Excerpted from "Kant Aesthetics and Teleology" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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2. AestheticsAn
aesthetic judgment, in Kant's usage, is a judgment which is based on
feeling, and in particular on the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.
According to Kant's official view there are three kinds of aesthetic
judgment: judgments of the agreeable, judgments of beauty (or,
equivalently, judgments of taste), and judgments of the sublime.
However, Kant often uses the expression “aesthetic judgment” in a
narrower sense which excludes judgments of the agreeable, and it is
with aesthetic judgments in this narrower sense that the “Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment” is primarily concerned. Such judgments can either
be, or fail to be, “pure”; while Kant mostly focusses on the ones which
are pure, there are reasons to think that most judgments about art (as
opposed to nature) do not count as pure, so that it is important to
understand Kant's views on such judgments as well.The
“Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” is concerned not only with judgments
of the beautiful and the sublime, but also with the production of
objects about which such judgments are appropriately made; this topic
is discussed under the headings of “fine art” or “beautiful art”
[schöne Kunst] and “genius.”...In
the “Analytic of the Beautiful” with which the “Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment” begins, Kant tries to capture what is distinctive about
judgments of beauty by describing them under four heads or “moments.”
These are as follows:First Moment (§§1-5)Judgments
of beauty are based on feeling, in particular feelings of pleasure
(Kant also mentions displeasure, but this does not figure prominently
in his account; for more on this point, see Section 2.3.6 below). The
pleasure, however, is of a distinctive kind: it is disinterested, which
means that it does not depend on the subject's having a desire for the
object, nor does it generate such a desire. The fact that judgments of
beauty are based on feeling rather than “objective sensation” (e.g.,
the sensation of a thing's colour) distinguishes them from cognitive
judgments based on perception (e.g., the judgment that a thing is
green). But the disinterested character of the feeling distinguishes
them from other judgments based on feeling. In particular, it
distinguishes them from (i) judgments of the agreeable, which are the
kind of judgment expressed by saying simply that one likes something or
finds it pleasing (for example, food or drink), and (ii) judgments of
the good, including judgments both about the moral goodness of
something and about its goodness for particular non-moral ends.Second Moment (§§2-9)Judgments
of beauty have, or make a claim to, “universality” or “universal
validity.” That is, in making a judgment of beauty about an object, one
takes it that everyone else who perceives the object ought also to
judge it to be beautiful, and, relatedly, to share one's pleasure in
it. But the universality is not “based on concepts.” That is, one's
claim to agreement does not rest on the subsumption of the object under
a concept (as for example, the claim to agreement made by the judgment
that something is green rests on the ascription to the object of the
property of being green, and hence its subsumption under the concept
green). Relatedly, judgments of beauty cannot, despite their universal
validity, be proved: there are no rules by which someone can be
compelled to judge that something is beautiful. The fact that judgments
of beauty are universally valid constitutes a further feature (in
addition to the disinterestedness of the pleasure on which they are
based) distinguishing them from judgments of agreeable. For in claiming
simply that one likes something, one does not claim that everyone else
ought to like it too. But the fact that their universal validity is not
based on concepts distinguishes judgments of beauty from non-evaluative
cognitive judgments and judgments of the good, both of which make a
claim to universal validity that is based on concepts.It
should be noted that later, in the “Antinomy of Taste,” Kant does
describe the universality of judgments of beauty as resting on a
concept, but it is an “indeterminate concept,” and not the kind of
concept which figures in cognition (§57).Third Moment (§§10-17)Unlike
judgments of the good, judgments of the beautiful do not presuppose an
end or purpose [Zweck] which the object is taken to satisfy. (This is
closely related to the point that their universality is not based on
concepts). However, they nonetheless involve the representation of what
Kant calls “purposiveness” [Zweckmässigkeit]. Because this
representation of purposiveness does not involve the ascription of an
end, Kant calls the purposiveness which is represented “merely formal
purposiveness” or “the form of purposiveness.” He describes it as
perceived both in the object itself and in the activity of imagination
and understanding in their engagement with the object. (For more on
this activity, see the discussion of the “free play of the faculties”
in Section 2.2; for more on the notion of purposiveness, see Section
3.1).Fourth Moment (§18-22)Judgments
of beauty involve reference to the idea of necessity, in the following
sense: in taking my judgment of beauty to be universally valid, I take
it, not that everyone who perceives the object will share my pleasure
in it and (relatedly) agree with my judgment, but that everyone ought
to do so. I take it, then, that my pleasure stands in a “necessary”
relation to the object which elicits it, where the necessity here can
be described (though Kant himself does not use the term) as normative.
But, as in the case of universal validity, the necessity is not based
on concepts or rules (at least, not concepts or rules that are
determinate, that is, of a kind which figure in cognition; as noted
earlier in this section, Kant describes it, in the Antinomy of Taste,
as resting on an indeterminate concept). Kant characterizes the
necessity more positively by saying that it is “exemplary,” in the
sense that one's judgment itself serves as an example of how everyone
ought to judge.2.2 How are Judgments of Beauty Possible?Running
through Kant's various characterizations of judgments of beauty is a
basic dichotomy between two apparently opposed sets of features. On the
one hand, judgments of beauty are based on feeling, they do not depend
on subsuming the object under a concept (in particular, the concept of
an end which such an object is supposed to satisfy), and they cannot be
proved. This combination of features seems to suggest that judgments of
beauty should be assimilated to judgments of the agreeable. On the
other hand, however, judgments of beauty are unlike judgments of the
agreeable in not involving desire for the object; more importantly and
centrally, they make a normative claim to everyone's agreement. These
features seem to suggest that they should be assimilated, instead, to
objective cognitive judgments.In
claiming that judgments of beauty have both sets of features, Kant can
be seen as reacting equally against the two main opposing traditions in
eighteenth-century aesthetics: the “empiricist” tradition of aesthetics
represented by Hume, Hutcheson and Burke, on which a judgment of beauty
is an expression of feeling without cognitive content, and the
“rationalist” tradition of aesthetics represented by Baumgarten and
Meier, on which a judgment of beauty consists in the cognition of an
object as having an objective property. Kant's insistence that there is
an alternative to these two views, one on which judgments of beauty are
both based on feeling and make a claim to universal validity, is
probably the most distinctive aspect of his aesthetic theory. But this
insistence confronts him with the obvious problem of how the two
features, or sets of features, are to be reconciled. As Kant puts it:
“how is a judgment possible which, merely from one's own feeling of
pleasure in an object, independent of its concept, judges this pleasure
as attached to the representation of the same object in every other
subject, and does so a priori, i.e., without having to wait for the
assent of others?” (§36, 288)The
argument constituting Kant's official answer to this question is
presented in the section entitled “Deduction of Pure Aesthetic
Judgments,” in particular in §38, but versions of the argument are
presented in the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” in particular in §9 and
§22. The argument in all of its forms relies on the claim, introduced
in §9, that pleasure in the beautiful depends on the “free play” or
“free harmony” of the faculties of imagination and understanding. In
the Critique of Pure Reason, imagination is described as “synthesizing
the manifold of intuition” under the governance of rules that are
prescribed by the understanding: the outcome of this is cognitive
perceptual experience of objects as having specific empirical features.
The rules prescribed by the understanding, are, or correspond to,
particular concepts which are applied to the object. For example, when
a manifold is synthesized in accordance with the concepts green and
square, the outcome is a perceptual experience in which the object is
perceived as green and square. But now in the Critique of Judgment,
Kant suggests that imagination and understanding can stand in a
different kind of relationship, one in which imagination's activity
harmonizes with the understanding but without imagination's being
constrained or governed by understanding. In this relationship,
imagination and understanding in effect do what is ordinarily involved
in the bringing of objects under concepts, and hence in the perception
of objects as having empirical features: but they do this without
bringing the object under any concept in particular. So rather than
perceiving the object as green or square, the subject whose faculties
are in free play responds to it perceptually with a state of mind which
is non-conceptual, and specifically a feeling of disinterested
pleasure. It is this kind of pleasure which is the basis for a judgment
of beauty.Kant
appeals to this account of pleasure in the beautiful in order to argue
for its universal communicability: to argue, that is, that a subject
who feels such a pleasure, and thus judges the object to be beautiful,
is entitled to demand that everyone else feel a corresponding pleasure
and thus agree with her judgment of beauty. For, he claims, the free
play of the faculties manifests the subjective condition of cognition
in general (see for example §9, 218; §21, 238; §38, 290). We are
entitled to claim that everyone ought to agree with our cognitions: if
I perceive an object to be green and square, I am entitled to claim
that everyone else ought to perceive it as green and square. But for
this demand for agreement to be possible, he suggests, it must also be
possible for me to demand universal agreement for the subjective
condition of such cognitions. If I can take it that everyone ought to
share my perception of an object as green or square, then I must also
be entitled to take it that everyone ought to share a perception of the
object in which my faculties are in free play, since the free play is
no more than a manifestation of what is in general required for an
object's being perceived as green or square in the first place.. . .2.6 Art, Genius and Aesthetic IdeasWhile
Kant attaches special importance to the beauty of nature (see e.g., FI
XI, 244), he also makes clear that judgments of beauty may be made also
about “fine” or “beautiful” art [schöne Kunst]. In the course of his
treatment of beautiful art in §§43-54 he discusses fine art in relation
to the production of human artifacts more generally (§43), compares
fine art to the “arts” of entertaining (telling jokes, decorating a
table, providing background music) (§44), and makes some remarks about
the relation between the beauty of art and that of nature, claiming in
particular that fine art must “look to us like nature” in that it must
seem free and unstudied (§45). Kant also offers a typology of the
various fine arts (§51) and a comparison of their respective aesthetic
value (§53).Of
particular interest, within Kant's account of fine art, is his
discussion of how beautiful art objects can be produced (§§46-50). The
artist cannot produce a beautiful work by learning, and then applying,
rules which determine when something is beautiful; for no such rules
can be specified (see the sketch of the Second Moment in Section 2.1
above). But, Kant makes clear, the artist's activity must still be
rule-governed, since “every art presupposes rules” (§46, 307) and the
objects of art must serve as models or examples, that is, they must
serve as a “standard or rule by which to judge” (§46, 308). Kant's
solution to this apparent paradox is to postulate a capacity, which he
calls “genius,” by which “nature gives the rule to art” (§46, 307). An
artist endowed with genius has a natural capacity to produce objects
which are appropriately judged as beautiful, and this capacity does not
require the artist him- or herself to consciously follow rules for the
production of such objects; in fact the artist himself does not know,
and so cannot explain, how he or she was able to bring them into being.
“Genius” here means something different from brilliance of intellect.
For example, Newton, for all his intellectual power, does not qualify
as having genius, because he was capable of making clear, both to
himself and others, the procedures through which he arrived at his
scientific discoveries (§47, 308-309)....