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.