The contents of this Book Four break down like this:
§§43-5: Art
§§46-50: Genius, taste and aesthetic ideas
§§51-3: Division and comparison of the fine arts
§54: Remark on gratification
It is a measure of Kant’s relative uninterest in art that it takes him until p182 (in the Guyer/Matthews translation) of his treatise on aesthetics to discuss it, but what he has to say is interesting as always, especially since he touches on other major topics such as genius, spirit and taste.
In this post we will look just at art ( §§43-5), then do separate posts for the other topics.
Art in general
Kant begins §43 by outlining a series of ways in which art is distinct from nature, science and handicrafts. Firstly, art and nature. Note Kant here is talking about ‘art in general’ – he will later make distinctions (of course) between kinds of art.
Art is distinguished from nature as doing (facere) is from acting or producing in general (agere), and the product or consequence of the former is distinguished as a work (opus) from the latter as an effect (effectus).
This is basically the view of the old system of the arts: human making is opposed to nature. We can tabulate his distinctions like this:
| Art | Nature |
|---|---|
| Doing | Acting/producing in general |
| Work (opus) | Effect |
| Production through freedom | Production through instinct |
| Humans | Animals |
Both art and nature involve production. Animals produce according to instinct – Kant gives the example of bees and their ‘regularly constructed’ honeycomb – without rational reflection. Art by contrast is a human product produced according to freedom (which for Kant involves free will and reason). Human making results in ‘works’, whereas products created by nature are ‘effects’.
He then gives the example of someone finding a piece of carved wood. Kant makes a significant point: we assume the carved wood is a product of art, not nature, because it was caused by a will that conceived of a purpose that gave the item its form, i.e. there was a concept that pre-existed the object. In other cases too ‘a representation of it in its cause must have preceded its reality.’ Notice: although for some baffling reason he does not spell it out, Kant is saying here that art concerns adherent beauty: there is a will, plan or intention and the object is realised according to it. It follows that we cannot make a pure judgement of taste about the beauty of a work of art... The exception is when the art is non-representational and abstract, in which case its beauty is not adherent.
Kant then distinguishes art from science:
Art as a skill of human beings is also distinguished from science (to be able from to know), as a practical faculty is distinguished from a theoretical one, as technique is distinguished from theory.
The emphasis here is on being able to do something as opposed to knowing something. Kant makes a reference to the Dutch polymath Petrus Camper, who ‘describes quite precisely how the best shoe must be made, but he certainly was not able to make one.’
| Art | Science |
|---|---|
| To be able | To know |
| Practical | Theoretical |
| Technique | Theory |
Kant’s conception of art so far resembles the ancient conception of techne: art as skilled making. But he then makes a much more modern distinction:
Art is also distinguished from handicraft: the first is called liberal, the second can also be called remunerative art [Lohnkunst].
Art should be produced ‘only as play, i.e. an occupation that is agreeable in itself’. Handicraft is a labour, disagreeable or burdensome in itself, that one only does for money and which can be compulsorily imposed. Guyer/Matthews translate Lohnkunst as ‘remunerative art’, Bernard and Pluhar have the more negative ‘mercenary art’. Kant is here accepting the modern system of the arts – analysed in detail by Paul Oskar Kristeller and Larry Shiner2 – which from the late 17th century onwards divided the so-called ‘fine arts’ away from ‘crafts’. Kant is presenting the same division here, though for now he is talking about ‘art in general’ rather than ‘fine arts’ in the usual way.
| Art | Handicrafts |
|---|---|
| Liberal | Remunerative/mercenary |
| Play | Labour |
| Agreeable in itself | Disagreeable/burdensome; Can be compulsory |
Kant isn’t interested in a discussion of which activities count as arts, sciences or crafts, but he points out:
In all liberal arts there is nevertheless required something compulsory, or, as it is called, a mechanism, without which the spirit, which must be free in the art and which alone animates the work, would have no body at all and would entirely evaporate.
As examples of such ‘mechanisms’, he lists, in poetry, ‘correctness and richness of diction, as well as prosody and metre’. Kant is retaining some dignity for the so-called free and liberal arts by arguing they are not ‘mere play’ but still require a degree of planning and work. This prefigures §46 where he says art presupposes rules.
Beautiful/fine art
In §44, ‘on beautiful art’, Kant claims;
There is neither a science of the beautiful, only a critique, nor beautiful science, only beautiful art.
A science of beauty cannot exist because it would require determinate concepts, whereas the judgement of taste is based upon a non-cognitive feeling. Nor can there be such a thing as beautiful science. Kant is talking about the so-called schöne Wissenschaften, which was the German term for belles-lettres or works of artistic literature. The only relationship between fine art and the schöne Wissenschaften is:
for beautiful art in its full perfection much science is required, such as, e.g., acquaintance with ancient languages, wide reading of those authors considered to be classical, history, acquaintance with antiquities, etc.
These are a ‘necessary preparation and foundation’ for what Kant calls ‘beautiful art’. The term schöne Kunst would normally be translated as ‘fine art’, but G&M prefer ‘beautiful art’ as Kant is achieving a consistency of terms (schön = beautiful) that is lost in the usual English usage, and that they would like to preserve. Kant lays out two further layers of distinction between kinds of art:
If art, adequate for the cognition of a possible object, merely performs the actions requisite to make it actual, it is mechanical; but if it has the feeling of pleasure as its immediate aim, then it is called aesthetic art. This is either agreeable or beautiful art. It is the former if its end is that pleasure accompany the representations as mere sensations, the latter, if its end is that it accompany these as kinds of cognition.
So first he divides art in general into mechanical and aesthetic art.
- Mechanical art (mechanisch): art merely produced according to a plan.
- Aesthetic art (ästhetisch): art that aims at the feeling of pleasure.
As usual, Kant offers no examples to make this distinction of types clearer: by mechanical art he seems to mean mere imitation or rule-following, like perhaps the copies of Greek sculpture turned out by the Romans. Paul Crowther suggests Kant is thinking of ‘representations which are created solely with a view to conveying factual information, and which make no demands on us beyond that.’3
Kant then takes ‘aesthetic art’ and makes a further division, between agreeable and beautiful/fine:
- Agreeable (angenehm): art whose purpose is mere enjoyment, sensations, charms. Kant gives the examples of table talk, lively social interaction such as jokes, telling stories, table settings, games that pass the time, and what we might call muzak, i.e. background music that is there ‘merely as an agreeable noise’. These examples are unusual as most are not normally considered ‘art’. As Crowther notes, we are dealing with kitsch.
- Beautiful/fine (schön): purposive in itself, without a purpose, yet nevertheless ‘promotes the cultivation of the mental powers [Kultur der Gemütskräfte] for sociable communication’.
The universal communicability of a pleasure already includes in its concept that this must not be a pleasure of enjoyment, from mere sensation, but one of reflection; and thus aesthetic art, as beautiful art, is one that has the reflecting power of judgement and not mere sensation as its standard.
The social pleasures of the agreeable are merely diverting and amusing. The sociable communication of the fine arts involves meaningful discussion of our condition as human beings.
To summarise, I have created this splendid chart:
If it seems over-elaborate (i.e. two more steps than are usually made), you have Kant to thank.
In §45 Kant discusses the nature of fine art under the header ‘Fine art is an art to the extent that it seems at the same time to be nature’, opening with this striking passage:
In a product of art one must be aware that it is art, and not nature; yet the purposiveness in its form must still seem to be as free from all constraint by arbitrary rules as if it were a mere product of nature... Nature was beautiful, if at the same time it looked like art; and art can only be called beautiful if we are aware that it is art and yet it looks to us like nature.
We have already defined beauty as the form of purposiveness, or purposiveness without purpose. This is found in both human-made objects and in natural objects and implies an intelligent designer, whether there really was a designer or not. When we make a pure judgement of taste, we base our judgement on the purposive form of the object, regardless of any intentions or purpose that might lie behind its existence. As Kant goes on to say:
That is beautiful which pleases in the mere judging.
We judge both artistic and natural beauty the same way, though it is clear from what has gone before that beauty in art is in some ways secondary or inferior to nature.4 In nature we may make a pure judgement of taste; in art, we are judging ‘merely’ adherent, impure beauty.
Thus the purposiveness in the product of beautiful art, although it is certainly intentional, must nevertheless not seem intentional; i.e., beautiful art must be regarded as nature, although of course one is aware of it as art.
To appear as nature, a work of art must agree with rules that allow it to become what it ought to be, without showing any sign that the rules have imposed upon the artist’s mental powers. Whereas in nature we can have no knowledge of any divine creator or designer, in art we can know exactly who created a given work, but the rules behind his or her labour must not impair our judgement of taste. (I would add however, that the judgement is already impaired, since a judgement of artistic beauty is a judgement of merely adherent beauty.)
Kant thus leads us into his next discussion, which is of genius.
Notes
1. Douglas Burnham, An Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgement (2000).
2. Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics’, Journal of the History of Ideas, October 1951 and January 1952; and Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (2001), chapter 3 p62.
3. Paul Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (1993).
4. Art is inferior to nature in terms of ‘pure’ beauty, but not in terms of the ideal of beauty, where art is mixed with morality.
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