PHILOSOPHER IMMANUEL KANT ON NATURAL AND ARTISTIC BEAUTY
For this Blog entry, I have decided not to write about Halloween, haha, but I am looking at Philosophy and especially philosophical views regarding Art. This will be an ongoing entry from time to time and I kick off with Immanuel Kant ( 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804 ). This article is an excerpt from one of my University College essays and is complete with references.
Portrait of the Philosopher Immanuel Kant by Dean James
In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant moves explicitly in this direction, in proposing ‘‘the form of the purposiveness of an object”1 that causes ‘‘the harmonious free play of the cognitive faculties”2 in us as the defining feature in any beautiful object, natural or artistic. The point of Kant’s terminology is not to enable the clear resolution of disagreements by specifying an art-relevant property in objects about whose instances everyone will immediately agree. He is quite aware that the phrase ‘‘form of purposiveness” is so vague that its application will be reasonably disputed (even if underlying such disputes there is in principle a genuine question of correctness).3 Rather, the point of Kant’s phrases is to begin to suggest why the experience of beauty, natural and artistic alike, matters to us. It is more than a mere affirmative buzz or tingle. It is a pleasurable feeling with a distinct causal history and, in virtue of that history, a distinct significance for us.
In pleasing us, natural and artistic beauty, according to Kant, serve no exterior purpose. The experience of beauty does not yield knowledge, and it does not of itself enable the satisfaction of desires for material goods. Yet it is not nonetheless merely agreeable or pleasant;4 instead,
the experience of beauty matters. Beauty in nature makes us feel as though the natural world were congenial to our purposes and projects. In feeling the beautiful natural object to be ‘‘as it were” intelligible or made for us to apprehend it, we further feel that nature as a whole -- which seems
to ‘‘shine forth” in beauty -- is favorable to our cognitive and practical interests as subjects. To experience a beautiful sunset, according to Kant, is to feel (though not to know theoretically) that nature makes sense.
Pleasure in the beautiful is also in no way practical, neither like that from the pathological
ground of agreeableness nor like that from the intellectual ground of the represented good. But yet it has a causality in itself, namely that of maintaining the state of the representation of the mind and the
occupation of the cognitive powers without a further aim. We linger over the consideration of the beautiful because this consideration strengthens and reproduces itself . . .5
Though Kant’s terminology may be difficult, the experience he is describing is a familiar one. Beautiful objects of nature or art engage our attention. We enjoy them in paying active, cognitive attention to them, even if we acquire from them neither definite theoretical knowledge of nature
nor material goods nor mere (passively received) pleasant sensations.
The experience of successful art then combines the experience of natural beauty with the invigorating experience of the natural sublime.6 In stemming from genius, ‘‘the talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art,”7 the successful work of art is necessarily original. It proceeds not
from copying or aping (Nachmachung), but from taking up and freely imitating (Nachahmung), following after, or being inspired by prior artistic work.22 Genius cannot describe or indicate scientifically how it brings its product into being . . . [
T]he author of a product that he owes to his genius does not
know himself how the ideas for it come to him, and also does not have
it in his power to think up such things at will or according to plan, and
to communicate to others precepts that would put them in a position to
produce similar works.8
In thus springing forth chthonically in and through the genius in its maker, rather than according to any definite plan, the successful work of art resembles such sublime, terrifying yet invigorating natural phenomena as overhanging rocks, storms at sea, and raging torrents. Arguably Kant overstates the point, in that makers of art must have some rough conception of what they are trying to do (compose a sonata or paint a still life or write a novel, say). Moreover, the ability to produce art successfully can be cultivated through training and practice. But (like Aristotle in remarking
that sometimes rules can be broken successfully) Kant captures our sense that in artistic production some free experimentation with the materials and formal possibilities of a medium normally takes place. This free experimentation or improvisation, beyond mere aping, is a source of our interest in the artistic product. The work of art and the power of free production that it evidences inspire us, its audience. Our own cognitive powers are ‘‘animated,”9 as we are brought to feel that we have like
powers that might likewise be brought to expression in fully achieved, exemplary action and its products.
Yet despite being chthonically original in stemming from natural genius, the genuine work of art must also be exemplary. ‘‘Since there can also be original nonsense”25 that is not art, the genuine work of art must be intelligible or make sense. While being original, the products of genius ‘‘must at the same time be models.”10 As in the experience of beauty in nature, the audience must feel as though the product is favorable to our cognitive and practical interests as subjects, something we can or could
take as a model and follow after. It must seem to us to model and anticipate a world of subjects who act all at once fully, freely, expressively, and according to deeply purposive reason, without coercion or constraint.
Kant’s accounts of both natural and artistic beauty have considerable appeal. Natural and artistic beauty seem to engage and absorb the eye or ear together with the attentive mind, and they seem valuable ‘‘for their own sake,” rather than for the sake of any exterior cognitive or practical
interest. Dewey notes that attention to the formed work of art resembles an experience of thinking about something else via the use of signs and symbols, yet the focus remains on the work itself and on its qualities,which are evident in attentive perception.11 Attending to formal qualities and interrelations in the work may well produce the kind of pleasurable absorption and have the kind of value that Kant says it has. The satisfying arrangement of qualities or formal elements is a criterion of art.
Yet we may also doubt whether Kant’s account is wholly adequate to the varieties of art. Kant’s central terms ‘‘form of purposiveness” and ‘‘harmonious free play of the cognitive faculties” are vague and metaphysical.
They do not point to any neutral, uncontestable procedures for identifying successful works. Though he holds that works of art do express indefinite ‘‘aesthetic ideas” -- ideas such as justice and freedom that can only be figuratively symbolized, not directly embodied in things present to sense experience28 -- his focus on formal elements and the pleasure of apprehending them may underrate the representational and cognitive dimensions of some art. Many works of twentieth-century art, including much of Dada, conceptual art, and performance art, seem more provocative and ‘‘assertational” than intended to provide pleasure in the apprehension of formal elements.
Nonetheless, where provocative and assertational intentions wholly override the imperative to achieve satisfying form in a medium, then the status of the product as art becomes subject to some doubt. The result of wholly provocative or assertational intentions swerves toward tract, screed,
or propaganda, and away from art. As Dewey puts it, ‘‘doing or making is artistic,” as opposed to exclusively theoretical, symbolic, communicative, political, and so forth, ‘‘when the perceived result is of such a nature that its qualities as perceived have controlled the question of production.”12 Practitioners in the studio and workshop do pay special attention to formal elements and their interrelationships. They typically monitor and correct their production in order to achieve an absorptive coherence of elements. Likewise, critics typically attend to the formal details of the presence or absence of such an achievement in a work. While it is true that all objects have form, attention to singular arrangements of elements that invite and sustain absorptive engagement is central to the artistic enterprise. In Dewey’s phrasing,
Objects of industrial art have form -- that adapted to special uses. These objects take on aesthetic form, whether they are rugs, urns, or baskets, when the material is so arranged and adapted that it seems immediately the enrichment of the immediate experience of the one whose aesthetic perception is directed to it . . .Where the form is liberated from limitation to a specialized end and serves also the purposes of an immediate and vital experience, the form is aesthetic and not merely
useful.13
1 Purposiveness without a purpose or finality without an end (Zweckmässigkeit ohne
Zweck) is the subject of the ‘‘Third Moment” of the ‘‘Analytic of the Beautiful,” §§10--17
of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. See in particular Kant’s ‘‘Definition of the
beautiful inferred from this third moment” in Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans.
Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 120.
2 Kant initially develops the idea of the harmonious free play of imagination
(focusing on a single object or work) and understanding in the Critique of the Power of
Judgment, introduction, section 7. To say that imagination and understanding ‘‘play
freely” is to say that we intuit or focus on an object without seeking or arriving at any
definite knowledge of the object intuited; to say that they do this harmoniously is to
say that in our focusing on the object it is nonetheless ‘‘as though” understanding
takes place.
3 See Critique, trans. Guyer and Matthews, p. 163. Kant’s defense of the intersubjective
validity of judgments of taste and his explanation of how there can nonetheless
be disagreement in overt verdicts issued by apprehenders will be considered in
chapter 7.
4 Kant distinguishes the (morally)
5 ibid., §12, p. 107.
6 Kirk Pillow has argued persuasively that the work of art is seen by Kant as having
a sublime content -- an indeterminately large and not quite wholly unified fund
of ideas, emotions, and attitudes that challenges the imagination in attempting to
trace and present it -- somehow coherently housed within a beautiful form. See Kirk
Pillow, Sublime Understanding (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), especially chapter 3,
‘‘Sublime Understanding.”
7 Kant, Critique, trans. Guyer and Matthews, §46, p. 186.
8 See ibid., §47, p. 188; see also §49, p. 196, on aping and copying versus inspiration
and serving as a model.
9 ibid., §46, p. 187.
10 See ibid., §12, p. 107 and §48, p. 194, for references to animation.
25 ibid., §46, p. 186. 2
6 ibid.
11 See Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 38.
12 On aesthetic ideas see Kant, Critique, trans. Guyer and Matthews, §49, pp. 191--96,
and on symbolization see §59, pp. 225--27.
13 Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 48.
14 ibid., p. 116.
15 ibid., p. 38.
