Kant’s Critique of Judgement is famous for demonstrating a synthesis between two seemingly opposing claims of beauty: on the one hand, that beauty is purely subjective, and the other, that claims of the beautiful have universal validity. Kant investigates what it means to say something in art or nature is “beautiful,” and how it’s possible for someone to make a work of what he calls “fine art,” or art with “imagination, understanding, spirit, and taste.” This essay will explore how Kant develops his idea of the “genius” as the creator of “fine art,” and further, that this art serves as exemplary of “taste,” which is the capacity to recognize beauty from an individual perspective, and to consider it universally. To begin, we’ll contextualize the considerations of art with a preliminary overview of what it means to make any judgement of taste. In doing this, we’ll see what it is that makes art beautiful, and then how that beautiful art is produced. Finally, we will consider if there is any way in which taste could be delimited other than by the genius.
Kant understands judgements of taste as purely subjective and aesthetic judgements; this is to say, firstly, that the judgement comes only from the feeling of delight or aversion in the subject making it, and not from something in the object itself. Secondly, that the judgement only concerns the representation of that object, and not the concept of that object. In short, a judgement of taste is made only by considering how that object, as it is appearing to us, and irrespective of the concept of the object, makes us feel; in other words, they are disinterested. “Interest” does not mean a type of fascination like we often mean it colloquially, but more as a type of direction that predetermines the judgement. The “agreeable,” Kant explains, is interested, as it is based on pleasure in sensation, such as liking the flavor of a dish, or finding a movie “enjoyable.” He specifies, however, that the agreeable does not “merely [please], but that it gratifies,” as we have a concept of the object of pleasure that fulfills us. With judgments of the good, one “must always know what sort of a thing the object is intended to be,” as we call “useful things ‘good,’” only because we know what that thing is supposed to do.
In contrast, a judgement of the beautiful “simply pleases us… apart from any interest.” Aesthetic judgements have nothing presupposing the object in the judgement (as they concern only the representation of the object in our mind), and are based on the subject's feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Beyond that, Kant conceives of the beautiful not as mere opinion, as one cannot say “this thing is beautiful to me,” like they can with the agreeable. It is not that judgements of the beautiful are based merely on the feeling of pleasure, but the subject’s pleasure is the starting ground for one to make a claim of beauty with universal voice. Kant writes that “when [someone] declares something to be beautiful, he expects the same delight from others,” and when someone else disagrees with that judgement, he “denies them taste.”
When we speak about the beautiful, we’re speaking with a “universality,” where we appeal to a faculty of taste that Kant suggests we all possess, namely, what he calls “public sense.” This distinguishes judgements of taste from mere opinion most of all, as we must put aside specifically what makes the agreeable “gratifying” (in that we have a concept of what fulfills a certain pleasure), and speak “disinterestedly” on behalf of everyone. This conception of “public sense” or “taste” is also on the basis of what Kant calls “culture,” where our capacity to have a taste for beauty (and an aversion to displeasing things) comes from our “sociability,” or, how we understand our being as intrinsically part of a community with others.
The pleasure in beauty, of which we demand universal agreement, comes from the judgement itself, otherwise, the judgement would be based on a concept (of pleasure). Kant explains that “this purely subjective (aesthetic) judging of [the representation of] the object… is antecedent to the pleasure in it, and is the basis of this pleasure in the harmony of the cognitive faculties.” The pleasure we derive from the harmony of the faculties is secondary to the judgement, and thus, Kant clarifies, “[the beautiful is that] which pleases in the mere judging of it.” This “harmony” is of the imagination and the understanding, and occurs, basically, when we find a “purposeless” “purposiveness” in the representation. Kant describes “purposiveness” as “the causality of a concept in respect of its object… [where] the object itself is thought to be possible only through a concept of it.” The way we understand a hammer comes from both the concept of a hammer (which is the “end” for the person designing the hammer), and from the idea that this hammer has a function (its own end).
For beauty, however, we are not pleased by how a beautiful forest has trees which photosynthesize, or how the river has certain nutrients that keep life flourishing, as these are still concepts. The pleasure we receive in aesthetic judgments comes precisely from considering solely the aesthetic representation, and finding a type of purposiveness within that representation, free from any conceptual purpose. Kant conceives “organisms” as “natural ends,” or “self-organized beings,” which is to say we can aesthetically understand the organism as a complete compilation of their organs (which serve functions of their own) forming a whole. As a “whole,” the organism is “both [an] end and means,” and has an “intrinsic purposiveness” as it fits within a system of ends. Our capacity to identify purpose within organisms, as self-organized products of nature, which have no “conceptual” purpose, is the same capacity that harmonizes the understanding and imagination in our judgement of beautiful things: thus, nature’s purposiveness, without an explicit purpose, is present in the aesthetic form of the object, and is what we identify as beautiful upon reflection of the object.
Kant thinks that this is the common thread that unites art and nature as beautiful in the same way, in fact, he writes that “the purposiveness of [fine art’s] form must appear just as free from the constraint of arbitrary rules as if it were a product of mere nature.” He does not mean that art must be a portrait of a landscape to be “fine,” but rather it must have the same purposiveness as nature does. Kant explains “the beauty of nature is a beautiful thing; beauty of art is a beautiful representation of a thing,” though, as aesthetic objects, they are both representations in our minds of the noumena, but art is then doubly representative. In this way, beauty, of nature and of art, is always “the same,” as it refers to that aesthetic purposiveness. Kant defines art, generally, as “production through freedom,” which is to say that art is only such on the basis of a free agent who “rationally deliberates” and makes decisions about its creation. For art to be “free from the constraint of arbitrary rules,” we can consider what Kant calls “free art” as the essential basis for both what is purely beautiful in an aesthetic sense, and also for “fine art.” The art is “free” in that there is no concept restricting it (just as there is none in the judgement of it), rather, there is an aesthetic idea.
The aesthetic idea is a “counterpart” to a “rational idea.” They are “ideas” insofar as “they strain after something lying out beyond the confines of experience,” and allow the artist to “approximate” the idea as it manifests in the artwork (as paint on canvas, or poetry on paper, for instance). Kant elaborates that “no concept can be wholly adequate to [aesthetic ideas] as internal intuitions.” That said, the creation of the artwork, with the aesthetic idea in the artist’s mind, is “allied” with a given concept: the artist has an aesthetic idea of something, and so uses concepts to convey, as closely as possible, that idea, but only as those concepts are invoked through their “free employment of imagination.” We now arrive at Kant’s concept of the “genius,” who creates fine art with free imagination employing concepts from the understanding, with taste as a natural guiding principle in their creation, and spirit as “the faculty of presenting aesthetic ideas.” Genius is understood as an innate faculty of certain individuals “through which nature gives the rule to art.” The genius’s taste supersedes the “cultural taste,” as in, they do not merely make works which imitate a popular style, but they transcend that style and make an example of what beautiful art can even be.
However, is it really necessary for the genius to be the producer of fine art? Kant distinguishes between “fine art,” made by the genius, and generally “pretty” or pleasing art, such as how “a poem may be very pretty and elegant, but is devoid of spirit.” It is possible that one could compose a song that “does all the right things,” so to speak, such as having a catchy hook, metaphor and rhyme, and powerful instrumentals, but nonetheless is missing what Kant calls the “exemplary” quality of fine art, and is merely a type of “aping;” in fine art, there is a “feeling of unity in the presentation, whereas [aping] follows definite principles.” The genius (or at least, the faculty of genius) is necessary for fine art insofar as spirit is necessary for that art to be exemplary.
We can understand the genius as the “positive delimiter” of taste, whereby creating fine art from “outside” the cultural sphere of taste, the genius sets a “standard” for future works of fine art. But it cannot only be the genius who delimits it, as in some sense, what is “beautiful” is also understood by what is not beautiful. While Kant generally speaks of taste “positively,” as we cultivate our sense of taste through recognizing artistic “classics,” for instance, there is also an element of “negativity” to taste. He describes a naive young poet who believes his own poetry to be beautiful, and thinks anyone who disagrees has false taste. Yet, once “his judgement [of taste] has been sharpened,” by encountering and judging more and more works of fine art, he may revise his initial judgement. Notably, Kant is saying that the poet no longer sees their art as beautiful once they’ve come to encounter other instances of beauty (and “sharpened” their judgement)—however, insofar as the “not-beautiful” is then delimited by the beautiful (through its exclusion in the cultivation of taste), we can only assume that when the poet “deserts his former judgements,” he is negatively reconstructing what is his taste, given the examples (the classic fine works of art), and given his own not-beautiful works, all relative to one unifying taste. So it cannot be only the genius who is delimiting taste by making exemplary works, but also everyone who makes a free aesthetic judgement of any artwork, beautiful or not, given the “cultivation” of taste in our understanding.
Kant’s contribution to aesthetic philosophy is unprecedented, and there is a mountain’s worth of insight left to be uncovered from his third critique—all too often we still hear today that claims of beauty are “relative,” or, that anything can be art so long as it is made by an artist: Kant’s philosophy resists this modern urge to reduce the importance of aesthetics, and instead proposes the cultivation of a cultural taste, where we then can realize the most beautiful world (“realize” in a double sense of understanding, and also its manifestation). So long as we encourage artists to make works with spirit, and so long as we continue to discuss and share our own judgments of the beautiful, we might witness the arrival of the most free and beautiful art.
Works Cited
Kant, Immanuel. 2008. Critique of Judgement. Edited by Nicholas Walker. Translated by James C. Meredith. Oxford University Press
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