections he sticks to the formula, presenting us with a single antinomy that relates to the question of taste.

The antinomy of taste

He begins in §55:

A power of judgement that is to be dialectical must first of all be rationalistic, i.e., its judgements must lay claim to universality, and indeed do so a priori, for the dialectic consists in the opposition of such judgements. 

Kant dismisses judgements of the agreeable as not belonging to the dialectic. Conflicts of taste do arise between people, but insofar as they are disputes over personal preferences, they are merely subjective. No one thinks to try and make a universal rule out of them. The dialectic therefore must attend to the critique of taste, not to taste itself, i.e. to conflicts over the a priori possibility of judgements of taste.

A transcendental critique of taste will thus contain a part that can bear the name of a dialectic of the aesthetic power of judgement only if there is an antinomy of the principles of this faculty [i.e. taste], which makes its lawfulness and hence also its inner possibility doubtful.

It may seem a little late to start worrying about whether a critique of taste is possible, but Kant dutifully produces an antinomy, which he calls the Antinomy of Taste (die Antinomie des Geschmacks). This is a potential contradiction that revives the anxiety about validity that has dogged the entire work.

In §56 Kant presents the problem by laying down two ‘commonplaces’ of taste.

1. Everyone has his/her own taste

The judgement is non-conceptual; its determining ground is merely subjective (empirical, agreeable, sensory) and thus it cannot demand the assent of others. Consequently:

2. There is no disputing about taste

No dispute over taste can be decided by means of proofs. We can argue (streiten) about taste, but cannot dispute (disputieren). Both try to bring about agreement, but the difference is that arguing in this context is, so to speak, bickering over preferences; disputing, for which Kant uses the more Latinate verb, is a more formal kind of philosophical argument that appeals to proof via determinate concepts.

These two commonplaces pose subjective relativism against Kant’s oft-repeated claim in the CoJ that the judgement of taste has universal validity. But Kant thinks another commonplace is needed:

3. It is possible to argue about taste

There are, in fact, disagreements, and they must be based on something. Simply the possibility of agreement or disagreement suggests the existence of grounds, at least in principle, for making decisions that are not just privately and subjectively valid. This contradicts the claim that everyone has his/her own taste.

This is similar to how David Hume presents the paradox in Of the Standard of Taste: all taste is subjective, yet we think some taste is better than others. Kant discerns that the central problem here is whether or not judgements of taste are based on concepts that allow them to be proved true. That gives him the following antinomy, set out as thesis and antithesis:

1. Thesis: The judgement of taste is not based on concepts, for otherwise it would be possible to dispute about it (decide by means of proofs).

2. Antithesis: The judgement of taste is based on concepts, for otherwise, despite its variety, it would not even be possible to argue about it (i.e. to require the assent of others).

What Kant is doing is setting out two contradictory positions, both of them faulty, so they may enter a kind of discussion that will resolve the problem and move philosophy forwards. He tries to do that in §57. It seems to me his move in the third commonplace is pretty weak, but as always, while it is possible to raise all manner of controversies and debates², in these articles I am mostly attempting a simple elucidation of what Kant is saying – as far as that is possible, because of course any attempt at elucidation will itself necessarily be an interpretation.

Did this problem actually arise in the Analytic? Kant says the antinomy is the same as ‘two peculiarities’ he has already raised (in §32 and §33). These were:

1. The judgment of taste claims universality as if it were objective.
2. The judgment of taste is not determinable by grounds of proof at all, just as if it were merely subjective.

But these issues have already been addressed. It seems Kant wants here to do something further, namely to take them up a level.

Solution

Kant claims that the conflict arises because the word concept is, wrongly, used in the same sense in both statements. The essence of his argument in §57 is that the concept in the thesis is determinate (a concept of the understanding, allowing for proofs and knowledge) and the concept in the antithesis is indeterminate (a concept of reason, unable to be proven scientifically). Thus:

1. The judgement of taste is not based on determinate concepts.
2. The judgement is based on indeterminate concepts.

Kant reasserts that the judgement of taste is a merely reflective judgement: it is not cognitive and does not seek to determine a concept for the beautiful object. ‘To provide a determinate objective principle of taste, by means of which its judgements could be guided, examined, and proved, is absolutely impossible.’ What could this indeterminate concept be, that grounds the judgement of taste? Here he introduces something new. The judgement must be based on some sort of concept,

but a concept that cannot be determined by intuition, by which nothing can be cognised, and which thus also leads to no proof for the judgement of taste. A concept of this kind, however, is the mere pure rational concept of the supersensible, which grounds the object (and also the judging subject) as an object of sense, consequently as an appearance. (my emphasis)

This is an ingenious move, wriggling out of a problem while respecting the age-old difficulty inherent in proving why one aesthetic valuation is ‘better’ than another. Kant claims that the judgement of taste draws its validity by means of this concept

which can be regarded as the supersensible substratum of humanity.

Kant’s ‘pure rational indeterminate concept of the supersensible substratum of appearances’ seems to be a generic concept of cognition in general, or even being in general. He offers us a vague, generic, indeterminate, non-cognitive (‘unfit for cognition’) sort of concept rooted not in our experience but in reality itself, the world of things in themselves about which we can make no knowledge claims. 

He himself acknowledges this concept of the supersensible is an odd idea. It is

the sole key to demystifying this faculty which is hidden to us even in its sources, but there is nothing by which it can be made more comprehensible.

Kant is trying to unpack a phenomenon – the paradox of taste – that has puzzled civilisation for centuries, and concludes that it is hard to explain because that is simply the kind of phenomenon it is: something that touches the supersensible realm about which we can know little or nothing.

Kant has already answered the question about the universal validity of taste (in the Deduction and elsewhere) by reference to our shared cognitive faculties, so why is he introducing this new notion? The best explanation is probably that he is adding to and extending what he has already said. If the judgement of taste is rooted in the indeterminate harmony of our cognitive faculties, in cognition in general, it is not a great leap to appeal to a concept that is similarly rooted in cognition in general.

But this concept cannot be not any old concept; it is supposed to resolve the antinomy of taste. Kant says:

The antinomy that has here been set out and resolved is based on the correct concept of taste.

Unfortunately he does not elaborate about this correct concept of taste. Christian Helmut Wenzel suggests it must relate to taste’s a priori ground, the principle of subjective purposiveness:

This principle... must be ‘correct’ in two senses: (1) It must establish the judgment of taste as an a priori judgment, so that an antinomy of principles (not just an empirical contradiction between particular judgments of taste) can arise; and (2) it must allow for a solution to this antinomy... The principle of subjective purposiveness does indeed satisfy these two requirements. It gives an a priori basis and allows for the antinomy; and it is indeterminable and thus allows for the solution.³

This is corroborated by the Remark II that follows §57, where Kant makes a significant comment on the supersensible that confirms a connection to subjective purposiveness, while also indicating a grander purpose behind the treatment of the Antinomy of Taste:

Three ideas are revealed: first, that of the supersensible in general, without further determination, as the substratum of nature; second, the very same thing, as the principle of the subjective purposiveness of nature for our faculty of cognition; third, the very same thing, as the principle of the ends of freedom and principle of the correspondence of freedom with those ends in the moral sphere.

Thus by his recruitment of the supersensible Kant is doing more than simply searching around for a fudge that will rescue him from a difficulty. He is connecting the judgement of taste, and judgement in general, with the same ultimate noumenal reference that underlies theoretical and practical philosophy, thus uniting the CoJ with the two previous Critiques (and tying a bow on top).

At the end of §57 Kant is keen to indicate that his conclusion is consistent with the previous two Critiques, and he reminds us that he has resorted to a similar strategy before:

In the same way both here and in the Critique of Practical Reason one is compelled, against one’s will, to look beyond the sensible and to seek the unifying point of all our faculties a priori in the supersensible: because no other way remains to make reason self-consistent [i.e. without contradiction].

In conclusion, the dialectic is not merely filling a required plot in Kant’s architectonic but is playing an important part in his larger plan, both for the Third Critique and for his critical philosophy in general.

Notes

1. The CPR for example includes the famous Third Antinomy: 1) Everything is causally determined according to natural law. 2) Human beings have freedom of the will.
2. E.g. there is an incisive discussion of the Dialectic in chapter 10 of Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (1979, 2nd ed. 1997).
3. Christian Helmut Wenzel, An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics (2005), p123.

 

Kant on poetry

In §53, Kant offers a definition of poetry that offers a neat insight into his theory of art. This is on p203-4 of the Guyer/Matthews translation of the Critique of Judgement.

The art of poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius, and will be guided least by precept or example) claims the highest rank of all. It expands the mind by setting the imagination free and presenting, within the limits of a given concept and among the unbounded manifold of forms possibly agreeing with it, the one that connects its presentation with a fullness of thought to which no linguistic expression is fully adequate, and thus elevates itself aesthetically to the level of ideas. It strengthens the mind by letting it feel its capacity to consider and judge of nature, as appearance, freely, self-actively, and independently of determination by nature, in accordance with points of view that nature does not present by itself in experience either for sense or for the understanding, and thus to use it for the sake of and as it were as the schema of the supersensible. It plays with the illusion which it produces at will, yet without thereby being deceitful; for it itself declares its occupation to be mere play, which can nevertheless be purposively employed by the understanding for its own business.

Aesthetic ideas

Kant begins §49 by introducing spirit as the faculty for presenting aesthetic ideas (ästhetische Ideen). This section of the book represents Kant’s recognition that art affects us differently to the pure experience of form involved in the free beauty of nature and the pure judgement of taste, and needs its own process. This is a relief, since his severe formalism was very unpromising as a way of accounting for our complex and multi-sided experience of art.

What, then, are aesthetic ideas? Kant explains:

By an aesthetic idea... I mean that representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible. (p192)

This is a rich and fascinating notion. Kant thinks of the imagination, as explored in his previous works, as a productive cognitive faculty, meaning that it brings a sensory creativity to what we actually experience. It helps the sensibility produce representations, and actively helps bring representations together, as in memory, or in the sequences of impressions that create continuity in perception.

[It is] very powerful in creating, as it were, another nature, out of the material which the real one gives it. We entertain ourselves with it when experience seems too mundane to us.

The imagination can use our rich body of experiences to create a new reality. With imagination we can transform mundane experience, in accordance with reason, and feel our freedom from the laws that normally govern associations of ideas. We borrow material from nature and imaginatively transform it into something that goes beyond nature.

One can call such representations of the imagination ideas: on the one hand because they at least strive toward something lying beyond the bounds of experience, and thus seek to approximate a presentation of concepts of reason (of intellectual ideas), which gives them the appearance of an objective reality; on the other hand, and indeed principally, because no concept can be fully adequate to them, as inner intuitions.

In Kant’s epistemology, outer intuitions are perceptions of space and time, of the external world; inner intuitions are of our own states of mind. As the aesthetic so-called ‘idea’ allows no determinate concept, it cannot itself be a rule or concept; rather it is an imaginative presentation somehow bound up with a concept. Kant describes the aesthetic idea as a counterpart of the idea of reason, and this association opens up a possible relation to morality, as Robert Wicks noted:

Owing to their expansive quality, aesthetic ideas generate associations with moral concepts in how they formally stretch our imagination in the direction of reason. It follows that moral themes are appropriate subjects for beautiful works of art, since then the given moral purpose would be reinforced by the aesthetic idea’s expansive form.¹

Ideas of reason typically, for Kant, concern such intangibles as the soul, God, freedom and morality, and later in the Dialectic he will build on the relationship between aesthetic ideas, genius and morality. Aesthetic ideas can exceed anything in nature. Like ideas of reason, they allow us to strive towards, or speculate on, things for which no determinate concept is adequate, ‘beyond the bounds of experience’ – that is, the supersensible (übersinnlich). The supersensible, put briefly, is that which is presented to us unsupported by the senses or intuitions. It seems to be another way of talking about the intelligible or noumenal, i.e. the world as it is in itself. Reason is a supersensible faculty.

Kant thinks it is poetry that allows the fullest realisation of the aesthetic idea². By means of an imagination that emulates the ideas of reason, poets can explore invisible beings, hell, eternity, creation, death, love – to create the concrete and sensuous out of things that are supersensible or abstract or even unexperienceable.

Kant tries to outline the process:

Now if we add to a concept a representation of the imagination that belongs to its presentation, but which by itself stimulates so much thinking that it can never be grasped in a determinate concept, hence which aesthetically enlarges the concept itself in an unbounded way, then in this case the imagination is creative, and sets the faculty of intellectual ideas (reason) into motion... [my emphasis]

Whether or not we are persuaded by Kant’s mechanism, the aesthetic idea is a superb notion and one of the great innovations of the CoJ: a representation or idea that ‘gives more to think about than can be grasped and made distinct in it’. Such a notion seems perfectly matched to poetry and to art, in which so many elements – personal, historical, formal, ideological, emotional, etc – are bundled into one concrete, evocative, endlessly meaningful object. Good works of art can be constantly reinterpreted.

Aesthetic attributes

Kant recruits supplementary representations he calls (aesthetic) attributes (ästhetische
Attribute): these are a kind of additional symbol appended to the concept. He gives the example of Jupiter’s eagle with lightning in its claws: our conception of the eagle (the attribute) as powerful, airborne, proud, bearing inhuman power, illuminates the rational idea of Jupiter as king of heaven. Aesthetic attributes represent something that lets the imagination

spread itself over a multitude of related representations, which let one think more than one can express in a concept determined by words;

i.e. they spread out in a chain of intuitive associations that evoke meaning beyond the original image;

and they yield an aesthetic idea, which serves that idea of reason instead of logical presentation, although really only to animate the mind by opening up for it the prospect of an immeasurable field of related representations.

These attributes can be used in painting, sculpture, poetry and oratory. All can give the imagination ‘an impetus to think more... than can be comprehended in a concept’.

Kant transforms into a literary critic with a example from a poem by Frederick the Great³. The Prussian king conveys, through an image of the sun setting with a benign afterglow, an idea of reason, i.e. a meditation upon the nearing end of one’s life, by means of the attribute of a summer sun that evokes associations in us that in part can’t even be expressed.

Kant then describes aesthetic ideas again, which is repetitious, but as a concise definition it is worth reproducing:

In a word, the aesthetic idea is a representation of the imagination, associated with a given concept, which is combined with such a manifold of partial representations in the free use of the imagination that no expression designating a determinate concept can be found for it, which therefore allows the addition to a concept of much that is unnameable, the feeling of which animates the cognitive faculties and combines spirit with the mere letter of language.

The expression of aesthetic ideas

A little later in §51, during a dull taxonomy of the arts, Kant adds a discussion of how aesthetic ideas get expressed. He begins with the statement

Beauty (whether it be beauty of nature or of art) can in general be called the expression of aesthetic ideas.

In fine art the aesthetic idea is occasioned through a concept, whereas in nature it can be aroused by mere reflection without a concept. Presumably Kant thinks that in both cases there is a perceived intelligible rule behind the object; in the artwork this is found in the concept, while in nature it is found in postulated intelligent design.

Kant goes on to divide the pictorial arts, which he calls ‘those of the expression of ideas in sensible intuition’, into plastic (e.g. sculpture and architecture) and painting (in a broad sense that includes, unusually, pleasure gardens). Of these two divisions he says:

Both make shapes in space into expressions of ideas: the former makes shapes knowable by two senses, sight and feeling (although in the case of the latter, to be sure, without regard to beauty), the latter only for the first of these. The aesthetic idea (archetype, prototype) is for both grounded in the imagination; the shape, however, which constitutes its expression (ectype, afterimage) is given either in its corporeal extension (as the object itself exists) or in accordance with the way in which the latter is depicted in the eye (in accordance with its appearance on a plane); or else, whatever the former is, either the relation to a real end or just the appearance of one is made into a condition for reflection.

In short, certain arts turn physical forms or bodies (artworks), through their appeal to our senses, into expressions of imaginative intuitions and ideas that go beyond the merely determinate and empirical.

To sum up the aesthetic idea:

• Presented by spirit, i.e. the animating principle in the mind or faculty for the presentation of aesthetic ideas
• It is a representation produced by the imagination
• Stimulates so much thought that no determinate concept is adequate to it
• No language fully attains it or can make it intelligible
• Counterpart of the idea of reason
• Strives toward something lying beyond the bounds of experience (supersensible)
• Seeks to approximate ideas of reason, thus has appearance of objectivity
• Makes things sensible beyond the limits of experience
• Revealed in its full measure by poetry
• Unleashes a multitude of related representations (attributes) that animate the mind
• Beauty is the expression of it
• Given concrete expression through artworks

 Notes

1. Robert Wicks, Kant on Judgement (2007), p130-1. Practical reason is the foundation of Kant’s moral philosophy, hence the reason-morality connection.
2. Kant follows tradition in thinking that ‘the art of poetry... claims the highest rank of all’ (§53, p203). However among the pictorial arts he ‘gives the palm to painting>’ (p207).
3. This seems a bit sycophantic, even though Frederick the Great had died a few years earlier in 1786.

Kant on taste and spirit

In §48 and the beginning of §49 of the CoJ, Kant turns his attention to the topics of taste and spirit.

Taste

Kant claims in his header that section 48 is ‘on the relation of genius to taste’. He begins by setting out the distinction between the two:

For the judging of beautiful objects, as such, taste is required; but for beautiful art itself, i.e., for producing [Hervorbringung] such objects, genius is required.

Kant defined taste in §1 as ‘the faculty for the judging of the beautiful’. Here he splits the roles of taste and genius into judging and making, respectively. He feels a further analysis is required since the beauty of nature and the beauty of art are distinct. ‘A beauty of nature is a beautiful thing’, he writes; ‘the beauty of art is a beautiful representation of a thing.’

• To judge beauty in nature I do not need a concept of what sort of thing the object is meant to be, nor to know its purpose. I simply contemplate its form of purposiveness. 
• But beauty in art ‘always presupposes an end in the cause’ so the sort of thing it is meant to be must be grounded in a concept; therefore we must take into account its perfection, i.e. how far its internal constitution as an object measures up to its purpose. 

As usual, Kant lends himself to a table:

Nature	Art
A beautiful thing	A beautiful representation of a thing
No concept needed to judge it Mere form pleases for itself	Presupposes an end = a concept Takes its perfection into account

Once again Kant raises adherent beauty without, for some reason, naming it:

To be sure, in the judging especially of living objects in nature, e.g., a human being or a horse, objective purposiveness is also commonly taken into account for judging its beauty; but in that case the judgement is also no longer purely aesthetic.

Taking a concept into account during judging is the definition of adherent beauty, and you will recall that the human being and the horse were two of his examples of it back in §17. Interestingly he says that ‘art always presupposes an end’ (near top of p190, my emphasis), making no exception for non-representational art as he seemed to in the third moment. It is not clear if he has forgotten that distinction or has changed his mind.

He continues:

Nature is no longer judged as it appears as art, but to the extent that it really is art (albeit superhuman); and the teleological judgement serves as the foundation for the aesthetic and as a condition of which the latter must take account.

I won’t get into teleological judgements here, but Kant notes that we may feel compelled to judge the suitability of natural objects to their purposes as if they were products of a superhuman (übermenschlich) or divine artist – intelligent design in the creationist sense.

Kant remarks that if we find a woman’s figure beautiful, it is because we think nature has represented the purposes of the female physique beautifully, i.e. it aligns with a concept that makes the woman what she ought to be.

He then observes that art can make ugly or displeasing things – the furies, diseases, war, etc – seem beautiful. Hence his statement that ‘the beauty of art is a beautiful representation of a thing’: the original thing need not be beautiful at all, though art can make its representation so, as distinct from ‘the beauty of nature’ which really is beautiful and not ugly. The exception is things that arouse loathing, or disgust, whereupon nothing can overcome our natural revulsion.

Kant ends the section by commenting on the distinction between products of taste (mechanical art) and products of genius (fine art). He claims that giving a beautiful form to fine art ‘requires merely taste’,

to which the artist, after he has practiced and corrected it by means of various examples of art or nature, holds up his work, and after many, often laborious attempts to satisfy it, finds the form that contents him; hence this is not as it were a matter of inspiration or a free swing of the mental powers, but a slow and indeed painstaking improvement.

The artist presents his hard work to taste for assessment. Kant reiterates that taste is a ‘faculty for judging’, not for production; therefore work of this sort is a bit flat and not fine art, though it can belong to a ‘useful and mechanical art’. (Perhaps Kant has in mind that uninspiring, academically correct average that he described, in the third moment, as the ‘normal idea of the beautiful’.) He explicitly aligns taste on its own with merely mechanical art. This sort of pleasing form, where one ‘still remains to a certain extent free’, can also be applied to table settings, or a moral treatise or a sermon; they can be beautiful without being called works of beautiful/fine art.

Fine art, by contrast, includes

a poem, a piece of music, a picture gallery and so on; and there, in one would-be work of beautiful art, one can often perceive genius without taste, while in another, taste without genius.

What does Kant mean? Firstly, we can see that taste and genius are distinct abilities. Someone may have one and not the other, but a work that aspires to be fine art needs both taste and genius. Secondly, the faculty of taste, or judging, is sufficient to help an artist create a serviceable product, but creating fine art requires that inborn gift of genius, through which nature gives the rule to art in exemplary and original products. In Kant’s view however a genius does not create spontaneously – a great deal of hard work is involved.

After §48 Kant moves on from taste to other topics, but he returns to taste in the short §50, where he explains his view on an significant question: which is more important in matters of fine art, genius or taste?

That is the same as asking whether imagination or the power of judgement counts for more in them. (p196-7)

Unsurprisingly, Kant connects genius with imagination and taste with judgement. Confusingly, he argues that the indispensable condition for fine art is taste, not genius. Genius is inspired, and rich and original in ideas, but the imagination needs to be restrained by the understanding, otherwise it will only produce nonsense (Unsinn). The power of judgement is the faculty that brings imagination into such a relation and is thus more necessary for the sake of beauty.

Kant paints genius as an unruly force that needs taste to temper it, like a responsible parent:

Taste... is the discipline (or corrective) of genius, clipping its wings and making it well behaved or polished; but at the same time it gives genius guidance as to where and how far it should extend itself... by introducing clarity and order into the abundance of thoughts it makes the ideas tenable, capable of an enduring and universal approval, of enjoying a posterity among others and in an ever-progressing culture.

Paul Crowther calls taste’s correcting a ‘striving for perfection’, and concludes that taste in art is ‘the process whereby genius is refined by mastery of perfection.’¹

In his anthropological works, Kant explores the powerful faculty of the imagination as the generator of dreams, constantly producing images; if allowed to dominate, imagination can lead to madness. Nothing better lives up to the idea of ‘original nonsense’, unregulated by reason, than a dream.² If we are to sacrifice genius or taste, it must be the former that concedes.

For beautiful art, therefore, imagination, understanding, spirit and taste are requisite. [Then, see footnote to p197:] The first three faculties first achieve their unification through the fourth.

Spirit

What does genius contribute that taste does not? Kant introduces at the start of §49 a new notion, to which he grants just two short paragraphs³:

One says of certain products, of which it is expected that they ought, at least in part, to reveal themselves as beautiful art, that they are without spirit, even though one finds nothing in them to criticise as far as taste is concerned. 

He gives the examples of a poem, story, oration and conversation that are respectively pretty, accurate, thorough and entertaining, but without showing spirit (Geist). He also gives the example of a woman who may be ‘pretty, talkative and charming, but without spirit’ – picking out a woman here may indicate that Kant is sceptical of women’s capacity for spirit in general.

So what is ‘spirit’? It is one of what the section header calls the ‘faculties of the mind that constitute genius’, and seems to be the element that makes the difference between a boring academic or mechanical product and one of fine art. Kant explains:

Spirit, in an aesthetic significance, means the animating principle in the mind. That, however, by which this principle animates the soul, the material which it uses for this purpose, is that which purposively sets the mental powers into motion, i.e., into a play that is self-maintaining and even strengthens the powers to that end.

Kant goes on to describe this ‘animating principle’ as the ‘faculty for the presentation of aesthetic ideas’. What, then, are aesthetic ideas? We will discuss those in the next post.

Later in the section (p195) Kant adds that spirit is the talent for expressing what is unnameable and making it communicable, whether in language, painting or plastic arts. It involves apprehending the ‘rapidly passing play of the imagination’ and unifying it into a concept. Essentially, spirit is the quality that genius brings to fine art which is lacking in those dull, spiritless works of mere taste. As Robert Wicks put it:

When this artistic spirit is embodied in an object, the animated object becomes artistically beautiful, and the manner in which this animation stimulates the harmony of the cognitive faculties in the perceiver, matches and communicates the very quality of the original artistic spirit that was in the artist. ‘Spirit’ is what the artistic genius adds to a work of otherwise academic art. This spirit is what constitutes the artistic beauty of the work and is that which, in principle, stimulates the harmony of everyone’s cognitive faculties.

Art requires something compulsory or mechanical, which gives a body to spirit, which then animates the work.

In a later work, the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant clarified the relationship between taste and spirit:

The principle of the mind that animates by means of ideas is called spirit. – Taste is a merely regulative faculty of judging form in the combination of the manifold in the power of imagination; spirit, however, is the productive faculty of reason which provides a model for that a priori form of the power of imagination. Spirit and taste: spirit to provide ideas, taste to limit them to the form that is appropriate to the laws of the productive power of imagination and so to form them (fingendi) in an original way (not imitatively). (p143-4)⁴

This echoes the CoJ: spirit is the productive faculty; taste trims and regulates it.

Notes

1. Paul Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (1993), p66.
2. See for example The Classifications of Mental Disorders (1764) in which Kant writes ‘the madman is a waking dreamer’, later quoted by Freud.
3. There is a scattering of other references to spirit through the CoJ, e.g. at the end of Introduction VII and on p183, but none as substantial as here.
4. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). Translated by Robert B. Louden.

Kant on genius

In the next few sections, namely §§46-50, Kant discusses his conception of genius, and brings in three other significant topics: spirit, taste and aesthetic ideas. These sections are a bit more readily grasped than other parts of the book. He begins:

Genius [Genie] is the talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art. Since the talent, as an inborn productive faculty of the artist, itself belongs to nature, this could also be expressed thus: Genius is the inborn predisposition of the mind (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art.

As the context implies, the Latin word ingenium meant a natural disposition or aptitude. The Latin term genius has its etymological roots in gene, as in ‘generation’, or giving birth. It referred to a male, protective household spirit or begetting spirit (‘begetting’ implying male procreation), identified with the paterfamilias or male head of the family. The term fell into disfavour during the Middle Ages because of its pagan origins, but was revived during the Renaissance in reference to creative power, picking up some of the meaning of ingenium as it went. The assumption was that a genius was male (hence any masculine gendering in my language below).

For Kant, genius is ‘inborn’: one is either born with it or not. As such, it is a gift of nature, not a product of culture. Whatever one thinks of this definition, says Kant, ‘fine art must necessarily be considered as arts of genius.’ It becomes clear why he thinks this:

Every art presupposes rules which first lay the foundation by means of which a product that is to be called artistic is first represented as possible.

Here, without mentioning the term, Kant presents art as a matter of adherent beauty, at least insofar as we cannot abstract away from those rules (non-representational art being an exception, though see §48 where Kant seems to forget or over-rule this). As we know, a pure judgement of taste cannot rely on a determining concept, so there can be no science of beauty.

Beautiful art cannot itself think up the rule in accordance with which it is to bring its product into being. Yet since without a preceding rule a product can never be called art, nature in the subject... must give the rule to art. (§46)

An artwork is a human-made product, and such it must presuppose a rule or concept that leads to it being the thing it is. Kant’s theory leaves him with a difficulty that Christian Helmut Wenzel has summarised perfectly:

On the one hand, a work of art is not an object of nature but a man-made thing, something that was produced under the influence of certain rules, the rules that lie at the basis of skills, purposes, intentions, deliberations, and whole traditions of artistic practice. On the other hand, a work of art is something that we find beautiful – at least usually, and this judging it to be beautiful must, according to Kant’s theory, be independent of rules. Hence the rules that went into the production of the work of art must somehow disappear, so to speak, in the free play that underlies the liking for the beautiful.¹

‘There is a tension,’ Wenzel observes, ‘between rules and freedom’ (p95). Kant’s solution for this tension is to seize on genius, already a popular notion in late 18th century Germany: ‘beautiful art is possible only as a product of genius’. Giving the notion his own spin, he draws four conclusions.

One sees that genius 1) is a talent for producing that for which no determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition of skill for that which can be learned in accordance with some rule, consequently that originality must be its primary characteristic. (CoJ, p186)

This sounds like Kant is emphasising that genius is distinct from crafts or mechanical art; the comments are consistent with the claim that this sort of talent is inborn and not something that can be taught. Genius must be original, but it is not enough to be original:

2) That since there can also be original nonsense, its products must at the same time be models, i.e., exemplary, hence, while not themselves the result of imitation, they must yet serve others in that way, i.e., as a standard or a rule for judging.

We have encountered this idea of the exemplary already. The artist brings a new object into the world and others must try to work out the rules of production from the object itself; we have no rules, only the exemplar. Note the difference between an exemplar and an example: an example is simply an instance; an exemplar is a pattern or model to be followed. For Kant, exemplars are original – they break new ground – yet serve as a new standard.

3) That it cannot itself describe or indicate scientifically how it brings its product into being, but rather that it gives the rule as nature, and hence the author of a product that he owes to his genius does not know himself how the ideas for it come to him, and also does not have it in his power to think up such things at will or according to plan, and to communicate to others precepts that would put them in a position to produce similar products.

Here is the heart of how Kant turns the notion of genius to meet his own philosophical requirements. It flows from seeing genius as a gift of nature: the forces of nature manifest themselves through the mind and works of the genius. It even seems as if they, not the artist, are ultimately responsible for works of art – but only, as Kant notes in his final 4th point, beautiful/fine art.

The implications go further. If purposive or beautiful natural objects put us in mind of an intelligent designer, which in nature can only be God (in his practical philosophy Kant says it is morally necessary to assume God’s existence), and this creator gives the rule to art through genius, then the genius is the conduit for the divine. There is a long tradition of the artist receiving divine inspiration, starting with Homer and Plato’s Ion. But Kant is following a different, non-occasional model: he references the history of the Latin genius as the ‘spirit’ that is no passing visitation but ‘given to a person at birth’. He later remarks (p188) that genius ‘is apportioned to each immediately from the hand of nature, and thus dies with him, until nature one day similarly endows another.’

Comparison with science

Kant takes originality seriously. He begins §47 by asserting:

Everyone agrees that genius is entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation.

Kant coins the label of ‘blockhead’ [Pinsel] for one who merely copies without thinking for himself. Since learning is nothing but imitation, it does not count as genius.

Thus everything that Newton expounded in his immortal work on the principles of natural philosophy, no matter how great a mind it took to discover it, can still be learned; but one cannot learn to write inspired poetry, however exhaustive all the rules for the art of poetry and however excellent the models for it may be.

Even the greatest scientific mind cannot be called a genius, because science is determinate and can be set out so others can follow it, whereas

no Homer or Wieland² can indicate how his ideas, which are fantastic and yet at the same time rich in thought, arise and come together in his head, because he himself does not know it and thus cannot teach it to anyone else either.

The great scientific mind differs from the apprentice ‘only in degree’, but differs from the artistic genius ‘in kind’. Kant means no disrespect to science – on the contrary, he is its keen advocate, and an admirer of Newton³ – only that for him ‘genius’ is a specific thing, limited to artistic production. Of course, this is controversial and goes against normal usage, in which figures like Newton or Einstein or, say, the maths prodigy Ramanujan are described as ‘geniuses’. Not to get into a debate on different uses of this label, but by dismissing learning as ‘nothing but imitation’ Kant is overlooking the place for creative thinking in the sciences, and indeed in every other area of human activity.

Rules of artistic production

If the gift of nature ‘gives the rule to [fine] art’ (p188), what is this ‘rule’ or rules? It cannot be set out in a formula, for then the judgement of taste would be based upon concepts. Instead:

the rule must be abstracted from the deed, i.e. from the product.

The work, again, must be exemplary – created according to a rule, but a rule that is only revealed in the product itself, ‘against which others may test their own talent, letting it serve them as a model not for copying but for imitation.’ The distinction between copying (Nachmachung) and imitation (Nachahmung) is that copying is just mechanical and plagiaristic, whereas imitation means following or emulating a standard set by another while creating one’s own original product⁴. It is clear that imitation alone is not enough – Kant has just demoted science for being ‘nothing but imitation’ and not counting as genius – so presumably one also needs one’s own portion of genius too. And this is what Kant goes on to say. He admits it ‘is difficult to explain’ how the rules of art may be abstracted from the product, and suggests:

The ideas of the artist arouse similar ideas in his apprentice if nature has equipped him with a similar proportion of mental powers. The models of beautiful art are thus the only means for transmitting these to posterity, which could not happen through mere descriptions. 

Kant explains some of his thinking in expecting rules in art:

There is no beautiful art in which something mechanical, which can be grasped and followed according to rules, and thus something academically correct [etwas Schulgerechtes], does not constitute the essential condition of the art. For something in it must be thought of as an end, otherwise one cannot ascribe its product to any art at all; it would be a mere product of chance.

This is clear. There must be a concept, an end or purpose, otherwise the object would not have been made in the first place. Art demands design, and determinate rules. Kant is scathing towards people who think otherwise:

Superficial minds believe that they cannot show that they are blossoming geniuses any better than by pronouncing themselves free of the academic constraint of all rules, and they believe that one parades around better on a horse with the staggers than one which is properly trained.

Kant may be having a dig at his Romantic contemporaries in the Sturm und Drang movement here. He asserts:

Genius can only provide rich material for products of art; its elaboration and form require a talent that has been academically trained, in order to make a use of it that can stand up to the power of judgement. (my emphasis)

Kant began by saying nature gave the rule to art. Now he seems to be saying that nature gives the gift of genius, then the genius provides ‘rich materials’, and it is academic training that supplies the rule. This seems contradictory. No one who has experience of academic training in art (as I have), could be left unable to ‘describe or indicate... how they bring their product into being’ or to ‘communicate to others precepts that would put them in a position to produce similar products’. On the contrary, academic training – by which we mean here the classical ‘atelier’ tradition – is explicit and precise about technique. But this apparent contradiction can be solved if we look back to the start of the paragraph, already quoted: even fine art has ‘something mechanical’ that follows rules and is academically correct. The academic training provides the mechanical aspect; genius provides the inspiration or spirit, and it is that imaginative aspect which the artist cannot account for. ‘The originality of his talent constitutes one (but not the only) essential element of the character of the genius.’

Kant then has another dig, this time against the ‘charlatan’ (Gaukler) who spreads about him a ‘mist’ or haze (Dunst) of genius in matters of ‘careful rational inquiry’ i.e. where genius does not belong – and against the public that is awestruck by his nonsense and mistakes it for genuine insight.

Something to note: it used to be customary to speak of ‘genius’ as something a person, more precisely a male, has (‘he has genius’). But it gradually became something a person is (‘he is “a” genius’). Kant makes that shift, I think for the first time, in this section, e.g. when he talks of people ‘who have the honour of being called geniuses’ (p188).

What does Kant achieve through his conception of the genius? He has an artist who follows rules (the mechanical, academic training side) but also seems not to follow rules (the inspired, original talent side), thus bringing together and solving the two sides of the tension between rules and freedom.

Must all artists possess genius? Plainly, no. As we saw in my previous post, Kant puts art through several divisions: he lists ‘mechanical art’ as coming under the heading of ‘art in general’, so it is produced by artists, but he goes on to dismiss it in §47 as ‘a mere art of diligence and learning’, which in his system bars the artists who practice it from genius. That leaves us with ‘aesthetic art’, which Kant subdivides as fine arts and agreeable arts. May one be an agreeable artist of genius? Well, Kant claims it is beautiful/fine art that ‘seems at the same time to be nature’, and that genius is the means by which nature gives the rule to art, and that therefore ‘beautiful art must necessarily be considered as arts of genius’. It seems clear that Kant does not mean to include the charms, jokes and muzak of agreeable art in the purview of genius. The genius belongs only to fine art.

In the next sections, §§48-50, Kant continues his discussion on genius through the topics of taste, spirit and aesthetic ideas, which we will write about separately. But there is a little more to say about genius when we get to §49.

§49

In this section Kant discusses what he calls spirit, which is the faculty, peculiar to genius, for presenting aesthetic ideas. I will discuss that in the next post.

He closes §49 with some additional thoughts on genius, in the new light cast by the aesthetic idea. Normally the mental powers of imagination and understanding are in a certain relation, with imagination constrained by the understanding and having an (adequate) concept imposed upon it. In a genius, however, the powers attain an aesthetic relation or proportion in which the imagination is free to search beyond the understanding.

Thus genius really consists in the happy relation, which no science can teach and no diligence learn, of finding ideas for a given concept on the one hand and on the other hitting upon the expression for these, through which the subjective disposition of the mind that is thereby produced... can be communicated to others. (p194-5)

Kant goes on to break down four properties of genius:

1. It is a talent for art, not science, determined by rules.
2. It requires a particular relation of the imagination (intuitions) and the understanding (concepts). 
3. It displays itself through the expression of aesthetic ideas, and the imagination appears as purposive.
4. The free correspondence of imagination and understanding relies on a proportion and disposition based not on rules but in the subject. 

He adds that:

Genius is the exemplary originality of the natural endowment of a subject for the free use of his cognitive faculties.

In a coda, Kant talks again about the genius’s work of art serving as an exemplar, calling him a ‘favourite of nature’ (ein Günstling der Natur) and a ‘rare phenomenon’ who can give rise to a school, insofar as it proves possible to extract the rules he used from his works. He saves some disdainful remarks for those who ‘ape’ by mere copying because they lack the talent to be exemplary themselves, and for the ‘bungler’ (Stümper) who puts on individualistic flourishes just to be gaped at.

Notes

1. Christian Helmut Wenzel, An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics (2005), p98.
2. Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813) was a classicist German poet who wrote the epic Oberon. The comparison with Homer is exaggerated.
3. Part of the purpose of the First Critique was precisely to make science possible in the face of scepticism and relativism.
4. Here ‘imitation’ is used approvingly, but Kant in §49 uses ‘imitation’ in a sense closer to ‘copying’ and prefers ‘emulation’ for a distinct, laudable approach proper to another genius.

Kant on art

In sections §§43-54 of the Critique of Judgement Kant for the first time has a proper discussion of art. It appears to come under the same heading as the Deduction, but is clearly a change of subject. I am persuaded by Douglas Burnham’s suggestion¹ that we read the Deduction as an imaginary Book Three of the Analytic of the Aesthetic Judgement, and the section on art and genius as Book Four, a division that makes a lot more sense than Kant’s own organisation.

The contents of this Book Four break down like this:
        §§43-5: Art
        §§46-50: Genius, taste and aesthetic ideas
        §§51-3: Division and comparison of the fine arts
        §54: Remark on gratification

It is a measure of Kant’s relative uninterest in art that it takes him until p182 (in the Guyer/Matthews translation) of his treatise on aesthetics to discuss it, but what he has to say is interesting as always, especially since he touches on other major topics such as genius, spirit and taste.

In this post we will look just at art ( §§43-5), then do separate posts for the other topics.

Art in general

Kant begins §43 by outlining a series of ways in which art is distinct from nature, science and handicrafts. Firstly, art and nature. Note Kant here is talking about ‘art in general’ – he will later make distinctions (of course) between kinds of art.

Art is distinguished from nature as doing (facere) is from acting or producing in general (agere), and the product or consequence of the former is distinguished as a work (opus) from the latter as an effect (effectus).

This is basically the view of the old system of the arts: human making is opposed to nature. We can tabulate his distinctions like this:

Art	Nature
Doing	Acting/producing in general
Work (opus)	Effect
Production through freedom	Production through instinct
Humans	Animals

Both art and nature involve production. Animals produce according to instinct – Kant gives the example of bees and their ‘regularly constructed’ honeycomb – without rational reflection. Art by contrast is a human product produced according to freedom (which for Kant involves free will and reason). Human making results in ‘works’, whereas products created by nature are ‘effects’.

He then gives the example of someone finding a piece of carved wood. Kant makes a significant point: we assume the carved wood is a product of art, not nature, because it was caused by a will that conceived of a purpose that gave the item its form, i.e. there was a concept that pre-existed the object. In other cases too ‘a representation of it in its cause must have preceded its reality.’ Notice: although for some baffling reason he does not spell it out, Kant is saying here that art concerns adherent beauty: there is a will, plan or intention and the object is realised according to it. It follows that we cannot make a pure judgement of taste about the beauty of a work of art... The exception is when the art is non-representational and abstract, in which case its beauty is not adherent.

Kant then distinguishes art from science:

Art as a skill of human beings is also distinguished from science (to be able from to know), as a practical faculty is distinguished from a theoretical one, as technique is distinguished from theory.

The emphasis here is on being able to do something as opposed to knowing something. Kant makes a reference to the Dutch polymath Petrus Camper, who ‘describes quite precisely how the best shoe must be made, but he certainly was not able to make one.’

Art	Science
To be able	To know
Practical	Theoretical
Technique	Theory

Kant’s conception of art so far resembles the ancient conception of techne: art as skilled making. But he then makes a much more modern distinction:

Art is also distinguished from handicraft: the first is called liberal, the second can also be called remunerative art [Lohnkunst].

Art should be produced ‘only as play, i.e. an occupation that is agreeable in itself’. Handicraft is a labour, disagreeable or burdensome in itself, that one only does for money and which can be compulsorily imposed. Guyer/Matthews translate Lohnkunst as ‘remunerative art’, Bernard and Pluhar have the more negative ‘mercenary art’. Kant is here accepting the modern system of the arts – analysed in detail by Paul Oskar Kristeller and Larry Shiner² – which from the late 17th century onwards divided the so-called ‘fine arts’ away from ‘crafts’. Kant is presenting the same division here, though for now he is talking about ‘art in general’ rather than ‘fine arts’ in the usual way.

Art	Handicrafts
Liberal	Remunerative/mercenary
Play	Labour
Agreeable in itself	Disagreeable/burdensome; Can be compulsory

Kant isn’t interested in a discussion of which activities count as arts, sciences or crafts, but he points out:

In all liberal arts there is nevertheless required something compulsory, or, as it is called, a mechanism, without which the spirit, which must be free in the art and which alone animates the work, would have no body at all and would entirely evaporate.

As examples of such ‘mechanisms’, he lists, in poetry, ‘correctness and richness of diction, as well as prosody and metre’. Kant is retaining some dignity for the so-called free and liberal arts by arguing they are not ‘mere play’ but still require a degree of planning and work. This prefigures §46 where he says art presupposes rules. 

Beautiful/fine art

In §44, ‘on beautiful art’, Kant claims;

There is neither a science of the beautiful, only a critique, nor beautiful science, only beautiful art.

A science of beauty cannot exist because it would require determinate concepts, whereas the judgement of taste is based upon a non-cognitive feeling. Nor can there be such a thing as beautiful science. Kant is talking about the so-called schöne Wissenschaften, which was the German term for belles-lettres or works of artistic literature. The only relationship between fine art and the schöne Wissenschaften is:

for beautiful art in its full perfection much science is required, such as, e.g., acquaintance with ancient languages, wide reading of those authors considered to be classical, history, acquaintance with antiquities, etc.

These are a ‘necessary preparation and foundation’ for what Kant calls ‘beautiful art’. The term schöne Kunst would normally be translated as ‘fine art’, but G&M prefer ‘beautiful art’ as Kant is achieving a consistency of terms (schön = beautiful) that is lost in the usual English usage, and that they would like to preserve. Kant lays out two further layers of distinction between kinds of art:

If art, adequate for the cognition of a possible object, merely performs the actions requisite to make it actual, it is mechanical; but if it has the feeling of pleasure as its immediate aim, then it is called aesthetic art. This is either agreeable or beautiful art. It is the former if its end is that pleasure accompany the representations as mere sensations, the latter, if its end is that it accompany these as kinds of cognition.

So first he divides art in general into mechanical and aesthetic art.

• Mechanical art (mechanisch): art merely produced according to a plan.
• Aesthetic art (ästhetisch): art that aims at the feeling of pleasure.

As usual, Kant offers no examples to make this distinction of types clearer: by mechanical art he seems to mean mere imitation or rule-following, like perhaps the copies of Greek sculpture turned out by the Romans. Paul Crowther suggests Kant is thinking of ‘representations which are created solely with a view to conveying factual information, and which make no demands on us beyond that.’³

Kant then takes ‘aesthetic art’ and makes a further division, between agreeable and beautiful/fine:

• Agreeable (angenehm): art whose purpose is mere enjoyment, sensations, charms. Kant gives the examples of table talk, lively social interaction such as jokes, telling stories, table settings, games that pass the time, and what we might call muzak, i.e. background music that is there ‘merely as an agreeable noise’. These examples are unusual as most are not normally considered ‘art’. As Crowther notes, we are dealing with kitsch.
• Beautiful/fine (schön): purposive in itself, without a purpose, yet nevertheless ‘promotes the cultivation of the mental powers [Kultur der Gemütskräfte] for sociable communication’.

In case you are confused about how the enjoyable sociability of the agreeable arts differs from the ‘sociable communication’ of the fine arts, Kant adds:

The universal communicability of a pleasure already includes in its concept that this must not be a pleasure of enjoyment, from mere sensation, but one of reflection; and thus aesthetic art, as beautiful art, is one that has the reflecting power of judgement and not mere sensation as its standard.

The social pleasures of the agreeable are merely diverting and amusing. The sociable communication of the fine arts involves meaningful discussion of our condition as human beings.

To summarise, I have created this splendid chart:



If it seems over-elaborate (i.e. two more steps than are usually made), you have Kant to thank.

In §45 Kant discusses the nature of fine art under the header ‘Fine art is an art to the extent that it seems at the same time to be nature’, opening with this striking passage:

In a product of art one must be aware that it is art, and not nature; yet the purposiveness in its form must still seem to be as free from all constraint by arbitrary rules as if it were a mere product of nature... Nature was beautiful, if at the same time it looked like art; and art can only be called beautiful if we are aware that it is art and yet it looks to us like nature.

We have already defined beauty as the form of purposiveness, or purposiveness without purpose. This is found in both human-made objects and in natural objects and implies an intelligent designer, whether there really was a designer or not. When we make a pure judgement of taste, we base our judgement on the purposive form of the object, regardless of any intentions or purpose that might lie behind its existence. As Kant goes on to say:

That is beautiful which pleases in the mere judging.

We judge both artistic and natural beauty the same way, though it is clear from what has gone before that beauty in art is in some ways secondary or inferior to nature.⁴ In nature we may make a pure judgement of taste; in art, we are judging ‘merely’ adherent, impure beauty.

Thus the purposiveness in the product of beautiful art, although it is certainly intentional, must nevertheless not seem intentional; i.e., beautiful art must be regarded as nature, although of course one is aware of it as art.

To appear as nature, a work of art must agree with rules that allow it to become what it ought to be, without showing any sign that the rules have imposed upon the artist’s mental powers. Whereas in nature we can have no knowledge of any divine creator or designer, in art we can know exactly who created a given work, but the rules behind his or her labour must not impair our judgement of taste. (I would add however, that the judgement is already impaired, since a judgement of artistic beauty is a judgement of merely adherent beauty.)

Kant thus leads us into his next discussion, which is of genius.

Notes

1. Douglas Burnham, An Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgement (2000).
2. Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics’, Journal of the History of Ideas, October 1951 and January 1952; and Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (2001), chapter 3 p62.
3. Paul Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (1993).
4. Art is inferior to nature in terms of ‘pure’ beauty, but not in terms of the ideal of beauty, where art is mixed with morality.

The fourth moment

The fourth, final and shortest moment of the judgement of taste (§§18-22) concerns the modality of the satisfaction in the object, i.e. whether this satisfaction is a possibility, actuality or necessity. Kant begins (I have tweaked the emphases):

Of every representation I can say that it is at least possible that it (as a cognition) be combined with pleasure. Of that which I call agreeable I say that it actually produces a pleasure in me. Of the beautiful, however, one thinks that it has a necessary relation to satisfaction.

Kant carefully talks of what we ‘say’ or ‘think’ of the pleasure in the beautiful, because his general conception of modality is that it concerns our attitude to the relation between an object and our feeling.¹

Kant’s focus is on the pleasure we take in a representation when we judge its beauty, and why we feel that everyone ought to agree with us. He has already offered some explanation of this. Because the person brings no private interest to their judgement, he or she is relying on the built-in mental faculties found in every human being, and the judgement acquires a subjective universality a priori, based in the free play of our faculties or ‘cognition in general’.

Now he wants to explore the topic further, and decides the beautiful has a necessary relation to pleasure, but this necessity is neither theoretical nor practical.

• Theoretical: an objective necessity that everyone must feel identically. Scientific knowledge.
• Practical: an ethical necessity that asserts that everyone ought to behave morally.

An aesthetic judgement without concepts has a different character, neither objective nor practical. Kant concludes:

Rather, as a necessity that is thought in an aesthetic judgement, it can only be called exemplary, i.e., a necessity of the assent of all to a judgement that is regarded as an example of a universal rule one cannot produce.

Since the pure judgement of taste is not a cognitive or logical judgement we can only say that everyone should find the object similarly beautiful. ‘Exemplary’ means we cannot produce a cast-iron rule for beauty and must therefore depend on the example set by someone making an actual judgement. The scholar Christian Helmut Wenzel describes this neatly:

Someone has to step forward, so to speak, and actually make a judgment of taste before anyone can be expected to agree to anything. The judgment itself is exemplary. It looks like an example of a rule, as if a general rule preceded it. But in fact there is no rule to start with.²

The judgement’s subjective necessity is grounded in cognition in general, that is, the same conditions that are required to make theoretical and practical judgements possible. In all three cases there is an engagement of the imagination and the understanding, but the pure judgement of taste stands in its own special relation (i.e. free play) to those conditions.

We cannot look for necessity in our individual empirical experience – it can only be grounded a priori as a principle that applies to all judgements of taste. Kant wants to ask what that principle is.

The need for an a priori principle 

The first thing we should ask is why Kant thinks we need an a priori principle.

He sets out his view in the CoJ’s Introduction, where in Section V he says that scientific study of the world needs indeterminate judgements that allow us to create new concepts. If a zoologist discovers an unknown animal, he or she will have no concept for it, and will have to create a new one (perhaps naming it after themselves in the process). We also need to know that the various laws that we discover will cohere into a predictable and reliable unity. Otherwise, says Kant, ‘no thoroughgoing interconnection of empirical cognitions into a whole of experience would take place’ (p70). It is important that our cognition and judgements should be universally valid (and communicable). If they were purely subjective, we could not establish objective knowledge of the world, and we would be stuck with scepticism.

Kant thinks (it is a bold claim, but he stands by it) the laws of nature, space and time ultimately come from ourselves, imposed by the categories of the understanding; so we perceive a purposiveness in nature that makes it seem as if nature was designed to coordinate with these cognitive faculties in us. To paraphrase:

The power of judgement must think of nature in accordance with a principle of purposiveness for our faculty of cognition. (p71)

This makes sense: in order for objective knowledge to be possible there must be a correspondence between nature and our equipment for knowing about it, otherwise our perceptions could just be random and yield no true knowledge at all. The lawful unity of nature strikes us as if it was designed for us:

hence we are also delighted... when we encounter such a systematic unity among merely empirical laws, just as if it were a happy accident which happened to favour our aim.

Kant does not say nature is in fact designed so that we humans can cognise it, just that it seems that way to us. If such design were true, we would have to address the question of God – a topic Kant discusses in the second part of the CoJ on teleology.

This then is why we need an a priori principle of judgement, namely the principle of purposiveness. This principle by itself does not give us knowledge of nature (it’s an ‘as if’) but it is the manner in which judgement must proceed: a necessary assumption.

The puzzle remains: if purposiveness is the a priori principle of judgement in general, what is the a priori principle of the specific faculty of taste, which is a kind of subcategory of judgement? The faculty of judgement in general includes theoretical and practical judgements. Purposiveness holds for the judgement of taste as well, but the judgement of taste is a particular kind of judgement: it is neither objective nor cognitive, with no reliance on determinate concepts. So where does it get its (exemplary and conditional) necessity? Kant proposes a further a priori principle.

Common sense

If judgements of taste were determinate their necessity would be clear; if they were merely sensory (subjective in the relativist sense) no one would claim they were necessary.

They must thus have a subjective principle, which determines what pleases or displeases only through feeling and not through concepts, but yet with universal validity. Such a principle, however, could only be regarded as a common sense [Gemeinsinn]. (§20)

The pure judgement of taste, our ability to declare an object beautiful and expect assent, is ‘conditional’ – it depends upon the existence of a common sense or sensus communis:

Only on the presupposition of such a common sense... can the judgement of taste be made.

Kant thus locates the necessity of pure judgements of taste in the a priori faculties of the mind. He makes clear he does not mean an external sense (of the spatial, material objects of the external world) but an inner sense (of our own states of mind). Nor does he mean ‘common sense’ in the everyday meaning of practical intelligence, but literally, as an inner sense we all have in common. It is a subjective principle of shared feeling that lets us judge beauty in the absence of rules, according to which we may ‘assume’ that our satisfaction in beauty is ‘a rule for everyone’. However, it is, like the ideal of beauty, a ‘merely ideal norm’ (§22), whose validity is only exemplary.

Why can we presuppose this common sense? In §21, Kant says that for our judgements to be universally valid, rather than mere private opinions, it must be possible for them to be communicable from one person to the next. We don’t all have to have the same personal tastes, but we must be able to communicate our feelings and reasons to each other in terms we all understand. Otherwise we are left with the spectre of scepticism. In this case, our disposition for a cognition in general – which he raised in §9 – must also be communicable, since without cognition the judgements couldn’t happen. This is why we can presuppose a common sense.

He adds that the cognitive powers must have a proportion [Proportion] – a relative balance or weight between them – that is ‘optimal’ for the animation of the imagination and the understanding. If we are doing arithmetic the understanding will be doing the work; if we are writing a poem the main player will be the imagination; in aesthetics the two achieve harmony. The relationship of the common sense to this free play is not clear. Here Kant calls it ‘the effect of the free play of our cognitive powers’. So it is not the same thing as the free play, rather an effect of it.³ There are quite a few similar terms flying around now: subjective universality, communicability, the universal voice, common sense / sensus communis – all these terms are ways of talking around the same, somewhat confusing process.

Can we prove any of this? I don’t see how we can, but Kant’s view is clear:

since the universal communicability of a feeling presupposes a common sense, the latter must be able to be assumed with good reason. (§21)

Common sense, then, is the subjective a priori principle of taste (‘taste’, you will recall from §1 p89, being the faculty for the judging of the beautiful). Note: the ‘necessity’ we are discussing is not that of the common sense itself but that of our satisfaction in the beautiful, and thus the judgement of taste, which draw their alleged⁴ necessity from our presupposition of the existence of the common sense.

Kant adds a caveat in §22, which is that the universal assent grounded in common sense is not an objective necessity, only a subjective one:

it does not say that everyone will concur with our judgement but that everyone should agree with it. Thus the common sense... is a merely ideal norm.

We treat the judgement of taste as if it were objective, but it has only exemplary necessity by virtue of a principle that is subjectively universal. If it was objectively universal, the judgements of taste would demand universal assent in a scientific, logical sense. Instead, as we are relying on an indeterminate norm, we cannot be certain that the judgement has been ‘correctly subsumed’. But we can’t understand the universality of taste – our demand that others should agree with us that a given object is beautiful – without presupposing a common sense a priori.

Kant concludes:

That is beautiful which is cognised without a concept as an object of a necessary satisfaction.

Notes

1. Pointed out in Christian Helmut Wenzel, An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics (2005), p77.
2. Ibid., p78.
3. Later, in §35, Kant seems to equate the two.
4. Kant himself refers to the necessity of the judgement of taste as ‘alleged’ in the header to §20.

The third moment (2)

The remainder of the third moment discusses perfection, objective vs subjective purposiveness, pure and adherent beauty, and the ideal of beauty. Sections §§15-17 may be seen as studying ways in which an idea of reason can play a role in aesthetic judgements.

Perfection

Kant has already taken pains to distinguish the pure judgement of taste from other kinds of judgement. In §15 he explores another, involving the notion of perfection (Vollkommenheit). There is a long-held view in philosophy, dating back to the ancient Greeks, that an object’s beauty is based upon its degree of perfection, and people often still talk in such terms today¹. Kant sets out the issue:

An objective inner purposiveness, i.e., perfection, already comes closer to the predicate of beauty, and has therefore been held to be identical with beauty even by philosophers of repute, though with the proviso if it is thought confusedly. It is of the greatest importance in a critique of taste to decide whether beauty is really reducible to the concept of perfection.

The classical view is that the measure of an object’s beauty is how well it matches what it ought to be in order to match its purpose. Kant’s rationalist predecessors Leibniz and Wolff (the ‘philosophers of repute’) also allowed that beauty was a form of perfection if thought ‘confusedly’ (a technical term we needn’t get into here).

Kant, of course, approaches the question of beauty (and perfection) through purposiveness. When an object has a determinate purpose, we speak of objective purposiveness, or, if you like, purposiveness with purpose. Kant says objective purposiveness has two aspects, external (utility) and internal (perfection). Being Kant, he doesn’t explain these terms.

• Utility: External. The object’s ability to serve a purpose it was created to serve, i.e. to meet a subject’s end, regardless of its own history or reason for existence.
• Perfection: Internal. The properties that make the object itself suitable for its purpose, i.e. how well the object measures up to the concept of the thing it is supposed to be.

Utility and perfection are related to the good, which doesn’t only concern morals but also how well a thing is done. Objective purposiveness requires a concept of what sort of thing the object is supposed to be. (Kant then makes a further distinction between two kinds of perfection, qualitative and quantitative, which we can skip over.)

The judgement of taste however does not rely upon a concept, and thus it cannot be grounded in the perfection of the object. The judgement of taste is based upon an indeterminate purposiveness without purpose and has nothing to do with the good (whether moral or useful). Similarly it cannot rest on the object’s utility, because pleasure in the beautiful is only concerned with an object’s form qua object, not with how well it performs tasks. Objects may have purposes, but we do not judge their beauty according to them. Beauty is a matter of subjective not objective purposiveness:

What is formal in the representation of a thing... does not by itself allow any cognition of objective purposiveness at all... nothing remains but the subjective purposiveness of representations in the mind of the beholder. (p112)

To compare:

• Objective purposiveness: in the object; always requires a concept/purpose; includes rules and concepts that enable us to judge an object’s perfection; judgements of the good
• Subjective purposiveness: not in the object but inside our minds; no concept/purpose and no role for an object’s perfection; judgements of taste

Thus, as Kant makes clear in the section’s header:

The [pure] judgement of taste is entirely independent from the concept of perfection.

And later in §16:

Perfection does not gain by beauty, nor does beauty gain by perfection.

For Kant, perfection means measuring up to an objective standard that is unavailable to the subjective judgement of taste. If the latter was beholden to perfection, aesthetics would not be possible – hence the topic’s great ‘importance’. Instead, the judgement of taste calls for formal unity and subjective purposiveness. Note: this means we do not base our judgements of beauty on whether causal intentions, e.g. those of an artist in creating an artwork, have been met.

Despite all this, it turns out there is at least one way in which perfection can co-exist with the beautiful.

Pure and adherent beauty

In §16 Kant introduces an unexpected new distinction between kinds of beauty:

There are two kinds of beauty: free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) or merely adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). The first presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be; the second does presuppose such a concept and the perfection of the object in accordance with it. The first are called (self-subsisting) beauties of this or that thing; the latter, as adhering to a concept (conditioned beauty), are ascribed to objects that stand under the concept of a particular end. (p114, my bold)

The Latin term vaga means ‘wandering’ or ‘aimless’. The German word anhängend has been translated ‘dependent’ (Meredith, Bernard) or ‘accessory’ (Pluhar), but I agree with Guyer and Matthews that ‘adherent’ is better.

Suddenly Kant is allowing a role for concepts in judgements of taste. There is, after all, a role for perfection – not in a pure judgment of taste, true, but in a partial way through adherent beauty.

• Free beauty is the kind of beauty he has been discussing so far. 
• Adherent beauty is an impure kind of beauty that is mixed with a determinate concept and the perfection of the object.

For Kant, a judgement of taste that is mixed with sensory gratification or ‘charm’ is not pure. In §13 he said ‘any interest spoils the judgement of taste and deprives it of its impartiality’ and in §14 he said a judgement of taste ‘is pure only insofar as no merely empirical satisfaction is mixed into its determining ground’. Now he is giving us another way in which a judgement of taste can be impure: adherent beauty depends upon a concept, so that we judge the object as beautiful insofar as it belongs to one or another kind of thing.

Kant gives us some examples of both free and adherent beauty that are a bit peculiar and perhaps represent his life experience, interests and meagre interest in art. Let’s take free beauty first: ‘many birds’ (not all birds), marine crustaceans, abstract and non-representational designs that ‘signify nothing by themselves’, and musical fantasias without a text (i.e. more abstract musical works, judged on their form) – these are ‘free and please for themselves’.

In the judging of a free beauty (according to mere form) the judgement of taste is pure. No concept of any end for which the manifold should serve the given object and thus which the latter should represent is presupposed, by which the imagination, which is as it were at play in the observation of the shape, would merely be restricted.

Then Kant offers some examples of adherent beauty:

But the beauty of a human being... the beauty of a horse, of a building (such as a church, a palace, an arsenal, or a garden-house) presuppose a concept of the end that determines what the thing should be, hence a concept of its perfection, and is thus merely adherent beauty.

Why does Kant think that (some) birds are examples of free beauty but a horse is an example of adherent beauty? On the face of it, this seems random. One explanation is that he is thinking of a horse’s social function: he assumes that people in his (pre-automobile) cultural context could not conceive of a horse without also thinking of the purpose of a horse, whether for the military, transportation, etc. Further, Kant was a fan of the natural historian Buffon, for whom horses were close to humans socially: on that view, horses are so close to us that we can’t abstract away from their usefulness to us.

As for people, Robert Wicks has neatly explained their presence on the list:

In the case of human beings... it is almost impossible to see people as being mere objects, so in such cases, judgments of adherent beauty are practically unavoidable. With respect to people, judgments of pure beauty verge on being immoral, for such judgments must ignore, rather than respect, the humanity in people.²

We can summarise the data Kant has given us in a table:

	Free beauty	Adherent beauty
Characteristics	Pulchritudo vaga Pure judgement of taste Judged according to mere form No concept of what the object should be Self-subsisting beauty	Pulchritudo adhaerens Not a pure judgement of taste Presupposes a concept and the perfection of the object Conditioned beauty
Kant’s examples	Flowers Birds (parrot, hummingbird, bird of paradise) Marine crustaceans Designs à la grecque (i.e. under influence of ancient Greek art) Foliage for borders/wallpaper Music without text	Human being Horse Building (church, palace, arsenal, garden-house*)

* Pluhar and Bernard have ‘summer-house’.

Kant says of his examples of adherent beauty:

Just as the combination of the agreeable (of sensation) with beauty, which properly concerns only form, hindered the purity of the judgement of taste, so the combination of the good... with beauty does damage to its purity.

The existence of a determinate internal purpose damages the object’s beauty. The concept of what the thing is meant to be imposes restrictions: if a building is meant to be a church, it has to be made a certain way to ensure it meets the purposes of a church. You can’t build it any way you please. Therefore its beauty is not free: if it is ‘restricted, then it is no longer a free and pure judgement of taste’. We do not simply judge the object: we have an idea of how it must look and allow that to influence our judgement. With such objects we struggle to abstract their beauty since they are strongly functional. Kant draws a distinction between what is before our senses, i.e. a pure judgement of taste aware of no purpose or concept (free beauty) and what is before our thoughts, i.e. thinking of the object’s purpose or concept (adherent beauty). Beauty adheres, or hangs on, or is accessory, to the concept, like a subordinate partner.

We could still make a judgement of taste in these cases if we ‘either had no concept of this end or abstracted from it’ (p115). Kant doesn’t say it, but the awkward conclusion seems to follow that a child or ignoramus might succeed in making a pure judgement of taste where someone better-informed or educated could not.

Anything human-made will be conditioned by a purpose, so we are more likely to find free beauty in nature, which we consider less in terms of purposes; adherent beauty is more likely in art, in which human will and intentions are apparent and we are therefore more aware of the object’s uses and purposes. This emerges in Kant’s explicit discussion of art in later sections.

Oddly in a book of aesthetics, hardly any of Kant’s examples are works of art. Designs, perhaps; but only music would count as so-called fine art.³ In line perhaps with his formalism, Kant doesn’t seem to count representational art as free beauty: his only examples of free beauty in art are abstract and non-representational. Unhelpfully, though, his examples of adherent beauty include no examples of art at all, except insofar as buildings (as architecture) might be classed amongst the fine arts. And in §48 (top of p190), he confusingly seems to say that all art presupposes a purpose, whether non-representational or not... or at least makes no reference to any exceptions.

Kant’s introduction of a form of beauty that contradicts his theory of beauty is unexpected, but it would be unfair to think he’s being careless. As we will see, he returns to the idea later in his discussion of fine art and genius (though he never refers to ‘adherent beauty’ in that section). Here is Wicks again:

As we continue to explore Kant’s theory, it will become evident that his aesthetics initially focusses on pure beauty in an effort to establish the universal validity of judgments of taste, slowly gravitates towards distinguishing adherent beauty in a positive way, owing to its capacity to respect moral obligations, and ends up symbolically aligning every form of beauty with morality.

The best approach to the CoJ, not just on this topic but in general, is to be generous and see it as a gradually unravelling chain of ideas rather than a theory that is strictly cohesive from the beginning. It was, after all, written over 200 years ago, in a culture where norms of writing were different and more discursive – the rigours of analytic philosophy for example were still far off.

It is not a virtue to claim coherence where there is none, but in fact the idea of adherent beauty is related to the themes of the third moment so far. Although free beauty is occasioned by purposiveness without a purpose, there are many cases where it is difficult not to see a purpose in the object, e.g. in a church whose purpose as a place of worship is well-known to everyone. Kant’s theory needs to be able to account for these cases.

Kant’s introduction of conceptual beauty is also important for his subsequent attempts in the CoJ to connect beauty with morality, and it is therefore pertinent to find ways of allowing interest and concepts of the good into judgements of taste, albeit while doing ‘damage’ to their ‘purity’.

The ideal of beauty

In the next section (§17), Kant elaborates on the new-found presence of concepts in beauty. He begins with his familiar stance:

There can be no objective rule of taste that would determine what is beautiful through concepts... To seek a principle of taste that would provide the universal criterion of the beautiful through determinate concepts is a fruitless undertaking.

Instead, the universally communicable feeling of satisfaction is based in a common ground ‘deeply buried in all human beings’.

Kant now introduces a new notion: the ideal of beauty. He claimed in §16 that, in adherent beauty, taste becomes ‘fixed’ or stable and can have rules which condition our appreciation. Discussing whether some ‘products of taste’ serve as models for others, he asks what kind of thing might achieve the ‘maximum’ of beauty:

The highest model, the archetype [Urbild] of taste, is a mere idea [Idee], which everyone must produce in himself, and in accordance with which he must judge everything that is an object of taste.

An idea is a concept of reason. As Kant has already said, there can be no universal criterion of the beautiful through determinate concepts. The model product of (impure) taste (which must mean a work of art), resting only on ‘reason’s indeterminate idea of a maximum’, can be only exemplary, i.e. an instantiation of an assumed set of rules rather than the rules themselves. The artist brings a new object into the world and others must seek the rules of its production from the object itself; we have no rules, only the exemplar. Similarly the archetype or ideal is a mere idea that we can but strive towards. We find this ‘ideal of the beautiful’ in ‘individual presentations’ (or examples) of the imagination that are adequate to the idea. How, asks Kant, do we find such an ideal?

The ideal can only exist in adherent beauty: the beauty cannot be ‘vague’ (this harks back to that term pulchritudo vaga and is a synonym for ‘pure’ or ‘free’) but fixed by a concept, and therefore partly intellectualised through a connection to reason. We seek the ideal in vain in those wallpapers and crustaceans Kant listed earlier. We also won’t find it in palaces and gardens, which are determined by concepts but not enough to be ideal.

Only that which has the end of its existence in itself, the human being [Mensch], who determines his ends through reason...: this human being alone is capable of an ideal of beauty, just as the humanity in his person, as intelligence, is alone among all the objects in the world capable of the ideal of perfection.

We human beings are most adequate to reason, as we alone determine our own rational ends as agents in nature, and possess (for Kant) the highest purpose of all, namely moral law. The human being – who was ‘merely adherent’ in §16 – has become the ideal of beauty. Given that adherent beauty is impure and conditioned, this is not the pinnacle of beauty he/she enjoyed in classical times and which was praised by Kant’s contemporary Winckelmann, though the quest for an ideal seems superficially similar.

Kant of course is not satisfied unless he has made distinctions, so he proceeds to draw one between the idea of reason already mentioned and the normal idea (or ‘aesthetic normal idea’).

• Idea of reason: a concept that could have no possible corresponding object in experience, i.e. exceeds the bounds of what we can know: such as God, the soul, or freedom.
• Normal idea: Obtained by empirically taking all instances of a kind of thing and making an average out of them. Judging an individual thing as a member of a species.

The normal idea uses its experience of human beings to construct a kind of average or standard ‘that can serve them all as a common measure’. For example if you aggregate the height of all humans you will find ‘the stature for a beautiful man’.

Now if in a similar way there is sought for this average man the average head, the average nose, etc., then this shape is the basis for the normal idea of the beautiful man in the country where this comparison is made.

This ‘normal idea of the beautiful’ (p120) is a bit disappointing – only a mere ‘average’ – and varies by nation, giving culturally different ideas of beauty. A ‘Negro’, a Chinese and a European will have different normal ideas of the beauty of a figure. This figure is an ‘image for the whole species’, an archetype used by nature for all instances of human beings but never itself instantiated, and found (in theory) by distilling all the instances. Take care that we are not talking about an ‘ideal of beauty’ here but a normal idea of it; Kant is quick to downplay the archetype thus attained:

It is by no means the entire archetype of beauty in this species, but only the form that constitutes the indispensable condition of all beauty, and so merely the correctness in the presentation of the species... For that very reason it cannot contain anything specifically characteristic, for then it would not be the normal idea for the species. Its presentation also does not please because of beauty, but merely because it does not contradict any condition under which alone a thing of this species can be beautiful. The presentation is merely academically correct. (p119)

Kant adds in his footnote to p119 that a perfectly regular subject has nothing characteristic about him/her and thus more closely expresses the ideal than a highly specific person.⁴

The aesthetic normal idea prepares the way for the aesthetic idea that comes up later in §49. For now we may turn to the idea of reason, and here we find the ideal, which ‘on the grounds already introduced can be expected only in the human figure’. Don’t forget, this ideal is not an actual thing: it is only exemplary and a mere idea to strive for. Nonetheless Kant gets high-flown:

In the latter the ideal consists in the expression of the moral, without which the figure would not please universally and moreover positively... The visible expression of moral ideas, which inwardly govern human beings, can of course be drawn only from experience; but as it were to make visible in bodily manifestation (as the effect of what is inward) their combination with everything that our understanding connects with the morally good in the idea of the highest purposiveness – goodness of soul, or purity, or strength, or repose, etc. – this requires pure ideas of reason and great forces of imagination united in anyone who would merely judge them, let alone anyone who would present them.

The ideal of beauty, then, combines the spatio-temporal form of the average human body with morality: the result is a kind of generic image of humankind. It could be taken as a given culture’s basic model, like Polykleitos’s sculpture Doryphoros or Spear-Bearer in ancient Greece, only in Kant’s hands it does not revolve around an ideal of physical perfection but around morality. No sensory charm may be mixed with this ideal, since sensory gratification is merely bodily and ‘barbaric’. But we may mix an interest with it, of course, since it involves the good. Kant is consistent and acknowledges:

[This] then proves that judging in accordance with such a standard can never be purely aesthetic, and judging in accordance with an ideal of beauty is no mere judgement of taste.

Indeed not – but we are becoming aware that failing to achieve purity in the judgement of taste is less of a problem than it seemed in earlier sections. In locating beauty in purposiveness without purpose, Kant has allowed aesthetics its own unique kind of judgement, but it still does not operate in isolation from other aspects of our being.

Notes

1. The world of contemporary fine art tends to scorn or ignore beauty these days, but that accounts for only a tiny fraction of the art that is made.
2. Robert Wicks, Kant on Judgement (2007), p62.
3. The notion of the ‘fine arts’, as we conceive them today, only became established in the 18th century. But that’s another topic.
4. Comics fans may know Scott McCloud’s theory that the faces in comics become more universal the less detail they include; see Understanding Comics (1993), p31. In his footnote, Kant goes on to make the outrageous claim that people’s exterior reflects their interior, and that average-looking people are inwardly average too (and thus not geniuses).