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*) |
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).
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