Aesthetic ideas

Kant begins §49 by introducing spirit as the faculty for presenting aesthetic ideas (ästhetische Ideen). This section of the book represents Kant’s recognition that art affects us differently to the pure experience of form involved in the free beauty of nature and the pure judgement of taste, and needs its own process. This is a relief, since his severe formalism was very unpromising as a way of accounting for our complex and multi-sided experience of art.

What, then, are aesthetic ideas? Kant explains:

By an aesthetic idea... I mean that representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible. (p192)

This is a rich and fascinating notion. Kant thinks of the imagination, as explored in his previous works, as a productive cognitive faculty, meaning that it brings a sensory creativity to what we actually experience. It helps the sensibility produce representations, and actively helps bring representations together, as in memory, or in the sequences of impressions that create continuity in perception.

[It is] very powerful in creating, as it were, another nature, out of the material which the real one gives it. We entertain ourselves with it when experience seems too mundane to us.

The imagination can use our rich body of experiences to create a new reality. With imagination we can transform mundane experience, in accordance with reason, and feel our freedom from the laws that normally govern associations of ideas. We borrow material from nature and imaginatively transform it into something that goes beyond nature.

One can call such representations of the imagination ideas: on the one hand because they at least strive toward something lying beyond the bounds of experience, and thus seek to approximate a presentation of concepts of reason (of intellectual ideas), which gives them the appearance of an objective reality; on the other hand, and indeed principally, because no concept can be fully adequate to them, as inner intuitions.

In Kant’s epistemology, outer intuitions are perceptions of space and time, of the external world; inner intuitions are of our own states of mind. As the aesthetic so-called ‘idea’ allows no determinate concept, it cannot itself be a rule or concept; rather it is an imaginative presentation somehow bound up with a concept. Kant describes the aesthetic idea as a counterpart of the idea of reason, and this association opens up a possible relation to morality, as Robert Wicks noted:

Owing to their expansive quality, aesthetic ideas generate associations with moral concepts in how they formally stretch our imagination in the direction of reason. It follows that moral themes are appropriate subjects for beautiful works of art, since then the given moral purpose would be reinforced by the aesthetic idea’s expansive form.¹

Ideas of reason typically, for Kant, concern such intangibles as the soul, God, freedom and morality, and later in the Dialectic he will build on the relationship between aesthetic ideas, genius and morality. Aesthetic ideas can exceed anything in nature. Like ideas of reason, they allow us to strive towards, or speculate on, things for which no determinate concept is adequate, ‘beyond the bounds of experience’ – that is, the supersensible (übersinnlich). The supersensible, put briefly, is that which is presented to us unsupported by the senses or intuitions. It seems to be another way of talking about the intelligible or noumenal, i.e. the world as it is in itself. Reason is a supersensible faculty.

Kant thinks it is poetry that allows the fullest realisation of the aesthetic idea². By means of an imagination that emulates the ideas of reason, poets can explore invisible beings, hell, eternity, creation, death, love – to create the concrete and sensuous out of things that are supersensible or abstract or even unexperienceable.

Kant tries to outline the process:

Now if we add to a concept a representation of the imagination that belongs to its presentation, but which by itself stimulates so much thinking that it can never be grasped in a determinate concept, hence which aesthetically enlarges the concept itself in an unbounded way, then in this case the imagination is creative, and sets the faculty of intellectual ideas (reason) into motion... [my emphasis]

Whether or not we are persuaded by Kant’s mechanism, the aesthetic idea is a superb notion and one of the great innovations of the CoJ: a representation or idea that ‘gives more to think about than can be grasped and made distinct in it’. Such a notion seems perfectly matched to poetry and to art, in which so many elements – personal, historical, formal, ideological, emotional, etc – are bundled into one concrete, evocative, endlessly meaningful object. Good works of art can be constantly reinterpreted.

Aesthetic attributes

Kant recruits supplementary representations he calls (aesthetic) attributes (ästhetische
Attribute): these are a kind of additional symbol appended to the concept. He gives the example of Jupiter’s eagle with lightning in its claws: our conception of the eagle (the attribute) as powerful, airborne, proud, bearing inhuman power, illuminates the rational idea of Jupiter as king of heaven. Aesthetic attributes represent something that lets the imagination

spread itself over a multitude of related representations, which let one think more than one can express in a concept determined by words;

i.e. they spread out in a chain of intuitive associations that evoke meaning beyond the original image;

and they yield an aesthetic idea, which serves that idea of reason instead of logical presentation, although really only to animate the mind by opening up for it the prospect of an immeasurable field of related representations.

These attributes can be used in painting, sculpture, poetry and oratory. All can give the imagination ‘an impetus to think more... than can be comprehended in a concept’.

Kant transforms into a literary critic with a example from a poem by Frederick the Great³. The Prussian king conveys, through an image of the sun setting with a benign afterglow, an idea of reason, i.e. a meditation upon the nearing end of one’s life, by means of the attribute of a summer sun that evokes associations in us that in part can’t even be expressed.

Kant then describes aesthetic ideas again, which is repetitious, but as a concise definition it is worth reproducing:

In a word, the aesthetic idea is a representation of the imagination, associated with a given concept, which is combined with such a manifold of partial representations in the free use of the imagination that no expression designating a determinate concept can be found for it, which therefore allows the addition to a concept of much that is unnameable, the feeling of which animates the cognitive faculties and combines spirit with the mere letter of language.

The expression of aesthetic ideas

A little later in §51, during a dull taxonomy of the arts, Kant adds a discussion of how aesthetic ideas get expressed. He begins with the statement

Beauty (whether it be beauty of nature or of art) can in general be called the expression of aesthetic ideas.

In fine art the aesthetic idea is occasioned through a concept, whereas in nature it can be aroused by mere reflection without a concept. Presumably Kant thinks that in both cases there is a perceived intelligible rule behind the object; in the artwork this is found in the concept, while in nature it is found in postulated intelligent design.

Kant goes on to divide the pictorial arts, which he calls ‘those of the expression of ideas in sensible intuition’, into plastic (e.g. sculpture and architecture) and painting (in a broad sense that includes, unusually, pleasure gardens). Of these two divisions he says:

Both make shapes in space into expressions of ideas: the former makes shapes knowable by two senses, sight and feeling (although in the case of the latter, to be sure, without regard to beauty), the latter only for the first of these. The aesthetic idea (archetype, prototype) is for both grounded in the imagination; the shape, however, which constitutes its expression (ectype, afterimage) is given either in its corporeal extension (as the object itself exists) or in accordance with the way in which the latter is depicted in the eye (in accordance with its appearance on a plane); or else, whatever the former is, either the relation to a real end or just the appearance of one is made into a condition for reflection.

In short, certain arts turn physical forms or bodies (artworks), through their appeal to our senses, into expressions of imaginative intuitions and ideas that go beyond the merely determinate and empirical.

To sum up the aesthetic idea:

• Presented by spirit, i.e. the animating principle in the mind or faculty for the presentation of aesthetic ideas
• It is a representation produced by the imagination
• Stimulates so much thought that no determinate concept is adequate to it
• No language fully attains it or can make it intelligible
• Counterpart of the idea of reason
• Strives toward something lying beyond the bounds of experience (supersensible)
• Seeks to approximate ideas of reason, thus has appearance of objectivity
• Makes things sensible beyond the limits of experience
• Revealed in its full measure by poetry
• Unleashes a multitude of related representations (attributes) that animate the mind
• Beauty is the expression of it
• Given concrete expression through artworks

 Notes

1. Robert Wicks, Kant on Judgement (2007), p130-1. Practical reason is the foundation of Kant’s moral philosophy, hence the reason-morality connection.
2. Kant follows tradition in thinking that ‘the art of poetry... claims the highest rank of all’ (§53, p203). However among the pictorial arts he ‘gives the palm to painting>’ (p207).
3. This seems a bit sycophantic, even though Frederick the Great had died a few years earlier in 1786.