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).

The third moment (1)

The third moment (§§10-17) is the longest. Its goal is to explain what it is about an object that produces the harmony of imagination and understanding discussed in §9 – what properties make us judge an object as beautiful – and also why some objects might produce it to different intensities i.e. why some objects are more beautiful than others.

This moment is supposed to consider the logical aspect of relation: in Kant’s words ‘the relation of the ends that are taken in consideration’ in judgements of taste. Here that seems to mean the relationship between the subject and the beautiful object (more precisely the representation of the object) and how it arouses pleasure in us – that is, the relation between taste and purpose.

Kant begins §10 by introducing the new topic of purpose (Zweck) and purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit), and explaining what these terms mean. As Guyer and Matthews (G&M) point out in their translators’ introduction (p.xlviii), the natural approach is to translate Zweck and Zweckmäßigkeit in matched pairs, as either end and finality or purpose and purposiveness. G&M break with this for their own reasons, but I prefer the latter pairing; when I quote from G&M’s text you just need to remember that end and purpose are two alternative translations for the same word in Kant.

Purpose and purposiveness

The ancestry of these notions goes back to Aristotle’s four causes. Kant defines a purpose as ‘the object of a concept’ (§10, p105). An object’s purpose is the reason why it was made, such as the concept of a self-portrait in the mind of an artist. The plan (concept) has to exist first, to give rise to the object (purpose).

When an object has a purpose it is purposive (zweckmäßig; as it is not a noun, it loses the capital Z). An object is purposive if it seems to have been made, or designed. Note the distinction: saying an object is a ‘purpose’ (noun) is an assertion; saying it is ‘purposive’ (adjective) is a description: the object has the compelling appearance of having a purpose, but we have to allow the possibility that it has none. Similarly, purposiveness is the property of appearing to have been made for a purpose.

Kant continues:

An object or a state of mind or even an action... is called purposive merely because its possibility can only be explained and conceived by us insofar as we assume as its ground a causality in accordance with ends, i.e., a will that has arranged it so in accordance with the representation of a certain rule. (p105, my emphasis)

Purposes and purposiveness are connected causally by the will, which belongs to the human faculty of desire. The artist wills or plans that she paints a self-portrait; she paints to realise the end/purpose of having a self-portrait. Something that came about by accidental or mechanical means is not purposive and had no purpose. To think of purposes presupposes intelligence and intention as well as causality; we can’t really conceive of it any other way. Judgements of taste reflect upon how an object – even a natural object – appears to us as if it were the product of intelligent design (though Kant never uses that phrase).

This causality is important because it is linked to pleasure. Kant says ‘the attainment of every aim is combined with a feeling of pleasure’ (Introduction VI). Our artist no doubt felt pleasure in completing her self-portrait. But Kant also defines pleasure in §10 as:

the consciousness of the causality of a representation with respect to the state of the subject, for maintaining it [the subject] in that state. 

Pleasure lies in an object’s ability to keep us (the human subject) in the same (pleasurable) state. Put differently: when we take pleasure in an object we want to continue in that satisfied state. A little later, in §12, Kant says we linger over the beautiful because it is self-sustaining.

Then Kant adds something interesting:

Purposiveness can thus exist without an end, insofar as we do not place the causes of this form in a will, but can still make the explanation of its possibility conceivable to ourselves only by deriving it from a will.

We can perceive purposiveness in an object even when we don’t know what its purpose is: a purposiveness without purpose. If we find the self-portrait in a junk shop we don’t know it’s a self-portrait, still less that, say, the artist painted it as an heirloom to her children – to us it’s just a painting of a woman. But it’s clear the unknown artist had some purpose, even though we don’t know precisely why he or she painted the woman we see in the painting. No one thinks it could have sprung up by itself through some natural process: we infer that someone created it by intelligent design. 

Douglas Burnham offers the example of a wave retreating from a beach to leave words in the sand.¹ We would have to allow the logical possibility that it happened by chance, but that would be extremely unlikely. The likelihood would be that some intelligence was responsible, even though we could perceive neither the being responsible, nor the purpose, nor the means by which the words were formed. In a pre-Darwinian foreshadowing of certain contemporary religious debates, Kant later argues in the CoJ’s second part, the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgement, that living organisms create a similarly strong impression of having been intelligently designed, though we cannot prove that God did the designing.

When Kant calls a purpose ‘the object of a concept’ at the beginning, it sounds strange and abstract – surely it’s people who have wills and purposes, not concepts themselves? But it makes more sense now when we think of purpose without an identifiable causal will. There is no intelligent designer at work in the evolution of animal species, either, yet we can talk of a bird’s wings or a lion’s teeth etc as purposive – as serving some kind of function for the animal.

Clearly, we can think of purposiveness independently of the causing person and independently of purpose – e.g. we may think of the purposiveness of a painting in the abstract, without reference to the concrete activity of the artist, her concept of it as a self-portrait, her role as a causal will, the determination of the resulting object in accordance with that concept, etc. From Kant’s abstract perspective, aesthetics is interested only in the ‘representation of the effect’ and the pleasure brought about by our consciousness of that causality. Again:

The consciousness of the causality of a representation with respect to the state of the subject... can here designate in general what is called pleasure.

Kant rejects direct causality, and seeks this strange notion of purposiveness without a purpose, because in his theory there is no place for a concept (purpose) in a pure judgement of taste. We note the appearance of purposiveness in objects but it does not act as a rule governing our aesthetic feeling.

Form of purposiveness

Kant reiterates in §11 that a judgement of taste is aesthetic: it is not cognitive, as it does not involve a concept. If our pleasure is grounded in a purpose, it can’t be a judgement of taste, as a purpose always includes an interest. Why? Because it requires the object; you have an interest in the object existing at the end. In my example: there has to be a self-portrait at the end of the process. The judgement of taste by contrast is disinterested, i.e. it has no interest in whether the object actually exists or not.

We have established that the judgement of taste:

• can’t be based on sensation, as that would be a judgement of sensory gratification (the agreeable).
• can’t be based on an end in which we have a moral interest, as that would be a judgement of the good.
• can’t be based on any other kind of interest or concept.

This brings Kant to an intriguing conclusion:

Nothing other than the subjective purposiveness in the representation of an object without any end... consequently the mere form of purposiveness in the representation through which an object is given to us, insofar as we are conscious of it, can constitute the satisfaction that we judge, without a concept, to be universally communicable, and hence the determining ground of the judgement of taste. [my emphasis]

When we experience a beautiful object, we have a feeling of pleasure, and the source of that feeling of pleasure is our perception of the object’s ‘form of purposiveness’. At the beginning of the third moment Kant refers to the forma finalis, which means ‘purposive form’ (p105). Now, specifically in relation to the judgement of taste, he is using another phrase, the ‘form of purposiveness’ (Form der Zweckmäßigkeit) of an object (p106). There is a subtle distinction being made here:

• Purposive form (aka ‘finality of form’): a concept causes the purpose; we perceive that purposiveness in the object’s form.
• Form of purposiveness (aka ‘form of finality’): the representation has merely the ‘form’ of having a purpose, without actually having a discernable purpose (‘without any end’). When we judge its beauty, we ascribe to it a purposiveness without purpose (without a concept) that is the ground of the judgement of taste. Kant talks of a ‘subjective purposiveness’, i.e. purposiveness in a certain relation to the perceiving human subject.

Thus ‘form of purposiveness’ and ‘purposiveness without purpose’ seem to mean the same thing. It is, for Kant, is what our judgements of beauty are based on: the apprehension of purposiveness without purpose in the beautiful object. Our reflection upon this apprehension (in a reflective judgement) is what occasions the harmony of the faculties and the pleasure associated with it.

Photo: UpstateNYer

The purposiveness is revealed to us by the constitution of the object. There is evidently a causal, intelligent (human) will behind the making of an artwork such as a painting. There is no such will in, say, the formation of a rock or a flower, but Kant believes we see purposiveness in natural objects too:

A flower... e.g., a tulip, is held to be beautiful because a certain purposiveness is encountered in our perception of it which, as we judge it, is not related to any end at all. [Footnote to p120]

We have already established that beauty can’t be grounded in sensory qualities, so Kant locates beauty in the spatio-temporal form of the object: perhaps this is why he introduces the additional term ‘form of purposiveness’ in which form is emphasised. This form derives from the a priori categories of knowledge, which impose space and time upon our intuitions and guarantee the judgement’s universality. The judgement of taste is grounded only in the pleasure we take in the object’s perceptual form, not in any pleasure we might take in sensations or concepts mixed into our experience of the object. Thanks to this emphasis it is fair to call Kant the first formalist theorist. We shall say a bit more about this at the end of the post.

Charm, emotion and form

In the next four sections (§§12-15) Kant discusses some aspects of the judgement of taste in the light – sometimes – of purposiveness and form.

Kant begins (§12) by considering the a priori grounds of the judgement of taste, looking at moral satisfaction, as discussed in the Critique of Practical Reason, and comparing it to aesthetics. The upshot of this dense section is that the judgement of taste rests on a priori grounds because its feeling of pleasure is grounded in our cognitive faculties. The ground of the pleasure is the a priori principle of purposiveness without purpose.

This pleasure is not pathological like the agreeable, or intellectual like the good. It seeks to maintain the mind in its pleasurable state of occupying the cognitive powers without any further aim. We linger (weilen) over the beautiful because it ‘strengthens and reproduces itself’ – it is self-sustaining.

Charms and emotions

Kant goes on to elaborate his theory of form, including what form is not. He reminds us (§13) that judgements of taste must be disinterested or else lose their universality.

Taste is always still barbaric when it needs the addition of charms and emotions for satisfaction let alone if it makes these into the standard for its approval.

Melodramatically, Kant uses the powerful term ‘barbaric’ (barbarisch) for the vulgar pleasures aroused by mere sensation. He introduces a discussion of charms and emotions (Reize und Rührungen), which just seem to be another way of talking about sensation and interest: Kant mentions as ‘charms’ the green of a lawn and the tone of a violin. Aesthetic judgements are described in two ways (§14, p108) that include a distinction between material and form:

• Empirical: agreeable, judgements of sense; material aesthetic judgements
• Pure: beauty, judgements of taste; formal aesthetic judgements.

For Kant, ‘pure’ means empty of sensory content, which is why the First Critique addresses ‘pure reason’ rather than just ‘reason’. Again he insists that the judgement of taste should be mixed with no ‘merely empirical’ satisfaction. We are accustomed to thinking of sensory charms as belonging the sphere of beauty, and Kant notes this, while rejecting it:

A mere colour... a mere tone... is declared by most people to be beautiful in itself, although both seem to have as their ground merely the matter of the representations, namely mere sensation, and on that account deserve to be called only agreeable. (p108)

The problem with ‘charm’ (Reiz) is that sensations are subjective: they ‘cannot be assumed to be in accord with all subjects’ and a given colour or tone will not be ‘judged in the same way by everyone’. In short, they are not universally communicable.

Kant wants to separate out the form and the sensation of something like a colour or tone – when the sensation is ‘pure’ it starts to ‘concern forms’ and may be universally communicable. What are we to understand by the ‘purity’ of colour and tone? Kant appeals to the scientific theory of his day, describing both colours and tone as vibrations of the air, in which aspect they would be purely formal, as opposed to the sensations we have of them. How we are to know these formal aspects without having sensations of them is a mystery.

Kant seems to be thinking along the lines of John Locke’s theory of primary and secondary qualities in objects. Secondary qualities are sensations such as colours, flavours, sounds, smells; primary qualities are more structural and spatio-temporal. This is a simple division of phenomena that in reality are deeply entangled and complex, and Kant’s treatment is rather weak: e.g. he claims that ‘simple’ sensations, like simple colours, may contribute to form whereas mixed colours cannot, since you can’t tell if they are pure or not. How you define which colours are ‘simple’ and which are ‘mixed’ is another mystery. 

Charms may be ‘combined with the satisfaction in the beautiful’, that is, added to our satisfaction to interest the mind, but they do not contribute to beauty itself – Kant calls this a ‘common error’. Charms may not be part of beauty’s determining ground, for the judgement of taste is based purely on the purposiveness of the object’s form. Beauty ‘should properly concern mere form’.

As for emotion (Rührung), which Kant describes as a sensation in which agreeableness is produced, ‘it does not belong to beauty at all.’ It is not obvious how Rührung differs from Gefühl (translated as ‘feeling’).  

• Rührung implies being ‘moved’ or ‘stirred’ and a kind of mental shift: it produces agreeableness ‘only by means of a momentary inhibition followed by a stronger outpouring of the vital force’.
  
• Gefühl is the capacity for pleasure or displeasure, associated with the contemplative judgement of taste, in which is contemplative and disinterested.

Form

Kant now turns to discussing his conception of form, elaborating in a famous passage (§13, p110) on what is allowed and what isn’t.

In painting and sculpture, indeed in all the pictorial arts, in architecture and horticulture insofar as they are fine arts, the drawing [Zeichnung] is what is essential, in which what constitutes the ground of all arrangements for taste is not what gratifies in sensation but merely what pleases through its form.

G&M translate Zeichnung as ‘drawing’ and Bernard as ‘delineation’; Pluhar and Meredith prefer ‘design’. Kant rejects, as ever, anything physiological:

The colours that illuminate the outline [Abriß] belong to charm; they can of course enliven the object in itself for sensation, but they cannot make it worthy of being intuited and beautiful.

Positively, he declares that:

All form of the objects of the senses (of the outer as well as, mediately, the inner)² is either shape [Gestalt] or play [Spiel]: in the latter case, either play of shapes (in space, mime and dance) or mere play of sensations (in time). The charm of colours or the agreeable tones of instruments can be added, but drawing in the former and composition in the latter constitute the proper object of the pure judgement of taste.

Kant contends that only purely formal qualities like design, shape and composition can occasion the free play of the faculties in the judgement of taste. This is what he means by the form of purposiveness.

Kant writes again of pure colours and tones, allowing that they may play a part in attracting us to the form: they make the form ‘more precisely, more determinately, and more completely intuitable’. But colours seem to play only a supporting role in beauty. In music, we must disregard the charms of the timbres of different instruments (as in his example of the violin) and attend only to the ‘pure’ notes.

He also comments on what he calls ornaments (or parerga which here means something like ‘incidental flourishes’). Through its form, an ornament (he gives as examples ‘the borders of paintings, draperies on statues, or colonnades around magnificent buildings’) may also ‘augment the satisfaction of taste’, but only through its own form; if it is attached as a charm to recommend approval it is mere ‘decoration’ and ‘detracts from genuine beauty’.

Kant’s attitude to sensation and form seems a bit peculiar to us, but it is entwined with this wider philosophy. There is an illuminating passage in the CPR that helps us understand the formalism of his aesthetics:

I call that in the appearance which corresponds to sensation its matter, but that which allows the manifold of appearance to be intuited as ordered in certain relations I call the form of appearance... The matter of all appearance is only given to us a posteriori, but its form must all lie ready for it in the mind a priori, and can therefore be considered separately from all sensation.³ (A20/B34)

In the CoJ we see an echo of this when Kant describes aesthetic judgements as either empirical (material) or pure (formal) (§14, p108). Empirical sensation can give us only particulars; for the judgement of taste to excite our powers of cognition in general, it must be an a priori judgement, and if it is separated from sensation, it can rest only in a priori forms of appearance, which means the properties of space and time. Kant therefore stresses the spatio-temporal properties of the beautiful object such as shape, geometry, and so on. He does not bother to explain any of this – as usual, he assumes the reader is familiar with his other works. 

Sometimes in Kant’s aesthetics it is as if he is pushed into conclusions by the philosophical structures he has himself created. This can lead to an admirable consistency, or it can just create problems: here Kant attains both. An aesthetics that disregards sensation in the judging of the beautiful – such as, in music, the rich and distinct timbres of the various instruments – is a strange and severe creation. Fortunately, Kant later offers us, for art at least, the aesthetic idea (§49), a much more appealing and suitable approach that we will come to presently.

Continued in part 2. 

Notes

1. Douglas Burnham, An Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgement (2000). Funnily enough Robert Wicks’s book uses a similar example of seashells spelling out ‘we are seashells’ on a beach.
2. The ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ senses are two domains that are discussed in the CPR. Outer senses are about the spatial, material objects of the external world. Inner senses make us aware of our own states of mind, such as moods and feelings.
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1787). There is a good discussion of how Kant draws on the CPR’s account of form and matter in Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (1997), p202 onward.
 

The second moment

Like the first moment, the second (§§6-9) is fairly short at eight and a half pages long, but it too is packed with ideas. Kant opens with this header:

The beautiful is that which, without concepts, is represented as the object of a universal satisfaction [allgemeines Wohlgefallen]. (p.96)

Kant claims that judgements of taste/pure beauty are universal, by which he means that every human being may be expected to experience them similarly:

For since it is not grounded in any inclination of the subject (nor in any other underlying interest), but rather the person making the judgement feels himself completely free with regard to the satisfaction that he devotes to the object, he cannot discover as grounds of the satisfaction any private conditions, pertaining to his subject alone, and must therefore regard it as grounded in those that he can also presuppose in everyone else; consequently he must believe himself to have grounds for expecting a similar pleasure of everyone. (§6)

Because the judgement of taste is not grounded in any interest, the person judging brings nothing – no morals, no utility, no physical need, no financial stake, etc – that may impose upon the judgement. The consequence is that private, individual, idiosyncratic considerations have no influence. When we feel pleasure in e.g. a painting, there is nothing specific to our own senses, experience, etc, that grounds the judgement: the judgement is free. Therefore we are using only the built-in mental faculties (the hardware, so to speak) found in every human being. We may ‘presuppose’ that the faculties work the same for everyone, thus we should all expect a similar feeling of pleasure.¹

This is reminiscent of, though not identical to, Hume’s claim that ‘the general principles of taste are uniform in human nature’² and everyone would judge the same way if certain impediments were removed.

The judging subject therefore

will speak of the beautiful as if beauty were a property of the object and the judgement logical (constituting a cognition of the object through concepts of it), although it is only aesthetic. [my emphasis]

Why does Kant argue this? To answer that, we must refer to his theory of mind from the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), which he makes no effort to summarise here. On Kant’s epistemological model, the sensibility gives us sense impressions, then the understanding imposes concepts known as categories upon them, including properties like space, time and causality. These categories guarantee the objectivity of our knowledge. Individual human beings enjoy a common awareness of the world ‘out there’ because we share the same a priori faculties. The judgement of taste therefore should appear to us as if it were not subjective but objective.

But a judgement of taste, as we know, cannot rely on concepts and is not cognitive. Therefore it does not have the objective validity of empirical knowledge. Instead it has a subjective universality, that is, it is based upon a purely subjective feeling of pleasure, but that feeling acquires the force of objectivity because the a priori conditions for the feeling are present in every person. Kant is aware that something being at once subjective and universal is a paradoxical notion – he calls it ‘something remarkable’ (eine Merkwürdigkeit).

This illuminates Kant’s insistence, in the first moment, on disinterestedness: the judgement of taste must be disinterested for it to claim universal validity. The second moment deals with the logical aspect of quantity (whether the judgement is singular, particular or universal), and normally this would come first. Kant reversed the order and made his first moment about quality instead. This may be because he needed to establish disinterestedness in preparation for the discussion of universality.

The judgement of taste is impersonal, does not depend on sensory stimuli, allows no moral, political or other interest, and should be experienced the same by anybody. In Kant’s hands it is starting to sound oddly detached, and far removed from conventional notions of taste and beauty, let alone the flesh-and-blood world of human life and society. He is also deviating from the common notion that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. If that were true, judgements of beauty would be merely subjective, whereas Kant thinks there is more to it: the metaphorical ‘eye’ or equipment that humans have in common (our mental faculties) also brings something to the judgement.

The agreeable and the good

In §7, Kant compares the beautiful with the agreeable and the good in this new light of universality. The agreeable, he says, is not universal, because:

everyone is content that his judgement, which he grounds on a private feeling, and in which he says of an object that it pleases him, be restricted merely to his own person.

My sensory gratification of the agreeable is private: it is ‘agreeable for me’, a gratification of my unique body. Thus everyone has their subjective preferences and it would be a waste of time to have arguments over whether one is right or wrong to prefer red wine to white, etc.

For one person, the colour violet is gentle and lovely, for another dead and lifeless.

He is perhaps responding to Hume here, who never got beyond a standard of taste based upon the senses. Kant recognises that there can be ‘unanimity’ about the agreeable, e.g. when a host manages to please everyone’s senses with his or her entertainments. But he isn’t too concerned about this, dismissing it as only ‘comparatively’ universal, based on ‘general’ rules not universal ones.

Then very briefly he comments on the good, observing that its claim to universal validity relies upon a concept, which is not true of the agreeable or the beautiful.

Kant says the agreeable is based upon sensory gratification, but has yet to say positively what the beautiful is based upon. We do know that beauty, by contrast to the agreeable, is disinterested and free of any ‘private conditions’ – that is why the beautiful is universal whereas the agreeable isn’t even though both are subjective. No one is content that beauty be restricted to their own person; indeed, if it pleases merely one person we cannot call it beauty at all.

If he pronounces that something is beautiful, then he expects the very same satisfaction of others: he judges not merely for himself, but for everyone...

Instead of tolerating divergent opinions, the judge ‘expects’ (muten) and ‘demands’ (fordern) that others must agree, and ‘rebukes them if they judge otherwise’.

In  §8 Kant compares the agreeable and the beautiful like this:

• the agreeable is ‘the taste of the senses’ (Sinnen-Geschmack), i.e. sensory gratification, making private judgements
• the beautiful is ‘the taste of reflection’ (Reflexions-Geschmack), making public judgements. 

Both are aesthetic judgements, says Kant, but of different sorts. He observes that the judgement of taste may not, in practice, command agreement from everyone on particular cases, but that no one disputes at least the possibility of universal agreement.

Logic

Kant then considers, for the first time, the judgement of taste with explicit reference to the logical aspects. A judgement that is objectively valid through a concept must also be subjective, as it will be valid for the individual people who use the concept, too. But it does not go the other way: something subjectively valid (i.e. aesthetic) is not also objectively valid, because it does not relate to objects, only to subjective feeling. Thus, a universality that is aesthetic must be of ‘a special kind’.

The logical form of quantity of judgements comes in three kinds:

• Universal judgements take the form ‘All As are Bs’
• Particular judgements take the form ‘Some As are Bs’
• Singular judgements take the form ‘This A is B’ or ‘the A is B.’

All judgements of taste are singular, e.g. ‘this rose is beautiful’. If I try to compare roses in general – ‘all roses are beautiful’ – the judgement ceases to be aesthetic. A pleasure in a representation is in a particular item (a rose) and cannot be generalised to all items of that kind (all roses) since you cannot experience all such items (every rose in the world). Judging the beauty of all roses must instead be a logical judgement.

The universal voice

Kant reiterates that judgements of taste involve no concepts:

If one judges objects merely in accordance with concepts, then all representation of beauty is lost. Thus there can also be no rule in accordance with which someone could be compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful.

This lack of a ‘rule’ – Kant conceives of concepts as serving as rules – will come up again.

Kant goes on to introduce the notion of the universal voice (allgemeine Stimme). This phrase, which he never uses again, seems to be just another way of talking about subjective universality: that judgements of taste can be considered valid for everyone. He notes that only a logical judgement can postulate or assume everyone’s agreement. The judgement of taste therefore ‘only ascribes’ this agreement to everyone and thus the universal voice is ‘only an idea’. Because it is not logical and is only aesthetic, there is a lack of certainty about a judgement of taste, which is why we will not in fact always agree, even though the possession of faculties in common implies we should.

The free play of the faculties 

Opening the last section of the second moment (§9), Kant raises a new issue:

whether in the judgement of taste the feeling of pleasure precedes the judging of the object or the latter precedes the former.

When we make a judgement of taste, three things are happening: first we perceive the object, then

• we make a judgement about its beauty 
• we feel pleasure

These two responses could happen one before the other, or they could happen simultaneously. It seems reasonable to ask which it is. In fact for Kant it is very important. He even calls the question of sequence ‘the key [Schlüssel] to the critique of taste’. Certainly, from what follows, the judgement and the pleasure seem to be two distinct things.

If the pleasure precedes the judgement, Kant claims, the sensory object is prior to our decision about it. Our judgement would depend upon finding the sensation agreeable, and the agreeable is not a universal judgement. This matter of ordering lets Kant distinguish further between judgements of sensory gratification (pleasure precedes the judgement) and judgements of taste (judgement precedes the pleasure). In the latter you would perceive the object in a disinterested state, judge its beauty, and feel pleasure or displeasure ‘as a consequence’.

This merely subjective (aesthetic) judging of the object, or of the representation through which the object is given, precedes the pleasure in it... (p.103)

This seems counter-intuitive: in everyday terms we tend to think we judge something following our emotional response. But the question of sequence for Kant is really about the continuing theme of whether the judgement is universally valid or not. In a judgement of taste, the judgement precedes the pleasure.

We should here note a problem: Kant sometimes describes judgements of taste as ‘based on’ or ‘grounded in’ a feeling of pleasure, which would require that the pleasure come first. Here however he says the judgement comes first. Commentators have offered various solutions to rescue Kant, which I won’t get into here, but the contradiction is clear.

Kant introduces another new term – universal communicability (Mitteilbarkeit) or ‘communication of the state of mind’. This is another way of talking about the ‘universal voice’ and subjective universality. Only cognition, says Kant, can be universally communicable:

Nothing, however, can be universally communicated except cognition and representation so far as it belongs to cognition. For only so far is the latter objective, and only thereby does it have a universal point of relation with which everyone’s faculty of representation is compelled to agree.

The reflective judgement however is non-cognitive and non-determinate. How can we have universality then, given that the judgement of taste does not rely on a concept? Kant proposes that its universality ‘can be nothing other than’ a state of mind that he calls ‘cognition in general’ (Erkenntnis überhaupt)³. This is a special relation of the powers of representation to each other, which is found in aesthetic judgements. Remember, a representation is how an object ‘out there’ is given to us by our mental equipment. Kant explains in an important passage:

The powers of cognition that are set into play by this representation are hereby in a free play, since no determinate concept restricts them to a particular mode of cognition... Now there belongs to a representation by which an object is given, in order for there to be cognition of it in general, imagination for the composition of the manifold of intuition and understanding for the unity of the concept that unifies the representations. This state of a free play of the faculties of cognition with a representation through which an object is given must be able to be universally communicated, because cognition, as a determination of the object with which given representations... should agree, is the only kind of representation that is valid for everyone.

In ordinary cognition (explained in the CPR), the sensibility (which includes the imagination) provides an intuition and the understanding imposes a concept. In the CoJ, Kant is now proposing something new: that beauty incurs its own, special relation of the faculties. In free play, neither faculty imposes on the other. The human subject becomes conscious of a correspondence (Übereinstimmung) of the powers of cognition. Kant asks, how do we become conscious of this correspondence?

• If we became conscious of it intellectually, it would be through a concept. But the judgement of taste has no concept because it is a subjective feeling of (dis)pleasure.
• We must become conscious of it aesthetically, i.e. through sensation.

Kant expands on this:

The animation [Belebung] of both faculties (the imagination and the understanding) to an activity that is indeterminate but yet, through the stimulus of the given representation, in unison [einhellig], namely that which belongs to a cognition in general, is the sensation whose universal communicability is postulated by the judgement of taste. 

The judgement comes first and is the ground of our pleasure in the ‘harmony’ of the faculties of cognition. Free play ‘animates’ our faculties, allowing the imagination to harmonise with the understanding without being determined by its concepts. The faculties are animated into an indeterminate activity that belongs to cognition in general. The German word that Guyer/Matthews translate as ‘animation’ is Belebung, which has an implication of ‘life’ (Leben); Bernard prefers ‘excitement’, Meredith and Pluhar prefer ‘quickening’; another option might be ‘enlivening’. This state of mind in free play is the subjective universal communicability of a judgement of taste. Being able to communicate our state of mind ‘carries a pleasure with it’.



Commentators on Kant have found section 9 puzzling and obscure. How do we prove that he is correct about the faculties and this peculiar relation of them? Arguably, Kant is fudging to get the outcome he wants, namely a way to achieve universality with a judgement that is non-conceptual. Robert Wicks, who describes Kant’s strategy of free play as ‘ingenious’, nicely sums up the import of us taking pleasure in ‘cognition in general’:

This is roughly analogous to looking at some object, and approving of the object in light of its capacity to lead us to appreciate the sheer pleasure of being able to see at all... Similarly, it is analogous to approving of one’s daily activities, not in view of some job that one has, but in view of their capacity to lead one to appreciate the pleasure of simply being alive.⁴

Our pleasure in the individual object or representation connects us with a more general, abstract sense of pleasure in our own cognitive powers. Whether or not we are persuaded that Kant is right, this is a rather lovely idea. Instead of looking to gain knowledge from the beautiful object we become aware of what Kant called in §1 the ‘feeling of life’ – a term connected etymologically with Belebung or ‘enlivening’. Kant concludes:

A representation which... is in agreement with the conditions of universality... brings the faculties of cognition into the well-proportioned [proportioniert] disposition [Stimmung] that we require for all cognition and hence also regard as valid for everyone (for every human being) who is determined to judge by means of understanding and sense in combination.

This becomes important later on, where he calls this mental disposition (Pluhar translates it ‘attunement‘ ) a ‘common sense’ (§21) and claims it is the a priori principle of taste. We will get to this ‘a priori principle’ in another post, but arguing the case for it is Kant’s stated goal in the CoJ.

He closes the second moment with a further definition of the beautiful:

That is beautiful that pleases universally without a concept.

‘Lawfulness without a law’

Kant’s theory of free play is one of the most important in his aesthetics. What it involves is sometimes labelled ‘lawfulness without a law’, or ‘free lawfulness’ (p124).

Kant sees concepts as, in part, rules or laws, applied by the understanding so the imagination can synthesise sense data. In the free play, the imagination and understanding harmonise in a way that generally obeys the rules of concepts (lawfulness) without actually using any (without a law).

Imagination in the free play... conforms to the general conditions for the application of concepts to objects that are presented to our senses, yet without any particular concept being applied, so that imagination conforms to the conditions of understanding without the constraint of particular concepts [SEP].

This is paradoxical, and Kant doesn’t really nail it down, leaving to commentators to delve into how it might work and why it would be pleasurable.⁵

Notes

1. To my knowledge Kant never considers the possibility that different people or groups of people might have different faculties or forms of intuition. This is curious, given he was sexist and racist, but that’s another topic.
2. David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste (1757), §28.
3. Christian Helmut Wenzel suggests translating it as ‘cognition as such’ i.e. cognition transcendentally conceived. See his book An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics (2005).
4. Robert Wicks, Kant on Judgment (2007).
5. See for example Hannah Ginsborg, ‘Lawfulness Without a Law_Kant on the Free Play’ (1997).

The first moment

The first moment of the beautiful (§§1-5) is just seven and a half pages long, yet, like most of the Critique of Judgement, it is dense with ideas. It claims that the judgement of taste (Geschmacksurteil) is both aesthetic and disinterested.

Technically the first moment concerns the ‘quality’ of the judgement of taste. Quite what this means is not obvious and Kant does not trouble to explain. An interpretation has been offered by Paul Guyer:

The first moment... defines the ‘quality’ of the judgement of taste by means of a constraint on the states of mind on which it may properly be grounded and to which it may lead.¹

The key to this quality is that the judgement should be ‘without interest’.

Aesthetic

In the first section, Kant establishes that the judgement of taste is aesthetic (ästhetisch). His opening lines get straight to business:

In order to decide whether or not something is beautiful, we do not relate the representation by means of understanding to the object for cognition, but rather relate it by means of the imagination (perhaps combined with the understanding) to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure. The judgement of taste is therefore not a cognitive judgement, hence not a logical one, but is rather aesthetic, by which is understood one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective.[§1, p.89]

Kant is taking for granted that the reader knows his theory of cognition, and makes no effort to explain what he’s talking about. In the CoJ he usually uses ‘representation’ (Vorstellung) to refer to what he calls in other works an ‘intuition’ (Anschauung) i.e. a sense perception. An object and its representation are distinct things. If I stand in front of my friend Joanna I will see her face, whereas if someone else stands behind her they will only see the back of her head; the representations will be different, but Joanna will be the same. The appearances of objects are given to us as representations: in cognition the understanding is primary, in aesthetic judgement the imagination is primary. Both faculties are involved in the representation. Kant seems to be saying that we can refer it to one or the other: to the understanding to get facts about the object, or to the imagination to judge its beauty.

We’re used to thinking of beauty in terms of beautiful objects, such as artworks. Yes, the object needs to be there to start the process. But for Kant, beauty is not in the object: it involves a relationship with the object, but beauty is a mental process based upon a particular, single, subjective experience. ‘Subjective’ here simply means that which relates to the subject, with no pejorative or relativist implications.

When we judge an object’s beauty, we go by the feeling of pleasure or displeasure experienced by the human subject. This judgement is neither cognitive nor logical. Why is it not cognitive? Because it is based on subjective feelings, not concepts. Kant will assert this point again and again. He states plainly in §5: the judgement of taste is ‘not a cognitive judgement (neither a theoretical nor practical one), and hence it is neither grounded on concepts nor aimed at them’ (p95).

• In cognition the judgement is determinate, i.e. it subsumes the particular object under a concept and thus gains us knowledge. 
• In beauty the judgement is not determinate but reflective, i.e. no determining concept is used, and it therefore gains us no knowledge. It is only about how the object’s appearance makes us feel.

Note that there are different kinds of aesthetic judgements, and judgements of taste are only one of them. All are related to feeling, but include:

• Judgements of sensory gratification
• Judgements of taste (judgements of pure beauty)
• Judgements of the sublime

We will discuss these distinctions as we go along. Get used to Kant making distinctions and breaking things into types. He has a mania for it.²

Why does the aesthetic not involve concepts?

In Kant’s epistemology, to gain knowledge about an object we need to combine our apprehension of it with the application of a concept (from the faculty of understanding). This is like applying a kind of rule that explains what the object is. We are presented with a particular (the object), and apply a universal (the concept).

However, an aesthetic judgement is not cognitive: it is not about getting factual information or knowledge about the object. What is important is that the judgement concerns a person’s subjective feeling of pleasure or displeasure. As the judgement concerns feeling, not knowledge, there is no determining concept of the beautiful. For Kant, art is aesthetic (reduced to feeling), not conceptual; his opposition of aesthetic and concept helped to frame aesthetic theory for the next two centuries.

Kant is wrestling with an interesting problem. If I say to my friend that 2+2=4, she can’t say I’m wrong. But if I say to her that I find something beautiful, she could respond that she doesn’t agree, and there is no way that I can prove I’m right. We simply feel one way or another. So there is a realm – aesthetic experience – where the usual laws for establishing truth don’t seem to apply. Unlike in cognition (the first Critique) or in morals (the second Critique) there is no concept that determines a given particular. In response Kant comes up with an ingenious solution, namely subjective universality, which we will look at elsewhere.

Disinterested

Kant declares in the header to §2 that:

The satisfaction that determines the judgement of taste is without any interest [Interesse].

Another way of saying this is that judgements of taste are disinterested (uninteressiert). ‘Disinterestedness’ means something like impartiality. Kant defines interest as ‘the satisfaction that we combine with the representation of the existence of an object’ – if we have an interest in the object, we must desire that it exists. Interest means the human subject links the object with desire or action: we might have a physical longing for it, a moral or financial stake in it, even an intellectual desire (perhaps it embodies a noble principle we find inspiring). In some cases we might want to eat or drink the object because we are hungry or thirsty.

For Kant, to say ‘this is beautiful’ in such cases would be a misuse of the word ‘beautiful’. When we seek to judge the object’s beauty the only thing that matters is our ‘mere contemplation’, independent of the faculty of desire. Therefore, a judgement of taste is disinterested. This is true both of beauty in nature and beauty in art.

Kant gives the example of a palace: looking at it, one might be dismayed, like Rousseau, at the sweat and labour expended by the working class on unnecessary extravagance just so that rich people could live in luxury. He adds that if we were on a desert island and could easily conjure up any accommodation we wished, we might not take even that tiny amount of trouble if we already had a comfortable dwelling, i.e. again that its magnificence is superfluous. But moral, political or practical attitudes have nothing to do with the specific question of whether or not the palace is beautiful. With regard to that, ‘one only wants to know whether the mere representation of the object is accompanied with satisfaction in me’. Note ‘in me’ and the following phrase ‘in myself’: it is about a feeling of pleasure inside me; and it is about the mere representation, not about the existence of the object.

The claim that we should be indifferent to the existence of an object we find beautiful may seem strange on first acquaintance. But what if instead we daydreamed of a palace – or a flying horse, or other fanciful object? If the imaginary object is as beautiful as a real one, it makes no difference if it is real or not, from a purely aesthetic point of view.

So the judgement of taste is distinct from

• judgements related to cognition (theoretical, scientific)
• judgements related to desire (practical, moral)

It is of another, very pure type:

• judgements related to feeling (aesthetic), i.e. without interest or a stake in whether the object actually exists

If we love a beautiful painting, say, we may well wish to own it, and pay good money to become its possessor. Kant addresses this in a footnote (p91), pointing out that judgements of taste can produce an interest, they just cannot be grounded in one. That is, the judgement itself must be a feeling of subjective pleasure through mere contemplation; if we then respond by wanting to buy the painting and taking an interest in its existence, value and ownership, that is a separate matter.

It’s important to understand that the notion of disinterestedness does not mean indifference or apathy. On the contrary, for Kant it is a kind of favour (Gunst) (§5); disinterest means our relationship with the beautiful can be more pure, free, and pleasurable, and even helps points us toward what it means to be a human being (of which more later).

To clarify the distinction between interested and disinterested judgements, Kant goes on in §§3-4 to discuss two types of interest: the agreeable and the good. 

The agreeable

The first of these is a form of aesthetic judgement. Kant claims:

The agreeable [Angenehm] is that which pleases the senses in sensation.

Kant argues there is a confusion about the term ‘sensation’. If we think of satisfaction as itself just a (pleasurable) sensation, we cannot make any meaningful distinctions between sources of satisfaction (sensory/agreeable, moral/good, aesthetic/beautiful) because the end is the same however it is achieved: mere pleasurable sensation or gratification. Kant thinks, on the contrary, that we need to make distinctions.

His argument in §3 is confusingly presented, in my view, but his point is that what he calls the ‘agreeable’ is a subjective sensory judgement: a feeling of pleasure prompted by an object. He offers the examples of spicy food and good health. Judgements of the agreeable involve desire for the object and therefore, as Kant says in the header,

The satisfaction in the agreeable is combined with interest.

These are sometimes called judgements of sensory gratification. They are not based upon mere contemplation but involve my bodily state being gratified by the object’s existence.

Kant wants to be clear that we must not equate sensation and feeling, so he makes an explicit terminological distinction between sensation (Empfindung), which is an ‘objective representation of the senses’, and feeling (Gefühl), which is subjective and cannot be such a representation. Hence his references to a ‘feeling of life’ (das Lebensgefühl) and a ‘feeling of pleasure or displeasure’ (das Gefühl der Lust oder Unlust) with regard to judgements of taste. As an example, he claims that the green of the meadows may be seen objectively (as a sensation or sense perception) or subjectively (as a feeling of (dis)pleasure in the colour): there is a difference between perceiving something is green and feeling pleasure in the loveliness in the green. That seems plausible, but Kant is making a bold claim, namely that judgement of the beautiful cannot rest on sensory stimuli. 

Judgements of the agreeable and the beautiful are both aesthetic (both are about subjective satisfaction), but only the latter is a judgement of taste (a.k.a. a judgement of pure beauty) because a judgement of taste, as we have established, is without interest. The beautiful (it turns out later) is about purposive form; the agreeable is about sensory gratification for its own sake. We could describe this as a distinction between ‘coarse’ feeling and ‘finer’ feeling. 

The good

In #4 Kant moves on to a second type of interested judgement: that of the good (gut).

The satisfaction in the good is combined with interest.

Kant is introducing another type of judgement that involves an interest: our pleasure in the moral good, a topic he theorised in the Critique of Practical Reason. Moral action is practical because it is about how we should act in the world and do the right thing.

In order to find something good, I must always know what sort of thing the object is supposed to be, i.e. I must have a concept of it.³

In Kant’s moral philosophy, we have to understand precisely what we are dealing with, devise a maxim or rule, and hold it up to the scrutiny of reason. It therefore involves the concept of an end or purpose. The good is something we desire, and thus depends upon the existence of the object.

The good is the object of the will (i.e., of a faculty of desire that is determined by reason). But to will something and to have satisfaction in its existence, i.e. to take an interest in it, are identical.

Unlike with the agreeable, we are not talking about an aesthetic judgement here, because the good must have a concept.

The agreeable differs from the good. I guess we might use the excessive drinking of wine as an example. From the perspective of the agreeable, the glut of wine pleases our senses, but from the perspective of the good, it is displeasing because of its consequences, i.e. making us unfit for performing even basic tasks (such as finding the keys to our front door).

What the agreeable and the good do have in common is that they are always combined with an interest in their object.

Comparison

In the last section of the First Moment (§5) Kant compares the agreeable, the good and the beautiful as three distinct kinds of satisfaction. The main difference is that judgements of taste (of the beautiful) are ‘merely contemplative’ and disinterested, whereas –

the agreeable and the good both have a relation to the faculty of desire (p94)

– and therefore involve interests and have a stake in objects in the world. These satisfactions may be related to inclination (the agreeable), respect (the good) and favour (the beautiful) (Neigung, Gunst, Achtung) which Kant calls ‘three different relations of representations to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure’ (p95). He seems to be talking about one kind of pleasure that can be related to in three ways. These three terms are not greatly used hereafter.

Of the three kinds of satisfaction, only that in the beautiful is free: no external need, moral or rule is imposing upon our judgement. Kant gives the example of hunger: if we approach a glorious piece of cuisine when hungry, our need will cloud any judgement of whether the dish is beautiful. (In §28 he mentions how ‘someone who is in the grip of inclination and appetite’ cannot judge the beautiful.)

Let’s summarise these characteristics:

• The agreeable gratifies us through the senses (animals experience it too); it involves a pathological feeling of pleasure evoked by an object of sensation; it combines with an interest of the senses; it is related to inclination; and is an aesthetic judgement.
• The good is what we esteem (valid for every rational being); it involves the presence of a concept of the understanding; it combines with an interest of reason; it is related to respect; and is not an aesthetic judgement.
• The beautiful is what merely pleases us; it is neither sensible nor rational, dependent upon neither object nor concept; it combines with no interest; it is related to favour, by which Kant means a kind of pleasure completely free of desire or need; and it is an aesthetic judgement.

As I mentioned before, not all aesthetic judgements are what Kant calls judgements of taste – we might refer to the latter by the perhaps more explicit term judgements of pure beauty (this is what Robert Wicks proposes in his book Kant on Judgement for example⁴). I will retain the label ‘judgements of taste’ because it is what Kant uses in the CoJ. The reason we say ‘pure’ beauty, incidentally, is because Kant later introduces distinctions between

1. beauty that is pure vs beauty that is adherent
2. between judgements that are pure vs judgements that are mixed with empirical, physiological pleasures. 

So, in just a few pages Kant has given us a multitude of definitions and distinctions. He concludes with a definition of the beautiful, or at least the first instalment of one:

Taste is the faculty of judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful. [p96]

To conclude, here is what we’ve learnt about the judgement of taste specifically:

• Subjective feeling of (dis)pleasure in the human subject
• Neither cognitive, theoretical nor practical
• Aesthetic, but not a judgement of sensory gratification
• Disinterested; no interest in the actual existence of the judged object
• Does not rely on a concept
• Cannot rest on sensory stimuli
• Merely contemplative
• Relation of representations to the feeling of (dis)pleasure is favour = a free satisfaction
• Completely free.

Kant’s ideas about disinterestedness and purpose would later be taken up in new ways. When something is purposeful, we are thinking of its practical use, or how we can turn it to our own ends – how it can be put to work. However the purposive object we experience aesthetically seems as if it has its own internal coherence of parts that relate only to the object’s own existence. It is a self-sufficient form unto itself. Disinterestedness allows that we should be able to appreciate something non-instrumentally, for its own intrinsic value, without judging it as a means for our own ends.

The idea that our satisfaction in a judgement of beauty would not have an ‘interest’ in the existence of the object underwrote thinkers like the Formalists and the New Critics, who were interested in the autonomy of the art object (especially the poem) and the need to analyse it free of the intentions of the author.

It also goes hand-in-hand with the concept of human freedom: that objects and us are independent of one another, that we are free, autonomous beings, who are in some respect unconstrained by our animal and instrumental interests.

However, Kant is leaving himself with a problem: if no concept is involved in the aesthetic, we can’t use the concept of ‘existence’, or the concept of the object (e.g. the concept of a ‘painting’), because the concept would determine the aesthetic. We cannot talk philosophically of the object itself or engage with its particularity.⁵

Another problem is that ‘disinterestedness’ seems to distance the object from the emotional involvement that often accompanies our encounters with beauty and/or art, and to isolate it from the human world that it actually resides in.

Notes

1. Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (1997), p148.
2. Incidentally, Kant sometimes refers in the CoJ to ‘satisfaction’ (Wohlgefallen) and sometimes to ‘pleasure’ (Lust). Ironically here he seems to be making no theoretical distinction. Methodical though he is, he can be surprisingly careless in his use of terms. (Somebody however will have argued that there is in fact a distinction, and maybe they’re right: that’s how Kant scholarship goes.)
3. In the same paragraph Kant goes on to hint that beauty is in fact involved in some way with concepts, but we must wait and see how that could be possible within his theory.
4. Robert Wicks, Kant on Judgement (2007), p17.
5. Hegel would solve this problem by arguing that we do, in fact, respond conceptually to the object, because the object itself contains conceptual content that allows it to be thought.