by Robert Wicks
…by an aesthetic idea I understand that representation of the imagination which occasions much thought, without, however, any definite thought, i.e. any concept, being capable of being adequate to it. It consequently cannot be completely compassed and made intelligible by language – we easily see that it is the counterpart (pendant) of a rational idea, which conversely is a concept to which no intuition (or representation of the imagination) can be adequate.
(Critique of Judgement, Section 49)
One of the commendable aspects of Kant’s analysis of fine art is his reluctance to force it too squarely into his canonical theory of pure beauty. He realizes that fine art is permeated with metaphorical expression and allusive symbolism, and that it is impossible to overlook its meanings in any plausible theory of its beauty. To account for artistic beauty, he consequently develops a conception of aesthetic ideas.
In his open-minded attention to the constitution of fine art, Kant soon finds himself in danger of losing the universality of judgements of beauty that ideally attaches to our very use of the term ‘beauty’. The difficulty arises because the linguistic and cultural content of aesthetic ideas interferes with the universality of the judgements.
Recalling our earlier example, suppose that an ancient Egyptian, attending exclusively to the spatio-temporal structure of a crystal formation, judges the structure to be beautiful. Someone from a later century, disinterestedly viewing the same crystal and exclusively the same design, might easily agree. When restricting our attention to spatio-temporal structures, universal agreement is possible. In contrast, the same Egyptian, upon being presented with a fine Medieval painting of a crucifixion (if such time travel were possible), would be in no position to judge the painting’s beauty as a crucifixion. If the Egyptian’s faculties of imagination and understanding were to resonate to any significant extent in view of the painting, they would not be resonating for the same reasons as those of someone who appreciates the painting in light of its Christian meaning. Their respective judgements of the painting’s beauty would consequently be unable to cohere with one another.
Unlike the forms of space and time with which people are naturally equipped, religious imagery is not innate, so the historically derived contents of aesthetic ideas do not support the universality of judgements of artistic beauty. Since Kant’s theory of the beauty of fine art as the expression of aesthetic ideas includes this kind of historically contingent imagery, it is not conducive to judgements of beauty where we can expect all other humans to agree.
Key idea: Maintaining the universality of judgements of beauty
Kant’s theory of pure beauty restricts our attention to an object’s spatio-temporal form and thereby gives us clear grounds to expect other people to agree with our judgements of beauty. In his theory of fine art, Kant tries to preserve the universality of judgements of beauty by advocating universally-recognizable subject matters, such as love, death, courage, etc. When the concepts expressed in fine art become culturally specific, however, the universality of judgements of beauty becomes more difficult to sustain.
What Kant loses in the universality of judgements of the beauty of fine art, he gains in the plausibility of his account of fine art. His description of fine art as laden with metaphorical content and as surpassing all efforts to circumscribe exact meanings, is not only convincing on the face of things. It fits well with the more modern idea that works of fine art are, in their meaningful constitution, closely comparable to dreams. Like fine art, dreams are also densely symbolic, as if a set of meanings were put into a compressor to generate a thought-provoking, significance-radiating image. As are works of fine art, dreams are endlessly interpretable.
Reinforcing the plausibility of Kant’s theory of fine art is his account of artistic genius. According to Kant, artistic geniuses – people who have a special ability to generate aesthetic ideas – have a naturally powerful creative capacity, almost as if nature itself were working through these individuals to express its own intentions in works of fine art. As mentioned in connection with the principle of the purposiveness of nature, our cognitive, scientific purposes direct us to regard nature as a supreme work of art, as if it were the product of a divine intelligence. When we appreciate fine art itself, conversely, we often take pleasure in how it looks so naturally done, as opposed to appearing contrived and artificial. In this respect, the artistic genius is like the divine intelligence, albeit on a finite human scale, insofar as the genius creates a ‘second nature’ in the work of fine art, whose appearance looks natural.
The spontaneous and imaginative aspect of artistic creation that Kant’s theory highlights, is consistent with the hypothesis that artistic creativity issues fundamentally from the unconscious part of the mind. Creative processes are typically inscrutable to the artists themselves, who often cannot explain how they arrive at their artistic insights and unique styles of expression. In dreams as well, the metaphorical content derives inexplicably from the unconscious, often as the expression of hidden desires.
Near the end of Kant’s life, the concept of the ‘unconscious’ assumed a strong presence in the writings of other philosophers, partially due to Kant’s own trailblazing in his theory of fine art. A good example is F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), who was familiar with Kant’s third Critique, and who associated the artistic genius with the unconscious in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800).
At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) explicitly developed links between the unconscious, dreams and artistic creativity in his psychoanalytic writings. Following Freud’s insights about the instinctual nature of artistic creativity, the early twentieth-century surrealist movement was convinced that artistic creativity issues from the free flow of thoughts from the unconscious. Kant’s theory of fine art may find it difficult to establish and maintain the universality of judgements of beauty, but in its account of fine art’s profundity, it is among the most historically influential aspects of his aesthetic theory.
Dig Deeper
Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer, (eds.), Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 1982)
Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Salim Kemal, Kant and Fine Art: An Essay on Kant and the Philosophy of Fine Art and Culture (Clarendon Press, 1986)
Rebecca Kukla (ed.), Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Kenneth Rogerson, The Problem of Free Harmony in Kant’s Aesthetics (SUNY Press, 2009)
Study questions
1 Why would Kant find it objectionable to say of a particularly brilliant and colourfully spectacular sunset, that it is ‘beautiful’?
2 Is it ever proper practice to judge the beauty of a human being through a judgement of pure beauty, regarding the person simply as an abstract design?
3 Why would Kant find it objectionable for someone, upon encountering a flea that matches exactly the image of a ‘perfect specimen’ of a flea, to refer to it as a ‘beautiful’ flea?
4 What is Kant’s objection to extensive facial tattoos? Is this an aesthetic or moral objection?
5 Why are all judgements of artistic beauty, judgements of adherent beauty?
6 What should an ideally beautiful human being look like, according to Kant?
7 Why does Kant locate music at the lowest level of the fine arts?
8 In Kant’s view, what is an aesthetic idea?
9 Why does Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas make it difficult to make judgements of the beauty of fine art with which all human beings can be expected to agree?
10 What is the connection between ‘the unconscious’ and Kant’s theory of artistic genius?
15
Sublimity, beauty, biology and morality
As expressed across his three Critiques, Kant’s philosophy can be read as an extended analysis of whether a perfectly moral s
ociety can be realized. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he restricts the scope of scientific knowledge to the sensory world of space and time, establishing our freedom in a supersensible world beyond. In the Critique of Practical Reason and other moral writings, he describes our moral awareness and duties as grounded in reason, postulating God as the guarantor of worldly happiness. In the Critique of the Power of Judgement, he explains how the reinforcing experiences of beauty, sublimity and living organisms help compatibly to draw nature and morality together. In this chapter, we will consider these several ways in which Kant associates nature and morality in the third Critique.
1 Aesthetic ideas and morality
Kant formulates his theory of aesthetic ideas in view of the rich meanings in fine art, whose resonating effect on the cognitive faculties he equates with the feeling of beauty. Fine art can express all kinds of subjects – moral, immoral and morally neutral – and aesthetic ideas can accordingly be fitted to non-moral as well as moral subjects. There is no necessity that aesthetic ideas have a moral content.
In their very form, however, aesthetic ideas direct us towards moral awareness and a supersensible realm. As we saw in the previous chapter, aesthetic ideas in fine art are metaphor-rich images that, relative to some given theme, stimulate our imagination in a continually expansive elaboration of the theme. These themes are usually so wide, that the aesthetic ideas, although expansive, are never fully comprehensive. Consider the many artworks about war, love or intrigue, or the many paintings of the crucifixion. The resonance of the themes is endless.
The experience of aesthetic ideas in fine art is thus double-sided: the artworks’ richness tends to render the given themes with a solid measure of satisfaction, while the rendition always leaves us with a sense of frustration. Romeo and Juliet is one of the finest tragic romances, but its excellence does not terminate the genre of tragic romance. Other tragic romances also expand upon this universal theme.
Independently of the themes expressed, and true for all aesthetic ideas, the general form of an aesthetic idea is expansiveness in an effort to embody a theme that defies adequate expression in a physical medium. In their very expansiveness, aesthetic ideas direct our attention away from the sensory world of images and metaphors to the conceptual sphere of reason, and thereby pave the way to morality. Kant’s own examples and explanation of how aesthetic ideas in art expand our awareness are as follows:
The poet ventures to make sensible, realize rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, hell, eternity, creation, etc.; or even if he deals with things of which there are examples in experience, e.g., death, envy and all vices, also love, fame, and the like, he tries, by means of imagination, which emulates the play of reason in its quest after a maximum, to go beyond the limits of experience and to present them to sense with a completeness of which there is no example in nature.
(Critique of Judgement, Section 49)
Kant appreciates that although their content is not necessarily moral, the expansive format of aesthetic ideas itself extends our awareness beyond space and time to touch upon moral realities. In this respect, he believes that through its inherent expansiveness, the very format of expression in fine art is conducive to moral expression. If the form and the content of aesthetic ideas are not to contradict one another, then the content of aesthetic ideas in fine art should also be morally centred as a matter of consistency. Implicit in Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas is consequently the directive that, if we are to respect rationality, then the aesthetic ideas in fine art should have a moral content.
2 Sublimity and morality
Kant’s theory of the sublime closely parallels his account of how aesthetic ideas function in fine art. He maintains that the experience of the sublime also expands our awareness – indeed, more definitively so than in fine art – into the moral realm, lifting it from the sensory into the non-sensory sphere. In the experience of the sublime this expansiveness is not caused by a metaphor-rich image, as in fine art, but by an extremely large object or a life-threatening object or situation.
The experience of the sublime in relation to extremely large objects Kant refers to as the ‘mathematically’ sublime, since it involves magnitudes in nature that surpass our abilities to capture them with any finite measure. The experience of the sublime in relation to life-threatening objects or situations he refers to as the ‘dynamically’ sublime, since it concerns nature’s overwhelming power over our human bodies. In both cases we are swept away initially, either by immeasurable expanses or by immeasurable power.
When confronting a very large, seemingly endless, object or expanse – this could be either a natural expanse such as a cloud-filled sky or a human-made object such as the Great Wall of China – we try to make sense of it by holding together all of its parts in our imagination. Since the items are virtually endless, we succeed in holding in mind only some of the parts, never achieving full comprehension. The initial effect is a feeling of frustration in recognition of our imagination’s weakness. We feel small in the face of the sublime.
Kant observes that our imagination, or sensory faculty, in its frustrated effort to expand sufficiently to encompass the vast object, passes its task over to a different faculty that is indeed able to complete the process of comprehension. To alleviate the feeling of frustration, the faculty of imagination’s activity shifts to the faculty of reason which comprehends the object through a rational idea. The vast object may frustrate our imagination, but this frustration positively stimulates our reason, which is the seat of morality. The mathematically sublime object does not have any moral content in itself, but it acts as a stimulus to this higher awareness.
In a parallel manner, Kant observes that life-threatening objects or situations can cause an experience of the sublime. Here, the same kind of transition from our sensory-oriented faculties to our rational faculty occurs, except that there are different causes for the transition. When our physical security is endangered by terrible storms or earthquakes, for instance, and if we are not overwhelmed with fear, it becomes possible to appreciate a spiritual aspect of ourselves that remains immune to physical destruction, namely, our reason and its associated moral dimension. The experience results in a surge of moral awareness and sense of personal invulnerability in the face of death. In this respect, not only the experience of the beauty in fine art, but the experience of the sublime has a morally motivating aspect.
3 Beauty as the symbol of morality
On yet another register – that upon which we compare judgements of pure beauty and moral judgements in their elementary structure – Kant notes a further correspondence between beauty and morality. He expresses this by saying that ‘beauty’ – and here he intends specifically the structure of judgements of pure beauty – is a ‘symbol’ of morality. His observation is that judgements of pure beauty and moral judgements share some basic qualities, and that through this affinity, the experience of beauty invites us to draw a connection to morality.
In Kant’s view, judgements of pure beauty have four main qualities that moral judgements share. First, a beautiful object pleases us immediately in the harmony of the cognitive faculties that it causes, and our judgement of pure beauty flows directly from that cognitive harmony. Second, the judgement of beauty is disinterested insofar as it is detached from worldly considerations. In particular, it abstracts from the question of whether the object of beauty is an actually existent object. Third, the judgement of pure beauty is associated with freedom, not in the sense of free choice, but in reference to the free play of the cognitive faculties that the beautiful object stimulates. Fourth, the judgement of pure beauty demands agreement from others, and is universalistic. This gives us the four qualities of (1) immediacy, (2) disinterestedness, (3) freedom and (4) universality.
Moral judgements have the same four qualities in Kant’s view. First, the sense of duty that grounds moral judgements is an immediate feeling of self-respect. Second, as grounded in pure reason, moral jud
gements are independent of our worldly, sensory inclinations. Third, moral judgements presuppose that we are free. Fourth, they demand agreement from everyone, like judgements of beauty. In light of these parallelisms, Kant refers to beauty as a symbol of morality.
As evidence for the association, Kant mentions how in our discourse about the beauty of objects, we often cite morally toned expressive qualities, speaking, for instance, of the magnificent trees, the smiling fields, and the tender flowers. His point in drawing our attention to this style of expressive discourse, is to show that beauty and morality reinforce each other. They are the siblings of reason. Just as judgements of beauty can inspire moral awareness, moral awareness can inspire us to be more sensitive to the beauty that surrounds us:
Now taste is at bottom a faculty for judging of the sensible illustration of moral ideas (by means of a certain analogy involved in our reflection upon both these); and it is from this faculty also and from the greater susceptibility grounded thereon for the feeling arising from the latter (called moral feeling), that the pleasure is derived which taste regards as valid for humanity in general and not merely for the private feeling of each. Hence it appears plain that the true propaedeutic for the foundation of taste is the development of moral ideas and the culture of the moral feeling; because it is only when sensibility is brought into agreement with this that genuine taste can assume a definite invariable form.
(Critique of Judgement, Section 60)
4 Living things and our moral destiny
Kant’s aesthetic theory occupies the first half of the third Critique. The second half focuses upon the principle of the purposiveness of nature and the moral meaning of the presence of living things. With respect to the principle, our cognitive faculties aim to understand nature predictably in a thoroughly mechanistic, scientific way. For this aim to be achievable, it must be assumed that nature is itself receptive to these cognitive aims as a mechanical entity through-and-through.
