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.
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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.
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