Kant and the Judgement of Taste
Immanuel Kant tried to solve the Enlightenment’s problem of taste: how can a judgement that rests on a feeling nonetheless claim to hold for everyone? His answer in the Critique of Judgement (1790) – disinterested pleasure, purposiveness without purpose, the sublime within our own minds – became the foundation of almost all later aesthetics, including the aesthetics of those who turned against him.
Immanuel Kant spent his whole life in and around Königsberg in East Prussia. He never travelled to Italy and saw very little of the art that the debates of the 18th century were about. Yet he became perhaps the most influential thinker in aesthetics. His first work on the subject, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 1764), is a readable essay in the British tradition, full of examples – night is sublime, day is beautiful – but also marked by the prejudices of its time about nations and the sexes. The work that made him the classic of aesthetics came only a quarter of a century later. Kant read Rousseau and the British philosophers avidly, and he later wrote that Hume had woken him from his dogmatic slumber – although that concerned the theory of knowledge rather than aesthetics.
In the 1780s Kant had written two great works that transformed philosophy: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), on what we can know, and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), on how we ought to act. Between the world of nature, where everything follows laws, and the world of freedom, where we act morally, there was a gulf. The Critique of Judgement (1790) was meant to bridge it. The book has two parts, one on aesthetic judgements and one on purposiveness in nature, and it is the first part that has made it famous. Judgement is the capacity to think the particular as contained under the universal. Sometimes the universal, a rule or a concept, is already given, and judgement applies it. Sometimes only the particular is given, and judgement must itself seek the universal. The judgement of taste is of the latter kind, which is why it is so hard to pin down.
Kant’s starting point is the problem of the Enlightenment. He agrees with Hume and the British philosophers that beauty is not a property that can be proved: when I say that a flower is beautiful, I base this on a feeling of pleasure, not on concepts. But he agrees with the rationalists that we lay claim to universal validity. Someone who says “this wine is good to me” does not demand that others agree; someone who calls something beautiful speaks as if beauty were a property of the thing and expects everyone to concur. Kant therefore distinguishes between three kinds of pleasure: in the agreeable, which holds only for me, in the good, which rests on concepts, and in the beautiful. Since the judgement of taste does not rest on concepts, no one can be persuaded of beauty by argument. If someone reads me his poem and it does not please me, Kant writes, he may cite Batteux or Lessing and all the rules of taste; I will still stop my ears and trust my own judgement. Taste demands autonomy: one must see for oneself.
Kant analyses the judgement of taste in four steps, which he calls moments. The first is that pleasure in the beautiful is disinterested: it does not care whether the object exists or what it can be used for. He gives the example of a palace. Someone may think it a waste, or, like an Iroquois sachem visiting Paris, prefer the eating-houses to all the palaces, or, with Rousseau, rail against the vanity of the great. All this may be right, but it has nothing to do with whether the palace is beautiful. The second moment is that the beautiful pleases universally without a concept. The third is that the beautiful has a purposiveness without purpose: the form seems fitted, as if made for our capacity to perceive it, without our thinking of any definite aim. The fourth is that the judgement claims necessity, since it presupposes a common sense, a sensus communis, in all human beings.
Why can we demand that others agree? Kant holds that the experience of beauty arises in a free play between the imagination, which gathers together what we see, and the understanding, which otherwise orders it under concepts. When something is beautiful, both are set in motion without any determinate knowledge resulting. Since all human beings have the same faculties, I can attribute the same experience to others. Beauty thus lies neither solely in the thing nor solely in my private preference, but in the relationship between the form and the faculties that everyone shares. Kant also puts it this way: one can quarrel about taste, even though one cannot prove it. We reason, compare and try to make others see what we see, because we presuppose that the same faculty exists in them.
From this follows one of Kant’s most debated distinctions, that between free and dependent beauty. Flowers, many birds, shells, scrolls and foliage on wallpaper are freely beautiful: we do not need to know what they are meant to be in order to find them beautiful. A human being, a horse or a building – a church, a palace, an arsenal – is, by contrast, judged with regard to what it is meant to be, and its beauty is dependent on that. This was an important observation for architecture: a building cannot be judged as pure form, since its purpose is always part of the picture. Kant also held that in the visual arts, architecture included, drawing and form are what is essential, while colours mostly contribute charm – a late echo of the academy’s dispute over line and colour. In the same context Kant writes of the ideal of beauty, which can apply only to the human figure, since only human beings have their purpose within themselves. As an example of the average normal idea of a body he cites Polykleitos’ famous Doryphoros – one of many signs of how the canon of antiquity lived on in his thinking.
Alongside the beautiful stands the sublime, which Kant took over from Burke but gave a new meaning. The mathematically sublime we encounter in the immensely large: when we stand before the pyramids or enter St Peter’s in Rome and cannot grasp the whole. The dynamically sublime we encounter in the mighty forces of nature – thunderclouds, volcanoes, hurricanes, the boundless ocean, a lofty waterfall – which we observe from a place of safety. At first we feel small and powerless. Then we discover in ourselves a faculty greater than all nature: reason, which can think the infinite and will not be subdued by nature’s might. The sublime therefore lies not really in nature but in our minds. Kant held that the sublime shows itself most purely in raw nature, not in works of art, where human intentions and measures are always present. It was the painters of Romanticism who took up the challenge of bringing it into the picture nonetheless.
Fine art differs from the beauty of nature in being made with intent. Yet it must look like nature, that is, not like something produced according to rules. It can therefore be created only by genius, the innate talent through which nature gives the rule to art. Genius creates works that are original but also exemplary, so that they become models for others without being teachable as recipes. What makes a work of art alive Kant calls spirit: the capacity to present aesthetic ideas, representations that give much to think about without any determinate concept being adequate to them. Among the arts he ranks poetry highest. Architecture he counts among the formative arts but stresses that its purpose is essential to it. Fine art also differs from craft, which is carried out for wages and for some other end. Art should be free, like play, even if it requires schooling and mechanical skill as its basis.
Finally Kant links the beautiful to morality. Beauty is a symbol of the morally good, since in both cases we rise above the merely private and put ourselves in the place of everyone else. He sees an immediate interest in the beauty of nature as the mark of a good soul. This is an important nuance in an aesthetics that is otherwise often read as pure formalism: disinterested experience is not indifference, but prepares us to love something without wanting to possess it.
The Critique of Judgement became a foundation for almost everything that followed. Schiller built directly on Kant, while Herder attacked him in Kalligone in 1800. The Romantics took over genius and the sublime, Schopenhauer disinterested contemplation. A century later the idea of the autonomy of form became a source for the formalists of modernism, and Clement Greenberg called Kant the first real modernist. At the same time criticism has been persistent, from Nietzsche to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who saw “pure” taste as the hallmark of an educated class. The chapter on Romanticism takes up where Kant left off: can art give us access to something that philosophy cannot reach? In 1914 Clive Bell made significant form the defining feature of art, and much of what was written about abstract art in the 20th century can be read as a continuation of Kant’s third moment.