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| Portrait of Immanuel Kant, by Johann Gottlieb Becker |
Kant spent his whole life in the Prussian harbour city of Königsberg (now part of Russia and called Kaliningrad). He came from a religious, petit bourgeois family of modest means, and for years he had to scrape by without a salary, lecturing at the University of Königsberg to paying students. In this earlier phase of his career, his published papers (known as his ‘pre-critical’ period) included a treatise called Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) which is, however, as much about sex differences and national characters as aesthetics.
Kant became a full professor in 1770 in his mid-forties when he was offered the chair of logic and metaphysics at the university. Upon his appointment he was expected to deliver a Latin dissertation, and the text he presented, usually known as the Inaugural Dissertation1, represented a break from his earlier work and set the tone for what followed. Over the following ten years, Kant published almost nothing while he worked intensely on his mature system of thought. Finally in 1781, he began to release a stream of seminal works, including:
- 1781: Critique of Pure Reason (known as the First Critique) – this enormous and difficult book on epistemology is one of the masterpieces of Western philosophy.
- 1783: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics – Kant’s attempt to make the ideas of his forbidding Critique more accessible.
- 1785: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals – one of the most important works on ethics.
- 1786: Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science – on natural philosophy including Newtonian physics.
- 1787: Second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason – the heavily revised second edition is now known as version B, and the first edition as version A.
- 1788: Critique of Practical Reason (Second Critique) – another major work on moral philosophy.
- 1790: Critique of Judgement (Third Critique, also translated Critique of the Power of Judgement) – deals with aesthetics and teleology.
- 1797: Metaphysics of Morals – a study of ethics, law and politics.
If you are proving slow at achieving your goals in life, you may take some encouragement from Kant, who did not achieve the system of thought he is celebrated for until he was 57 years old. This later work – known as Kant’s ‘critical’ period – completely transformed Western thought. There is philosophy before Kant, and there is philosophy after him.
Those of us who study art and aesthetics take a particular interest in the Critique of Judgement. Kant conceived of it as mediating the concerns of the first two Critiques. It is less focused than those works, and is only marginally about art. However, it is a rich, dense and rewarding work. As John H. Zammito explained:
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement of 1790 marked a watershed in German intellectual life, providing a conduit through which the most important ideas and ideals of the German eighteenth century passed to the generation of Idealism and Romanticism.2
Not only that: the Critique of Judgement may reasonably be considered the foundational text of modern aesthetics.
It is difficult to grasp the aesthetics of the Third Critique without some knowledge of the broader philosophy into which it is inextricably woven, so let’s take a brief look at Kant’s broader project.
Kant’s philosophical project
Kant’s ‘critical philosophy’ was an attempt to resolve a debate, dating back to Plato and Aristotle, that was raging in 18th century Europe.
This debate concerned the nature of human knowledge. On one side the most important figures were Locke, Berkeley and Hume (English, Irish and Scottish respectively), who are known as the British empiricists. On the other were Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz (respectively French, Dutch and German), who are known as continental rationalists.
These philosophers were concerned, amongst other things, with key questions of epistemology (theory of knowledge). What can we humans know? What is the mind, and how do we think? What is the relationship of subjective knowledge to the objective world? Do our senses report the world accurately?
The rationalists emphasised reason over experience, arguing for innate principles through which we understand our experience. There were some things we can know through thinking alone, and they were suspicious of the ways that our sense perceptions could mislead us.
- Rationalists favoured a priori (Latin, lit. ‘from the earlier’) reasoning that does not rely upon experience. To take a common example, we know the phrase ‘all bachelors are unmarried’ must be true without needing first-hand knowledge of every bachelor in the world, or indeed any bachelor at all.
The empiricists emphasised experience over reason, arguing that we gain knowledge from experience. They were sceptical about innate knowledge: the mind was born as a blank slate, ready to be imprinted with information gathered by the senses, and the role of reason was to compare and organise these impressions.
- Empiricists favoured a posteriori (Latin, lit. ‘from the latter’) reasoning that does rely on experience. For example, we cannot deduce from the concepts ‘Immanuel Kant’ and ‘philosopher’ whether or not Immanuel Kant was a philosopher. Only experience can tell us that.
This division into two camps – the primacy of reason vs the primacy of experience – was not clear-cut and the philosophers overlapped or contradicted each other in various ways, but the differences of approach seemed hard to reconcile.
Kant himself was part of the rationalist tradition of Leibniz and Wolff, though he took an idiosyncratic interest in trying to pull empirical science into the fold. Then with the Inaugural Dissertation he began to question rationalism. He tried to rescue what was good in both sides, but pointed out that they were missing a crucial distinction: the rationalists were discussing things in themselves whereas the empiricists were discussing things as they appeared to us. Sensible (i.e. sense-able) and conceptual representations of the world were distinct sources of knowledge, the first of the world of sensed experience, the other of the ‘intelligible’ world of reason.
The cause of Kant’s decisive turn was, he said, the scepticism of Hume, which compelled him to reappraise his own philosophy. He famously told the story in the Preface to the Prolegomena:
I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.3
Exactly what Kant was remembering, and when he read it, is subject to scholarly debate. But what shook Kant so profoundly was Hume’s questioning of how we can know anything.
Kant was living through what is today known as the ‘epistemological turn’,4 a shift from the ancient and medieval focus on metaphysics to a bourgeois focus on human beings and problems of human knowledge. It began with Descartes, who looked inwards to what the human self can know purely from its own resources. Another way of looking at this is as a shift of interest from objectivity to subjectivity, from the outside world to the human mind.
For Hume, all thought was derived from subjective sensory experience. What he called ‘matters of fact’ depended upon causal inference: we see one effect apparently lead to another, but it is impossible to prove that the effect must necessarily follow every time. We infer a causal connection, based upon our experience of seeing the conjunction of events over and over again, as a kind of mental habit, but we cannot prove that inductive reasoning of this kind is reliable. Hume therefore had no time for metaphysical speculation, boldly claiming that such works could be thrown in the flames5. We had to be sceptical about whether we could justify our beliefs and moral actions through reason.
Kant saw that Hume’s claims were a threat to the Enlightenment values of reason and moral freedom. He did not want to abandon metaphysics (God, for example), moral agency or the possibility of non-empirical knowledge of the world. We needed to be aware of what reason could do, but also of what it could not do, of what its limits were: we needed a critique of reason.
Why should an aesthetician care about this? Well, Kant is trying to establish the nature and limits of mental life. The way in which we sense, think, judge and reflect will define how we can have aesthetic experience, or judge the beauty of objects, and he offers a fascinating account of what beauty really is. Kant’s ideas had an immediate impact and created the framework in which aesthetics should be discussed. They are the basis for Schiller’s aesthetics and the starting point for Romanticism, as well as the idealism and aesthetics of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. And even if modern aestheticians don’t agree with the entire structure of Kant’s thought, some of his broader framing is still relevant today.
Read the Inaugural Dissertation (1770) or as edited for easier digestion by Jonathan Bennett (PDF).
Read the Prolegomena (1783) or as edited for easier digestion by Jonathan Bennett (PDF).
1. To give its full title, the Dissertation on the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World (1770).
2. John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1982), p1.
3. Kant, Preface to Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783, translated by Gary Hatfield), p10.
4. In the early 20th century there was another, ‘linguistic’ turn, when attention shifted to philosophy’s relationship with language.
5. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748, revised edition 1777). Hume thought knowledge was divided into two types, relations of ideas and matters of fact. These are sometimes analogised as ‘Hume’s Fork’: two things which can never meet, like two prongs on a two-pronged fork or two diverging paths at a fork in the road.
6. Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787). This is often labelled his ‘Copernican Revolution’, though Kant did not use that term. His point was that Copernicus shifted astronomy from the stars revolving around a stationary spectator to the spectator revolving around the stars (or star). Similarly, metaphysics needed to shift from knowledge conforming to objects to objects conforming to (a priori) knowledge – from the position and movement of the external world to the position and movement of the human observer.
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