Grice's Kantotelian aesthetics

THE IMMANUEL

Immanuel Kant's only significant work in aesthetics, the Critique of the Power of Judgment, came late in his life, at the end of the extraordinary decade in which he had published the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, revised 1787), the Prolegomena to any future Metaphysics (1783), the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and a host of important essays on history, science, and theology as well as philosophy.

Although we take its existence for granted now, Kant's third Critique could only have struck its original audience as a surprising and puzzling work.

It is surprising, because the second critique had not announced a forthcoming third anymore than the first had announced that there would be a second.

It is puzzling, because the treatise not only gives an extended treatment to one topic, namely aesthetic experience and judgment, which Kant had previously denied could be the subject of a science (Critique of Pure Reason, A 21/B 35–6), but also links that topic with another, namely the teleological judgment of both organisms within nature and of nature as a whole, to which Kant had never before linked it.

Clearly there must have been some revolution in Kant's conception of the tasks of philosophy as well in his assessment of the prospects of both aesthetics and teleology.

This change in view both made it imperative for him and enabled him to write this book, linking two subjects that were not only disparate but that had also previously been problematic for him, so soon after having completed his exhausting labors on the first two critiques.

Kant does not immediately reveal a profound motivation for the treatise in either the first draft of its Introduction, the so-called “first introduction” of 1789, or in the Preface or first section of the published Introduction as well as several of its subsequent sections.

These are focused on the distinctions among the several faculties of the mind and the divisions of philosophy.

As a result, the introductions make it seem as if Kant has been moved primarily by a pedantic desire for completeness to find a place in his system for two disciplines, 'aesthetica' and teleology, that had been discussed by many of his predecessors, but that had apparently not played a large role in his own thought heretofore.

It seems that the main task of the third Critique will be to introduce the conception of a new class of judgments or new use of the power of judgment, “reflecting” (reflektierend) judgment, which will subsume the aesthetic and teleological judgment and demonstrate both their affinities with and differences from the theoretical judgments analyzed and grounded in the first Critique and the moral judgments treated in the second Critique.

However, Kant is driven to connect aesthetic and teleological judgment by a much more profound and powerful motivation than that of mere systematic housekeeping.

This deeper motivation is first revealed in the second section of the published Introduction.

Here Kant claims that there is a substantive and important problem that calls for a third critique, namely that, "although there is an incalculable gulf fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, as the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, as the super-sensible, so that from the former to the latter (thus by means of the theoretical use of reason) no transition is possible, just as if there were so many different worlds, the first of which can have no influence on the second: yet the latter should have an influence on the former, namely the concept of freedom should make the end that is imposed by its laws real in the sensible world, and nature must consequently also be able to be conceived in such a way that the lawfulness of its form is at least in agreement with the possibility of the ends that are to be realized in it in accordance with the laws of freedom."
CPJ, Introduction, section II, 5:174–5; see also section IX, 5:195–6

The problem that has apparently not been solved by the earlier two critiques is that of showing that our choice to act in accordance with the moral law, as the fundamental principle of all laws of freedom, a choice that can be free only if it is conceived of as taking place in a “super-sensible” or noumenal realm that is not governed by the deterministic laws of “sensible” or phenomenal nature, where every event is fully determined by chains of causality extending far back beyond any particular choice of any particular individual, must nevertheless be efficacious within that phenomenal world, able to transform the natural world into a “moral world” where people really do act in accordance with the moral law and the ends that are imposed upon us by that law really can be realized.

And the reason for linking aesthetic and teleological judgment together in a third critique apparently must be that these two forms of human experience and judgment together somehow offer a solution to this problem.

But what problem about the efficacy of the laws of freedom in the realm of nature could remain to be solved after the first two critiques?

The Critique of Pure Reason had argued that although we can disprove the possibility of any breach in the determinism of the natural world and cannot have theoretical knowledge of the freedom of our will in the noumenal world, nevertheless we can coherently conceive of the latter.

And the Critique of Practical Reason had argued that we can confidently infer the reality of our noumenal freedom to choose to do whatever morality requires of us from our immediate awareness of our obligation under the moral law combined with the principle that if we ought to do something then we must be able to do it (see Critique of Practical Reason, §6, 5:30, and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:62, 66–7).

The second Critique had also argued that since morality imposes an end upon us, namely that of realizing the highest good, the greatest happiness consistent with the greatest virtue, we must believe this to be possible, and thus must postulate “a supreme cause of nature having a causality in keeping with the moral disposition” (Critique of Practical Reason, Dialectic, 5:125; translation from Gregor, p. 240). If Kant has already established that on the basis of our awareness of our obligations under the moral law we can be confident that we have free will and that all of the laws of nature are at least consistent with our realization of the ends commanded by the moral law, what more needs to be done in order to throw a bridge between the theoretical cognition of nature and the laws of freedom?

As both the second critique and the preceding Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals make clear, Kant clearly recognizes that in order to act morally, we need to (i) understand the moral law and what it requires of us; (ii) believe that we are in fact free to choose to do what it requires of us rather than to do what all our other motives, which can be subsumed under the rubric of self-love, might suggest to us; (iii) believe that the objectives that morality imposes upon us can actually be achieved, and (iv) have an adequate motivation for our attempt to do what morality requires of us in lieu of the mere desirability of particular goals it might happen to license or even impose in particular circumstances.

All of these together constitute the conditions of the possibility of morality. Kant also thinks that at one level all these conditions are satisfied by pure practical reason itself: (i) the very form of pure practical reason gives us the moral law; (ii) the first “fact” of pure practical reason, namely our consciousness of our obligation under this law, implies the reality of our freedom to be moral by means of the principle that we must be able to do what we know we ought to do; (iii) we can postulate by pure practical reason alone that the laws of nature are compatible with the demands of morality because both laws ultimately have a common author; and finally (iv) pure respect for the moral law itself can be a sufficient motivation for us to attempt to carry it out (and attempts to do so have “moral worth” only when that is our motivation).

But Kant also recognizes that we are sensuous as well as rational creatures, and need sensuous as well as rational presentation and confirmation of the conditions of the possibility of morality. The task of the third Critique will then be to show how both aesthetic and teleological experience and judgment provide sensuous confirmation of what we do already know in an abstract way, but also need to feel or make palpable to ourselves, namely the efficacy of our free choice of the fundamental principle of morality in the natural world and the realizability of the objectives which that choice imposes upon us, summed up in the concept of the highest good. Specifically, Kant will argue that although in its purest form, the free play of our understanding and imagination that constitutes the experience of natural beauty does not presuppose any judgment of moral value, the very fact of the existence of natural beauty appears to confirm that the world is hospitable to our goals, especially our moral goals, while our experiences of natural sublimity and artistic beauty both involve the free play of our cognitive powers with morally significant ideas, and thus are distinctively aesthetic yet morally significant.

Following the canonical model introduced into eighteenth-century aesthetics by Burke and transmitted into Germany by Mendelssohn, Kant divides the first half of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment,” into two main parts, the “Analytic of the Beautiful” and the “Analytic of the Sublime.”

But Kant actually analyzes three main forms of aesthetic experience—the experience of beauty, paradigmatically natural beauty; the experience of the sublime, again paradigmatically of sublimity in nature; and the experience of fine art—and each of these forms of aesthetic experience ultimately reveals distinctive connections to morality.

Starting from the claim that Francis Hutcheson had made in 1725 and Mendelssohn reintroduced in 1785, Kant begins his analysis of the judgment of taste, that is, our claim that a particular object is beautiful, from the premise that our pleasure in a beautiful object occurs independently of any interest in the existence of the object as physiologically agreeable (CPJ, §3, 5:205–7) or as good for some purpose expressed by a determinate concept of utility or morality (CPJ, §4, 5:207–9).

Yet he insists, a judgment of taste does not express a merely idiosyncratic association of pleasure with an object.

To call an object beautiful is to speak with a “universal voice,” to assert that the pleasure one takes in the object is one that should be felt by anyone who responds to the object, at least under ideal or optimal circumstances, even though “there can also be no rule in accordance with which someone could be compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful (CPJ, §8, 5:216).

How can one's pleasure in an object be independent of its subsumption under any determinate concept and its satisfaction of any determinate interest and yet be valid for all who properly respond to the object? Kant's answer is that although our pleasure in a beautiful object is not a response to its subsumption under a determinate concept, it is an expression of the free play of the cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding that such an object induces, and those cognitive faculties must in fact work the same way in everyone.

His underlying idea is that we experience a beautiful object as having the kind of unity that we ordinarily find in objects by subsuming them under a determinate concept, but independently of any such subsumption.

Because finding such unity is our ultimate cognitive aim, we take pleasure in this discovery, especially since the unity we find must appear contingent, as it were unexpected, if it is not linked to any determinate concept (see CPJ, Introduction VI, 5:186–7).

This is not to say that we do not subsume an object we find beautiful under any determinate concepts at all; we must if we are even to identify the object of our pleasure and judgment of taste in any determinate way.

Kant's theory must rather be that when we find an object beautiful we experience it as having a degree of unity that cannot be explained by any of the determinate concepts under which we do subsume it). Kant thus appeals to the concept of free play, hinted at by Mendelssohn and developed further by Sulzer, to solve the problem of taste that was emphasized by British aestheticians such as Hutcheson and Hume, with whose works Kant was intimately familiar.

In this account, Kant makes two striking assumptions.

First, he asserts that in “pure” judgments of taste our pleasure in beauty is a response only to the perceptible form of an object, not to any matter or content it may have—for example, in pictorial arts, “the drawing is what is essential,” while the “colors that illuminate the outline…can…enliven the object in itself for sensation, but cannot make it…beautiful” (CPJ, §14, 5:225).

Second, he assumes that the cognitive faculties of all human beings work the same way, that is, respond to particular objects in the same way, even when they are in “free play” rather than at serious work. The second of these claims seems indefensible, but Kant never backs off from it.

The first of these claims also seems unjustifiable, but this time Kant modifies his claim almost as soon as he makes it.

While he continues to maintain that in pure judgments of taste our pleasure is in the unity of the form of the object alone, he quickly recognizes that there are a variety of impure forms of beauty where what we respond to with the free play of our imagination and understanding is harmony between an object's perceptible form and its matter, its content, or even its purpose.

Thus, just two sections after his assertion of formalism, Kant introduces the category of “adherent beauty,” which is the kind of harmony between an object's form and its intended function that pleases us in a beautiful summer-house or racehorse; and he will subsequently assume that successful works of fine art normally have intellectual content and please us in virtue of the harmony among their content, form, and material.

However, Kant interposes his analysis of the experience of the sublime between his initial analysis of pure beauty and his later analysis of fine art. Again following a hint that we have already found in Mendelssohn, Kant recognizes two forms of the sublime: the “mathematical” and the “dynamical.” Our experience of both is a mixture of pain and pleasure, a moment of pain due to an initial sense of the limits of imagination followed by pleasure at the recognition that it is our own power of reason that reveals the limits of our imagination. The mathematical sublime involves the relationship between imagination and theoretical reason, which is the source of our idea of the infinite; our experience of this form of the sublime is triggered by the observation of natural vistas so vast that our effort to grasp them in a single image is bound to fail, but which then pleases us because this very effort of the imagination reminds us that we have a power of reason capable of formulating the idea of the infinite (CPJ, §26, 5:254–5).

Kant holds that in this experience we do not just infer that we have such a faculty, but actually experience “a feeling that we have pure self-sufficient reason” (CPJ, §27, 5:258). In the case of the dynamical sublime, what we experience is a harmony between our imagination and practical reason. This experience is induced by natural objects that seem not just vast, but overwhelmingly powerful and threatening—volcanoes, raging seas, and the like (CPJ, §28, 5:261. Kant's examples were all commonplaces in the eighteenth century, going back to Joseph Addison's illustrations of “grandeur” in Spectator 412, June 1712). Here we experience fear at the thought of our own physical injury or destruction followed by the satisfying feeling that we have "within ourselves a capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature," namely, "our power (which is not part of nature) to regard those things about which we are concerned (goods, health and life) as trivial, and hence to regard its power (to which, to be sure, we are subjected in regard to these things) as not the sort of dominion over ourselves and our authority to which we would have to bow if it came down to our highest principles and their affirmation or abandonment."
CPJ, §28, 5:262)

Now we can turn to Kant's analysis of fine art and our experience of it. For Kant, all art is intentional human production that requires skill or talent, yet fine or “beautiful” (schöne) art is produced with the intention of doing what anything beautiful does, namely, promoting the free play of the cognitive powers. That a work of fine art must be the product of intention and yet produce the free play of the mental powers seems like the paradox that “beautiful art, although it is certainly intentional, must nevertheless not seem intentional” (CPJ, §45, 5:306–7). Further, Kant also assumes that although our pleasure in beauty should be a response to the form of an object alone, fine art is paradigmatically mimetic, that is, has representational or semantic content (CPJ, §48, 5:311). This too seems like a paradox. Kant aims to resolve both of these apparent paradoxes through his theory that successful works of fine art are products of genius, a natural gift that gives the rule to art (CPJ, §46, 5:307). A work of genius must have “spirit,” which it gets through its content, typically—as Kant assumes without argument, although perhaps in his time, long before the invention of non-objective art, without any real need for argument—a rational idea, indeed an idea relevant specifically to morality. But in order to be beautiful, a work of art must still leave room for the freedom of the imagination, and therefore cannot present such ideas to us directly and didactically (indeed, such ideas cannot be directly and adequately presented in sensible form). Instead, a work of art succeeds when it presents an “aesthetic idea,” a representation of the imagination that “at least strive[s] toward something lying beyond the bounds of experience, and thus seek[s] to approximate a presentation of the concepts of reason.” A successful work of art also “stimulates so much thinking,” such a wealth of particular “attributes” or images and incidents, “that it can never be grasped in a determinate concept” (CPJ, §49, 5:314–15)—thereby stimulating a pleasurable feeling of free play among the imagination, understanding, and reason while at the same time satisfying the demand that a work of art have both a purpose and a content.

We can now see how Kant thinks that our aesthetic experiences and judgments can bridge the gulf between our abstract, intellectual understanding of the requirements and conditions of morality and a palpable, sensuous representation of those requirements and conditions. Kant suggests six links between the aesthetic and moral, which together make palpable the satisfaction of the four conditions of the possibility of morality that were noted in the introduction to the present section.

First, Kant evidently holds that objects of aesthetic experience can present morally significant ideas to us without sacrificing what is essential to them as objects of aesthetic response and judgment. This is obvious in the theory of aesthetic ideas, where Kant indeed assumes that works of art always have some morally relevant content. But this view takes other forms as well. In fact, Kant maintains that all forms of beauty, natural as well as artistic, can be regarded as expressions of aesthetic ideas: even natural objects can suggest moral ideas to us although such suggestion is not the product of any intentional human activity (CPJ, §51, 5:319). In “The Ideal of Beauty,” Kant also maintains that beauty in the human figure can be taken as “the visible expression of moral ideas, which inwardly govern human beings”; here he argues that only human beauty can be taken as a unique standard for beauty, because it is the only form of beauty that can express something absolutely and unconditionally valuable, namely the moral autonomy of which humans alone are capable. At the same time he holds there is no determinate way in which this unique value can be expressed in the human form, thus there is always something free in the outward expression in the human figure of the inner moral value of the human character (CPJ, §17, 5:235–6).

The second link is Kant's claim that the aesthetic experience of the dynamical sublime is nothing other than a feeling of the power of our own practical reason to accept the pure principle of morality and to act in accordance with it in spite of all the threats or inducements to do otherwise that nature might place in our way. Because the experience of the dynamical sublime so centrally involves an intimation of our own capacity to be moral, Kant actually insists that “the sublime in nature is only improperly so called, and should properly be ascribed only to the manner of thinking, or rather its foundation in human nature” (CPJ, §30, 5:280). And while he does not want to claim that this experience is identical to explicit moral reasoning, but only a “disposition of the mind that is similar to the moral disposition” (CPJ, General Remark following §29, 5:268), he does in at least one place argue that the complex character of the experience of the sublime makes it the best representation in our experience of our moral situation itself (CPJ, General Remark following §29, 5:271).

However, Kant elsewhere argues, third, that there are crucial aspects of our moral condition that are symbolized by the beautiful rather than the sublime. He claims that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good because there are significant parallels between our experience of beauty and the structure of morality. Indeed, he insists that it is only insofar as the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good that we have any right not merely to predict that under ideal circumstances others should agree with our appraisals of beauty but actually to demand that they do so (CPJ, §59, 5:353). Kant adduces “several aspects of this analogy,” the most important of which is that

The freedom of the imagination (thus of the sensibility of our faculty) is represented in the judging of the beautiful as in accord with the lawfulness of the understanding (in the moral judgment the freedom of the will is conceived as the agreement of the latter with itself in accordance with universal laws of reason). (CPJ, §59, 5:354)

Because the experience of beauty is an experience of the freedom of the imagination in its play with the understanding, it can be taken as a palpable symbol of the freedom of the will to determine itself by moral laws that is necessary for morality but not itself something that can be directly experienced. In other words, it is the very independence of aesthetic response from direct determination by concepts, including moral concepts, that makes the experience of beauty an experience of freedom that can in turn symbolize moral freedom. Presumably this can be reconciled with Kant's earlier claim that the sublime is the most appropriate symbol of morality by observing that while the experience of beauty makes the freedom of the will palpable to us, it is only the mixed experience of the sublime that brings home to feeling that this freedom must often be exercised in the face of resistance offered by our own inclinations.

Kant's fourth connection between the aesthetic and the ethical lies in his theory of the “intellectual interest” in the beautiful. Here Kant argues that although our basic pleasure in a beautiful object must be independent of any antecedent interest in its existence, we may add a further layer of pleasure to that basic experience if the existence of beautiful objects suggests some more generally pleasing fact about our situation in the world. Kant's claim is that since it is of interest to practical reason that nature be hospitable to its objectives, we take pleasure in any evidence that nature is amenable to our objectives, even when those are not specifically moral; and the natural existence of beauty is such evidence, because the experience of beauty is itself an unexpected fulfillment of our most basic cognitive objective.

Kant's fifth claim is that aesthetic experience is conducive to proper moral conduct itself. In his concluding comment on his analyses of both the beautiful and the sublime he states that “The beautiful prepares us to love something, even nature, without interest; the sublime, to esteem it, even contrary to our (sensible) interest” (CPJ, General Remark following §29, 5:267), where being able to love without any personal interest and to esteem even contrary to our own interest are necessary preconditions of proper moral conduct. Kant makes a similar point in his later Metaphysics of Morals (1797) when he argues that “a propensity to wanton destruction of what is beautiful in inanimate nature,” even though we do not owe any moral duties directly to anything other than ourselves and other human beings, nevertheless

weakens or uproots that feeling in [us] which, though not of itself moral, is still a disposition of sensibility that greatly promotes morality or at least prepares the way for it: the disposition, namely, to love something (e.g., beautiful crystal formations, the indescribable beauty of plants) even apart from any intention to use it. (Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue §17, 6:643; Gregor, p. 564)

Sixth and finally, in the brief “Appendix on the methodology of taste,” Kant suggests that the cultivation or realization of common standards of taste in a society can be conducive to the discovery of the more general “art of the reciprocal communication of the ideas of the most educated part” of a society “with the cruder, the coordination of the breadth and refinement of the former with the natural simplicity and originality of the latter” (CPJ, §60, 5:356), where this art is apparently necessary to the realization of the goal of “lawful sociability,” or the establishment of a stable polity on the basis of principles of justice rather than sheer force.

Thus, aesthetic experience can be conducive to the development of sound politics as well as personal ethics, although the two are of course not unconnected, since Kant is a political moralist who believes that we have a moral duty to establish a just state, not merely a prudential interest in doing so.

These six links between aesthetics and morality satisfy the four conditions that need to be met in order to bridge the gulf between nature and freedom by making our abstract grasp of the contents and conditions of morality palpable to our sensuous nature. In particular, (i) the presentation of moral ideas in objects of natural and artistic beauty and especially in beautiful human form itself provides sensuous illustration of moral ideas, above all the foundational idea of the unconditional value of human freedom itself; (ii) the experiences of the dynamical sublime and of the beautiful in their different ways both confirm our abstract recognition of our own freedom always to choose to do as morality requires; (iii) the intellectual interest in the beautiful provides sensuous confirmation of nature's amenability to our objectives, which is otherwise only a postulate of pure practical reason; and (iv) the claims that the experiences of the beautiful and the sublime and the sharing of these feelings among different strata of highly diversified societies are conducive to the realization of morality reveal ways in which our natural sensuous dispositions can be used as means to the realization of the goal set by our purely rational disposition to be moral.