Taste
Kant claims in his header that section 48 is ‘on the relation of genius to taste’. He begins by setting out the distinction between the two:
For the judging of beautiful objects, as such, taste is required; but for beautiful art itself, i.e., for producing [Hervorbringung] such objects, genius is required.
Kant defined taste in §1 as ‘the faculty for the judging of the beautiful’. Here he splits the roles of taste and genius into judging and making, respectively. He feels a further analysis is required since the beauty of nature and the beauty of art are distinct. ‘A beauty of nature is a beautiful thing’, he writes; ‘the beauty of art is a beautiful representation of a thing.’
- To judge beauty in nature I do not need a concept of what sort of thing the object is meant to be, nor to know its purpose. I simply contemplate its form of purposiveness.
- But beauty in art ‘always presupposes an end in the cause’ so the sort of thing it is meant to be must be grounded in a concept; therefore we must take into account its perfection, i.e. how far its internal constitution as an object measures up to its purpose.
As usual, Kant lends himself to a table:
| Nature | Art |
|---|---|
| A beautiful thing | A beautiful representation of a thing |
| No concept needed to judge it Mere form pleases for itself | Presupposes an end = a concept Takes its perfection into account |
Once again Kant raises adherent beauty without, for some reason, naming it:
To be sure, in the judging especially of living objects in nature, e.g., a human being or a horse, objective purposiveness is also commonly taken into account for judging its beauty; but in that case the judgement is also no longer purely aesthetic.
Taking a concept into account during judging is the definition of adherent beauty, and you will recall that the human being and the horse were two of his examples of it back in §17. Interestingly he says that ‘art always presupposes an end’ (near top of p190, my emphasis), making no exception for non-representational art as he seemed to in the third moment. It is not clear if he has forgotten that distinction or has changed his mind.
He continues:
Nature is no longer judged as it appears as art, but to the extent that it really is art (albeit superhuman); and the teleological judgement serves as the foundation for the aesthetic and as a condition of which the latter must take account.
I won’t get into teleological judgements here, but Kant notes that we may feel compelled to judge the suitability of natural objects to their purposes as if they were products of a superhuman (übermenschlich) or divine artist – intelligent design in the creationist sense.
Kant remarks that if we find a woman’s figure beautiful, it is because we think nature has represented the purposes of the female physique beautifully, i.e. it aligns with a concept that makes the woman what she ought to be.
He then observes that art can make ugly or displeasing things – the furies, diseases, war, etc – seem beautiful. Hence his statement that ‘the beauty of art is a beautiful representation of a thing’: the original thing need not be beautiful at all, though art can make its representation so, as distinct from ‘the beauty of nature’ which really is beautiful and not ugly. The exception is things that arouse loathing, or disgust, whereupon nothing can overcome our natural revulsion.
Kant ends the section by commenting on the distinction between products of taste (mechanical art) and products of genius (fine art). He claims that giving a beautiful form to fine art ‘requires merely taste’,
to which the artist, after he has practiced and corrected it by means of various examples of art or nature, holds up his work, and after many, often laborious attempts to satisfy it, finds the form that contents him; hence this is not as it were a matter of inspiration or a free swing of the mental powers, but a slow and indeed painstaking improvement.
The artist presents his hard work to taste for assessment. Kant reiterates that taste is a ‘faculty for judging’, not for production; therefore work of this sort is a bit flat and not fine art, though it can belong to a ‘useful and mechanical art’. (Perhaps Kant has in mind that uninspiring, academically correct average that he described, in the third moment, as the ‘normal idea of the beautiful’.) He explicitly aligns taste on its own with merely mechanical art. This sort of pleasing form, where one ‘still remains to a certain extent free’, can also be applied to table settings, or a moral treatise or a sermon; they can be beautiful without being called works of beautiful/fine art.
Fine art, by contrast, includes
a poem, a piece of music, a picture gallery and so on; and there, in one would-be work of beautiful art, one can often perceive genius without taste, while in another, taste without genius.
What does Kant mean? Firstly, we can see that taste and genius are distinct abilities. Someone may have one and not the other, but a work that aspires to be fine art needs both taste and genius. Secondly, the faculty of taste, or judging, is sufficient to help an artist create a serviceable product, but creating fine art requires that inborn gift of genius, through which nature gives the rule to art in exemplary and original products. In Kant’s view however a genius does not create spontaneously – a great deal of hard work is involved.
After §48 Kant moves on from taste to other topics, but he returns to taste in the short §50, where he explains his view on an significant question: which is more important in matters of fine art, genius or taste?
That is the same as asking whether imagination or the power of judgement counts for more in them. (p196-7)
Unsurprisingly, Kant connects genius with imagination and taste with judgement. Confusingly, he argues that the indispensable condition for fine art is taste, not genius. Genius is inspired, and rich and original in ideas, but the imagination needs to be restrained by the understanding, otherwise it will only produce nonsense (Unsinn). The power of judgement is the faculty that brings imagination into such a relation and is thus more necessary for the sake of beauty.
Kant paints genius as an unruly force that needs taste to temper it, like a responsible parent:
Taste... is the discipline (or corrective) of genius, clipping its wings and making it well behaved or polished; but at the same time it gives genius guidance as to where and how far it should extend itself... by introducing clarity and order into the abundance of thoughts it makes the ideas tenable, capable of an enduring and universal approval, of enjoying a posterity among others and in an ever-progressing culture.
Paul Crowther calls taste’s correcting a ‘striving for perfection’, and concludes that taste in art is ‘the process whereby genius is refined by mastery of perfection.’1
In his anthropological works, Kant explores the powerful faculty of the imagination as the generator of dreams, constantly producing images; if allowed to dominate, imagination can lead to madness. Nothing better lives up to the idea of ‘original nonsense’, unregulated by reason, than a dream.2 If we are to sacrifice genius or taste, it must be the former that concedes.
For beautiful art, therefore, imagination, understanding, spirit and taste are requisite. [Then, see footnote to p197:] The first three faculties first achieve their unification through the fourth.
Spirit
What does genius contribute that taste does not? Kant introduces at the start of §49 a new notion, to which he grants just two short paragraphs3:
One says of certain products, of which it is expected that they ought, at least in part, to reveal themselves as beautiful art, that they are without spirit, even though one finds nothing in them to criticise as far as taste is concerned.
He gives the examples of a poem, story, oration and conversation that are respectively pretty, accurate, thorough and entertaining, but without showing spirit (Geist). He also gives the example of a woman who may be ‘pretty, talkative and charming, but without spirit’ – picking out a woman here may indicate that Kant is sceptical of women’s capacity for spirit in general.
So what is ‘spirit’? It is one of what the section header calls the ‘faculties of the mind that constitute genius’, and seems to be the element that makes the difference between a boring academic or mechanical product and one of fine art. Kant explains:
Spirit, in an aesthetic significance, means the animating principle in the mind. That, however, by which this principle animates the soul, the material which it uses for this purpose, is that which purposively sets the mental powers into motion, i.e., into a play that is self-maintaining and even strengthens the powers to that end.
Kant goes on to describe this ‘animating principle’ as the ‘faculty for the presentation of aesthetic ideas’. What, then, are aesthetic ideas? We will discuss those in the next post.
Later in the section (p195) Kant adds that spirit is the talent for expressing what is unnameable and making it communicable, whether in language, painting or plastic arts. It involves apprehending the ‘rapidly passing play of the imagination’ and unifying it into a concept. Essentially, spirit is the quality that genius brings to fine art which is lacking in those dull, spiritless works of mere taste. As Robert Wicks put it:
When this artistic spirit is embodied in an object, the animated object becomes artistically beautiful, and the manner in which this animation stimulates the harmony of the cognitive faculties in the perceiver, matches and communicates the very quality of the original artistic spirit that was in the artist. ‘Spirit’ is what the artistic genius adds to a work of otherwise academic art. This spirit is what constitutes the artistic beauty of the work and is that which, in principle, stimulates the harmony of everyone’s cognitive faculties.
Art requires something compulsory or mechanical, which gives a body to spirit, which then animates the work.
In a later work, the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant clarified the relationship between taste and spirit:
The principle of the mind that animates by means of ideas is called spirit. – Taste is a merely regulative faculty of judging form in the combination of the manifold in the power of imagination; spirit, however, is the productive faculty of reason which provides a model for that a priori form of the power of imagination. Spirit and taste: spirit to provide ideas, taste to limit them to the form that is appropriate to the laws of the productive power of imagination and so to form them (fingendi) in an original way (not imitatively). (p143-4)4
This echoes the CoJ: spirit is the productive faculty; taste trims and regulates it.
Notes
1. Paul Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (1993), p66.
2. See for example The Classifications of Mental Disorders (1764) in which Kant writes ‘the madman is a waking dreamer’, later quoted by Freud.
3. There is a scattering of other references to spirit through the CoJ, e.g. at the end of Introduction VII and on p183, but none as substantial as here.
4. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). Translated by Robert B. Louden.
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