The Origins of Kant's Aesthetics 1009209426, 9781009209427

Citation preview

THE ORIGINS OF KANT’S AESTHETICS

Organized around eight themes central to aesthetic theory today, this book examines the sources and development of Kant’s aesthetics by mining his publications, correspondence, handwritten notes, and university lectures. Each chapter explores one of the following themes: aesthetic judgment and normativity, formal beauty, conceptual beauty, artistic creativity or genius, the fine arts, the sublime, ugliness and disgust, and humor. Robert Clewis considers how Kant’s thought was shaped by authors such as Christian Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten, Georg Meier, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Sulzer, Johann Herder, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Henry Home, Charles Batteux, JeanJacques Rousseau, and Voltaire. His study uncovers and illuminates the complex development of Kant’s aesthetic theory and will be useful to advanced students and scholars in fields across the humanities and studies of the arts.  .  is the author of The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Kant’s Humorous Writings: An Illustrated Guide (2020) and the editor of Reading Kant’s Lectures (2015) and The Sublime Reader (2019).

THE ORIGINS OF KANT’ S AESTHETICS ROBERT R. CLEWIS Gwynedd Mercy University

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge 2 8, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York,  10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009209427 : 10.1017/9781009209403 © Robert R. Clewis 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Clewis, Robert R., 1977– author. : The origins of Kant’s aesthetics / Robert R. Clewis. : Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. :  2022029795 (print) |  2022029796 (ebook) |  9781009209427 (hardback) |  9781009209434 (paperback) |  9781009209403 (epub) : : Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804 | Aesthetics. | Philosophy, German–18th century :  2799.4 54 2023 (print) |  2799.4 (ebook) |  111/.85–dc23/eng/20221021 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029795 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029796  978-1-009-20942-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In memory of Chester McConnell Thompson

CONTENTS

List of Figures viii Acknowledgments ix A Note on Citations xii List of Abbreviations xiii 1

Introduction

 

Aesthetic Judgment and Beauty

1

On Rules of Taste

2

Beauty Free

3

Beauty Grounded

 

21

23

51 70

Genius and the Fine Arts

4

Genius, Thick and Thin

5

Classifying the Fine Arts

 

101

103 129

Negative and Positive States

6

Meet the Sublime Now: It’s a Negative Pleasure

7

Ugliness and Disgust: Disagreeable Sensations

8

Playing with Humor Closing Reflections Bibliography Index 258

211 241

243

vii

149 151 179

FI GURES

5.1 Classification of the arts 8.1 The aesthetic arts 224

131

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful for the permission to use passages or sections (revised and adapted) from the following publications: Chapter 1: Robert R. Clewis, “The Sources and Development of Kant’s Views on Aesthetic Normativity,” Contemporary Studies in Kantian Philosophy 4 (2019): 1–19. Chapter 3: Robert R. Clewis, “Beauty and Utility in Kant’s Aesthetics: The Origins of Adherent Beauty,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 56, no. 2 (2018): 305–36. Chapter 6: Robert R. Clewis, “The Majesty of Cognition: The Sublime in Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, and Kant,” in Baumgarten’s Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. J. Colin McQuillan (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 241–72. Chapter 8: Robert R. Clewis, Kant’s Humorous Writings: An Illustrated Guide (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). This book came into existence, alas, in a time of Covid-19. I am grateful to everyone who made its publication possible despite the countless stresses caused by a global pandemic. I have incurred innumerable debts to those who have shaped my understanding of Kant’s aesthetics and his intellectual development. Any list of the individuals to whom I am indebted will surely be inadequate. For their suggestions or comments, or in various ways shaping this book, I would like to thank Uygar Abaci, Karl Ameriks, Lydia Amir, Henny Blomme, Jane Boddy, Karin de Boer, Emily Brady, Reinhard Brandt, Javier Burdman, Noël Carroll, John Carvalho, Loraine Clewis, Rick Clewis, Jennifer Dobe, Ivan Drpić, Corey Dyck, Richard Eldridge, Antonino Falduto, Susan Feagin, Serena Feloj, Luigi Filieri, Lea Fink, Luca Fonnesu, Courtney Fugate, Pablo Genazzano, Kristin Gjesdal, Paul Guyer, Espen Hammer, Jackson Hoerth, Desmond Hogan, Jonathan Johnson, David Kim, Pauline Kleingeld, Heiner Klemme, Efraín Lazos, Charles Lewis, Paulo Licht dos Santos, Robert Louden, Huaping Lu-Adler, Samantha Matherne, J. Colin McQuillan, Jennifer Mensch, Stefano Micali, Kate Moran, Pablo Muchnik, Lara Ostaric, Stephen Palmquist, Konstantin Pollok, Dennis Schulting, Elisa Schwab, Sandra Shapshay, Susan Meld Shell, Werner Stark, Michela Summa, Oliver Thorndike, Edgar Valdez, ix

x



Bart Vandenabeele, Ian Verstegen, Achim Vesper, Michael Weiß, Reed Winegar, Mary Wiseman, John Zammito, Melissa Zinkin, and Günter Zöller. Hilary Gaskin was a constant source of support at all stages of this project. I am indebted to the anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press for their astute advice on the proposal and typescript. Many thanks to Donna Smyrl for helping design the two figures. Antje Kühnast read a late draft of the book, and Seydel Acuña and Sarah Kim helped me with some of the proofreading. All of this book’s remaining errors and infelicities are of course my own. The very early stages of the book were in part supported by an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellowship at the University of Munich (LMU). I am grateful to Günter Zöller for assisting me during my stay, which led to my editing a volume, Reading Kant’s Lectures (2015), which in turn laid the foundation for working with Kant’s lectures and literary remains as I do in the present study. One of the pleasures of writing this book was holding and touching some of the original student transcriptions of Kant’s lectures. I am grateful to the Journal of the History of Philosophy for awarding me a Kristeller-Popkin Travel Fellowship that made archival research possible. For access to such materials, I am indebted to the Marburger Kant-Archiv (with special thanks to Werner Stark), the Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, and Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preußischer Kulturbesitz. This book was also in part made possible by the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main, where I completed several of the chapters in 2019 and early 2020, before the pandemic struck. I am grateful to Winfried Menninghaus and the Max Planck researchers with whom I discussed this project. I would also like to thank another group in Frankfurt: scholars of Kant’s philosophy at the Goethe University of Frankfurt and members of the Frankfurt Kant-Arbeitskreis. I am indebted to Marcus Willaschek, who welcomed me to Goethe University, and I profited a great deal from conversations with Gabriele Gava, Jamie Hebbeler, Achim Vesper, Christian Wenzel, and other members of the Frankfurt Kant-Arbeitskreis. My understanding of aesthetics has been informed by the enjoyable discussions that have taken place in the Philadelphia Area Aesthetics Reading Group over the years. May the readings continue! The last phase of the book was also in part supported by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. For the lively discussion and useful comments, I would thus like to thank the organizers, commentators, and audiences where I presented earlier versions of this material, including Goethe University, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Vytautas Magnus University, and the University of Pavia (humor); the University of Würzburg (formalism); the University of Potsdam (genius); the University of Pennsylvania, LMU Munich, and the Immanuel Kant Baltic



xi

Federal University in Kaliningrad (fine arts); Martin-Luther-Universität HalleWittenberg and Federal University of São Carlos (normativity); and Princeton University (sublimity). Thanks, too, to the participants and audiences at the Twelfth International Kant Congress in Vienna (2015) and the Thirteenth Congress in Oslo (2019), and at the meetings of the American Society of Aesthetics and the European Society of Aesthetics. I am very fortunate to have Michael Clinton, Donald Duclow, and Patrick Messina as friends and colleagues in the humanities at Gwynedd Mercy University, and I am grateful to Betsy Chapin, Lisa McGarry, and Mary van Brunt for their ongoing support of this project. I would like to thank Elisa Schwab, Sofia, Giulia, and Lawrence as well as Giovanna for making this book possible. I lost my grandfather Chester McConnell Thompson on January 23, 2021 – one of many taken by Covid-19 – and I dedicate this book to his memory.

A NOTE ON CITA TIONS

References to Kant’s writings are from the works by Immanuel Kant published in the Academy Edition (Akademie-Ausgabe [AA]), Kant’s gesammelte Schriften (1900–), edited by the Royal Prussian, subsequently German, then Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, in 29 volumes, now published by Walter de Gruyter. Following convention, references to the first Critique (Kritik der reinen Vernunft) use the standard A/B page numbers, where “A” refers to the first edition of 1781 and “B” to the second edition of 1787. Citations use Arabic numerals to indicate the AA volume, followed by the page. For instance, “VAnth/Parow 25:380” refers to the Parow anthropology lecture transcription, Academy Edition volume 25, page 380. When a lecture is not published in the Academy Edition, references are to the manuscript page number. Thus, “VAnth/Reichel ms page 83” refers to page 83 in the unedited manuscript of the anthropology lecture Reichel. Kant’s Reflexionen (Reflections or handwritten notes) are cited by means of the abbreviation “R” followed by the conventional number of the individual Reflections provided in the Academy Edition volumes. For example, “R 1503; 1780–84; 15:805” refers to Reflection number 1503, written at some time between 1780 and 1784 and found on page 805 of AA volume 15. Translations of Kant’s writings are typically taken from the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge University Press, 1992–), with occasional (silent) modifications. When the Cambridge Edition does not translate a passage, the translation is frequently my own and indicated as such.

xii

ABBREVIATIONS

The following abbreviations of Kant’s works stem from the ones adopted by the journal Kant-Studien (published by Walter de Gruyter in Berlin). Since most of the abbreviations refer to writings found in the Academy Edition (AA), the relevant volume (when applicable) is listed after each text.

AA Anth BDG BGSE Br EEKU GSE Kowalewski

KpV KrV KU Log MS MSI NEV NG Phil Enz R

Akademie-Ausgabe Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (AA 07) Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (AA 02) Bemerkungen in den Beobachutngen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (AA 20) Briefe (AA 10–13) Erste Einleitung in die Kritik der Urteilskraft (AA 20) Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (AA 02) edition that includes V-Anth/Dohna (published in Immanuel Kant, Die philosophischen Hauptvorlesungen Immanuel Kants, ed. Arnold Kowalewski [Munich and Leipzig: Rösl, 1924]) Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (AA 05) Kritik der reinen Vernunft (cited according to the A and B editions) Kritik der Urteilskraft (AA 05) Jäsche Logik (AA 09) Die Metaphysik der Sitten (AA 06) De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis (Inaugural Dissertation) (AA 02) Nachricht von der Einrichtung seiner Vorlesungen in dem Winterhalbenjahre von 1765–1766 (AA 02) Versuch, den Begriff der negativen Größen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen (AA 02) Philosophische Enzyklopädie (AA 29) Reflexion (AA 14–9)

xiii

xiv TG UD ÜGTP V-Anth/Brauer V-Anth/Busolt V-Anth/Collins V-Anth/Ding V-Anth/Dohna V-Anth/Fried V-Anth/Ham V-Anth/ Mensch V-Anth/Mron V-Anth/Parow V-Anth/Phil V-Anth/Pillau V-Anth/Reichel V-Lo/Blom V-Lo/Dohna V-Lo/Phil V-Lo/Wien V-Met/Herder V-Met/L1 V-Met/Mron V-Met/Vig V-Mo/Collins V-PG/Holstein V-PP/Herder

   Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch die Träume der Metaphysik (AA 02) Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral (AA 02) Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien in der Philosophie (AA 08) Anthropologie 1772/73 Brauer, unedited manuscript Anthropologie 1788/89 Busolt (AA 25) Anthropologie 1772/73 Collins (AA 25) Anthropologie Dingelstaedt, unedited manuscript Anthropologie Dohna-Wundlacken (in the Kowalewski edition) Anthropologie 1775/76 Friedländer (AA 25) Anthropologie Hamilton 1772/73, unedited manuscript Anthropologie 1781/82 Menschenkunde (AA 25) Anthropologie 1784/85 Mrongovius (AA 25) Anthropologie 1772/73 Parow (AA 25) Anthropologie 1772/73 Philippi (AA 25) Anthropologie 1777/78 Pillau (AA 25) Anthropologie Reichel, unedited manuscript Logik Blomberg (AA 24) Logik Dohna-Wundlacken (AA 24) Logik Philippi (AA 24) Wiener Logik (AA 24) Metaphysik Herder (AA 28) Metaphysik L1 (AA 28) Metaphysik Mrongovius (AA 29) Metaphysik Vigilantius (AA 29) Moralphilosophie Collins (AA 27) Physische Geographie Holstein (AA 26.1) Praktische Philosophie Herder (AA 27)

u Introduction

I begin with a letter, sent to Kant from Tübingen on the first of February 1774 and signed by an unidentified author, “C.F.R.”: Noble, Learned, Esteemed Herr Professor, Allow me to thank you for the great pleasure that I have received in particular from your Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime. For quite a while now, I have made aesthetics my main activity and to this end I read not only Longinus, but also in particular the excellent essays of Mendelssohn, Home, Meiners, and others.1 But none pleases me as much as yours. Whenever I compare these or other aestheticians with each other, I find that your opinions are fundamentally different from them regarding how to study the main sources of our cognitions in aesthetics or the way aesthetic concepts are formed in general: whether the kinds of ideas this science encompasses belong to those definite powers that have been discovered up this point or to other capacities not yet perceived by the ancient philosophers; whether the correct taste for the beautiful and sublime is inborn, or whether the sensation of the beautiful comes from the structure of the human being, or whether it depends on education or climate or age, in short whether everything beautiful is relative: and finally if there are different kinds of beauty, which of these should one take to be the most beautiful in general?

A few lines later, C.F.R. offers some answers and defends a distinction between sensible and intellectual beauty. In what concerns the question, whether all beauty is absolute or relative, I always think one must make a distinction between sensible beauty and intellectual beauty. With sensible beauty there can be different opinions; one can claim to take many different things, or even the opposite, to be beautiful; one might not notice certain beautiful qualities because one has not yet been raised to the required enlightenment and cultivation of the understanding; often what is missing is either the agreeable ideas

1

C.F.R. is referring to Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Home (Lord Kames), and Christoph Meiners. The full title of Kant’s 1764 treatise is Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.





   ’  themselves or at least a strong association of them; in that case, everything is only relatively beautiful. Only with the intellectually beautiful, I think, can the judgment of human beings lacking any erroneous concepts not be varied. For, if it is certain that everything intellectual is something absolute and necessary in and of itself – and who should deny this? – then I think my proposition can be rightly said to follow. The same object cannot be understood differently by me and someone else, provided that neither one of us errs. In contrast, with sensible beauty, the matter looks quite different. With this kind, the senses alone are activated, and the senses depend on the various tissues of the fibers and other similar conditions. . . . But the intellectually beautiful must be equally beautiful to all possible nations, and if this is not the case, they err. When it is judged correctly, the object that is intellectually beautiful cannot be judged otherwise. Here only errors can sneak in – not different opinions that are grounded in the matter itself. (Br 10:146–8; my trans.)2

Despite C.F.R.’s pleas to hear from him at the end of the letter, it is unclear that Kant ever responded. If he replied, there is no record of it.3 C.F.R. is touching on the distinction that Kant would later formulate, sixteen years later, in §16 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment: the distinction between adherent beauty and free beauty, or between (partly) conceptual and the sensible beauty. It would be a stretch to say that C.F.R. is the hidden source of Kant’s view in §16, since Kant had already been thinking of something like the distinction between sensible and intellectual beauty. In addition, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Johann Georg Sulzer had already presented similar ideas. It may well be a coincidence that C.F.R.’s position reflects Kant’s own thinking at this time. At the same time, the letter could have encouraged or prompted Kant to develop or make further use of the contrast. In any case, in the 1770s Kant not only made such a distinction, he agreed that the intellectual kind was the more “self-standing” or selfsufficient of the two kinds. This is the exact reverse of his position in the third Critique (i.e., Critique of the Power of Judgment), where Kant holds that it is free beauty that is self-sufficient. In this study, I explore such continuities and discontinuities in Kant’s thinking.

2

3

The collection, Immanuel Kant, Correspondence, trans. Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), does not contain a translation of this letter (Letter 80). The selection of Kant’s letters, Otto Schöndörffer, Kant’s Briefwechsel, ed. Rudolf Malter and Joachim Kopper (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1986), does not include this letter. Nor does the thorough study, Werner Stark, Nachforschungen zu Briefen und Handschriften Immanuel Kants (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1993), identify the letter’s author. Thanks to Werner Stark and Steve Naragon for discussion of this letter (and many other points).





“The Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment” in Kant’s third Critique is widely recognized as being one of the most important contributions to aesthetic theory in the history of the discipline. As one scholar put it, “If the single most influential text in the history of philosophical aesthetics were to be chosen, Immanuel Kant’s . . . Critique of Judgment of 1790 might well turn out to be the one that a majority of philosophers would point to.”4 By paying attention to Kant’s early publications, marginalia, correspondence, and university lectures, I explore the development and sources of Kant’s aesthetic theory.5 Each of this book’s eight chapters is devoted to how Kant handles a theme that should be of interest to readers in aesthetics and allied fields. The themes are aesthetic normativity, free (sensible) beauty, adherent (intellectual) beauty, creativity or genius, the fine arts, sublimity, ugliness and disgust, and humor. For some decades now in anglophone Kant research, scholars have been investigating the genesis of Kant’s third Critique.6 Such studies, though

4

5

6

Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 21. For details about the lectures and Kant’s teaching activity, see Steve Naragon’s remarkable, continuously updated site, “Kant in the Classroom.” https://users.manchester.edu/ Facstaff/SSNaragon/Kant/Home/index.htm [accessed September 7, 2021]. Given the website’s extraordinary breadth and depth, I will not here go over the details of Kant’s teaching activities. See also the Introductions to the “Critical Guide” volumes on Kant’s lectures on anthropology, metaphysics, and ethics. Alix Cohen, ed., Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Courtney D. Fugate, ed., Kant’s Lectures on Metaphysics: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Lara Denis and Oliver Sensen, eds., Kant’s Lectures on Ethics: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). See also the Introduction to Robert R. Clewis, ed., Reading Kant’s Lectures (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 1–29. Howard Caygill, “Kant’s Apology for Sensibility,” in Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Brian Jacobs and Patrick Kain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 164–93. John Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002). John Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 12–28. Paul Guyer, “Play and Society in the Lectures on Anthropology,” in Clewis, Reading Kant’s Lectures, 223–41. Paul Guyer, “Beauty, Freedom, and Morality: Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology and the Development of His Aesthetic Theory,” in Essays, ed. Jacobs and Kain, 135–64. For studies in languages other than English, see, for instance, Daniel Dumouchel, Kant et la genèse de la subjectivité esthétique: Esthétique et philosophie avant la Critique de la faculté de juger (Paris: J. Vrin, 1999). Serena Feloj, Il sublime nel pensiero di Kant (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2013). Paul Menzer, Kants Ästhetik in ihrer Entwicklung (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1952). Alfred Baeumler, Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft. Bd I. Das Irrationalitätsproblem in der Ästhetik und Logik des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur Kritik der Urteilskraft (Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1923). Hans-Georg Juchem, Die Entwicklung des Begriffs des Schönen bei Kant unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Begriffs der verworrenen Erkenntnis (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1970). In this Introduction, I explain how the present book builds on yet goes beyond such studies,



   ’ 

significant, have not been organized around specific topics that are of interest to contemporary aesthetic theorists and readers from kindred disciplines. Nor have they all paid sufficient attention to the claims Kant made in his university lectures and handwritten notes or marginalia (i.e., the Reflexionen or Reflections). And while some studies have examined Kant’s views of aesthetic normativity,7 beauty, or the sublime, much less scrutiny has been given to topics of increased interest across the humanities and social sciences today, such as ugliness, disgust, and humor. And when ugliness, disgust, and humor have been investigated, it has usually been without much attention to the evolution of Kant’s views. How did Kant arrive at the position published in 1790? How might his early views clarify what he was trying to say in the third Critique? I will tackle such questions by focusing on Kant’s early materials, charting the development of his aesthetic theory as Kant was responding to ideas from authors such as Charles Batteux, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Edmund Burke, Henry Home, Hume, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lord Shaftesbury, Voltaire, and Christian Wolff.8 As C.F.R. implies (“Longinus, Mendelssohn, Home, and Meiners”), to understand the origin of Kant’s aesthetics, one must examine Kant’s predecessors. Kant’s ideas in aesthetics drew heavily from the German philosophical tradition that stems from Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten,9 and Meier and extends to Mendelssohn and Sulzer.10 At the same time, Kant also appropriated ideas from British authors as well as (to a lesser extent) writers in French (Batteux, Rousseau) and Italian (Pietro Verri). Since Kant’s early

which tend to be contributions to Kant scholarship without being organized around core themes in aesthetics, or which are working with older editions and translations of Kant’s work. 7 For instance: Konstantin Pollok, Kant’s Theory of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Karl Ameriks, “Ginsborg, Nature, and Normativity,” British Journal of Aesthetics 56, no. 4 (2016): 389–95. David Berger, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory: the Beautiful and Agreeable (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). 8 Given limitations of space, I cannot examine all of the relevant thinkers who deserve to be covered, and writers I discuss are often covered all too briefly. In particular, more attention would be given to Johann Jakob Bodmer, Johann Jakob Breitinger, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Georg Friedrich Meier, Karl Philipp Moritz, and Sulzer. Entire books could be (and sometimes have been) written about their aesthetic theories. 9 When Kant started teaching an anthropology course in 1772/73, he used the “Empirical Psychology” section from Alexander Baumgarten’s Metaphysica (Halle: Carl Hemmerde, 1739). Since that section included topics from Baumgarten’s aesthetics, Kant’s anthropology course is an indispensable source for understanding the development of his aesthetics. 10 On Mendelssohn and Kant, including an examination of their respective aesthetic theories, see Paul Guyer, Reason and Experience in Mendelssohn and Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).





aesthetics synthesizes mainly the German and British aesthetic traditions, I focus on writers from these two traditions. I examine the early materials in order to discern and comment on the continuities and discontinuities in his views, to gain possible insights into the meaning and wider context of the claims in the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment.” (For reasons that will become evident in this Introduction, I do not examine the book’s second part, the “Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment.”) By considering the positions Kant once adopted, one can contextualize and better discern the meaning of some of the claims defended in the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment.” For instance, Kant’s early grounding of taste in harmony and symmetry can explain (if not justify) why the third Critique contains a version of formalism – endorsed by theorists such as Clement Greenberg yet widely disputed by critics who emphasize the cultural, materialist, economic, or political contexts of art production and consumption.11 My intended audience naturally includes Kant scholars, historians of philosophy, and historians of ideas. Given the themes covered in this book, I also write for students and scholars in philosophical aesthetics, art history, German studies, literary theory, media and film studies, and readers working in fields where Kant’s ideas about aesthetics are widely discussed (whether in a positive or negative light). Here Kant may be a widely cited source for the current debate (as in the case of the sublime, ugliness, and humor), while at other times he may be less directly associated with the topic today (as in the fine arts). Each chapter addresses one of the core aesthetic themes in conjunction with selected views of some of his contemporaries or recent predecessors, whose positions will bring into relief the specific features of Kant’s thought.12 To be sure, just as one could write monographs about the historical figures who influenced Kant, one could devote a book to each of my eight topics. Given my aims, I do not assign entire chapters to Kant’s “principle of purposiveness” or to his view of “vital forces.” Few (if any) contemporary authors appeal to such concepts in proposing aesthetic theories today. For similar reasons, I do not devote chapters to Kantian notions of the common

11

12

Influential examples of such critical perspectives are Terry Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), and Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). Similar interpretations continue to be offered today. For a consonant method, see Pauline Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3. Menzer likewise gives a brief overview of Kant’s sources before going into Kant’s views on a given theme (e.g., genius). Menzer, Entwicklung, 84–6.



   ’ 

sense (sensus communis),13 the supersensible substrate underlying inner and outer nature, the reflective power of judgment as such, a transcendental deduction of the a priori principle of the power of judgment, the finality of nature, or nature as a system.14 Kant’s views of physiognomy, including its relation to the ideas of Johann Caspar Lavater and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, may be of considerable historical interest, but given my aims I consider Kant’s account of physiognomy only in passing. Many topics relevant to the “Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment” (organisms, hylozoism, Spinozism, arguments for God’s existence, the ends of history, the systematic nature of philosophy) could not be discussed in this book. Thus, a criterion for selecting the eight themes is influence or import within aesthetics. Kant’s account of each theme, moreover, had to be of sufficient philosophical interest, or (ideally) even guide the contemporary debate (as in the sublime or the form of aesthetic judgment). A related criterion is that Kant himself investigated the topic with sustained attention. I thus leave aside tragedy and comedy as well as the notion of novelty, for Kant did not address these topics at any length in the third Critique (though he touches on them here and there in Reflections and lectures). The centrality of most of the eight topics should be clear. The normativity of aesthetic judgment is widely debated in contemporary philosophical aesthetics, and it seems to be increasingly discussed in the wider humanities and studies of the arts.15 Studies and theories of beauty, whether more conceptual (genrebased, stylistic, institutional) or more formalistic, continue to be carried out or proposed, even if few contemporary critics would view appraisals of art in terms of beauty alone. The notion of genius is present, even if in modified

13

14

15

Kant’s understanding of the common sense or sensus communis surely belongs to his wider aesthetic and epistemological theory, and it connects Kant to predecessors such as Shaftesbury. Given my aim of reaching contemporary audiences, however, I do not explore the notion of the sensus communis. In any case, the notion of the common sense (as a sense for judging in common or with universal/general [allgemeingültig] validity) appears to emerge only around 1781/82 (V-Anth/Mensch 25:1095–6), or 1777–80 (VMet/L1 28:250–1), or 1776–78, here in a sense tied to sociality rather than in the third Critique sense: “Aesthetic judgment (in accordance with common sense) is taste. . . . Taste is the judgment of society or social judgment” (1776–78; R 1860; 16:139; cf. R 1850; 1776–78; 16:137). See also the note in Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 372 no. 48. Guyer, Taste, 44, claims that the principle of systematicity is “actually irrelevant” to Kant’s theory of taste. He adds (59): “Kant’s explanation of aesthetic response is at odds with his characterization of the principle of reflective judgment, and the principle of taste has nothing to do with the latter.” Although Kant does not use the phrase “aesthetic normativity” per se, I hope readers will permit me to use it to refer to the bindingness or demand for agreement associated with aesthetic judgments of beauty and sublimity.





form, in theories of artistic creation and creativity generally, and is relevant to the interdisciplinary field of creativity studies that has been growing since the 1950s. The centrality of the fine arts to aesthetics hardly requires comment. The sublime came to particular prominence in European aesthetic debates by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. For a while, especially in the wake of G.W.F. Hegel, the sublime perhaps drifted away to some extent, but now it continues to be widely discussed. The third Critique’s account of ugliness, despite the brevity of Kant’s remarks, has been well studied by scholars such as Karl Rosenkranz since the first half of the nineteenth century, if not earlier. Examined by writers from Aristotle to Lessing, not only is ugliness analyzed in aesthetics today, the concept also seems especially suited for interpreting many contemporary artworks. The inclusion of the chapter on humor perhaps requires more explanation. While humor research is a growing interdisciplinary field, the study of humor within contemporary philosophy can be characterized as a subdiscipline of philosophical aesthetics. There are Kantian reasons, too. First, Kant’s thoughts on humor can be seen as part of his more general aesthetic theory – not just as part of his anthropology, psychology, or ethics. Laughter at humor, Kant thinks, involves a play with aesthetic ideas (or rich representations of the imagination) – similar to how he describes aesthetic play in response to beauty. While the aesthetic play in humor and the one in beauty are not identical, they are analogous.16 Second, Kant considers the ability to create humor via wit to be one of the “agreeable” aesthetic arts. If so, examining humor as an agreeable art can clarify Kant’s view of the arts in general. Finally, in a section on the imagination, Kant himself examines ridicule and laughter after discussing genius or the artist (Anth 7:174). Throughout the anthropology lectures, Kant pursues similar connections between the arts (above all, music) and laughter at humor, both conceived as kinds of play (e.g., V-Anth/ Collins 25:184–7). In each chapter, the investigation is typically guided by an interpretive question. What, according to Kant’s early aesthetics, is the role played by rules? Does he think an artistic genius can produce original nonsense or must it be tamed by taste? How does he classify the fine arts? Guided by the question, each chapter usually includes a version of the following five components: 1. Summarize the general account of the topic Kant defends in the third Critique. 2. Characterize the (modern) intellectual debate or context that shaped Kant’s view of the topic in question. 16

See Robert R. Clewis, Kant’s Humorous Writings: An Illustrated Guide (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 54–8.



   ’ 

3. State the development of Kant’s views by examining the pre-Critical materials (publications, marginalia, correspondence, and lecture transcriptions). 4. Revisit the third Critique, revealing what views are retained, omitted, or modified. 5. Explain any discontinuities or continuities in his views.17 On (1): Entire articles and monographs can be (and have been) devoted to each of the topics summarized toward the beginning of each chapter. The study of Kant’s aesthetics in the third Critique in anglophone Kant studies has grown considerably since the 1970s. Nevertheless, at the beginning of each chapter, I offer as conventional or accurate a reading as possible, while at the same time acknowledging interpretive difficulties and questions. I start each chapter with an overview of Kant’s position in the third Critique, for it is due to his published account, I gather, that readers today would be interested in studying his intellectual development in the first place. With such an overview of Kant’s more familiar position in place, readers can see what claims were retained, rejected, or modified, and in what ways (though without necessarily seeing his development as a steady and inevitable “march” toward the published version of 1790). Another reason (besides the light it might shed on the third Critique) to consider the relevant historical–philosophical developments (2) is to see if Kant’s views relate to his intellectual predecessors in “philosophically interesting ways.”18 To provide focus, I typically limit my analysis to authors Kant mentioned, cited, or directly engaged with. For my purposes, it is typically not enough for a writer to have put forward claims or arguments similar to, or that resonate with, Kant’s, or to have proposed ideas that overlapped with his (or ideas that Kant opposed for that matter). While recognizing the limits of this procedure, I instead seek documentable influences on Kant’s aesthetics, verified by his invoking the writer in a text or source material, that is, in Kant’s allusions and references to, or citations of, the author or person in question.19 This means: yes to Lessing and Rousseau, and no to Diderot. In engaging in (2), the notion of a “text” is construed broadly so as to include a “constellation” of sources (somewhat in the sense of Dieter Henrich’s Konstellationsforschung), including intellectual papers or magazines such as 17

18 19

For a similar method, see Huaping Lu-Adler, “Constructing a Demonstration of Logical Rules, or How to Use Kant’s Logic Corpus,” in Clewis, ed., Reading Kant’s Lectures, 137–58. Thanks also to Marcus Willaschek for discussing this methodological point. Lu-Adler, “Constructing,” 157. Herder, whom I discuss in the chapter on genius, is an exception. In neither his Reflections on aesthetics nor in the third Critique does Kant name Herder, but I think Kant’s philosophical concerns with Herder lead Kant to consider the view that a genius can produce original nonsense, and thus that “genius” needs to be tamed by taste and judgment (see Chapter 4). See also Zammito, Genesis, esp. 8–10, 142–3.





the English journal, The Spectator.20 But I naturally draw from the more philosophical. Major political events (treaties, edicts), reports on natural disasters (such as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake), and various kinds of visual materials or written documents (printed or not) surely informed Kant’s thinking, and they make up part of the relevant intellectual context. But to limit my scope and provide focus, I analyze mainly philosophical texts. One might also worry if a study focuses too much on (2), the thread of Kant’s main argument or position will be lost. This could pose a risk, admittedly. But, as noted, toward the beginning of each chapter, I summarize (as much as feasible) the respective account in the third Critique. In addition, each chapter shows how Kant’s views developed (3). The focus remains squarely on Kant. With the lecture transcriptions, dating can be uncertain. Moreover, the lecture notes were written by student transcribers, and these note-takers could garble Kant’s message. Since none of the lecture transcriptions is a verbatim transcript of Kant’s lectures, the transcriptions must be used with caution.21 If they are to provide authentic insight into Kant’s views, they should be read in light of his published works (keeping in mind the publication’s genre, style, and audiences) as well as other sets of lecture notes, his marginalia, and correspondence. Günter Zöller observes: “The philosophical interest that resides in Kant the lecturer chiefly consists in the further evidence the lectures provide for the extended emergence of Kant’s original and novel views out of the critical reception of received positions and established doctrines.”22 Accordingly, one needs to understand the eighteenth-century background of Kant’s views. Zöller continues: “typically then, analyzing and assessing Kant’s lectures will involve both a close consideration of the doctrinal traditions and traditional doctrines involved in the lectures’ subject matter and a consideration of Kant’s own pertinent philosophical views, as documented in his contemporaneous works, above all the published works, but also the handwritten remains (Nachlaß) and correspondence.”23 In the case of Kant’s aesthetics or views of taste, however, there are not any “published works” after the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime of 1764 (a work that itself concerns, after all, much more besides aesthetic theory). Thus, in

20

21

22

23

Dieter Henrich, Konstellationen. Probleme und Debatten am Ursprung der idealistischen Philosophie (1789–1795) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991). For guidelines on using the transcriptions, see the Introduction to Fugate, Kant’s Lectures on Metaphysics, 11; Naragon, “Kant in the Classroom”; and the Introduction to Clewis, ed., Reading Kant’s Lectures, 8–14. Günter Zöller, “‘Without Hope and Fear’: Kant’s Naturrecht Feyerabend on Bindingness and Obligation,” in Clewis, ed., Reading Kant’s Lectures, 346–61, 346. Ibid.



   ’ 

writing about the development of Kant’s aesthetics, I look closely at the marginal notes, lecture transcriptions, and correspondence. The marginal notes enjoy a certain advantage: they were written by Kant. One can be sure a Reflection expresses what was (at least at one point) a thought he had, even if he later changed his mind or was just working through his thoughts (or summarizing or commenting on another author) rather than stating a considered position. At the same time, the fragments can be difficult to date (often more so than the lecture transcriptions), having at best a merely general date range. Like most Kant scholars, then, I follow Academy editor Erich Adickes’s meticulous efforts to order these literary remains chronologically. I realize that some scholars (Elfriede Conrad) have questioned the method used by Adickes or Benno Erdmann before him,24 but I do not attempt to offer any major revisions of Reflection dates. Let me also clarify in what sense this book is not an examination of the origins of Kant’s aesthetics. I do not dive into disputes about the order of composition of Kant’s third Critique or attempt to revise previous archeological investigations and genetic reconstructions. Following previous scholarship, I am content to claim that Kant wrote the bulk of the Critique of the Power of Judgment between summer 1787 and late 1789, and that in all likelihood he did so in relative haste.25 Finally, when I discuss which views are retained or modified in the third Critique (4), I propose to understand the trajectory of Kant’s aesthetics in terms of five main arcs (more below). In this way, I explain the discontinuities or continuities in his views (5).

24

25

Lu-Adler, “Constructing,” 139 no. 1, which cites Elfriede Conrad, Kants Logikvorlesungen als neuer Schlüssel zur Architektonik der Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994), 46–51, 65–73. On methodological issues concerning Kant’s views of logic, see also Huaping Lu-Adler, Kant and the Science of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 9–30. See Guyer, Taste, 390 no. 122; and Guyer’s Introduction to Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment. Zammito, Genesis, makes useful comments on the earlier efforts by James Meredith, Michel Souriau, and, most recently, Giorgio Tonelli, “La formazione del testo della Kritik der Urteilskraft,” Revue internationale de philosophie 8, no. 4 (1954): 423–48. Zammito divides up the writing of the third Critique into three phases: a transcendental grounding of aesthetics (summer 1787 to 1788); a cognitive phase, incorporating a new theory of reflective judgment (late 1788 to May 1789); and an ethical turn (late summer to fall 1789). Zammito, Genesis, 5–6, 45. Henry Allison writes: “A good indication of the haste with which Kant composed the Critique of Judgment and of his changing views during the period of its composition (roughly from September 1787 through 1789) is provided by the fact that he wrote two distinct introductions to the work.” Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 347 no. 17. Kant wrote two different versions of the introduction to the third Critique. He appears to have chosen not to publish the draft of the First Introduction because he considered it to be too long.





For those who wish to learn more about the sources and development of Kant’s aesthetics, it is a perfect time to examine materials that have relatively recently been edited and published in German and translated into English and other languages. Since Kant never published works on aesthetics between 1764 and 1790, his anthropology lectures and Reflections are a main (but not the only) source for charting and understanding the development of his aesthetics. Kant’s anthropology lectures were published in the two-tome volume 25 of the Academy Edition in 1997.26 The lectures were translated (two of them in their entirety) into English in 2012,27 as part of the series The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant.28 Both Lectures on Anthropology and Notes and Fragments29 (another volume in The Cambridge Edition) make Kant’s aesthetic theory and other areas more accessible to English-reading audiences, and they provide a valuable resource for understanding the sources and development of Kant’s aesthetic theory. Although Kant’s anthropology has been discussed almost ever since he began lecturing on it, to this day no book-length study has focused on and examined (as I propose to do) Kant’s ideas on aesthetics in his lectures and marginalia on anthropology and other areas.30 26

27

28

29

30

AA 25 (i.e., 25.1 and 25.2) contains seven anthropology lecture transcriptions: Collins (1772/73); Parow (1772/73); Friedländer (1775/76); Pillau (1777/78); Menschenkunde (1781/82); Mrongovius (1784/85); and Busolt (1788/89). The year (winter semester) Kant gave the course is given in parenthesis. The Naumburg manuscript (currently in the Marburg university library but not mentioned in AA 25) is a relative of the Busolt transcription and likewise based on an anthropology course given in the late 1780s. Unfortunately, it contains little material on aesthetics. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Anthropology, ed. Allen Wood and Robert Louden, trans. Robert R. Clewis, Robert Louden, G. Felicitas Munzel, and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Lectures on Anthropology contains complete translations of the Friedänder and Mrongovius transcriptions as well as excerpts of the other five transcriptions published in AA 25. On the origins and aims of The Cambridge Edition, see “Interview with Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood,” in Kants Schriften in Übersetzungen, ed. Gisela Schlüter (Hamburg: Meiner, 2020), 53–72. Kant’s physical geography lecture transcriptions (recently published in AA 26.2) have not yet been translated into English. For several reasons why they should be translated, see Robert R. Clewis, “The Importance of Translating Kant’s Physical Geography Lectures,” in Kants Schriften in Übersetzungen, ed. Schlüter, 717–20. Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments: Logic, Metaphysics, Moral Philosophy, Aesthetics, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). In three chapter contributions, Guyer likewise concentrates on the significance of the anthropology and metaphysics lectures as a source for Kant’s views in aesthetics. He maintains that some of the essential elements of Kant’s mature aesthetic theory are already present in early versions of the lectures, especially a theory of free play that emerges around the mid-1770s. My study in part builds on Guyer’s work, especially his division of Kant’s development into three main phases, though my book stands out by applying this framework to the noted topics in aesthetics. On the lectures on



   ’ 

With its selection of eight prominent themes in aesthetics, combined with attention to the sources and development of Kant’s aesthetics, this monograph has affinities with previous Kant studies while at the same time going beyond them.31 My historical approach resonates with recent edited volumes on Kant and the German intellectual tradition, some of which examine themes in aesthetics.32 Given my focus on aesthetics, this study is allied with recent collections and monographs on Kant on feeling, especially the feeling of life.33 Since Kant used the “Empirical Psychology” section of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica in his course on anthropology and those passages in the lectures

31

32

33

anthropology, see Guyer, “Play and Society” and Guyer, “Beauty.” On the metaphysics lectures, see Paul Guyer, “Kant’s Aesthetics in his Lectures on Metaphysics,” in Fugate, ed., Kant’s Lectures on Metaphysics, 156–78. For Guyer’s earlier take on Kant’s early aesthetics, see Guyer, Taste, 12–28. Allison, Taste, neither focuses on all of the proposed themes nor examines Kant’s development in detail. Frederick Beiser, Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), examines the history of modern German aesthetics, but it does not examine my eight themes or focus on Kant. Berger, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory, discusses mainly beauty and aesthetic normativity and does so without attention to the development and context of Kant’s aesthetic theory. Paul Bruno, Kant’s Concept of Genius: Its Origin and Function in the Third Critique (London: Continuum, 2010), focuses on a central theme in aesthetics (genius) in Kant’s published works, but focuses on only one of my eight topics. Otto Schlapp’s classic study, Kants Lehre vom Genie und die Entstehung der ʻKritik der Urteilskraft’ (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1901), while useful, works with older textual materials and does not systematically examine all of my themes. The first volume of Paul Guyer’s three-volume A History of Modern Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) examines Kant, but, like Hammermeister’s The German Aesthetic Tradition, it is devoted to many more thinkers in the modern period than Kant, and it naturally focuses on Kant’s published works rather than his unpublished Reflections and lecture transcriptions. While the first part of Menzer, Entwicklung, discusses a few of my eight themes, it is laid out chronologically rather than devoting a chapter to each theme, and only about half of the book (up to page 119) covers Kant’s development before 1790. Moreover, it works with older textual materials. Zammito, Genesis, discusses far more than aesthetics, taking on issues raised by natural teleology and Kant’s systematic philosophy, and pays great attention to Kant’s relation to Herder. Rachel Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), provides insights into Kant’s accounts of beauty and aesthetic judgment, but with less focus on Kant’s sources and development than I provide here. E.g., Daniel Dahlstrom, ed., Kant and His German Contemporaries: Volume 2, Aesthetics, History, Politics, and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Kelly Sorensen and Diane Williamson, Kant and the Faculty of Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Katalin Makkai, Kant’s Critique of Taste: The Feeling of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Jennifer Mensch, ed., Kant and the Feeling of Life (Albany: SUNY Press, forthcoming), a volume in honor of the work of Rudolf Makkreel, who explored similar connections to life. See Rudolf Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the “Critique of Judgment” (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990).





often examine issues in aesthetics, my book touches on some of the issues analyzed in recent monographs and collections on Kant’s empirical psychology and anthropology.34 Given my focus on the history of aesthetics, this study has much in common with histories of early modern aesthetics, even if these monographs do not examine Kant alone.35 In particular, my selection of eight themes places the present book in affinity with Tatarkiewicz’s analysis of “six ideas” in aesthetics, though he does not investigate the origins and development of Kant’s aesthetics per se.36 Accordingly, I develop a recent trend of examining Kant’s pre-Critical publications, correspondence, Reflections, and lecture transcriptions. As Courtney Fugate puts it in the Introduction to his edited volume on Kant’s lectures on metaphysics, “scholars are now, more than ever before, focusing their efforts on understanding Kant’s philosophical activity as an organic whole, of which his lecturing activities constituted an essential part.”37 I propose that Kant’s trajectory developed along five main arcs. Though they are not the only way by which to understand the development of Kant’s aesthetics, the arcs capture many of the significant changes that occurred between Kant’s early and mature or Critical views. (I state them briefly here and then discuss them in a section at the end of most chapters.)38 1. A shift from art to nature. Due to his growing interest in natural teleology and the purposiveness of nature, Kant focuses less on the aesthetic experiences of art and he gives greater importance to aesthetic experiences of nature. 2. Self-standing beauty: from intellectual beauty to free beauty. Kant has a notion of something like free or pure beauty in his early aesthetics. He distinguishes such free beauty from purpose-based beauty, which he typically thinks of in terms of a perfection of the object and/or its aims and purposes. Surprisingly, however, he views the purpose-based or partly intellectual kind as the kind of beauty that is “self-standing.” Later, there 34 35

36 37 38

E.g., Cohen, ed., Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology. Stefanie Buchenau, The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment: The Art of Invention and the Invention of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Kristin Gjesdal, Herder’s Hermeneutics: History, Poetry, Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Simon Grote, The Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition. J. Colin McQuillan, Early Modern Aesthetics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). Rachel Zuckert, Herder’s Naturalist Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Guyer, Modern Aesthetics; references to this book will be to vol. 1. Władysław Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1980). Fugate, Introduction to Kant’s Lectures on Metaphysics, 4. Although my discussion of the arcs in the chapter sections called “The third Critique Reconsidered” risks appearing somewhat mechanical, it strikes me as the most economical way to connect the pre-history of the third Critique to the published work.



   ’ 

is a shift in which kind of beauty he calls independent or self-standing: whereas in the early period Kant views purpose-based beauty (later called “adherent” beauty) as “self-standing,” in the third Critique he reserves this term for free or pure beauty. 3. Aesthetic perfection to aesthetic ideas. Kant’s early aesthetics appeals to or makes use of a German rationalist concept of perfection, even if he does not always distinguish its ethical, aesthetic, and logical aspects, and even if it is not always clear when he is stating his considered views, working through his thoughts, or commenting on Baumgarten or Meier.39 In any case, Kant moves in general from talking about the notion that beauty is (or at least involves) an aesthetic perfection to claiming, in conjunction with a new theory of a free harmonious play between the imagination and understanding, that beauty is an expression of aesthetic ideas (KU 5:314–20), that is, representations of the imagination that are so rich that they cannot be brought under determinate concepts. 4. Sources and normativity of the pleasure: from laws of intuition to free play. Kant shifts from thinking that the pleasure in beauty arises from facilitation of sensible comprehension (i.e., comprehension according to the laws of sensibility) to thinking that it arises from a free harmonious play between the imagination and understanding. The normativity of aesthetic judgment follows a close, but distinct, trajectory: normativity goes from being grounded in laws of intuition or sensibility as well as in consensus over time (a principle of sociality, broadly speaking), to being grounded in an a priori principle of the (aesthetic) power of judgment. 5. Aesthetic experience as freedom: the moral turn. Kant moves from making only loose or vague connections between aesthetics and morality to thinking of the aesthetic experiences of beauty and sublimity as being experiences of freedom (yet nonetheless independent of morality), and thus as

39

From the 1750s, see, for instance, R 403; 1752–56 (perhaps 1762–63); 15:161, which corresponds to Baumgarten, Metaphysica, §606. See also R 1748, 1752–56; 16:100, Kant’s note on Meier’s Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre, §19. For slightly later notes, see also R 656; 1769–70; 15:290; and R 696; 1769–70; 15:309. See also Zammito, Genesis, 99–101 as well as Baeumler, Das Irrationalitätsproblem, 261 no. 3, which states that Kant, not Meier, introduces the term “taste” (Geschmack). On Kant’s very early views of logic and aesthetics, especially in relation to Baumgarten and Meier, see also Menzer, Entwicklung, 23–35. A number of Kant’s logic notes from the 1750s and 1760s could be read as if they were endorsements of the rationalist view, but one must be cautious here, since it is not always clear that Kant is defending the view rather than making use of its language to express his own distinct views, or even commenting on Baumgarten or Meier. As Menzer observes, it is not always clear that Kant agreed with the text he was teaching or interpreting. See Menzer, Entwicklung, 35.





being in a position to support morality, even if only indirectly. This shift can be seen as part of a moral teleology and is most prominent in the published work of 1790. In the following chapters, I use notions of the sources and normativity of aesthetic pleasure as well as the moral turn to divide up Kant’s thinking into three main stages – admittedly, one of a number of ways Kant’s development could be divided up. In Phase 1 (1760s to early 1770s), Kant arrives at the idea that a judgment of taste is based on an immediate yet universally and necessarily valid feeling of pleasure in response to an object.40 Kant understands such pleasure to arise solely from the correspondence between the form of a beautiful object and the universally valid laws of human sensibility (not understanding and reason). This aspect can be analyzed further. Guyer usefully describes the Critical theory of the judgment of taste as containing two elements. The first is a logico-linguistic analysis of the claims of an aesthetic judgment, according to which a person who claims that an object is beautiful is claiming that the pleasure that they take in the object is one that can reasonably be expected to occur in any other properly situated observer of the object. This is the thesis that judgments of taste make a claim to universality, or at least generality. This element (in some form) is already in place in Phase 1. The second element of Kant’s theory is the psychological explanation of the causes of such aesthetic pleasure (which in turn explains why such an expectation would be reasonable).41 Kant’s theory changes significantly in this regard. In Phase 1, Kant argues that the pleasure in beauty is occasioned by the correspondence between an object (its form) and the laws of sensibility alone.42 The laws of sensibility (while ontologically subjective) are here taken to be just as (epistemically) objective as the laws of understanding, though it should be noted that what exactly Kant means by “laws of sensibility” remains somewhat obscure. Hence the claim to generality, Kant thinks, is warranted. While Kant addresses the issue of the justification or normativity of aesthetic judgments, he does not yet talk about a “deduction” of a principle of taste.43

40

41 42

43

As noted, my understanding of Kant’s phases is indebted to and builds on Guyer’s work on Kant’s lectures (in consultation with work by Menzer, Tonelli, Schlapp, and Zammito). See, e.g., Guyer, “Play and Society” and “Beauty.” Guyer, “Beauty,” 139. Ibid., 142. Kant also refers to promoting “inner life” (V-Anth/Collins 25:181; V-Anth/ Parow 25:379). For Kant, pleasure is the consciousness of the promotion of life, or activity, while pain is the consciousness of its hindrance or obstacles to activity. For Kant on the concept of life or animation, see the essays in Mensch, ed., Kant and the Feeling of Life, and Makkai, Kant’s Critique, esp. 11–12. Guyer, “Beauty,” 142–3.



   ’ 

Phase 2 spans from the mid-1770s to the time of the composition of the third Critique, or about 1787. In this second stage, as can be seen from anthropology lecture transcriptions from the mid-1770s such as Friedländer and Pillau, Kant henceforth holds that the pleasure in beauty is the product of a harmonious interaction between sensibility (or imagination) and understanding: a harmonious free play of the faculties. In other words, the notion of a free play of the powers (as a source of aesthetic pleasure) appears for the first time during this period, as a 1775/76 lecture shows (V-Anth/Fried 25:560). A notion of a free play of the faculties is repeated in lectures of 1781 (V-Anth/Mensch 25:982). Likewise, as a 1784/85 lecture transcription states, “free play of the imagination must be in harmony with the understanding, otherwise it cannot be pleasing” (V-Anth/Mron 25:1279). On the basis of his notion of a free play, Kant makes further refinements to his account of art as the product of genius (especially in response to Alexander Gerard’s 1774 work, An Essay on Genius). Kant also tries out various ways to classify the arts. Since aesthetic response involves understanding and not just sensibility (or imagination), Kant distinguishes the fine arts from each other by the particular ways in which sensibility and understanding are related to each other when one aesthetically engages with art. Kant uses his idea that sensibility and understanding relate in distinct ways to distinguish oratory or rhetoric (Beredsamkeit) from poetry (Dichtkunst). (In rhetoric, the understanding is in charge, but in poetry, sensibility governs.) Even if Kant makes some general claims about aesthetic experience and morality during stages one44 and two, he does not connect them in terms of an analogy between aesthetic freedom and practical freedom. This changes in the final, third stage. In this Phase (not earlier than December 1787, and above all in the publication of the third Critique as well as in later lectures and Reflections), Kant characterizes the harmony between imagination and understanding that is central to both aesthetic experience and artistic creativity as a form of freedom. His emphasis on various aspects of freedom allows Kant to connect aesthetic experience with morality. Kant makes a crucial connection between the aesthetic and the moral, which he considers the final end or purpose of nature (§84). This link allows him to put aesthetics in relation to a moral teleology,45 that is, a teleology that makes use of the ideas of freedom and morality. As late as June 1787, Kant was still thinking of the book as a “Critique of Taste” (Kritik des Geschmacks), the phrase that he had used to describe aesthetic theory in a short publication over twenty years earlier (NEV 44

45

A 1772/73 lecture states: “The entire use of the beautiful arts is that they set moral propositions of reason in their full glory and powerfully support them” (V-Anth/Collins 25:33). Guyer, “Beauty,” 153–8.





2:311), where the term Kritik seems closer to an empirically-based “criticism” (as in Kames’s Elements of Criticism) that cannot amount to a doctrine, than to transcendental critique resting on an a priori principle (as in the three Critiques).46 Kant uses the phrase Kritik des Geschmacks in a June 25, 1787 letter to Christian Gottfried Schütz.47 He also reveals that even as late as the end of June 1787 he has not yet started to work on the book in earnest. He admits: “I must turn to the Foundations of the Critique of Taste at once” (Br 10:490). As his late December 1787 letter to Reinhold shows, six months later Kant is still referring to his work as a “Critique of Taste,” though, as Baeumler notes, perhaps here the term Kritik is finally understood in the transcendental sense.48 Such a critique, the letter to Reinhold indicates, somehow concerns or is part of teleology (Br 10:515). The connection between taste and teleology, while not at all spelled out in the letter, is significant.49 In the published work, Kant specifies that the experience of beauty in both nature and art can be understood as evidence of the fit between nature and human objectives that is the fundamental regulative principle of his teleology.50 In the third Critique, Kant holds that nature speaks to humans through its beautiful forms (KU 5:301), offering signs of nature’s amenability to human ends. The noted moral turn – where aesthetic experience can reveal something about human capacities of morality without sacrificing what makes it distinctively aesthetic – enables Kant to write the sections on the ideal of beauty or human beauty (§17), the dynamical sublime (§28), the experience of beauty as the symbol of the morally good (§59), and the intellectual interest in the beauty of nature, seen as if it were speaking to us in its beautiful forms (§42). The moral turn also affects his view of genius (§§46–50). Kant now conceives of artistic genius as a special art-producing talent and gift of nature that can express moral ideas in art. He views aesthetic ideas as able to represent moral ideas, or to have moral content, though without sacrificing

46

47

48 49

50

In a revealing fragment from about 1769–70, Kant writes: “Beautiful arts only allow for criticism [critic]. Home. Hence no science of the beautiful” (R 1588, 16:27; my trans.). See also a note likely from the mid to late 1760s: “Aesthetics serves as criticism [Critic] because its principles are discovered a posteriori” (R 1579; 16:19). As the reference to the a posteriori nature of the principles shows, Kant means “criticism” in a Kamesian sense here, not “critique” in a transcendental sense. See also Kant’s May 12, 1789 Letter to Carl [Karl] Leonhard Reinhold (Br 11:39), where Kant claims that the “Critik des Geschmacks” is a part of the “Critik der Urtheilskraft.” Baeumler, Das Irrationalitätsproblem, 283–4. The letter does not indicate the precise structure of the published work, for the third Critique devotes distinct parts to aesthetics and teleology. Given the contents and structure of the completed third Critique, one might get the impression that Kant’s innovation – after the letter – was the separation of aesthetics and teleology. Guyer, “Beauty,” 154.



   ’ 

the freedom of play between imagination and understanding (analogous, in the sublime, to the complex yet ultimately harmonious relation between imagination and reason). Finally, Kant introduces and defends an a priori principle of taste (or of the faculty of feeling pleasure and displeasure). In anthropology lectures in the 1780s, Kant distinguishes among pleasures in the agreeable, beautiful, and good (V-Anth/Mensch 25:1095–6; V-Anth/Mron 25:1316; V-Anth/Busolt 25:1508). In fact, he had already made this threefold distinction in lectures in the early 1770s (e.g., V-Anth/Collins 25:167, 181) and in his February 21, 1772 letter to Marcus Herz (Br 10:129).51 But Kant’s “discovery” of the a priori principle of the faculty of feeling pleasure and displeasure by late December 1787 enables him to take these as transcendental, rather than empirical, distinctions.52 Before this discovery of the a priori principle, Kant had denied that aesthetic pleasures, even if shared or shareable with others, could justifiably lay claim to any universal normativity or necessity.53 To understand the development of Kant’s aesthetics properly, one needs to work through his sometimes dense early claims about aesthetic judgment and beauty (Part 1). In Chapter 1, I thus survey philosophers from the German and British aesthetic and intellectual traditions with which Kant directly engages in the third Critique and pre-Critical materials. What is the role of rules in his early aesthetics? Laying the foundation for some of the book’s later analyses, I show how the early Kant synthesizes ideas from his German and British predecessors. Chapter 2 describes Kant’s developing views of free beauty and of “form,” a term widely used throughout all phases of his aesthetics. If Kant is a formalist of some kind, which kind is he? I suggest that there are strong, moderate, and weak formalisms in Kant’s aesthetic theory, both early and late. Chapter 3 examines adherent beauty. How are beauty and the good related? Like Sulzer and Hume, Kant distinguishes between free beauty and purposebased beauty, that is, the kind grounded in the purposes or aims of the object or artwork. Even in his early aesthetics, Kant (in various ways) holds that beauty and goodness are distinct concepts yet can be conjoined. Purposebased beauty is central to Kant’s early aesthetics; indeed, he calls it “selfstanding.” This kind of beauty is retained in the third Critique in the form of adherent beauty, yet, as noted, he there calls free beauty “self-standing.” Chapter 4 explores Kant’s theory of genius (Part 2, “Genius and the Fine Arts”). Kant lectured and wrote about genius even before he read Gerard’s Essay on Genius around 1776 – he had already been thinking about Plato, 51 52

53

For several 1770s Reflections that reveal these distinctions, see Menzer, Entwicklung, 89. Rachel Zuckert, “A New Look at Kant’s Theory of Pleasure,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60, no. 3 (2002): 239–52, 250 no. 12. Ibid., 250 no. 29.





Edward Young, Rousseau, and his former student, Johann Gottfried Herder. Still, Gerard’s essay had a profound effect on Kant’s conception of genius. I avoid the well-discussed question about whether (or why) Kant denied that scientific activity requires or displays genius and instead ask: In Kant’s view, can genius produce original nonsense? Is taste a component of genius, or does taste impose constraints on genius (as if from the outside)? I suggest that Kant takes up two distinct conceptions of genius, the “thick” and the “thin.” Both conceptions can be found in Kant’s early thoughts about genius. When the two notions are retained in the third Critique, it creates internal tensions. How does Kant classify the various fine arts? Chapter 5 examines Kant’s modern theory of the fine arts with reference to his predecessors, in particular Batteux and Wolff. Kant experiments with different classificatory themes over the years. Starting in the mid-1770s, Kant conceives of aesthetic experience of fine arts as evoking a free play between imagination and the understanding, distinguishes the fine arts from handicraft, and views the fine arts as products of genius (and spirit) that express or exhibit aesthetic ideas. In Part 3 (“Negative and Positive States”), I examine the sublime, ugliness and disgust, and laughter at humor. Chapter 6 characterizes the development of Kant’s views of the sublime in the Observations and other pre-Critical writings and materials. The description of the sublime in the third Critique is shaped by Kant’s moral turn and, to some extent, his interest in a principle of natural purposiveness (the objects that paradigmatically elicit the sublime are natural objects, though Kant’s position here is quite complex). How does the early Kant synthesize the ideas of Burke on the one hand and Baumgarten and Mendelssohn on the other? How does Kant shift from a psychological– anthropological account of the sublime to a nonempirical, transcendental one? Chapter 7 explores ugliness and disgust (Ekel). Does Kant think that there can be aesthetic judgments of ugliness? In providing an overview of the third Critique position, I argue that there cannot be pure aesthetic judgments of the ugly. In his early accounts, Kant views the responses to ugliness and disgust as unpleasant and therefore as (in his sense of the term) interested. He typically discusses ugliness and disgust in connection with a teleological perspective of the whole of nature and of natural purposes. The ugly is disagreeable, since it is dysfunctional or asymmetrical (or both). A version of this view carries over into the third Critique. The ugly, if and when it is judged by the principle of nature’s purposiveness (the principle of the power of judgment), would be contrapurposive and therefore disagreeable. Kant completes the “Analytic of the Beautiful” with a “Remark” on laughter (or §54), and in similar fashion I conclude the book with a chapter on humor. Kant’s thoughts on humor can be viewed as part of his aesthetics: his view of laughter at humor can be interpreted in terms of his theory of a harmonious free play of the faculties. What are the sources of his account of humor, and how did his thoughts about humor develop? Kant combines elements of



   ’ 

incongruity, superiority, and release theories of humor. While responding to authors such as Mendelssohn, Hobbes, and Shaftesbury, he adds his own, more original, thoughts about humor by appealing to his theory of a free play between imagination and understanding. Once Kant begins to understand aesthetic responses in terms of a harmonious free play, it puts him in a position to connect humor to his wider aesthetic theory.

PART I Aesthetic Judgment and Beauty

1 On Rules of Taste

In a 1932 review called “The Naive Ravel,” Edward Robinson slammed Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, which had premiered four years earlier: [Boléro is] the most insolent monstrosity ever perpetuated in the history of music. From the beginning to the end of its 339 measures it is simply the incredible repetition of the same rhythm . . . and above it the blatant recurrence of an overwhelmingly vulgar cabaret tune that is little removed, in every essential of character, from the wail of an obstreperous back-alley cat.1

Should one see this harsh assessment as a mere expression of Robinson’s personal dislike of the performance? Or is there some basis for an aesthetic evaluation of an artwork, whether rooted in sense perception or in a particular cultural history of music? If there are standards of aesthetic judgment, do they deserve to be called rules of taste? The normativity of judgment is not reserved for art criticism: it is a significant topic in contemporary philosophy and aesthetics, well beyond Kant studies.2 Yet much of this debate has its roots, in one way or other, in the third Critique. Indeed, contemporary philosophers of art employ (with modifications) some of the central ideas about normativity and aesthetic judgment presented in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.3 With regard to aesthetic normativity, Kant holds two distinct positions. The first one, associated with the early period of his aesthetics starting in the late

1

2

3

Quoted from Michael Lanford, “Ravel and ‘The Raven’: The Realisation of an Inherited Aesthetic in Bolero,” Cambridge Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2011): 243–65, 243. On aesthetic, practical, and epistemic normativity in Kant, see, e.g., Pollok, Normativity. Most analyses of aesthetic normativity, I should add, do not pay sufficient attention to Kant’s early aesthetics. Note, too, I do not intend to give a philosophical defense of Kant’s view of aesthetic normativity or a philosophical reconstruction of the strongest Kantian account. E.g., Noël Carroll, On Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2009). For an overview of aesthetic normativity, including discussions of Hume and Kant, see Richard Eldridge, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 167–99.





   ’ 

1760s, synthesizes the British and German aesthetic traditions. The second arises from a major turn in his thinking some time near the end of 1787, when he claimed to have “discovered” an a priori principle of the faculty of pleasure and displeasure, which allows one, he thinks, to require or demand others to agree with one’s appraisals and judgments, that is, as he put it in the published work, to “assent to the aesthetic judgments that we make” (KU 5:278). Accordingly, I wish to argue for the following two claims: 1. In the third Critique, Kant engages and responds to the eighteenth-century debate regarding aesthetic normativity, appropriating the German and British aesthetic traditions in particular. 2. Kant responds to this debate in two main phases. From the late 1760s until about 1787, Kant claims that there are empirical rules of taste, using the language of so-called rationalist aesthetics, as he denies that aesthetics is a genuine science (Wissenschaft) that contains a priori judgments or propositions. He combines this with a consensus-based account inspired by Hume and Kames (Henry Home). His position regarding aesthetic normativity undergoes a fundamental shift at the end of 1787, which requires him to modify his earlier synthesis.

The Third Critique on Aesthetic Normativity The “normativity” under discussion is the aesthetic judgment’s claim to universal validity. Here is how Kant refers to a proposed aesthetic normativity in the First Introduction to the third Critique: By contrast, the possibility of an aesthetic judgment which is nevertheless a judgment of mere reflection grounded on a principle a priori, i.e., a judgment of taste, if it can be shown that this is really justified in its claim to universal validity, absolutely requires a critique of the power of judgment as a faculty with its own special transcendental principles (like understanding and reason). (EEKU 20:244; emphasis added)4

4

In addition to distinguishing judgment (Urteil) from the power of judgment (Urteilskraft), the Guyer–Matthews translation employs footnotes to reveal Kant’s use of Urteil and Beurteilung. Though some scholars deny the significance of this distinction, Kant’s use of the terms strikes me as philosophically important. I am thus broadly sympathetic with the two-act interpretation Guyer has defended in and since Kant and the Claims of Taste. I would emphasize that the two-act structure is best understood analytically and logically, not empirically or as involving two phenomenologically distinct acts of reflection. Guyer makes this point too; Taste, 134, 389 no. 109.

   



A (pure) aesthetic judgment5 makes a normative claim on everyone, that is, a claim to being universally valid. Although the judgment of taste “has merely subjective validity, it nevertheless makes a claim on all subjects of a kind that could only be made if it were an objective judgment resting on cognitive grounds and capable of being compelled by means of a proof” (KU 5:285). The claims of others make a claim on us, and vice versa. Meanwhile, one must judge for oneself – independently and with autonomy. Kant considers Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful to be an excellent example of the psychological, non-transcendental method in aesthetics.6 Such a method employs an “empirical exposition.” Kant thinks that Burke’s method lacks the necessity and universality that a critique demands, which in turn requires Kant’s transcendental method (KU 5:277; cf. EEKU 20:238): Thus the empirical exposition of aesthetic judgments may always make a start at furnishing the material for a higher investigation, yet a transcendental discussion of this faculty is still possible and essential for the critique of taste. For unless this has a priori principles, it could not possibly guide the judgments of others and make claims to approve or reject them with even a semblance of right. (KU 5:278)

Of course, a skeptic about the normativity of aesthetic judgments might insist that there are no a priori principles of taste and aesthetic judgment. The skeptic is, more generally, wary of Kant’s transcendental method (cf. KrV A11–12/B25; A xvi–xvii), questioning its assumptions about judging under ideal or proper circumstances.7 Properly situated and informed aesthetic judges may just be idealizations without any reality and better understood in other terms – taste could instead be a reflection of ideological commitments or struggles for power. The skeptic is unlikely to be appeased by Kant’s appeal to

5

6

7

Unless otherwise noted, by “aesthetic judgment” I refer to aesthetic judgments of beauty and the sublime, rather than the agreeable. In one sense of the term, a “pure” aesthetic judgment is one that meets the conditions of taste (disinterestedness, subjective universality, purposiveness without a purpose, and necessity). Thus, there is a sense in which even adherent judgments (§16) could be “pure,” even though they are not purely aesthetic since they are (in various ways) combined with teleological elements. See Allison, Taste, 141. Admittedly, Kant complicates matters by occasionally using “pure” and “free” as synonyms. In the 1793 edition, Kant calls this method “physiological.” Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Dodsley, 1757). Kant’s transcendental arguments and method in aesthetics have been widely studied in the literature. See, e.g., Anna Tumarkin, “Zur transscendentalen Methode der Kantischen Asthetik,” Kant-Studien 11, no. 1–3 (1906): 348–78.



   ’ 

a common sense underlying a free harmony of the faculties that is supposed to give rise to a pleasure on which the judgment of taste is based (§21, KU 5:239). However, Kant never considered skepticism about taste to be a live philosophical option, not even in his early aesthetics. By seeing what positions Kant once held, I submit, one can not only see how he would have responded to skepticism about taste but also better understand the claims of the third Critique, at the very least by seeing what earlier positions Kant is thereby rejecting. How, before Kant arrived at his mature aesthetics, did he address the validity of aesthetic judgments? To answer this, I first turn to some participants in the eighteenth-century intellectual debate.

Some Modern Authors Shaping Kant’s Views Given the focus on aesthetic normativity, I examine the authors or traditions that influenced Kant most directly and who also themselves in some way addressed the topic. In particular, I discuss Hume and Kames as well as representative figures in the German rationalist aesthetic tradition that stems from Leibniz and Wolff.8 As Guyer notes, “the debate about taste from which Kant’s aesthetics emerged focused on the possibility of agreement in taste.”9 Hume arguably offers the most important eighteenth-century contribution to the debate.10

8

9 10

A proper investigation of this topic, space permitting, would extend to more detailed discussion of Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, Leibniz, Lessing, Wolff, Meier, Mendelssohn, Bodmer and Breitinger, Moritz, and Sulzer, as well as francophone authors such as Batteux, Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Rousseau, and Voltaire, and Italians such as Pietro Verri. Guyer, Taste, 2, mentions several of these writers, and he discusses several of them in Guyer, Modern Aesthetics. Note, not all of the prominent writers in aesthetics were interested in the question of the intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgments – Burke, for instance, mainly describes and characterizes aesthetic responses. Guyer, Taste, 387 no. 61. In Taste, 2–7, Guyer examines what he calls the “rationalist” and “empiricist” approaches to the question of normativity of taste and aesthetic judgment. I will likewise use these two terms (which, I admit, are potentially problematic) since I want to refer to the traditions collectively. Guyer, Taste, 145. Kant’s contrast between the two “commonplaces” in the “Antinomy” of taste (§56) could have been influenced by the contrast Hume makes in his 1757 essay, “Of the Standard of Taste,” between two “species of common sense.” David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987), 226–49, 230. One species says that each person’s sentiment is right, and the other insists that some judgments are to be taken more seriously than others. In his discussion of taste in §34 (KU 5:285), Kant quotes from David Hume’s essay, “The Sceptic,” in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, 159–80. See also the note in Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 385 no. 1.

   



In the third Critique, indeed, Kant mentions Hume while discussing taste (§34) and genius (§50).11 In “Of the Standard of Taste,” with which Kant was familiar,12 Hume sees “taste” as rooted in features of humanity, specifically, in biological and psychological capacities shared by human beings, such as delicacy and sense. Hume refers to the “great resemblance between mental and bodily taste.”13 But to arrive at an appropriate aesthetic judgment of a work or object of taste, having delicate taste is not enough: the appropriate judgment must be aligned with the consensus of seasoned critics over time.14 These reasonable and astute experts (who themselves have delicate sentiment) set the “standard of taste,” and they do this by communicating statements and judgments that can serve as (or lead to) empirical rules or guidelines for the production and appreciation of art. Proper critics have five qualities or habits that enable them to serve as reliable and trustworthy judges. This statement summarizes Hume’s view: “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to 11

12

13

14

In addition, some of the examples in §2 (e.g., a palace) are similar to those found in Hume’s Treatise and Kames’s Elements of Criticism. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1874), 96 (bk. II, pt. I, sec. VIII). Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, ed. Peter Jones, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2005), vol. 1, 154, 245, 292. See also Guyer, Taste, 393 no. 27. In a 1775/76 anthropology lecture, Kant mentions Hume’s story of the key on a leather thong (inspired by Cervantes’ Don Quixote) where two people (both correctly) discern the tastes of leather and iron in a given sample of wine (V-Anth/Fried 25:500; cf. R 233; 15:89; 1776–78; and R 1503; 1780–84; 15:805). Kant also discusses Hume’s aesthetics in the remarks he made in his copy of the Observations (BGSE 20:21) and in the 1772/73 lecture on anthropology (V-Anth/Parow 25:385). For a consonant view of the influence of Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” on Kant’s aesthetics, see Makkai, Kant’s Critique, 18 no. 43 and no. 44, which also contain references to similar positions by Jens Kulenkampff and Theodore Gracyk. Hume, “Standard of Taste,” 235. The vast scholarship on Hume’s aesthetics shows no signs of diminishing. A recent collected volume devoted to Hume’s essay is Reading David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste,” ed. Babette Babich (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019). On Hume’s aesthetics more generally, see Dabney Townsend, Hume’s Aesthetic Theory: Taste and Sentiment (New York: Routledge, 2001). On Hume’s aesthetics, see also Timothy Costelloe, The Imagination in Hume’s Philosophy: The Canvas of the Mind (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 141–76; Guyer, Modern Aesthetics, 124–39; Makkai, Kant’s Critique, 18–33. Hume scholars debate whether the critical consensus over time is meant to ground the aesthetic judgment or merely to indicate its correctness, but I do not take a position on this question here. A similar issue is found in the theory of the neo-Kantian Jonas Cohn, who in interesting ways combines similar (if Hegel-inspired) views of canon formation with core concepts from Kant’s aesthetics. See Robert R. Clewis, “Aesthetic Normativity in Freiburg: Jonas Cohn as an Alternative to Kant,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 39, no. 2 (2022): 183–97.



   ’ 

this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.”15 Yet Hume recognizes that critics – even if they are well practiced, unbiased, and equipped with delicacy and strong sense – are bound to differ with each other. People may even disagree with their past selves. “At twenty, Ovid may be the favourite author; Horace at forty; and perhaps Tacitus at fifty.”16 The contingences of temperament and personality, personal experience, age, and culture will be reflected in a divergence of aesthetic judgments. In another essay, “The Sceptic,” Hume puts the point as follows: There is something approaching to principles in mental taste; and critics can reason and dispute more plausibly than cooks or performers. We may observe, however, that this uniformity hinders not, but that there is a considerable diversity in the sentiments of beauty and worth, and that education, custom, prejudice, caprice, and humour, frequently vary our taste of this kind.17

Taking a balanced position, Hume acknowledges the “considerable diversity” in feeling beauty and assigning aesthetic value or “worth,” but he also maintains that there are semi-standards or quasi-principles in taste (“there is something approaching to principles”). Over time, the exercise of such judgment by the critics leads to the formation of a canon of admirable artworks or models of taste. In “Standard of Taste,” Hume writes that with “a real genius, the longer his works endure, and the more wide they are spread, the more sincere is the admiration which he meets with.”18 As Peter Kivy observes, Hume thinks that there are general principles of correct composition in the arts, or what Hume calls “avowed patterns of composition” based a posteriori on what has been found over the centuries to gratify people of delicacy in aesthetic and artistic matters.19 In Hume’s words, there are “general rules of beauty . . . drawn from established models, and from the observation of what pleases or displeases, when 15 16 17

18 19

Hume, “Standard of Taste,” 241. Ibid., 244. Hume, “The Sceptic,” 163. “The Sceptic” was first published in 1742 in the “Second Edition, Corrected” of Essays, Moral and Political. Hume’s essays were translated into German as early as 1755 by Johann Georg Sulzer. Yet this edition did not include “Standard of Taste,” which was not published until 1757. Hume’s “Standard of Taste” was translated into German in 1758 and 1759. See the note in Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 379 no. 9. “The Sceptic” was first translated into German in 1768. See Heiner Klemme’s Introduction to Heiner Klemme and Manfred Kuehn, eds., The Reception of British Aesthetics in Germany: Seven Significant Translations, 1745–1776, 7 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2001), vol. 3, x. Hume, “Standard of Taste,” 233. Peter Kivy, De Gustibus: Arguing about Taste and Why We Do It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 7.

   



presented singly and in a high degree.”20 But such rules21 or principles are contingent and comparative, based on consensus over time. In Elements of Criticism, Henry Home, Lord Kames, offers general principles of criticism and applies them to some examples, most of which come from poetry and drama rather than from the visual arts or music. He states that his “chief aim” is “to establish practical rules for the fine arts.”22 His norms for the judgment of art are empirical generalizations based on artworks that are deemed successful. Kames offers some examples of the kinds of guidelines he has in mind. Since “communication of thought” is “the chief end of language,” he reasons, “words that convey clear and distinct ideas, must be one of its capital beauties.”23 In other words, the language of any literary work should allow for a clear flow of thought. This idea allows one, Kames thinks, to assess or judge what succeeds (or fails) in the formal aspects of poetry, such as rhythm, rhyme, and figures of speech.24 A second principle Kames offers is: Since “language ought to correspond to” the topic, the emotional impact of language ought to correspond to the subject matter. According to this idea, heroic actions ought to be described using elevated language.25 The German rationalist aesthetic tradition, for its part, addresses the topic of aesthetic normativity by appealing not to the judgments of seasoned, astute critics over time, but to a concept of the object’s perfection. The claim to agreement concerning a judgment of beauty or taste is grounded in the perfection of the work or object – though the concept of perfection is not necessarily understood the same way by everyone in this tradition. The rationalists (if one can speak of such writers collectively) consider the

20

21

22 23 24 25

This quote as well as the one in the previous sentence are found in Hume, “Standard of Taste,” 235. The German translation of Hume’s “Standard of Taste” might have created some confusion regarding the notion of “rules,” since Regel (rule) sounds stronger than a mere “standard.” Hume’s essay was translated in 1759 by the theologian Friedrich Gabriel Resewitz (who also published his own essay on genius, Versuch über das Genie, in 1759) under the title, Von der Grundregel des Geschmacks. Kant owned a copy of Resewitz’s translation. The year before, J. J. Dusch published a (1758) translation of Hume’s essay as Von der Regel des Geschmacks. See Klemme’s Introduction to Klemme and Kuehn, eds., The Reception of British Aesthetics, vol. 3, vi and xiii–xiv. At the same time, translation of Hume’s term cannot be entirely to blame, since even Hume uses the word “rule” to designate a standard or norm founded on experience and observation. In writing of “rules” of taste grounded in the laws of intuition, Kant is synthesizing the language of the empiricist and rationalist traditions. Hume, Criticism, vol. 1, 141. Ibid., vol. 2, 382–3. Guyer, Modern Aesthetics, vol. 1, 192. In Aesthetica (Francofurti ad Oderam: I. C. Kleyb, 1750), Baumgarten likewise maintains that an elevated, sublime style best fits the heroic way of life (see Chapter 6).



   ’ 

judgment of “taste” to be a “clear” but “confused” or indistinct logical judgment.26 The judgment of taste or beauty is a sensible intuition of a kind of perfection in the object. According to Wolff’s 1720 work, Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Human Soul (known as “German Metaphysics”), for instance, beauty is the intuitive cognition of perfection (anschauenden Erkänntniß der Vollkommenheit).27 In Metaphysica – which Kant adopted for his course on anthropology – Baumgarten claims that beauty (§§336–40) is a kind of perfection (§662). Yet Baumgarten understands perfection epistemically rather than metaphysically. In Aesthetica, Baumgarten holds that beauty is the perfection of sensitive cognition.28 Between Wolff and Baumgarten, a noteworthy conversion or swapping of terms takes place. For Baumgarten, beauty is the perfection of sensitive cognition, but for Wolff, it is the intuitive cognition of perfection. Finally, though much more can and should be said about this tradition, I simply note that Mendelssohn and Sulzer also view beauty as a type of perfection.29 In the rationalist aesthetic tradition, then, beauty is a kind of perfection – though one that is known confusedly and sensitively rather than intellectually. If such perfection can be demonstrated, it can lead to the formulation of what could function like a rule of taste. It could be used as a major premise in a syllogism of taste, such as the following: 1. All aesthetic objects displaying features x, y, and z are aesthetically pleasing (beautiful). 2. This object displays features x, y, and z. 3. Therefore, this object is aesthetically pleasing (beautiful). If there is an “objective principle of taste,” a priori proofs concerning taste are possible.30

26

27

28

29

30

“Clear” means (roughly) that the perceiver can recognize the beautiful object and distinguish it from non-beautiful ones. “Confused” indicates that it is not possible to enumerate one by one all the properties that identify and distinguish the beautiful object, though perhaps one can discern some of them (such as unity in variety). Christian Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedanken von Gott der Welt und der Seele des Menschen (“German Metaphysics”) (Halle: Renger, 1720), §404. “Aesthetices finis est perfectio cognitionis sensitivae, qua talis, §1. Haec autem est pulcritudo.” Baumgarten, Aesthetica, I, §14. For a Latin–German translation, see: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica/Ästhetik, ed. and trans. Dagmar Mirbach (Hamburg: Meiner, 2007). For further details about this period, see Beiser, Diotima’s Children, and Guyer, Modern Aesthetics. I here follow the sense Kant gives to the phrase, “objective principle of taste”: it is “a fundamental proposition under the condition of which one could subsume the concept of an object and then by means of an inference conclude that it is beautiful” (KU 5:285).

   



Despite some family disputes, writers in the German rationalist tradition can be interpreted as adopting an aesthetics that is based on principles and rules. As Konstantin Pollok observes, for Baumgarten, sensibility has its own rules and “the goal of a theoretical aesthetics is to find out the rules of cognizing as well as artistically producing this kind of perfection [beauty].”31 And as Hammermeister notes, for Baumgarten, “true” or “good” art depends on the “application of rules that the science of art and beauty is to develop.”32 Developing this idea and taking it to an extreme, Meier offers no fewer than fifty rules (Regeln) to observe in order to improve one’s taste (Geschmack).33

Kant’s Development: A Synthesis, Then a Discovery Since Kant published nothing on aesthetics after the appearance of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime in 1764 and before the publication of the Critique of the Power of Judgment in 1790, his lectures, correspondence, and marginalia are invaluable for understanding Kant’s development, the arguments he considers and gives up, and his relation to the foregoing aesthetic traditions. Though I wish to avoid giving the impression that Kant’s intellectual development in aesthetic theory is an inevitable march toward the third Critique, I will examine the development of Kant’s views of aesthetic normativity more or less chronologically.34 Pre-1787. One of Kant’s first recorded mentions of “taste” in a lecture is found in a transcription from a lecture on physical geography (V-PG/Holstein 26.1:100). According to a set of lecture notes stemming from 1757–59 (and based on Kant’s own handwritten notes for the course), Kant briefly comments on the variety of tastes found among the peoples around the globe. Though the claim might sound like a commonplace of the era, Kant expresses it using the language of German rationalism: “By taste I understand the sensible judgment of the perfection or imperfection of what moves the senses.

31 32 33

34

Pollok, Normativity, 40. Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition, 12. Guyer, Taste, 15. See Georg Friedrich Meier, Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften, Zweyter Theil (Halle: Carl Hemmerde, 1749), §§471–8. For an assessment of the strengths and weakness of the rationalist position, see Robert R. Clewis, “The Sources and Development of Kant’s Views on Aesthetic Normativity,” Contemporary Studies in Kantian Philosophy 4 (2019): 1–19, 6–7. In a similar vein, Piero Giordanetti analyzes the origins of various areas of Kant’s aesthetics. See, e.g., Piero Giordanetti, “Kants Entdeckung der Aprioriät des Geschmacksurteils: Zur Genese der Kritik der Urteilskraft,” in Heiner F. Klemme et al., eds., Aufklärung und Interpretation: Studien zu Kants Philosophie und ihrem Umkreis (Würzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1999), 171–96.



   ’ 

One will see from the divergence of taste among human beings that with us a great deal is based on prejudices” (V-PG/Holstein 26.1:100).35 Though Kant makes a similar point about the divergence of tastes in the Observations, he does not directly address the question of aesthetic normativity or examine the possibility of rules of taste. In marginal notes or remarks (Bemerkungen) written in his personal copy of the Observations around 1764–66, however, Kant touches on the theme. He searches for a foundation in aesthetics while recognizing the diversity of aesthetic judgments according to features such as age, education, government, and climate: “In the metaphysical foundations of aesthetics, the non-moral [unmoralische] feeling is noticed in its diversity” (BGSE 20:49–50). Another marginal note shows that Kant is struggling to find a rational principle of taste (BGSE 20:21). He alludes to Hume’s standard of taste. I speak about taste. I thus take even my own judgments in such a way that, according to the standard of taste (aesthetically), they are generally [allgemein] true, even if, according to the standard of measured reason (logically), only some of them are valid precisely. (BGSE20:21; my trans.)36

This synthesis of the rational and the aesthetic, of logic and feeling, remains the main theme throughout his early thinking about aesthetic normativity. There may be rules of taste, but they are only empirical.37 At this point I need to introduce an idea that is fundamental to Kant’s early aesthetics. The main driver of the “rationalist” side of Kant’s synthesis is a notion I call the principle of sensible comprehension:

35

36

37

In physical geography lectures given after 1772/73, when he began to teach anthropology, Kant no longer examines taste. See AA 26.1:100 no. 177a. A very early marginal comment on Meier (1752–56) where Kant mentions taste along similar lines is R 1748 (16:100): “A sensible judging of perfection is called taste.” See also Menzer, Entwicklung, 34. See Klemme’s Introduction to Klemme and Kuehn, eds., The Reception of British Aesthetics, vol. 3, xiv, which also provides a translation. Kant discusses the topic of “disputing” about taste not only in the third Critique (KU 5:338), but also in marginalia and lectures from the 1770s and 1780s, such as the following (from 1771): “The proposition: de gusto non est disputandum, if ‘disputing’ means the same as to establish positions on both sides by rational grounds, is entirely correct. But if it means that there is [in matters of taste] no rule at all, hence no rightful contradiction, then it is a principle of unsociability, crudeness and even ignorance” (R 706; 15:313). The reference to a “rule” should not be interpreted in the strong sense of claiming that there are actual a priori rules of taste. See also V-Anth/Collins 25:180; VAnth/Parow 25:378; V-Anth/Mron 25:1326; and V-Met/L1 (about 1777–80) 28:251. Disputing about taste is also discussed in lectures given just before and after the publication of the third Critique (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1509; V-Met/Vig 29:1011). See the note in Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 385 n.1.

   



Principle of sensible comprehension: The beautiful facilitates sensible comprehension according to the laws of intuitive cognition or sensibility.

In the words of the Parow anthropology lecture, “Everything that facilitates and enlarges sensible intuitions delights us according to objective laws that are valid for everyone” (V-Anth/Parow 25:377–8; my trans.). To put it yet another way, the facilitation of sensible comprehension is a necessary condition of beauty: ease of graspability in intuition is a necessary condition of judging an object to be beautiful. As Guyer observes, the early theory “linked our pleasure in the beautiful to the ‘facilitation’ of knowledge, and eventually became Kant’s mature theory of the harmony of imagination and understanding.”38 According to the principle of sensible comprehension, the normativity of aesthetic judgments is grounded on laws of sensibility or intuition that, while in turn based on the subject, are epistemically objective. The generally valid, empirical “rules” of taste are in turn (somehow) derived from these laws of intuition.39 The laws of intuition or sensibility are epistemically objective, but the rules based on them are merely empirical.40 Several passages justify assigning the principle of sensible comprehension to Kant. A fragment from around 1769 states: “Beauty consists in the correspondence of the form – appearance – with the . . . laws of sensibility. Order. Unity” (R 1793, 16:117; about 1769–70). Kant explains the pleasure in beauty as arising from the agreement of an object with the laws of sensibility. The following Reflection (circa 1769) shows how such eased (“promoted”) comprehensibility in intuition could be pleasurable. It also reveals how Kant understands aesthetic normativity: In everything that is approved by taste, there must be something that facilitates making distinctions in the manifold (something that stands out); something that promotes comprehensibility (relations, proportions); something that makes interconnection possible (unity); and finally something that promotes the distinction from everything possible. 38 39

40

Guyer, Taste, 139. According to the third Critique, judgments of taste require or demand genuine universal agreement, whereas rules of the agreeable make a claim to only comparative universality (Allgemeinheit) (KU 5:213). In the Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Kant rejects the notion that the axioms of geometry have only induction-based “comparative universality” (MSI 2:404). He uses this point as evidence for his view that space is a pure intuition (MSI 2:402). The sense of universality in Kant’s early aesthetics (i.e., generality) differs from the stricter kind defended in the third Critique. The anthropology Friedländer contains a comparative use of “universal”: “The rules of reason are universal and do not permit of any exception, but if we only have empirical rules, then these permit many exceptions” (V-Anth/Fried 25:670). On “empirically universal” rules even in logic, see R 1904 (1776–79 or perhaps even the 1790s; 16:154). See also Section II of the published Introduction to the third Critique (KU 5:174). Guyer, Taste, 18.



   ’  Beauty has a subjective principium, namely conformity with the laws of intuitive cognition, but this does not hinder the universal validity of its judgments for people, if the cognitions are all the same. (R 625; 15:271)

Kant draws the conclusion that eased comprehensibility in intuition provides the basis for the claim to taste’s normativity (assuming other conditions such as disinterestedness are met). Since harmony (in music) or symmetry (in architecture) does not just conform to the laws of intuition (as presumably any spatial/temporal object would), but facilitates or promotes comprehension according to the laws of sensibility or intuition (see also R 639; 1769; 15:276), it is experienced with an aesthetic pleasure that can be reasonably exacted or expected from others. Given their common cognitive abilities, human beings can be expected to respond to such pleasure in the same way, even if whether a particular work or object does so remains an open question. A note from 1769 states that a beautiful form (“of intuitions”) “pleases only through providing the understanding with comprehensibility and facility in grasping a large manifold and at the same time with distinctness in the entire representation” (R 638; 15:276). What Kant describes is not just comprehensibility, or conformity to the laws of sensibility, but “facility” in grasping a manifold. Another fragment, while not bringing out this point about facilitation, highlights the universal validity of the “fitting” spatial/temporal relations of the beautiful object. The object’s form can be cognized in accordance with the “common rules of coordination” and thus with universal validity: That which pleases in the object and which we regard as a property of it must consist in that which is valid for everyone. Now the relations of space and time are valid for everyone, whatever sensations they may have. Thus in all appearances the form is universally valid; this form is also cognized [erkannt] in accordance [nach] with common rules of coordination [Coordination]; thus what fits [gemäß ist] the rules of coordination in space and time necessarily pleases everyone and is beautiful. That which is agreeable in the intuition of the beautiful comes down to the comprehensibility of a whole, but the beauty comes down to the universal validity of this fitting relation. (R 672; 1769–70; 15:298)41

The principle of sensible comprehension is also formulated in the logic lectures of this period. In an early lecture from about 1770, Kant used Meier’s Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre (“Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason”). According to the transcription, Kant employs Meier’s rationalist language of perfection (as Kant had done even in the 1750s; see R 1748) and

41

The concept of “coordination” emerges in several other fragments of this time (e.g., R 639 and R 628; 15:273–4) as well as in the Inaugural Dissertation (MSI 2:393).

   



identifies “aesthetic perfection” as a perfection according to laws of sensibility (V-Lo/Blom 24:45). In other words, the normativity in aesthetic judgments of beauty comes from its facilitation of comprehension according to the laws of sensibility or intuition. Kant draws a connection between pleasure (which he thinks of as a feeling of the promotion of “life”) and a playful “activity.”42 “What promotes our life, i.e., what brings our activity into play, as it were, pleases. Something becomes easy for us if it is in order. Order is thus a means for the agreement of our cognition with the object with which it is concerned” (V-Lo/Blom 24:45; emphasis added).43 Now, it may be unclear how an application of the principle of sensible comprehension could be seen as a kind of activity. Guyer presses the point: “Kant’s appeal to rules of sensibility has no obvious connection to his original claim that pleasure arises from activity, or at least he owes us an explanation of the activity, indeed distinctively human activity, for which these rules are the rules.”44 I think these passages show that the pleasure in beauty arises from the “activity” of facilitating comprehension according to the (spatial and temporal) forms of intuition. The object appears to have “order” since, according to the rules of sensibility, it eases comprehension or “agreement.” This reading is confirmed by a passage from a 1772/73 anthropology lecture. The representation of the form [Gestalt] or figure [Figur] of things should be made in accordance with the laws of sensibility. – All human beings have certain agreeing laws through which they form objects: those are the laws of representation. What makes sensible intuition easier pleases and is beautiful; that is in accord with the subjective laws of sensibility, and it promotes the inner life, since it sets the cognitive powers into activity. The facilitation happens through space and time. Alteration in space is figure, in time it is merely play. The play of alteration is facilitated through proportion in the parts. Symmetry facilitates comprehensibility, and is the relation of sensibility. (V-Anth/Collins 25:181; emphasis added)45

This passage also shows the connection between the principle of sensible comprehension and generality. An object’s facilitation of sensible comprehension (“symmetry facilitates comprehensibility”) implies the quasi-universality of judgments about its beauty and of taking pleasure in it (due to the subject’s activity). The passage continues: 42

43 44 45

The view that pleasure is a feeling of the promotion of life is found throughout Kant’s lectures, including lectures on metaphysics from the second half of the 1770s (V-Met/L1 28:247). See also V-Met/L1 28:251–2. Guyer, “Kant’s Aesthetics,” 167. As footnotes at AA 24:181 indicate, some of this passage’s phrases come from the Hamilton anthropology transcription. See also V-Anth/Parow 25:379–80.



   ’  In the case of a disproportioned house, I can represent the whole with difficulty; by contrast, in the case of a well-built house, I see the equality of both sides. Equality of the parts promotes my sensible representation, facilitates the intuition, increases the life of activity and favors it; hence the whole must please me, but for that reason also everyone, for this rule is fundamental for everyone. (V-Anth/Collins 25:181; emphasis added)

The link between form, on the one hand, and objectivity or general validity, on the other, is also clear in a Reflection from 1769. In everything beautiful, that the form of the object facilitates the actions of the understanding46 belongs to the gratification and is subjective; but it is objective that this form is universally valid. (R 630; 1769; 15:274)

What facilitates this sensible comprehension or grasping in intuition, a kind of activity, is pleasant. It pleases in a way that is valid for other subjects similarly equipped with sensibility and “powers of cognition.” Kant considers it to be an empirical fact or principle that pleasure arises from the facilitation of sensible comprehension. Several passages indicate that, for Kant at this time, any rules (or standards) in aesthetics would be only empirical. Around 1769 (or perhaps 1764–68), he writes, “one has no a priori grounds for justifying a taste, but only the general consensus in an age of rational judging” (R 623; 15:270). Thus, whatever else he might think at this time, Kant subscribes to a consensus-based account along the lines of Hume and Kames. Although practical logic is “demonstrable” and therefore a “theory,” there is “no theory” of taste. “There are aesthetic observations, but not dogmata. Its rules are not established through reason, but through taste” (R 1585; 1769–70, 16:26). Aesthetics, Kant holds, is not a doctrine or science. In another Reflection from 1766–69, Kant implies that the rules of taste are a posteriori. “Taste affords no rules a priori because it ought to be a sensible judgment, which cannot be made in accordance with such rules, but only in sensible intuition” (R 1787; 16:114). Models offer a basis for judging, creating a canon of works: “The rules serve to explain and criticize taste, but not as precepts. The norms of taste are models, not for imitation, but for judging” (16:114). The judging of “models” leads to a “general consensus.” According to a lecture on logic (Blomberg) from about 1770, taste has “generally valid laws,” but they cannot be “known in abstracto and a priori.” They can only be known “in concreto” and empirically (V-Lo/Blom 24:45–6). As stated in another Reflection from the mid to late 1760s (or slightly later), when Kant says that a law, principle, or rule is given “in concreto,” he is claiming that it is 46

This reference to understanding rather than to sensibility may be due to a transcription error or might perhaps refer only to mental activity in a general sense.

   



“empirical.” The limits of common [gemeine] reason in concreto are “determined by the field of experience” (R 1579; 16:19).47 Kant’s published works also reveal his views on the matter, and indeed they should be given more weight than his Reflections and lectures. He refers to the (empirical) rules associated with a “criticism of taste” (Kritik des Geschmacks).48 He writes that, in examining the nature of reason, he is being led “to pay some attention to the criticism of taste, that is to say, aesthetics. The rules of the one [i.e., reason] at all times serve to elucidate the rules of the other” (NEV 2:311).49 How does the facilitation of sensible comprehension according to the laws of intuitive cognition lead to and generate empirical rules? An anthropology lecture from 1772/73 helps answer this question. The rules or laws of sensibility give rise to the “rules of aesthetics.” The transcriber writes that judgments about beauty (and – echoing Baumgarten – ugliness) are objective yet in agreement with the rules of sensibility. Clearly, “objective” here only means that the judgments are intersubjectively valid, not that the judgments pick out objective properties. The judgments are “subjective” in that they are based on the laws of sensibility: they are objective epistemically, but subjective ontologically. Judgments about beauty and ugliness are objective but not in accordance with rules of the understanding, but of sensibility. Sensibility has its rules as much as understanding. Certain principles of taste must be universal and be universally valid. Thus there are certain rules of aesthetics: with them we must set aside stimuli and emotions. (V-Anth/Collins 25:181)

Unlike ethical judgments, judgments of beauty apply only to humans who share a specific kind of sensibility. “Angels or rational creatures on other planets: but the beautiful should not please them, for they can have other laws 47 48

49

See also Guyer, Taste, 16. Kant uses “Critik” or “Kritik” of taste to refer to his project as late as December 1787 (Br 10:514–5; cf. Br 10:490), though perhaps at that point the term Critik is finally being used in its transcendental, nonempirical (and non-Kamesian) sense. Kant’s letter to Marcus Herz (February 21, 1772) reveals that the work that eventually became the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781 was supposed to include a section on taste. Kant claims that there are “principles” of feeling, taste, and the power of judgment (the latter being associated with morality): “I had also long ago outlined, to my tolerable satisfaction, the principles of feeling, taste, and power of judgment, with their effects – the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good – and was then making plans for a work that might have the title, The Limits of Sensibility and Reason. I planned to have it consist of two parts, a theoretical and a practical. . . . The second part . . . would have two sections, (1) the universal principles of feeling, taste, and sensuous desire and (2) the first principles of morality” (Br 10:129; emphasis added). The “principles” here are not a priori principles of feeling, but empirical rules or standards derived on the basis of shared responses to beautiful objects and works.



   ’ 

of sensibility” (V-Anth/Collins 25:198). Finite rational inhabitants of other planets could experience and judge something analogous to beauty, but, since such creatures would have different forms of intuition or sensibility, they would likely find different objects and forms to be beautiful. “What universally agrees with the subjective laws of human beings in general pleases in appearance: beautiful. What agrees with the subject in general (whether it is a human one or another kind) is good” (R 715; about 1771; 15:317). The judgments are not valid for all rational beings as such. In this respect, judgments of taste differ from the laws of morality, since aesthetics does not enjoy strict universality.50 The Parow lecture transcription, based on the anthropology course of the same year as the Collins (1772/73), contains an interesting variant of this passage. According to the Parow transcriber, Kant considers the possibility of a science of aesthetics and calls the principle of sensible comprehension one of its “laws.” If “aesthetics” were a science, it would be a science of sensibility in a broadly Baumgartenian sense, namely, a science of the sources of pleasure that can be derived from sensible cognition. It is true that much in it [i.e., in taste] is empirical and gathered together on the occasion of experience, but not all rules are abstracted from it, and then if the judgment of taste is accompanied by understanding, they certainly lie in the nature of our sensibility. From this, one sees then that they can never be opposed to one another, for since they are valid for the object, or since the laws of sensibility are the same for all, opposing judgments of taste would produce a contradiction. One must be true, the other false. On the other hand, judgments of feeling [Gefühls] can be opposed to one another because sensations [Empfindungen] [are] the subjective expression, only it need not be reflections [Reflexiones]51 which one takes for sensations. Beauty and ugliness are really valid for objects, and there are general laws of sensibility as much as of understanding, and a science [Wißenschaft] for the former and an aesthetic, as much as one for the latter, i.e., a logic, can be made. One of its laws is this: Everything that facilitates and enlarges sensible intuitions delights us according to objective laws that are valid for everyone. Our sensible intuitions are either

50 51

Thanks to Robert Louden for discussion here. Kant uses the term “reflection” in 1769–70 in line with his views of sensible comprehension, and not yet in the third Critique sense of an aesthetic judgment of reflection: “Taste in the appearance is grounded on the relations of space and time that are comprehensible to everyone, and on the rules of reflection” (R 648; 15:284). See also R 683; 1769–70; 15:305: “the reflected appearance is the figure [Gestalt].” And R 878; 1776–78; 15:385: “What agrees with the universal subjective laws of cognition (not of sensation) of human beings is beautiful, and pleases in reflection, merely because it accords with the conditions of reflection.”

   



in space, namely the figures [Figuren] and figurations [Gestalten] of things, or in time, namely, the play of alterations. (V-Anth/Parow 25: 377–8; my trans.; emphasis added; cf. KU §14)

The sentences at the end give insight into the connection between the principle of sensible comprehension and the spatial and temporal forms of intuition Kant identifies in the Inaugural Dissertation (1770). Facilitation of the universally shared laws of sensibility (which are “the same for all”) gives rise to empirical judgments, but the laws are not themselves empirical. Whereas it is an empirical “law” (or fact or principle) that what is grasped easily (i.e., spatial or temporal figure in the form of symmetry and harmony) brings pleasure, the laws of sensibility on which this empirical fact is based are universally valid for human beings. Though the fact or principle would be based on empirical generalizations about the nature and causes of aesthetic pleasure in humans, it follows from the smooth application of the laws of sensibility that are “valid for everyone.” If there is a connection between beauty and the universal laws of sensibility, it is because beauty lies in ease of comprehension (in space or time) of forms or objects. Since Kant refers to figures (shapes, forms) and play of alterations, or “sensible intuitions” in space and time, I read him as explaining the pleasure in order and proportion as arising from this easy or facilitated sensible comprehension, conceived of as a kind of mental activity.52 In the Pölitz lecture transcription (1780–82), Kant continues to adopt and modify the rationalist axiom that the detection of perfection (Volkommenheit) is registered with pleasure: “For we call something perfection, when it contributes to being pleasant” (V-Lo/Pölitz 24:513; my trans.). Given the context (a logic lecture in which he is commenting on Meier), perhaps one should not read this as a straightforward endorsement of perfection in aesthetics, but instead, in the wider context of Kant’s developing criticism of an aesthetics of perfection.53 Indeed, Kant admits that the concept of perfection belongs to metaphysics rather than aesthetics or criticism. The lecture states that the 52

53

Cf. the section on pleasure and displeasure at V-Met/L1 28:245–53, where agreement with the laws of sensibility, the understanding, and reason is treated as the ground of different kinds of pleasure. On life, pleasure, and activity, see V-Met/L1 28:247. On comparatively universal, empirical rules in taste, see V-Met/L1 28:251–2. Commenting on V-Met/L1 28:251–2, Guyer, “Kant’s Aesthetics,” 166–7, suggests Kant does not explain why pleasure in order, proportion, and the like would be universally valid. See Kant’s criticism of perfectionism (or his relating “perfection” to a mind) in a treatise of 1763, The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (BDG 2:90). See also Kant’s marginal note (mid-1760s) that mentions the “facilitation” of mental activity but without appealing to perfection: “Sulzer says that what facilitates and promotes the natural efficacy of the soul touches me with pleasure. This says only that it promotes the natural striving after pleasure” (BGSE 20:137). Finally, consider Kant’s claim that pleasure and displeasure are not representations of perfection (R 746; about 1771–72 or slightly later; 15:328). (Thanks to an anonymous reader for comments on this topic.)



   ’ 

aesthetic perfection of knowledge has only a posteriori norms or principles. “The perfection of knowledge,” insofar as it “can be judged only according to a posteriori norms,” is “aesthetic” (V-Lo/Pölitz 24:513). The transcription then states a version of the principle of sensible comprehension. Taste is the faculty of judging whether something agrees with the laws of sensibility. . . . What pleases universally pleases either according to the laws of sensibility, and then it is called beautiful, or according to the laws of the understanding, and then it is called good. (V-Lo/Pölitz 24:513)

Yet, consistent with the Parow lecture discussed above, on the next page the Pölitz transcription states that the rules of taste and sensibility have only “comparative” universality. The good and beautiful agree [übereinkommen] in that they both apply to the object. In both cases, there is a universally valid pleasure, but they differ in the following: with the former there is strict, and with the latter comparative, universality. . . . But the rules of taste cannot be proven, i.e., cannot be known a priori, for they are rules of sensibility. – Hence only experience can decide about the correctness of taste. (V-Lo/Pölitz 24:514; cf. KrV A 21 n.)

Again, Kant’s position seems to be that the laws of sensibility are (epistemically) objective, known a priori, and apply to all human beings (hence are universal), but the application of “rules of taste” to particular objects and works is empirical. Here, “correctness” is to be decided by experience.54 I now turn to the other major strand in Kant’s early thinking about aesthetic normativity: the consensus-based approach. On this view, empirical generalizations about beauty are based on models of taste about which there is consensus over time. The merely comparative generality of an aesthetic judgment is founded on models that are judged by critics to be valuable and to withstand the test of time. It appears that such an account emerges slightly later than the “laws of sensibility” approach, but it is difficult to be specific here, in part due to the problems of dating many of the relevant texts. In addition, the core of this idea is already present in some of the passages quoted above. There is some conceptual overlap between the idea that the rules of taste are empirical (generalized from human responses to works or objects on the basis of shared laws of sensibility) and the idea that the normativity of aesthetic judgment is based on received consensus concerning models of taste.

54

On the merits and demerits of Kant’s “laws of sensibility” account, see Clewis, “Sources and Development,” 10.

   



The Vienna Logic, which likely stems from lectures given in 1780 or 1781, reveals that Kant takes up a broadly Humean or Kamesian consensus-based approach. As explained in my survey above, on this view, practice and familiarity with models refine judgment and the “acquisition” of taste. If a genuine “science” (Wissenschaft) such as logic or geometry must contain or in part consist of judgments and propositions that are known a priori, then aesthetics (or “taste”) cannot be a science, for the rules of taste are empirical. Such empirical rules only serve to bring our judgment under certain concepts when it is cultivated through much practice. Taste, accordingly, cannot in any way be treated as a science. . . . The attempts of the fine arts always come first, followed then by the rules, which serve, however, only for criticizing art. Thus one must acquaint oneself with models of beauty, in order thereby to acquire taste. (V-Lo/Wien 24:812)

According to the lecture, the validity pertaining to aesthetic judgments is only a “common” validity rather than the universality proper that is associated with logical judgments (V-Lo/Wien 24:810). “Subjective universality” is grounded in “popularity” over time and in suitability for the common sense (sens commun). “I must presuppose the way I judge, the way everyone else can judge” (V-Lo/Wien 24:810).55 Likewise, he considers the “modality” of the judgments of taste to be only an “empirical necessity” (V-Lo/Wien 24:810). “Necessity and certainty of aesthetic perfection, that a cognition of the senses is necessary, i.e., that the experience and voices of all people confirm it. Subjective necessity is custom” (V-Lo/Wien 24:810).56 Kant makes similar claims in the Critique of Pure Reason, the first edition of which appeared in 1781. According to the Transcendental Aesthetic, what is borrowed from experience always has only comparative universality, namely through induction (KrV A24/B39). In a frequently cited footnote in the A edition, Kant comments on the use of the term “aesthetics.” As noted, Kant expresses doubts about the scientific status of aesthetics if conceived of as a science of taste: The Germans are the only ones who now employ the word “aesthetics” to designate that which others call the criticism of taste [Kritik des Geschmacks]. The ground for this is a failed hope, held by the excellent analyst Baumgarten, of bringing the critical judging of the beautiful under principles of reason, and elevating its rules to a science. But this effort is futile. For the putative rules or criteria are merely empirical as far as their

55

56

The lecture’s consensus-based approach would suggest that (at least this part of ) the lecture comes from the early 1780s. For a defense of a post-1790 date, see Michael Forster, “Kant’s Philosophy of Language?” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 74, no. 3 (2012): 485–511. See also R 1928, from some time between 1780 and 1789 (likely toward 1780): the “grounds of the satisfaction in the first [i.e., in beauty] are merely empirical” and based on “the consensus of the judgment of many people over a long time” (16:159).



   ’  sources are concerned, and can therefore never serve as a priori rules according to which our judgments of taste must be directed, rather the latter constitutes the genuine touchstone of the correctness of the former. For this reason it is advisable again to desist from the use of this term and to save it for that doctrine which is true science. (KrV A 21 n.)

Here the term Kritik can be understood in Kames’s sense of a “criticism” (R 1588, 16:27). The A 21 assessment of the status of the “criticism” of taste is in agreement with the earlier Reflections and lectures examined above. Kant still denies the possibility of an a priori principle of taste and of aesthetic judgment.57 The consensus-based position even appears in the Jäsche Logic. Despite its late publication date (1800), Jäsche Logic consists of a compilation of student lecture notes that derive from different decades.58 An important passage from the 1770s begins as follows: Aesthetics . . . as mere criticism of taste has no canon (law) but only a norm (model or standard for passing judgment), which consists in universal agreement. (Log 9:15)

In agreement with A 21, Kant then endorses Kames while rejecting Baumgarten. The former [aesthetics] has only empirical principles and thus can never be science or doctrine, provided that one understands by doctrine a dogmatic instruction from principles a priori, in which one has insight into everything through the understanding without instruction from other quarters attained from experience, and which gives us rules, by following which we procure the required perfection. Some, especially orators and poets, have tried to engage in reasoning concerning taste, but they have never been able to hand down a decisive judgment concerning it. The philosopher Baumgarten in Frankfurt [am Oder] had a plan for an aesthetic as a science. (Log 9:15; see also V-Lo/Blom 24:49)

The passage continues by endorsing the (broadly Kamesian) consensusbased position, according to which “criticism” derives its rules a posteriori.

57 58

See also Guyer, Taste, 26. Guyer observes that Kant’s “lectures on logic” (or the Jäsche Logic) were “published in 1800, but were actually based on the materials from the 1770s.” Guyer, Taste, 15. The textual problems with the Jäsche Logic have also been noted by scholars such as Boswell and (well before him) Baeumler. Baeumler, Das Irrationalitätsproblem, 268 no. 6. Terry Boswell, “On the Textual Authenticity of Kant’s Logic,” History and Philosophy of Logic, vol. 9, no. 2 (1988): 193–203. To give just one instance of Jäsche Logic’s questionable status as a source of Kant’s later views, his early “laws of sensibility” account lingers on in the 1800 publication (Log 9:36–8).

   



But Home [i.e., Kames], more correctly, called aesthetics criticism [Kritik], since it yields no rules a priori that determine judgment sufficiently, as logic does, but instead derives its rules a posteriori, and since it only makes more general, through comparison, the empirical laws according to which we cognize the more perfect (beautiful) and the more imperfect. (Log 9:15)

Before turning to a major shift in Kant’s thinking about aesthetic normativity, I would like to highlight an aspect of the consensus-based account: sociality. In Kant’s early aesthetics, sociality is both a source of the aesthetic pleasure in beauty and a ground of its comparative generality or normativity. “If I call it beautiful, I do not thereby declare merely my own satisfaction, but also that it should please others” (R 640; 1769; 15:280). “Taste is really the faculty for choosing that which sensibly pleases in unison with others” (R 647; 1769–70; 15:284). This view dovetails well with a consensus-based account since, according to the latter, one is judging with fellow apprehenders of beautiful objects. The connection between beauty and sociality (whether as a source of pleasure or as a ground of normativity) is a common theme in Kant’s early notes about aesthetics. One feels pleasure or gratification in taste, he writes, because the approval is there “on account of” the universality (R 710, about 1771, 15:314). If people were isolated, without society, the inclination to beauty would never arise. “Since universal validity is useless as soon as society is lacking, then all the charm of beauty must also be lost” (R 686; 1769–70; 15:306; see also R 1791; about 1769–70; 16:116). “Just because in taste it comes down to whether something also pleases others, it takes place only in society, that is, only in society does it have a charm” (R 648; 1769–70; 15:284).59 In the mid-1770s, Kant still expresses this view of sociality (e.g., R 769, from about 1772–75, 15:335). As Guyer observes, Kant has not yet distinguished the transcendental ground of pleasure in the beautiful (the a priori principle of

59

The principle of sociality is noted by Menzer, Entwicklung, 76 and Guyer, Taste, 139. The early view that communicability itself causes pleasure arguably emerges in the second paragraph of §9 in the third Critique. Kant writes: “Thus it is the universal capacity for the communication of the state of mind in the given representation which, as the subjective condition of the judgment of taste, must serve as its ground and have the pleasure in the object as a consequence” (KU 5:217; emphasis added). For additional statements concerning sociality, see the following Reflections: R 653; 1769–70; 15:289. R 683; 1769–70; 15:304–5. R 701; 1770–71; 15:310–11. See also the lectures: V-Lo/Blom 24:45–6; V-Lo/ Phil 24:353–5; V-Anth/Collins, 15:179–80; and V-Met/L1 28:250–2. See also the note in Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 368 no. 20.



   ’ 

taste or aesthetic judgment) from socially grounded satisfaction in the empirical fact that pleasure in the beautiful is shared with others.60 A Sudden Discovery: Late 1787 and Beyond. This changes around late 1787. As I will explain below, this shift is arguably already reflected in Kant’s emendments (for the B edition of 1787) to the A 21 footnote on the possibility of “aesthetics.” Moreover, in his letter to Reinhold at the end of December 1787, Kant refers to a “discovery” of an a priori principle of the faculty of feeling pleasure and displeasure (Br 10:514). Around this time, Kant rejects his earlier synthesis of the (empirical) rule-based account and the consensusbased account because he thinks he has discovered an a priori principle of the faculty of feeling. This leads him to work on the “critique of taste” (Kritik now arguably being used in the transcendental sense) and finally to publish the third Critique in 1790. After the appearance of that work, there appear to be no fundamental changes to the core doctrines of his aesthetic theory. Though there may be disagreement about the details and nature of the shift, and whether there is one single a priori principle or several, scholars largely agree that Kant underwent a change in his thinking at this time. As Colin McQuillan observes, Kant’s views on aesthetics “changed dramatically shortly before he published” the third Critique in 1790.61 Guyer likewise explains the meaning of the “sudden discovery” described in the letter to Reinhold, while emphasizing some of the continuities with Kant’s pre-1787 views about the lack of determinate or a priori rules in aesthetics.62 In the third Critique, Kant continues to reject the idea that there are a priori rules of taste (KU 5:284–5). It is potentially confusing when in Section VIII of the Introduction Kant writes, “the aesthetic power of judgment is thus a special faculty for judging things in accordance with a rule but not in accordance with concepts” (KU 5:194; emphasis added). But the reference to a “rule” need not be taken as a particular rule of taste: it can also be read as referring to the a priori principle of aesthetic judgment or of taste.63 The principle provides the “a priori grounds” of the judgment, as implied by the title of §12 (“The judgment of taste rests on a priori grounds”). 60 61

62

63

Guyer, Taste, 10, 13, and esp. 19–25. See also Guyer, “Play and Society.” J. Colin McQuillan, “The Science of Aesthetics, the Critique of Taste, and the Philosophy of Art: Ambiguities and Contradictions,” Aesthetic Investigations 4, no. 2 (2021): 144–62. The interpretations of Guyer and Zammito, Genesis, also resonate with this view. Guyer’s Introduction to Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, xiv–xxi. Around this time, “Kant somehow came up with the idea of a new kind of a priori principle that would let him write a critique of taste without undermining his scruples about determinate rules for judgments on the beauty of objects” (xxi). It could also correspond to §18, where the aesthetic judgment of beauty is said to be an example of a “universal rule” that one cannot produce (KU 5:237). A similar claim is made in §37 (KU 5:289). Or, it might also refer to the notion that models or exemplary artworks are taken to function as rules or standards for taste (KU 5:308).

   



The nature of the principle is disputed in the literature, and I do not intend to go deep into that debate here. I will assume that the general principle of the power of judgment is the principle of the purposiveness of nature, or the formal purposiveness of nature. This interpretation is supported by the contents of Section V of the Introduction, whose very title is “The principle of the formal purposiveness of nature is a transcendental principle of the power of judgment” (KU 5:181). In Section V, Kant describes the understanding as needing an a priori principle “in order to investigate” empirical laws of nature. The understanding needs to “ground all reflection on nature on an a priori principle, the principle, namely, that in accordance with these [empirical] laws a cognizable order of nature is possible” (KU 5:185). If so, the principle would seem to be the principle of the purposiveness of nature. It is a principle for (or supplied by) the power of judgment rather than for (or by) cognition or desire, and it is a priori rather than empirical. But something even more basic than the nature of the principle is controversial: Is there one principle or many? In his December 1787 letter to Reinhold, Kant writes, “I am now at work on the critique (Critik) of taste, and I have discovered a new kind/sort (Art) of a priori principles” (Br 10:514, Zweig trans.). Kant uses the plural: “eine neue Art von Principien a priori entdeckt wird.” This has led some translators and scholars to write of principles in the plural.64 Whatever Kant’s German might imply, it seems odd to use the plural in the English equivalent. Whereas the phrase “a new kind of rules” is jarring, “a new kind of rule” is grammatical. Accordingly, I will refer to the a priori principle of the faculty of feeling pleasure and displeasure (or, as he calls it in the published work, of the power of judgment) in the singular. Whatever one makes of the letter to Reinhold, the third Critique frequently states that there is just one transcendental, a priori principle of the power of judgment. For instance, in Section III of the published Introduction, Kant refers to “a proper principle of its own for seeking laws” (KU 5:177). And later in that section: “It is therefore to be suspected at least provisionally that the power of judgment likewise contains an a priori principle for itself” (KU 5:178). The end of Section IV states: “the principle of the power of judgment in regard to the form of things in nature under empirical laws in general is the purposiveness of nature in its multiplicity.” “The purposiveness of nature is thus a special a priori concept” (KU 5:180–1). And, finally, at the end of Section V: “The power of judgment thus also has in itself an a priori principle for the possibility of nature” (KU 5:185). The textual evidence suggests not only that there is one principle of the power of judgment, but also that it is the a priori, transcendental principle of the purposiveness of nature.65 64 65

Yet, like Guyer, Zammito, Genesis, 47, writes of a “principle.” At the same time, it is sometimes difficult to see how exactly the transcendental principle Kant mentions in the Introduction (e.g., Section V) relates to a principle of taste or aesthetic judgment.



   ’ 

In the Preface to the 1790 edition of the third Critique, Kant gives an infinite regress argument for why there cannot be objective rules for the application of judgment. If there were such rules, he argues, the power of judgment would need a rule for the application of that rule, then another rule to apply that one, and so on, and an infinite regress would arise (KU 5:169). I cannot evaluate this argument here or similar passages in the first Critique,66 but I will note that the conclusion of the argument is consistent with Kant’s earlier claim that there are no objective rules of taste. To capture this notion in the third Critique, Kant introduces the concept of heautonomy, his term for when the power of judgment prescribes a law to itself rather than to nature (EEKU 20:225; KU 5:185–86).67 In addition to repudiating perfectionism in aesthetics (EEKU 20:228; KU 5:214, 221, 228, 289), Kant rejects the view that the standard of taste is a norm established by critics over time. He holds that making a pure aesthetic judgment requires the application of an a priori principle. The harmonious play of the imagination and understanding leads to an aesthetic pleasure on the basis of which a person makes an aesthetic judgment and speaks with a “universal voice” (KU 5:216). In line with this, Kant defends the notion of the autonomy of aesthetic judgment. An aesthetic judge should not unreflectively follow the opinion of others. This notion is thus poised to come into tension with his earlier consensus-based account. “If someone does not find a building, a view, or a poem beautiful, then, first, he does not allow approval to be internally imposed upon himself by a hundred voices who all praise it highly” (KU 5:284). The poet who is convinced he is right about the aesthetic value of a poem will not change his mind based on the testimony of others alone (even if he might define or refine his views in light of their opinions). Rejecting a consensus-based approach to the normativity of aesthetic judgment, Kant thus denies the possibility of empirical proofs of the correctness of a judgment of taste. Kant is even more convinced that there cannot be a priori proofs of taste. “An a priori proof in accordance with determinate rules can determine the judgment on beauty even less” (KU 5:284). If so, a rule of taste cannot function as a major premise in a syllogism or proof concerning taste. In fact, Kant 66

67

See KrV A132–3/B171–2; cf. Anth 7:199. See Makkai, Kant’s Critique 45–69, for a discussion of Kant’s infinite regress argument – according to which judgment would require a rule for judging, and a rule for that, and so on. Makkai argues for the essential “exercise” of judgment (61) and rejects the view (which she attributes to David Bell and Henry Allison) that what stops the infinite regress is something external to or beyond the power of judgment (such as “feeling”). Makkai, Kant’s Critique, 51–5, 57, 61. On heautonomy, see the Preface (KU 5:169) and Sections IV and V of the published Introduction (KU 5:180, 185–6). In the main arguments of the third Critique, Kant does not rely as heavily on the term as one might expect him to do. On aesthetic heautonomy, see Pollok, Normativity, 279–85.

   



rejects both consensus-based and rule-based approaches (“a priori grounds of proof”) in the same paragraph. If someone reads me his poem or takes me to a play that in the end fails to please my taste, then he can adduce Batteux or Lessing, or even older and more famous critics of taste, and adduce all the rules they established as proofs that his poem is beautiful; certain passages, which are the very ones that displease me, may even agree with rules of beauty (as they have been given there and have been universally recognized): I will stop my ears, listen to no reasons and arguments, and would rather believe that those rules of the critics are false or at least that this is not a case for their application than allow that my judgment should be determined by means of a priori grounds of proof, since it is supposed to be a judgment of taste and not of the understanding or of reason. (KU 5:284–5)

Since Kant grounds judgments of taste on an a priori principle of the power of judgment, it may be surprising to read his claim that taste needs examples or models. But among all the faculties and talents, taste is precisely the one which, because its judgment is not determinable by means of concepts and precepts, is most in need of the examples of what in the progress of culture has longest enjoyed approval if it is not quickly to fall back into barbarism and sink back into the crudity of its first attempts. (KU 5:283)

But the apparent tension can in this case be reconciled. Examples and models are needed for aesthetic education and teaching (especially since, Kant thinks, one cannot here appeal to proofs and demonstrations), but they do not ground the normativity of aesthetic judgments. That ground is provided by the a priori principle of the power of (aesthetic) judgment. As he was preparing the B edition (1787) of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant softened his assessment regarding the use of the term “aesthetics.” Perhaps Kant revised the footnote at A 21 in light of his (imminent) “discovery” of an a priori principle for the faculty of pleasure and displeasure, as mentioned in the 1787 letter to Reinhold. The second edition states that rules of taste are merely empirical as far as their “most prominent” sources are concerned (B 35–6). Kant leaves conceptual space for a priori sources and for non-determinate a priori principles. He thus leaves room for the a priori principle of the faculty of feeling pleasure and displeasure or, more generally, of the purposiveness of nature.68 The term “aesthetics,” he claims, might be 68

Baeumler, Das Irrationalitätsproblem, 272 no. 1, rejects the attempt by Tumarkin, Karl Vorländer, and Schlapp to see in the changes made in the B 35 footnote an



   ’ 

“shared” with speculative philosophy (which uses it for the theory of the cognition of space and time). One can take the term partly in a “transcendental” meaning and partly in a “psychological” one. Indeed, in the First Introduction to Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant shows that he is aware of the difficulties posed by using the term “aesthetic.”69

The Third Critique Reconsidered Kant presents early on the distinction between the empirical generality in matters of taste and beauty, on the one hand, and strict universality in logic and a priori concept application, on the other. This distinction is a constant theme in his early aesthetics. Kant supports the idea of the empirical generality of rules of taste in the early aesthetics before defending the notion that a judgment of taste is synthetic and rests on an a priori, transcendental principle (KU 5:288–89). In the third Critique, in other words, the empirical generality of rules of taste turns into a stricter universal validity in the sense that judgments of taste are based on a single a priori principle. Kant views pure aesthetic judgments as being grounded on a principle that has universal validity while at the same time denying that pure aesthetic judgments are based on concepts alone. Kant’s December 1787 letter to Reinhold reveals three reasons for a change of mind about the normativity of taste: a “sudden discovery” of an a priori principle for the faculty of feeling pleasure and displeasure; his take on the capacities and principles of the mind; and a new vision of a “teleology.”70 In this chapter, I have focused on my fourth arc by which to interpret the development of Kant’s aesthetics. The normativity of aesthetic judgment goes from being grounded in laws of sensibility and consensus over time, to being grounded in an a priori principle of the faculty of feeling or of the power of aesthetic judgment. Other arcs are also involved in the issue of aesthetic normativity – some more than others. Since Kant’s transcendental principle is a principle of the purposiveness of nature, the shift in the grounding of aesthetic normativity reflects his interest in natural teleology and purposiveness in nature (arc 1), even if one wishes he had better clarified the relation between the principle of the power of judgment in general and the principle of

69

70

approximation of, or move toward, the third Critique’s take on an a priori principle. I disagree with Baeumler and see a shift here. “Since all determinations of feeling are merely of subjective significance, there cannot be an aesthetic of feeling as a science as there is, say, an aesthetic of the faculty of cognition” (EEKU 20:222). “Hence our transcendental aesthetic of the faculty of cognition could very well speak of sensible intuitions, but could nowhere speak of aesthetic judgments” (EEKU 20:223). For an assessment of the third Critique account of aesthetic normativity, see Clewis, “Sources and Development,” 15–6. Guyer’s Introduction to Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, xv.

   



taste or aesthetic judgment in particular. In the early period, Kant is able to call purpose-based (not free) beauty “self-standing” (arc 2), since judgments about the work can be grounded in ideas of the purposes or aims of the work – making for partly intellectual judgments along the lines that C.F.R. had discussed. Once Kant discovers his a priori principle, however, he is now in a position to call free beauties “self-standing” (see Chapter 3). The shift from an aesthetics of perfection to one that gives a prominent role to aesthetic ideas (arc 3) is likely somehow relevant to Kant’s account of aesthetic normativity.71 However, I have not claimed that Kant grounds the normativity of aesthetic judgments of beauty in a free play with aesthetic ideas alone, though a play with aesthetic ideas is in my view a counterpart to and consistent with the formal elements in free beauty that ground the purity of aesthetic judgments of free beauty. Kant formulated an early precursor to the Critical notion of aesthetic ideas at some point around 1776–7872 (when he was intensively reading Gerard on genius), yet he did not have his insight into the a priori principle of feeling pleasure and displeasure until around 1787. If aesthetic ideas were really the key to his mature view of aesthetic normativity, it seems reasonable to expect Kant to have had this discovery or to have made this connection much earlier than he did. As for arc 5, the new view of the relevance of “teleology” can be seen in Kant’s letter to Reinhold, and it is clearly important to Kant’s philosophical project in the third Critique. In this chapter, however, I have not argued that aesthetic experience as a kind of freedom (on analogy with moral freedom) serves a basis of aesthetic normativity, since I do not think Kant relies on such an idea in his justification or deduction of the principle of aesthetic judgment. While moral teleology and the ethical turn are important to Kant’s broader philosophical and systematic aims and to the composition of the third Critique, they are less pertinent to the question of aesthetic normativity per se.73

Concluding Remark In his early views of aesthetic normativity, then, Kant appropriates key ideas from the German and British traditions, but his “sudden discovery” of an a 71

72

73

See, e.g., Andrew Chignell, “Kant on the Normativity of Taste: The Role of Aesthetic Ideas,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85, no. 3 (2007): 415–33. See, e.g., two Reflections from 1776–78: “The idea animates the imagination, and this in turn gives life to the idea, namely material for its animation, i.e., sensibility as an animal life” (R 950; 15:421). “Spirit is that which affords much to think about” (R 958; 15:422). Given my aims, I do not examine the nature, scope, and argument of the deduction of judgments of taste. The literature on the deduction is vast, but see especially Guyer, Taste, 248–93; Allison, Taste, 160–92; Zuckert, Beauty and Biology, 321–67; Eldridge, Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, 187–95; and Paul Crowther, The Kantian Aesthetic: From Knowledge to the Avant Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010), 89–115.



   ’ 

priori principle of feeling pleasure and displeasure requires him to significantly revise his views.74 Nevertheless, Kant’s early notion that the beautiful is easily graspable in intuition carries over into the third Critique view that in pure beauty one attends to the “form” of the object. A strong version of this idea construes form in spatial or temporal terms alone. According to a weaker version, form is simply whatever elicits a harmonious free play of the imagination and understanding. In the next chapter, I examine Kantian formalism more closely.

74

For philosophical and historical reasons to study the development of Kant’s views of aesthetic normativity, see Clewis, “Sources and Development,” 16–8.

2 Beauty Free

The notion that beauty is a response to formal properties such as proportion and symmetry can be traced at least as far back as the Stoics, if not Plato.1 Thomas Aquinas thinks the beauty “in a thing” is based on “form” and consists “in due proportion.”2 Modern thinkers express similar ideas as well. Francis Hutcheson conceives of beauty as unity amidst variety, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Moses Mendelssohn see unity of the manifold as the underlying ground or principle of beauty. Of course, Kant is also seen as a formalist of some kind. Critics such as Clement Greenberg invoke a formalist Kant and place a great emphasis on form,3 and there are different readings of Kant as a formalist in the more specialized literature too. Kant’s account of free beauty, combined with his widespread use of the concept of form, leads readers to view him as a formalist. Free beauty is, roughly, the kind of beauty that involves a response to an object’s perceptible sensory features without the invocation of concepts – what C.F.R. called sensible beauty. Such beauty is “free” because no concept determines the act of judging. The sensible features include an object’s or edifice’s design or shape, spatial form, or (in the case of music and song) its rhythm in combination with harmony and/or melody. Since Kant is often called a formalist and “form” plays a prominent role in his account of free beauty, I explore in what ways his accounts can be

1

2

3

See Aiste Celkyte, “The Stoic Definition of Beauty as Summetria,” Classical Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2017): 88–105. Richard Bett, “Beauty and Its Relation to Goodness in Stoicism,” in Ancient Models of Mind, ed. Andrea Nightingale and David Sedley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 130–52. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 5, Article 4, Reply to Objection 1. A translation can be found in Thomas Aquinas, Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton Pegis (New York: The Modern Library, 1945), 40. For his works, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 61 vols. (Cambridge and New York: Blackfriars and McGraw-Hill, 1964–80). I discuss Clement Greenberg’s reading of Kant in Robert R. Clewis, “Greenberg, Kant, and Aesthetic Judgments of Modernist Art,” AE: Canadian Aesthetics Journal 18 (2008): 1–15. See also Paul Crowther, “Kant and Greenberg’s Varieties of Aesthetic Formalism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42, no. 4 (1984): 442–5.





   ’ 

considered formalist. To explore what kind of formalist he could be, I begin with the modern notion of unity amidst variety that makes up part of the context for his thinking.

The Modern Context: Unity amidst Variety As already noted, Kant was familiar with the theories of Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, Hutcheson, Hume, Hugh Blair, Kames, Gerard, and James Beattie. Within the German tradition, Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, and Sulzer markedly influenced Kant’s aesthetics.4 Rather than trying to cover the history of aesthetic formalism, I will focus (if briefly) on an idea common to both traditions: unity in variety. Some of the German “rationalists” who viewed beauty as perfection can be seen as formalists in that they defend a notion of unity in variety. Hutcheson can be viewed as a formalist in a related sense.5 There are surely fundamental philosophical differences here: the so-called rationalists tend to see beauty as an objective quality, whereas the empiricists tend to view beauty as a sentiment in a subject. Yet the endorsement of unity in variety can be found in both. As one scholar puts it, “For Hutcheson, as for Descartes and Leibniz before him, beauty is what presents itself not just as regular, ordered, and harmonious, but also as varied and manifold.”6 At the core of Hutcheson’s aesthetic theory is the “internal sense” of beauty that he considers to be “universal.”7 The internal sense “is a passive power of receiving ideas of beauty from all objects in which there is uniformity amidst variety.”8 Humans have a “natural” propensity to perceive unity in variety and to take pleasure in it. Two aspects of his unity amidst variety principle can be identified. The first one claims that wherever objects display equal uniformity, variety increases beauty. Thus, a square is more beautiful than an equilateral 4

5

6 7

8

Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2013), 47–8. On the British influence on Kant’s aesthetics, see Theodore A. Gracyk, “Kant’s Shifting Debt to British Aesthetics,” British Journal of Aesthetics 26, no. 3 (1986): 204–17; and Paul Guyer, “Gerard and Kant: Influence and Opposition,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 9, no. 1 (2011): 59–93. Zuckert reads Hutcheson and Mendelssohn as subscribing to “whole-formalism” (the view that beauty is a unity of diversity). Moreover, she recognizes that they both allow that we may perceive unity of diversity because of an object’s proportion. They “take that to be one case among many of unity of diversity, which is the defining factor in (our experience of ) the beautiful.” Rachel Zuckert, “The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant’s Aesthetic Formalism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 44, no. 4 (2006): 599–622, 601 no. 8. Lucia Procuranti, La percezione del bello da Descartes a Kant (Trento: Verifiche, 2009), 70. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2004), 23. On universality, see 63, 66–9. Ibid., 67.

 



triangle. The second aspect goes in the reverse direction: wherever objects exhibit variety, greater uniformity increases the beauty.9 For example, an equilateral triangle surpasses a scalene triangle in beauty, a square has more beauty than a rhombus, and so on.10 Hutcheson also uses the unity in variety principle to explain beauty in the planets and stars, plants, animals, water and other fluids, and even musical harmonies and mathematical theorems.11 He considers these principles to be “rules of original beauty,” though the reference to rules is best understood in a loose sense.12 Hutcheson also applies the notion of unity in variety to representational art, or what he calls “relative” beauty. Whereas absolute or original beauty is “that beauty which we perceive in objects without comparison to anything external, of which the object is supposed [to be] an imitation or picture,” comparative or relative beauty is “that which we perceive in objects, commonly considered as imitations or resemblances of something else.”13 Relative beauty is the beauty found in reproduction and imitation in art by a “statuary, painter, or poet.”14 It is trickier, though perhaps still possible, to pinpoint aesthetic formalism in the German scholastic tradition. Beauty, for the German rationalists, is a perfection, yet the latter is not understood in the same way by all of the writers in this tradition. Moreover, the concept of perfection can be understood in a more intellectual sense and in a more perceptible sense. On the one hand, “perfection” can indicate something conceptual like a rational structure or order (or even a concept of an instrumental or moral goodness), or at least a feature or quality that lies toward the conceptual end of a continuum that goes from the sensible to the conceptual. On the other hand, “perfection” could be taken to indicate something sensible or perceptual – such as a perceived or sensed unity in variety, as in symmetry, proportion, and harmony. If one focuses (as I do in this chapter) on perfection as perceived unity in variety, it seems possible to see this aspect of rationalist theories as formalist.15 And if one focuses on perfection as conceptual or intellectual, it is plausible (perhaps even more so) to see rationalist theories as nonformalist (as I do in the next chapter). 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

Ibid., 29. In comments on regularity at the end of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” (KU 5:241–2), Kant implicitly rejects Hutcheson’s position, since he would consider the geometrical figures to be instances of objective rather than subjective formal purposiveness, hence not genuine instances of beauty. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 30–6. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 27, orthography modified. Ibid., 42. Compare Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 19: “Their [Baumgarten’s and Wolff’s] account of perfection states simply that it consists in harmony, unity in variety,” rather than objective purposiveness.



   ’ 

Formalism and the Third Critique on Free Beauty Only when Kant gets to §16 of the third Critique does he specify what he means by “free” beauty. He introduces a distinction between free and adherent beauty: There are two kinds of beauty: free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) or merely adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). The first presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be; the second does presuppose such a concept and the perfection of the object in accordance with it. The first are called (self-standing) [für sich bestehende] beauties of this or that thing; the latter, as adhering to a concept (conditioned beauty), are ascribed to objects that stand under the concept of a particular end. (KU 5:229; cf. 245–6)

Kant gives the impression that he is suddenly introducing the notion of “free” beauty, but in fact he had already been discussing it. In the published Introduction, he describes an “aesthetic judgment on the purposiveness of the object, which is not grounded on any available concept of the object and does not furnish one” (KU 5:190). Likewise, in §4, the aim of which is to distinguish judgments of beauty from judgments of the good (whether the moral or the agreeable), Kant writes: “Flowers, free designs, lines aimlessly intertwined in each other under the name of foliage, signify nothing, do not depend on any determinate concept, and yet please” (KU 5:207). A free judgment of beauty or of taste must be “without a concept.” To be sure, when I judge a tulip to be beautiful, I can recognize and acknowledge that it is a tulip. According to a principle of charity, it is perhaps best not to read Kant as claiming that, in the act of judging a thing to be beautiful, the apprehender lacks a concept of the perceived object altogether. Concepts can be used to identify and refer to the object judged beautiful. The point is that the concept of the object cannot be used to make the inference that, due to subsumption under that concept, the object must be beautiful; after all, some tulips are not beautiful.16 As Guyer puts it, “While what makes something a sonata or statue may be determinable by concepts, what makes it beautiful is not.”17 Kant’s commentators dispute the role of concepts in the pure (free) judgment of taste.18 Despite scholarly debates about how the judgment of free 16 17 18

Guyer, Taste, 386 no. 40; 389 no. 105. Ibid., 168. There are at least three principal (and widely discussed) interpretations of the role of concepts in the judgment of taste and of the related issue of the harmony of the faculties: pre-cognitivist, multi-cognitivist, and meta-cognitivist. See the overview presented by Guyer, who characterizes his position as meta-cognitivist. Paul Guyer, “Harmony of the Faculties Revisited,” in Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge:

 



beauty or taste is “without a concept,” a few things are generally agreed upon. Here is one way to summarize Kant’s view of free beauty in the third Critique. If “x” stands for a singular term such as “this flower,” then “x is a free beauty” is a pure aesthetic judgment of free beauty only if the following necessary conditions are met.19 The pure aesthetic judgment of free beauty is subjective, disinterested,20 and makes a claim to being universally valid (“subjectively universal”) and necessary. It is, further, a singular judgment concerning the contemplative pleasure felt in response to an object having a form of purposiveness (that is, purposiveness without a purpose).21 The pleasure derives from the harmonious free play of the imagination and understanding without the application of a concept.22 At least at some level, it is evident that free beauty is a response to “form” (KU 5:223; cf. EEKU 20:249; KU 5:411). While this justifies calling Kant a formalist of some kind, what the invocation of form actually means and entails is far from clear. To consider what sort of formalist Kant is, one has to lay out the various kinds of formalism that might reasonably be attributed to him. Specifically, I name three kinds and classify these as strong, moderate, and weak formalism.

19 20

21

22

Cambridge University Press, 2005), 77–109. A pressing concern for the meta-cognitivist, in my view, is to explain how free beauty would differ from adherent beauty, since in judging adherent beauty concepts of the object are also taken into account, and Kant uses the notion of adherent beauty to characterize the beauty of an object as an aesthetically pleasing member of its kind, or as an exemplary specimen, or in terms of its purposes and functions. In another essay, in fact, Guyer appears to accept the implication that nearly all beauty is partly conceptual or adherent. See Paul Guyer, “Kant on the Purity of the Ugly,” in Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 141–62, 61–2. Thanks to Noël Carroll for discussion here. On the various senses of interest and disinterestedness, see Robert R. Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 146–58. Stephanie Adair, The Aesthetic Use of the Logical Functions of Kant’s Third Critique (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018), interprets the four “moments” of the judgment of taste according to Kant’s fourfold “table” of logical judgments (in the process, she omits a discussion of adherent beauty). But, as Guyer points out, Kant employs the table of judgments when he was still in a pre-Critical stage influenced by Baumgarten and Meier, that is, before Kant had settled on his mature aesthetic theory. Thus, the table is not intrinsic to Kant’s mature views. See Guyer, Taste, 116. For Kant (early and late), the response to beauty is intrinsically linked to feeling pleasure. In contrast, some contemporary empirical researchers hold that it is possible for an objective property of beauty to not elicit pleasure. For discussion, see Gregor HaynLeichsenring and Anjan Chatterjee, ”Colliding Terminological Systems – Immanuel Kant and Contemporary Empirical Aesthetics,” Empirical Studies of the Arts 37, no. 2 (2019): 197–219, 212. In that case, however, it would seem to be more an instance of (what Kant would consider) conceptually-determined cognition and intellectual recognition than of nonconceptually determined, aesthetic experience.



   ’  Strong formalism: Pure aesthetic judging is a response only to play in space (design, figure, figuration) or in time (rhythm in possible combination with harmony and melody). Such spatial or temporal features are what (one might say more colloquially) pure aesthetic judgments of free beauty are “about.”

This view holds that aesthetic response consists in an engagement with spatial and/or temporal properties or qualities of the object.23 These features of the object are essential to and required for aesthetic appreciation of it; they are the main elicitors of the response in the judging subject.24 Passages supporting this version of formalism can be found in §13: A judgment of taste on which charm and emotion have no influence (even though these may be combined with the satisfaction in the beautiful), which thus has for its determining ground merely the purposiveness of the form, is a pure judgment of taste. (KU 5:223; emphasis added)

And the subsequent section (§14) contains this notorious passage: In painting and sculpture, indeed in all the pictorial arts, in architecture and horticulture insofar as they are fine arts, the drawing is what is essential, in which what constitutes the ground of all arrangements for taste is not what gratifies in sensation but merely what pleases through its form. . . . All form of the objects of the senses (of the outer as well as, mediately, the inner) is either shape or play: in the latter case, either play of shapes (in space, mime, and dance), or mere play of sensations (in time). (KU 5:225; emphasis added)

Of course, the problem with the strong formalist position is that it seems overly restrictive, as several commentators have noted.25 This provokes many readers to attribute to Kant what I call moderate formalism:

23

24

25

Strong formalism would count as an instance of what Zuckert calls “property-formalism” (the view that the form of an object can be described in terms of a set of specific spatial or temporal properties that characterize the relations that hold among different parts of the object, and that these properties are responsible for the object’s beauty). Zuckert, “Form,” 600. In this chapter, I set aside Kant’s complex views of color, including his apparent acceptance of Leonhard Euler’s theory. Although Kant writes about color while discussing aesthetic form, examining it would complicate matters unnecessarily. For additional, consonant arguments against reading Kant as (only) a strong formalist, see Zuckert, “Form.” For a discussion of some of the early Reflections on form as well as a (more controversial) characterization of formalism that incorporates the first Critique’s account of the “mathematical principles,” see Mary Gregor, “Aesthetic Form and Sensory Content in the Critique of Judgment: Can Kant’s ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’ Provide

 



Moderate formalism: “Form” is understood as what in the object allows a manifold of sensation to be united by the imagination without the application of a concept. Pure aesthetic judging can be a response to play in space (design, figure, figuration) and in time (rhythm, possibly with harmony and/or melody), but, while beauty is a response to something in the object, aesthetic judging is not limited to attending to spatial or temporal features of the object alone.

On this view, spatial and temporal form can play an important role in pure aesthetic judgments of free beauty, but it does not play the only one. Note that the most important elicitor of aesthetic reflection here is still form, so this position counts as a kind of formalism. Allison can arguably be said to attribute to Kant such a position. He writes: “Form, construed as a possible subject matter for reflection, may include, but need not be limited to, spatiotemporal configuration. . . . A beautiful object is one which provides the materials for such an ordering by the imagination.”26 And Allison adds: “Again, form is explicitly identified with the arrangement of the sensible material produced by the imagination in its apprehension of the object (rather than with any structural feature of the object apprehended).”27 Kant never defines what he means by “form” in the third Critique, so one might look to Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View to help elucidate what he means, as in fact Allison does.28 In §67, Kant defines form as “the way in which free (productive) imagination arranges this matter [of sensation] inventively” (Anth 7:240–1). Kant also adds that it is form that allows a pure judgment of taste to make a claim to universal validity: “Only form can lay claim to a universal rule for the feeling of pleasure.”29 Moderate formalism would appear to have the virtue of keeping the object in sight (as weak formalism risks failing to do, as will be seen in a moment) while at the same time not being as restrictive as strong formalism. On this view, the fact the form is that of the object remains central. The link between the object and form can be seen in Kant’s contrast between the sublime and the beautiful (§23): “The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in limitation” (KU 5:244). Natural beauty carries with it a purposiveness “in its form” (KU 5:245). In beauty, Kant claims in §26,

26 27 28 29

a Philosophical Basis for Modern Formalism?” in The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, ed. Richard Kennington (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1985), 185–99. Allison, Taste, 136. Ibid., 137. Ibid. In numerous marginalia and lectures, Kant states that the pleasure in response to “form” is universally valid. On universal validity and aesthetic normativity, see the previous chapter.



   ’ 

a “purposiveness of the form of the object” is the basis for the judging (KU 5:253). At the end of his discussion of the sublime (§30), moreover, Kant characterizes the sublime as species finalis accepta, non data: in the sublime, the look of finality is assigned, not given. Kant thus implies that in the beautiful, the form is in some sense given (data), even if the manifold is united by the imagination (KU 5:280). Indeed, Kant explains the task of the deduction of the principle of taste a few lines later as follows (§31): “It is only the universal validity of a singular judgment, which expresses the subjective purposiveness of an empirical representation of the form of an object, that has to be shown for the faculty of judgment in general” (KU 5:280–1). Likewise, at the beginning of the deduction of judgments of taste in §38, he writes: “If it is admitted that in a pure judgment of taste the satisfaction in the object is combined with the mere judging of its form, then it is nothing other than the subjective purposiveness of that form for the power of judgment that we sense as combined with the representation of the object in the mind” (KU 5:289; emphasis added). On this view, the reference to the object’s (form’s) delimitation is taken to be a crucial implication of a distinction Kant presents at the end of the “Analytic of the Beautiful.” Kant claims that in responding to a beautiful form, the imagination does not indulge in mere fantasy. He distinguishes between beautiful objects (in which imagination apprehends a manifold found in the object) and beautiful views of them (merely created or invented by a fanciful imagination) (KU 5:243–4).30 Thus, the flickering flame and the rippling brook are not beauties but only “carry with them a charm for the imagination.” In a section on the imagination in the Anthropology, Kant makes a similar point and even uses some of the same examples – flickering flames, a rippling brook, even music – to contrast fanciful reverie with the aesthetic response to a beautiful form (Anth 7:173–4).31 This intrinsic link to the object is arguably lost in the final kind of formalism:32

30

31

32

See also KU 5:240, according to which “the object can provide it [i.e., the imagination] with a form.” Commenting on this passage, Guyer writes: “This freedom is not total freedom from constraint, for pleasure in the beautiful is meant to be a response to the manifold presented by an object or its form, and thus to something which is independent of the imagination. . . . The harmony of the faculties must be produced by a manifold which is given to the imagination.” Guyer, Taste, 222–3. In a Reflection on anthropology from the late 1770s (with possibly later additions), Kant likewise claims that the imagination “plays” with the “variety in a vista” and “uniform movements,” and to illustrate this, he adduces both the music/flame/brook examples and a crowd of people that “moves us with respect” (R 350; 1776–79; 15:137–8). I do not attempt to decide which of these three kinds of formalism (all of which I think can be associated with certain passages written by Kant) is the most viable position or interpretation. Nor do I try to come up with a unified interpretation of his position that would reconcile its inner tensions.

 



Weak formalism: A free harmonious play can in principle be elicited by any kind of object or representation (including partly conceptual representations): “form” stands for whatever elicits the free harmonious play of the faculties.33 Thus, pure aesthetic judging can be a response to play in space (design, figure, figuration) and in time (rhythm, harmony, melody), but (against strong formalism) it need not be.

While Guyer appears to acknowledge some aspects of moderate formalism in the assertion Kant makes at KU 5:240 (as seen in Guyer’s statement, quoted above in footnote 30, “This freedom is not total freedom from constraint . . .”), he appears to think that weak formalism is all that Kant, given his claims and presuppositions, needed to be committed to.34 As Guyer puts it, “The form of finality in an object consists precisely in its tendency to produce the harmony of the faculties, or its suitability for allowing this state to result from the contemplation of it.”35 A few pages later, Guyer writes: To attribute formal finality to an object is to claim that it is suitable for occasioning this state, but not to claim that it does so in virtue of any specific properties. . . . The concept of the mere form of finality . . . is not identical with any particular notion of aesthetic form, and does not itself imply a restriction of taste to the kinds of properties Kant offers as examples of aesthetic form.36

And finally: Again, the point is simply that the explanation of pleasure as due to the harmony of the faculties does not itself place a constraint on the possible contents of the manifold of the imagination, or determine which of its features may allow it to be grasped in a unified but free play of the higher cognitive faculties. Kant’s explanation of aesthetic response places constraints on what kinds of approval can found judgments of taste, but not, it seems, on what sorts of properties of objects may contribute to their beauty.37

33

34

35 36 37

See also Guyer, Taste, 199, 202. Accurately or not, Allison attributes such an interpretation to Guyer: “Indeed, for him the form of purposiveness stands for little more than a placeholder for whatever is capable of occasioning such harmony.” Allison, Taste, 135. Kant appears to commit a fallacy called illicit conversion at the end of §13 (KU 5:223). See Guyer, Taste, 195–201. Almost out of nowhere, Kant suddenly writes not of a form of purposiveness, but of a purposiveness of form. Allison also recognizes Kant’s conversion or swapping of terms, but finds it less troublesome. Allison, Taste, 132. Note, in the (unpublished) First Introduction, Kant uses the phrase “purposiveness of form”: “We shall see in the sequel that the purposiveness of form in appearance is beauty, and the faculty for judging it is taste” (EEKU 20:249; see also EEKU 20:234–5). Guyer, Taste, 192. Ibid., 195. Ibid., 208.



   ’ 

Now, one might wonder why weak formalism – which could be thought of as a “functionalist” view in that the form of the object acts like a placeholder for whatever evokes a harmony of the faculties – counts as a kind of formalism at all. But, first of all, at the very least Kant must be a formalist of some kind, given that he uses the term “form” repeatedly, and indeed does so in both his early and mature aesthetics. Whatever Kant’s position is, it is surely formalist in some sense.38 In addition, it is a formalist position in that even on the weak view, Kant uses the concept of form to account for the universal validity of pure aesthetic judgment: a desire to find universal validity for beauty is a main driver of Kant’s formalism, even of the weak kind. Moreover, the weak formalist interpretation can fully countenance the fact that Kant employs a fourfold analogy between judgments of beauty and judgments of morality (KU 5:354). Indeed, since it is the least restrictive of the three positions, perhaps it can acknowledge the importance of morality for aesthetic experience even more readily than strong and moderate formalism can. On the weak formalist reading, Kant leaves unspecified the precise features or qualities of the beautiful object (or representation) or work. On this view, any object in principle, without necessarily exhibiting symmetry and order (KU 5:241–2), can elicit such a play between imagination and understanding. Consider, for instance, this passage from the First Introduction, where Kant defines what he means by “aesthetic judgment of reflection.”39 If, then, the form of a given object in empirical intuition is so constituted that the apprehension of its manifold in the imagination agrees with the presentation of a concept of the understanding (though which concept be undetermined), then in the mere reflection understanding and imagination mutually agree for the advancement of their business, and the object will be perceived as purposive merely for the power of judgment, hence the purposiveness itself will be considered as merely subjective; for which, further, no determinate concept of the object at all is required nor is one

38

39

James O. Young claims to identify what he calls Kant’s antiformalism in music. James O. Young, “Kant’s Musical Antiformalism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78, no. 2 (2020): 171–82. The phrase “anti”formalist may be too strong. Although it is instructive to emphasize, as Young does, the mimetic elements in the Critical account that resonate with Batteux, this aspect of Kant’s position also seems compatible with weak formalism. It would be a mistake to ignore the formalist elements in the Critical account (not to mention the formalism in Kant’s early aesthetics), in light of the formalism in §14 as well as Kant’s deep concern to justify the claim to universal validity through the concept of form. The phrase “aesthetic judgment of reflection” actually occurs neither in the main text of the third Critique nor in the published Introduction, but only in the First Introduction (EEKU 20:220–1; 224–5; 230–1).

 



thereby generated, and the judgment itself is not a cognitive judgment. – Such a judgment is called an aesthetic judgment of reflection. (EEKU 20:220–1; emphasis added)

Arguably, the phrase at the beginning of the quote (“form of a given object”) leaves open the object’s spatial and temporal qualities or other properties. The object only needs to promote a harmony of the imagination and understanding, and Kant uses the term “mere reflection” to describe this mental activity. Kant appeals to “form” again a few pages later in the unpublished First Introduction, when he explains what he means by an aesthetic judgment of reflection. Again, it seems, “mere form” does not refer to the spatial or temporal form of the object or to aesthetic properties such as symmetry, proportion, order, and harmony. The phrase simply refers to its ability to evoke the harmony of the faculties or a state in which the imagination and understanding are mutually promoting and expeditious (beförderlich). In an aesthetic judgment of reflection (rather than of sensation), it is that sensation which the harmonious play of the two faculties of cognition in the power of judgment, imagination and understanding, produces in the subject insofar as in the given representation the faculty of the apprehension of the one and the faculty of presentation of the other are reciprocally expeditious, which relation in such a case produces through this mere form a sensation that is the determining ground of a judgment which for that reason is called aesthetic and as subjective purposiveness (without a concept) is combined with the feeling of pleasure. (EEKU 20:224; emphasis added; cf. KU 5:190)

On the weak formalist reading, the reference to form merely refers to the fact that an object is able to evoke the harmony of the faculties and thereby the sensation of pleasure on which the aesthetic judgment of reflection is grounded.40 A crucial reason for reading Kant as a weak formalist concerns aesthetic ideas, which can function as the content of an act of judging. Aesthetic ideas are sensibly rich, even overabundant, representations that an artist exhibits or expresses through (or in) a work of art. “By an aesthetic idea,” Kant writes, “I mean that representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to

40

Note, too, that the form that can elicit the harmony of the faculties is not restricted to nature. See Rodolphe Gasché, in Form: Zwischen Ästhetik und künstlerischer Praxis, ed. Armen Avanessian et al. (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2009), 285–98, 287. See also Guyer, Taste, 53. Kant mentions art in the published Introduction (“be it a product of nature or of art”) (KU 5:191; cf. 197).



   ’ 

be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible” (KU 5:314). Aesthetic ideas, Kant claims, are the counterpart to rational ideas. Whereas rational ideas cannot be presented in intuition, aesthetic ideas are so abundant with imaginative representations and intuition that they cannot be given a determinate concept. Aesthetic ideas put the rational ideas in a sensible form that cannot be fully brought under concepts. Such ideas include not only heaven, hell, and eternity, but also death and envy, love, and fame (KU 5:314). In this way, some beautiful works can be seen as a sensible expression of morally significant ideas. On this view, an aesthetic apprehender can play with the sensibly given form as an expression of an aesthetic idea. Particular works of art can express morally relevant ideas such as freedom, justice, or virtue (or the particular virtues). Apprehenders can judge and take aesthetic pleasure in such content as it is presented in sensible form, or perhaps also appreciate the particular manner or style used by the artist to express such content. In the case of an aesthetic idea, the aesthetic free play is with such content (expressed in images) rather than just with the spatial and temporal form of the object, though to be sure sensible properties of the work or object (functioning as aesthetic attributes of the object) can be used to express the aesthetic ideas. In other words, the artist may well make use of the design, structure, or composition and the object’s individual sensible properties to express aesthetic ideas. If so, reflection on aesthetic ideas is compatible with reflection on spatial and temporal sensible properties such as design and composition, even if weak formalism does not recognize the latter alone. Thus, Kant’s commitment to a theory of aesthetic ideas provides some support for reading him as a weak formalist. Finally, the notion of adherent (or partly conceptual) beauty offers a final way to bolster the weak formalist reading: the sheer fact that Kant acknowledges adherent beauty seems to support a weak formalist interpretation, since in adherent beauty, concepts of the object play some role in the act of judging (though without determining the judgment). Since the experience of adherent beauty involves reflection on conceptual content (especially, for Kant, the purposes of the object), it suggests that aesthetic experience of beauty cannot be a matter of sensible form alone. Despite these apparent advantages, weak formalism faces a potential problem. When one understands form as a placeholder for eliciting harmonious free play, one does not specify what it is in the object that “allows” the harmony of the faculties to arise in the apprehending subject. The position seems unsatisfactory insofar as it has little to do with the actual object that is involved in, or the stimulus of, the judgment of taste. After all, it is precisely the qualities and form of the object that seems to be what is disputed in debates about formalism.

 



Again, I do not here attempt to decide which is the most viable position or interpretation of these three, all of which, I think, are somehow found in various ways in the third Critique. I instead suggest that tensions in the third Critique are inherited from Kant’s thinking about the matter over the course of the decades preceding the composition of the published work. How did Kant arrive at such a conflicted position?41

The Development of Kant’s Aesthetic Formalism(s) The three kinds of formalism can be found in all phases of Kant’s aesthetic theorizing. Though tempting, it would be a mistake to see a one-to-one correspondence between strong, moderate, and weak formalism and each of the three main phases of Kant’s thinking (roughly, 1760s to early 1770s; mid1770s to 1787; 1787 and beyond), though to be sure weak formalism can only emerge after Kant had arrived at his theory of the harmonious free play of the faculties (i.e., sometime after the mid-1770s). The three kinds of formalism, in other words, to some extent overlap and coexist. Following the order of presentation adopted above, I begin with strong formalism. In the early phase of Kant’s development, “form” is understood as spatial figure (design, configuration), or temporal beat (rhythm) with melody or harmony. Strong formalism can be traced back to the years just before and around the Inaugural Dissertation (1770), where Kant publishes his views about space and time as forms of intuitive cognition.42 Like the “laws of sensibility” grounding the normativity of aesthetic judgments, the forms of intuition (space and time) are ontologically subjective, but epistemically objective (cf. KrV A28/B44). Spatial and temporal form in the early aesthetics can be understood more specifically as symmetry, harmony, and proportion, and, as seen in the last chapter, these properties facilitate the comprehension of a sensible manifold in space or time and are consequently perceived with pleasure. In the 1760s and early 1770s, Kant holds that the feeling of beauty is a response to proportion in the object. Form is an object’s “order” or “unity,” a function of its spatial/temporal relations. To see this position in Kant’s early aesthetics, consider three representative passages.43

41

42 43

Mary Gregor likewise observes that Kant’s early aesthetics contains an “unresolved tension,” since Kant is looking for the source of a communicable pleasure in something that is not knowledge or cognition, yet at the same time seeks it in the “laws of intuitive knowledge.” Evaluating Kant’s position, she denies that the early Kant has the “equipment” for formalism. The reason, she asserts (controversially), is that Kant has not yet developed a theory of the mathematical categories and a priori principles for combining a spatial-temporal manifold. Gregor, “Aesthetic Form,” 191, 194. Gregor, “Aesthetic Form,” 190, also identifies the relevance of the Dissertation here. See also Menzer, Entwicklung, 76.



   ’  Taste is the selection of that which is universally pleasing in accordance with rules of sensibility. It pertains preeminently to sensible form; for with respect to this there are rules that are valid for all. (R 627; 1769–75; 15:273) Beauty consists in the correspondence of the form – appearance – with the laws of sensibility. Order. Unity. (R 1793; 1769–72; 16:117) Taste pertains to the universality of satisfaction and hence pertains precisely to the form of the object that fits with [gemässe] the universal laws of sensibility. . . . The conditions of the beautiful form of objects are representations in accordance with [nach] relations of space and time. (R 1791; 1769–70 or 1771–72; 16:116)

According to the principle of sensible comprehension, the beautiful facilitates sensible comprehension according to the laws of intuitive cognition or sensibility (these laws are the “rules” that are “valid for all”). The apprehension of beauty, in other words, arises from the response to play of shapes in space or play in time (“sensible form”). One of the main drivers of Kant’s formalism, as noted, is the need to ground the universality of beauty (R 630, R 672). In this period, Kant repeatedly uses his matter/form distinction to argue for beauty’s universality, where beauty is contrasted with the agreeable and charming. As an early logic lecture states, “The beautiful concerns only the form, the beholding; but charm concerns sensation and the alteration of our condition” (V-Lo/Phil 24:360). In such cases, the notion of “form” is paired with the idea that beauty “always” pleases and is grounded in universal “laws of sensibility” (ibid). In Reflections from this period, one sees that Kant understands form in terms of spatial and temporal relations. Since space and time are the universal conditiones of the possibility of objects in accordance with [nach] the rules of sensibility, the concordance of appearance or sensation in the relations of space and time, together with the universal law of the subject for producing such a representation of form, belong to that which necessarily corresponds to every sensibility, thus to taste. (R 702; about 1771, 15:311)44

As many fragments show, around 1769 Kant distinguishes feeling from taste in a way that runs parallel to his later distinction between judgments of the agreeable and judgments of taste, though it would be misleading to suggest that Kant has already worked out a consistent view of the relation between feeling (Gefühl) and sensation (Empfindung) (or of the relation of these to

44

Contrast this view with the third Critique’s claim that symmetry and regularity can become unappealing (KU 5:241–2). See also Chapter 7 on disgust.

 



sensibility, Sinnlichkeit).45 “If the object is in agreement with the feeling of the subject with regard to matter, then it is agreeable and charms or moves; if it is in agreement with feeling with regard to form, then it is beautiful” (R 1796, 1769–70, 16:118–9).46 According to another fragment from this period (R 1789) “feeling” gives rise to pleasure attained from the sensation of the subject, the “matter,” and it constitutes “charm and emotion.” “Taste” is the “pleasure that can be attained only concerning the form of the object.” In the note, Kant invokes a version of the principle of sensible comprehension: the “cognition of the form” cannot be attained through “the effect of the object on the senses” but rather arises through “the laws of the activity of the subject (especially of the inferior cognition, which coordinates).” The ground of satisfaction, the fragment concludes, is subjective as far as “matter” is concerned, but it is objective with regard to the “formal” ground of satisfaction (R 1789, about 1769–72; 16:115–6; cf. R 630).47 A statement by Allison rightly traces Kant’s “tendency to connect the universality claim of a pure judgment of taste with spatiotemporal form” to around 1769, or several years before the first Critique and at the beginning of Kant’s so-called silent decade. Kant’s tendency to connect the universality claim with spatiotemporal form, Allison plausibly holds, seems to be more of a holdover from the period of the Inaugural Dissertation than a direct application of the doctrine of the first Critique. As the Reflexionen dating roughly from 1769 through the early seventies show, Kant entertained in that period the possibility of grounding the universality claims of judgments of taste in the “laws of intuitive cognition,” that is, spatiotemporal form.48

Allison adds, more controversially, that the latter grounding “entails not only a restrictive formalism . . . but also that everything conforming to these laws, that is, everything given in space and time, must be beautiful.”49

45

46

47

48 49

In the third Critique, the term “aesthetic” refers to both private sensations (including the agreeable) and responses to beauty. How the aesthetic relates to “feeling” (Gefühl) and to “sensation” (Empfindung) is not as clear as one might expect, though the difference between feeling and (kinds of ) sensation is discussed in §3 (KU 5:205–6). See also Bem 2:207 and The Metaphysics of Morals (1797) (MdS 6:211 n.). It would take a study of its own to analyze these polysemous terms and their conceptual interrelations in the Critical philosophy and Kant’s early works. As this note shows, the distinction between the “agreeable” and the “beautiful” (and both of these from the good), a staple of Kant’s aesthetics, was in place as early as 1769, and Kant makes the agreeable/beautiful distinction repeatedly in the notes and lectures from different periods (e.g., R 1891; likely from 1776–78; 16:150). See also V-Met/Mron 29:893 from 1782/83. On taking aesthetic pleasure in response to form, see also Logic Philippi (early 1770s), VLo/Phil 24:348, 351, 360. Allison, Taste, 369 no. 47. See also Guyer, Taste, 139. Allison, Taste, 369 no. 47.



   ’ 

Though his statement in the block quote is useful, Allison’s claim that “everything given in space and time must be beautiful” is questionable.50 First of all, not every object given in space and time exhibits symmetry or harmony or presents a form that eases sensible comprehension. It is not just a matter of “conforming” to the laws of intuitive cognition (in space and time), but (as Kant sometimes says) a matter of facilitating comprehension according to these laws, giving rise to the “empirical” fact or law of aesthetic pleasure discussed in the previous chapter. For instance, my untidy and cluttered office would be perceived in accordance with the laws of sensibility, but it would not facilitate sensible comprehension and would certainly not be beautiful.51 And crucially, according to even Kant’s early aesthetics, one must be disinterested to be in a position to experience beauty: in this way, Kant repeatedly distinguishes the beautiful from the good (whether moral or instrumental) and the agreeable. If so, Kant’s early aesthetics carves out a special conceptual space for the experience of beauty. What of moderate formalism? Some claims that lay the foundations for moderate formalism can be found in the Inaugural Dissertation, even if Kant does not apply them to themes in aesthetics or matters of taste. In §4, Kant writes: “In a representation of sense there is, first of all, something which you might call the matter, namely, the sensation, and there is also something which may be called the form, the aspect [species] namely of sensible things which arises according as the various things which affect the senses are coordinated by a certain natural law of the mind” (MSI 2:392–3).52 While not about taste or aesthetic matters per se, the rest of the passage is also relevant: The form of the same representation is undoubtedly evidence of a certain reference or relation in what is sensed, though properly speaking it is not an outline or any kind of schema of the object, but only a certain law, which is inherent in the mind and by means of which it coordinates for itself that which is sensed from the presence of the object. (MSI 2:393)

A (modified) version of this view of form can also be found in the Critique of Pure Reason: “I call that in the appearance which corresponds to sensation 50

51

52

Gregor, whose paper Allison cites, indeed denies this view. Gregor, “Aesthetic Form,” 191, states: “Something more is required to produce the pleasure on which our judgment is based.” In addition, Kant sometimes writes that a play or contrast of sensations is required to experience beauty – not just a single sensation, but differentiated and compared ones (e.g., R 638). Recall Allison’s claims that “a beautiful object is one which provides the materials for such an ordering by the imagination” and that “form is explicitly identified with the arrangement of the sensible material produced by the imagination in its apprehension of the object.” Allison, Taste, 136–7.

 



its matter, but that which allows the manifold of appearance to be ordered in certain relations I call the form of appearance” (KrV A20/B34).53 Some passages from the last phase of Kant’s aesthetics and even after the publication of the third Critique likewise suggest moderate formalism. According to a lecture from 1788/89, “form” is what evokes aesthetic pleasure (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1508–9). According to the Vigilantius lecture on metaphysics from the 1790s (sometimes referred to as K3), pleasure in beauty is “that satisfaction in the object through the mere intuition of it, with complete indifference (without regard) to its existence. – It can be based on pure or sensible intuition. E.g., a beautifully built house pleases me with its form” (V-Met/Vig 29:1010). “Satisfaction or dissatisfaction in an object therefore, whereby the aesthetic power of judgment considers the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, concerns merely the form of the object, which is subject to sensible or pure intuition, and of which it determines only whether it is beautiful or not beautiful” (V-Met/Vig 29:1010; original italics).54 Finally, as noted, in the Anthropology Kant defines form as “the way in which free (productive) imagination arranges” the matter of sensation “inventively” (Anth 7:240–1). In such passages, there is more emphasis on the unification of a given manifold by the imagination than on whatever evokes a free harmonious play of the faculties. This leads, finally, to weak formalism. A crucial feature of weak formalism, as seen above, is its ability to account for Kant’s notion of an aesthetic idea, which gives sensitively or imaginatively rich content, including morally significant content, to an artwork. As noted in the previous chapter, something like the Critical notion of aesthetic ideas (as a bountiful product of the imagination that gives rise to much thought) comes to prominence around 1776 (R 950, 958), accompanied by increased attention to the theory of genius, in turn largely brought about by Kant’s reading of Gerard’s Essay on Genius. To be sure, Kant writes about “ideas” and even “idealism” even before 1776, and he mentions “ideas” and the “ideal” throughout the fragments and lectures from the first phase of his aesthetics, the era of (and slightly before) the Dissertation. However, the “idea” or “ideal” in such passages differs from the “aesthetic idea” in the third Critique’s sense of an overabundant representation of the imagination. According to the Parow lecture (1772/73), the moral “ideal” is contrasted with bodily charm (Reiz). The ideal (idealisch) usually has 53

54

The 1787 edition of the first Critique says it “can” be ordered, whereas the 1781 edition says it “is” (wird) ordered. In one of his logic lectures from around the time of the A edition (about 1780), Kant is reported to have claimed that the beautiful applies “to the object” (V-Lo/Pölitz 25:514). In Chapter 7, I return to this claim that the power of judgment determines only whether the object is beautiful or not (without implying aesthetic ugliness).



   ’ 

to do with “morality” or has morality as its “object” (V-Anth/Parow 25:380; V-Anth/Collins 25:184).55 More than an aesthetic idea in the third Critique sense, the “idea” or “ideal” here seems like an intellectual representation of the nonsensible world – perhaps building on the claims presented in the Dissertation. But by the mid to late 1770s, the notion of aesthetic ideas in the third Critique’s sense seems to be more or less in place, as notes such as R 950 and R 958 indicate. In the post-1790 Vigilantius lecture on metaphysics, Kant connects beauty to form in a way that sometimes seems to indicate the weak formalist position – even if the Vigilantius transcription also contains the moderate formalist view, as seen above. The following text (which is even underscored by the transcriber) suggests the placeholder interpretation of the notion of form: “Beautiful in aesthetic judging is only that which pleases without any interest in the existence of the object itself, merely in the intuition of it and indeed in the form of it and pleases because here a free play of the power of imagination is effected in agreement with the lawfulness of the understanding” (V-Met/Vig 29:1011; emphasis added). As if to illustrate the interpretive difficulties discussed in this chapter, a transcription based on a lecture likely from 1793/94, or about three years after the publication of the third Critique, presents at least two of the options considered above. On the one hand, form can be related to the object. On the other hand, it can be related merely to the power of representation (as in weak formalism). “To the beautiful belongs a multiplicity that constitutes a unity. But this multiplicity must not be so manifold that one cannot bring about any unity. This manifold can either be related to the object, or it can be a mere relation to the occupation of my power of representation” (V-Anth/Reichel ms 81–2; emphasis added).

Concluding Remark All three positions are found in the third Critique, then, and the tensions in the work’s treatment of formalism are traceable back to Kant’s adopting various positions throughout different phases of his aesthetics.56

55

56

A 1769 fragment states that a charm of beauty usually rests on associated thoughts, which sounds like a very distant precursor to the notion of aesthetic ideas. “What pleases in appearance, but without charm, is pretty, seemly, proper (harmonious, symmetrical). If the charm springs from the immediate sensation, then the beauty is sensible; but if it has sprung from associated thoughts, then it is called ideal. Almost all of the charm of beauty rests on associated thoughts” (R 626; about 1769; 15:271). For reasons having to do with readability and limited space, I here forgo examining Kant’s formalism in terms of my main arcs.

 



Kant defended elements of a strong formalist view quite early (in the 1760s), and then later added to it (in the direction of weak formalism) by developing a theory of aesthetic ideas, introducing a free play of the faculties as the source of aesthetic pleasure, and bringing out core connections between morality and beauty. Whereas some parts of Kant’s early position support the strong formalist reading, the weak one is supported by his growing attention to the role of aesthetic (and moral) ideas in aesthetic experience as well as his understanding of aesthetic experience in terms of a free play of the faculties in response to form. A version of strong formalism is alive and well today in some circles. Aspects of strong formalism – that is, understanding aesthetic experience mainly as a response to formal properties such as symmetry, proportion, and harmony – can be discerned in recent empirical research on beauty. For instance, one psychologist considers beauty to be a “distinctive intrinsic property,” specifically, a “formal inherent property of visual stimuli that has the potential to elicit visual pleasure by direct sensory stimulation.”57 Here Kant’s ideas are explicitly used – as researchers Hayn-Leichsenring and Chatterjee put it – “as a potential reservoir” from which to “reevaluate old questions and invite new questions in empirical aesthetics.”58 Still, empirical researchers do not ignore concept-laden beauty. HaynLeichsenring and Chatterjee aim to separate the effects of “bottom-up formal psychophysical properties” of visual images that are “most likely to be shared across individuals” (which seems like a version of strong formalism) from “top-down educational, cultural, and historical contributions to aesthetic experiences.”59 This reference to educational–cultural–historical “contributions” touches on the role of concepts in experiences and judgments of beauty.60 Kant would envision the latter under the label of adherent beauty – the topic of the next chapter.

57

58 59 60

Christoph Redies, “Beauty: Neglected, but Alive and Kicking,” British Journal of Psychology 105, no. 4 (2014): 468–70, 468; emphasis added. Hayn-Leichsenring and Chatterjee, “Colliding Terminological Systems,” 215. Ibid., 214. Both the sensitive–intuitive and the conceptual–cultural sides of Kant’s account are represented in recent empirical aesthetics. Daniel Graham and Christoph Redies explore the intrinsic properties of beautiful (visual) stimuli and how they relate to basic mechanisms of visual perception. Daniel Graham and Christoph Redies, “Statistical Regularities in Art: Relations with Visual Coding and Perception,” Vision Research 50, no. 16 (2010): 1503–9. On reconciling both the sensitive–intuitive and the cultural–historical– conceptual approaches to aesthetics (represented in Kant’s notions of free and adherent beauty), see Robert R. Clewis, “How to Distinguish and Reconcile Sensitive and Conceptual Taste,” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 43, no. 1 (2020): 43–53.

3 Beauty Grounded

In a discourse, self-standing beauty is the relation between sensibility and thoroughness and truth. Knowledge of human beings and familiarity with the sciences provide the substance over which we can spread beauty. Beauty that runs counter to the understanding is not lasting. It is all to no avail to want to become a beautiful mind with an empty head. When one reads David Hume (one of the latest writers) and an English Spectator, one does not know if one should value more the beauty, or more the thoroughness and the insights. (V-Anth/Parow 25:385)1

According to this passage from a 1772/73 anthropology lecture transcription, Kant describes “self-standing” beauty as partly intellectual or conceptual beauty. In the third Critique, Kant calls this kind of beauty “adherent” or “dependent” (§16) and he contrasts it with free beauty. He then claims that it is free beauty that is “self-standing.” How was such a shift possible? On its own, the term “self-standing” (selbstständig)2 means what is independent or lasting. In Kant’s pre-Critical period, the label “self-standing” refers to the kind of beauty that is tied to ends. If “purpose-based” beauty is a forerunner of adherent beauty, how – to put it more provocatively – could independent beauty be a predecessor of dependent beauty? By the very term “adherent,” Kant appears to allot this kind of beauty a secondary status. Seen as ancillary, this kind of beauty might be viewed as an outgrowth of Kant’s aesthetic formalism (however that might be understood). Yet purpose-based beauty is central to Kant’s early aesthetics. Plus, Kant retains at least some version of partly conceptual or intellectual beauty in the third Critique. The fact that adherent beauty is “ancillary” and is not identified as “self-standing” is not an indication that Kant considers it to be

1

2

My translation. A partial translation is also found in Klemme’s Introduction to The Reception of British Aesthetics in Germany, ed. Klemme and Kuehn, vol. 3, xiv. The following terms are possible translations of selbstständig: “self-subsisting,” “self-sufficient,” and “independent.”



 



unimportant. As I argue toward the end of this chapter, adherent beauty even plays a role in Kant’s broader systematic aims. In Kant’s early aesthetics, “purpose-based” beauties are those that fulfill the aim or function of the object in a manner that is aesthetically or sensibly pleasing. But why does Kant call these beauties “self-standing?” Kant apparently makes the inference that, since the instrumental or morally good in the object is independent and enduring, any beauty connected to that good would also merit being called self-standing. The claim that the good is self-standing can be understood in light of the traditional theory according to which the good is more stable and lasting than mundane events or things – as in neoPlatonic and Augustinian theories of evil as a privation of the good. In fact, along just these lines, one of Kant’s lectures on philosophical theology states that “God is self-standing goodness” (28:1076; my trans.).3 Likewise, around 1769 or 1770, Kant writes that “the good pleases steadily [beständig], the beautiful pleases everybody, even if not all the time” (R 1792; 16:117). A purpose-based beauty is “self-standing” because the relation to some concept or concepts contributes to the security or lasting quality of the judgment about the object’s beauty. A concept here provides a partial basis for one’s aesthetically liking the object.4 Although Kant has a more or less consistent understanding of “self-standing,” he applies it to two different classes of objects. In the pre-Critical aesthetics, the term refers to works and objects with purposes or ends, and in the third Critique to free beauties (or judgments about them),5 that is, objects that give rise to a free and harmonious play of the mental faculties independently of determination by concepts or at least after abstraction from such concepts. In addition to characterizing the eighteenth-century debate about beauty and utility, I thus here track two key distinctions in Kant’s aesthetics: the distinction between free and adherent beauty, and the one between what is self-standing beauty and what is not self-standing beauty (i.e., the contrast class). Kant retains the same general understanding of self-standing beauty, but that undergoes a change of referent arising from his view that purpose-based (or adherent)

3

4

5

The Lectures on Religion were edited by Pölitz (first published in 1817) and are based on a course Kant gave during the 1783/84 winter semester. On science as beautiful, see Angela Breitenbach, “The Beauty of Science without the Science of Beauty: Kant and the Rationalists on the Aesthetics of Cognition,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 56, no. 2 (2018): 281–304. The body of scientific knowledge, if and when it is viewed as beautiful, would count as an instance of partly conceptual or intellectual beauty in the sense I am using here. I leave aside the controversial issue of whether the free/adherent distinction is one between two kinds of beauties, or between two ways of judging objects and representations.



   ’ 

beauty is not as lasting or stable as free beauty – and thus of less enduring interest.6

Some Ideas Shaping Kant’s Views of Adherent Beauty Eighteenth-century European writers tapped into a rich classical tradition of thinking about the relation between beauty and goodness. Plato had offered an “identity” model. He sometimes identifies the beautiful and the good, as in kalokagathia (beautiful-and-good).7 In the Republic, however, the Form of the good illuminates the Form of beauty and truth. Hence the good differs from beauty. “Both knowledge and truth are beautiful things, but the good is other and more beautiful than they.”8 Such an account implies that beauty, while distinct from goodness, is ultimately a mode of the good. Plotinus endorses a similar position. According to his (chronologically first) treatise, “On Beauty,” the good is the source of the beauty of the Forms.9 Pseudo-Dionysius, meanwhile, retrieves the identity theory. In On the Divine Names, Pseudo-Dionysius claims that the beautiful is “identical” with the good, even using the phrase “the Beautiful and Good.”10 Aquinas likewise maintains that beauty and the good are co-extensive, differing only in aspect and in which faculties – cognitive or appetitive – are primarily involved. “The beautiful is the same as the good, and they differ in aspect only.”11 In the eighteenth century, one of the most contentious issues in the field that eventually came to be known as “aesthetics” was understanding the relationship between beauty and utility, or between beauty and goodness in a broad sense. The “good” was understood to include both the morally and instrumentally good, perhaps following Aristotle’s distinctions of the good, pleasant, and useful.12 6

7

8 9 10 11

12

On a connection between self-standing and adherent beauty, see also the note in Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 371 no. 36. Understanding this shift offers insight into both the genesis of the third Critique and the eighteenth-century debate about beauty and utility. In addition, the discussion of “blocking” (explained below) fits in well with contemporary discussions of “imaginative resistance” – a term used to refer to cases in which, repelled by immoral or otherwise repugnant material, viewers or readers resist contemplating what is presented to them by a work of art. Plato, Symposium, 201c. Following convention, Plato is cited by the Stephanus page. For his writings, see Plato, Complete Works, ed. J. M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). Plato, Republic, 508e. Plotinus, The Enneads, I, Treatise 6, ch. 9. Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, ch. 4, sec. 7, 704B. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, First Part of the Second Part, Question 27, Article 1, Reply to Objection 3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 8, ch. 2 (1155b19). Aristotle is cited by the book/ chapter followed by the Bekker pagination (given in parentheses). For Aristotle’s writings,

 



Some modern authors made the beautiful and the good entirely independent or autonomous, while others saw them as interdependent, and still others saw beauty as a mode of the good (including perfection and utility). In addition to the ancient and medieval “identity” model mentioned above, three eighteenth-century models were therefore available. 1. Autonomism: Beauty and perfection (or else utility)13 are distinct concepts and cannot be united: increase in one has no effect on the other. Perfection (or else utility) is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of beauty. 2. Blocking-unificationism: Beauty and perfection (or else utility) are distinct concepts yet can be united. An object’s dysfunctionality blocks or acts as a constraint on its beauty. Increased utility can (and often does) lead to increased beauty, and decreased utility can lead to decreased beauty. 3. Containment: Beauty is a form or mode of perfection. These descriptions, while perhaps oversimplified, are useful ways of classifying various eighteenth-century writers. As I will explain in a moment, Shaftesbury (insofar as he is a proponent of “disinterestedness”), Hutcheson, and Burke appear to accept a version of the first position. Shaftesbury (on another reading), Hume, Berkeley, Gerard, Kames, Sulzer, and (early and late) Kant take up a version of the second. Writers in the broadly Leibnizian traditions adopt the third approach. (To my knowledge, no eighteenth-century thinker defended a conceptually possible alternative: the idea that dysfunction, or a decrease in utility, is a sufficient cause of beauty.) The modern debate about utility and beauty commences with Shaftesbury.14 Intended or not, one consequence of Shaftesbury’s The Moralists was to persuade his successors that the response to the beauty of an object is independent of possession of that object – which sounds autonomist. Nevertheless, in a passage in Characteristics’ concluding “Miscellaneous Reflection,” Shaftesbury states that “beauty and truth are plainly joined with the notion of utility and convenience.”15 This claim would appear to make it an instance of the unificationist theory. Still, Shaftesbury does not explain how they were

13

14

15

see Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). I write of both “perfection” and “utility” (or what Kant would view as mediate rather than immediate or moral goodness), not to identify these distinct concepts, but in order to capture both the German and British aesthetic traditions. I cannot here characterize the conceptual relation between perfection and utility. Note, Kant’s conception of “perfection” in terms of ends and purposes distinguishes it from most of the preceding rationalist conceptions of perfection. My account is indebted to and builds on Guyer, “Beauty and Utility.” See also Guyer, Modern Aesthetics, 39–42. Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper), Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 415.



   ’ 

conjoined – which is perhaps why he was interpreted as adopting an autonomist position. In An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Hutcheson insists on the difference between utility and beauty. As noted in the previous chapter, Hutcheson understands the nature of beauty as uniformity amid variety. On this view, there is no intrinsic connection between the response to beauty and the recognition of utility. In the third dialogue in Alciphron (1732), Berkeley rejects Hutcheson’s position: the feeling of beauty (in response to “proportions”) is dependent on and very closely connected with the recognition (by reason) of the object’s utility or “end for which it was made.” “Proportions, therefore, are not, strictly speaking, perceived by the sense of sight, but only by reason through the medium of sight. . . . Consequently beauty . . . is an object, not of the eye, but of the mind.”16 In the fourth edition of the Inquiry (1738), Hutcheson responds to Berkeley. Hutcheson insists that there is no direct connection between the utility and the beauty of objects or between one’s responses to these distinct properties. Burke sides with Hutcheson. In the Enquiry, Burke holds that an object’s utility is neither a cause of its beauty nor a sufficient condition for beauty. He notes that many features or characteristics that are highly useful (at least to their possessors) – say, the snouts of swine – are not beautiful. They are even ugly or odd-looking.17 In A Treatise of Human Nature (of which the first part was published in 1739), Hume appears to split the difference between Berkeley and Hutcheson. He recognizes a distinction between beauty and utility.18 Yet he ultimately sides more with Berkeley, maintaining that the majority of the cases of beauty are actually cases of the beauty of utility rather than the beauty of mere species or appearance. “Handsome and beautiful, on most occasions, is not an absolute but a relative quality.”19 16

17

18

19

George Berkeley, Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher: In Seven Dialogues: Containing an Apology for the Christian Religion, against Those Who Are Called Free-Thinkers (New Haven, CT: Sidney’s Press, 1803), 129–30. In “Letters on the Sentiments,” Mendelssohn sometimes implies that utility or fitness is not a sufficient cause of beauty. The many vessels of the “vascular system” and the “intestines,” though they serve a purpose, have “sheer multiplicity” and lack “proportion.” Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 23. See Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition, 16. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously in 1779), Hume likewise claims that beauty is not always functional. “Our sense of music, harmony, and indeed beauty of all kinds, gives satisfaction, without being absolutely necessary to the preservation and propagation of the species.” David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Other Writings, ed. Dorothy Coleman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 74. Hume, Treatise, III.iii.i.

 



Hume tries to resolve the dispute by recognizing two varieties of beauty. One kind of beauty depends on the appearance of utility, and he discusses this kind more than “absolute” beauty. The second, pure kind is unrelated to utility. In a representative passage, Hume distinguishes the beauty of “mere figure and appearance” from that of “convenience” and utility: The order and convenience of a palace are no less essential to its beauty, than its mere figure and appearance. In like manner the rules of architecture require, that the top of a pillar should be more slender than its base, and that because such a figure conveys to us the idea of security, which is pleasant.20

So, this kind of beauty is related to or takes into account the object’s purposes or utility (“convenience”). And even if one is not the owner of the object or edifice in question, one can at least sympathize by way of imagination or fancy, feeling something like the owner’s pleasure in the object. In An Essay on Taste (1759), Gerard seems to acknowledge a blocking condition. He maintains that “a great degree of inconvenience generally destroys all the pleasure, which should have arisen from the symmetry and proportion of the parts.”21 But he also holds that fitness or utility does not merely act as a necessary condition for aesthetic pleasure; it can also generate positive pleasure.22 “When we recognize a fitness for answering an important end; we then infer, not only intention, but art and skill in the cause: which implying mental excellence and perfection, the view of it gives a noble satisfaction.”23 In Elements of Criticism, Kames (Henry Home) holds that an object’s utility can lead to a kind of beauty he calls “relative,” the perception of which “is accompanied with an act of understanding and reflection.”24 He introduces a distinction between intrinsic beauty, which is “discovered in a single object viewed apart without relation to any other,” and relative beauty, which is “founded on the relation of objects,” namely, their use or purpose.25 Kames 20

21

22 23 24 25

Ibid., II.i.viii. See also the section, “Some Farther Reflections Concerning the Natural Virtues” in Hume, Treatise, III.iii.v, as well as An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, sec. VI, pt. II, in David Hume, Enquiries concerning the Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 244–5: “Ideas of utility and its contrary, though they do not entirely determine what is handsome or deformed, are evidently the source of a considerable part of approbation or dislike.” Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste: With Three Dissertations on the Same Subject by Mr. De Voltaire, Mr. D’Alembert, and Mr. De Montesquieu (London: A. Millar, A. Kincaid, and J. Bell, 1759), 38. Guyer, Modern Aesthetics, 162. Gerard, Taste, 41. Kames, Criticism, vol. 1, 143. Ibid., 142.



   ’ 

thus acknowledges both something like absolute beauty – based on qualities such as color, figure, motion, order, regularity, uniformity, symmetry, and proportion – and purpose-based beauty.26 “In a word,” he writes, “intrinsic beauty is ultimate: relative beauty is that of means relating to some good end or purpose.”27 At one point he even implies that utility can be a sufficient condition of beauty: utility can render an object beautiful. “Thus a subject void of intrinsic beauty, appears beautiful from its utility; an old Gothic tower, that has no beauty in itself, appears beautiful, considered as proper to defend against an enemy.”28 But, as if not fully committed to that thesis, he immediately acknowledges the case in which the two kinds of beauty instead “coincide” or unite in the same object, as sometimes happens with a racehorse and the human body. These can please “partly from symmetry, and partly from utility.”29 On the European continent, aesthetic theory developed within the framework established by Leibniz and Wolff, as previously noted. The key to this framework is the idea that beauty is, as Wolff puts it, an intuitive cognition of the perfection of its object.30 This tradition’s conception of perfection is, as seen, understood in various ways, with Wolff understanding perfection more in a metaphysical sense (as the harmony of an object’s parts) and Baumgarten in a more epistemological sense (as a harmony of cognitive elements). Still, the broadly rationalist conception of perfection leaves plenty of room for the notion of utility, although perfection is not the same as utility or mediate goodness. While perfection does not always entail utility, perceiving an object’s utility can be said to be an instance of perceiving its perfection. Taking pleasure in the clear, but confused, perception of utility is just as good a case of beauty as any other kind. Accordingly, authors such as Wolff or Johann Christoph Gottsched see no special reason to distinguish one’s pleasure in beauty from pleasure in utility. Baumgarten considers utility and beauty31 to be two kinds of “perfection.” In §662 of his Metaphysics, Baumgarten defines beauty (pulchritudo) as a phenomenon’s perfection observable to taste, and ugliness (deformitas) as observable imperfection. In “On Sentiments,” Mendelssohn argues that beauty and reason are not antithetical, and that reason is useful as well as a source of aesthetic pleasure. He conceives of beauty as a kind of perfection. In “On Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences,” he writes of the “perfection, beauty, and order” 26

27 28 29 30 31

Ibid., 143–4. Note that Kames includes color in this list – as the early Kant sometimes does (R 618, R 871, mentioned below). Ibid., 143. Ibid. Ibid. Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedanken (“German Metaphysics”), §404. See also Chapter 1. Baumgarten, Metaphysica, §§336–40 and §662.

 



perceived in an object to which an apprehender is drawn. For Mendelssohn, perfection is “the utility and sensuous pleasure that the object promises us since both belong to the perfections of our intrinsic or extrinsic condition.”32 Finally, in Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (“General Theory of the Fine Arts”) (1771–74), Sulzer distinguishes between “proper” and “improper” beauty in a way that runs somewhat parallel to the third Critique’s distinction between free and adherent beauty. Notably, Sulzer ultimately unifies them under the notion of perfection.33 This intellectual background, then, shaped Kant’s thinking about purposebased or adherent (dependent) beauty. An observation by Guyer summarizes the situation well: “Kant’s description of dependent beauty is not far from the explanation of beauty typical of rationalist aesthetics and of at least some empiricist aesthetics.”34

The Third Critique on Adherent Beauty The most familiar Kantian position is the one in §16, where Kant claims that “adherent” beauty is based on a concept of the object’s perfection and/or its purpose. He distinguishes free or nonconceptual beauty from adherent beauty, and he classifies free beauty as the “pure” kind and concept-based beauty as “not pure” – as is evident in the very title of §16. In that section’s first paragraph, moreover, he characterizes free beauty as “self-standing” (KU 5:229; cf. 245, 246).35 Now, if adherent beauty incorporates or appeals to concepts (including concepts of ends), how can adherent beauty be a form of beauty at all, when, as seen in the previous chapter, a judgment of beauty is supposed to be free of particular concepts? Drawing from the literature, I suggest that concepts can play a role in three main ways. Let me first clarify that, for Kant, judgments of “perfection” here are judgments of an object’s “goodness” in relation to the concept of its end.36 This goodness can be understood to encompass both the morally good and the instrumentally good or utility. An adherent judgment of beauty is purposebased or “conditioned” by a concept of the object’s end: 32

33

34 35

36

Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, 297. Both “On Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences” and “On Sentiments” can be found in Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings. I will not try to work out how this aspect of Mendelssohn’s position squares with the more Burkean claim mentioned in note 17 above. Alexander Rueger, “Beautiful Surfaces: Kant on Free and Adherent Beauty in Nature and Art,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 16, no. 3 (2008): 535–57, 538. Guyer, Taste, 400 no. 99. The terms “concept-based” and “purpose-based” are related, for the concept that is at issue is that of the object’s purpose. “Concept-based” of course has the wider extension. Crowther, Kantian Aesthetic, 128.



   ’  But the beauty of a human being (and in his species that of a man, a woman, or a child), the beauty of a horse, of a building (such as a church, a palace, an arsenal, or a garden-house) presuppose a concept of the end that determines what the thing should be, hence a concept of its perfection, and is thus merely adherent beauty. (KU 5:230; cf. 229)

A concept of the object – a concept of its kind, purpose, or function (“perfection”) – is attended to or plays some kind of role in the act of judging it to be adherently beautiful.37 This is what makes this kind of beauty “conditioned.” Geoffrey Scarré claims that, for Kant, adherent beauty has no connection to the concept of perfection. He claims that Kant’s point is that the apprehension of free beauty is restricted by a judgment as to whether it is morally appropriate for the object in question to be beautiful or not.38 In light of Kant’s numerous references to perfection in §16 and §17, this cannot be wholly correct. But Scarré does have a point (even if it should be broadened to include nonmoral appropriateness). Restriction or constraint is the first way a concept of the object’s purpose or perfection can affect, combine with, or be incorporated into aesthetic judgments of it. Constraint: The purpose or function of the object limits or restricts the aesthetic judgment of the object’s beauty.

Here are the two other ways: Addition: The function or perfection (for objects of its kind) adds to, or combines with, the object’s formal-aesthetic or sensible qualities. Interaction: The function or perfection interacts with the object’s formalaesthetic or sensible properties.

Combining various interpretations of the role of concepts in adherent beauty, I suggest that there are at least three ways concepts can be at play in adherent beauty. Since they appear to be compatible, it seems unnecessary to insist on a single “right” way.39 In all three cases, a free play of the imagination or free 37

38

39

In my view, the free/adherent distinction arguably does not rest on ontological properties distinguishing and picking out different kinds of objects, but on what is taken into consideration (or instead bracketed out) in the act of judging (KU 5:231; cf. 229). Yet Kant may have thought human beauty was an exception to this, since he thinks moral constraints always apply in the human case. For similar positions on “bracketing,” see James Kirwan, The Aesthetic in Kant (London: Continuum, 2004), 46; Rueger, “Beautiful Surfaces”; Zuckert, Beauty and Biology, 207 no. 49; Crowther, Kantian Aesthetic, 118; and Donald Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 116. Geoffrey Scarré, “Kant on Free and Dependent Beauty,” British Journal of Aesthetics 21, no. 4 (1981): 351–62. He emphasizes the “blocking” element in Kant’s account. Guyer, “Free and Adherent Beauty,” 137–8; and Guyer, Modern Aesthetics, 439.

 



harmony of the faculties obtains. In other words, the concept (end, purpose) of the object does not determine the aesthetic judgment. On the Constraint model, the pleasure felt in response to the object is a pleasure in the free harmonious play of the cognitive faculties that the object’s form induces while under constraints placed on it by the object’s purposes or function. In this case, a functional or moral failure of the object, or its being a poor specimen or instance of its kind, would block the aesthetic judgment of it as beautiful. Dysfunctionality, inappropriateness, or even immorality could prevent the pleasure in what would otherwise be the object’s beauty. In such cases, feeling aesthetic pleasure in response to such and such an object would be inappropriate or indecorous, or unethical or unjust, for a phenomenon or being of that type. That is, it would be inappropriate in relation to the kind of activity, or being, that it is. For instance, a church’s religious functions limit what can be done in its design and decoration. A human person’s status as a moral being endowed with dignity restricts in what ways or to what extent a person may be “beautified” or decorated by permanent markings. Another common example of blocking comes from architecture. It is found in Hume (as seen above) as well as in one of Kant’s anthropology lectures: “When a column is thicker above than it is below,” the column is less suited to fulfill its purpose (V-Anth/ Mron 25:1332). In terms of the eighteenth-century models characterized above, this first way would constitute the “blocking” element in the blocking-unificationist model. According to Addition, the object’s fulfillment of its purpose or perfection can bring about a pleasure that is conjoined with, or contributes to, the aesthetic qualities of the object whose beauty independently brings about aesthetic pleasure. An example of this would be a Ming vase that is successfully re-fitted to function as a lamp and source of light. The “additive” model can be instantiated in cases of exemplary specimens and instances, too. In such cases, the fact that the specimen (e.g., rose) is exemplary – it has its definitive properties more completely than most other instances of its kind – combines with the fact that it is sensibly-aesthetically pleasing and well-balanced.40 In terms of the eighteenth-century models, this way would constitute the “unification” aspect of the blocking-unificationist model. Finally, for Interaction, the object’s function and its form harmonize in ways that are found to be aesthetically pleasing. The concept of the purpose of the object does not merely constrain the imagination; it also guides aesthetic reflection. Such an ideal was widely defended by twentieth-century design 40

Crowther, Kantian Aesthetic, 120, 127, describes a “combination” or “logical hybrid” of judgments of perfection and of beauty and recognizes this second way. Similarly, Zammito claims that adherent beauty contains two separate judgments. Zammito, Genesis, 126.



   ’ 

theorists, though it need not be limited to this context. A gleaming and welldesigned modern Italian lamp, or a Bauhaus chair, unites form and function in an aesthetically pleasing manner. In the case of artifacts or works of a certain genre or kind, the object’s functional properties accord with its pleasing sensible or formal-aesthetic properties in imaginatively interesting ways. Unlike the second model, this is not simply a matter of combination, but of agreement. The functional properties that render the object perfect are (to use Zuckert’s phrase) “taken up” as part of the play of properties in a beautiful form.41 This way is best characterized as belonging to the “unification” element of the blocking-unificationist model.42 These three roles for concepts reveal the richness of Kant’s brief account of adherent beauty (§16). Of the three eighteenth-century models (autonomist, blocking-unificationist, containment), the third Critique account is best characterized as belonging to a blocking-unificationist model. Kant clearly rejects an “identity” model. In the third Critique, indeed, he employs the word “unification” (Vereinbarung): taste “gains” by a “combination of aesthetic satisfaction with the intellectual,” where there are, if not rules of taste, then at least “rules for the unification of taste with reason, i.e., of the beautiful with the good” (KU 5:230). Kant uses the same term, Vereinbarung, throughout his early writings, lectures, and marginal notes, to which I now turn.

The Development of Kant’s Views of Purpose-Based Beauty In a passage from an early work that examines both Newtonian mechanics and natural purposes, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), Kant identifies what seems to count as an instance of intellectual beauty. In line with a pre-Critical teleological framework, he locates a conceptuallyinformed beauty in the harmony and order in the universe. Commenting on the apparent order and design in nature, Kant asks: “Is all this not beautiful, are these not visible purposes achieved by cleverly applied means?” (NTH 1:224). His “silent astonishment” before the “infinite variety and beauty that shines forth” from the universe is at once intellectual and sensory-aesthetic (NTH 1:306). Although his considerations to be sure reflect a Newtonianmechanistic and pre-Critical, optimistic teleology, these may be Kant’s earliest

41 42

Zuckert, Beauty and Biology, 204. Guyer had initially focused on the first interpretation (Constraint) (Taste, 219–20), but he later recognized all three ways. Zammito, Genesis, 126, emphasizes Addition. Likewise, when Allison, Taste, 290, writes of a “taste component” within the “complex evaluation” involved in the judgment of adherent beauty, he examines the issue in terms of Addition. Several commentators (e.g., Crowther, Kantian Aesthetic, 129, 135) explicitly or implicitly work with all three interpretations.

 



published references to the feeling of beauty that, while sensory-aesthetic, is at the same time partly conceptual and intellectual. The Observations, though it contains much more than what one would now consider aesthetic theory, nevertheless offers three passages relevant to the distinction between free and purpose-based beauty. Kant presupposes a beauty/utility distinction when he asserts that some people “prefer the beautiful to the useful” (GSE 2:229). But he adds that the “facility” with which an action is carried out is a necessary condition of its beauty. “For the beauty of all actions it is requisite above all that they display facility and that they seem to be accomplished without painful effort” (GSE 2:229). If an action produced with painful effort and an action produced with “facility” have the same degree of utility, this passage implies, beauty and utility are distinct. So what is the relation between beauty and utility? A second passage perhaps hints that Kant’s position is best classified as unificationist. It is indeed customary to call useful only that which can satisfy our cruder sentiment, what can provide us with a surplus for eating and drinking, display in clothing and furniture, and lavishness in entertaining, although I do not see why everything that is craved with my most lively feeling should not be reckoned among the useful things. (GSE 2:226)

The quip at the end (Why can’t everything I crave with lively or aesthetic feeling be viewed as useful?) can be read as more than jest. Whatever evokes the “lively feeling” (including beauty)43 – namely the lavish display or radiance – can be considered useful or functional. Finally, Kant attributes the utility of an upbeat or humorous entertainment to its having “real content.” He praises “the taste for an entertainment that is certainly cheerful, but must also have real content, that is humorous but must also be useful because of serious conversations” (GSE 2:242 n.). The humorous discourse’s real content is a source of its utility, which in turn is derived from fulfilling its aims.44 The notion of the “real content” of the conversation is close to the conceptual content lying at the core of “self-standing” beauty. Let me dig into Kant’s marginal notes from the late 1760s and era of the Inaugural Dissertation, revealing how his early aesthetics fits into the unificationist model. These forerunners of the free/adherent distinction in Kant’s early Reflections are noteworthy not only on account of their subject matter,

43

44

The “lively feeling” includes the feeling or sentiment of beauty: “the lively sentiment of the beautiful announces itself through shining cheerfulness in the eyes” (GSE 2:209). The Observations implies that some instances of “humor” would count as instances of “lively feeling” and taste. Cf. a Reflection from 1776–78: taste is “as it were courteous and humorous” (R 1856; 16:138). On humor, see Chapter 8.



   ’ 

but also because they were written after the Observations yet before Kant began lecturing on anthropology in 1772/73. In 1769, the year before the publication of the Dissertation, Kant wrote the following in his copy of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica: “Self-standing beauty must be grounded on a lasting [beständig] principio; now no cognition is unalterable but the one that reveals what the thing is; hence it is a combination with reason” (R 635; 15:275; my trans.). In describing this “cognition” as a Vereinigung with reason, Kant uses unificationist language. Self-standing beauty is the kind that is grounded on a lasting “principle,” or something stable, enduring, or substantial. (Note too that the “grounding” of beauty on a principle – of the good, say – does not thereby make it a mode of that principle.) But beyond the fact that “what the thing is” relates to an object,45 the meaning of the claim that a cognition reveals “what the thing is” remains obscure. It does not specify whether it is a claim about classes and kinds (as in conceptual and purpose-based beauty), or about what it means to be an object as such (as in Kant’s theoretical philosophy). Other Reflections help clarify what Kant has in mind. In a marginal note from 1769, if not earlier (1764–68), he introduces the idea that poetry evokes a harmonious play of thoughts or motion of the mental powers not “necessitated by an end.” Kant echoes a Berkeleyan worry about blocking – there may be so much disutility in the object that one simply cannot feel aesthetic pleasure in response to it. So Kant adds the condition that the mental play of thoughts “not be a hindrance” to reason. But he also thinks that the “harmonious play” cannot have the particular end of promoting reason alone; that is, it cannot be merely instrumental. Poesy (i.e., poetic invention) has the “end” only of setting the mental powers into play, and this is a process that requires it to have mental “content.” Poesy has neither sensations nor intuitions nor insights [Einsichten] as its end, but rather setting all the powers and springs in the mind [Gemüthe] into play; its images should not contribute more to the intelligibility [verstandlichkeit] of the object, but should give lively motion to the imagination. It must have a content, because without understanding there is no order and its play arouses the greatest satisfaction. (R 618; 15:266–7)

This passage reveals that a theory of imaginative play and play of the cognitive powers – though not yet the theory of a free harmonious play between the imagination and understanding46 – appears in Kant’s theory in the late 1760s. A poem’s conceptual or intellectual content provides order, while the

45 46

R 1829: “what the thing is (this relates to the object)” (from 1772–75; 16:130). As Dumouchel, Kant, 168, rightly notes. See also Menzer, Entwicklung, 59–60.

 



imagination is enlivened and animated. Kant distinguishes beauty related to an “end” from beauty that merely concerns the harmony between the object’s “look” and the state of mind. The same fragment states: In all products of nature and of art, there is something that is related merely to the end, and something that concerns merely the correspondence of the appearance with the state of mind, i.e., the manner, the vestment [Einkleidung]. The latter, even if one does not understand any end, often counts for everything. E.g., figure and color in flowers,47 tone and harmony in music. Symmetry in buildings. (R 618; 15:266–7)

With the “latter,” or sensible beauty, Kant has in mind something close to what Hume called “absolute beauty” (and what Kant would later call “free” beauty).48 Another Reflection from 1769 provides more evidence for reading the early Kant as subscribing to the unificationist model. The inner perfection of a thing has a natural relation to beauty. For the subordination of the manifold under an end requires a coordination of it in accordance with common laws. Hence the same property through which a building is beautiful is also conducive [zuträglich] to its goodness,

47

48

On “pure color,” see also R 871; mid-1770s; 15:383. Though Kant usually opposes color, as sensation, to form, in a 1769 note Kant claims that color (matter) can be part of the figure (Gestalt) of the object: figure includes both form and matter. “To figure [Gestalt] there belongs not merely the form of the object in accordance with spatial relations in appearance, but also the matter, i.e., sensation (color)” (R 638; 1769; 15:276). In other remarks from 1769–70, however, he treats color merely as sensation. “A representation is sensible if the form of space and time is in it; it is even more sensible if sensation is connected with it (color). . . . Beautiful objects are those whose internal order pleases in accordance with the laws of intuitus (R 646; 1769–70; 15:284). Kant reportedly comments on Louis-Bertrand Castel’s effort to make a Farbenklavier or piano-like instrument (i.e., an ocular harpsichord) that would use colors rather than sound tones (V-Anth/Mensch 25:1135). Kant thinks that Castel failed, since music “moves” the mind in affects (Affecten) and passions (Leidenschaften): light, it seems, cannot move people the way music does. Kant does not mention Castel in the third Critique. After the book’s publication, Christoph Friedrich Hellwag discusses Castel in a December 13, 1790 letter to Kant (Br 10:236). Hellwag asks Kant to comment on a potential comparison Hellwag proposes between the colors of the rainbow and the tones of the musical octave. He directs Kant to his 1786 article on the topic, noting that he believes to have found a similar comparison in several “rich” passages in Kant’s third Critique. In his response to Hellwag on January 3, 1791, Kant mentions an “analogy between colors and tones” (Br 10:244–5), but I have the impression Kant did not give Hellwag the affirmation he was seeking. The reference to “symmetry” fits in well with the (strong) formalism discussed in the previous chapter. Note, too, the examples of sensible or pure beauty come from architecture and music: the crucial feature is the symmetry or proportion they display, not whether or not they are artifacts.



   ’  and a face would have to have no other shape for its end than for its beauty. Of many things in nature we notice beauty, but not ends; it is to be believed that the satisfaction in their appearances is not the aim, but the consequence of their aim. (R 628; 15:273–4)49

The claim that the building’s beauty is “compatible” with its goodness suggests adherence to the “blocking” aspect of the blocking-unificationist model. Note that Kant writes that the inner perfection of a thing has a “natural relation” to beauty, but does not claim that beauty is a mode of perfection or goodness. He states that taking satisfaction in a beautiful appearance is a “consequence” of the ends of the objects found beautiful. But he adds that we do not “cognize” the “ends.” Kant does not fully spell out this unification account – these are marginalia after all. These early Reflections surely lack the detail of §16 and §17 of the third Critique, where his account suggests the three aforementioned ways in which concepts are relevant to aesthetic judgments of purpose-based beauty. But Kant’s early account appears to be unificationist, even if he sometimes expresses it in the language of the German aesthetic rationalism of Meier or Baumgarten (on whom he is often commenting). In another note from the same period (though possibly from as late as 1775), Kant claims that “the utility of cognition is not beauty” (R 1811; 16:124). He echoes Burke’s point that utility is not a sufficient cause of beauty. Kant thus distances himself from the German aesthetic tradition (and its containment model) even as he employs its terminology. Likewise, a Reflection from 1769–70 states that “self-standing” beauty can serve to make “general concepts intuitive”: Logical perfection with regard to form consists in truth (in concepts) and its means. Aesthetic perfection with regard to form consists in graspability in intuition. The form of sensibility that facilitates the perfection of the understanding is the self-standing [selbständig] beautiful, which can serve to make general concepts intuitive [anschauend] and prepares appearances for distinctness through general concepts. (R 1794; 16:118)

“Aesthetic perfection” appears to refer to the case in which the object’s form elicits pleasure according to the principle of sensible comprehension discussed in the previous chapter (“graspability in intuition”). With self-standing beauty,

49

Cf. a Reflection from 1769: “The beauty of cognition which is to the benefit [beforderlich] of reason and the evidence of the understanding is called self-standing [selbständig]” (R 629; 15:274; my trans.).

 



however, “general concepts” are made “intuitive.” But much remains unclear here. Kant does not explain the specific roles of sensibility and understanding in the experience of self-standing beauty.50 He does not say what he means by “general” concepts, and he is employing the German scholastic terminology of “perfection” to state his views. I read this admittedly puzzling Reflection as dealing with three kinds of form: that of logical and aesthetic perfections, and a third kind, a “form of sensibility” that unites the aesthetic and logical (or conceptual) perfections. This third kind “facilitates” the understanding’s perfection; its activity is not merely to be subsumed under the understanding. If that is right, it would appear that with the latter Kant is going beyond rationalist views that distinguished logical from aesthetic cognition but did not defend a combination or unification of them in this manner. Accordingly, while “aesthetic perfection” with regard to intuitive-sensible form may constitute beauty in general, the form of sensibility that in addition facilitates the understanding’s perfection and makes concepts intuitive would constitute selfstanding beauty. In this way, Kant’s view could be called “unificationist.” Of course, one wishes that Kant had articulated his position more. A further Reflection (from 1769) makes this reading even more plausible. After separating (in other passages from this period) utility or mediate goodness from beauty, Kant does not leave them as exclusive disjunctions, but reunites them. He distinguishes between sensible (sinnliche) beauty and selfstanding beauty, which is defined as a “means” to the concept of the good. The sensible form (or the form of sensibility) of a cognition pleases either as a play of sensation or as a form of intuition (immediately) or as a means to the concept of the good. The former is charm, the second the sensibly beautiful, the third self-standing [selbständige] beauty. (R 639; 15:276; emphasis added)51

Self-standing beauty, here contrasted with the sensibly beautiful, is a “means” (in the sense of a vehicle or vehiculum) to the concept of the good, that is, an aesthetic or sensible response to the good. This kind of beauty is not identical to the instrumental or moral good, and it is not a mode of the good either. It is a sensible presentation of the good. In contrast, an object is sensibly beautiful or “pleases immediately in the intuition if its form fits with the law of coordination among appearances and facilitates sensible clarity and magnitude. Like symmetry in buildings and harmony in music” (ibid.; emphasis added).52 But, the fragment concludes, “the object pleases in the intuitive concept [im 50 51 52

Guyer, Taste, 18. On this fragment, see also the note in Kant, Notes and Fragments, 614 no. 40. Note the reference to facilitation (“facilitates sensible clarity and magnitude”). On symmetry and harmony in art or artifacts, see also: “The play of intuitions is found in edifices, furnishings, dress, gardens” (R 807; about 1776–78; 15:359).



   ’ 

Anschauenden Begriffe] if its relation to the good can be expressed through a concept that pleases in sensible form. (Conventional or natural taste.)” (R 639; 15:279; emphasis added). Note that the beautiful object has a “relation” to the good that is expressed by its beautiful “sensible form.” In self-standing beauty, the object pleases in the intuitive concept. Its sensible form is found to be pleasing, while at the same time, “a concept” (i.e., not the understanding in general) expresses the object’s relation to the good. This reading seems to be confirmed in another Reflection from the same time. Whereas beauty is perceived immediately, through the faculty of sensibility, reason recognizes “utility,” which consists in the relation of something as a means to what pleases, whether it gratifies or appears only beautiful. . . . Here there is a maximum, or rather a unity, of satisfaction. . . . An end in general is the object. (R 678; 1769–70; 15:300)53

Finally, consider this early Reflection: “Whether beauty and perfection, hence their causes as well as the rules for judging of them, do not stand in a secret connection [geheimer Verbindung]. E.g., a beautiful person often has a good soul” (R 622; 1769 or 1764–68; 15:269). If the relation between beauty and perfection were a matter of containment, there would be little “secret connection.” In fact, there would not really be a need for a “connection,” since the relation between beauty and perfection would be more direct, a matter of subsumption. The logic and anthropology lectures from this period (1772/73) are in agreement with the position presented in the Reflections. The Collins anthropology transcription states that, whereas feeling is produced by stimuli and emotion, in the case of “pure” beauty (“beauty merely as beauty”) one judges “not in accordance with feeling, but in accordance with appearance” in comparison with feeling (V-Anth/Collins 25:178; cf. KU 5:190). Kant then contrasts beauty and utility (V-Anth/Collins 25:181). “Beauty pleases immediately” (V-Anth/Collins 25:176). Then, as if anticipating a worry expressed by commentators on his mature account54 – he then inquires whether beauty that is tied to the purposes of an object could still be beauty, given that those purposes are the means to some end. Kant implies that it can, and he introduces the notion of a “thorough” liking: “If beauty is united with utility, the liking for it becomes more thorough [gründlicher] and enduring. Just the same, pure [reine] beauty, which is only for taste and furnishes a certain pure gratification, remains void of all utility” (V-Anth/Collins 25:176).55 Note, Kant 53 54 55

See also R 1813; about 1770–71 or 1772–77; 16:125. Zammito, Genesis, 126; Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 20. Cf. V-Anth/Dohna, 171; and Kowalewski, 208. The anthropology Dohna-Wundlacken manuscript contains variants of key passages in anthropology Collins. It can be found at

 



is speaking of cases where beauty is “united” with utility (a kind of goodness), not where it is a mode of utility or goodness. After distinguishing them, Kant reunites beauty with utility and other kinds of goodness and perfection (VAnth/Collins 25:177). This concept of goodness includes morality, and Kant appears to be drawing from Sulzer when he writes about this theme. According to the Collins lecture transcription, Kant comments on Sulzer’s Preface to General Theory: “The entire utility of the fine arts is that they present the moral principles of reason in full splendor and buttress them forcefully. Sulzer demonstrates this very clearly” (V-Anth/Collins 25:33; my trans.). While Kant does not yet draw an analogy between morality and beauty (as distinct but analogous kinds of freedom), he reportedly still makes some connections to morality: art can “present” moral principles, and beauty can thereby support or “buttress” morality. It is easy to get lost in all these details. The following passage from Collins provides a good summary. The transcription claims that in order for something like a watch to please me aesthetically, I need to know its end (which is given by the “idea”). After stating a version of constraint or blocking (“what violates the aim of the thing goes against its beauty”), the lecture reads: In a poem or a discourse, what is self-standing in beauty rests on truth and purity. Logical perfection constitutes self-standing beauty. Otherwise there can indeed be adornment there, but one still sees that genuine beauty is missing. If in the wrong room, the most beautiful paintings are useless and displayed poorly. The understanding must make the foundation, and then the beauty can be spread out over it. – Beauty and colors presuppose a substance on which they are applied. No writers who lacked what is self-standing were admired for their taste for very long. (V-Anth/Collins 25:193; my trans.)56

56

Kants Vorlesungen über Anthropologie at http://www.online.uni-marburg.de/kant_old/ webseitn/gt_ho304.htm [accessed September 24, 2021]. A version of the transcription is published, not in AA 25, but in Immanuel Kant, Die philosophischen Hauptvorlesungen Immanuel Kants. Nach den aufgefundenen Kollegheften des Grafen Heinrich zu DohnaWundlacken, ed. Arnold Kowalewski (Munich and Leipzig: Rösl, 1924). The page number (here, 171) given after V-Anth/Dohna refers to the manuscript page (also reproduced online); the one following Kowalewski refers to the page in Kowalewski, Hauptvorlesungen. Although scholars sometimes overlook its mixed provenance, the Dohna-Wundlacken anthropology lecture derives in part from a 1772/73 source lecture, not just from the 1790s. See editor’s Introduction, AA 25:CXLVI. Given both its content and its similarity to the passage in Collins, the present V-Anth/Dohna passage very likely comes from the 1772/73 lecture. Cf. V-Anth/Dohna, 193–4; Kowalewski, 225.



   ’ 

If aesthetic perfection (and ease of sensible comprehension according to the laws of intuition) is the basis for free beauty, then logical perfection, this passage implies, is the foundation of self-standing beauty, but not identical to it (cf. V-Anth/Parow 25:385, quoted above). The Parow version of this passage is revealing. After claiming that we should pay attention to an author’s aim (Endzwek), the Parow states: “In each thing, we observe some self-standing beauty; just the same, it is plainly seen that the things that do not have anything that is self-standing, also lack selfstanding beauty, since their possible charm is nothing self-standing. E.g., fashion” (V-Anth/Parow 25:383–4; my trans.).57 “One cannot take a thing to be beautiful until one knows what kind of a thing it is supposed to be. One must therefore always presuppose the idea of the thing” (V-Anth/Parow 25:384; my trans.). In fact, the lecture makes an even stronger claim: with respect to the thing, the correspondence of emotion with the “idea” of the thing (what kind of object it is) is true (wahre) beauty (V-Anth/Parow 25:384).58 Purpose-based beauty is seen as truer or higher than sensible beauty (see also R 871; 15:383; quoted below). The Parow transcription also clearly reveals the blocking aspect of Kant’s account: “All conveniences and stimuli that go against the thing’s purpose are opposed to the self-standing [dem selbstständigen] in beauty” (V-Anth/Parow 25:385). Anthropology lecture Hamilton, a third transcription from the same source lecture as Collins and Parow, makes a similar point. If beauty is secondary to the understanding, the lecture reads, the result is longer lasting.59 The Hamilton transcription then states that one must have thorough cognitions (grundliche Kenntnisse) in order to bring about something in the beautiful sciences or arts. “Beauty is lasting; one finds therefore no better historian than Hume” (V-Anth/Ham 25:193). Hume’s writings are not the only ones to exemplify this kind of beauty. The manuscript states that “the English Spectator is the best weekly,” and, still speaking of The Spectator published by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, continues: “One does not know if one should marvel at the beauty or at the thoroughness of the thoughts. One cannot learn beauty from any model, if one does not have a thorough cognition of the thing” (V-Anth/Ham 25:193).60 Thus, self-standing beauty is the kind of beauty used to characterize the beauty in writings with intellectual 57 58

59

60

Cf. V-Anth/Dohna, 192; Kowalewski, 224. Cf. V-Anth/Collins 25:193; R 628, above. “Idea” here (and in similar fragments) should not be read as an “aesthetic idea” in the Critical sense. Passages in the Hamilton anthropology transcription differ occasionally from the corresponding texts in Collins and Parow, and textual variants in Hamilton are placed in footnotes throughout AA 25. While many of the variants are negligible and brief, some of them (like this one) are noteworthy and substantial. Passages from the Hamilton transcription are included in AA 25 only in instances of meaningful alternate readings. Cf. V-Anth/Dohna, 193; Kowalewski, 225.

 



content – including disciplines such as metaphysics.61 Such writings contain a thorough cognition yet are presented in a manner pleasing to the imagination. Accordingly, in this earliest aesthetic phase, the kind of beauty that is selfstanding (lasting, independent) is the one tied to purposes and/or concepts, including intellectual content. Kant subscribes to a model according to which the failure to be a good instance of a kind can hinder one’s feeling beauty in response to it (“blocking”), and in which the object’s showing itself to be an excellent instance of its kind, or performing its function well, can add to aesthetic pleasure in the object (“unification”). The intellectual content functions as the concrete matter (Stoff) that provides substance to the writing or discourse. The version of this passage in the Brauer transcription (likewise based on the 1772/73 course) is truly remarkable in this light: “And when beauty is made secondary to the understanding, there is something lasting [Und wo Schönheit dem Verstande secundirt, da ist etwas dauerhaftes]” (V-Anth/Brauer ms page 130). For “secondary” simply means ancillary, in other words, adherent. Partly intellectual or concept-based beauty, or the kind in which sensible beauty is made secondary to the understanding, is thus characterized as “lasting.” Thus, it is the partly conceptual or intellectual beauty that is enduring and self-standing – a position contrary to the one presented in the third Critique. I move on to the next phase of Kant’s development, which starts around the mid-1770s. He holds onto his unificationist position. Kant claims that “what the art of intuition reveals clearly” is beautiful and contrasts it with the response to objects where purposes are determined by reason. The contrast is reminiscent not only of Kant’s distinction between pure and purpose-based beauty, but also of Hume’s and Sulzer’s distinctions between immediate and relative beauty. In a difficult but important note, Kant writes: Ars aspectabilis est pulchritudo. [Art that is worthy of being seen is beautiful]. What the art [Kunst] of intuition presents clearly and readily is beautiful. Hence the art must not be cognized through reason, thus insofar as the object is considered as a means, but in the thing itself. Regularity, proportion, measured division. A regular polygon. A pure color; the distribution of colors for charm (tulips, pheasants). Proportionate tone. The agreement (relation) of phaenomeni with an idea in general [überhaupt]; beauty requires understanding. The agreement of the phaenomeni with the essential end [wesentlichen Zweke] is the higher [obere] beauty. The art in appearance. (R 871; mid 1770s; 15:383)

61

According to Herder‘s metaphysics lecture notes (early 1760s), Kant claimed that metaphysics should be thorough yet beautiful (V-Met/Herder 28:6).



   ’ 

What it would mean to cognize art in “the thing itself” is puzzling, especially if one has in mind the thing in itself from the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). However, rather than having in mind something like the thing in itself, Kant apparently means that an aesthetic contemplation that does not attend to ends set by reason focuses on features that are in the object per se: regularity, proportion, measured division, and perhaps even pure color. In the beginning lines, Kant appears to subscribe to a position close to Hutcheson’s or Mendelssohn’s unity-in-variety theory. Art should be cognized and enjoyed not insofar as it satisfies purposes, but only for displaying features such as regularity, symmetry, and proportion. According to the passage’s second half, there can be an agreement between the appearances and an idea provided by the understanding or reason (“the essential end”). This would count as purpose-based beauty. (Note, Kant mentions an “agreement” with the end, not being a mode of the end.) But Kant goes even further: the agreement of the phenomena with “the essential end” is the higher kind of beauty.62 Thus, it would appear that this Reflection mentions both kinds of beauty but ultimately privileges the Berkeleyan side of Kant’s account, that is, the side that is oriented toward utility, ends, and purposes. Though the passage is vague about the specific roles of sensibility (intuition) and understanding (and about “an idea in general”), Kant plainly distinguishes pleasure in the beautiful object’s agreement with its “essential end” from pleasure stemming from a “clear” or “ready” (hence not just any) presentation in intuition. Similar views about agreement with (but not subsumption under) the understanding and reason are found in fragments from the same period. “Beauty is self-standing where the sensibility harmonizes with perfection regarding reason in accordance with universal laws” (R 1814; 1770–71 or 1772–77; 16:125). Kant claims that in self-standing beauty, sensibility is in harmony with perfection regarding reason, not that sensibility is contained under reason or understanding.63 62

63

Likewise, lecture notes from this phase read: “True beauty consists in the agreement of sensibility with the concept” (V-Anth/Fried 25:655; emphasis added). See also a note from about 1772–75: “Because the essential in every representation is the idea of the thing, all aesthetic perfection is a union of the subjective with the objective” (R 1826; 16:130). The blocking or “constraint” view is found in the Reflections on anthropology. Whereas spirit animates the mind, “the power of judgment determines the idea of what a thing properly should be. The shape, how it appears, must not contradict the idea. The power of judgment therefore binds and limits the play of sensibility, but it gives it true unity and thereby strengthens the impression” (R 817; 1776–78 or slightly earlier; 15:364). According to R 814, “The power of judgment is the capacity to relate actions to an idea as their purpose. The product displays the power of judgment if it leads to the idea and is harmonious with it. . . . [For instance,] the power of judgment with regard to the dignity of a building, with regard to its ornaments, which must not conflict with its purpose” (R 814, about 1776–78; 15:363). See also R 947 from 1776–78: “The power of judgment is

 



Kant writes that the substantially good is in “agreement” with reason or something conceptual (an “idea”): “The appearance insofar as it is in agreement with the idea constitutes the essentially beautiful” (R 806; 1773 or 1776–78; 15:355). Elsewhere in this fragment, Kant writes that the power of judgment that is formative (bildende) pertains only to the “means of harmonious order” and not to either utility or to what is thorough and enduring, that is, to what would amount to rendering a beauty self-standing. “The formative power of judgment pertains only to the means of harmonious order and its advancement, hence unity, multiplicity, demarcation. It does not pertain to utility or to the mediately pleasing, that which is thorough and enduring in buildings, in the human body, in dress” (R 806; 15:355). The strictly formative power of judgment, in other words, is distinguished from the mediate or mediating kind that combines the “thorough and enduring” with the sensibly pleasing.64 The strictly formative power of judgment, to put it in third Critique terms, concerns free beauty.65 The anthropology lectures from the mid-1770s introduce a new concept that, while it may look like an instance of jargon, supports reading Kant as a blocking-unificationist: the hypostatic. The term “hypostatic,” which apparently derives from Aristotle, refers to a substance acting as a material substratum underlying change.66 An example of hypostatic cognition, for Kant, is a literary passage or discussion containing significant intellectual content: Our cognitions can have clarity in the understanding and intensity in sensation. In the presentation, we can differentiate the emphatic and hypostatic cognitions. This classification is taken from Aristotle. . . . What produces an intensity of sensation, would therefore be emphatic and, where there is a self-standing beauty, it would be hypostatic. The English Spectator has self-standing beauty; the embellishing of speech with images belongs to emphatic beauty. (V-Anth/Fried 25:485)67

64

65

66

67

the Censor of the sensations, in order to distinguish whether they belong to the idea and are connected with it or whether they even hinder and obscure it” (15:420). See also: “Taste does not concern the useful, but it must harmonize with that. It is a consistent play of understanding and sensibility” (R 983; 1776–89; 15:429). Note the reference to a “play” of two faculties. Kant sometimes takes his beauty/utility distinction too far. A Reflection from the mid1770s sets beauty in direct opposition to utility and describes them as being in an inverse relation (R 868; 1776–78; 15:382). See also Guyer, Taste, 174, which translates R 868. “To sum up, some of the phenomena which occur in the air are merely appearances [kat’ emphasin], while others have actual substance [kath’ hypostasin].” Aristotle, On the Universe, ch. 4 (395a29–30). See also V-Anth/Parow 25:385; V-Anth/Mron 25:1228; V-Anth/Busolt 25:1443.



   ’ 

Kant thinks that the intellectual content (“clarity in the understanding”) can give an object or work enduring beauty, and he aligns the substantial (hypostatic) and the “self-standing.” Again, the “self-standing” is independent, enduring, and stable. Another technical-sounding term deserves comment, since it sounds like it might be able to clarify what Kant means by adherent beauty: “adhering representation,” a topic that recurs throughout the anthropology lectures (including Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View). At first glance, this notion might strike readers of the third Critique as a potential forerunner of “adherent” beauty. It is not. Although the terms used are the same (adhaerirende, angehörigen, anhängenden), the pre-Critical and Critical concepts are not equivalent in either intension or extension. According to the Friedländer notes, Kant discusses a “dry” sermon that is spiced up by what is ancillary or adherent, varnish that makes the substance more interesting. The dryness is not undesirable – it is the core of the sermon. We can “consider every representation in its bare state and separated from everything,” and understand the content clearly, or else we can “examine it with certain representations that belong [angehörigen] and adhere [anhängenden] to it, and give it a certain accompaniment” (V-Anth/Fried 25:491).68 The dry intellectual content of the sermon constitutes its main representation (Hauptvorstellung). The conceptual content is not (as in the third Critique) what renders a discourse “adherent,” but rather creates a need for embellishment by secondary representations. This makes for another remarkable contrast with the position presented in the third Critique. The Pillau lecture (1777/78) states that the beautiful arts are distinguished from the useful arts. The play in rhetoric can be an aesthetic play with the conceptual content expressed in an idea shaped by the orator’s ends and intentions (V-Anth/Pillau 25:760). In addition, the transcription contains a passage in which “self-standing” is understood as passing the test of time or enduring through the ages – consistent with the “consensus-based” account Kant adopts at this time. Since taste, unlike fashion, is steady or lasting (beständig), “Homer pleases us and has always pleased us” (V-Anth/Pillau 25:788; my trans.).69 This makes sense of why Kant had claimed that The Spectator contains or evokes “hypostatic” beauty. The Spectator is not merely following fads and fashions. It expresses intellectually interesting ideas that give it an enduring appeal. The Menschenkunde lecture (1781/82) reveals that Kant employs a blocking-unificationist model. Beauty and the mediate good (utility) are distinct, it states, but can be connected: “The beautiful and agreeable rest on sensations: the good on concepts. The beautiful stands in a natural connection 68 69

See also V-Anth/Parow 25:266; V-Anth/Mron 25:1256; Anth 7:138. Likewise, a later logic lecture (likely stemming mostly from 1792) contrasts “the selfstanding beautiful” with “what is alterable in accordance with the variety of taste following fashion” (V-Lo/Dohna 24:714; my trans.).

 



to the good, even if they are not the same” (V-Anth/Mensch 25:1100; my trans.). The good (health or fitness) is not determined by the senses, but requires a judgment “of reason.” Kant asks if the beautiful must always go together (hängt zusammen) with what is purposive (Zweckmässigen). He answers that while the senses do not make a judgment about a thing, “all beauty must have a relation to the good” (V-Anth/Mensch 25:1100; my trans.). Again, having a relation to the good does not mean that it is a mode of the good. Human bodily health requires a useful and functional relation of the parts, or at least one that does not block utility. Perhaps alluding to Hume or William Hogarth,70 Kant refers to the stock example from architecture (i.e., columns should be broader at the base). The transcription states: “everything must be aimed at the useful; otherwise it would not please [gefallen].” The passage concludes: “One thus nevertheless sees that we find here a unification of nature and taste, [a unification] of the good nature seeks to bring about, and the beautiful” (V-Anth/Mensch 25:1101; my trans.). There are some conceptual twists and turns in which Kant appears to subscribe to an autonomist model, but his position is best seen as “unificationist” (he even uses the word “unification”). To be sure, he adduces examples that sound autonomist: annoying weeds that flower beautifully, and cows and donkeys that, though useful, do not typically appear beautiful (V-Anth/Mensch 25:1101). But his overall strategy here is to distinguish beauty from utility, then to recombine them. In a set of lecture notes a few years later, the model is again, without question, unificationist. In a lecture from 1784/85, Kant continues to make his familiar distinction between the agreeable, beautiful, and good (V-Anth/ Mron 25:1316, 1325, 1331).71 Amid Rousseau-like admonitions about not letting beauty prevail over the good, Kant claims that “the beautiful can be reconciled with the useful and good,” even as beauty and utility are distinct. Such combination or unification is an indication of “purified taste” (V-Anth/ Mron 25:1327). If the beautiful is contrary to the useful or “mediate good,” then “it is not even beautiful”; this is the familiar case of blocking (V-Anth/ Mron 25:1332). But then comes unification: Beautiful and good come into affinity. . . . I can therefore paint the good beautifully, but not as agreeable, not as charming; otherwise virtue becomes a coquette. – The beautiful serves for the recommendation of the good. The human being becomes refined [verfeinert] the more he finds taste in the beautiful. (V-Anth/Mron 25:1332)

70

71

William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). Cf. Hume, Treatise, II.i.viii, quoted above. See also KU 5:204–11; V-Anth/Collins 25:167, 175; V-Anth/Parow 25:367; V-Anth/Pillau 25:788.



   ’ 

Sentiment allows one to depict virtue more beautifully, with lively colors, and can make virtue more intuitable (anschaulicher) through the use of history and stories (V-Anth/Mron 25:1333) – using what he elsewhere calls “profound” wit (Anth 7:222). Beauty can indirectly promote the good and has an affective value (Affektionspreis). Kant claims that through “taste” the human being becomes (culturally) refined, but does not hold that humans are thereby morally edified. The focus is more on entertainment than on morality. The transcription states that “the aesthetic worth of a cognition is entertainment; for example, well-written novels, poems, and the like, entertain us while we read them” (V-Anth/Mron 25:1228). In such experiences, the logical (conceptual) and the aesthetic are combined harmoniously: “In some cognitions, logical and aesthetic worth are found together. Thus Horace says: Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re. Pleasing in manner and important in content. One also calls the latter hypostatic self-standing, and the former emphatic” (V-Anth/ Mron 25:1228).72 The anonymous-Dingelstaedt (also from a lecture from 1784/85, if not 1788/89) likewise reads: “Within cognition, we can in general distinguish the hypostatic73 or self-standing, and the emphatic or aesthetic. When it comes to cognition, the manifold’s adornment [Einkleidung] is the most entertaining. Unity in the manifold is the hardest, but also at the same time an important end of all our cognitions” (V-Anth/Ding ms page 15). Finally, I turn to the mature phase of Kant’s aesthetics. In the period right before 1790, the textual evidence on adherent beauty is scarce, though there is some evidence that in his anthropology lecture Kant expresses something like the notion of adherent beauty with regard to the arts of speech.74 In terms of the beauty/good relation, the Busolt anthropology lecture (1788/89) reveals a blocking-unificationist model. Goodness is understood here as both the morally and the instrumentally good. The transcription contains themes that are prominent in the third Critique: the experience of beauty is “disinterested,” the beautiful object pleases with regard to its “form,” and the appreciator is “indifferent” to its existence (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1508; cf. 1510). With “things of art,” the transcription states, the beautiful can be united with the good (VAnth/Busolt 25:1510). Here, unification and blocking elements are combined. The purposiveness of a thing is the (mediate) good, and whatever goes against the utility of a thing also contravenes its beauty. “The thing must always be suited to the purpose. Sensibility must concur with the understanding and its

72 73

74

On suaviter in modo, see also R 618; 15:267; and V-Anth/Reichel ms page 66. The manuscript reads “hypothetical,” but this appears to be a typographical error introduced by the note transcriber. Kant claims that in evaluating (beuhrtheilen) a discourse (Rede) aesthetically (as involving free play), one needs to have an idea (Idee) or concept that serves as a rule (Regel) by which to judge it (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1494; see also R 1923; likely 1780–89; 16:158). On oratory and rhetoric in the third Critique, see KU 5:327, 327 n.

 



concepts. In the case of beauty we do not look at utility, but the thing must still not go against the thing’s usefulness” (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1510; my trans.). In what appears to reveal an increasingly prominent moral orientation in Kant’s aesthetic theory, the lecture states that, unlike the merely sensory gratification of the agreeable, taste promotes the faculty of understanding and encourages moral gratification (moralische Vergnügen) (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1511). In the third Critique, in addition to presenting the notion of adherent beauty in §16, Kant gives a prominent role to the concept of freedom, in particular the freedom of imagination and its play with the understanding. In §59, Kant holds that the freedom of the imagination can act as a symbol of the freedom of morality (KU 5:354). In §42, he argues that one can take a morally based or intellectual interest in the experience of beauty (KU 5:300). He claims that judgments of taste, though disinterested and distinct from judgments of the morally good, can still support one’s moral development precisely because of their analogy with morality. In the published work, Kant combines his view that taste, precisely due to its disinterestedness, can indirectly promote morality, with his view that pure judgments of taste lie on a justifiable a priori principle that nevertheless does not turn them into determinate judgments.75 The Reichel manuscript (1793/94) distinguishes beauty from the instrumentally good or useful. Here, the notion of the particular mode of attention given to the object, or how one considers it, is noteworthy, suggesting that the same object can be considered in two different ways: “If the house is therefore considered in light of its symmetry, it is beautiful but not useful; if I see it in terms of its durability, spaciousness, and the like, then it is good, i.e., useful” (V-Anth/Reichel ms page 83). In addition, Kant makes his by now familiar unificationist move. The reference to the “good” and the “concept” in the title of the section is significant: “On the Good that Pleases through the Concept.” This is the same sort of language that can be found in his early unification accounts – and it does not make him a rationalist or commit him to the view that beauty is a mode of goodness or of perfection. Kant unifies beauty and utility in a way that reflects the latest phase of his aesthetics, for he connects beauty to the morally good: “The beautiful, even if distinct from the good, has a relation to it; it has a proximity to the morally good; for he who has taste in the beautiful is closer to the moral than he who enjoys merely sensible gratifications. . . . Beauty is richer in freedom and meritorious” (V-Anth/Reichel ms page 83). Kant’s use of the unificationist model reflects a moral-teleological vision that characterizes beauty as a kind of freedom. Beauty stands in “relation” to the good in general and in “proximity” to the morally good in particular.76 75 76

See Guyer’s Introduction to the “Aesthetics” chapter in Kant, Notes and Fragments, 481. In an astute article, Emine Hande Tuna discusses an earlier version of the interpretation I present in this chapter. Emine Hande Tuna, “Self-Standing Beauty: Tracing Kant’s



   ’ 

The Third Critique Reconsidered Here are three main ways the third Critique account compares and contrasts with Kant’s earlier approaches. The kind of beauty that (on the early view) is felt in response to an object in which the “good” is expressed through a sensibly pleasing concept (R 639; 15:279) is clearly a precursor to adherent beauty, which incorporates the perfection or ends of the object into the aesthetic experience. Second, in the third Critique, Kant argues that beauty can promote, at least indirectly, one’s moral edification by depicting or presenting sensible images of moral ideas. Though a connection to morality is inchoate in his early view that taste can refine us, and although (following Sulzer) Kant makes some claims about beauty somehow supporting morality, the Critical account spells it out in more detail through a theory of aesthetic and morally significant ideas and an analogy between beauty and the morally good. Finally, in the third Critique, Kant takes a term from his anthropology – “adhering” (“adhering representations”) – and uses it in his aesthetic theory, giving it the sense of “secondary” or “ancillary.” According to the third Critique account of adherent beauty, a concept renders “adherent” any partly intellectualized beauty that would be felt in response to sensible presentations of that concept. By contrast, according to the earlier anthropology lectures, (dry) conceptual content creates a need for ancillary embellishment: it is not what makes the beauty adherent or ancillary. Why, in the third Critique, does Kant move to an account according to which free beauties are said to be self-standing, thereby giving priority to free beauty? Here, characterizing Kant’s development in terms of some of my arcs may be useful. If free beauty is not restricted to nature and adherent beauty is not restricted to art, there are actually two principal shifts covered in this chapter that need to be explained: the shift from adherent to free beauty as “self-standing,” (arc 2) and the shift of emphasis from art to nature (arc 1).77

77

Views on Purpose-Based Beauty,” Southwest Philosophy Review 35, no. 1 (2019): 7–16, which criticizes Robert R. Clewis, “Beauty and Utility in Kant’s Aesthetics: The Origins of Adherent Beauty,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 56, no. 2 (2018): 305–36. She proposes that the early Kant subscribes not to unificationism but to the “containment“ account and that he holds that beauty is a form of perfection. She holds that Kant gives up the aesthetic perfectionist-rationalist elements and eventually defends a version of the “blocking-unificationist” view. I do not agree with all of her points, and I insist on the influence of unificationist British authors (e.g., Hume, Shaftesbury, Kames) on Kant’s early publications such as the Observations and Announcement of his Lectures (1765–66) (GSE 2:253; NEV 2:311; see also Log 9:15). But I have modified this chapter in light of her remarks. There is less to say about my arc 3 (concerning aesthetic ideas). Kant discusses partly conceptual or purpose-based beauty as early as the 1760s (Phase 1). Thus, Kant’s thinking about conceptual beauty precedes the increased attention he gives, starting around 1776, to aesthetic ideas, genius, and spirit (Geist). The notions of aesthetic ideas and purpose-

 



In the earlier phases of his aesthetics, Kant calls purpose-based or conceptual beauty “self-standing” on the grounds that the partial basis in (or relation to) concepts of ends adds to the security or enduring quality of judgments of taste (R 635). Judgments of conceptual or purpose-based beauty make only a hypothetical claim on others: if one shares my concept of this object’s kind, purpose, or genre (and if the work is a “means” to that end in that noninstrumental way that is required of beauty), then one ought to find this object (substantially) beautiful (cf. KU 5:231).78 As long as Kant had not found a way of justifying the claim to universal validity of “pure” judgments of taste, he may have thought that beauty combined with usefulness had a more secure (hence, “self-standing”) claim to validity than beauty without usefulness. Here normativity enters the picture. Sometime around late 1787, Kant thought he had found such a justification: a “deduction” of an a priori principle of feeling pleasure and displeasure. In judgments of free beauty, one makes “justified claims to universal assent” because one employs a “universally valid a priori principle.”79 In other words, Kant eventually discerned a nonsensory, universally valid, a priori basis for judgments of pure beauty.80 With the discovery of the proper role of “intersubjective validity in aesthetic judgment,” the bold claim that he had “discovered a new sort of a priori principle,” which he announced in the late December 1787 letter to Reinhold, could finally be defended.81 With this justification in place, he was then able to claim “self-standing” status for free beauty, whether in nature or art. Now, I think it is also in part for expository reasons that Kant emphasizes free (pure) beauty at the beginning of the third Critique. Kant’s analysis of beauty in the book starts (in §2) with pure (free) judgments of taste (KU 5:205). He may have preferred to call pure or free beauty “self-standing” because he considered the conceptual constraint in adherent beauty to lead to a more complex instance of the harmonious and free play of the faculties, which was the core of his aesthetic theory and which he set out to present and defend. He could thereby set apart his position from the more conceptual or intellectualist accounts of his predecessors in the German scholastic tradition. Calling free beauty “self-standing’” allowed Kant to emphasize the clearest

78 79 80

81

based (adherent) beauty, even if they are both typically found in a work of art, are conceptually distinct. Zuckert, Beauty and Biology, 208. Ibid. Robert Wicks, Kant on Judgment (London: Routledge, 2007), 9. See also Robert Wicks, “Dependent Beauty as the Appreciation of Teleological Style,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 4 (1997): 387–400. Guyer, Taste, 13.



   ’ 

example of beauty (free beauty) that gave rise to harmonious, free play of the faculties in response to an object’s “form.” I now turn to the point about nature. In the early Reflections and the lectures, the beauty of nature per se plays a relatively subordinate role. Kant’s systematic aims play a key role in his emphasis on nature and “teleology,” as is evident in his 1787 letter to Reinhold – even if the letter reveals a conception of the planned work that differs from the actual structure of the published third Critique. Kant reports the discovery of a “systematicity” and relates that he is “at work” on the “Critique of Taste,” which he connects, albeit without explanation, to “teleology.” He claims to have “discovered a new sort of a priori principle” concerning “the faculty of feeling pleasure and displeasure,” having previously thought it impossible to find an a priori principle for it. (In the letter, he does not clarify what the principle is.) The analysis of the mental powers allows him to discover a systematicity that “put him on the path to recognizing the three parts of philosophy, each of which has its a priori principles . . . [viz.] theoretical philosophy, teleology, and practical philosophy” (Br 10:514–5). A prominent focus on nature is evident in an important and relatively lengthy marginal note from around this time (1785–89), a draft of an outline of the first part of the third Critique. Kant states that, since in beauty and sublimity “there is subjective purposiveness of nature,” the cultivation of beauty and sublimity “in nature” is “preparation for moral feeling” (R 992; 15:436–7). (It is possible that Kant wrote of “teleology” to Reinhold with such “purposiveness of nature” in mind.) This Reflection also provides additional support for my seeing Kant’s shift (to free beauty) as due to his “discovery” of an a priori principle, for he claims that a “universally valid” judgment “must have a principle.” He refers to a “deduction of the aesthetic power of judgment concerning the beautiful in nature.” In the third Critique, Kant is interested in how the beauty of nature can be connected to natural purposiveness, revealing an apparent “technique of nature.” In §23, Kant characterizes natural beauty as self-standing: “Natural beauty (the self-standing kind) [die selbständige] carries with it a purposiveness in its form, through which the object seems as it were to be predetermined for our power of judgment” (KU 5:245). “The self-standing [selbständige] beauty of nature reveals to us a technique of nature” (KU 5:246).82 Kant expresses a systematic aim to bridge a gap or gulf between nature and freedom (KU 5:176; cf. 195–6; EEKU 20:244), where “nature” 82

Also relevant to the shift to nature is Kant’s conception of the “heautonomy“ of the power of judgment, according to which the power of judgment legislates not to nature, but to itself (KU 5:185–6; cf. 169, 350, EEKU 20:225). Kant writes that the self-standing natural beauty, in virtue of its “form,” seems to be “predetermined” for the power of judgment (KU 5:245).

 



includes both outer or external nature as well as “inner” nature (that is, inclinations and drives). This self-imposed philosophical goal is a reason Kant calls (pure) natural beauty “self-standing.” The “impurity” of judgments of adherent beauty perhaps renders them less central to Kant’s transcendental philosophical concerns, at least on the surface.83 Perhaps “purity” (free beauty) seemed to be more central to his project. Kant may have recognized a need to find “purity” in responses to external nature – the experience of free natural beauty being an exemplary case – in order eventually to connect his aesthetic theory to an account of teleology, according to which nature is viewed as a system of ends and morality is seen as the “final end” of such nature (KU 5:435). It may have struck Kant as more transparent to apply the term “self-standing” to the pure beauty of natural forms, since the task he had given himself was to show how it was possible to make a transition from lawfulness according to nature to that of freedom, that is, by starting from nature in order to then pass over to freedom (cf. KU 5:326). Nevertheless, “adherent” beauties (§16) can still be said to play a role in Kant’s self-imposed task of bridging the perceived gulf between nature and freedom (arc 5). Adherent beauty – including the beauty of the human form (§17), the aesthetic judgment of which is partly subject to conceptual and/or moral constraints (though without losing the freedom of imagination or free play that makes this an aesthetic experience of beauty) – could help bridge the gap between thinking in terms of the lawfulness of nature and lawfulness according to freedom. Specifically, Kant thinks that the aesthetic ideal of human beauty (the proportioned and beautiful human form) could provide a sensory representation of “the uniqueness of morality as a necessary end” and the “primacy of practical reason.”84 Along similar lines, in the case of adherent beauty in fine art that expresses aesthetic ideas, this assistance would occur by providing sensory or symbolic representations of moral ideas and concrete ideals in poems and paintings, songs and speeches, and monuments and buildings. This is not to reduce the value of art (for Kant) to moral value, but only to claim that on Kant’s view art can be used to support the ends of morality.

Concluding Remarks Kant recognizes the benefits of appealing to concepts in some judgments of taste: “taste gains by this combination of aesthetic satisfaction with the 83 84

Zuckert, Beauty and Biology, 208. Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays in Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 36, 41. For a similar argument, see also Guyer, Modern Aesthetics, 458; and Christian Helmut Wenzel, An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics: Core Concepts and Problems (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 75. The aesthetic ideal – or the maximum of human beauty – is not to be confused with the aesthetic idea, or the rich representation of the imagination that cannot be brought to concepts.



   ’ 

intellectual in that it becomes fixed and, though not universal, can have rules prescribed to it in regard to certain purposively determined objects” (KU 5:230). Wenzel observes that knowledge of art history and social history “forms a conceptual background against which taste becomes more ‘fixed’ (preserved and stable over time).”85 As Kant recognizes in his early accounts, purpose-based beauty can be stable and enduring. In the third Critique, Kant continues to think that some instances of beauty can be partially governed by (empirical) concepts such as genre and authorial intention, or even (rational) concepts such as moral ideas (even when sensibly embodied or expressed), and that insofar as it was so governed, concepts could serve as the basis for rational discussions, providing a way to lift discussions of art and aesthetic objects out of depths of personal preferences and idiosyncrasies, and thereby to settle “many disputes” of taste (KU 5:231). Although appraisers and critics may never be able to provide demonstrative logical proofs in matters of taste since rules remain unavailable (“but in this case these are also not rules of taste,” the passage at 5:230 continues), it may still be possible to discuss whether and how an aesthetic object or work of art is (or is not) an exemplary or successful instance of its kind, genre, style, or movement. Partly conceptual beauty is still employed in contemporary theories of aesthetic evaluation.86 Art critics take into account the genre and purposes of a work; they consider artistic intentions and aims. They frequently see a work of art not merely in terms of its formal-sensory aesthetic qualities, but also experience, interpret, and evaluate it in terms of its place in art history and various institutional and historical contexts and social practices. Adherent beauty, in short, is relevant to contemporary debates about art.87 In the next chapter, I look more closely at the origin of the work of art.

85 86

87

Wenzel, Introduction, 71. E.g., Noël Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 163 no. 4: “The evaluations discussed in this essay are what Kant might have considered to be judgments of dependent [i.e., adherent] beauty.” Likewise, to explain the role of “empirical conceptual judgment” in adherent beauty, Zuckert appeals to the notion of “standard” properties presented in Kendall Walton’s analysis of the categories of art. Zuckert, Beauty and Biology, 206; on art forms and conventions, see 211 no. 55. Kirwan, The Aesthetic in Kant, 107; and Rueger, “Beautiful Surfaces,” 552.

PART II Genius and the Fine Arts

4 Genius, Thick and Thin

Gerard, an Englishman, has written about genius and has offered the best observations about it, although the topic can also be found in other authors (V-Anth/Mensch 25:1055).

The influence of the Scottish philosopher Alexander Gerard on Kant has long been recognized.1 The mark of other authors, not so much. Of course, Kant’s eighteenth-century predecessors disagreed with each other. If, in formulating his views, Kant draws from various sources, it seems reasonable to expect that his account reflects some of these tensions. Indeed, one finds two aspects of his account of genius in the third Critique, which might be called the “thin” and the “thick,” and which have been recognized in the literature.2 On the thin version, the imaginative power is unrestrained: genius, one might say, runs wild. It comes up with original ideas but does not know how to express them in a communicable way. Genius, as a

1

2

Gerard’s 1774 Essay was translated into German by Christian Garve in 1776 as Versuch über das Genie (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1776). Garve’s translation was the stimulus for Kant’s numerous reflections on genius from around 1776 to 1778. See Giorgio Tonelli, “Kant’s Early Theory of Genius Pt. 1 (1770–1779),” Journal of the History of Philosophy 4, no. 2 (1966): 109–32, esp. 109–10; and Giorgio Tonelli, “Kant’s Early Theory of Genius Pt. 2 (1770–1779),” Journal of the History of Philosophy 4, no. 3 (1966): 209–24. See also Zammito, Genesis, 41; Piero Giordanetti, “Kant e Gerard: Nota sulle fonti storiche della teoria Kantiana del ‘genio’,” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 46, no. 4 (1991): 661–99; and Guyer, “Gerard and Kant.” On Kant’s early views of genius, see Menzer, Entwicklung, 62, 83–9; on Kant’s Critical views, see 163–9; and on Gerard’s influence on Kant’s theory of genius, 87, 166. Allison, Taste, 301, mentions both conceptions. Kant’s two conceptions of genius are also identified by Schlapp, Kants Lehre vom Genie, 334: genius is used in the sense of an exemplary, intuitive originality which produces great works of art and which is a combination of fantasy and understanding (what I here call the thick sense). But, Schlapp notes, the term is also used to refer to the productive but unrefined, undisciplined imagination without the corrective of the understanding (the thin sense). See also Joseph Cannon: “One can find two different definitions of genius in the third Critique.” “The Moral Value of Artistic Beauty in Kant,” Kantian Review 16, no. 1 (2011): 113–26, 124 no. 4. Finally, see Zammito, Genesis, 144–5.





   ’ 

kind of freedom (especially freedom of imagination), is conceived of as raw originality. Thus, taste and the power of judgment must step in and curb the flights of fancy. According to the thick or robust version, genius already curbs itself. The capacity for genius finds attributes to give sense to its ideas. Genius comes up with the appropriate forms to express its original ideas and thereby communicate them. On this more substantive conception, genius is not made up of imagination and spirit alone, but also includes within it taste, judgment, and understanding. So, can the capacity for genius come up with original nonsense, or must its products and creations at the same time be exemplary?3 Building on previous scholarship, I suggest that Kant takes up two very different strands of thought about genius. To put it in terms Gerard and Kant both use, one can “have” genius (thin sense), or one can actually “be” a genius (thick sense). Kant’s thin conception might in part derive from Young, while the thick one likely stems from Gerard and Sulzer. If so, writers in English and German alike inform Kant’s views.4

The Third Critique on Genius Kant presents his account of genius in §46 to §50 of the third Critique (KU 5:307–20). Genius, he maintains, is required in order to produce a work of fine rather than mechanical art. In §46, Kant opens his discussion of genius with the following: Genius is the talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art. Since the talent, as an inborn productive faculty of the artist, itself belongs to nature, this

3

4

Katherine Hawley mentions Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” as an example of delightfully creative “nonsense” verse. Katherine Hawley, “Creativity and Knowledge,” in The Routledge Handbook on Creativity and Philosophy, ed. Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran (New York: Routledge, 2018), 60–73, 61. In light of its artistic success, this poem strikes me as being exemplary, not merely nonsensical. The poem turns on a creative and aesthetically appealing play between sense and nonsense. Scholars in the field of creativity studies draw from Kant’s account of genius and cite him as a forerunner of the idea that creativity involves being original while producing something of value (thick sense). Note, too, it is common in the creativity literature to distinguish (minimal) “Little-c-creativity,” which is ordinary or everyday, from (substantial) “Big-C-Creativity,” which concerns the unusual or extraordinary. Kantian genius as artistic ability is closer to the latter. See Alison Hills and Alexander Bird, “Creativity without Value,” in Creativity and Philosophy, ed. Gaut and Kieran, 95–107, 107 no. 10. When using the word “genius,” researchers often distinguish among the product, process, and person. Applying this to Kant’s account, one might distinguish the work of art, the act of creating, and the genius qua individual (in turn distinguished from genius as a capacity).

,   



could also be expressed thus: genius is the inborn predisposition of the mind (ingenium)5 through which nature gives the rule to art. (KU 5:307)

Kant tries to give a definition that agrees with the ordinary linguistic practice (in German) – somewhat reminiscent of how Aristotle considers and then assesses common opinions. Kant indicates an unease with the above definition, however, and wonders whether it is “merely arbitrary or is adequate to the concept which is usually associated with the word genius or not” (KU 5:307). Although he does not cite any sources for the common views of genius, Kant is aware of the etymological origins of the word and its ancient roots as a guiding spirit. “For that is also presumably how the [German] word Genie is derived from [Latin] genius, in the sense of the particular spirit given to a person at birth, which protects and guides him, and from whose inspiration those original ideas stem” (KU 5:308). Although Kant does not think of genius as being a guide, he does retain its connection to inspiration and original ideas. Kant then offers an argument for why beautiful or fine arts are arts of genius, that is, to explain how nature (in the subject) gives the rule to art through the models created by genius. Kant’s account can be summarized as follows. 1. Genius is original. The genius does not copy anyone else’s work or products. He may respond to his predecessor’s work, but he6 does not copy or ape them (KU 5:308, 318). In fact, Kant calls originality genius’s primary characteristic (KU 5:308; see also Anth 7:224). For this reason, genius also does not follow rules. It cannot be learned or taught. 2. Genius (on one view) creates works of value, works that are meaningful or significant. In Kant’s terms, products of genius must be “models” or “exemplary” (KU 5:308; see also Anth 7:224). Other artists as well as art appreciators use the genius’s work as a “standard or a rule for judging” other works. The products of genius are used as models not for copying (Nachmachung) but to inspire other geniuses (KU 5:309).7

5

6

7

Following Wolff, Kant translates the Latin ingenium with Witz (Anth 7:201, 220). For an overview of the German rationalist tradition on Witz and ingenium, see Clewis, Kant’s Humorous Writings, 27–8. I avoid making Kant’s views look more egalitarian than they actually were. On this issue, I am influenced by Pauline Kleingeld, “Me, My Will, and I: Kant’s Republican Conception of Freedom of the Will and Freedom of the Agent,” Studi Kantiani 33 (2020): 103–23, 112. See also Pauline Kleingeld, “On Dealing with Kant’s Sexism and Racism,” SGIR Review, 2, no. 2 (2019): 3–22. On the contrast between copying and imitation, see R 920; 1776–78; 15:405. For Kant’s early view of models, see R 2569; about 1769–70; 16:420–4. See also the Blomberg logic lecture (from about 1770): “The norm, the guideline (how something ought to be) of taste, does not lie in the universal rules of reason, but instead is found nowhere but in real works of taste. Hence there must be



   ’ 

3. Genius is blind.8 Even if a genius has the aim and intention of creating an artwork, he does not know how he creates his products. Genius “cannot itself describe or indicate scientifically how it brings its product into being” (KU 5:308; see also Anth 7:225). Because a genius does not know how he comes up with his art, he cannot teach it to anyone else either (KU 5:309). The “rule” in “nature giving the rule to art” lies in the artwork itself (the model). “The rule must be abstracted from the deed, i.e., from the product, against which others may test their own talent” (ibid.). 4. By means of genius, nature (in the subject) prescribes the rule to art – specifically, to beautiful art – but it does not prescribe any rules to science. Science, unlike beautiful art, can in principle be taught and fully explained. Although Kant does not list them, I will also add two more key claims: 5. Genius is rare, extraordinary, or exceptional. (Though related to it, rarity is not the same as originality.) 6. Genius employs and draws from the power of imagination. The aesthetic ideas expressed in the artwork are generated by the imagination. Through aesthetic ideas, genius provides content or material to the work of art (KU 5:310). Genius displays itself in the “expression of aesthetic ideas” (KU 5:317; cf. 344). The genius creates art by giving sensible form to aesthetic ideas. (This ability to animate or enliven through ideas is one reason why genius is very close to “spirit.”)9 There are many themes one could pick up here, including Kant’s controversial claims about science and genius.10 But instead of exploring the role of genius in science or mathematics, I wish to examine Kant’s two conceptions of

8

9

10

lasting models of taste, or taste will soon come to an end.” The lecture states that the language used (e.g., Latin) should be dead or unchanging (V-Lo/Blom 24:46; cf. KU 5:232 n.). Maria Kronfeldner calls this blindness feature the “obscurantist” thesis and attributes it to Kant. Maria Kronfeldner, “Explaining Creativity,” in Creativity and Philosophy, ed. Gaut and Kieran, 213–29, 216. For instance, a 1777/78 anthropology lecture states that spirit (Geist) means “just as much” as genius (Genie) (V-Anth/Pillau 25:782). For a list of Reflections and lecture notes that concern Geist, see the note in Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 382 no. 42. When, at the conclusion of his analysis of genius (the last sentence of §50), Kant summarizes the faculties of the mind needed for the production of art, he does not write Genie (as might be expected) but Geist (spirit). “For beautiful art, therefore, imagination, understanding, spirit and taste are requisite” (KU 5:320). This apparent slip may indicate that, even in the third Critique, genius is very close to spirit (in the aesthetic sense). See also the beginning of §49, where Kant calls spirit the “animating principle in the mind” and the “faculty for the presentation of aesthetic ideas” (KU 5:313–4), phrases he ordinarily uses for genius. Joseph Cannon claims that “spirit” is “the term under which Kant pursues his account of the faculties that harmonize in genius.” Joseph Cannon, “Reply to Paul Guyer,” Kantian Review 16, no. 1 (2011): 135–9, 135. See also Menzer, Entwicklung, 87. On the teachable skills of science as opposed to a talent for genius, see V-Anth/Fried 25:556–7; V-Anth/Mensch 25:1061; V-Anth/Mron 25:1310–11; and V-Anth/Busolt 25:1493–4; and R 932; 1776–78; 15:413.

,   



genius by asking if works of genius have to be exemplary and valuable, or instead if genius can produce original nonsense.11 To put it another way: Does genius contain taste as one of its components, or is it tamed by taste (from the outside, as it were)?12 Here is a key passage that touches on the issue: Since there can also be original nonsense, its products must at the same time be models, i.e., exemplary, hence, while not themselves the result of imitation, they must yet serve others in that way, i.e., as a standard or a rule for judging. (KU 5:308; see also 5:319)

This passage evidently states that there can be original nonsense, but in what sense “must” (müssen) the products of genius be exemplary models? Is this “must” meant as a “should” (an ideal to strive for), or instead as ruling out the possibility of products of genius that cannot function as models and standards for taste? The two conceptions in Kant’s account can be seen as an opposition between two contrary theses.13 Thin: Genius is able to create nonsense that is original but not exemplary, and genius stands in conflict with, and does not include, taste.

To avoid a tendency to produce original nonsense, on this view, genius must be tamed by taste. Genius provides the original ideas, but since they could lead to “original nonsense,” it is taste, as a separate capacity, that puts the idea into communicable sensible form. Taste curbs and shapes genius, but taste is not a 11

12

13

A common view in the creativity literature defines creativity as a trait characterized by the disposition of an individual (1) to have novel ideas (originality) (2) that are valuable or produce objects that are valuable (i.e., a thick conception). Hills and Bird reject this view, arguing for the necessity of originality but not value. They view Kant on genius as “remarkably similar” to their view (i.e., a thin conception): Kant “denies that creativity . . . is a disposition to produce value.” Hills and Bird, “Creativity without Value,” 103. See also their article, Alison Hills and Alexander Bird, “Against Creativity,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99, no. 3 (2019): 694–713. This chapter’s guiding question not only connects to contemporary work in creativity studies and the philosophy of creativity, but is also of historical interest. In fact, the question posed by the Berlin Academy in 1775 was nothing other than this: “What is Genius, of what elements is it composed, and do these permit themselves to be distinguished within it?” See Zammito, Genesis, 42. Moreover, a very similar question had been raised and discussed by the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, to which Gerard belonged. Bruno, Genius, 30. Taste’s relation to genius is discussed in a fruitful exchange between Joseph Cannon and Paul Guyer. See Cannon, “Artistic Beauty.” Paul Guyer, “Genius and Taste: A Response to Joseph Cannon, ‘The Moral Value of Artistic Beauty in Kant’,” Kantian Review 16, no. 1 (2011): 127–34. Finally, Cannon, “Reply.” The fact that Cannon and Guyer are able to identify and elucidate two distinct views of the relation between taste and genius implies, I think, that Kant’s account contains both the thin and thick conceptions of genius.



   ’ 

necessary element of genius per se. Genius works in conjunction with taste to achieve an exemplary product. On this narrow conception, genius is a capacity to be original (novel) but need not in itself be a capacity to create works that are aesthetically valuable, exemplary, or appropriate. This contrasts with the following thick or more expansive conception. Thick: Genius is unable to create nonsense that is original but not also exemplary, and genius stands in harmony with, and includes, taste.

From this perspective, genius controls and judges itself, finding communicable forms to express its original ideas. On this more substantive or robust view, the original content of the genius (expressed in aesthetic ideas) must have a communicable form. The products of genius must be both original and exemplary, not just original nonsense. Genius by itself implies the capacity to produce exemplary works. According to this interpretation, as one commentator puts it, Kant “affirmed that genius must produce work that is both original and exemplary, where the latter signifies that the work provides models worthy of emulation and admiration.”14 This reading is closer to what is called the “historiometric” definition of genius according to which the genius is the capacity to produce something of cultural, intellectual, or artistic value.15 On this conception, there are no mad geniuses. I now cite some of the passages in the third Critique supporting each conception, starting with the thin one. Kant writes: “Genius can only provide rich material for products of art; its elaboration and form require a talent that has been academically trained, in order to make a use of it that can stand up to the power of judgment” (KU 5:310). It looks like genius provides the ideas (material), and training (based on judgment and understanding) comes in and makes the ideas understandable and communicable. Further support is given by the very title of §50: “On the combination of taste with genius in products of beautiful art.” If Thick were correct, it would mean that in the title of §50 Kant mistakenly characterizes his own view: if genius already contained taste, genius would not need to be combined with taste. It would be quite remarkable were Kant to make such an obvious mistake about his own position. Moreover, §50 itself contains several passages that support Thin.16 Already in §48, “On the Relation of Genius to Taste,” Kant opposes taste to genius, which is conceived as the power of “inspiration” and “free swing” of 14

15 16

Dean Keith Simonton, “So You Want to Become a Creative Genius? You Must Be Crazy!” The Dark Side of Creativity, ed. David H. Cropley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 218–34, 221. Ibid. This leads Schlapp to claim that in §50, Kant goes into “greatest contradiction” with himself. Schlapp, Kant’s Lehre vom Genie, 332.

,   



the mental power. It is taste that allows genius to find the appropriate “form” for the beautiful artwork. To give this form to the product of beautiful art, however, requires merely taste, to which the artist, after he has practiced and corrected it by means of various examples of art or nature, holds up his work, and after many, often laborious attempts to satisfy it, finds the form that contents him; hence this is not as it were a matter of inspiration or a free swing of the mental powers, but a slow and indeed painstaking improvement, in order to let it become adequate to the thought and yet not detrimental to the freedom in the play of the mental powers. (KU 5:312–3; emphasis added)

Here it looks like it is taste (in conjunction with painstaking training and preparation, and perhaps also understanding and judgment), not genius, that finds the appropriate and exemplary forms for the original, aesthetic ideas. At the end of §48, Kant claims that beautiful art requires both genius and taste. On its own, genius is insufficient to create beautiful art. With a “poem, a piece of music, a picture gallery, and so on,” in a work that is potentially a work of beautiful art, “one can often perceive genius without taste, while in another, taste without genius” (KU 5:313). The point is put even more clearly in a pointed passage in §50: “Taste, like the power of judgment in general, is the discipline (or corrective) of genius, clipping its wings and making it well behaved or polished” (KU 5:319). Admittedly, it would have been useful if Kant had listed some works of genius that, while inspired and original, lacked taste and judgment. He somewhat sarcastically writes of a “frequent” talent “for composing [dichten] works that break one’s head” (the way works of mystical brooders do) or that “break one’s neck” (as some works of “genius” do), but he offers no clear examples (KU 5:334). Still, it seems fair to say that a spirited fanatic (Schwärmer) who composes or creates artworks would count as Kant’s target. Moreover, as I will state toward the end of this chapter, there is textual evidence that Kant was (at least at one point) aiming at Rousseau and Herder (and the authors of the Sturm und Drang or Storm and Stress movement), even if in the third Critique Kant does not name or explicitly criticize either Rousseau or Herder in this context.17 At the end of §47, Kant seems to be aiming at particular “superficial minds,” but he does not name his targets there either (KU 5:310).

17

As I discuss below, Kant considers Plato and Rousseau to be fanatical and enthusiastic geniuses, respectively (R 921; about 1776–78; 15:406). Kant thinks of John Milton, William Shakespeare, Christoph Martin Wieland, Homer, and Leonardo da Vinci as exemplary artistic geniuses (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1497; KU 5:309; Anth 7:224).



   ’ 

The passage in §47 is worth citing since it reveals the thick conception, to which I now turn. Now since the originality of his [i.e., the genius’s] talent constitutes one (but not the only) essential element of the character of the genius, superficial minds believe that they cannot show that they are blossoming geniuses any better than by pronouncing themselves free of the academic constraint of all rules, and they believe that one parades around better on a horse with the staggers than one that is properly trained. (KU 5:310; emphasis added)

When Kant writes that “the originality of his talent constitutes one (but not the only) essential element of the character of the genius,” he implies that what the genius also possesses is an “academically trained” talent to communicate in a way that stands up to the power of judgment. The parenthesis “but not the only” implies that other elements necessarily belong to the “character of the genius.” An essential component, in other words, is taste (and, as he sometimes adds, the power of judgment and understanding), the ability to tame or control one’s imagination and thus not produce works of nonsense. Genius, then, includes the ability to express its ideas using forms in a way that passes the standards of taste and the power of judgment. Genius, on this robust and substantive view, does not produce mere nonsense, but expresses original aesthetic ideas that are artistically valuable and “exemplary,” which is a core theme in §49 (KU 5:318). Several passages in §49 further reveal a thick conception of genius. The mental powers, then, whose union (in a certain relation) constitutes genius, are imagination and understanding. . . . Thus genius really consists in the happy relation . . . of finding ideas for a given concept on the one hand and on the other hitting upon the expression for these, through which the subjective disposition of the mind that is thereby produced, as an accompaniment of a concept, can be communicated to others. (KU 5:316–7)

Kant’s subsequent list of the components of genius (KU 5:317–8) culminates in the claim that, “According to these presuppositions, genius is the exemplary originality of the natural endowment of a subject for the free use of his cognitive faculties” (KU 5:318).18

18

For the thick conception, see also the Anthropology: “However, to free the power of imagination even from this constraint and allow the talent proper to it to proceed without rules and rave [schwärmen], even against nature, might deliver original folly; but it would certainly not be exemplary and thus also would not be counted as genius” (Anth 7:225; emphasis added; cf. 241).

,   



The thick conception appears to be the one that is most emphasized in the Kant literature, so perhaps it is unnecessary to document it further here.

Some Ideas Shaping Kant’s Views Plato looms in the background of any discussion of genius and inspiration; indeed, Kant’s account is in part a response to his ideas. Since Plato suggests that the poets do not fully understand the meanings of their proclamations, he would belong in the thin camp.19 Within Kant’s own era, Addison and Young also lean toward the thin conception. In fact, however, Addison (1711) distinguishes two kinds of genius along the lines I am calling the thin and the thick. To be sure, Addison offers pithy reflections rather than a rigorous examination of the concept of genius.20 Still, his brief analysis contains distinctions that prefigure ones found in Gerard and Kant. Addison contrasts “great natural geniuses” that have something “nobly wild and extravagant” about them, with a kind of genius that is formed “by rules.”21 Addison associates the first kind of genius with originality, imagination, and sublimity. As examples, he mentions Homer, Pindar, and Shakespeare. He associates the second, rule-governed kind with imitation, constraint, and models. Here he names Virgil and John Milton. He makes it very clear that he is not privileging the first over the second kind, however.22 In a work influential in Britain and Germany, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), Young appears to build on Addison’s distinction. He seems to go further than Addison in that he appears to endorse or prefer genius that is natural rather than learned (or, thin rather than thick).23 Young distinguishes “adult” geniuses (such as that of Shakespeare), which are mature and already grown, from “infantine” geniuses (such as Jonathan Swift’s) that must be nursed and tutored by learning.24 He disparages copying and instead praises originality (cf. KU 5:308). “That meddling ape Imitation, as soon as we come to years of Indiscretion (so let me speak), snatches the Pen, and blots out nature’s mark of Separation, cancels her kind intention, [and] destroys all

19 20 21

22 23

24

For Kant on inspired poets, see Anth 7:188. Bruno, Genius, 20. See Addison’s Spectator entry of September 3, 1711. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator; With Notes, and a General Index. The Eight Volumes Comprised in One (Philadelphia, PA: Hickman and Hazzard, 1822), 188–9. Ibid., 189. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition: In a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison (London: Millar and Dodsley, 1759). Young, Conjectures, 31–2. See Berys Gaut, “Education for Creativity,” in The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, ed. Eliot Paul and Scott Kaufman (New York: Oxford University Press, 265–87), 267.



   ’ 

mental individuality.”25 Nevertheless, as the title (Conjectures) might be taken to suggest, Young does not undertake a systematic examination of genius.26 It is clear that Kant read and admired Young for his wit (Witz), a concept connected to genius or ingenium in German philosophy at the time. He considered Young to have deep or profound wit, and Kant frequently mentions him in his lectures.27 There is no record of Kant citing Young’s Conjectures, but since Young’s thoughts on originality (genius) were important in Kant’s day, it is probable that Kant was aware of his views. There were other currents in the atmosphere too. In particular, a lively debate about fanaticism (Schwärmerei)28 and enthusiasm (Enthusiasmus) also informs Kant’s thinking about genius and inspiration. Shaftesbury, for instance, distinguished desirable from undesirable enthusiasm,29 and Hume and Mendelssohn were likewise both deeply concerned about the dangers of fanaticism.30 The Sturm und Drang thinkers likewise shape Kant’s thinking – by repelling him toward a thick conception of genius. Here, as many scholars have noted, Kant reacts to Herder in particular. Perhaps since Kant was so troubled about the possibility of Schwärmerei in general, he wanted to avoid any appearance of endorsing the thin conception of genius. Given my interest in identifying Kant’s sources, it is reasonable to single out Gerard, who stands out among authors who influenced Kant on genius. Gerard wrote an essay on taste fifteen years before his work on genius.31 In 25 26 27

28

29

30

31

Young, Conjectures, 42; orthography modified. Bruno, Genius, 23. Kant discusses Young on profound wit or Witz (ingenium), referring to Young’s collection of satires, The Universal Passion. “Hence it is said: the wit of the English is excessively profound. For example, Young’s Satires. Great wit is found in it, but it does not entertain the way the French wit does; still, it pleases even more” (V-Anth/Fried 25:517; my trans.; cf. V-Anth/Parow 25:399, V-Anth/Mron 25:1265.) Moreover, Kant considered Young’s poetry to be an intense elicitor of the sublime (GSE 2:211 n.). See Rachel Zuckert, “Kant on Practical Fanaticism,” in Kant’s Moral Metaphysics, ed. Benjamin Lipscomb and James Krueger (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 291–318. Kant was aware of Shaftesbury’s writings on ridicule, wit, and enthusiasm. In a November 1768 letter to Kant, Herder praises Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy and mentions the latter’s views of ridicule and Enthusiasmus (enthusiasm) (Br 10:77). When it comes to genius, however, Kant engages more with Gerard than with Shaftesbury. For discussion of Shaftesbury, Hume, and Mendelssohn and further references, see Robert R. Clewis, “The Feeling of Enthusiasm,” in Kant and the Faculty of Feeling, ed. Kelly Sorensen and Diane Williamson, 184–207. For an historical argument for translating Schwärmerei as “fanaticism,” see Robert R. Clewis, “Schwärmerei and Enthusiasmus in Recent English Translations of Kant’s Lectures and Writings on Anthropology,” in Kants Schriften in Übersetzungen, ed. Schlüter, 649–75. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (London: A. Millar, A. Kincaid, and J. Bell, 1759). Gerard’s An Essay on Taste was translated into German in 1766. Alexander Gerard, Versuch über den Geschmack, trans. Karl Friedrich Flögel (Breslau: Johann Ernst Meyer, 1766). Excerpts of the third edition (1780) of Gerard’s Essay on Taste can be found in

,   



An Essay on Taste (1759), he draws a close connection between genius and taste, especially in the section, “Of the Connexion of Taste with Genius” (Part 3, Sec. 2).32 Genius and taste, he writes, are connected to “a considerable degree, since they both spring from imagination.”33 Genius consists in (1) the ability to discern, by imagination, associations of ideas – in other words, “invention,” which seems close to ingenium (ingenuity, wit) as a power to see connections; (2) the capacity to create a regular, proportioned whole out of this heap of materials or ideas collected by fancy (i.e., “design”); and (3) the ability to “express” the results of these first two components or powers. He writes: “A genius for the fine arts implies, not only the power of invention or design, but likewise a capacity to express its designs in apt materials.”34 Given that genius is characterized as a power to aptly express its designs or rearranged results, this could be read as reflecting a thick conception of genius. However, this ability to find expression for the ideas that genius invents (or discovers) and rearranges seems to lie in tension with another claim Gerard makes: genius requires the assistance of taste. Thus genius is the grand architect, which not only chooses the materials, but disposes them into a regular structure. But it is not able to finish it by itself. It needs the assistance of taste, to guide and moderate its exertions. . . . It [taste] serves as a check on mere fancy; it interposes its judgment, either approving or condemning; and rejects many things, which unassisted genius would have allowed.35

At least on the basis of this statement, which reflects a thin view of genius (since taste is curbing genius), it seems unclear whether for Gerard genius contains a “capacity of expression” within itself (as one of its components) or instead if genius needs taste to assist it (as if from the outside). Gerard appears to be aware of the tension. In fact, in the opening sentence of the section, Gerard states that there are two ways of viewing the relation between taste and genius: “Taste may be considered either as an essential part, or as a necessary attendant of genius; according as we consider genius in a more or less extensive manner.”36 On the whole, it appears that in the essay on taste Gerard maintains that (at least in actual practice) taste is a component of genius, subscribing more to the thick or more extensive conception of genius.

32

33 34 35 36

Dabney Townsend, Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics (Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1999). Gerard, Taste (1759), 173–80. Allison maintains (citing the 1764 edition of An Essay on Taste) that Gerard’s view that there was a close connection between genius and taste “clearly influenced” Kant. Allison, Taste, 394 no. 62. Gerard, Taste (1759), 177. Ibid., 175. For discussion, see also Guyer, Modern Aesthetics, 172–3. Gerard, Taste (1759), 176–7; orthography modified. Ibid., 173.



   ’ 

Though genius and taste are conceptually distinct, they are often united or found together since a person of genius has some degree of taste: “But it [genius] is never found where taste is altogether wanting.”37 In his later work, An Essay on Genius, Gerard continues to offer what seems to be, on the whole though not always, a thick conception of genius.38 Genius, he maintains, requires a combination of many faculties and brings into play several intellectual powers, including sense, memory, judgment, and, above all, imagination.39 As in the essay on taste, however, a thin conception sometimes emerges. He maintains that genius is a “modification” of the imagination alone, and essentially: “Genius consists essentially in the vigour and in a particular economy or construction of the imagination.”40 For this reason, genius needs to be assisted by other faculties. He writes: Genius has been defined by some to consist in the union of a fine imagination and a fine judgment. . . . The extensive influence of judgment in producing works of genius has given occasion to this definition. But genius ought notwithstanding to be considered as a modification of the imagination.41

37

38

39 40 41

Ibid., 177. Other aspects of Gerard’s Essay on Taste are worth mentioning: (1) the notion of aesthetic rules, and (2) his view of facility in perceiving proportions (and its link to a “play” of the faculties). In the third or 1780 edition (but not in 1759 or 1764), Gerard defends the use of “general rules and principles” found on “sentiment” which “give us great advantage for judging concerning particular phenomena,” including works in the “fine arts.” See Townsend, ed., British Aesthetics, 293; Gerard, Taste (1780), 267. According to the 1780 edition, Gerard thinks that such principles do not limit the range of genius, but expand it. “The investigation of general principles, and deference to them as the test and measure of excellence, far from extinguishing the fire, or confining the range of genius, will contribute most effectually to its elevation and enlargement.” See Townsend, ed., British Aesthetics, 294; Gerard, Taste (1780), 270. In the first edition, he also presents an account that is very close to Kant’s early view of beauty as based on a principle of sensible comprehension (“facility” in conception). “The first species of beauty is that of figure; and belongs to objects possessed of uniformity, variety, and proportion. . . . Facility in the conception of an object if it be moderate, gives us pleasure.” See Townsend, ed., British Aesthetics, 280; Gerard, Taste (1759), 31. And he adds in the 1780 edition: “If the object which pleases us, possess uniformity, variety, and proportion, we are sure that it is beautiful.” See Townsend, ed., British Aesthetics, 289; Gerard, Taste (1780), 255. Interestingly, even in the 1759 edition (Part 1, sec. 1, on novelty), he refers to an object’s giving “play of our faculties.” Gerard, Taste (1759), 7. Guyer, Modern Aesthetics, 174, indeed sees Gerard’s emphasis on mental activity in aesthetic experience as “an important source” for Kant’s conception of the free play of the faculties underlying aesthetic experience. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Genius (London: W. Strahan, 1774), quoted here. A facsimile reprint is Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Genius, ed. Bernhard Fabian (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1966). Gerard, Genius, 95. See also Bruno, Genius, 32. Gerard, Genius, 386. Ibid., 385.

,   



As before, he sees no problem with making a distinction between two intellectual powers and the intertwining of those capacities in actual practice: “Intellectual powers, essentially distinct in themselves, are frequently complicated together in their exercise.”42 Even if genius and judgment are exercised and found together, they are distinct powers. “Though genius needs the assistance of judgment, yet it ought to be considered as a faculty distinct from judgment.”43 This distinction will turn out to be useful in alleviating some of the tension in Kant’s account, too. Gerard claims that the imagination is productive (cf. feature 6 in Kant’s account, above). While Gerard recognizes the contribution of productive imagination, he continues to think that artists must have some skill, training, and practice in order to express their ideas. He writes: “A capacity of employing some instrument, so as to express the conceptions of the imagination, is common to genius for all the arts.”44 He holds that genius is an inventive capacity (cf. feature 1, above). Both scientists and artists possess such an inventive power. “Genius is properly the faculty of invention; by means of which a man is qualified for making new discoveries in science, or for producing original works of art. . . . If a man shows invention, no intellectual defects which his performance may betray, can forfeit his claim to genius.”45 At the same time, he maintains, genius requires both imagination and judgment (or understanding). “The vigour of imagination carries forward to invention; but understanding must always conduct it and regulate its notions.”46 “Without judgment, imagination would be extravagant; but without imagination, judgment could do nothing.”47 While genius derives its immediate origin from the imagination, imagination (or fancy) by itself will not constitute genius. “If fancy were left entirely to itself, it would run into wild caprice and extravagance, unworthy to be called invention.”48 “A man can scarce be said to have invented till he has exercised his judgment.”49 “In a man of genius,” a fertile imagination or fancy, even if it is the “principal ingredient in genius,” must be “checked by judgment” and “reflection.”50 Gerard maintains that taste, or the “judgment of beauty,”51 can shape and influence genius. Taste does not merely guide genius; in the arts (“in all 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Ibid., 385–6. Ibid., 386. Ibid., 417. Ibid., 8–9; orthography modified. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 75–6. Ibid., 377.



   ’ 

imitations”), taste gives genius its “particular form and track.”52 Because taste not only instigates and gives regularity to genius, but also curbs it, taste “has very great influence on genius” and “a person’s genius and his taste are correspondent.”53 Note, taste is here “correspondent” to genius, not a component of it; it checks or curbs genius. While such statements that reflect a thin conception should not simply be ignored, they do not undo or negate the thick aspects of Gerard’s account either. Perhaps they reflect the original, basic tension in his account mentioned above (and perhaps Kant inherits such tensions). In this case, there may be a way to resolve the tension. As I suggest below, it could also help resolve a parallel tension in Kant’s account of genius: even if, in line with a thin or narrow conception, Gerard conceptually distinguishes genius and taste as distinct mental or intellectual powers, in actual practice they are found in a particular person or artist (the genius) who combines them in a coordinated and productive manner. Before turning to Kant, I will briefly mention two writers from the German tradition: Mendelssohn and Sulzer, both of whom also appear to be working with a generally thick conception.54 For Mendelssohn (1761), genius is a kind of artistic virtuosity that evokes awe (Bewunderung) in audiences or readers. Awe is a “debt” owed to genius. “Awe is a debt that we owe the extraordinary gifts of spirit. These gifts are called, in the narrowest sense of the word, ‘genius.’ Accordingly, where sensuous marks of genius are to be found in a work of art, we are ready to give the artist the admiration he deserves.”55 Awe is implicitly a kind of respect for the artist’s or virtuoso’s56 perfection of his talents. Since, for Mendelssohn, genius is far from just an imaginative ability, his account can be placed in the thick camp. Sulzer’s view can be placed there too.57 He begins a 1771 entry on taste (Geschmack): “Taste is at bottom nothing other than the faculty for feeling the 52 53 54

55

56

57

Ibid., 397. Ibid., 399. See also Bruno, Genius, 34–43, esp. 39–40. Cannon, “Moral Value,” 122, implies that Mendelssohn operates with a thick conception. Cannon claims that Kant “attributes the artistic achievement Mendelssohn lays at genius’s feet to the discipline of genius by taste and skill.” Beiser likewise claims that Mendelssohn, taking up Sulzer’s notion of “reflection,” holds that reflection is “the very heart of genius itself. The genius must be master over his own inspiration, so that he is not overwhelmed by it but dominates and controls it, making it the instrument for his own ends.” Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 232–3. Moses Mendelssohn, “On the Sublime and Naive in the Fine Sciences,” trans. Daniel Dahlstrom, in Robert R. Clewis, The Sublime Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 91–100, 98. Compare Kant’s note: “A genius of execution is a genius in manner and is called a virtuoso” (R 812; about 1776–78; 15:361–2). Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 232, suggests that Sulzer’s 1757 essay on genius, “Analyse du Génie,” influenced Mendelssohn’s thoughts on the topic. See also Menzer, Entwicklung, 85.

,   



beautiful.”58 He adds: “The understanding and genius of the artist give to his work all the essential parts that belong to its inner perfection, but taste makes it into a work of fine art.”59 Taste, he claims, is the core capacity of the artist, whereas genius and understanding are secondary: “Properly speaking, taste therefore constitutes the artist, to which genius and understanding are added.”60 Reminiscent of Gerard, Sulzer claims that a “great” artist requires all three capacities (genius, understanding, and taste). This clearly reflects an expansive view of genius.61

The Development of Kant’s Views of Genius In characterizing the evolution of Kant’s thinking about “genius,” one must be wary of the different uses of the word. As noted, genius can refer to an attendant “guide,” but he rarely adopts this sense. The term can also designate the disposition, inclination, or temperament of a person or even a people or nation, and indeed he writes about the character of the French, English, and Germans as early as in the Observations (Beo 2:243–56; Anth 7:313–5). Although there may sometimes be some overlap, I largely set aside these senses and examine genius in the sense of the capacity or force that produces a work of art.62 Kant took up the topic of genius as an origin of the work of art as early as the 1760s, even before he read Gerard’s 1774 essay. Many of these early Reflections lean toward a thin conception of genius.

58

59 60 61

62

See the article “Geschmack,” 371–85, in the volume beginning with the letter “E,” in Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1792), 371; my trans. Ibid., 372 (also quoted in Allison, Taste, 394 no. 62). Ibid., 372; my trans. Many francophone authors employed the term génie, but they did not study the topic in depth as did their peers in other European traditions. Bruno writes: “Despite the above cited usages of génie, it is important to note that there is no evidence that any Frenchman undertook studies specifically dedicated to uncovering the meaning of genius, like those of Gerard and Young.” Bruno, Genius, 14. I set aside how francophone writers conceived of génie and esprit, even though Kant adopts and works with these notions and even if they are likely a reason why, in early Reflections, Kant makes a very strong connection between genius (Genie) and spirit (Geist, esprit). Bruno, Genius, 13, distinguishes these senses of genius (guide, disposition of a nation or person, and creative power). Using the national character sense of genius, Kant quotes Hume on English genius in §50 (KU 5:320 n.). Compare a 1772/73 version of the statement: “About his nation, Hume himself, one of their greatest authors, admits what we have just claimed” (V-Anth/Parow 25:399). In a 1776–78 note, Kant makes similar claims about the Germans, English, and French; see also the problematic fourth Section of the Observations.



   ’ 

Several years before the translations of Gerard’s Essay on Genius into German in 1776, Kant opposes “instruction” through rules and precepts to “fine art” or “art of genius.” Whereas instruction employs “a priori rules” and “can be taught,” “fine art is not grounded on any science and is an art of genius” (R 621; 1769 or 1764–68; 15:268).63 This Reflection (assuming the date range is correct) shows that Kant did not come up with his key distinction between rule-based instruction (science) and genius-inspired art on the basis of reading Gerard’s Essay on Genius alone.64 Kant opposes taste and genius in a way that points toward the thin conception. He writes: “Taste enables the enjoyment to be communicated; it is therefore a means and an effect of the unification of people.” The note goes on to contrast taste and judgment on the one hand with genius and feeling on the other: “Taste pertains to the judgment, not to the feeling; hence the latter must be transient. Genius, however, pertains to feeling. Taste is therefore the refinement of the power of judgment” (R 767; 1772–73; 15:334–5). Kant distinguishes genius and taste in a logic lecture from the early 1770s, still revealing a thin conception. “Genius and taste are to be wholly distinguished from one another. Genius works, so to speak, in the rough, but in excellent things” (V-Lo/Blom 24:46). Several 1772/73 anthropology lecture transcriptions also touch on genius (e.g., V-Anth/Collins 26:167).65 According to the Parow lecture, the English authors do not reveal taste but instead show “a kind of sentiment and genius” (V-Anth/Parow 25:399). The “greatest” English authors – the transcriber mentions Young as well as Alexander Pope and Addison – have “something striking and lofty” (etwas frappantes und hohes) in their writings. Young’s writings demonstrate a kind of “genius” but are not pleasing to “taste.” Genius is “very much” to be distinguished from taste. “Genius only produces materials,” whereas taste orders and arranges the material so that it is pleasing (V-Anth/Parow 25:399; cf. 385). The “On Genius” section of the Philippi transcription (1772/73) contains a similar opposition between what can be taught and what can be created by genius. Whereas learning, say, a craft requires work and ability, genius requires invention and talent. “One can thus have taste without genius, and vice versa” (V-Anth/Phil ms page 83; cf. R 812 and KU 5:313). And a logic lecture from summer 1772 suggests that beauty in art is a product of genius. “The beautiful 63

64

65

Also cited by Menzer, Entwicklung, 86. See also two early notes: R 671; 1769–70, 15:297; and R 754; 1772; 15:330. In fact, in a fragment from 1769, Kant refers to “John Streel” and claims: “Taste does not need genius. It is a long custom in manners” (R 1788; 1769; 16:115). The Collins lecture (1772/73) briefly characterizes genius in terms of originality and spirit: “Genie means an original spirit [Originalgeist]. The word Geist is used in many situations” (V-Anth/Collins 25:167; my trans.). See also V-Anth/Collins 25:193–4.

,   



is a matter of genius and in no way a matter of imitation” (V-Lo/Phil 24:370). Texts such as these generally reflect a thin conception. In the next phase of Kant’s aesthetics, even after he has read Gerard’s Essay on Genius around 1776, there are some remnants of the thin conception. However, a thick account increasingly emerges. I begin with the traces of the thin view. A longer fragment from about 1776–78 (R 812) reveals a thin conception. The note begins by stating that genius is the faculty for producing what cannot be learned. “Genius requires inspiration [Begeisterung].” Kant then seems to equate “talent” (Talente) and “spirit” (Geist): it is the capacity to produce something out of oneself – which requires a kind of freedom – presumably a kind of (aesthetic) freedom of imagination. “The form of genius is freedom.” But the crucial sentence is this: “The power of judgment and taste determine the limits for genius, hence without these, genius borders on madness [Tollheit].” On this view, genius could create original nonsense. To avoid madness, genius needs to be limited by the power of judgment and taste.66 Given that genius is the cause of original “ideas,” Kant adds, genius has its true field in poesis: to poeticize is to create. Just as genius is limited or curbed by taste, spirit is opposed to the power of judgment. The fragment concludes: “Genius consists in the originality of the idea in the production of a product.” Thus, if and when an “original” idea is limited and shaped by judgment and taste, it results in the production [Hervorbringung] of a product (R 812; 15:361–2).67 Genius is seen as the positive force in creating ideas (R 817; 1776–78 or perhaps earlier; 15:364).

66

67

Kant frequently compares madness (Tollheit) and genius. He writes that genius is mixed with a certain dose of madness (Anth 7:188) and claims that “delusion of sense” (Wahnsinn) can border on genius (Anth 7:202). Likewise, he writes in a note: “Genius, which borders on madness, is the strength of phantasy without the power of judgment” (R 1510; 1780–84; 15:827). Throughout his various lectures, too, Kant admonishes against an unbounded imagination. For instance: “All frenzies [Regungen] can only be reached through fantasy [Phantasie] and not through reality. The transcendent giving of wings to our imagination must be held in limits” (V-Anth/Fried 25:510). R 812 also contains this claim: “In mathematics, genius actually reveals itself in the invention [Erfindung] of methods.” See also Menzer, Entwicklung, 86. On the other hand, other marginal notes from this period indicate that mathematics is rule-like and does not employ genius. “Mathematics is in itself a clear rule” (R 922; about 1776–78; 15:410). Nevertheless, Wenzel holds that in notes and lectures from the late 1770s and early 1780s, Kant claims that both mathematical and artistic invention involve genius, and then changes his mind about genius in mathematics at some point during the mid-1780s. Wenzel, Introduction, 139. Christian Wenzel, “Beauty, Genius, and Mathematics: Why Did Kant Change his Mind?” History of Philosophy Quarterly 18, no. 4 (2001): 415–32. See also Christian Wenzel, “The Art of Doing Mathematics,” in Creativity and Philosophy, ed. Gaut and Kieran, 313–30, esp. 318–23. Menzer claims that it is not possible to determine what made Kant change his mind. Menzer, Entwicklung, 87.



   ’ 

Whereas genius “creates,” the “power of judgment and taste administer” (R 1847; 1776–78; 16:136). Another fragment likewise suggests that genius needs to be tamed, implying that it might otherwise come up with original nonsense without finding the appropriate forms for its ideas. Whereas mechanism “knocks genius down,” “the rule, by contrast, is not the doctrine but the discipline of genius.” “Genius consists precisely in having an idea and not a rule for its basis.” Genius needs discipline precisely in order to avoid original nonsense. “Genius without discipline is crude” (R 829, 1776–78; 15:370). The notion of “idea” that is “original” or a product of imagination (hence, not all “ideas”) can plausibly be read as a precursor of the aesthetic idea in the third Critique’s sense. As the Pillau lecture (1777/78) states, “Spirit is thus the universal unity of the human mind; or also, the harmony among them [i.e., the faculties]. Spirit is also the enlivening of sensibility through the idea. . . . The products of genius foresee an idea, through which the imagination is enlivened,” and genius “appeals to a rich imagination” (V-Anth/Pillau 25:782–3). This passage even indicates the link between the harmony of the faculties and the idea, an original product of genius, that enlivens or animates the imagination. The Pillau lecture also reveals a thin conception of genius. Spirit, it states, can also be called the “originality” of talent. “There are arts capable of spirit, if spirit can be brought to bear, or where there is a principle of the new.” As noted, genius “appeals to a rich imagination.” “But the products of imagination are merely like a chaos” (V-Anth/Pillau 25:783).68 In a similar fashion, the coeval Lecture on Philosophical Encyclopedia69 contains a section on genius in which Kant briefly calls genius an “original” talent, a talent for multiple things that is “purpose-free” (zweckfreye) (Phil Enz 29:12).70 The Mrongovius anthropology lecture (1784/85), like the third Critique, works with both thick and thin conceptions.71 A passage suggests (in line with the thick view) that taste is an essential component of genius: “To genius belong the power of imagination, power of judgment, spirit, and taste, just as 68

69

70

71

In Guyer’s view, according to the Pillau lecture, “genius manifests itself both in the invention of content for art and in the invention of sensible forms by means of which to present and enliven such content.” Guyer thus appears to identify a thick conception. Guyer, “Beauty,” 150–1. The transcription Friedländer is likely from 1777/78, though it is possible it derives from the semesters 1779/80 or 1781/82. See also V-Anth/Mensch 25:945 (which mentions Gerard); 25:991; and 25:1055–66 (the section on genius), esp. 25:1060–2. These passages are omitted in the translation of the Menschenkunde found in the Cambridge Edition volume, Lectures on Anthropology. See also Menzer, Entwicklung, 87. The Mrongovius has a section on genius (V-Anth/Mron 25:1310–5) and mentions Gerard (25:1314).

,   



to a painting belong expression, design (correctness), composition (fineness) and coloring (proper mixture of colors)” (V-Anth/Mron 25:1313). But other pages in the transcription indicate a thin conception: “A genius can have little taste, and someone with a great deal of taste can have little genius” (ibid.) At one point, the transcription even uses Sulzer’s language of perfection to express a thin conception (taste is not essential for genius): “A taste is perhaps exacted for genius; but it is nothing essential; rather, it belongs to [its] perfection” (V-Anth/Mron 25:1313).72 The lecture states that taste “limits the daring of genius.” While genius requires a freedom of imagination, it should not go too far, though it is inclined to do so. “With genius, the power of imagination must not be fettered, and yet there must not be mere chimeras. There is a fine, small boundary here. Genius thus borders very closely on delirium” (V-Anth/Mron 25:1313). Since the lecture transcription states that taste is not essential for genius and genius borders closely on delirium, it is fair to say that the thin conception is at work here. Notwithstanding these claims, a thick conception gradually becomes more prominent in the late 1770s and early 1780s, even if Kant’s position is by no means well-defined. In an important fragment, Kant rejects a position he attributes to Gerard, namely, the view that genius is a special power or “talent” with a determinate object. “Genius is not, as Gerard will have it, a special power of the soul (otherwise it would have a determinate object), but a principium of the animation of all other powers through whatever ideas of objects one wants” (R 949; 1776–78; 15:420–1).73 In the next line, Kant suggests that the originality of genius is limited by “learning” and by the “idea” of the artwork. “Invention presupposes an animation of the cognitive powers, not merely the sharpening of the capacity for learning. But this animation must be aimed at an end through the generation of an idea; otherwise it is not invention, but accidental discovery” (ibid.). During this period, I believe, Kant is connecting his view of genius to his theory that aesthetic pleasure arises from a free play of the faculties, as the above reference to an “animation of the cognitive powers” reveals.74 The year 72

73 74

“Zum Genie wird wol ein Geschmak erfordert; es ist aber nichts wesentliches; sondern gehört zur Vollendung” (V-Anth/Mron 25:1313). See also Menzer, Entwicklung, 87. For the view that the notion of genius gives rise to Kant’s view of free play, see Schlapp, Kants Lehre vom Genie, 382, 387. Given the correspondence between free play and genius, one might wish to infer that the receptive capacity of taste actually requires a sort of genial talent in the recipient or apprehender. Now, perhaps one adopts something analogous to the role of an artist when experiencing beauty (playing with various features of the object and imaginatively rearranging or recreating them), but attributing genial talent to apprehenders seems to be too strong, especially given the thin conception: Kant thinks that the capacity for genius, in light of its exceptional and original power to find and eventually express aesthetic ideas, is rare. As Wenzel likewise notes, “not every



   ’ 

1776 is indeed around when Kant identifies the free harmony of the faculties as the source of the pleasure in beauty. This view of harmony or animation of the faculties as the source of aesthetic pleasure is evident in claims such as the one just examined: genius is a principle of the “animation” of all mental powers through ideas of objects (or artistic intentions), and invention presupposes an “animation” of the cognitive powers. In fact, in a lecture from this time, Kant combines the two main ideas of the second phase, the harmonious free play (the source of aesthetic pleasure) and spirit (an essential component of genius). “We will be able to call the harmonious play of the understanding and sensibility the ‘beauty of the spirit’. A beautiful spirit thinks in such a way that understanding is there but stands in harmony with sensibility” (V-Anth/ Pillau 25:759; cf. 783). Thus, Kant is connecting two principal strands of his aesthetic theory: free play and genius (or spirit). According to a logic lecture from the early 1780s, what is called genius “unifies” beauty and thoroughness – which reflects the thick conception. The genius creates works that are both entertaining and instructive (V-Lo/Pölitz 25:516), that is, examples of partially intellectual beauty. The “empty head” may create products that contravene the intellect, but it cannot create works of genius. Taste “belongs to” or is an “essential component” of genius. “There are four elements that one cannot teach: sentiment, the power of judgment, spirit, and taste. These make up genius. Additional faculties might perhaps belong to genius, but these properly make up the substance of genius” (R 874; 1776–78; 15:384; my trans.). In like manner, an anthropology lecture from 1775/76 considers, and presumably rejects, the thin notion. Genius is a “creative talent,” or talent to “produce something without any guidance” or rules. In fact, genius does not need rules in the first place. “Genius is free of rules because it needs none; hence people who are no geniuses, and yet want to be taken as such, abandon the rules, in order to try to give themselves the reputation of genius. However, the rules retain their value” (V-Anth/Fried 25:556). In writing of such “people,” Kant may have in mind Sturm und Drang thinkers such as Herder, or at least proponents of a Platonic view of inspiration.75

75

person who has taste and is an artist is a genius.” Wenzel, Introduction, 100. On this issue, see also Zammito, Genesis, 143 and Menzer, Entwicklung, 167. Kantian genius is not Platonic enthusiasmous, and Kant does not mention enthusiasm in his discussion of genius in the third Critique. Still, he does write about Enthusiasm and Enthusiasmus even in the Critique (KU 5:272, 275) as well as in other works such as The Conflict of the Faculties. Overall, he was of two minds about enthusiasm. Although Kant had firm reservations about enthusiasm (Enthusiasm, Enthusiasmus), he had even stronger objections to fanaticism (Schwärmerei). For references and further discussion, see Clewis, “The Feeling of Enthusiasm,” and, for an earlier and slightly different statement, Clewis, Kantian Sublime, 169–99.

,   



Rousseau also seems to be a target. Around 1764–66 Kant had already jotted down in a marginal note in his copy of the Observations: “I must keep reading Rousseau until the beauty of the expression no longer disturbs me, and only then can I examine him with reason” (BGSE 20:30; my trans.). Kant identifies Rousseau’s slippery and puzzling “genius” as part of the problem. He attributes to Rousseau spirit and feeling – designations associated with genius: The first impression felt by a reader of the writings of Mr. J.J. Rousseau is that he finds there an uncommon acuity of spirit [Scharfsinnigkeit des Geistes], a noble impetus of genius [Schwung des Genies], and a soul full of feeling [gefühlvolle Seele], and this in perhaps the highest degree that a writer has ever possessed all of them together, regardless of the age or people from which he comes. The impression that follows next is bewilderment before strange and nonsensical [wiedersinnische] opinions which conflict so strongly with what is generally admitted that one is inclined to suspect that the author only wanted to show, by virtue of his extraordinary talents, the magical power of rhetoric, and to pose as the eccentric who, by a captivating novelty, distinguishes himself from all rivals in wit. (BGSE 20:43–4; my trans.)

A Reflection labeled “On Genius” (about a decade later) introduces a distinction between two kinds of genius, associated with Plato and Rousseau, respectively. The first kind is more theoretical and “oversteps in ideas” (fanatical genius). The second is more practical or concerned with taking actions in the hope of achieving some good (enthusiastic genius). Kant mentions Plato and Rousseau as examples of fanatical and enthusiastic geniuses, respectively (R 921; about 1776–78; 15:406).76 In another note, Kant again rejects a Platonic conception of inspiration: Genius is not some sort of daimon [spirit] that gives out inspirations and revelations. If genius is to have matter, then one must have learned much or formally and methodically studied. Genius is also not a special kind and source of insight; it must be able to be communicated and made understandable to everyone. Genius only comes in where talent and industry do not reach; but if the illuminations that are presented amant obscurum [i.e., loving obscurity] and do not want to be seen and examined in the light at all, when they do not yield any graspable idea: then the imagination is raving, and, since its product is nothing, it has not arisen from genius at all, but is only an illusion. (R 899; 15:393; 1776–78)

In line with the thick conception (“Genius . . . must be able to be communicated and made understandable to everyone”), the end of the passage suggests

76

See also R 921a; 1776–78; 15:407–9.



   ’ 

that genius does not produce sheer nonsense. The painter or poet must have undergone some kind of formal or methodical training in order to know how to express the “idea” and make it “graspable,” avoiding an undesirable kind of illusion. According to another note, in the arts (above all, in poetry), “rules must always lie at the basis and serve for direction, not in order to produce the product but to make the actions harmonious. It requires first of all a mechanism of talent and a genius beyond the finite” (R 922; about 1776–78; 15:409–11). Finally, I turn to the third phase of Kant’s aesthetics, in particular, to the Busolt anthropology lecture (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1492–9).77 Many of the claims supporting the thin conception are familiar by now. Judging art requires taste, but producing it requires genius (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1494–5). A thin conception passage reads like the one at the end of §50, according to which taste clips the wings of genius (KU 5:319). The freedom of the imagination must also be a chief ingredient. In the other powers of the mind, one seeks rules. But the imagination will be independent. It is bold, it is creative, and it is always doing violence to the rules of the understanding, which would as it were clip its wings.

At the same time, some claims in the transcription suggest or reveal a thick conception. The quote immediately continues: However, the imagination must also be under laws. If it subjects itself to laws, where its greatest freedom takes place, where the happiest agreement with the greatest possible determinacy of the understanding and reason exists, then it has the disposition that is required for a genius. (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1493–4; my trans.)

The transcription also states: “Now the genius has the ability to animate the ideas of the power of imagination, and to place them in a harmonious, proportionate movement” (Busolt 25:1494; my trans.). The genius – Kant mentions Milton – “comprehends everything in a single idea and engages the play of all the mental powers in the imagination” (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1495; my trans). “A genius [viz., Milton or Shakespeare] is not distinguished from a mind [Kopf] in terms of the degrees of talent, but according to the fortunate 77

The Busolt lecture touches on the role of genius in the arts. For instance: “Genius goes properly with art. Art can be distinguished from handicraft, in that with handicraft when one knows how to do it, one can also do it; but with art it is not like that; one can have good knowledge there but not be able to make anything, e.g., such as with painting. Genius belongs to the arts, and these arts will be called the fine arts. There are no beautiful sciences at all because they belong to the understanding. But there are beautiful arts, such as poetry, rhetoric, etc. One certainly cannot call a genius the person who has achieved much through reproduction and imitation – though he is learned” (V-Anth/ Busolt 25:1493; my trans.).

,   



proportion of the mental powers that are harmoniously enlivened by the power of imagination” (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1497; my trans.; cf. Anth 7:246). As indicated, I think it is possible to alleviate some of the tension in Kant’s account. One might plausibly distinguish the capacity for genius (as a talent for producing original aesthetic ideas) from the actual combination or instantiation in a particular person and artist, that is, the genius who can also make use of taste and judgment in creating an artistically successful work. In fact, Kant himself makes just such a distinction. “There is a difference between: this one has genius, and: he is a genius” (R 812, about 1776–78; 15:361). Or as he puts it in the Anthropology, the term “genius” can denote not only a person’s “natural gift,” but also “the person himself” (Anth 7:224). Perhaps the sensibly expressed ideas in an artistic product may be widely communicable, but it is taste (with judgment and understanding), not the genius that one “has” (i.e., the gift or capacity), that is responsible for giving the work the communicability that makes a great work an artistic success. This way, genius as a capacity to come up with the original ideas of imagination could still be considered in terms of the thin conception, while at the same time the actual practice of the creation of artworks could be accounted for in terms of the thick view. On such a proposal, the concept of genius as a capacity does not per se include taste, but in practice genius is curtailed by taste, namely, when a harmonious combination of powers or capacities is found in a particular artist – a Milton, Shakespeare, Wieland, Homer, or Leonardo.

The Third Critique Reconsidered The discussion of genius as the source of artistic creations obviously invokes the concept of art. At the same time, Kant’s definition of genius involves the concept of nature, for it is nature (albeit inner nature or nature in the subject) that gives the rule to art (KU 5:307). This claim from the third Critique thus blurs any facile distinction between nature and art. A similar view is also found in a fragment from 1776–78: “Spirit is the secret source of life. It is not subjected to the power of choice, rather all its movements come from nature. Reflection rests on planning and diligence. What arises from the spirit is original” (R 831; 15:371; about 1776–78).78 Kant’s notion of genius threatens 78

See also R 922: “The talent in which nature replaces the help of art (makes it dispensable) is genius” (about 1776–78; 15:409–11). And V-Anth/Pillau 25:782: “Spirit is thus the universal unity of the human mind; or also, the harmony among them [i.e., the faculties]. Spirit is also the enlivening of sensibility through the idea.” Especially in light of what (as noted) Kant writes about “ideas” in the mid to late 1770s, the “idea” here sounds like a precursor to the aesthetic idea that, according to the third Critique, is exhibited in a work of art, rather than either the principle of purposiveness or the idea of nature as a whole. For a discussion of both R 831 and V-Anth/Pillau 25:782 that instead emphasizes “nature” as “supersensible substrate” and “nature as a whole . . . understood in its



   ’ 

or goes beyond any simple nature–art binary – and thus complicates (in perhaps interesting ways)79 what seems to be assumed by my first arc. Given Kant’s definition of genius as (inner) nature giving the rule to art, it is hard to insist too much on the shift from art to nature. The increased focus on free beauty as “self-standing” also plays less of a role in interpreting Kant’s conceptions of genius – at least insofar as the genius creates artworks that are viewed as adherent rather than free beauties. Though genius is a natural talent and a gift of nature, it results in products that are typically (though not necessarily)80 judged as adherent or partly conceptual beauties, such as when, for instance, they are judged in terms of the aims and intentions of the artist and the ends of the product or work. For obvious reasons, the increasing role of aesthetic ideas (arc 3) is extremely relevant to Kant’s views of genius. Aesthetic ideas become increasingly important from the mid-1770s on, and a genius creates art through aesthetic ideas and original representations of the imagination. An early 1770s lecture contains a notion that is similar to an aesthetic idea in the third Critique sense, but the term is not used: “A cognition agrees with the subject when it gives us much to think about and brings our capacity into play. This requires especially ease, intuition, and this requires similia, examples, instances” (V-Lo/Blom 24:44; emphasis added). Something close to the third Critique’s notion of aesthetic ideas becomes more prominent once Kant writes about genius in response to Gerard, or around 1776.81

79

80

81

systematic and purposive unity,” see Lara Ostaric, “Genius and the ‘Moral Image of the World’: The Artist and Her Work as a Source of Moral Motivation,” in Margit Ruffing et al., eds., Recht und Frieden in der Philosophie Kants (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 667–76, 673–4. I remain grateful to the late Joseph Margolis for probing the culture–life dichotomy and his thoughts about whether there might be a neglected alternative in which humans are not opposed to nature but also at the same time are not merely or only biological beings. On genius, culture, and second nature, see also Eldridge, Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, 119–20. As noted in Chapter 3, I read Kant as holding that some artworks can be judged as free beauties. A non-third Critique’s sense of “aesthetic idealism” (V-Anth/Collins 25:48) and “aesthetic ideal” (V-Anth/Parow 25:271, 325), where aesthetic idealism is set in opposition to “nature” and associated with a chimerical way of thinking, is also found in the early 1770s. In contrast, the following fragments from a few years later contain something like the third Critique’s sense of an aesthetic idea, given the connection between genius (or animated spirit) and the “idea”: “Genius consists precisely in having an idea and not a rule for its basis” (R 829; 1776–78; 15:370). “Nothing animates the spirit except for a certain universal which the mind grasps prior to all particulars, and from which it forms its outlook or products. Hence genius consists in this capacity to create the universal and the ideal” (R 932; 1776–78; 15:413; emphasis added).

,   



On the source and normativity of aesthetic pleasure (arc 4), I note that on the thick view, the genius (through the artwork) communicates the free harmony or “proportion” in his mental powers, hoping that, in perceiving and aesthetically engaging with the work, apprehenders of the work will feel such harmony and proportion too.82 Kant does not have much to say about this harmony or proportion before the mid-1770s, when he adopts a new view of the source of aesthetic pleasure. Consequently, the thick conception appears to come to prominence once Kant develops his theory of free play. According to my final arc, Kant undertakes a moral turn in the published work of 1790. It would be nice to discover that this shift was mirrored in discussions of genius found in marginalia or in an anthropology lecture (e.g., Busolt) given right before Kant published the third Critique, but there is insufficient textual evidence on this theme. While one would expect Kant to say that the genius expresses morally significant aesthetic ideas, it is hard to find texts in the late but still pre-1790 materials to confirm this.

Concluding Remarks As Zammito and several scholars have argued,83 Kant’s target in presenting the thick conception includes writers who at one point belonged to the Sturm and Drang, such as Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and, above all, Herder.84 Zammito writes: “Herder and the Sturm und Drang were the main targets of Kant’s theory of art and genius.”85 (For whatever reason – and one could think of several – Kant never names Herder in the third Critique.) In those places in the third Critique where Kant endorses the thick or robust conception of genius (and implicitly criticizes the thin one), he does so in part for polemical reasons. As early as 1768, Kant had already taken the liberty of adopting a tone of admonishment toward Herder. In a May 1768 letter to his former student, Kant warns Herder of the “warm winds of youthful feeling” – an adumbration 82 83

84

85

In “Response to Joseph Cannon,” Guyer emphasizes this aspect of genius. According to Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kant “steadfastly maintained the concept of taste which the Sturm und Drang not only violently dismissed but also violently demolished.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), 57. James Meredith also identifies the leaders of the Sturm und Drang as Kant’s target; cited by Zammito, Genesis, 349 no. 22. On the Sturm and Drang, see Roy Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953). Two useful recent studies of Herder in English are Gjesdal, Herder’s Hermeneutics, and Zuckert, Herder’s Naturalist Aesthetics. Meanwhile, Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 254–9, distances Lessing from the Sturm und Drang and rejects the view that Lessing’s concept of genius is a chief source of his alleged irrationalism. Zammito, Genesis, 10; see also 8–10, 142–3.



   ’ 

of Kant’s later disapproval of genius gone wild. Kant adds: “I await with confidence this epoch of your genius [Ihres Genies] based on what I know of you” (Br 10:74; my trans.). Kant’s worry (and later disappointment) explains why he might have been drawn around 1774 (the year Gerard’s essay on genius first appeared) to a thick conception of genius.86 The expansive view that genius cannot produce original nonsense, or that taste is a necessary component of genius, resonates with Kant’s deep worry that flights of fancy might go unbounded. For systematic reasons that quite understandably drive readers to construct a unified whole out of a publication such as the Critique of the Power of Judgment, it is tempting to claim that Kant has a single, coherent view of genius, and that, moreover, either the thick or the thin conception makes for his considered view. But, as Allison, Cannon, and Schlapp have maintained, the Critique contains both conceptions. As unsatisfying as it may be to acknowledge this, perhaps Kant’s readers are forced to live with the tension – though maybe they can also take some comfort in identifying and understanding its origins.

86

See the complaints about Herder’s writing at the end of Kant’s April 6, 1774, letter to Hamann: “For I, poor earthling, am not at all equipped to understand the divine language of intuitive reason. What can be spelled out for me with ordinary concepts in accordance with logical order I can pretty well comprehend” (Br 10:156).

5 Classifying the Fine Arts

“Whatever else Kant may be thought, and it is difficult to exaggerate his achievement, he was as clearly not a literary genius as any philosopher in history.”1 Alasdair MacIntyre’s sentiment is not confined to the anglophone philosophical tradition. The twentieth-century French philosopher Étienne Gilson comments on Kant’s views of music with this line: “Kant’s personal philistinism here assumes a dreadful claritas [that is] quite its own. His [a]esthetics is but a corollary to his Critique of Practical Reason.”2 Kant is not widely admired for his aesthetic judgments about the fine arts. In fact, it is common to find writers charging that he had little personal experience with the arts. Besides his limited experience with some of the arts, perhaps the generally scholastic style of the Critique of Pure Reason (some sparkling passages aside) deserves some of the blame for the opinion that he was not “a literary genius.” Nevertheless, Kant, who admired Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Albrecht von Haller, was offered a professorship of poetry in 1764,3 so at least on the personal or biographical level, such claims should give readers pause. As far as his writing style goes, early works such as the Observations (1764) and the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766) display a polished (if prejudiced) lightheartedness and a love of satire, respectively. Of course, it is a pity that Kant discusses neither Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart nor Johann Sebastian Bach, given his relative cultural and historical proximity to them. Alas, his exposure to music was limited to parties and to church: Kant heard agreeable background music at soirees, but he had particular disdain for hymn singing, especially when it disturbed his peace.

1

2 3

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 43. Étienne Gilson, The Arts of the Beautiful (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1965), 152. Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xvi. On Kant’s aesthetic education and his views of poets and literary writers, see Menzer, Entwicklung, 12–21.





   ’ 

In any case – leaving aside such biographical matters – Kant actually has something interesting to say about the arts. Not only does Kant describe and classify the fine arts4 in the third Critique, but there is also a rich backstory to his views.

The Third Critique on Classifying the Fine Arts Kant identifies at least eight forms of fine art: poetry, rhetoric (Beredsamkeit), painting, sculpture (Bildhauerkunst),5 architecture (Baukunst), horticulture (Gartenkunst), music, and dance.6 One of the third Critique’s principles for classifying the arts is the theory of the free harmonious play of the faculties, that is, the idea that beauty requires the “suitability of the imagination in its freedom to the lawfulness of the understanding” (KU 5:319). This leads to the following scheme, one of several found in Kant’s corpus (see Figure 5.1).7 Kant immediately introduces reservations about the scheme he proposes, admitting that “it is only one of the several experiments that still can and should be attempted” (KU 5:320 n.). In §51, he suggests a more “abstract” and drier classification scheme (KU 5:321). On this alternative view, fine art is divided into the art of the expression of thoughts (arts of speech) and art of the expression of intuitions, which is in turn divided according to form (pictorial art) and matter (art of the play of sensations). In addition, Kant recognizes that it is possible to combine distinct art forms and artistic media. Thus, a theatrical play is a combination of rhetoric with what he calls painterly presentation. A song is poetry set to music. Dance combines music and painterly presentation. Opera combines dance, theater, and song. Kant hints at the notion of a total work of art, but he does not endorse it. Instead, he doubts that such cross-media combination leads to a more beautiful product or work (KU 5:325). Noteworthy here is also Kant’s recognition that some artworks may unite the exhibition or presentation (Darstellung) of the sublime with beauty: “The exhibition of the sublime, so

4

5

6

7

The word schön usually means “beautiful,” but when followed by “art” can be translated as “fine,” just as beau (“beautiful”) is used in the corresponding French phrase for the fine arts, les beaux arts. Sculpture, like painting, counts as one of the formative/pictorial/imagistic (bildenden) arts (KU 5:225). Sculpture is “that which presents corporeal concepts of things as they could exist in nature (although, as a beautiful art, with regard to aesthetic purposiveness)” (KU 5:322). Kant classifies the “art” of producing laughter at humor as an agreeable rather than fine art since humor’s aim is to have “pleasure accompany the representations as mere sensations” (KU 5:305). In tension with this, however, Kant characterizes laughter at humor as a play with aesthetic ideas (see Chapter 8). On the third Critique’s classification of the fine arts, see also Menzer, Entwicklung, 169–74.

   



Arts of speech Mental Content - Thought Kind of Expression - Word (articulation)

Rhetoric

Poetry

Pictorial arts Mental Content - Intuition (the form of intuition) Kind of Expression - Gesture (gesticulation)

Painting

Plastic arts Painting proper

Sculpture

Horticulture

Architecture

Arts of the play of sensaon Mental Content - Sensation (the matter of intuition) Kind of Expression - Tone (modulation)

Music

Agreeable arts

(play of tones) Art of colors Arts of laughter Dinnerware Table arts Background music Games

Figure 5.1

Classification of the arts

far as it belongs to fine art, can be united with beauty in a verse tragedy, a didactic poem, an oratorio” (KU 5:325).8 In the third Critique, Kant focuses mainly on painting, poetry, and music, but he also touches on sculpture and architecture. He writes very little about

8

On Kantian artistic sublimity, see Clewis, Kantian Sublime, 116–25; and Robert R. Clewis, “A Case for Kantian Artistic Sublimity: A Response to Abaci,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 2 (2010): 167–70.



   ’ 

dance and gardening,9 though he does mention them. He says even less about theater.10 About song and music he is negative or critical, since the loud sounds of singing and song, he insists, can intrude on the freedom of others who might not want to hear the music.11 In the third Critique, he does not examine metal work and woodwork, furniture making, quilting, or ceramics. In 1790, Kant would have viewed these as crafts rather than fine art, thereby distinguishing his position from a Wolffian one, as will soon be seen. Indeed, Kant distinguishes between the fine or beautiful (schön) arts and the mechanical arts (KU 5:306–7). The mechanical arts can be taught, and they follow rules: students can thereby learn how to reproduce the products. Teachable mechanism may be necessary for fine art, but it is not sufficient (as it is for mechanical arts) (KU 5:310). Whereas “mechanical art” is a “mere art of diligence and learning,” “fine art” is “that of genius” (§47, KU 5:310). Fine art is a “liberal” art, he states in §43, while handicraft is “remunerative” (KU 5:304). The fact that the craftsman or artisan is paid for his work also limits his freedom, Kant implies, since he has to cater to market demands. Fine art is produced “through” freedom: “By right, only production through freedom, i.e., through a capacity for choice that grounds its actions in reason, should be called art” (KU 5:303).12 In §44, Kant makes a key distinction between fine art and agreeable art. “Fine” art is the art whose end is that pleasure accompany representations as kinds of cognition (Erkenntnisarten). Agreeable art aims to have pleasure accompany the representations as mere sensations. Both are called “aesthetic” arts – in a sense deriving from Greek aesthetikos (perception, sensation) – since

9

10

11

12

Kant seems to apologize in the third Critique for including landscape gardening among the fine arts, though in early Reflections he often includes horticulture among the arts. He prefers the English gardens to the more tame and trimmed French gardens, presumably because the English version gives the impression of freedom, though, he adds, it should also not border on the chaotic (KU 5:242). Meanwhile, the order in the French gardens, while graspable, risks becoming tiresome to the point of nausea. From a biographical standpoint, Kant’s passing over theater in the third Critique is striking, for drama was an art form he knew and appreciated (especially when younger), and, at least in principle, was in a good position to judge. Kuehn, Kant, 166. See also Menzer, Entwicklung, 20. On the references to comedy and tragedy found in Kant’s Reflections and lectures, see Clewis, Kant’s Humorous Writings, 37–43. For his more positive views of music, however, see V-Anth/Mron 25:1325–6 and V-Anth/ Busolt 25:1509. Based on an examination of modern writers such as Karl Philipp Moritz and Wilhelm Wackenroder, Nicolas Wolterstorff charges that distinctions such as the one between fine art and craft reflect the questionable assumption that one should enjoy and engage in “art for art’s sake.” Nicolas Wolterstorff, Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). For a response to this objection, see Robert R. Clewis, “Kant on the Fine Arts: Reply to a Social Practices Objection,” in Kantian Readings, ed. Nina Dmitrieva (Dordrecht: Springer, forthcoming).

   



both fine art and agreeable art involve a kind of pleasure – whether of the agreeable or the pleasure that is based on the harmony of the faculties. Fine art and agreeable art can be distinguished from “mechanical” art in that the latter aims at the production of a determinate object (KU 5:305). Kant raises the issue of the hierarchy or ranking of the arts: Is poetry superior to music? Is music inferior to painting? Although this line of inquiry might appear quaint today, as I will mention in the next section, the hierarchy of the arts was a central issue in the period in which aesthetics was coming into its own as a field. In terms of what one might now think of as “aesthetic value,” Kant holds that poetry comes first, then the pictorial arts, then music (the art of tones).13 Poetry is superior because it originates in genius and lends itself to the expression of aesthetic ideas. Its rich imagery offers the most food for thought without leading to ordinary cognitive judgments. The pictorial arts come next since they are more lasting than music, for they begin with an aesthetic idea and provide sensible form to it, whereas music starts with a play of sensations and then an aesthetic idea is found to match one’s sensation or affect. Kant is not very clear about what he means in the case of music, but he might have in mind that the joy one feels in hearing a particular piece or kind of music could lead one to think of blessedness (as a reward for virtue) or other similar moral ideas. Within pictorial arts, painting proper comes before the other “painterly” kinds of art (such as gardening or horticulture), because as the art of drawing (design), painting proper is the basis for these other pictorial arts (KU 5:330). The art of tones comes last since, even if music is the most agreeable art form, it merely plays with sensations. Whether or not Kant needed to make this inference can be questioned, however, since it seems reasonable to claim that one can find sensations (say, of color or tone) to be aesthetically satisfying and Kant could acknowledge that one plays with the pure mathematical form and harmony of sensations (KU 5:224; see also R 618, R 871, discussed above), as Kant seems to hold at times. In any case, for Kant music has the additional problem that, like a strong perfume, it can be forced upon others and thereby hinder their freedom. In yet another way, then, the arts are understood in terms of the concept of freedom. Almost as a concession, however, in §53 Kant indicates that he has not made up his mind about music. When viewed in terms of the agreeableness of the sensation rather than the cognitive content it provides, he ranks music higher than painting. But when considered from the point of view of

13

Kant disparages rhetoric (Beredsamkeit) understood as ars oratoria insofar as it is deceptive and manipulative (KU 5:327). At the same time, he gives more respect to “eloquence” (Wohlredenheit) or good-speaking.



   ’ 

cultivating the mind and the “enlargement of the faculties,” the order is reversed (§53, KU 5:329).14

The Modern Tradition Shaping Kant’s Views In the modern period, philosophers as different as Thomas Hobbes and Wolff came up with various classifications of the arts, reflecting the new technologies and instruments then becoming available. It may be debatable how great a break from ancient and medieval thinking such conceptual schemes constituted, or to what extent ancient authors and medieval writers already had the conception of the arts endorsed by the moderns. In my view, given all of the cultural, technological, scientific, and political changes associated with modernity, it seems very likely that something was innovative about the modern thinking about the arts.15 Kant does not cite many authors when discussing either his classification or his ranking of the arts. Since scholars have pointed out that Kant’s view of the arts is not terribly original,16 one wishes he had left more clues about his sources. Still, since Batteux and Wolff were influential authors at the time, it is very likely that Kant was familiar with their views of the arts, and in the third Critique Kant singles out Batteux.

14

15

16

Kant’s views of music are notoriously ambivalent. In §51, Kant considers music to be now a fine art, now only an agreeable one (KU 5:325). Kant is not sure whether music is best seen as a “beautiful play of sensations” or instead as a mere flow of “agreeable sensations” (ibid.). In §53, as just seen, Kant likewise gives different perspectives on music’s place in the hierarchy of the arts (KU 5:329). According to the 1772/73 Collins anthropology lecture, it seems that music can be both charming and beautiful: “Charm in music consists in what sets my affects into motion.” This sounds like an expressivist theory and a version of eighteenth-century affect theory (Affektenlehre). But the very next sentence reads: “A piece that is composed according to all the rules of music can be beautiful; it can please and yet lack charm; it leaves us untouched and we only approve” of it (V-Anth/Collins 25:184). The modern concept of the fine arts, according to Beiser, has no equivalent in the first half of the eighteenth century in Germany. Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 40. On the fine arts generally, see Paul Oskar Kristeller’s influential but controversial articles: “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics, Part I,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (1951): 496–527; and “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics, Part II,” Journal of the History of Ideas 13, no. 1 (1952): 17–46. See also Tatarkiewicz, Six Ideas, 11–23; and McQuillan, Early Modern Aesthetics, 39–70. McQuillan, Early Modern Aesthetics, 62–3. McQuillan, however, points out three areas where Kant’s thinking was more original: the distinction between beautiful art and handicraft, the view that the fine or beautiful arts are produced by a combination of human capacities (imagination, understanding, spirit, and taste), and his theory of aesthetic ideas.

   



In Les beaux arts réduit à un même principe (1746), Batteux presents the idea that the arts are imitative or mimetic.17 Mimesis (imitation) is the single principle to which the fine arts can be reduced: beautiful art imitates nature. Zammito suggests that Batteux was in part brought to Kant’s attention by Mendelssohn, who had a more broadly European perspective on the arts.18 Mendelssohn put the insights of the British and French authors (including Jean-Baptiste Du Bos) “directly into the context of German school philosophy.”19 Specifically, Kant could have become more familiar with Batteux’s principle through Mendelssohn’s 1757 essay, “On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences.” In his essay, Mendelssohn argues that Batteux’s principle, if taken as an explanation of the pleasure in beauty, just pushes the issue back a step – for why should the beauties of nature be pleasant? In Mendelssohn’s words: “What do the beauties of nature and of art have in common, what relation do they have to the human soul, such that they are so pleasing to it?”20 In a 1759 letter to Kant, Hamann refers to Batteux: “Even the greatest human genius should seem to us unworthy of imitation. Nature, said Batteux,” is to be imitated (Br 10:12–3). So Batteux’s views would have been known to Kant for certain by the late 1750s. And perhaps Mendelssohn’s query planted the idea that a straightforward mimetic view was unsatisfactory and that more complex views of the relation between nature and art, along with an account of the activity of the mind or (as Kant would put it in the mid1770s) a harmonious free play of the faculties, were needed in order to have a proper account of the arts and the responses they elicit. Given Wolff’s systematic thinking about the arts in general, it is very likely that Wolff too influenced Kant’s thinking about the arts.21 Even if Wolff had no concept of the fine arts per se and had an expansive sense of what counted as art, he was still among the first to conceive and advocate a philosophy of the arts.22 Beiser claims that Wolff “gave the greatest importance to the arts” 17

18

19

20 21

22

A recent translation is Charles Batteux, The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle, trans. James Young (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Batteux’s treatise was published in Paris in 1746 and translated into German in 1751. In §33, Kant mentions Batteux while denying that there are rules of taste (KU 5:284), and the mimetic principle could even be one of the “rules” Kant had in mind here. On the more positive side, Kant’s slogan that a beauty of art is a beautiful representation of a thing (of nature) is reminiscent of Batteux’s mimetic principle (KU 5:311). On Kant and Batteux, see also Young, “Kant’s Musical Antiformalism.” Zammito, Genesis, 23. As far as I can tell, Kant never discusses Du Bos. But since Carl Leonhard Reinhold mentions Du Bos in a January 19, 1788 letter to Kant (Br 10:524), Kant was doubtless aware of him before writing the work of 1790. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, 171. On Wolff and the arts, see Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 50–6; Buchenau, Founding of Aesthetics, 6–10; Guyer, Modern Aesthetics, 47–63; and McQuillan, Early Modern Aesthetics, 62. Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 50.



   ’ 

(understood in a broad, classical sense) and “assigned them a central place in his system,” although McQuillan questions the claim that the place was of the “greatest importance” or “central.” McQuillan concludes that Wolff’s “followers – especially Gottsched, Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, and Lessing – probably deserve more credit than Wolff for enriching philosophy with their investigations of the arts.”23 Without going into the details of Wolff’s system of the manual and liberal arts – which found a place for activities such as woodcutting24 – I suggest that Wolff’s system helped form the general background in which Kant developed his own ideas about art. In particular, Kant seems to have first adopted a broadly Wolffian (expansive) view of the arts, before coming up with his more original view of the arts as “aesthetic” (in turn subdivided into agreeable and fine arts) and his more distinctive take on the contrast between the fine arts (as original productions of genius) and the manual, mechanical arts. Concerning particular media and art forms, Kant was likely aware of the pro-poetry views of Burke as well as of the controversies regarding what can be portrayed in art. In the third Critique, Kant acknowledges Lessing’s and Mendelssohn’s idea that the ugly or disgusting cannot be represented in art (see Chapter 7).25 The claim that sculpture is constrained or limited in at least this sense raises the debate about the various features of the media, and it implicitly raises the question of which medium is superior. Though Burke’s influence on Kant is disputed in the literature, I take Burke’s mark to be quite evident in writings such as the Observations, where Kant develops a clearly Burkean notion of the terrifying sublime.26 But Burke’s influence might also be discerned in Kant’s high estimation of poetry. Kant frequently says that the poet is freer than the painter: the poet is not as bound to a mimetic principle. The poet has “great freedom in thoughts and words” (V-Anth/Fried 25:526). The poet is “happier in fable than in truth” (V-Anth/ Pillau 25:761) – a view that could have been shaped by Burke’s Enquiry. In that work, Burke cites, then criticizes, this line from Horace: “What we learn merely through hearing makes less impression on our minds than what is presented to the faithful eye.”27 He claims instead that (spoken) words have more power to evoke the emotions or passions, since words are not completely “clear” and leave some obscurity, one of the sources of the sublime. Burke writes: “Poetry,

23 24

25 26 27

Ibid., 46–7. McQuillan, Early Modern Aesthetics, 62. Christian Wolff, Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General [Discursus praeliminarius de philosophia in genere (1728)], trans. Richard J. Blackwell (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1963), 4 (§6). Kant cites Lessing at KU 5:322; see also V-Anth/Collins 25:196; V-Anth/Parow 25:388. Kant cites Burke at V-Anth/Collins 25:199 and V-Anth/Parow 25:392. Burke, Enquiry, in Clewis, ed., Sublime Reader, 82.

   



with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the other art.”28 In addition, Kant mentions Jean-Philippe Rameau on music (R 639; 1769; 15:277).29 And he favorably cites the views of painting held by his contemporary Anton Raphael Mengs: A painter is either a mere imitator, or an original, who paints the original. According to the judgment of Mengs – who is still alive – Raphael painted the idea, since he painted the heavenly forms beyond the human. Correggio was a painter of blessedness, since he awakened a gentle play of sensations in us which experience does not give. Titian comes in last place, since he painted nature. (V-Anth/Collins 25:99; my trans.; cf. V-Anth/Parow 25:325–6)

These sentences are far from endorsing a straightforward mimetic principle, for Titian comes in last place because he painted nature. But even when a lecture or fragment mentions an artist or theorist such as Rameau or Mengs, or compares Raphael, Correggio, and Titian, Kant usually does not elaborate or comment extensively. This could of course be due to the limited nature of a lecture transcription or a fragment. Nevertheless, if in classifying the arts Kant is applying his own ideas about the sources of aesthetic pleasure (whether the principle of sensible comprehension or the free play of the faculties), then his thoughts could be more original than his familiar modern scheme might initially suggest. What he defends might be largely a commonplace of the time, but not necessarily the reasoning that led him there. I now examine that development in more detail.

The Development of Kant’s Views of the Fine Arts Over the years, Kant experimented with various schemes for the classification of the fine arts. In the early period, he appeals to the principle of sensible comprehension and uses the notion of beauty as a response to spatial or temporal form in order to distinguish and classify the arts. Once his “free play” theory emerges around the mid-1770s, Kant applies this explanation of the pleasure in beauty to understand the fine arts. Indeed, in §53, Kant organizes his main classification of the arts on the basis of two chief ideas: the principle of the free play of the faculties on the one hand, and the doctrine of aesthetic ideas on the other. 28 29

Ibid. On Rameau, see McQuillan, Early Modern Aesthetics, 45–6. A note in Kant, Notes and Fragments, 614 no. 41, suggests Kant might have been familiar with Rameau’s views from Jean D’Alembert or also through Rousseau’s dispute with Rameau about harmony. For extracts and references to these, see the note by Adickes at AA 15:277–9.



   ’ 

The Reflections and lectures likewise reveal that Kant did not develop the distinction between fine art and handicraft until at least the mid-1770s.30 In the earliest phase of his aesthetics, Kant tends to run the arts and crafts together in a manner reminiscent of Wolff. In a longer Reflection from 1769–70 in which he makes use of the principle of sensible comprehension, he takes a broad view of the arts. The concept of the arts includes remunerative craft or “handicraft.” He even goes so far as to claim that “tactics and maneuvers” are a kind of “beautiful arrangement.” The pictorial or formative arts produce “beautiful form,” which seems to be understood in terms of appearance to the eye or “arrangement.” These image-based arts “concern either merely the form or also the material. That which concerns merely form is landscape design; that which also concerns the material is architecture (even the art of furnishing).” It continues: “To the formative arts there belongs in general the art of producing any beautiful form, such as the art of beautiful vessels, of the goldsmith, the jeweler, the furnisher, even the finery of a woman, just as much as architecture.” He even mentions what would not ordinarily be considered a fine art – “likewise all work of gallantry” (R 683; 15:304–5) – though he does not explain what he means.31 Finally, in a lecture from this time Kant mentions the “art of cooking” or the culinary “arts,” which, Kant adds, give rise to merely empirical generalizations about what pleases (V-Anth/Collins 25:179). This broad understanding of the arts seems to be in line with the extensive sense used by Wolff. The “play” or activity that is crucial to Kant’s understanding of the fine arts in this period is mentioned in another handwritten note from 1769–70. The play is not yet a free harmonious play of the faculties, but a play in sensibility or intuition according to the principle of comprehension. The play of shapes and sensations requires, first, equal divisions of time (uniformity in the measure of time) or beat, 2. a comprehensible proportion that can be drawn from the relation of the alterations of the parts. (R 685; 15:305)

Rather than explaining how such “play” arises from a uniformity or a comprehensible proportion, Kant next introduces a remarkable distinction among charm in dance (here, it seems, he means actually dancing rather than

30

31

An early marginal note on the arts (1764–66) combines physiological, Burke-style thoughts with the view that “harmony arises from the agreement of the manifold”: “The tenderness of the nerves is one of the governing determinations of taste, for through it the degree of contrast or of affect – the hardness of sensations – is restricted, etc. Harmony arises from the agreement of the manifold, in music just as in poesy and painting. These are points of rest for some nerves” (BGSE 20:125; my trans.). On Kant’s taxonomy of the arts from around 1769–70, see Dumouchel, Kant, 164–9.

   



watching a performance),32 charm in music, and ideal charm, where he presents a kind of affect or arousal theory. The charm in dance is either corporeal and rests on the seemly motion of the limbs, that in music on the proportionate movement of the vessels of the body through harmonious tones. Ideal charm rests on the relation that the alterable shapes have on the affects or that which the tones that accompany one another have on the human voice and the expression of sentiment. (R 685; 15:305)

One thus finds the mathematical formal view of music side by side with an arousal theory (cf. KU 5:328–9).33 In the first sentence (“proportionate movement of the vessels of the body through harmonious tones”), Kant suggests that the body mechanistically responds to the mathematically defined movements of the sounds in the air. But Kant – like Batteux – then implies that music moves people when music sounds like, or imitates, the human voice, thereby arousing human emotions and affects. Unfortunately, he never explains how these two ways of understanding music might be compatible. Kant views the fine arts in terms of his theory of play and corresponding principle of comprehension. One feels aesthetic pleasure because of an object’s apparent comprehensibility (Begreiflichkeit), such as its proportion and symmetry (V-Anth/Collins 25:181). All human beings have conditions under which they can represent a great manifold, hence one also has a theme performed that for the above reasons [i.e., concerning proportion] must please everyone. Musicians are called “players;” we can call dancers “players with shapes,” just as with pantomimes. In a garden I find beauty through comprehensibility; if there is no order in it, then I can make no image of it; I see too much at once. If I look at a garden, then I am serious at first sight and seek proportion and symmetry; it pleases only because I am used to representing it that way. (V-Anth/Collins 25:182; my trans.)

The principle of sensible comprehension applies to the experience of several arts (or to their “proportion and symmetry”), not just to nature. Kant gives 32

33

Dance is a play of spatial forms, but accompanied by music. “Dance is to the eye what music is to the ear.” But with music, “there are finer divisions of time in more exact proportion” (R 683; 1769–70; 15:304). On the third Critique’s arousal theory, see Peter Kivy, “Kant and the Affektenlehre,” in The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 250–64. For a critical assessment of Kant’s remarks on music that also pays attention to his relation to eighteenth-century arousal theory and aesthetic rationalism, see Oliver Thorndike, “Kant’s ‘Theory of Music’,” Con-textos Kantianos: International Journal of Philosophy 14 (2021): 416–38.



   ’ 

examples from across the arts: the visual arts, music, pantomime,34 dance, and gardening. A passage from Parow clarifies further what he means by “play,” and it also explains why such play would be pleasing: the “facilitation of intuitive intuition” increases the feeling of life. Our sensible intuitions are either in space, namely the figures [Figuren] and shapes [Gestalten] of things, or in time, namely the play of alternations. Only two aspects apply to the sensible intuition in space, namely proportion of the parts or their harmony, and its regularity, which includes symmetry and eurythmia. An order of things in time one calls a “play,” and a play of shapes is its alternation in time. In good music, there are similarly two aspects, namely beat [Tackt], or an equal division of time; and secondly when many tones are unified, a harmony [Consonanz], or a proportion of tones, is promoted. This pleases because everything that increases our life elicits this effect in us, which one can certainly say about a facilitation of intuitive intuition, as human beings cannot represent a greatest manifold any other way. (V-Anth/Parow 25:378–9; my trans.; emphasis added)

In this early period, Kant calls architecture and music “disciplines.” Kant typically opposes discipline to “criticism,” a term associated with Kames (as in his Elements of Criticism) and Hume. Kant thinks that architecture and music are disciplines because they are a matter of pleasing relations in space and in time – again in line with his principle of sensible comprehension. “If the relations that constitute the ground of beauty are relations of quality (e.g., identity and difference, contrast, liveliness, etc.): then no discipline is possible, and even less science, but merely criticism” (R 626; 1769 or perhaps 1765–68 or 1771; 15:272). Here Kant contrasts quality with quantity, or mathematical relations (iteration of units in space) that make up the “form of the beautiful.” On such a view, even architecture can be a discipline. “Architecture (in the general sense) (the art of horticulture, etc.) is a discipline, likewise music. For in the former it is a matter of pleasing relations in the division of space, in the latter with regard to time” (ibid.).35 In the mid-1770s, Kant begins to hold that the arts are distinguished from each other by how they elicit a free harmonious play of the faculties, that is, their various kinds of “free play” carried out while attending to an object “without a purpose.” Music is understood as a play of impressions, style or rhetoric as a play of concepts, and poetry as a play of images. The arts of shape or figure (Gestalt) (i.e., architecture and horticulture) and the arts of attitude (Stellung) and gesture (Geberdung) (i.e., furnishings and costume) are

34

35

Pantomime, for Kant, is an “intuitive form of a series of human shapes” (R 683; 1769–70; 15:304). See also Clewis, Kant’s Humorous Writings, 41–2. On Kant’s “strong formalism,” see Chapter 2.

   



considered in terms of a play of intuitions. As Dumouchel observes,36 Kant comes close to approximating the third Critique’s tripartite division into the arts of speech, pictorial or intuitive arts, and the arts of the play of sensation (see Figure 5.1): Business is different from play. The former is on account of the idea and has a purpose; the latter is an occupation without a purpose. The play of impressions (music). Of concepts (style). Of images (poesy). . . . Free play. (A forced play is a contradiction.) A free play in wilderness, an artificial play in the garden. . . . The play of intuitions is either with regard to shape or to attitude (gesture). The play of intuitions is found in edifices, furnishings, dress, garden. . . . Play demands genius, purpose rules. Play entertains the sociable sentiments of the mind or at least what is social, e.g., emulation. (R 807; 1776–78; 15:358–9)

Given Kant’s increased attention to the concept of genius during this period (cf. R 812; 1776–78; 15:361), it is not surprising that Kant discusses the arts in terms of genius as well as play (“Play demands genius”). This provides additional support to the link between genius and play suggested in the previous chapter. Moreover, it is noteworthy that Kant thinks that one can have a play of intuitions in response to works of architecture (edifices), furnishing, dress, and gardening – even if they are otherwise useful and functional. In other words, it is possible to have a “play of intuitions” in response to objects that are typically seen in light of their purposes. Finally, what is absent here is also relevant. Kant makes no explicit link between aesthetics and morality, although this would have been an appropriate connection to make in such a fragment. Instead, he sees the play as merely entertaining and as engaging the social dimensions of human beings (“social sentiments of the mind”). In a dense Reflection from about the same period (R 1485; 1775–77; 15:700–4), Kant catalogs the various kinds of fabricating capacities – from inventing in general, to devising, poetizing (as in the fine arts), fictionalizing, to making something up and even lying. He now separates the handicrafts (inventions, knacks) from the fine arts (e.g., poetry) that involve a “play of imagination.” This distinction, I believe, arises due to the introduction of a new account of the source of aesthetic pleasure as well as to the development of his notions of aesthetic ideas and genius, which in turn developed in large part in response to reading Gerard at this time, as discussed in the previous chapter. Kant lists the various roles or capacities of imagination:

36

Dumouchel, Kant, 245.



   ’  Devise (enjoyment, festivity, fashion): to invent (through effort) a practical knack, e.g., with handicrafts. Means of carrying out some inventions. . . . Poeticize. The imagination voluntarily stretches to something new. Well poeticized but moderately thought. (With imagination, attempt new representations – with the understanding, think.) (The aim is here directed not at an object, but merely at the play of the imagination). . . . Fictionalize. To not distinguish the fictitious from the true. (Hypotheses are fictitious [gedichtet]. But: make up [andichten] false forces for nature.). (R 1485; 15:700; cf. V-Anth/Pillau 25:759)

In this fragment, Kant also describes the various arts in terms of the distinction between purposive business and entertainment “in itself,” as well as the idea that the pleasure in beauty is due to a harmonious movement of the mental powers. “Fine arts,” he writes, are “arts that move the mental powers harmoniously and to activation (entertainment, pleasing in itself ).” They are products not “of mere understanding,” but “of the poetic power.” He divides the arts into the “material” or “spiritual (speaking).” The material is either of lasting influence “(permanent product)” and a matter of “the shape,” or it is “transient” as in music and dance. Painting is poeticizing “through imagination,” while using nontransitory materials. In contrast, with music and dance, the material is “transitory.” Reminiscent of one aspect of his account of music in the third Critique, he states that music consists in “poeticizing through mere sensation” (R 1485, 15:701). He also distinguishes the inventor from the poet, or the “spirit of invention” from “poetic gift.” He writes: “The latter has a free play of the ideas [Ideen] and images [Bilder], if it is only living (subjective); the former must harmonize with objective conditions of knowledge.” This difference is the source, he claims, of “poetic entertainment” as well as why the poet proper is financially poor: unlike painters, poets “do not entertain for very long” and do so “only through thoughts.” Invention is a “business” where one aims to create something that will bring enjoyment (R 1485, 15:704). Whereas the poet has a free play of ideas and images, the inventor of handicraft and “knacks” must agree with objective conditions of knowledge in creating something useful or functional. This question of agreement with the “objective conditions of knowledge” can be connected to the question of mimesis in art. Should art imitate nature? Kant sometimes appears to endorse a mimetic principle and thus to think that art (typically painting) should imitate nature. In paradigmatic landscape paintings and portraits, he writes in around 1765, it is fine to “capture” nature (BGSE 20:124–5). And according to a fragment written about four years later, painting and sculpture are called imitative: “The arts are either formative or imitative. The latter are painting and sculpture” (R 683; 1769–70; 15:304).

   



But his view of imitation in the arts is more complicated than it looks. While he does claim that in landscape paintings and portraits can capture the natural landscape or appearance of a person, he adds that painting may sometimes depart from nature whenever nature is “not good enough” to elicit aesthetic pleasure, and he holds that poetry and theater can do this as well (BGSE 20:124–5). Likewise, as noted above, about seven years later (1772/73) Kant approvingly cites Mengs’s view that painting can show an ideal reality and that some painters (e.g., Raphael) are better at portraying ideal reality than others (V-Anth/Collins 25:99; V-Anth/Parow 25:325–6). In the late 1770s, Kant adds a further layer of complexity, likely due to the development of his notions of genius and its “ideas.” In a Reflection from 1776–78, Kant describes fine art as having “the formative power that competes with nature (in the appearance)” (R 959, 15:423). He writes: “It must have its rule, which however has subjective principles, hence the compatibility of a free exercise of our powers with our laws. It is a creation in accordance with our own sense” (ibid.). According to a note from 1776–78, the beautiful “lies in” ideas supplied by spirit (Geist) or genius: “The means of the beautiful is art, the rule [of the beautiful], nature. Nature is not the model of the beautiful, for the beautiful lies in ideas” (R 1855; 16:138).37 With such claims, Kant appears to create a tension between his adherence to a mimetic principle and his going beyond it. Such tension, I think, persists into the published work of 1790 and beyond. On the one hand, Kant writes that painting proper has the aim of “the beautiful depiction of nature” – which sounds like the endorsement of a mimetic principle (KU 5:322). On the other hand, he claims that painting is a mere imitation of nature with respect to aesthetic ideas. “A mere picture, which is made strictly for viewing and is to please for itself, is, as a corporeal presentation, a mere imitation of nature, though with respect to aesthetic ideas” (KU 5:322). The reference to aesthetic ideas arguably entails that the sensible images provided by the imagination can go far beyond accurately representing and imitating nature.38 In any case, not only is it unclear what it means to have “a mere imitation of nature . . . with respect to aesthetic ideas,” the claim is complicated by Kant’s view that beauty in general (including the beauty of nature) is itself the expression of aesthetic ideas (KU 5:320). It is unclear that this tension is ever resolved. Thankfully, for readers today who might desire a more expansive view of the arts without being tied to a mimetic principle, this may not be so undesirable. 37

38

The “ideas” supplied by “spirit,” and in which beauty is said to reside, can be seen as a precursor to the 1790 view of aesthetic ideas (see also Chapter 4). Compare Anthropology: “The painter of nature with paintbrush or pen . . . is not the beautiful spirit [schöne Geist], because he only imitates; the painter of ideas alone is the master of beautiful/fine art” (Anth 7:248).



   ’ 

According to the Pillau anthropology lecture, Kant uses the notion of free play to distinguish between rhetoric as primarily a business of the understanding and poetry as a play of sensibility. Kant then classifies the arts in terms of his theory of the harmonious free play: “To enliven the powers of the mind harmoniously are thus the fine arts, and the powers of the mind are the understanding and sensibility.” A few lines later, the transcription continues: The art of poetry coincides with music. For it also considers a measured beat [Tackt]. Rhetoric is a proper business of the understanding, but is enlivened through the play of the imagination. Poesy, however, is a business of sensibility, which the understanding orders. All fine arts are distinguished from the useful. Useful ones do not please immediately, but only by means of utility; but fine ones please immediately. The occupations [Beschäftigungen] that please immediately are not businesses [Geschäfte]; but the occupation that displeases immediately and pleases only by means of utility is work. Everything that moves the powers of the mind harmoniously pleases immediately. (V-Anth/Pillau 25:760–1)

In the sentences at the end, Kant distinguishes the fine from the useful arts in terms of immediacy and utility. A few pages later, the transcription revisits the issue but puts the distinction in terms of the mechanical arts of “industry” as opposed to the fine arts of “genius” that are capable of spirit. According to the Pillau ranking of the arts, poetry is the superior art form. Kant claims that poetry is freer (“happier”) than painting and rhetoric because poetry is less tied to nature. The more painting can be freed from imitating nature, Kant implies, the better. “In order to paint nature, the painter must remain faithful to nature, and in this way he is indeed restricted; but art will never be able to reach nature. By contrast, in mythology there are Arcadian shepherds and the poet is happy everywhere he can give free rein to the imagination” (V-Anth/Pillau 25:761–2; my trans.). Kant ranks higher the poet who enlivens the imagination through ideas.39 What about the link to morality? In the last phase of his aesthetics (that is, after December 1787), Kant continues to use the concept of genius to distinguish fine art from handicraft (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1493). Unfortunately, there is little textual evidence that can help clarify how Kant came to develop and refine his view of the complex connection between the fine arts and morality. One fragment touches on the issue, but it is hard to date more precisely than to

39

The Menschenkunde transcription treats the fine arts in the familiar terms of a play of “ideas” and of “sensations” (V-Anth/Mensch 25:1000; see 986–1003). But it also characterizes painting and sculpture as fine arts in which the creative imagination represents things in appearance (Apparenz, Schein), playing with illusion (Illusion) (V-Anth/Mensch 25:1000).

   



say it is from between 1780 and 1789 (R 1928; 16:159). Unlike neo-Platonic thinkers, Kant does not identify the good and beautiful; instead, while giving a variation of his familiar distinction between the beautiful and the good, in the fragment he at most draws an analogy between “beauty and virtue.” The fragment concerns beauty in general, not experiences of the fine arts in particular, and it leaves undetermined how exactly the fine arts are supposed to support or promote morality. As can be seen from this section, over the decades in which Kant thought about matters of taste and the fine arts, he experimented with various ways of understanding the nature, classification, and hierarchy of the arts. Once his theory of the free harmony of the faculties was in place, he used it to understand the nature of the various arts.

The Third Critique Reconsidered Given the shift from an almost exclusive focus on beauty in art to an emphasis on natural beauty (arc 1), it is unsurprising that Kant discusses fine art only at the end of the “Analytic of the Beautiful.” It may be disappointing to philosophers of art that he only considers the topic at the end of the “Analytic,” but it makes sense in light of the broader philosophical aims of Kant’s work. In light of his calling free (nonconceptual) beauty “self-standing” (arc 2), it likewise makes sense to save fine art for the end of the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” at least if there is a close connection between adherent beauty and art, conceived of as guided and informed by concepts. Indeed, it is tempting to interpret the beauty in art as necessarily a kind of adherent beauty, given that an artist creates the work with particular intentions and aims in mind. A passage from §48 might at first seem to support the widespread interpretation that necessarily links art and perfection (and thus adherent beauty), but the matter is not so simple, even if I cannot go into the details here. Kant claims, in what can be seen as a matter of analytic conceptual implication, that if the object is “given as a product of art,” then “in the judging of the beauty of art, the perfection of the thing will also have to be taken into account” (KU 5:311).40 Setting this issue aside, if one grants (as I do) that, in the typical case, as a matter of human psychology, perceivers usually do take into account the “perfection” (functions, purposes, aims) of the object when judging works of art, it makes sense to see Kant’s views of fine art somewhat as an appendix to a more basic theory of free beauty that is more closely linked to the beauty of nature and to which a separate deduction is devoted.

40

As noted, I do not think Kant is committed to viewing art as necessarily a kind of adherent beauty. In fact, some of Kant’s examples of free beauties are works of art: fantasias and “all music without a text” (KU 5:229; cf. 231).



   ’ 

The third arc (the shift to aesthetic ideas) is quite fundamental to Kant’s views of fine art, since aesthetic ideas animate art and give it spirit. As explained in this chapter and in the previous one, that is why fine art, for Kant, is the creation of genius. As noted, the notions of genius and aesthetic ideas are two of Kant’s more original contributions to thinking about the arts. Kant understands and classifies the arts in terms of the principle of sensible comprehension and then, starting in the mid-1770s, in terms of his notion of a free play between imagination and understanding. Accordingly, he uses his conception of the source of aesthetic pleasure to identify the nature of the arts as well as to classify them. In the third Critique, the list of the arts remains basically the same as in the early aesthetics, though it reflects Kant’s gradually moving away from an expansive view of the arts (à la Wolff) to one that more firmly distinguishes between the fine and agreeable art and that contrasts fine art and handicraft. The scheme in the third Critique is based on the principles of harmonious free play between the faculties, on the one hand, and, on the other, spirit (Geist) as the capacity for expressing ideas through the fine arts. Kant appears to come to this position by the mid to late 1770s: “There are arts capable of spirit such as horticulture, and spiritless arts such as handicraft” (R 958; 1776–78; 15:422). Once Kant had in hand a theory of aesthetic ideas and genius, it was hard to retain a (broadly) Wolffian view of the manual and the liberal arts, and he needed to distinguish fine art from handicraft and the mechanical art. How about the other half of the fourth arc, aesthetic normativity, or the justification of the normativity of aesthetic judgments? If, in the early aesthetics, normativity is grounded on the principle of sensible comprehension and then, after late 1787, on the a priori principle of feeling pleasure and displeasure (of aesthetic judgment), how do models and great artworks affect his approach to normativity? According to Kant’s early aesthetics, exemplary works supply empirical standards or “rules” for the judging of other works: models guide and shape aesthetic judgments.41 In the work of 1790, however, Kant argues that judgments of taste are based on an a priori principle. Models and exemplary works of genius continue to be relevant – they are used in the art schools and employed to refine judgment among audiences – but they do not indicate the correctness of an aesthetic judgment. There are no determinate or conceptually determined criteria for aesthetic judgment that would allow for the possibility of a science of criticism. 41

The view that aesthetic judgment is guided by exemplary models rather than based on universal a priori rules – reflecting a consensus-based approach – is a frequent theme in the logic Reflections and lectures. See R 1823; about 1772–75; 16:129. R 1851; 1776–78; 16:137. R 1869; 1776–78; 16:144. In the logic lectures, see V-Lo/Blom 24:46; V-Lo/Phil 24:349; and V-Lo/Wien 24:807, 812. Cf. the note in Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 372 no. 46. See also Chapter 1.

   



Finally, Kant’s thinking about the arts reflects his late moral turn and his interest in showing how it is possible to make a transition from thinking according to laws of nature to thinking according to freedom. In early Reflections and lectures, Kant offers some eighteenth-century commonplaces about how the arts support morality in general, but he does not explain how this might work. Any relation between morality and the arts, on the early account, is direct and simple rather than dialectical, as it is on the mature view, according to which practical reason takes a second-order interest in firstorder, aesthetic experiences. In the third Critique, Kant (at least implicitly) suggests or implies that the disinterested experience of morally significant artworks could potentially support morality.42 In any case, in §52 he writes that only “if the beautiful arts are . . . combined . . . with moral ideas” do they retain their enduring attraction; otherwise, they quickly lose their appeal (KU 5:326). If the art lacks a connection to morality, Kant implies, it would be better to concentrate one’s attention on the beauties of nature.

Concluding Remarks Kant consistently ranks poetry at the top of the arts. Poetry is not just a kind of play, but a play with ideas that have robust conceptual content, expressed in vivid imagery. Kant writes: “In the art of poetry, genius has its true field, for to poeticize [dichten] is to create [erschaffen]” (R 812; 1776–78; 15:361).43 By virtue of its intrinsic link to the imagination and genius, poetry is the art form par excellence, as if the capacity to poetize is best exemplified by and made concrete in poetry. In addition, poetry also makes use of rhyme, rhythm, and versification, thereby benefitting from some of the features of music, an art form that is more immediately tied to sensation. After poetry, the other art of speech is rhetoric. Kant understands rhetoric in terms of a play between sensibility (or imagination) and the understanding that is nevertheless led by the concepts used in a speech or discourse, rather than, as in poetry, guided by the imagination and its sensible images. Painting proper is seen as an often (but not necessarily) imitative art; as noted, Kant is not always clear about whether painting must imitate nature. What is clear is that he esteems painting as an art form that is very well suited to exhibit and express aesthetic ideas. Sculpture seems to be more closely tied to imitation than painting is. Painting proper can represent the ugly, but only if it depicts the object in a beautiful manner. In contrast, sculpture cannot 42

43

Yet even here Kant refrains from arguing that artistic beauty can be the object of a second-order, “intellectual” (rather than empirical) interest. For an argument that he could and should have explored the possibility of taking an intellectual interest in artistic beauty rather than in natural beauty alone, see Clewis, Kantian Sublime, 160–3. See also Dumouchel, Kant, 245.



   ’ 

actually represent the disgusting – lest aesthetic disinterest break down and the work itself become a source of disgust (see Chapter 7). Music consistently occupies an ambiguous position in Kant’s thought, depending on whether he emphasizes music’s ability to move and to arouse affects, or instead underscores its mathematical-formal elements or even its potential to be connected to aesthetic ideas. Dance is viewed in terms of a play of figures in time, accompanied by music. It would perhaps be possible to understand dance in terms of the sensible expression of aesthetic ideas, but Kant does not elaborate or pursue the point. He sometimes views architecture and horticulture in terms of symmetry and proportion, and when he does so, it seems to be either an application of the principle of sensible comprehension of his early phase or, if found in the published work, at least a remnant of it. At the same time, architecture and horticulture are also often seen in terms of their connection to utility and instrumental goodness.44 Edifices (such as churches or arsenals) and gardens (whether Japanese or English or French) can fulfill their respective functions in the ways explained in Chapter 3. The key here is that, in experiences of beauty, the imagination be expanded while avoiding (as some French gardens do not) a nauseating regularity or symmetry. At the same time, the imagination should not be stretched to the point of excess and extravagant freedom, as English gardens risk doing. Kant sees some works of architecture as capable of evoking responses of bewilderment (e.g., Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome) or an expanded imagination (e.g., the pyramids of Giza), both of which are aspects of experiences of the sublime. In the next two chapters, I examine the sublime and the ugly, two concepts used to make sense of some works of modern and contemporary art.

44

Menzer, Entwicklung, 20, 170, notes that when Kant discusses architecture at all, it tends to be in terms of the relation of purposiveness to beauty.

PART III Negative and Positive States

6 Meet the Sublime Now: It’s a Negative Pleasure

By looking at the sources and development of the account of the sublime Kant presents in the third Critique, I hope to reveal some of the continuities and discontinuities in his thinking about this central topic in modern aesthetics. As noted in my introduction, however, in this book I do not carry out an archeological or genetic reconstruction of the parts of the third Critique. On the dates of composition of sections such as the “Analytic of the Sublime,” I build upon the work of other scholars, who suggest that Kant composed the “Analytic of the Sublime” relatively late.1 Accordingly, I will give a very brief overview of the third Critique account, discuss some of the modern authors Kant engaged with, and examine the evolution of his thinking about the sublime.2

Feeling Oneself Free: The Sublime in the Third Critique Kant presents his theory of the sublime in §23 to §30 of the third Critique.3 Since I have presented my interpretation of the Critical account of the sublime 1

2

3

On the dating of the section on the sublime, see Zammito, Genesis, 275. He reviews the work of James Meredith, Michel Souriau, and Giorgio Tonelli. See also Serena Feloj, Il sublime nel pensiero di Kant (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2013), 100–8, which discusses the work of Dario Drivet, Souriau, Tonelli, and Zammito. In 2001, Piero Giordanetti pointed out the absence of a detailed study of the development of Kant’s ideas on the sublime. Piero Giordanetti, L’estetica fisiologica di Kant (Milano: Mimesis, 2001), 91 n. See the later analysis by Feloj, Il sublime, 53–98. While my approach resonates with Feloj’s, I here focus only on the aesthetic aspects of the sublime (rather than the sublime in Kant’s Critical ethical writings), and I engage with Kant’s lectures and numerous Reflections in greater detail – though Feloj does discuss the sublime in Kant’s lectures (90–8) as well as his marginal notes (Bemerkungen) from 1764–66. Kap Hyun Park devotes a chapter to the genesis of the sublime in Kant’s early lectures and Reflections. See Kap Hyun Park, Kant über das Erhabene (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009), 49–80, which emphasizes the sublime’s being grounded in the subject. On Kant’s developing views of the sublime, see also Dumouchel, Kant, 43–8, 72–5, 105–6. Though the “Analytic of the Sublime” officially ends at §29, in §30 Kant explains why the sublime does not require a “deduction” beyond the already given “exposition,” and why a deduction is needed only for “objects of nature” that are judged beautiful (KU 5:279).





   ’ 

elsewhere, I will not devote much space to his views of the sublime in the third Critique, but restrict myself to a few points that seem most relevant to understanding the sources and development of Kant’s views, beginning with the basic distinction between the mathematical and the dynamical sublime.4 The experience of the sublime arises from an interaction between imagination and reason (KU 5:266), which in turn divides into its theoretical and practical forms. In §24, Kant thus distinguishes the mathematical and the dynamical sublime (KU 5:247), based on whether the imagination interacts with theoretical or practical reason. The two kinds of experiences arise because a “movement” of the mind in the sublime “is related through the imagination either to the faculty of cognition or to the faculty of desire” (KU 5:247). The experience of the mathematical sublime involves a relation between imagination to the faculty of cognition (reason as theoretical faculty). The experience is a response to perceived extent or vastness. The experience of the dynamical sublime, in contrast, involves a relation between imagination (as sensibility) and the faculty of desire (reason as a practical faculty): it is a response to perceived power or great might. In the end, however, it is reason itself (or an idea of reason) that is revealed to be sublime. What is sublime is not the external power of nature or the Kraft without, nor is it the power of nature within (the imagination, Einbildungskraft), but the power of reason.5 In the sublime, the object that functions as the stimulus of the experience is vast or powerful (or both). In trying to perceive the vast or powerful object all at once, a person responds with a mixture of pain and pleasure. Although the overall experience of the sublime is pleasant, the experience has a complex, negative-to-positive structure. Thus, the experience of the sublime is a “negative pleasure.” The negative aspect here arises because, on account of its size or power, the object initially appears overwhelming or menacing. But experiences of the sublime, like those of beauty (KU 5:222), are ultimately pleasing experiences – and thus can be called positive.

4

5

On the aesthetic judgment of the sublime and on dependent (adherent) sublimity, see Clewis, Kantian Sublime, 56–125 and 96–108, respectively. For an argument against the widespread view of the Kantian sublime as necessarily involving self-directed attention, see Robert R. Clewis, “Imagination, Vital Forces, and Self-Consciousness in the Kantian Sublime,” in Kant and the Feeling of Life, ed. Mensch. For my own proposal regarding a theory of the sublime, see Robert R. Clewis, “Towards a Theory of the Sublime and Aesthetic Awe,” in Sublime Reader, 340–54. These ideas were refined and developed in Robert R. Clewis, “Why the Sublime Is Aesthetic Awe,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 79, no. 3 (2021): 301–14. To explain the experience of the mathematical sublime, Kant recycles stock examples such as the starry sky, the pyramids of Giza, and St. Peter’s (see also GSE 2:209–10). For the starry sky, see, e.g., Johann Jakob Bodmer’s 1741 work, Kritische Betrachtungen über die poetische Gemälde der Dichter (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1971), 223–4.

   : ’   



In the case of the mathematical sublime, the imagination tries to bring into one representation the idea of infinity that a vast object brings to mind, yet the imagination inevitably fails in its efforts. But in so failing it gives a sensible impression of the power of reason. In the case of the dynamical sublime, a powerful object such as a mighty waterfall poses a potential threat, though one is in a safe position (or at least feels safe). The body feels threatened by the power of nature. You imagine what it would be like to match up to it, but you realize that in any such contest you would fail. Nevertheless, this stretching of the imagination awakens a feeling of an even greater ability: freedom as a capacity to choose. This feeling is not to be identified with a rational or conceptual recognition.6 You sense the power within. Since this point is sometimes missed by empirical researchers and psychologists working on awe and the sublime, it is worth emphasizing that a person feeling the sublime does not feel fear. Being afraid is incompatible with the aesthetic experience of the sublime and it would vitiate one of its four conditions: disinterestedness. While the object may be so powerful that it is ordinarily experienced as threatening, to experience the sublime, Kant states, we must “find ourselves in a position of safety” (KU 5:261). Although the powerful object eliciting the experience of the dynamical sublime is “fearful,” we are not (in the experience of the sublime) actually afraid of it. “We can, however, consider an object as fearful without being afraid of it” (KU 5:260). A few lines later Kant clarifies: “In our aesthetic judgment nature is judged as sublime not insofar as it arouses fear, but rather because it calls forth our power . . . to regard those things about which we are concerned (goods, health and life) as trivial” (KU 5:262). And at the end of §28, Kant states that in the experience of the sublime one exercises the capacity for “judging nature without fear” (KU 5:264).7 In this way, Kant’s Critical account differs from that of Burke, who sees the experience of the sublime as originating in terror, albeit modified. In both the mathematical and dynamical kinds of the sublime, then, a potentially conflicting relation to a vast or powerful object is overcome in an ultimately harmonious relation between imagination and reason. Kant 6

7

In Clewis, “Imagination,” I argue that the sensory experience of freedom in the sublime need not (though it may) rise to the level of self-consciousness in an empirical sense, that is, self-directed attention. This way of interpreting Kant not only seems more plausible, it also seems more consistent with his transcendental method. Crowther rightly avoids the “self-awareness” or “reflexivity” interpretation, which is admittedly widespread. Paul Crowther, Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 124. This point leads to a fundamental reason why I deny that aesthetic responses to objects or events having moral content, or to representations or depictions of moral content, can (as many interpreters allege) be properly understood within the framework of the dynamical sublime: the moral law, unlike elicitors of the dynamical sublime, can never be fearsome.



   ’ 

sometimes describes the movement between the negative and positive moments, or between feeling overwhelmed and overcoming that feeling, as an oscillation or vibration. In the sublime, “the mind is not merely attracted by the object, but is also always reciprocally repelled by it” (KU 5:245). “This movement (especially in its inception) may be compared to a vibration, i.e., to a rapidly alternating repulsion from and attraction to one and the same object” (KU 5:258). In other places, however, Kant gives a different description of the “negative pleasure” in the sublime. He characterizes it as a momentary confinement followed by a release. I think of this as a dam-and-release. Unfortunately, Kant does not attempt to reconcile the two views. He presents the dam-and-release account at the end of §14, when he distinguishes beauty from the emotion (Rührung) in the sublime: “Emotion, a sensation in which agreeableness is produced only by means of a momentary inhibition followed by a stronger outpouring of the vital force, does not belong to beauty at all (KU 5:226).8 He describes the dam-and-release view again at the beginning of the “Analytic of the Sublime” (§23). The sublime “is a pleasure that arises only indirectly, being generated, namely, by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital powers and the immediately following and all the more powerful outpouring of them” (KU 5:244–5). It is worth noting that Kant is not very clear or consistent about what exactly is sublime. He indicates various candidates for what the term refers to and picks out: particular ideas of reason such as freedom or infinity (the absolutely great), reason itself, the (rational) mind (KU 5:264), a rational way of thinking (KU 5:280), human nature (qua free) (KU 5:280), the human moral vocation, the supersensible, and feelings or experiences in the typical eighteenth-century British sense (KU 5:264). Rather than saddling Kant with just one sense of the term, it may be sufficient to keep in mind which sense of the sublime is at hand. This brings up a related point about Kant’s use of the term “sublime.” Sometimes Kant writes – especially in the Critical ethical writings like the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason – about the sublime (das Erhabene, the raised) as the elevated. In such cases, the “sublime” is used in an adjectival sense or as an 8

The notion of the “outpouring” of life forces echoes Burke’s empirical account of the sublime. Burke’s Enquiry became known in Germany largely through a review that Mendelssohn published in Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften (“Library of the Beautiful Sciences”) in 1758. Burke’s influence can be seen in the theories offered by Mendelssohn’s essay on the sublime and by Kant’s Observations. Kant later calls Burke the “foremost author” of this empirical approach (KU 5:277). Given Mendelssohn’s review, the outlines of the Enquiry would already have been known to Kant in 1764, when he published the Observations. Lessing started but abandoned a translation of the Enquiry, and Christian Garve’s (anonymous) translation of it was published in 1773. See also the notes in Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 352 no. 10, 362 no. 27.

   : ’   



adjective.9 Thus, it is analytically true to say that a rational mind or way of thinking is sublime because it is raised (i.e., elevated above nature). When Kant says that a morally oriented kind of sadness is sublime if or “since it rests on ideas” (KU 5:276), it simply means that the sadness is based on moral judgments about the world: such judging requires freedom, or elevation over nature. Like the judgment of beauty, the judgment of the sublime has the four necessary conditions of pure aesthetic judgment. Kant applies all four of the conditions (corresponding to quantity, quality, relation, and modality) to judgments of the sublime as follows: For as a judgment of the aesthetic reflecting power of judgment, the satisfaction in the sublime, just like that in the beautiful, must be represented as universally valid in its quantity, as without interest in its quality, as subjective purposiveness in its relation, and the latter, as far as its modality is concerned, as necessary. (KU 5:247)

It is easy to miss that even in the Critical account the sublime is supposed to have (subjective) universal validity or make a claim to intersubjective validity. This point is important since in his early aesthetics Kant denies that experiences of the sublime have universal validity.

Ideas about the Sublime Shaping Kant’s Views I focus on a few authors whose ideas of the sublime were clearly known to Kant, especially those who, unlike Burke, have been less covered in the literature on the sublime.10 But first, Longinus. The unidentified author of On the Sublime plays a founder’s role in the conventional narrative of the sublime. Kant never mentions Longinus (or pseudo-Longinus) by name, although he was aware of some of his ideas. The unidentified author “C.F.R.“ mentions Longinus at the start of the February 1, 1774 letter to Kant that I cited at the beginning of my Introduction (Br 10:146). And in a letter to Kant just a few weeks later 9

10

I thank Oliver Sensen for pointing this out to me at the Eleventh International Kant Congress in Pisa in 2010. In a similar vein, Feloj points out that in the Observations and in the Critical ethical writings, “sublime” is primarily used as an adjective (modifying the moral law, or freedom) rather than as a noun (the feeling or judgment of the sublime). Feloj, Il sublime, 63; see also 73–4. Addison and Kames, whose writings in aesthetics Kant knew, describe the concept of grandeur, which, though similar to the sublime, is more positive and aligned with beauty. Grandeur is often associated with splendid works of architecture – like the category of the magnificent sublime that Kant presents in the Observations. For a useful overview of grandeur, see Brady, The Sublime, 29–30, 168–71.



   ’ 

(April 7, 1774), Hamann mocks Longinus’s admiration for Genesis while praising his “friend Herder” (Br 10:157). In his lectures on anthropology in the 1780s, Kant twice recounts Longinus’s comparison of the stylistic Cicero to the rousing Demosthenes. According to the lecture transcriptions, however, Kant never names Longinus in these two instances (V-Anth/Mensch 25:988; V-Anth/Mron 25:1256). He appears to have been uninterested in directly commenting on Longinus’s treatise.11 Though Baumgarten and Mendelssohn have not been completely overlooked in the conventional histories of the sublime, they are usually portrayed as having only moderate importance in the sublime’s history. Nearly all of the histories or narratives either skip over Baumgarten’s theory or mention him in passing as one of the founders of “aesthetics” – without any substantial discussion of his theory of the sublime, aesthetic dignity, or aesthetic majesty. Dagmar Mirbach, who translated Baumgarten’s Aesthetica into German, observes that the chapter devoted to magnitudo aesthetica (§177 to §422) is “hitherto almost unread.”12 Though nearly all of the histories of the sublime overlook Baumgarten on the sublime and how he fits into the narrative about the sublime, his contribution deserves to be better understood, not just for its own sake, but also since his aesthetics profoundly shaped Kant’s aesthetic theory.13 Baumgarten’s aesthetic theory at first appears to leave little room for the sublime, since it is associated with his views of beauty as the perfection of sensible cognition. But a sizeable portion of the Aesthetica is devoted to the 11

12

13

Kant never mentions either Nicolas Boileau (Despréaux) or John Dennis, two prominent writers on the sublime. If Boileau and Dennis made their mark on Kant, it was through the mediation of other figures such as Burke, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. Kant never appears to comment on the medieval use of sublimis in Bonaventure or Aquinas, or on Petrarch, or on Anna Aikin. For excerpts and references to these, see Clewis, ed., Sublime Reader. Dagmar Mirbach, “Magnitudo aesthetica, Aesthetic Greatness: Ethical Aspects of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Fragmentary Aesthetica,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics nos. 36–7 (2008/2009): 102–28, 103. Mirbach’s article, which is based on the Introduction to her 2007 German translation of Aesthetica, is one of the few philosophical studies devoted to Baumgarten on the sublime. For a historical and theological overview mentioning Baumgarten and the sublime, see Martin Fritz, Vom Erhabenen. Der Traktat ‘Peri Hybsous’ und seine aesthetisch-religiöse Renaissance im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Mohr Siebek, 2011), 230–83. Guyer briefly discusses Baumgarten on aesthetic magnitude or the sublime, in Guyer, Modern Aesthetics, 333–5. See also Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 122. Baumgarten’s account of the sublime is not substantively analyzed (if mentioned at all) in any of the following surveys or collected volumes on the sublime: Timothy Costelloe, ed., The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), though Paul Guyer examines it briefly in his chapter (103–4). James Kirwan, Sublimity: The Non-Rational and the Irrational in the History of Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2005). Philip Shaw, The Sublime [second edn.] (London: Routledge, 2017).

   : ’   



sublime, and it is discussed in numerous sections on “aesthetic magnitude” (Sections 15 to 26 and paragraphs §177 to §422).14 At almost 250 paragraphs, the part on aesthetic magnitude makes up the book’s longest chapter.15 Contemporary scholars have highlighted the practical-ethical and theological aspects of Baumgarten’s aesthetics. A goal of aesthetics, for Baumgarten, is to acquire, among other things, an aesthetic habit.16 Another goal is to exhibit virtue in its various sensible forms and expressions.17 Aesthetics, in other words, is part of cultivating the whole person. This moral or practical dimension is also evident in the case of the sublime.18 When Baumgarten writes about aesthetic magnitude or greatness (magnitudo),19 aesthetic dignity or nobility,20 and aesthetic majesty, he is in fact writing about the sublime. Although at some level there may be minor differences between the concepts of the aesthetically great, dignified, noble, majestic, and sublime, he appears to think of them as being mostly interchangeable.21 The sublime, for Baumgarten, is a kind of beauty, since a sublime cognition requires the perfection of the sensible. Beauty arises from the presence of six qualities or criteria of sensory cognition: richness/abundance/wealth (ubertas), magnitude/greatness (magnitudo), truth (veritas),22 light or clarity (lux), certainty (certitudo), and life (vita). In Aesthetica, Baumgarten examines these six criteria under the heading “heuristics” (though he died before he could write 14 15

16

17 18

19

20 21 22

Baumgarten, Asthetica, §1. Translations of Baumgarten are my own. The passages on the sublime range from Section 15 on “aesthetic magnitude” starting at §177, through Section 26, the “greatest magnanimity in aesthetics” ending with §422. Section 21 is entitled, “The Sublime Way of Thinking.” Grote, Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory, 128–41. Buchenau, Founding of Aesthetics, 148. Marbach, in Baumgarten, Aesthetica, 966 no. 3, on §211. On Baumgarten’s use of the notion of aesthetic magnitude to develop the ethical dimension of his thought, see Salvatore Tedesco’s Introduction to Baumgarten, L’Estetica, 15. In his chapters on aesthetic magnitude, Baumgarten distinguishes systematically between the greatness of the matter that is thought (magnitude materiae, §191–§216), the greatness of the way of thinking according to the respective greatness of its objects (ratio cogitationum, §217–§328), and finally the greatness of the person who thinks (magnitudo personae, §§352–422). Mirbach, “Aesthetic Greatness,” 114. I discuss ambiguities in this threefold position in Robert R. Clewis, “The Majesty of Cognition: The Sublime in Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, and Kant,” in Baumgarten’s Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. J. Colin McQuillan (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 241–72, 247–9. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §185. On aesthetic dignity, see Guyer, Modern Aesthetics, 335. Buchenau, Founding of Aesthetics, 141. Guyer observes that Baumgarten combines an aesthetics of truth (a kind of cognitivism) with a recognition of the emotional aspect of art. Guyer, Modern Aesthetics, 323. For cognitivism, see also Baumgarten, Metaphysics, §515.



   ’ 

the sections on life). Magnitude is discussed second, and at greatest length.23 Unlike Burke and Kant, who conceptually distinguish the beautiful and the sublime, Baumgarten holds that “the sublime way of thinking is beautiful in the fullest sense.”24 At the same time, Baumgarten thinks it is an error to attempt to portray everything beautiful as sublime. In §181, Baumgarten places moral aesthetic magnitude in “connection” with freedom (libertate connectuntur). A key passage reads: Furthermore, aesthetic magnitude (§177), both absolute (§178)25 and relative (§180), is either natural, which pertains to what is not closely connected with freedom, or moral, which applies to objects and cognitions insofar as they are more closely connected with freedom [libertate connectuntur].26

Baumgarten maintains that cognitions can be “connected with freedom.” Moreover, by “nature” he is not here referring to natural marvels as such – the Nile, the ocean, and so on. His example of the “natural” turns out to be poetic descriptions of things, such as a Virgil’s description of Entellus’s imposing muscles. Likewise, Baumgarten mentions a poet (Lucretius) who, when describing nature, says “great things” about Sicily.27 Other sources of the sublime are great acts of virtue and supererogatory acts, as well as the agents performing them. In §182, Baumgarten describes “moral” aesthetic magnitude as the kind “that is possible due to (per) the freedom that is determined in conformity with moral laws.” This kind of magnitude can also be called “aesthetic dignity” (dignitatem aestheticam).28 Employing a distinction between the moral and the nonmoral (or natural), Baumgarten contrasts positive and negative dignity. Great natural objects (described by the poets) might seem “insignificant from a moral point of view,” because they are only objects of nature. They belong to the sphere of “dignity,” even if it is a “negative” kind.29 He turns to positive dignity in the next paragraph (§206): “Among these same objects possessing generically the greatest magnitude (§203), sometimes emerge ones that have, in addition to natural magnitude and negative dignity (which can be said to pertain to the

23

24 25 26

27 28 29

On the six qualities, see Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §22. Cf. Baumgarten, Metaphysica, §515, §531, §669. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §319. In Aesthetica §178, Baumgarten distinguishes absolute from relative aesthetic magnitude. Baumgarten, Aesthetica §181. Guyer claims that this distinction between the natural and the moral kinds of aesthetic magnitude, even if Baumgarten applies it mainly to artworks or poetry, “anticipates Kant’s later distinction” between the “mathematical” and the “dynamical” sublime. Guyer, Modern Aesthetics, 333. Referring to “great Charybdis” and “menacing Etna.” Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §205. Ibid., §182. Ibid., §205.

   : ’   



great), a certain positive dignity (§193).”30 Divinely-inspired people such as Socrates have positive dignity. Baumgarten claims that the “first law of the positive dignity for sublime things [per sublimia]” is: “Everything human [humana], whatever it is, even the great [maxima] in a specific manner, is to be subordinated to the divine [divinis].”31 Positive dignity lies not only in the moral, but also in the divinely inspired. Giving a version of the modern view that heroic virtue is sublime,32 Baumgarten offers a scale of the “aesthetic dignity” of ways of life: the honest, the noble, and the heroic.33 He then matches these three with the plain, the moderate, and the sublime way of thinking (or: low, medium, high). Thus, his scale proceeds from the simple, honest way of life (which matches the plain), to the noble way of life (analogous to the moderate), to the heroic way of life, full of virtue.34 The heroic thus corresponds to the “sublime” (heroicum: sublimia). The sublime style best suits the heroic way of life. Poetry (like tragedy) not only depicts but even extols virtue (the morally good) and thus represents it in a manner that has great “magnitude.” The poet takes what is great and makes it greater (augere) – the topic of Section 23 (argumenta augentia). This point is summarized in the personal, almost touching, counsel Baumgarten offers at the end of Section 25, his conclusion to the discussion of the great or sublime in the Aesthetica: “You have to build up, with absolute importance [gravitatem] (sec. 24), that inborn greatness of heart that to a certain degree you must have (§45), and elevate it as much as you can (sec. 25). You are fortunate [felix] if this is sufficient and you are able to touch the sublime (sec. 26).”35 The sublime is clearly central to Baumgarten’s aim of identifying ways a person can transform into a felix aestheticus. In “On the Sublime and Naive in the Fine Sciences,” Mendelssohn examines the representation of the sublime in the fine arts – poetry, tragedy, painting, music, and architecture.36 Like Baumgarten, Mendelssohn quotes from the 30 31 32

33 34 35 36

Ibid., §206. Ibid., §399. On the heroic as sublime, see also Giambattista Vico, “On the Heroic Mind,” in Sublime Reader, 69–77. Boileau likewise calls the father in Corneille’s Horace an “old hero” who elicits “heroic grandeur.” See Nicolas Boileau Despréaux, “Preface to His Translation of Longinus on the Sublime,” in Clewis, ed., Sublime Reader, 58–61, 60. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §214. Ibid., §213. On the heroic, see also Ibid., §281, §363. Ibid., §422. Mendelssohn’s essay was published as the penultimate essay in his Philosophical Writings (1761), but a version of it had been published anonymously in 1758 in Library of the Fine Sciences and Free Arts under the title “Considerations of the Sublime and the Naive in the Fine Sciences.” See Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, xxxvi as well as Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 219. Mendelssohn reworked the essay yet again for the 1771 edition of Philosophical Writings. An excerpted version of the essay (trans. Dahlstrom) can be



   ’ 

poets (including modern authors), but he pays more attention to music and architecture than Baumgarten does. Mendelssohn published a 1758 review of Burke’s Enquiry and was familiar with Burke’s empirical, psychological account of the sublime. Mendelssohn takes over many of Burke’s examples while applying his own theory of perfection (and mixed sentiments).37 Mendelssohn concentrates on (objective) sublimity and the (positive) awe (Bewunderung) it inspires, whereas Burke focuses more on the fear-like jolt that verges on terror.38 Burke and Mendelssohn also approach the sublime from different intellectual frameworks. As Beiser observes, “Mendelssohn continued to uphold the aesthetics of perfection of Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten, according to which all aesthetic experience is a sensible perception of rational structure.”39 Mendelssohn draws from this German scholastic tradition to discuss the admiration felt before an object or person exhibiting a kind of perfection. Like Burke, Mendelssohn distinguishes beauty and sublimity. Whereas beauty is bounded and can therefore be taken in by the senses all at once, immensity (“gigantic or enormous in extension”) is unbounded.40 The vast object elicits a distinctive response. When “the boundaries of this extension are deferred further and further, then they ultimately disappear completely from the senses and, as a result, something sensuously immense emerges.”41 This gives rise to a pleasing shudder. The “objects of nature” that elicit such an “alluring” trembling are great or extensive: the vast sea, far-reaching plain, innumerable stars, or heights and depths that cannot be comprehended.42 Art can elicit this pleasant shudder or “mixed” sentiment. According to the essay, art is in some significant sense imitative or mimetic. “Because of the pleasantness of these sentiments art also makes use of them, seeking to

37

38

39

40 41 42

found in Clewis, ed., Sublime Reader, 91–100, the version cited in this chapter. The complete version (Dahlstrom’s translation) of “On the Sublime and Naive in the Fine Sciences” is found in Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, 192–232. On the essay, see also Guyer, Modern Aesthetics, 361–3. Beiser discusses Mendelssohn on the sublime in Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 217–24. Anne Pollok, “Gazing Upwards to the Stage: Mendelssohn’s Notion of Admiration and Its Consequences,” in The Moral Psychology of Admiration, ed. Alfred Archer and André Grahle (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 79–94, 85. Ibid. See also Aaron Koller, “Mendelssohn’s Response to Burke on the Sublime,” in Moses Mendelssohn’s Metaphysics and Aesthetics, ed. Reinier Munk (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 329–50, 331. Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 196. In comparison with the Mendelssohn-Burke relation, there is little scholarship on Mendelssohn’s response to Baumgarten on the aesthetically great. For passing discussion of Mendelssohn and Baumgarten, see Koller, “Mendelssohn’s Response,” 335, 337, 342. Mendelssohn, “Sublime,” 93. Ibid. Ibid.

   : ’   



produce them through imitation.”43 Some art is able to awaken this response because it appears boundless, though it is not itself an unlimited magnitude (Größe). For instance, the repetition of temporal intervals in music is able to represent the experience of an extended immensity. Mendelssohn identifies two kinds of immensity in art: the extended and the nonextended (“intensive”). The extensively immense can be called the enormous, while the intensively immense can be called the strong. The extensively immense is the vast or great in size, the intensive one is the mighty, the great in strength or power. Moreover, “the enormous is for the outer sense precisely what the sublime is for the inner sense.”44 The sublime in art is a kind of intensive immensity, or strength in perfection. When the strength is “a matter of a perfection,” it is said to be sublime. Mendelssohn summarizes his view as follows: “In the fine arts and sciences the sensuously perfect representation of something immense will be enormous, strong, or sublime depending upon whether the magnitude concerns an extension and number, a degree of power, or, in particular, a degree of perfection.”45 The term commonly applied to what is intensively enormous is “strength,” and strength in perfection is designated “the sublime.” In general, one could also say: each thing that is or appears immense as far as the degree of its perfection is concerned is called sublime.46

Whereas awe is the sentiment felt before the sublime, the sublime is characterized as an objective quality. Sublimity thus in a sense resides in the object, and its effect on subjects is the feeling of awe.47 Mendelssohn defines the sublime in art as a “sensuously perfect representation” of something immense, one that is capable of inspiring awe. All these sentiments blend together in the soul, flowing into one another, and become a single phenomenon which we call awe. Accordingly, if one wanted to describe the sublime in terms of its effect, then one could say: “It is something sensuously perfect in art, capable of inspiring awe.”48

Awe, he specifies, is a “debt” owed to the “extraordinary gifts of spirit” or genius creating the work.49 Awe is the soul’s condition when it looks at the “unexpectedly good,”50 the good in turn being a kind of perfection. The 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50

Ibid. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 94. Ibid. The sublime is the “object of awe.” Mendelssohn, “Sublime,” 96. Dahlstrom sometimes translates Bewunderung just as “awe” and sometimes as “awe or admiration.” Mendelssohn, “Sublime,” 94. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 95 n.



   ’ 

sublime experience, Anne Pollok observes, must “contain some reference to a higher perfection” either in the “grandness of the object that overwhelms our sensible apparatus” or in the “genius of the artistic presentation of a subject.”51 Virtue – including artistic virtue, or genius – can be seen as a display of intensive immensity. It is a kind of capacity or power, a perfection.52 Mendelssohn attributes more aesthetic value to intensive immensities than to nonintensive ones. Presumably he does so because of their clearer link to perfection (on the objective side) rather than imperfection (a limited cognitiveperceptual faculty), when apprehenders cannot fully take in a seemingly unbounded object. Moreover, he notes that mere vastness or magnitude/ greatness (Größe), by itself, can become monotonous and boring, even disgusting. The extensively great must contain some kind of order and structure if it is to “awaken a pleasant shudder.”53 It must be the great multitude in a vast unity that hints at a harmonious whole (even if it is a struggle to comprehend it).54 With this appeal to both multiplicity and unity, Mendelssohn understands the sublime in terms of his general theory of perfection as unity-in-variety. Echoing a distinction Baumgarten had made, Mendelssohn claims that there are two kinds of awe, one felt in response to the perfection in the object represented and the other at the perfection in the artist. The second kind is a response to the artist’s powers of representation and artistic abilities: the artist represents ordinary objects in an extraordinary way. In the perfection in the presentation, one discerns the stamp of genius.55 In the sublime in art in which the artist represents a sublime object (the first kind of sublimity), the naive and unaffected expression and presentation is most appropriate.56 The artist (e.g., Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Shakespeare) need not and should not embellish the magnitude represented. “It becomes clear from this that excessive embellishment in the expression of things is not compatible with something sublime of the first type.”57 Rather, “in representing something sublime of this type, the artist must devote himself to a naive, unaffected expression which allows the reader or spectator to think more than is said to him.” With the sublimity of the artist’s perfection, however, the poet’s manner of presentation can make use of “embellishments” and

51 52 53 54

55 56

57

Pollok, “Gazing,” 85. Mendelssohn, “Sublime,” 93–4. Ibid., 93. See also Pollok, “Gazing,” 86. Pollok, “Gazing,” 86. See also Koller, “Mendelssohn’s Response,” 340 and Beiser, Diotima’s Children, 223. Mendelssohn, “Sublime,” 95. Perhaps taking up Mendelssohn’s terms, Kant discusses the naive at the end of his discussion of laughter (KU 5:335). Mendelssohn, “Sublime,” 96.

   : ’   



“beauties” – selecting adjectives that designate “the most sensuous properties” through the use of melody, word combination, and harmony.58 Finally, it should be noted that Mendelssohn has no need to use the terms “noble” or “moral” sublime. To account for remarkable, stirring displays of virtue, he is not forced to identify a unique subspecies of sublimity, for he places such sublimity at the very heart of his theory. What might be called the moral sublime is already captured by his conception of the sublime as a strong, intensive immensity, a kind of perfection.

The Development of Kant’s Views of the Sublime Universal Natural History contains what is likely Kant’s earliest published statement on what he would later identify as the sublime. Although the claims in the work reflect a Newtonian-mechanistic and optimistic teleology, the seventh chapter begins with a flourish that, with its invocations of “silent astonishment” and a stirred imagination, brings to mind the phenomenology of the sublime: By its immensurable magnitude [Größe] and by the infinite variety and beauty that shines forth from it on all sides, the universe puts us into silent astonishment [stilles Erstaunen]. While the representation of all this perfection moves the imagination, another sort of delight captures our understanding when it contemplates how so much splendor [Pracht], so much magnitude/grandeur [Größe] flows from a single universal rule with an eternal and right order. (NTH 1:306; see also 367)

Kant does not analyze this experience as anything called the “sublime,” and his conceptual framework is clearly pre-Critical, lacking his mature conception of beauty as well as his mature views of reason as the power of the unconditioned and of practical reason as legislator of the moral law and, in turn, as a source of the dynamical sublime. In fact, he will not introduce an account of the “sublime” per se until the Observations, where the sentiment expressed in this passage would emerge under the name of the splendid/magnificent (prächtig) sublime.59 58 59

Ibid., 99. The Observations, though printed several times in Kant’s lifetime, has fallen into some deserved disrepute. According to Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, Kant there gives a “silly catalogue” of his personal preferences rather than any aesthetic theory. See Ugliness, ed. Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 287. Meg Armstrong justly criticizes the sexist and racist claims in Kant’s treatise. Meg Armstrong, “‘The Effects of Blackness’: Gender, Race, and the Sublime in Aesthetic Theories of Burke and Kant,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54, no. 3 (1996): 213–36, excerpted in Clewis, ed., Sublime Reader, 271–9. And even in his classic study, Samuel Monk passes



   ’ 

The three types of sublime officially presented in the Observations are the terrifying, the noble, and the splendid. Kant thinks of these as kinds of “finer feeling.”60 As the Burkean title of the Observations indicates, Kant thinks of the sublime as (whatever else it is) a feeling (Gefühl) in a subject and accounts for it in empirical-psychological terms. Like Burke, Kant thinks that the sentiment of the sublime is caused by certain kinds of objects or acts (e.g., night, virtue), and he offers many examples of them (which have struck critics as silly, or worse). The similarity to Burke was not lost on Kant’s readers, including even a young Herder.61 The terrifying sublime is characterized by an element of dread or melancholy. The noble sublime is imbued with the presence of quiet wonder. And the magnificent sublime contains some beauty within it, being a mixture of the sublime and beautiful (GSE 2:209). Kant thinks of the experiences in terms of what might be called a component theory in that it breaks the experience down into components or elements. The main component, the “stirring” feeling of the sublime, is positive or pleasant; it is then combined with other components. Thus, in the terrifying sublime, the core pleasure would be mixed with something like fear, the irksome element of dread and anxiety. In the magnificent/splendid sublime, the core component is added to a likewise positive feeling of beauty, similar to the concept of “grandeur” found in Kames and Addison. In the noble sublime, finally, the positive core feeling would be combined with what Kant calls a moral feeling. The terrifying sublime is obviously the most Burkean form of the three. Kant observes that Haller’s description of future eternity evokes a mild horror, in other words, the terrifying sublime (GSE 2:210). “Deep solitude is sublime, but in a terrifying way” (GSE 2:209). To explain what he means, Kant cites excerpts from “Carazan’s dream.” According to the story he summarizes in a

60

61

over “Kant’s tentative effort to discuss the sublime and the beautiful” in the work on the grounds that it is “of little value in view of the profounder analysis that he makes in his later work.” Samuel Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (New York: MLA, 1935), 6. The division of the Observations into the sublime and the beautiful is indebted to Burke as well as to other eighteenth-century British writers such as Addison and Gerard (who, in addition, examined novelty). As early as the 1760s, Kant thus held the view that the sublime and the beautiful are distinct kinds of aesthetic experiences. He never gave up the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful (or taste). The Blomberg logic lecture (circa 1770) states: “It is wrong, however, for him [Meier] to take the beautiful and aesthetic to be the same, for aesthetics includes not only the beautiful but also the sublime” (V-Lo/Blom 24:47). Kant divides the third Critique into an “Analytic of the Beautiful” and an “Analytic of the Sublime,” and in the published Anthropology and lectures from the early 1770s, Kant repeats the claim that the sublime, while involving aesthetic judging, does not belong to taste (Anth 7:241; V-Anth/Parow 25:391; V-Anth/ Collins 25:196). See Herder’s November 1768 letter to Kant (Br 10:77).

   : ’   



footnote, a man named Carazan is alone in outer space, as punishment for loving money more than fellow human beings. Carazan notices “that the shadows of the boundless void sank into the abyss.” Kant had introduced the anecdote with this: “I will only provide an example of the noble dread which the description of a total solitude can inspire” (GSE 2:209 n.; emphasis added). Carazan becomes afraid, but his total solitude inspires the response of the terrifying sublime (or noble dread) in readers. This point is worth noting, since in the Critical account of the sublime, Kant adopts a similar (if modified) setup when he describes the feeling aroused in observers of an upright, feardefying soldier (see below). In the Observations, Kant is as much interested in the moral feeling as he is in feelings of the sublime and beautiful. In fact, he characterizes morality and virtue in terms of the sublime: “Among moral qualities, true virtue alone is sublime” (GSE 2:215). In turn, one mode of the sublime feeling (the noble kind) is a response to morally significant content.62 This double interest in aesthetics and morality, an overlapping of the sublime with principlegrounded virtue, can be seen in the widely-quoted passage that begins as follows: “Thus true virtue can only be grafted upon principles, and it will become the more sublime and noble the more general they are” (GSE 2:217). Finally, the Observations contains a notion that anticipates what would become the mathematical sublime.63 Kant writes: “The mathematical representation of the immeasurable magnitude of the universe, metaphysical considerations of eternity, of providence, of the immortality of our soul contain a certain sublimity and dignity” (GSE 2:215). But Kant hardly spells this out, and he would not recognize the “mathematical” form of the sublime until he had formulated a more robust theory of reason as the faculty for thinking the infinite and unconditioned.64 Around 1764–66, Kant wrote marginal notes or “remarks” (Bemerkungen) in his personal copy of the Observations. Many of the fragments touch on issues in ethics (such as the nature of freedom, virtue, and independence of the will) as well as social, political, and religious matters – often tainted by dubious 62

63 64

On the overlap of the aesthetic and the practical-moral in the Observations, see Goldthwait’s Introduction to Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1960), 20, and Clewis, Kantian Sublime, 32–42. Guyer’s Introduction to the Observations, in Kant, Anthropology, History, Education, 19. There are “false” forms associated with the genuine kinds of the sublime. Honor and enthusiasm are false or negative kinds of the noble sublime, the grotesque of the terrifying sublime, and ostentation or extravagance of the magnificent sublime. On this aspect of Kant’s account, see Robert R. Clewis, “Kant’s Distinction between True and False Sublimity,” in Kant’s Observations and Remarks: A Critical Guide, ed. Susan Meld Shell and Richard Velkley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 116–43, especially 132–5.



   ’ 

claims about genders and peoples or nations. Like the Observations, these marginalia contain a blend of moral and aesthetic claims. They focus on ethical matters even more than the Observations does, as the marginalia reflect the marked influence of Rousseau on Kant at this time.65 The notes that touch on aesthetics are reminiscent of Burke’s Enquiry and Kant’s Observations in that they refer to psychological or even physiological phenomena. “In the feeling of the sublime, the powers of the human being seem as it were to be stretched; with the beautiful, they contract” (BGSE 20:119). Beauty and sublime are not the same. That one [Jenes] swells the heart and renders the attention fixed and tense; therefore it is tiring. This one [Dieses] lets the soul melt into a soft sensation, as it were, and, by relaxing the nerves, it puts feeling into a gentler emotion [Rührung] that, however, transforms into dullness, weariness, and disgust when it goes too far. (BGSE 20:19; my trans.)66

In the Observations, Kant had likewise written, “The sentiments of the sublime stretch the powers of the soul more forcefully and therefore tire more quickly” (GSE 2:211 n.). Throughout these marginalia Kant gives examples of what is sublime or beautiful, much as he did in the Observations (sunrise is beautiful, sundown is sublime). Kant’s analysis is empirical-psychological and anthropological rather than transcendental and “aesthetic” in the third Critique sense. Potentially promising connections between the sublime and respect are mixed in with empirical (and sometimes bizarre) anthropological claims, as can be seen in the following: A human being can cause two kinds of advantageous emotion [Rührung] in another: that of respect [Achtung] and that of love, the first through the sublime, the second through the beautiful. Woman combines both. . . . Principles are of the greatest sublimity, e.g., self-esteem requires sacrifice. E.g., a man can be ugly, a witty woman cannot. (BGSE 20:3; my trans.)

In these marginalia, Kant uses “sublime” in the adjectival sense too: vices can be sublime. “Revenge for oneself is sublime. Certain vices are sublime. . . . Some do not even have the courage for great vices” (BGSE 20:5; my trans.).

65

66

Feloj, Il sublime, 65, states that in these marginal remarks or Bemerkungen “the aesthetic problem is subordinated to the moral one even more than in the Observations.” Like many other scholars, she also acknowledges the influence of Rousseau on these marginalia (66). On these marginal notes, see also the chapters collected in Shell and Velkley, Kant’s Observations and Remarks. Kant seems to have switched Jenes (the former) and Dieses (the latter). Like Burke, Kant usually sees the beauty response as soft and relaxing and the sublime as tiring.

   : ’   



The courage that is allegedly required by such acts is what makes them sublime. The Critical account, in contrast, puts constraints on what can count as sublime, and vices do not merit being called “sublime.” To put it in terms explored in Chapter 3, a “blocking” occurs in the case of the sublime.67 Compared to the Observations, Kant’s 1763 essay, Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Ethics, is arguably more “philosophical,” but it still does not aim to address issues in philosophical aesthetics. In passing, Kant writes of the feelings of sublime, the beautiful, and the disgusting as “feelings of the human soul.” Like the concepts of space and time, he claims, they “can only be partially analyzed” (UD 2:280). The lectures from this time are more revealing. According to Herder’s notes on lectures on ethics (likely from winter semester 1763/64), Kant speaks of the sublime in terms of perfection, though this may be because he is interpreting and teaching Baumgarten’s textbooks (V-PP/Herder 27:31).68 At the same time, he does not follow Baumgarten dogmatically. Unlike Baumgarten, Kant works with a distinction between sublimity and beauty that does not see the sublime as a mode of beauty. The notes read: “Awe presupposes reverence, and the latter, the feeling for the sublime in moral perfections, just as love presupposes the intuitus of morally beautiful perfections.” There can be a moral or nonmoral response to the “perfection” in each: “The sublime is a perfection that is distinguished from the beautiful, and in both, the perfections may move us either morally or nonmorally.” Kant describes the response (reverence) to “a morally perfect sublimity” that moves us, and he distinguishes this from the response of love (again reminiscent of Burke). Kant elucidates the sublime and the beautiful in terms of repulsion and attraction. “Thus a grave clergyman, who evokes our reverence, often arrives very inopportunely in a gathering where the beautiful predominates. Love wishes for closer union; sublimity frightens us away” (V-PP/Herder 27:31). Kant combines the conceptual apparatus of Baumgarten (perfection, moral sublimity in the object) with observations and distinctions that are basically Burkean. In the anthropology lectures Collins and Parow from 1772/73, Kant questions the sublime’s universal validity, since the experience of the sublime is

67

68

On the constraints on the sublime, see Clewis, Kantian Sublime, 86, 96. On judgments about the possible sublimity of aspects of the French Revolution, other aspects of which (e.g., bloodshed and regicide) Kant considered to be immoral and/or unjust, see ibid., 208–14. On Kant’s textbooks, see Steve Naragon, “Kant in the Classroom: Moral Philosophy Notes.” https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Kant/Notes/notesMoral.htm [accessed October 3, 2021]. According to Naragon, the two texts Kant used that semester are Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Initia philosophiae practicae primae acroamatice (Halle: Carl Hemmerde, 1760); and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Ethica philosophica (Halle: Carl Hemmerde, 1740).



   ’ 

based on feeling (Gefühl) rather than, like beauty, on proportion (V-Anth/ Parow 25:390–1). The sublime is not a matter of pleasure (Gefallen) but of the size of the affect (Affects) (V-Anth/Collins 25:198). Whereas beauty belongs to taste, the sublime is a matter of feeling (V-Anth/Parow 25:391–2). It may seem as if the sublime has “universal validity,” Kant acknowledges, but unlike beauty, the sublime lacks universal (allgemeinen) “rules.” The universal rules associated with beauty are based on “proportion,” as discussed in Chapter 1. “Mere relations” can be brought under a rule, but since the sublime is not a matter of proportions, it cannot be subsumed under any rule. Kant is here invoking the principle of sensible comprehension as a basis of aesthetic normativity.69 Since the ocean or heavenly bodies (the starry sky) cannot easily be intuited in a single intuition, he concludes, the experience of the sublime lacks universal validity – a position he would modify in the third Critique.70 The lecture discusses the sublime in a mechanistic way. Kant cites the “Englishman” Burke (V-Anth/Collins 25:199; V-Anth/Parow 25:392). Burke, recall, explains the pleasure as a release of “tension” and the push-and-pulling of the nerves, “though it should have no idea of danger connected with it.”71 Kant offers similar mechanistic explanations of the sublime. He identifies a stretching of the nerves during the experience of the sublime even to the point of pain (schmerzt) and terror (Schrecken): “Regarding the sublime, it unhinges the nerves, and causes pain when it is engaged with forcefully. Indeed, one can bring the sublime to the point of terror and breathlessness” (V-Anth/Parow 25:389). The passage goes on to acknowledge society as a condition of feeling the sublime, which is contrasted with a disagreeable terror felt in solitude – similar to Carazan’s fear: If it is reported in society, everything wondrous is sublime and therefore pleasing; only in solitude does it terrify; indeed even the starry sky, if, when gazing at it, one remembers that all the celestial bodies and suns are like our sun in that a similar multitude of celestial bodies again orbit around them, elicits a feeling of horror and terror when alone, for one imagines that, as a small speck of dust in such an immeasurable set of 69

70

71

A passage from 1772/73 (separately inserted from the Philippi transcription) states: “When I am led to an idea according to laws of sensibility, it pleases. What we call sublime does not affect just our sentiment, but rather the understanding” (V-Anth/ Collins [Philippi] 25:175; my trans.). According to a fragment from this time, the touching [rührende] “is not really sublime, although it is often the effect of the sublime. It is the beginning of pain without impression or appropriation and thus a pain in a fictional condition, thus not in our own person, hence a pain that is only assumed” (R 767; 1772–73; 15:334). With the “touching,” Kant is perhaps referring to Du Bos on “artificial emotion.” See the note in Kant, Notes and Fragments, 616–7 no. 79. Burke, Enquiry, 126.

   : ’   



worlds, one does not even deserve the attention of the all-powerful being. Now all these movements such as the beautiful and the sublime in the end lead to something very mechanical. All these activities promote our life as a whole. (V-Anth/Parow 25:389; my trans.)72

As he did in Universal Natural History, Kant adopts a theological point of view. Moreover, the reference to the “mechanical” at the end reflects Kant’s empirical-physiological stance toward the sublime in this period. Finally, he sees the (splendid) sublime – like the beautiful – as a feeling that occurs only in society. Even if the experience of the sublime is not said to have universal validity, the wondrous (wunderbahre) becomes pleasing when it is reported “in society.” The anthropology Friedländer (1775/76) contains an early description of certain strong affects as sublime. In the courageous mind, anger (Zorn) – Cato’s rage – “has something sublime to it” (V-Anth/Fried 25:616).73 Here the term “sublime” is used in the adjectival sense. Cato does not have an aesthetic experience of the sublime. Rather, his righteous anger is called “sublime” since it seems to reveal or imply that Cato is free: observers see him as rising above nature, elevated, erhaben. Not everyone who is raised in this sense feels or has an experience of the sublime. In a Reflection from about this time, Kant does not ground the experience of the sublime on human freedom (or the capacity for moral feeling), as he would in the third Critique. The perspective on the sublime can still be called theological: The majesty of the creation in a starry sky includes our emotion through the extension of our mind and a bold flight. The admiration of the art in the creation yields an entirely different sentiment, namely that of satisfaction in providence and the good, in order to treasure the value of the creation and to love it. The textbook of divine majesty. (R 981; 1776–78; 15:428–9)

72

73

This passage appears to have made it into the Matuszewski anthropology transcription, which only in part comes from a 1791/92 course. Feloj, Il Sublime, 95, at one point discusses this passage as if it came from 1791/92, when it clearly comes from the 1772/73 course on which Parow is based (consider also the passage’s references to God and mechanism). On the mixed provenance of the Matuszewski lecture, see also Steve Naragon, “Kant in the Classroom: Anthropology.” https://users.manchester.edu/ Facstaff/SSNaragon/Kant/Notes/notesAnthropology.htm [accessed October 4, 2021]. Naragon recognizes the Matuszewski’s mixed provenance from 1772/73 and 1791/92. In fact, Feloj elsewhere (97) acknowledges that the lectures from 91/92 (such as Matuszewski) “take up many elements from the lectures from the 70s.” Compare: “Every affect of the courageous sort (that is, which arouses the consciousness of our powers to overcome any resistance (animi strenui)) is aesthetically sublime, e.g., anger” (KU 5:272).



   ’ 

In the early and mid-1780s, Kant does not appear to examine the sublime very much. In the Menschenkunde anthropology lecture (1781/82), he reportedly makes physiological claims about fear in connection with Haller’s poetry (V-Anth/Mensch 25:906), but there is little connection to sublimity. The transcription only briefly mentions Milton’s poetry in the context of the sublime (Anth/Mensch 25:991). And Kant reportedly repeats his opinion that young people prefer watching tragedy and older people comedy, but he does not explore the connection between sublimity and tragedy. Rather, the lecture just states that for young people the feeling of being moved or momentarily suffering is fleeting, whereas with older people the stirring emotion lingers on and is thus unpleasant (V-Anth/Mensch 25:922–3).74 All these are empiricalpsychological and anthropological remarks, with little hint of the transcendental theory of the sublime that Kant would formulate at the end of the decade. The Mrongovius anthropology transcription (1784/85) likewise adds nothing new to Kant’s account of the sublime.75 He adopts no transcendental perspective of the sublime, even though by this time he had published the Critique of Pure Reason and in his theoretical writings had made the Critical turn. Since the (incomplete) Busolt transcription (1788/89) likewise skips over the sublime, one must look elsewhere to discern anything about Kant’s development toward the late 1780s. Two Reflections on anthropology from the mid or late 1780s are more revealing. The first fragment (R 992) reveals Kant’s intention to organize the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” around his long-held distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. In a fragment from between 1785 and 1789, Kant mentions a “deduction of the aesthetic power of judgment concerning the beautiful in nature” and a deduction “concerning the sublime in nature”: § – A . Deduction of the aesthetic power of judgment concerning the beautiful in nature; – B . ––––––– concerning the sublime in nature. §. The culture of both in nature is preparation for moral feeling: the first with regard to imperfect duties, the second with regard to perfect duties. – For in both there is subjective purposiveness of nature. The first, with respect to its quality, the second, with regard to the magnitude of the purposive determination of the subject. (R 992; 15:437; emphasis added) 74

75

On the response to tragedy, see also BGSE 20:185, 123; R 1384; 1772–75; 15:603–4; and V-Anth/Mron 25:1332. In studying the sublime in the lectures on anthropology, Feloj thus passes over the 1780s lectures (i.e., Menschenkunde, Mrongovius, and the Busolt). She states: “The sublime is hardly mentioned.” In the 1780s, “the sublime disappears.” Feloj, Il sublime, 91.

   : ’   



In addition to sketching the main framework of the third Critique, he indicates that both the beautiful and the sublime require deductions, implying that both kinds of judgments make a claim to universal validity, and, moreover, that both the beautiful and the sublime would have parallel deductions (whereas in the published work of 1790, the deduction of the sublime is said to consist merely in its exposition). This attribution of universal validity to the sublime marks a shift in his thinking in comparison to the 1770s and, presumably, the early 1780s. Moreover, the mention of nature suggests that Kant is thinking of the sublime and beautiful in terms of a principle of the purposiveness of nature (“in both there is subjective purposiveness of nature”). This shift to thinking about how natural purposiveness applies to the sublime makes some sense of why Kant would include an analysis of the sublime in the third Critique at all. While this point is sometimes missed in the literature, the sublime does concern natural purposiveness and the purposiveness of nature, namely, inner nature (nature in the subject) – not to mention the mountains and ravines that give rise to or are proximate causes of experiences of the sublime. The Reflection shows that Kant was already viewing both kinds of aesthetic experiences in terms of natural teleology and thus in a way that could potentially connect what he would call the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” and the “Critique of Teleological Judgment,” even if in the published work he actually ends up separating taste and teleology (KU 5:169). (Meanwhile, another sentence in R 992 implies that Kant was at least considering writing about the sublime in art: “On the beautiful and sublime in art and the beautiful arts and sciences.”) In short, the fragment hints at how the sublime might be connected to Kant’s thoughts about natural teleology, and one only wishes he had said more.76 Finally, although in the third Critique Kant does not defend the claim that the subject’s purposive determination is itself great or extensive (cf. R 992: “with regard to the magnitude of the purposive determination of the subject”), in the published work he does see the experience of the mathematical sublime as generated by an encounter with a large extensive magnitude, which induces

76

The connection to natural purposiveness gives some support to my admittedly controversial reading of the purposiveness of the natural object judged in the experience of the sublime. For the argument that the object of nature has a kind of finality, even if that is precisely to look (initially) contrapurposive, see Robert R. Clewis, “The Place of the Sublime in Kant’s Project,” Studi kantiani 28 (2015): 149–68. See also Menzer, Entwicklung, 148, who maintains (commenting on R 993, discussed below) that a task that Kant needed to carry out in the third Critique was to show “that the principle of purposiveness governing aesthetics was also applicable to the feeling of the sublime.” Note, too, R 992’s reference to the “sublime in art” likewise provides some evidence for another controversial issue, namely, the possibility of artistic sublimity on Kant’s account.



   ’ 

a sensible awareness of something unbounded or infinite and thereby reveals the power of theoretical reason. R 992 indicates that Kant has made an ethical turn in his thinking about the sublime and was interested in how aesthetic experiences could (indirectly) support morality.77 Kant draws a connection between the sublime as aesthetic and moral feeling, but without suggesting that the two are identical or even overlap. He does not name a “noble sublime” as one of the forms of the sublime, though he had done so in 1764 and perhaps in the early 1770s.78 Rather, the cultivation of the sublime in nature is said to be (only) a preparation for moral feeling. One of the latest pre-1790 Reflections available on the sublime (R 993) was likely written in 1788–89, that is, just as Kant was composing the third Critique. It begins with what appears to be close to his conception of the mathematical sublime: On the sublime. It is that in the representation of which (in the imagination) the mind feels its vocation or disposition to extend itself to what exceeds all measure of the senses.

Kant also addresses the question of fear: It is as it were the discovery of an abyss [Abgrundes] in our own nature stretching itself beyond the bounds of the senses. – Hence the shudder that affects us. – A fear that is always driven away through thinking of [Besinnen] our security, and a curiosity that is too great for our power of comprehension. (R 993; 1788–89; 15:438)

The language is at times dark – an ever-stretching abyss. Yet the fear before the obscure is driven away by the awareness of one’s being safe. The Critical twist – which separates it from both Burke’s Enquiry and Kant’s Observations – is to maintain that the “depth of the mind in the moral,” or reason as a faculty of moral ideas, is “sublime” (15:439). With the claim that the depth of the mind in the moral is sublime, Kant extends the depth metaphor that he had introduced with the notion of an “abyss” within “our own nature,” that is, within reason. Kant thus wavers between depth and height metaphors: infinite chasm on the one hand and elevation on the other. An “abyss in our own nature” – reason – commands imagination to “extend itself,” thereby producing a negative pleasure.79 77

78 79

Commenting on this fragment, Park, Kant, 175–6, emphasizes the sublime’s connection to perfect duties and to the moral feeling. Compare R 806: “Sublime. Beautiful. Noble” (R 806; about 1773; 15:351). The metaphor is also found in the Anthropology (§78): “However, such an affect is stimulated only by reason, and is a kind of sacred awe at seeing the abyss of the

   : ’   



How does this compare to the early aesthetics of the sublime? Even if Kant does not use the term “noble” sublime or “the moral sublime” in the work of 1790, there are two ways in which the Critical account can be said to contain something like a notion of the noble or moral sublime or at least to connect the sublime to freedom. First, Kant describes some of our responses to virtue as aesthetic (not practical or moral) responses of the sublime. Consider his example of the fearless, virtuous soldier who evokes our admiration. In §28, Kant writes that one responds with Bewunderung to the genteel, moral soldier who displays fearlessness before death. “For what is it that is an object of the greatest admiration [Bewunderung] even to the savage? Someone who is not frightened, who has no fear, thus does not shrink before danger but energetically sets to work with full deliberation” (KU 5:262). Observers here feel a sublime response to the fearless, moral soldier’s embodiment of virtue. The soldier does not feel the sublime. Instead, with “full deliberation,” he is unmoved. He possesses self-rule and self-control (“incoercibility of his mind”), rising above nature (erhebt, sublime in the adjectival sense). The person who observes the soldier’s rising above nature can experience the sublime and is in a position to make an aesthetic judgment of the sublime. The structure of this observer–observed relation is similar to Mendelssohn’s account according to which one feels Bewunderung in response to a display of virtue. It is also reminiscent of the structure at work in Kant’s description of Carazan’s dream.80 Second, Kant holds that the sublime is based or grounded on “moral feeling” and freedom. In the third Critique, Kant grounds the validity of the judgment on the sublime on a shared human feature, namely, a presupposed practical freedom (even if one cannot prove one’s freedom – neither to oneself nor to anyone else). In §29, he writes: But just because the judgment on the sublime in nature requires culture (more so than that on the beautiful), it is not therefore first generated by culture81 and so to speak introduced into society merely as a matter of convention; rather it has its foundation in human nature, and indeed in that which can be required of everyone and demanded of him along with healthy understanding, namely in the predisposition to the feeling for

80

81

supersensible opening before one’s feet” (Anth 7:261; cf. the preparatory fragment to Religion at 23:101). For a classification of the various solicitors of (what I then called) the aesthetic judgment of the “moral” sublime, see Appendix 3 in Clewis, Kantian Sublime, 233. Kant’s claim that the judgment of the sublime in nature requires culture lies in tension with an assertion in that same sentence, namely, that it is “not therefore first generated by culture.” The culture requirement seems to be inconsistent with the appeal to human nature and freedom. As Koller observes, “Kant’s explanation of the sublime seems to require too much acculturation,” and such a requirement does not seem essential to Kant’s account of the sublime. Koller, “Mendelssohn’s Response,” 349; see also 349 no. 91.



   ’  (practical) ideas, i.e., to that which is moral. . . . But because the latter [i.e., the sublime] relates the imagination to reason, as the faculty of ideas, we require it only under a subjective presupposition (which, however, we believe ourselves to be justified in demanding of everyone), namely that of the moral feeling in the human being, and so we also ascribe necessity to this aesthetic judgment. (KU 5:265–6; emphasis added)

Kant grounds the necessity of the judgment of the sublime on the human capacity for morality (“moral feeling”), namely, on the fact that humans must operate under the idea of freedom and take themselves to be free whenever they act or take themselves to be agents. The judgment of the sublime is thus based on the shared capacity and disposition to hold other people accountable for their actions, and to do so on the basis of reasons – though the judgment of the sublime is not itself a practical judgment. In this sense, the judgment of the sublime is normative.

The Third Critique Reconsidered Consistent with Kant’s shift from art to nature, many (though not all) of his early examples of the sublime come from poetry and the dramatic arts. He cites many examples from poetry (Milton, Homer) and recognizes the sublime in tragedy. He writes in the Observations: “In my opinion, tragedy is distinguished from comedy primarily in the fact that in the former it is the feeling for the sublime while in the latter it is the feeling for the beautiful that is touched” (GSE 2:221; cf. R 664; about 1769–71; 15:295). Although in the Observations Kant recognizes the sublime in art, he does not explain how an experience of the sublime in art would be possible. By the late 1780s, Kant appears to be thinking about the sublime in terms of natural purposiveness, and he seems to have also had plans to discuss the sublime in art (R 992) – perhaps connecting the sublime and art through the notion of genius as a natural talent that gives the rule to art. In the Critique itself, Kant does not typically have in mind the sublime in art or the artistic sublime, though at the beginning of §52 he does recognize that some artworks (a verse tragedy, didactic poem, oratorio) can combine an exhibition of the sublime with beauty (KU 5:325). Almost all of Kant’s examples of elicitors of the experience come from (outer) nature: natural wonders such as overhanging cliffs, ravines, mountain chains, the innumerable stars in the night sky, and the like.82 He is interested in a difficult-to-grasp 82

Kant acknowledges the splendid sublime even in the Anthropology. “Splendor [Pracht] can be joined with true, ideal taste, which is therefore something sublime that is at the same time beautiful (such as a splendid [prachtvoller] starry heaven, or, if it does not

   : ’   



natural object as giving rise to an experience of the sublime that is itself purposive. Kant frequently writes of the sublime “in nature” (KU 5:246, 279, 280), whether inner or outer – even if he warns against committing a “subreption” or error in thinking that the object is sublime. In any case, the frequent references to the features of the marvels of nature would appear to suggest that his thought on the sublime is not after all a “mere appendix” to an account of the aesthetic judging of natural purposiveness (KU 5:246). And his analysis of the sublime clearly focuses on the judging of the purposiveness of the subject (or inner nature), as R 992 had indicated.83 But the Critical Kant need not be read as excluding the sublime in art or as denying the possibility of artistic sublimity. He even explicitly makes room for finding at least some experiences of the sublime in response to art.84 The Anthropology (1798) contains claims about representing the sublime in art, which, for Kant, is subject to the condition that it be presented in a beautiful manner. In the section “On Taste with Regard to the Sublime,” it reads: “The artistic presentation of the sublime in description and embellishment (in secondary works, parerga) can and should be beautiful, since otherwise it is wild, coarse, and repulsive, and, consequently, contrary to taste” (Anth 7:243). Taking a position similar to Mendelssohn’s, Kant holds that the artist should make use of embellishments and various ways of making the representation appear beautiful or at least conducive to taste, though how exactly particular works of art are able to do this must be set aside here. Consistent with his methodological aim of presenting a transcendental analysis and critique of pure aesthetic judgment, Kant does not explicitly give an account of an “adherent” aesthetic judgment of the sublime (arc 2). At the same time, he does not deny the possibility of adherent or partly intellectual or teleological judgments of the sublime, that is, judgments that take into account

83

84

sound too lowly, a St. Peter’s church in Rome)” (Anth 7:245–6). He uses the example of St. Peter’s, just as in the Observations. If there are traces of the splendid sublime in the Critical period, are there also remnants of the moral/noble sublime (the aesthetic response to a representation of the morally good), or is it somehow to be subsumed under the dynamical sublime (even though the moral law cannot inspire fear)? In this light, the preparatory fragment (presumably around 1793, the date written on the page) to Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (23:101) becomes interesting. Kant reverts to the pre-Critical term from the Observations, “terrifying sublime” (schreckhaft erhaben), to describe the human tendency toward evil, and “spiritually sublime” (geistig erhaben) to refer to the tendency to the “heights of the good.” See Clewis, “The Place of the Sublime in Kant’s Project.” As for the shift from purposebased to free aesthetic judgment (arc 2), Kant never writes of the “self-standing” sublimity of outer nature – which is understandable since, on the Critical view, the sublime lies in reason (or its ideas) rather than in external nature. See Clewis, “A Case for Kantian Artistic Sublimity.”



   ’ 

the purposes or aims of the object or thing in question.85 In fact, though many commentators miss this, Kant recognizes the possibility of partially conceptual (adherent) judgments of the sublime, but he chooses not to make use of such examples in his transcendental exposition (KU 5:269–70). Regarding the movement from perfection to aesthetic ideas (arc 3), I note that, as might be expected, the early Kant describes the sublime in terms of Baumgartian notions of an idea’s perfection (Vollkommenheit). He does so in a published text from 1755 (NTH 1:306) as well as a 1763/64 ethics course (VPP/Herder 27:31; see also BGSE 20:136–7, 144). In the course, Kant uses Baumgarten’s ethics textbooks, adopting his predecessor’s language of perfection – though perhaps without endorsing perfectionism completely. Indeed, he grows increasingly dissatisfied with aesthetic perfectionism. In the Observations, for instance, Kant thinks of the (terrifying) sublime in Burkean psychological, empirical terms, that is, without invoking the conception of perfection. Perhaps one can say that in this early period, Kant combines a German rationalist view of the sublime as perfection with a Burkean empiricist description of the sublime response. Leaving aside for a moment the possibility of adherent judgments of sublimity, I note that the notion of “perfection” in the sublime is transformed (arguably disappearing altogether) in the published work of 1790. Nevertheless, one could transpose perfectionism into the Critical key as follows, if one wished: one could say that in experience of the sublime, perfection lies in the admiration of reason (or its ideas), felt by the embodied mind through a stretch of the imagination. To the extent that perfectionism exists in Kant’s 1790 view of the sublime – if one ignores for the moment adherent judgments of sublimity directed at the external object’s perfection and/or purpose – it lies above all in Kant’s claim that in sublime experiences one admires or at least feels one’s power of reason rather than an objective perfection.86 The notion of an aesthetic idea does not play a major role in Kant’s account of the sublime. Ideas of reason and aesthetic ideas are counterparts, not identical. To be sure, some scholars have tried to reconstruct an account of the sublime in terms of aesthetic ideas.87 Interpreters are of course free to create a connection between the sublime and aesthetic ideas if they please, and it is not contradictory to claim that some works of art both evoke the sublime

85

86 87

On the possibility of adherent sublimity, see Clewis, Kantian Sublime, 96–108; and Robert R. Clewis, “What’s the Big Idea? On Emily Brady’s Sublime,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 50, no. 2 (2016): 104–18. See Guyer, Modern Aesthetics, 362–3. E.g., Robert Wicks, “Kant on Fine Art: Artistic Sublimity Shaped by Beauty,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53, no. 2 (1995): 189–93. Kirk Pillow, Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).

   : ’   



and express aesthetic ideas (which Kant associates with beauty in general) (KU 5:320). Nevertheless, Kant himself does not explain his theory of the sublime in terms of aesthetic ideas, so the attempt to read him that way should be recognized as being reconstructive. What about the sources and normativity of aesthetic pleasure (arc 4)? The 1790 account develops a more detailed explanation of the sublime as a negative pleasure. To be in a position to do so, Kant needs to have developed a theory of reason as a faculty of the unconditioned or supersensible ideas that seeks a whole or totality (KrV A307/B364). In explaining the mathematical sublime, Kant writes: “Now the mind hears in itself the voice of reason, which requires totality for all given magnitudes, even for those that can never be entirely apprehended although they are (in the sensible representation) judged as entirely given” (KU 5:254).88 The (early) principle of sensible comprehension as a source of the pleasure applies to beauty, not the sublime. In his early aesthetics, Kant sometimes denies universal validity to experiences of the sublime. As discussed in previous chapters, the principle of sensible comprehension is replaced by a theory of the free harmonious play of imagination and understanding. With some modification, this free play model can be applied to the sublime. Reason (as faculty of the unconditioned), not understanding, is in an initially contrapurposive but ultimately purposive relation with imagination, which produces the negative pleasure associated with the experience of the sublime. The initial disharmony between imagination and reason is ultimately purposive and pleasant in that the power of reason is sensibly disclosed and the imagination (even if it ultimately fails to realize or reach infinity) is expanded in the process. The imagination “acquires an enlargement and power which is greater than that which it sacrifices, but whose ground is hidden from it” (KU 5:269). Kant does not technically call the ultimately purposive interaction between imagination and reason a “free play,” but they are still in an interaction that is “aesthetic” and in which the imagination is stretched. Alongside the pleasures in rising above ordinary affairs and belonging to a moral order, or feeling a higher calling or vocation, accompanied by the corresponding rush of the vital forces, this interaction of the faculties, whereby the imagination is expanded even as the power of reason is felt, makes for some of the pleasures in the sublime. 88

A recent book-length study in English on reason in this sense is: Marcus Willaschek, Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics: The Dialectic of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). In The Kantian Sublime, 72–6, I compare the “subreption” in the sublime (KU 5:257) to the transcendental illusion that arises from reason’s demand to seek the unconditioned, drawing from Michelle Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For a study of Kant as a reformer of the Wolffian tradition of metaphysics, see Karin de Boer, Kant’s Reform of Metaphysics: The Critique of Pure Reason Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).



   ’ 

In the transcendental account, Kant attributes universal validity to the sublime. Though Kant is not clear about this, the normativity of the sublime is grounded on a feature of human nature or humanity: freedom as a capacity to rise above nature. The two forms of the sublime (mathematical and dynamical) correspond to two aspects of freedom: theoretical and practical. In its cognitive and practical dimensions, reason (as faculty of the unconditioned and of freedom) interacts with the imagination, producing a negative pleasure. In 1790, Kant uses some of the same (stock) examples as in his early aesthetics, and he still views the sublime as a failure to capture an overwhelming magnitude in a single intuition, that is, as ungraspable according to the laws of intuition, and thus (initially) contrapurposive. But in the third Critique Kant describes the sublime as having universal validity rather than as being a mere emotion (Rührung). This view of the sublime’s normativity is thus strongly shaped by the ethical turn (arc 5). Whereas the notion of a “moral” or noble sublime is already found in Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, and the early Kant, in the third Critique Kant offers a more subtle conceptual connection between the sublime and morality. He grounds the normativity of the experience of the sublime on morality and “human nature” (which, he thinks, can be thought of as free, and thus as subject to morality). When Kant gives an exposition of the sublime (which he thinks also counts as the deduction), it reflects his moral turn. To see the differences between the early and mature aesthetics of the sublime, consider once again the passage from Parow (1772/73): in the terrifying experience of solitude in the universe, “one imagines that . . . one does not even deserve the attention of the all-powerful being” (V-Anth/Parow 25:389), as if God or society provided comfort and respite from a solitude-induced despair. Five years later, in 1778, the experience of the sublime is still not given a moral grounding. Kant’s perspective remains largely theological rather than transcendental: he writes of “the textbook of divine majesty” (R 981). Yet when, at the famous conclusion of the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant describes an experience of the sublime – induced by the innumerable stars in the night sky – the notion of God is absent. Kant describes the “starry heavens above me” and “the moral law within me” without appealing to either fear or to the divine (KpV 5:161). And when he analyzes the sublime in the third Critique, Kant insists that the righteous person before the divine shall not fear (KU 5:260–1). Respect for one’s vocation does not come from being attended to by a creator, but from what humans do with their capacity to act.

Concluding Remarks Mendelssohn warns that what is extensively great or vast can lead to boredom, or even to disgust. This chapter is long, but I hope it has not elicited such a response. . . . The time for disgust is now.

7 Ugliness and Disgust: Disagreeable Sensations

[Johann Jakob] Heidegger was a celebrated singer and music performer from Switzerland. While at a party, it occurred to him to declare to a lord that he, Heidegger, had the ugliest face in all of London. The lord reflected for a moment and then made a bet that he could find someone even uglier. Heidegger agreed. The lord sent out for an old drunk woman. When she appeared, the whole party burst into laughter. They cried out, “Heidegger, you just lost the bet.” “Not so fast,” he replied, “Let the woman wear my wig. I’ll put on her headdress. Then we’ll see.” So they switched clothes. Everyone fell into laughter again, for the woman looked like a handsome and well-bred man, while Heidegger ended up looking like a witch.1

This story comes off as sexist and ageist. Kant loved telling it to his students. He probably did not aim to offend, however, but to show that how one applies the concept of ugliness depends on how one approaches or views the object or person in question. Seen as a woman, the Swiss singer appears ugly. The lady, viewed as “feminine,” becomes disgusting, not just ugly. As a man, she is handsome. What affects the judgment is what the object or person is supposed to be, a concept of what kind of thing or person it is. Kant also liked to tell the

1

See also Clewis, Kant’s Humorous Writings, 163, which contains commentary. The present version liberally draws from Anth 7:300 n. and V-Anth/Mron 25:1330. This anecdote is found in several other transcriptions: V-Anth/Collins 25:182–3; V-Anth/Parow 25:379; and V-Anth/Fried 25:665. It is also found in the anthropology Dohna-Wundlacken lecture (ms page 180 = pages 214–5 in Kowalewski, Hauptvorlesungen; and ms page 305 = page 320 in Kowalewski, Hauptvorlesungen). This confirms (as scholars such as Naragon have pointed out, but even esteemed scholars such as Tonelli, “La Formazione,” 440, seem to have missed) the mixed provenance (from 1772/73 as well as 1791/92) of the DohnaWundlacken anthropology lecture, which scholars should quote from only very cautiously. See Steve Naragon, “Kant in the Classroom: Dohna-Wundlacken.” https://users .manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Kant/Notes/notesAnthropology.htm#DohnaWundlacken1 [accessed October 6, 2021]. The origin of the Heidegger story is Jacob Friedrich von Bielfeld; see V-Anth/Parow 25:379 and AA 25:182 no. 175.





   ’ 

following anecdote to make a similar point about the relativity of ugliness and beauty: There was once a soldier with a big nose, but it was blown off in combat. Since he thought his nose was too big for his face, he wanted to replace it with a smaller, more attractive one. So he had the best wax nose sent from Paris. But when he had the new nose put on, he looked worse – ten times worse. So he ordered a version of his old nose, and he had that one put on. (V-Anth/Mron 25:1378)2

According to Kant’s reasoning, beauty is judged by a standard that derives from the average for a class or set of objects. This averaging principle implies that what seems “ugly” has its place in the larger scheme of nature. Each specimen, a variety (Varietät) that lies in nature, has a role to play. Neither an extremely short nose nor a very long one would be ugly in the greater whole. What one thinks is ugly (the disproportionate body part) only appears that way because one lacks the right perspective. What looks ugly is (only) an aspect of it, because one does not have in mind the normal or norm-based idea. A single object or person (a big nose, a Heidegger) may appear ugly or deformed in relation to individual specimens of its kind, but not if one considers all specimens together. These stories, though somewhat tucked away in Kant’s lectures, connect to broader claims made about ugliness. Indeed, whether Kant’s account has room for aesthetic judgments of the ugly (Häßliche) has been much debated. The introduction to a recent volume on aesthetic ugliness claims that “in recent years the ugly has been gaining some philosophical attention” and points out that the discussion has largely taken place within the context of Kant scholarship.3 Making a similar point, a recent article on ugliness states that “of the available literature on ugliness,” a “considerable share of research concentrates on exegeses of Kant’s views of ugliness . . . or, indeed, on the absence of such views.”4 Still, no monograph has yet to trace the evolution of Kant’s views of ugliness.5 Moreover, interest in ugliness is not limited to Kant studies. From

2 3

4

5

Quoted from Clewis, Kant’s Humorous Writings, 165. See also V-Anth/Fried 25:666. Lars Aagaard-Morgensen’s Introduction to On the Ugly: Aesthetic Exchanges, ed. Lars Aagaard-Mogensen and Jane Forsey (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2019), x. Panos Paris, “The Deformity-Related Conception of Ugliness,” British Journal of Aesthetics 57, no. 2 (2017): 139–60, 139. Paris argues that deformity and displeasure (jointly) suffice for ugliness. Menzer, Entwicklung, discusses some of the topics covered in the present book, but omits a section on ugliness. Zammito, Genesis, cites articles on ugliness, but does not closely examine the topic.

  :  



Karl Rosenkranz to Umberto Eco,6 ugliness is wildly popular. Since contemporary art no longer has to be beautiful, Arthur Danto felt a need to defend beauty as at least sometimes (though not necessarily) relevant to art, or to shield it from “abuse.”7

Are Aesthetic Judgments of Ugliness Even Possible? Kant’s commentators disagree on whether an aesthetic judgment of ugliness is possible, and if so, whether it can be “pure” or must be “impure.” The very notion of an aesthetic judgment of ugliness has created some confusion. Given this context, I cannot simply begin by “summarizing” the third Critique position. In contrast to the other seven themes examined in this book, the very possibility of this aesthetic judgment lies at the center of any purported synopsis. I will therefore give an overview of that debate, and in this way a sense of Kant’s position will emerge. Kant scholarship on ugliness can be divided into two main groups: those who affirm that there can be aesthetic judgments of ugliness, and those who deny it.8 Affirm: There can be (pure) negative aesthetic judgments of taste, that is, aesthetic judgments of ugliness.9 6

7

8

9

Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Hässlichen (Königsberg: Bornträger, 1853), translated into English in Karl Rosenkranz, Aesthetics of Ugliness, trans. Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Umberto Eco, ed., On Ugliness, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Rizzoli, 2007). Arthur Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2003). See also Eldridge, Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, 68. I here use the term (aesthetic) “negative judgments of taste” as synonymous with (aesthetic) “judgments of the ugly.” One of the main questions in the debate concerns what the “negative” means and entails. Scholars who (in different ways) affirm the possibility of aesthetic judgments of ugliness include the following. Allison, Taste, esp. 116. Matthew Coate, “‘Nothing but Nonsense’: A Kantian Account of Ugliness,” British Journal of Aesthetics 58, no. 1 (2018): 51–70. Alix Cohen, “Kant on the Possibility of Ugliness,” British Journal of Aesthetics 53, no. 2 (2013): 199–209. Mojca Küplen has published several articles on the topic as well as a monograph. See, e.g., Mojca Küplen, “Disgust and Ugliness: A Kantian Perspective,” Contemporary Aesthetics 9, article 10 (2011): no pagination, at https://digitalcommons .risd.edu/liberalarts_contempaesthetics/vol9/iss1/10 [accessed August 29, 2021]. Mojca Küplen, Beauty, Ugliness and the Free Play of Imagination: An Approach to Kant’s Aesthetics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015). Sean McConnell, “How Kant Might Explain Ugliness,” British Journal of Aesthetics (2008) 48, no. 2: 205–28. James Phillips, “Placing Ugliness in Kant’s Third Critique: A Reply to Paul Guyer,” Kant-Studien 102, no. 3 (2011): 385–95. Phillips argues that there can be disinterested judgments of free ugliness, where the ugly is recognized by its unsuitability to be an object of pure contemplation. Maarten Steenhagen, “Explaining the Ugly: Disharmony and Unrestrained Cognition in Kant.” Esthetica 11 (2010): no pagination. http://estheticatijdschrift.nl/



   ’  Deny: There cannot be any (pure) negative aesthetic judgments of taste or aesthetic judgments of ugliness.10

In this section, I first consider the arguments in favor of Affirm and then propose brief counterarguments to them. I take the debate to concern a pure judgment of ugliness, that is, the counterpart to the pure judgment of the beautiful. I find the arguments for Deny to be stronger than those for Affirm. Consistent with the method of this book, however, my point in this section is not so much to take a final position on the issue in question as to give a sense of the third Critique account. Accordingly, both Kant’s position and some of the interpretive difficulties associated with it should become clear in the following. 1. A first argument for Affirm begins with the fact that there are many references to displeasure (Unlust) and dissatisfaction (Misfallen) scattered throughout the third Critique – they are found as early as the Preface (KU

10

files/2014/09/09/3-Esthetica-ExplainingtheUgly-Disharmonyand-UnrestrainedCognitio ninKant-2010-11-24.pdf [accessed January 5, 2022]. Steenhagen does not defend the possibility of pure aesthetic judgments of ugliness per se and thus technically does not subscribe to Affirm, but since he is still trying to explain how Kantian judgments of ugliness would be possible (viz., as adherent, impure judgments), I place his paper here. One of the earliest articles on the Affirm side is: Christian Strub, “Das Häßliche und die ‘Kritik der ästhetischen Urteilskraft’: Überlegungen zu einer systematischen Lücke,” Kant-Studien 80 (1989): 416–46. Wenzel examines ugliness in several publications, starting with: Christian Wenzel, “Kant Finds Nothing Ugly?” British Journal of Aesthetics 39, no. 4 (1999): 416–22. Scholars placed together in Affirm (or Deny) do not agree on every point, and this list is not exhaustive. Finally, Jonathan Johnson ultimately remains agnostic about pure aesthetic judgments of ugliness, and he offers a useful survey of the arguments pro and con. Jonathan Johnson, “Understandings of Ugliness in Kant’s Aesthetics,” in Aagaard-Mogensen and Forsey, eds., On the Ugly, 47–66. Scholars who (for various reasons) deny that there are pure aesthetic judgments of ugliness include the following. Reinhard Brandt, “Die Schönheit der Kristallen und das Spiel der Erkenntniskräfte. Zum Gegenstand und zur Logik des ästhetischen Urteils bei Kant,” in Autographen, Dokumente und Berichte. Zu Edition, Amtsgeschäften und Werk Immanuel Kants, Kant-Forschungen, vol. 5, ed. Reinhard Brandt and Werner Stark (Hamburg: Meiner, 1994), 19–57. Serena Feloj, Estetica del disgust (Roma: Carocci editore, 2017), which I review in Robert R. Clewis, “On Serena Feloj’s Estetica del Disgusto” in Critique (2019) https://virtualcritique.wordpress.com/2019/07/15/robert-rclewis-on-serena-felojs-estetica-del-disgusto/ [accessed August 19, 2021]. Paul Guyer, “Kant on the Purity of the Ugly,” in Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 141–62. David Shier, “Why Kant Finds Nothing Ugly,” British Journal of Aesthetics 38, no. 4 (1998): 412–8. Theodore Gracyk discusses ugliness and the sublime in relation to form. Theodore Gracyk, “Sublimity, Ugliness, and Formlessness in Kant’s Aesthetic Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45, no. 1 (1986): 49–56. Garrett Thomson discusses Kantian ugliness in terms of Kant’s teleology. Garrett Thomson, “Kant’s Problems with Ugliness,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50, no. 2 (1992): 107–15. Guyer responds to Thomson’s article in: Paul Guyer, “Thomson’s Problems with Kant: A Comment on ‘Kant’s Problems with Ugliness’,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50, no. 4 (1992): 317–9.

  :  



5:169). They also appear in the published compendium based on Kant’s own course notes, the Anthropology (e.g., Anth 7:244). A good example of these disjunctives (or conjunctives) can be seen in the “Definition” at the end of the first Moment (quality) in the third Critique: “Taste is the faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction [Misfallen] without any interest” (KU 5:211). These numerous references to displeasure and dissatisfaction might be taken to imply that Kant is referring to an aesthetic judgment of ugliness. Such a conclusion would be too hasty, however. First, Kant often writes of pleasure on its own, without reference to displeasure. A few lines after the above Anthropology passage, he writes, “Music and the plastic arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, and horticulture) lay claim to taste as a susceptibility of a feeling of pleasure for the mere forms of external intuition” (Anth 7:244). Moreover, the argument fails to consider other ways of interpreting such conjunctions and disjunctions. The negative term Misfallen (dissatisfaction) is often paired with its positive semantic relative Wohgefallen (satisfaction) (e.g., KU 5:241–2), and Unlust (displeasure) is likewise often mentioned alongside Lust (pleasure). In such passages, Kant never specifies that he is thinking of displeasure as the basis of making a pure aesthetic judgment of ugliness.11 So then how should one interpret such phrases? They are best seen as references either to the sublime or to the general faculty of pleasure and displeasure (and thus, for Kant, to the feeling of life). The third Critique contains no section called the “Analytic of the Ugly,” but it does have an “Analytic of the Sublime.” Accordingly, one might reasonably take instances to Unlust or Misfallen to refer to the sublime. Since Kant characterizes the sublime as a negative pleasure (KU 5:245), it could make sense to think of the experience of the sublime as a kind of displeasure or dissatisfaction. (In the mathematical sublime, the imagination, while initially expanded, is in the end frustrated. In the dynamical sublime, the sense of well-being, or sensibility, is threatened.) While sometimes Kant might be referring to the sublime, at other times the displeasure or dissatisfaction cannot be read as applying to the sublime. This is the case with the Definition above. For a judgment about the sublime, though a pure aesthetic judgment, is not a judgment of taste (Anth 7:241), and the Definition concerns taste. So here the phrase refers either to the capacity for pleasure and displeasure in general, or to aesthetic ugliness. This point does not by itself exclude a reference to ugliness, but it does show that one cannot simply assume that the passage refers to a judgment of ugliness either.

11

Likewise, Kant’s argument in the published Introduction’s VII relates only pleasure to the exercise of a form of reflective judgment. See also Guyer, Taste, 69.



   ’ 

These references need not be taken to imply that there are pure or impure judgments of ugliness. References to “pleasure or pain” or to “satisfaction or dissatisfaction” do not by themselves entail that aesthetic judgments of ugliness are possible. 2. A second argument takes its starting point from the first sentence of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” (§1).12 “In order to decide whether or not something is beautiful, we do not relate the representation by means of understanding to the object for cognition, but rather relate it by means of the imagination (perhaps combined with the understanding) to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure” (KU 5:203). When I “decide” whether or not a given thing or event is beautiful, I might answer in the negative. If so, the argument goes, there can be negative judgments of taste. Mojca Küplen gives a version of this argument: “To evaluate objects as aesthetically ugly is to acknowledge that the reflective operation took place and that its outcome was a negative aesthetic feeling of ugliness (aesthetic displeasure), which therefore must be regarded as a counterpart to beauty.”13 To strengthen the case (before rejecting it), I will also cite this passage from the Anthropology. The judging of an object through taste is a judgment about the harmony or discord [Widerstreit] of freedom, in the play of the power of imagination and the lawfulness of understanding, and therefore it is a matter only of judging the form aesthetically (the unifiability of the sense representations), not the generation of products, in which the form is perceived. (Anth 7:241)

The reference to “discord” might be taken to imply that there can be a pure judgment of taste about an object that produces a disharmony between the imagination and understanding.14 The situation is more complicated than this argument implies, however. There are (at least) three, not two, answers one can give to the question about a particular object’s beauty. Answers may be positive, neutral, or negative. Following Guyer, whose article “Kant on the Purity of the Ugly” has shaped much of the recent anglophone debate, one can call this aesthetic trivalence (i.e., there are three values: beautiful, neutral, and ugly).15 The positively

12

13 14

15

Christian Helmut Wenzel, “Do Negative Judgments of Taste Have a priori Grounds in Kant?” Kant-Studien 103, no. 4 (2012): 472–93. Küplen, “Disgust and Ugliness.” See also the first Introduction, where the faculties are said to either help or “hinder” each other (EEKU 20:223). See also Richard Leppert, “Ugly,” in German Aesthetics: Fundamental Concepts from Baumgarten to Adorno, ed. J.D. Mininger and Jason Michael Peck (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 219–26, 225.

  :  



beautiful, for Kant, would be what elicits the harmonious free play between imagination and understanding. Second is the mere lack of beauty, the aesthetically neutral. An object or person can lack beauty but still not qualify as ugly. As Kant puts it in the Anthropology, a disfigured or ugly face “must rather be included among a variety that lies in nature, and must not be called a distorted face [Fratzengesicht] (which would be repulsive [abschreckend]); for even if it is not lovely, it can inspire love, and although it is without beauty, it is still not ugly” (Anth 7:300).16 Finally comes the real negative: the actually ugly. I take the debate in question to concern the possibility of aesthetic judgments about actual or real ugliness,17 not the aesthetically neutral (indifferent, insignificant). I will note, however, that it is not self-evident that the true opposite of beauty is ugliness. Like George Santayana, one might claim that the real opposite of beauty is the mediocre, the indifferent.18 Kant endorses aesthetic trivalence in Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (1763) as well as, it would appear, in a lecture on metaphysics from around the mid to late 1770s (V-Met/L1 28:248–9, 253). In the early 1780s, he seems to reject trivalence and to drop the notion of aesthetic ugliness, though there is one possible late exception: an ambiguous passage from the post-1790 lecture Metaphysics Vigilantius (discussed below). In Negative Magnitudes, Kant invokes a trichotomy of aesthetic evaluations (beautiful, ordinary, ugly), but according to the Logic Pölitz transcription (1780–82) he abandons this threefold division in the early 1780s: “Taste is [the ability] to distinguish the beautiful from the not-beautiful (not from the ugly, for what is not beautiful, is not always ugly)” (V-Lo/Pölitz 24:514).19 In making a judgment of taste, one makes a decision about an object’s beauty. But 16

17

18 19

Fratzen (grotesqueries, grimaces) is a prevalent theme in the Observations (GSE 2:214–5, 252, 255–6). Rosenkranz, Ugliness, 240–1, correctly views these examples from Kant’s Observations as going beyond the borders of the aesthetic and into the moral or practical sphere. In addition, Kant considers grotesqueries to be worthy of satire: “Hudibras parodies Fratzen” (BGSE 20:37). In Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, he satirizes chimerical ideas (TG 2:340). Bernard Bosanquet uses the term “real ugliness” and (like Kant) distinguishes it from “apparent ugliness,” the kind that can be represented beautifully in fine art. Bernard Bosanquet, “The Æsthetic Theory of Ugliness,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1, no. 3 (1890): 32–48. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York: Scribners, 1896), 21. The Logic Pölitz, once thought to derive from lectures from 1789, the year written on the title page, appears to derive from the early 1780s. Young maintains that the Logic Pölitz comes from “around 1780.” Michael Young’s Introduction to Kant, Lectures on Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), xxv. Young follows Tillman Pinder, “Zu Kants Logik-Vorlesung um 1780, anläßlich einer neu aufgefundenen Nachschrift,” in Kant-Forschungen, ed. Brandt and Stark, vol. 1, 79–114. Naragon gives the range



   ’ 

this does not mean that when the object is not beautiful, one proceeds to make a pure aesthetic judgment of ugliness. According to this transcription, taste does not distinguish the beautiful from ugliness, but from the non-beautiful. Now, a crucial issue in this debate (perhaps the most crucial one) is how a person judging an object to be ugly could have a “harmonious play” of the faculties, as a pure aesthetic judgment clearly requires (EEKU 20:224). It is hard to see how ugliness could lead to a “proportion” (KU 5:292) and harmony of the faculties that lie at the core of Kant’s mature aesthetic theory. If his theory of taste is based on a harmony of the imagination and understanding, it is difficult to see how a disharmony could be the basis for a pure aesthetic judgment. Moreover, it would seem that a sensation arising from perceiving ugliness would be unpleasant rather than pleasant. So it remains unclear why one would want to linger in the experience at all, the way one stays with beauty. Accordingly, it does not seem that displeasure could be the basis of (or itself amount) to a pure aesthetic judgment. To save Kant here, writers endorsing Affirm introduce the notion of a free disharmonious play – a concept that, it should be noted, is not itself elucidated or analyzed in any of Kant’s writings. There are different varieties of this overall strategy. Alix Cohen defines “pure ugliness” as the disinterested displeasure caused by the experience of what she calls a displeasing “foul play” between the imagination and the understanding.20 Küplen writes of a “discord” or “disharmony” among the “formal qualities” of the ugly object, creating a “disharmonious play.”21 And Maarten Steenhagen argues that a Kantian account of (impure) judgments of ugliness can be given in terms of a (relatively) disharmonious “free play” of the faculties of imagination and understanding.22 Now, it may be the case that there is a disharmony in the failure to find a suitable concept for a given object, or that there is something foul about such a failed attempt. But, as noted, it is unclear why this would be pleasant. If it is not pleasant, it is obscure why one would dwell in it the way one lingers before beauty. It is puzzling why one would have a disinterested and aesthetic play with such an object at all. In addition, it is unclear how or why a judgment based on a free disharmony would have any claim to universal validity, rather than just being disagreeable. According to Kant’s deduction of pure aesthetic judgments, a common coordination of the faculties, not discord, is a necessary condition and presupposition of knowledge (§21, §38). So it remains unclear how Kant’s

20 21 22

1780–82. Steve Naragon, “Kant in the Classroom: Logic Notes.” https://users.manchester .edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Kant/Notes/notesLogic.htm [accessed July 25, 2021]. Cohen, “Kant on the Possibility of Ugliness,” 203. Küplen, “Disgust and Ugliness.” Steenhagen, “Explaining the Ugly.”

  :  



deduction of aesthetic judgments of taste would work or apply in the case of ugliness; yet it would have to work, if pure aesthetic judgments of ugliness are to have subjective universality. Moreover, it is also not evident what role a free disharmony could play in Kant’s system nor how it could fit in with the transcendental principle of judgment, the principle of the purposiveness and systematicity of nature. (I am not suggesting that proponents of Affirm have ignored these problems. They just have not adequately addressed them.) In short, it is hard to see how such a play could be disharmonious when, as Kant states in Section VII of the Introduction (KU 5:190), play amounts to an accord between imagination and understanding. Based on KU 5:190, Guyer criticizes this aspect of the Affirm position (represented by Allison) as follows: .

Henry Allison’s argument that we must distinguish between the free play of the faculties and a harmonious play between them because there can also be unharmonious free play, as in the experience of the ugly, is belied by Kant’s equation of the state of play between imagination and understanding as one of accord (Einstimmung) between them in the Introduction to the third Critique. There is no room for a disharmonious state of play in this dispositive statement.23

To be sure, Kant can recognize the existence of actual ugliness in artifacts and objects judged at a local level. But a person experiencing ugliness would no longer be disinterested and would feel displeasure, issuing a judgment that is “impure” because (or in the sense that) it is disagreeable or else based on a prudential or moral reason.24 Some of the third Critique’s own examples confirm that the experience of ugliness, though based on a disagreeable sensation, is not (or does not amount to) a pure aesthetic judgment. According to a passage I presented when discussing purported rules of taste in Chapter 1, an aesthetic judge is dissatisfied by a poem or play: If someone reads me his poem or takes me to a play that in the end fails to please my taste [meinem Geschmacke nicht behagen will], then he can adduce Batteux or Lessing, or even older and more famous critics of taste, and adduce all the rules they established as proofs that his poem is beautiful; certain passages, which are the very ones that displease me [die mir eben mißfallen], may even agree with rules of beauty (as they have been given there and have been universally recognized): I will stop my ears, [and] listen to no reasons and arguments. (KU 5:284; emphasis modified)

23 24

Guyer, “Play and Society,” 228–9 no. 6. Guyer, “Purity,” 151. Guyer holds that judgments of ugliness are not purely reflective aesthetic judgments, but are based on sensory judgments or else practical judgments (whether prudential or moral).



   ’ 

The aesthetic judge in this example dislikes the work, but his encounter with the play or poem does not lead to a pure judgment of ugliness, though it may well lead to a disagreeable sensation or even to indifference. Again, I take the debate in question to concern a pure judgment of ugliness, that is, the counterpart to the pure judgment of the beautiful. To summarize, when one asks of an object, “Is it beautiful?” and receives a negative answer, we should interpret this to mean one of two things. Either the object is aesthetically neutral (flat, ordinary), or it is disagreeable, and one is repelled and thus one takes what might be thought of as a negative interest – which is still a mode of interest. It does not entail that one issues a pure negative aesthetic judgment of taste or a pure judgment of ugliness. 3. A third argument asserts that some objects or occurrences exhibit fascinating ugliness.25 An object may be ugly yet at the same time aesthetically attractive. In other words, here ugliness is viewed as an aesthetic property, albeit a negative one. The ugly need not be unpleasant; it can somehow be aesthetically pleasing. The “somehow” is vague, however. It may be that a peculiar-looking thing evokes a harmonious, free play between imagination and understanding, a kind of quickening of the faculties.26 But then it is not clear why the object would be experienced as (or judged to be) ugly rather than beautiful. Such fascinating “ugliness” does not seem so negative after all. Wenzel, who gives a version of this third argument, in fact reveals too much: “The fascination with the ugly can be a challenge to change perspective so that the disharmony disappears. . . . Things that appear ugly at first become beautiful when taste is more ‘educated’ and when we have learned how to take new perspectives.”27 Fascinating ugliness, he implies, is really a stage on the way to beauty. In fact, that is why this concept sometimes goes by the name of difficult beauty.28

25

26

27

28

See Dieter Lohmar, “Das Geschmacksurteil über das faszinierend Häßliche,” in Kants Ästhetik, Kant’s Aesthetics, L’esthetique de Kant, ed. Herman Parret (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 498–512. Lohmar examines previous analyses such as Strub, “Das Häßliche.” Wenzel, Introduction, 130–2, also invokes the notion of fascinating ugliness. McConnell, “How Kant Might Explain Ugliness,” 206 no. 2, 220, appeals to the quickening or animation of the faculties in their harmonious free play to explain the displeasure in the ugly. As he puts it pointedly (214), “The tempting notion of the disharmonious free play of the faculties does not make any sense.” This verdict seems right, but why the harmonious free play should evoke displeasure remains puzzling. Wenzel, Introduction, 132. Wenzel also claims that beauty and ugliness can be “interwoven” (131). Paris, “Deformity-Related Conception,” 139. Samuel Alexander and Bernard Bosanquet view ugliness as a difficult beauty or as an ingredient to beauty. Samuel Alexander, Beauty and Other Forms of Value (New York: Crowell, 1933), 163–5. Bosanquet, “Æsthetic

  :  



Some objects that do not appear symmetrical or harmonious are doubtless aesthetically captivating. But this claim does not support Affirm. Rather, such instances of the so-called fascinating ugly are compatible with Kant’s conception of the beautiful, especially if the beautiful is not to descend into the sweet, saccharine, alluring, or kitsch. Beauty can be difficult or challenging. Such inner tension is perhaps even part of what makes an artwork beautiful, that is, an aesthetic success (a Hieronymous Bosch panel, the Cubist painting, the Gustav Mahler symphony). The beautiful object or work cannot be boring or unworthy of aesthetic attention.29 Kant maintains that an artistic genius will sometimes choose to leave in some ugliness or deformity (§49), but he adds that students and apprentices should not blindly copy the genius when he leaves in such a deformation (Mißgestalt) or defect, since, normally, ugliness worsens the work. But this imitation becomes aping if the student copies everything, even down to that which the genius had to leave in, as a deformity/malformation [Mißgestalt], only because it could not easily have been removed without weakening the idea. This courage is a merit only in a genius, and a certain boldness in expression and in general some deviation from the common rule is well suited to him, but is by no means worthy of imitation, but always remains in itself a defect which one must seek to remove, but for which the genius is as it were privileged, since what is inimitable in the impetus of his spirit30 would suffer from anxious caution. (KU 5:318; emphasis added)

Though he recognizes that a genius might opt to let a disfiguration remain in a particular artwork, Kant implies that in the typical case ugliness is a defect that artists, especially art students, ought to remove. Indeed, the overall aim of including some apparent ugliness in the work is to create an overall effect or product that on the whole is judged to be beautiful, not to lead to an aesthetic judgment of ugliness in viewers and apprehenders. If Kant thought that aesthetic judgments of ugliness were possible and that they ran parallel to judgments of taste, it is unclear why budding artists should feel pressure to remove defects rather than to elicit judgments of ugliness. Moreover, as discussed in Chapter 2, Kant need not be read as a strong formalist about the object of pure aesthetic judgment. The object that elicits

29

30

Theory of Ugliness.” On easy and difficult beauty, see also Bernard Bosanquet, Three Lectures on Aesthetics (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963). Makkai, Kant’s Critique, 13, likewise states: “Kant’s ‘beauty’ is better thought of as standing for ‘aesthetic excellence’ or ‘aesthetic value’, and as subsuming an open-ended range of particular aesthetic values – including beauty narrowly construed. . . . It is this experience, finding something to be worth engaging with, that Kant’s experience of ‘beauty’ names.” Kant appears to be using a thin conception of genius here.



   ’ 

the free play in the judgment of taste does not have to be symmetrical or display order and proportion, and beauty need not be understood narrowly. Kant’s notion of beauty as the expression of an aesthetic idea, finally, can help account for the fascinating ugly. An aesthetic idea is an intuitive representation of the imagination that is so rich and boundless that it cannot be fully conceptualized or brought to concepts. One might say that, due to an inner tension, the imaginative intuition is so robust that one finds it aesthetically appealing and intriguing. The play with aesthetic ideas is unending – one keeps looking and looking. Such a representation, while fascinating, need not be called ugly. 4. A fourth argument turns on an analogy between doing wrong and judging ugliness. For Kant, vicious or wrong acts are not done out of ignorance of their being wrong or evil. When I commit acts of wrongdoing and violate the moral law, I am aware (or at least could become aware) that I am doing so and that I am still bound by the moral law as expressed in the categorical imperative. When I do a wrong action, I choose to contravene the moral law. This leads to an analogy with ugliness. When I make a negative aesthetic judgment of taste, I am still aware of, and apply, the principle that allows me to make a positive judgment of taste. I apply a principle of purposiveness. This analogy per se is not weak; it is just that Affirm cannot be concluded from it. The argument starts from a plausible premise, but it would be a mistake to infer that there are aesthetic judgments of ugliness rather than that the object exhibits a failed form of purposiveness or functionality and is thus disagreeable. It is true that, for Kant, even the wrongdoer recognizes (or could recognize) the moral law and is bound by it. As Kant states in the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, “The human being (even the worst) does not repudiate the moral law, whatever his maxims, in rebellious attitude (by revoking obedience to it). The law rather imposes itself on him irresistibly, because of his moral predisposition” (Rel 6:36). In the case of evil, the moral law is subordinated to the principle of self-love. The ground of evil cannot be placed in a “corruption of the morally legislative reason, as if reason could extirpate within itself the dignity of the law itself, for this is absolutely impossible” (Rel 6:35). The immoral agent, fallible but still rational, does not act on a would-be diabolical imperative. He acts on a maxim of self-love. As a 1770s anthropology lecture puts it, “Human beings do not in fact take any immediate satisfaction and enjoyment in evil, but only insofar as it is a means of satisfying their inclination and of promoting their advantage” (V-Anth/ Fried 25:608). Still bound by the moral law, the wrongdoer makes an exception of himself in the pursuit of advantage and self-interest. The moral law remains the criterion by which the agent’s maxims and actions are judged. The analogy with ugliness could have more profitably proceeded as follows. The response to ugliness does not involve an application of a separate

  :  



principle of un-purposiveness or contrapurposiveness.31 If one wished to claim that the perceiver of ugliness applies a principle of purposiveness, one should say that the object is viewed as exhibiting a botched or failed kind of purposiveness. Indeed, that is why the experience of such ugliness is typically unpleasant. In the third Critique, Kant claims that lopsided figures displease on account of their disfiguration or deformity. He does not claim that such shapes or forms lead to pure judgments of ugliness. To find such objects deformed, one does not need to use “taste” at all. In what is perhaps a response to Hutcheson, who viewed geometrical figures as beauties (see Chapter 2), Kant writes: No one is likely to think it necessary for a person to have taste in order to find more satisfaction in the shape of a circle than in a scribbled outline, or more in an equilateral and equiangular quadrilateral than in one that is lopsided and irregular, as it were deformed [verkrüppelten]; for this takes only common understanding and no taste at all. Where there is an aim in view, e.g., judging the magnitude of an area or grasping the relation of the parts in a division to each other and to the whole, there regular shapes, and indeed those of the simplest kind, are necessary, and the satisfaction does not rest immediately on the view of the shape, but on its usefulness for all sorts of possible aims. (KU 5:241–2; emphasis added)

After discussing asymmetrical and symmetrical objects in terms of purposiveness, Kant next discusses asymmetry in a room, a garden, and an injured animal. Such an asymmetrical or dysfunctional object displeases “because it is contrapurposive.” The rest of the paragraph continues: A room whose walls form oblique angles, a garden of a similar sort, even any injury to symmetry in the shape of animals (e.g., having one eye) as well as in buildings or floral arrangements displeases [mißfällt], because it is contrapurposive, not only practically, with regard to a determinate use of these things, but also for judging with respect to all sorts of possible aims; this is not the case in the judgment of taste, which, if it is pure, immediately connects satisfaction or dissatisfaction [Wohlgefallen oder Mißfallen] to the mere consideration of the object without respect to use or to an end. (KU 5:241–2)

In animals, the contrapurposiveness can arise from dysfunction, asymmetry, or both. Such ugliness would likely violate the disinterested condition for

31

Wenzel is thus forced to modify Kant’s account by introducing the notion of “negative purposiveness.” Wenzel, Introduction, 131. The application of the (positive) principle of purposiveness, I believe, leads to Deny.



   ’ 

aesthetic judgment: when ugliness becomes disagreeable, even something to avoid, the disinterested condition of the purity of the aesthetic judgment is vitiated. 5. A related argument also proceeds by analogy: just as beauty is the symbol of the morally good, ugliness symbolizes the morally evil. The argument makes use of the fact that, according to Kant, beauty symbolizes the morally good (§59). In addition, it indirectly draws from the previous pro-Affirm argument (concerning wrongdoing) and is broadly inspired by Leibnizian analogies between apparent ugliness and evil. This argument fails, however. It does so mainly because it does not square with Kant’s larger philosophical aims: there would be no systematic reason for ugliness to symbolize the morally evil. It would not help make the transition from the domain of nature to that of freedom. Through its beautiful forms, nature can be viewed as giving signs that it will not frustrate human attempts to be moral. In this way, Kant reasons, nature is taken to speak through beauty. But there would be no point to having a sign that nature will frustrate human ends. In fact, if nature were thought to speak that way – through ugliness – one might find it disheartening and lose hope that moral ends are achievable at all. The above survey of arguments pro/con is not meant to be exhaustive, but it does give an overview of what the judgment of ugliness is, or could be. One can see why there are good reasons to deny the possibility of pure aesthetic judgments of ugliness.32 Before turning to early modern views of ugliness shaping Kant’s views, I want to mention some concepts allied with ugliness, beginning with Kant’s treatment of disgust. It is significant that in §48 Kant refrains from claiming that there are aesthetic judgments of ugliness – right at the moment when it would have made sense to do so. However, he does make some revealing remarks about disgust. Ugliness, but not the disgusting, can be represented in fine art: Beautiful art displays its excellence precisely by describing beautifully things that in nature would be ugly or displeasing. The furies, diseases, devastations of war, and the like can, as harmful things, be very beautifully

32

Finally, for Deny one might argue as follows, broadly inspired by an interpretation of taste defended by Hannah Ginsborg. For Kant, universal communicability is itself pleasurable: being able to communicate one’s state of mind carries pleasure with it (KU 5:218). Thus, a feeling of displeasure that is universally communicable (in the judgment of ugliness) would conflict with the pleasure generated by its universal communicability. Consequently, a universally communicable feeling of displeasure would be a contradiction in terms. I will not defend the argument, however, since it is controversial that the Critical or mature Kant subscribes to the premise that universal communicability is itself pleasurable.

  :  



described, indeed even represented in painting; only one kind of ugliness cannot be represented in a way adequate to nature without destroying all aesthetic satisfaction, hence beauty in art, namely, that which arouses disgust [Ekel]. (KU 5:312; emphasis added)33

Kant holds that in painting and especially in poetry, (actual) ugliness can sometimes be represented, but it must be done in a beautiful manner.34 Disgust is an extreme, intense “kind” of ugliness, for the disgusting object is viscerally repulsive. Likely building on the views of Lessing and Mendelssohn, Kant continues: For since in this strange sensation, resting on sheer imagination, the object is represented as if it were imposing the enjoyment which we are nevertheless forcibly resisting, the artificial representation of the object is no longer distinguished in our sensation from the nature of the object itself, and it then becomes impossible for the former to be taken as beautiful. (KU 5:312; cf. 243)

Disgusting things cannot be represented in beautiful art – at least not in an accurate way that would make a viewer think it was the real thing – because then one would simply feel disgust and would not be disinterested. A panel (depicting hell) in Hieronymous Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” (c. late fifteenth century), or Pieter Bruegel’s “Triumph of Death” (1562), can represent ugly figures in an artful or beautiful manner. The problem is that with disgust, an aesthetic collapse, a breakdown of disinterestedness, takes place.35 In the rest of the passage, Kant claims (again after Lessing) that sculpture cannot represent ugliness or pain too accurately, lest it become repulsive to the viewer. The art of sculpture, since in its products art is almost confused with nature, has also excluded the representation of ugly objects from its images, and thus permits, e.g., death (in a beautiful genius) or the spirit of war (in the person of Mars) to be represented through an allegory or

33

34

35

See also §52, where Kant claims that pleasure for mere enjoyment (without an underlying “idea”) can become dull and loathsome (anekelnd) (KU 5:326). Kant held this view (found in writers from Aristotle to Baumgarten) for decades. A 1777/78 anthropology lecture states that one can present (darlegen) “ugly objects” in a pleasing manner (Pillau 25:789). See also a late logic Reflection: “(Here we deal not with beautiful objects, but with the beautiful presentation of concepts through the imagination, even if the objects are ugly)” (R 1935; 1790s; 16:162). On disgust as resisting depiction in art, see Feloj, Disgusto; Küplen, “Disgust and Ugliness;” and Pop and Mechtild, eds., Ugliness, 5.



   ’  attributes that look pleasing, hence only indirectly by means of an interpretation of reason, and not for the aesthetic power of judgment alone. (KU 5:312)

Compared with painting and sculpture, poetry is freer to represent deformity and ugliness. The literary or poetic arts, the arts of speech, are less sensitive to disgust’s aesthetic collapse. Because the plastic arts such as sculpture are especially suited to represent the object as if it were real (“almost confused with nature”), Kant suggests that one should substitute any depiction of disgusting material in the art of sculpture with symbolic or allegoric representations. In the case of literature and poetry, the representation of the disgusting object (through words) is further removed from the senses. Thus, a reader or listener is more able to appreciate the work in a disinterested manner and to feel aesthetic pleasure. Perhaps blurring the line (at least in practice if not principle) between transcendental and empirical claims, Kant makes the same point about representation in the Anthropology: Even the presentation [Darstellung] of the evil or ugly (for example, the figure of personified death in Milton) can and must be beautiful whenever an object is to be represented [vorgestellt] aesthetically, and this is true even if the object is a Thersites. Otherwise it produces either distaste [Unschmackhaftigkeit] or disgust [Ekel], both of which include the endeavor to push away a representation [Vorstellung] that is offered for enjoyment; whereas beauty on the other hand carries with it the concept of an invitation to the most intimate union with the object, that is, to immediate enjoyment. (Anth 7:241)

In short, if ugliness is not represented as beautiful, it risks being perceived as disgusting. The risk is that one is repelled by this disagreeable sensation. If confronted by the real (not fictional) consumption of another person’s bodily fluid, a spectator will likewise no longer be disinterested (Anth 7:178). Finally, while I do not have space to examine these concepts, I note that Kant makes several remarks about the monstrous (ungeheuer; das Ungeheure), grotesque (Fratzen, Grotesk),36 and the colossal (kolossalisch) or the almost too big for presentation (KU 5:253).37 An object is monstrous, Kant claims, “if by 36

37

In the third Critique, Kant mentions the grotesque (Grotesk) in only a single passage, where the grotesque arises from too much freedom of imagination (KU 5:242). On the grotesque, see also the Observations (GSE 2:214–5); for discussion, see Clewis, Kantian Sublime, 34–7. See also Anth 7:300. For a reading of the colossal as a “bordering” concept, see Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 119–47. In “Economimesis,” Derrida discusses Ekel as the unassimilable, unnamable, insensible, unintelligible, and unrepresentable. Jacques Derrida,

  :  



its magnitude it annihilates the end which its concept constitutes” (KU 5:253). Kant defines the monstrous in the Anthropology: “The monstrous is greatness that is contrapurposive (magnitudo monstrosa)” (Anth 7:243). By virtue of its enormity or size, the monstrous object or animal exceeds the end by which it was determined and thus can be said to be dysfunctional. Such an object or animal would also very likely violate the symmetry and regularity that Kant valued in his early aesthetics and that he at least recognizes (but does not fully endorse) in the third Critique (KU 5:242). Kant describes the monstrous when discussing the representation of “raw” nature. From such a perspective, he writes, “nature contains nothing that would be monstrous [ungeheuer] (or magnificent [prächtig] or terrible [gräßlich])” (KU 5:253). The striking claim that “nature contains nothing that would be monstrous” is similar to Kant’s early view that there is nothing ugly in nature, as will be seen in a moment. But first I would like to survey the eighteenth-century context for his views.

Forming Kant’s Views: Ideas about Deformity Kant does not appear to draw directly from western ancient, medieval, and renaissance theories of ugliness and disgust.38 His views about ugliness were shaped not by Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas, but mostly by modern authors, and by no means all of the significant ones; Diderot’s view of ugliness seems to have left Kant unaffected.39 Leibniz appears to think of ugliness as analogous to evil. Some things or events may strike one as ugly, but they are necessary to create a beautiful whole: they can be ugly locally, but not globally. Due to limited comprehension, Leibniz holds, human beings fail to see how the apparently ugly fits or plays a role in the larger picture. Like dissonances in music, the instances of

38 39

“Economimesis,” in Continental Aesthetics, ed. Richard Kearney and David M. Rasmussen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 431–51, 448–9. As bordering concepts, the colossal and the disgusting are well suited to support Derrida’s deconstructionist aims, but since I do not share that project I shall not pursue the matter. See also Leppert, “Ugly.” Denis Diderot, “Laideur,” Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 9 (Neuchâtel: Samuel Faulche, 1765), 176. For a translation, see Pop and Widrich, eds., Ugliness, 216–7. Diderot offers a view that is similar to the one found in the Heidegger anecdote above. “That a man were lame, a hunchback; that one added to these deformities all others that one can imagine, he should not be beautiful or ugly, but compared to another. . . . A thing is beautiful or ugly under two different aspects.” Diderot, in Pop and Widrich, eds., Ugliness, 217. Diderot (1751) distinguishes relative (relatif) and real (réel) beauty and ugliness. Denis Diderot, “Recherches philosophiques sur l’origine et la nature du beau,” (1751), in Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Jules Assézat, vol. 10 (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1876), 28.



   ’ 

the apparently ugly end up creating a more beautiful totality, just as in a chiaroscuro painting, light emerges from darkness.40 In Psychologia Empirica, Wolff directly opposes ugliness to beauty. “Whatever pleases is called beautiful, whereas whatever displeases is called ugly [deforme].” Wolff thinks of both beauty and ugliness in terms of the object’s perfection. “Beauty consists in the perfection of a thing, insofar as the very power of this thing is apt for producing pleasure in us.” He states: “Hence beauty can be defined as that which is the aptitude of a thing for producing pleasure in us, or, that which is observable of perfection: for it is in this observability that this aptitude consists.”41 Accordingly, ugliness is the disposition of a thing to produce displeasure whenever one observes its imperfection. Baumgarten likewise defines ugliness in terms of observable imperfection. According to Metaphysica’s definition of ugliness or deformity (deformitas), whereas beauty is the perfection that is observable by “taste” in the wide sense, ugliness is the perceptible imperfection: The perfection that is a phenomenon, or the perfection observable by taste in the broader sense, is BEAUTY, whereas the imperfection that is a phenomenon, or the imperfection observable by taste in the broader sense, is UGLINESS. Hence beauty as such delights the one who intuits it (§658), and ugliness as such is burdensome to the one who intuits it (§618).42

Baumgarten’s 1750 work Aesthetica contains a similar definition of ugliness or deformity (deformitas). The “imperfection” of sensible cognition is to be guarded against or avoided (cavenda).43 What makes sensible cognition less perfect, then, appears ugly or deformed. Narrowness, contemptuousness, falsity, incomprehensible obscurity, dubious fluctuation, and lifelessness are imperfections of cognition. As appearances, they disfigure or deform the sensible in general. Like Aristotle before him (and Mendelssohn and Kant after), Baumgarten thinks that ugly things can be thought (cogitari) in a beautiful manner. In turn, beautiful things can be cognized in an ugly way.

40

41

42

43

Pop and Widrich, eds., Ugliness, 4. They cite G.W. Leibniz, Confessio philosophi: ein Dialog, ed. Otto Saame (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994), 35, 37, 53. Christian Wolff, Psychologia Empirica, Methodo Scientifica Pertractata (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Renger, 1738). Quotes in this paragraph are from §543, §544, §545, respectively. They are translated in Baumgarten, Metaphysica, trans. Fugate and Hymers, 240, footnote a. Baumgarten, Metaphysica, §662. See also §607: “The art of forming taste, or the art concerning judging sensitively and presenting its judgment, is AESTHETIC CRITICISM.” Baumgarten, Aesthetica, §14, §23.

  :  



Baumgarten implies that ugliness (like beauty) does not lie exclusively in the object, but can be found in the manner of presentation.44 In Laocöon (1766), Lessing acknowledges the place of ugliness in poetry. Though Lessing is troubled by ugliness in the plastic arts, he does not completely exclude ugliness from painting. “May painting make use of ugly forms to attain the ridiculous and the terrible? I will not venture with an unequivocal ‘no’.”45 In poetry, by contrast, “ugliness of form loses its repulsive effect almost entirely by the change from coexistence to the consecutive.”46 For “the poet’s use of ugliness becomes possible for the very reason that in his description it is reduced to a less offensive manifestation of physical imperfection and ceases, as it were, to be ugly in its effect.”47 Lessing holds that pain or other forms of ugliness can be described in poetry but not represented directly in painting or at least sculpture: beauty is the so-called first law of the visual arts (cf. KU 5:312). One could say that in the case of poetry, there is less risk of aesthetic collapse. Lessing cites Mendelssohn on disgust: “But do not even unpleasant feelings become pleasing in imitation? No, not at all. A perceptive critic has already noted this fact about disgust.”48 Then Lessing quotes a passage from Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend (“Letters Concerning the Most Recent Literature”) in which Mendelssohn claims that feelings of disgust are always real and cannot be imitated in art. Mendelssohn understands ugliness as a kind of imperfection that elicits displeasure. In “On Sentiments,” he notes (via Theocles, writing to Euphranor) how the senses can become tired and it can be displeasing if the object is too complex. At the same time, uniformity can become “disgusting” if the senses are acute.49 Mendelssohn states that beneath the beautiful external form of human beings, i.e., in the intestines and entrails, ugliness can be perceived: “Beneath the skin, ugly forms are hidden.” He adds, however, that the divine being has a reason or purpose for creating humans that way. In “On Sentiments,” Mendelssohn thinks of ugliness as a negative magnitude. In this way, beauty and ugliness are opposed “intensive quantities.” Mendelssohn comments, “Warmth and cold, desire and aversion, beauty and ugliness, fear and hope, and still others are of this sort; hence, they can be characterized by + and –.”50 In other words, Mendelssohn subscribes to aesthetic trivalence.

44 45 46

47 48 49 50

Ibid., §18, §676, §204. Quoted from Leppert, “Ugly,” 223–4. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocöon, An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 128. Ibid., 121. Ibid., 126. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, 22–3. Ibid., 88.



   ’ 

In his prize-winning essay of 1763, “On Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences,” Mendelssohn states his view in terms of perfection. Like Baumgarten, Mendelssohn claims that the contemplation of imperfection (ugliness) affords displeasure. “Perfection” is the “utility and sensuous pleasure that the object promises since both belong to the perfections of our intrinsic or extrinsic condition. – The contemplation of perfection, beauty, and order affords us pleasure, the contemplation of imperfection, ugliness, and disorder affords us displeasure.”51 Toward the end of the essay, Mendelssohn views “taste” as the ability to distinguish beauty from ugliness. Conscience (which distinguishes good from evil) and a sense for the truth “are in their sphere what taste is in the domain of the beautiful and the ugly.”52 The modern British authors also write about ugliness as “deformity,” the standard eighteenth-century term in English to refer to ugliness. In fact, “ugly” appears only once in the three volumes of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, and “ugly” appears once in Hutcheson’s Inquiry, where it is employed as a synonym of the frequently used “deform’d.”53 In the Treatise, Hume routinely contrasts beauty and deformity, but he rarely writes about ugliness per se. In his short treatise on beauty, Hogarth (1753), whose caricatures and engravings Kant admired, argues that variety is beautiful and uniformity ugly, and he provides many examples from his drawings. Beauty appears in various forms, from fitness to curving lines. Ugliness appears in lack of fitness and in not having enough curves or at least the right kind of curvature. Plants that display variety are beautiful, but those that look uniform or display “sameness” are ugly.54 In Inquiry, Hutcheson thinks of ugliness as being relative to beauty. Only once one hears a piece of music, he maintains, can one be disappointed by future occurrences and in this sense find them ugly. “There is no form which seems necessarily disagreeable of itself, when we dread no other evil from it, and compare with nothing better of the kind.”55 Similarly, “deformity is only the absence of beauty” – which would seem to imply that deformity or ugliness is not real or substantial, but a privation. Unlike beauty, ugliness does not yield a positive feeling, that is, not “a positive pain or disgust,” at least not “any farther than what arises from disappointment.” The appearance of ugliness

51 52 53 54

55

Ibid., 297. Ibid., 303. Paris, “Deformity-Related Conception,” 141. Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, ed. Paulson, Chapter 8, 45. This edition contains Hogarth’s 1752 engraving, Columbus Breaking the Egg, lxiv. Kant mentions Columbus’s egg at KU 5:304 n. as well as R 2705; 1776–80s; 16:477. Quotes in this paragraph are from Hutcheson, Inquiry, 61–2, orthography modified.

  :  



turns out to be mainly a violation of preconceived notions and expectations about a certain object. In the Treatise, Hume maintains that a judgment of ugliness evokes a feeling of displeasure – a disagreeable sensation. “We seldom reflect on what is beautiful or ugly, agreeable or disagreeable, without an emotion of pleasure or uneasiness.”56 Beauty, Hume writes, is relative to “deformity”: Deformity of itself produces uneasiness; but makes us receive new pleasure by its contrast with a beautiful object, whose beauty is augmented by it; as on the other hand, beauty, which of itself produces pleasure, makes us receive a new pain by the contrast with any thing ugly, whose deformity it augments.57

Even if one knows that a “clumsy” or asymmetrical building will not fall on them, such an edifice can still look deformed or ugly. Hume works with a version of disinterestedness: the imagination reflects on an appearance and finds it “disagreeable,” even when one recognizes that the object or structure is holding up or working just fine. Hume also clarifies that the (aesthetic) response differs from fear. “But the passion is not the same with that which we feel, when obliged to stand under a wall, that we really think of the tottering and insecure.”58 While he does not provide much detail, Hume thus works with a notion of an aesthetic judgment of ugliness or deformity: the latter is viewed in relation to, and contrasted with, beauty.

Kant’s Evolving Views of the Ugly In the 1750s, Kant adopts a broadly Leibnizian view of evil and ugliness. According to a Reflection on metaphysics from 1753 or 1754, nature displays beautiful harmony. Kant’s example of “disorder” comes from the moral realm. Self-love, while the apparent “cause of moral disorder,” is in fact “the origin of that beautiful harmony which we admire” (R 3704; 17:234; cf. 17:231).59 In Universal Natural History (1755), Kant tries to account for the “order and beauty” and “perfect arrangement” of the universe, or the “harmony, the beauty, the purposes, and a perfect correspondence of the means to them in nature,” given that there could be a possible conflict with “blind mechanism” (NTH 1:222–3). Thinking of the apparent design or order in nature, he asks: “Is all this not beautiful, are these not visible purposes achieved by cleverly

56

57 58 59

Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, vol. 2, 146 (bk. II, pt. II, sec. V). Ibid., 161 (bk. II, pt. II, sec. VIII). Ibid., 344–5 (bk. III, pt. III, sec. I); orthography modified. Translated in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy before 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 80.



   ’ 

applied means?” (NTH 1:224; cf. 306, cited above). Kant continues to defend a broadly Leibnizian view of optimism to the end of the decade. In An Attempt at Some Reflections on Optimism (1759), he implies that on the whole, nothing is ugly. This perspective can also be seen in his general admiration of Alexander Pope’s optimism at this time.60 In Negative Magnitudes, Kant appears to abandon this view of ugliness and to adopt aesthetic trivalence.61 To illustrate his general theory of real (not conceptual or logical) “negative magnitudes” in philosophy, he offers a statement about ugliness that is all too brief: “For these reasons, aversion can be called a negative desire, hate a negative love, ugliness a negative beauty, blame a negative praise” (NG 2:182). On this account, there are three kinds of judgments (positive, neutral, negative): judgments of the beautiful, the nonbeautiful or aesthetically neutral, and the ugly. Taking up the traditional parallel between ugliness and evil, Kant distinguishes evils of lack (mala defectus) (e.g., not giving to someone in need) from evils of deprivation (mala privationis) (e.g., stealing from him). Deprivations presuppose that there are positive grounds that are canceled by the evil. Such “taking from” is a kind of negative “giving to” (NG 2:182). At the end of this section, Kant distinguishes between three kinds of “nothing” (NG 2:178).62 Kant thinks of ugliness as a kind of negative magnitude, a real force that conflicts with its positive counterpart, beauty. Thus, Kant would here seem to allow for negative judgments of taste or aesthetic judgments of ugliness. In a Reflection from about 1769–71 (cited by Wenzel, Strub, and Guyer), Kant continues to invoke this aesthetic trivalence (beautiful, ordinary, ugly). Ugliness, which evokes displeasure, is opposed to beauty. Pleasure: A; indifference: non A; displeasure: – A. There is no indifference of sensation, except only relative to this or that sense; for with regard to all the senses together, i.e., one’s state, something is always either agreeable or disagreeable. Likewise in the case of the beautiful or the good. But there is a counterbalance: A A = 0. One says: Satisfaction, indifference, dissatisfaction. Gratification, indifference, abhorrence. Beautiful, ordinary, ugly. Good, worthless, evil. Respect, disregard, contempt. Hatred, coldness, love. For just as all simple sensations are agreeable and become disagreeable only through conflict, so all simple relations of sensibility or reason that are positive are good and become evil only through conflict. (R 669; 15:296–7)

60

61 62

In an October 28, 1759 letter to Lindner (Br 10:22–3), Kant writes that in the Optimism essay, he “briefly defended optimism against Crusius.” See the Introduction in Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, lxii. Compare the fourfold division of the concept of “nothing” in the first Critique (KrV A292/B348).

  :  



Kant apparently held onto this view for a few more years. According to Logic Philippi (1772), Kant claims that “ugliness is thus something positive, not a mere absence [Abwesenheit] of beauty.” It is “rather the existence [Daseyn] of something contrary [zuwider] to beauty” (V-Lo/Phil 24:364).63 “Ugliness” is the “aesthetic imperfection” of deprivation (Beraubung). As in 1763, Kant continues to think of ugliness as a (real) privatum. He draws an analogy between ugliness and vice. Vice is not a mere lack (Mangel) of virtue, but “something positive.” It is like with money, where what diminishes the bottom line is just as real as what increases it. At the same time, Kant acknowledges the aesthetically non-beautiful. “Something can be non-beautiful and still not ugly, e.g., the artificial/forced [Gekünstelte]. It does not please us when we see that it took great effort for someone to create something, when he could have made it very easily using another way” (ibid.). To put it in terms discussed in earlier chapters, an object (or manifold) that fails to ease sensible comprehension is not beautiful, but it is not necessarily ugly. The empirically oriented Observations is different in method and aim from the Negative Magnitudes of the previous year, and its philosophical claims about beauty, disgust, ugliness, and sublimity, to the extent that they exist at all, are bound up with Kant’s prejudices about national character, personality types, and gender (e.g., GSE 2:233). When Kant calls a thing, person, or act ugly, disgusting, or grotesque, he makes a judgment that is not purely aesthetic, but tinged with other kinds of value – biological, political, social– cultural, and/or ethical (GSE 2:240; GSE 2:252). Yet despite these complex references to local instances of ugliness, he claims that creation as a whole is beautiful and splendid. If I observe alternately the noble and the weak sides of human beings, I reprove myself that I am not able to adopt that standpoint from which these contrasts can nevertheless exhibit the great portrait of human nature in its entirety in a moving form. For I gladly grant that so far as it belongs to the project of great nature as a whole, these grotesque attitudes [groteske Stellungen] cannot lend it other than a noble expression, although one is far too shortsighted to see them in this connection. (GSE 2:226–7)

A few lines later Kant concludes: “In this way the different groups unite themselves in a painting of magnificent expression [prächtigem Ausdruck], where in the midst of great variety unity shines forth, and the whole of moral nature displays beauty and dignity” (GSE 2:227). What might initially seem (morally) ugly can play a role in the wider economy of “moral nature.” The upshot is that Kant seems to be of two minds. In the same year or so in which

63

Cited by Guyer, “Purity,” 144; and Wenzel, “Kant Finds Nothing Ugly?” 418.



   ’ 

he defends aesthetic trivalence in a more “philosophical” essay (1763), in the more “popular” treatise (1764) he holds that ugliness exists locally but not globally – denying the real existence of ugliness in a way that is much more in line with his earlier Leibnizian optimism. The lectures from this time reflect the latter, global perspective. Ugliness is a kind of dysfunctionality, a deformity that is contrapurposive on the micro level: there are ugly noses, but only up close. Such ugliness is not, however, the object of a pure aesthetic judgment of ugliness. It is at most partially aesthetic, reflecting other kinds of value (practical, moral, functional, biological) or a lack of it. Following William Hay, Kant even suggests that “deformity” can play a useful social function.64 Kant was aware of the views Hay presented in 1754 in Deformity, which argues for the social contributions of people with disabilities and points out the advantages of disability (V-Anth/Parow 25:289; V-Anth/Pillau 25:789; V-Anth/Mensch 25:1178). In his anthropology lectures, Kant presents the idea that ugliness (like beauty) is relative to a given norm or category, i.e., to the kind of thing it is supposed to be – somewhat analogous to what would eventually become his notion of adherent beauty. “One cannot judge about beauty until one knows the thing. . . . I must know what the thing is supposed to be, if I want to determine its correct value” (V-Anth/Collins 25:192; cf. 182–3). A passage from 1772/73 from the Philippi transcription presents Kant’s thoughts about aesthetic displeasure and pleasure, which is understood in terms of the principle of sensible comprehension. The idea of what is purposive is the power of judgment. If the sensible representation agrees with this idea, it rests on the power of judgment. Everything displeases [mißfällt] when no idea of what the thing should be can be derived. The agreement of a thing with an idea always pleases, even if the objects themselves are hideous [scheußlich]. When I am led to an idea according to laws of sensibility, it pleases. (V-Anth/Phil 25:175; my trans.)

The lecture does not state that there are aesthetic judgments of ugliness. Rather, when something is contrapurposive, it “displeases.” As can be seen in this passage and others, Kant distinguishes between a thing and its representation or depiction (cf. V-Anth/Parow 25:379). An ugly person can be represented beautifully and excellently, and vice versa (V-Lo/Blom 24:51).65

64 65

William Hay, Deformity: An Essay (London, 1754). Consistent with the view that ugliness is disagreeable due to some disharmony, the lectures contain statements about inner “deformity” or lack of balance among the mental powers: “The disproportion of our cognitive powers with the understanding constitutes the greatest ugliness of the soul.” A mind that lacks proper understanding is deformed or

  :  



According to a 1780–82 logic lecture, Kant rejects the earlier beautiful– ordinary–ugly trivalence, as previously noted (V-Lo/Pölitz 24:514). During the early 1780s, Kant seems to retain the view that ugliness is dysfunctional and contrapurposive on a local level but may be purposive for nature as a whole. During this period, Kant continues to tell the nose anecdote (V-Anth/Fried 25:666; V-Anth/Mron 25:1378) as well as the one about Heidegger (found even in the Anthropology). Kant’s comments on physiognomy are also relevant to understanding his views of ugliness. He is, once again, ambivalent. He considers physiognomy worthwhile enough to devote a section to it in his anthropology lectures, yet he sides with Lichtenberg, a critic of physiognomy, over Lavater (V-Anth/Mron 25:1380). Kant considers physiognomy to be limited, even very deceptive. Insofar as physiognomy makes judgments about people based on their outward appearance, expressions, and facial features, it goes against the idea that human beings act freely (V-Anth/Mensch 25:1177–8). A passage on human appearances that is relevant for the present topic can be found in the Menschenkunde transcription: Shaftesbury notes in his philosophical writings that in the face of every human being, even the ugliest, there is such an originality and regularity that, as soon as we change a single thing in it, we ruin everything. This also appears to be confirmed by the fact that if one looks at many paintings, one can easily distinguish which portrait is derived from a living human being, and which merely from fantasy. So much peculiarity lies in the features of the face of each human being. (V-Anth/Mensch 25:1177)66

Such statements are not confined to lecture notes. Kant published a similar claim in On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy seven years later (1788). In a portrait, Kant writes, again citing Shaftesbury, a painter cannot change part of a face even if it displays “disproportion,” without thereby exposing the difference between the copy and the “original.” Every portrait painter who reflects on his art can confirm what Lord Shaftesbury already noted, namely, that there is a certain originality in every human face (its design, as it were), which marks the individual as

66

“crippled” (V-Anth/Parow 25:351). “Disharmony and disproportion” of the cognitive powers “constitute ugliness” (V-Anth/Collins 25:147; see also V-Anth/Busolt 25:1492). According to an AA editorial note (25:1177), Kant is referring to Shaftesbury’s (1709) “Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour” in Characteristics (pt. 4, sec. 3). Shaftesbury writes: “Now the variety of nature is such as to distinguish everything she forms by a peculiar original character, which, if strictly observed, will make the subject appear unlike to anything extant in the world besides.” Shaftesbury, Characteristics, ed. Klein, 66.



   ’  destined for particular ends which it does not have in common with others, although deciphering these signs exceeds our faculty. (ÜGTP 8:166)

I leave aside whether or not by 1788 Kant had formulated the transcendental principle of the purposiveness of nature that is to play the key role for the power of judgment in the third Critique. Either way, one can understand his views of ugliness in terms of the application of something like a teleological principle of the purposiveness of nature. Kant understands ugliness at this time in terms of the purposiveness of nature as a whole, as one of its “varieties” (Varietäten) that one has to assume to be necessary. According to the 1784/85 lecture Mrongovius, Kant even claims that in the course of nature, everything is beautiful.67 This passage from this anthropology lecture reveals continuity with earlier lecture notes. Even ugliness is called “regular.” Can an ugly thing perhaps be brought forth in nature as a natural product? No, for if we had broad cognition of its purposes, if we knew the use of all of its limbs, then nothing produced from the rules of nature would appear to us as ugly, but rather as truly beautiful, for in the course of nature, everything is beautiful. Ugliness is merely relative in comparison with others. If we keep regularity in mind, then the ugly, too, is regular. Nothing can be altered about it, otherwise one appears ten times worse. (V-Anth/Mron 25:1378; emphasis added; cf. V-Anth/Collins 25:192)

Kant then tells the “there are no ugly noses” story quoted above. And a few lines later the lecture states: “There is no ugly face from nature; the ugliness is mere variety [bloß Varietaet]” (V-Anth/Mron 25:1379). Not only does the lecture transcription not state that ugliness provokes an aesthetic judgment of ugliness, it seems to deny the possibility of ugliness in nature as a whole.68 Even in the extant materials deriving from the last phase of Kant’s aesthetics, there appears to be no major change in his views of ugliness. There is no evidence of a strong conceptual connection between ugliness and morality or immorality (cf. argument 5 above). Nor is there any indication that aesthetic judgments of ugliness are possible. In fact, one finds just the opposite. According to the anthropology lecture Busolt (1788/89), taste does not allow 67

68

Scholars dispute whether or not Kant’s aesthetic theory commits him to the claim that “everything is beautiful.” Without entering into that debate here, I note that the qualifying phrase “in the course of nature” restricts the scope of the claim – which is an application of a teleological principle of nature. The Mrongovius lecture presents the view that, due to aesthetic collapse, disgust cannot be realistically represented – not even in a poem, a restriction typically not found in other textual materials (V-Anth/Mron 25:1349). It adds that whereas physical disgust is a strong, vivid kind of repugnance, ideal disgust is a type of moral aversion (V-Anth/ Mron 25:1349).

  :  



for a disproportion of the faculties. “To spirit [Geist] belongs the richness and the animating of the power of imagination, so that it animates not disproportionately but harmoniously; this is then taste. The latter makes the power of imagination proportionate to the understanding” (Busolt 25:1495; my trans.).69 If the mind (in taste) must animate harmoniously and proportionately, it would seem that there can be no judgments of taste that animate disharmoniously. Just as he is composing the third Critique, Kant implies that (pure) negative judgments of taste are not possible. The Busolt transcription claims that one can present (darstellen) ugliness in art, if it is “beautiful” or “excellent” (treffliche) (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1510). The lecture states the by now familiar view that in poetry can one present ugliness in a beautiful way. “Can’t we have a beautiful (or excellent) presentation, of the ugly? – In poetry, sure, but not in sculpture and painting” (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1510). What did Kant think about ugliness after the publication of the third Critique? If there were a clear statement about ugliness in a lecture given after 1790, it would help resolve the dispute between Affirm and Deny, as it would help clarify Kant’s considered position. There are two potential passages. The following passage from anthropology Dohna-Wundlacken appears to derive from just after 1790. If so, it can be used to confirm what Kant meant in the third Critique, published just a few years earlier. The beautiful is the ground of pleasure and displeasure through reflection (taste) – or what in the appearance [is] for us without taste. It pleases only in the pure reflected intuition.70

Since it focuses on “the beautiful” as “the ground” of both pleasure and displeasure and calls this “taste,” the claim seems to support Deny: “the beautiful” has logical priority over ugliness. Indeed, ugliness is never mentioned in the passage. A second post-1790 lecture transcription even more clearly supports Deny. After claiming that “aesthetic taste” is “pleasure [Lust] through reflection,” anthropology Reichel (1793/94) defines feeling in general as the faculty of pleasure or displeasure. “The ability to have pleasure or displeasure in response to something is in general called feeling.” The transcription then states: “What pleases through the senses is agreeable,” but “what dissatisfies 69 70

Note the thick conception at work here. V-Anth/Dohna, in Kowalewski, Hauptvorlesungen, 174; my trans. Based on both its content (“pure reflected intuition”) and its location in the Dohna-Wundlacken transcription (manuscript page 125), this particular claim appears to derive from 1791/92. According to Naragon, the text up to manuscript page 72 and after page 353 is a close copy of lecture material from 1772/73, while the text in-between is an assortment, including material from the early 1790s. About 40% of the entire manuscript stems from 1772/73. Naragon, “Kant in the Classroom: Dohna-Wundlacken.”



   ’ 

[mißfällt] is disagreeable.” “What pleases through reflection” is “beautiful,” whereas “what dissatisfies” is “not-beautiful [nicht schön].”71 The lecture does not claim that what dissatisfies through reflection is ugly. The counterpart to what pleases through reflection is not “ugly,” but not-beautiful. Significantly, what dissatisfies is called “disagreeable.”72 A lecture from the following year (1794/95) might seem to indicate a different view. The Metaphysics Vigilantius transcription at first appears to recognize that there can be aesthetic judgments of ugliness, that is, judgments of that which “displeases me in intuition.” That which pleases through mere intuition is beautiful; that which leaves me indifferent in intuition, although it can please or displease, is notbeautiful; that which displeases me in intuition is ugly. Now on this pleasure rests the concept of taste. (V-Met/Vig 29:1010)

The account described here might sound like the trivalence in Negative Magnitudes, so it is tempting to think that this section of the lecture transcription comes from an earlier phase of Kant’s thinking. But that is not a plausible option here: the Vigilantius notes evidently stem from Vigilantius in 1794/95.73 Alternatively, it is possible that at this point in his lecture Kant simply went back to his pre-Critical ideas or was speaking loosely in front of students. These are not ideal interpretive moves, however. Thus, if neither the first explanation (earlier source) nor the second one (pre-Critical view) is acceptable, the proponents of Affirm would seem to have a piece of textual evidence: Kant appears to recognize aesthetic judgments of ugliness even after the publication of the third Critique. As Guyer observes, this passage could be used by those who want to assert (for Kant) aesthetic trivalence and therefore support Affirm.74 Nevertheless, the passage resists such an interpretation. First of all, the lecture transcription states that “on this pleasure rests the concept of taste,” not on this pleasure or displeasure “rests the concept of taste.” This phrase leaves open the possibility that the aesthetic judgment of whether or not something is beautiful can be founded simply on the presence or absence of 71

72

73

74

All references in this paragraph are to V-Anth/Reichel ms page 72 (the transcription is not found in AA 25); my trans. A few pages later, the transcription contains Kant’s threefold distinction between the agreeable, beautiful, and good, but it does not indicate that what pleases through “reflection” is ugly (V-Anth/Reichel ms page 81). On the Vigilantius lecture notes, see Reinhard Brandt and Werner Stark, eds., KantForschungen, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1987), 158 no. 100. These lecture notes are original and were completed by Vigilantius as auditor of the Kant lectures in the 1790s. Thanks to Werner Stark for discussion. Guyer, “Purity,” 145.

  :  



a single, purely aesthetic feeling (the pleasure in beauty).75 A few lines later, a crucial passage further complicates matters for Affirm. The lecture clearly refers to aesthetic bivalence (beautiful or not-beautiful) rather than trivalence. Satisfaction or dissatisfaction in an object therefore, whereby the aesthetic power of judgment considers the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, concerns merely the form of the object, which is subject to sensible or pure intuition, and of which it determines only whether it is beautiful or not beautiful. (V-Met/Vig 29:1010; emphasis added)

Crucially, the transcription refers to the aesthetically neutral, not the ugly. Accordingly, the Metaphysics Vigilantius does not provide clear evidence for the possibility of aesthetic judgments of ugliness. Moreover, other post-1790 transcriptions (Dohna-Wundlacken and Reichel) further tilt the balance in favor of Deny.

The Third Critique Reconsidered In the early period of his aesthetics, Kant had not yet formulated a transcendental principle of purposiveness of nature. Something like that principle may have been assumed – viewed as a whole, nature cannot be ugly – but he does not formulate it until he connects taste to teleology sometime around late 1787 (though he separates taste and teleology in the published work). In the third Critique, this inchoate idea undergoes a fundamental shift and becomes a transcendental principle. The shift from beauty in art to that of nature (to which the principle of the power of judgment is supposed to apply) is a useful lens through which to see ugliness. In his early period, even as late as the 1780s, Kant adopted a teleological view that did not easily allow for ugliness. The third Critique contains traces of this view. If a poem or a painting is to represent the actually ugly, it must be beautified. In other words, even fine art is subjected to the restraints of the principle that finds systematicity in nature. This restraint fits in well with Kant’s claim that nature “gives the rule” to art through the works created by genius. Any ugliness or deformity that remains in art and is not annulled and converted into beauty should add to the beauty of the work. This claim further supports Deny. My second arc concerns the shift from calling adherent (purpose-based) beauty “self-standing” to calling free beauty “self-standing.” To be sure, at the micro level, Kant can recognize the existence of ugly objects, artifacts, and events, the observation or perception of which displeases. Such experiences of

75

Ibid., 144.



   ’ 

ugliness can be called “impure” in the sense of being disagreeable and thus a mode of sensory and/or practical engagement with objects (not “impure” in the sense of being partly conceptual). But let me now consider the partly conceptual or “adherent” sense of “impure.” The possibility of adherent aesthetic judgments of ugliness poses a problem for Affirm. It is unclear how (on Affirm) one would make room for adherent judgments of ugliness, that is, judgments that are partly based on a concept of the ends or purposes of the object (ends which are not realized in the case of the ugly), but which nonetheless meet the four conditions of purity, including (subjective) universal validity. Once again, it is not evident how one would locate a “free disharmony” in adherent ugliness. A dilemma arises. It is uncertain how – on Kantian terms – an object’s failure to realize its aims or functions could give rise to pleasure rather than displeasure. But if it is instead unpleasant, it is unclear how it could be associated with a disinterested aesthetic play of the imagination and understanding, given that the object is failing to realize or fulfill its purposes. If the specimen in question is a failed form of functionality, it should be simply disagreeable or frustrating, with no room for play. Moreover, the judgment would lack universal validity.76 The third arc concerns the shift from seeing beauty as a kind of aesthetic perfection to seeing beauty as a play with aesthetic ideas. Clearly, the depiction of ugliness can be understood in terms of Kant’s account of aesthetic ideas: artists can represent ugliness via sensibly rich representations of the imagination. Milton, for instance, describes hell through his abundant imagery: he imparts “a fearsome splendor” (grause Pracht) to the “ideal of ugliness” and “hell” (R 757; 1772; 15:331).77 Likewise, Bosch achieves this through his fascinating painted imagery. Though aesthetic ideas are not themselves ugly, an exhibition of aesthetic ideas can be used to represent actual ugliness, whether physical or moral. In the case of the source of the pleasure in beauty (arc 4), Kant’s shift – from saying that aesthetic pleasure arises from the principle of sensible comprehension to claiming that it arises from a free harmony of the faculties –

76

77

To support his conclusion that Kant “can indeed account for a reflective aesthetic of ugliness,” Steenhagen proposes and describes a reflective aesthetic judgment of ugliness that is adherent rather than free. But he admits that what is felt here is displeasure, not pleasure. Tellingly, he concludes that such displeasure “results not in a pure reflective judgment, and no universal communicability or universal validity is demanded.” Steenhagen, “Explaining the Ugly.” I agree with him that such a judgment would be unpleasant, would lack universal validity, and would not involve a free harmony. For precisely such reasons, I am left wondering in what sense such a judgment would count as a reflective aesthetic judgment of ugliness at all. Note that Kant does not use the term “aesthetic idea,” but “ideal.” It seems that in the early 1770s he had not yet formulated his mature view of an “aesthetic idea.”

  :  



poses a fundamental problem for Affirm. It is difficult to see how, in the case of ugliness, one could have a free and harmonious play of the imagination and understanding (and if there were one, why a free harmonious play would be unpleasant, as ugliness is taken to be by authors such as Kant and Hume). And if there were an experience of a free disharmony, it is hard to see how it could be attributed intersubjective validity, as well as why, if it is a feeling of displeasure, one would want to linger in it. Defenders of Affirm thus face a dilemma. Finally, although Kant argues that beauty can be a symbol of the morally good, he never claims that ugliness is a symbol of evil. An argument that ugliness symbolizes evil (if it could be given) would not contribute to Kant’s systematic aims to help forge a bridge from the domain of nature to that of freedom. It is not evident how ugliness could be seen as an application of the (positive) principle of the purposiveness of nature, or the transcendental principle of the power of judgment, other than to say it is a failed form of functionality, something disagreeable at the local level.

Concluding Remarks Unlike many of his predecessors, the Critical Kant does not develop an account of aesthetic judgments of ugliness or negative judgments of taste. Kant’s British and German predecessors lack his Critical conceptual framework, which is based on an a priori principle of the power of judgment. The British writers tend to see ugliness (deformity) as a kind of dysfunction or asymmetry (or both). Kant is certainly able to recognize dysfunction and asymmetry in the world. Yet his Critical philosophical system does not allow for pure aesthetic judgments of ugliness in objects of either nature or art (created, after all, by a genius of natural talent, in which inner nature gives the rule), insofar as the system applies the transcendental principle of the purposiveness of nature. Historically speaking, when it comes to ugliness, Kant is an outlier. Successors like Karl Rosenkranz and Bernard Bolzano, neo-Kantians such as Hermann Cohen, and phenomenologists like Edith Landmann-Kalischer,78 all recognize judgments of the ugly as aesthetic, or at least discuss ugliness in their 78

Rosenkranz, Asthetik des Hässlichen. Bernard Bolzano, Über den Begriff des Schönen: Eine philosophische Abhandlung (Prague: Borrosch and André, 1843); see 36–7 (on the relatively beautiful) and 43–4. Hermann Cohen, Werke, ed. Hermann-Cohen Archiv (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2005); see vol. 8, part 3, vol. 1, 58; and vol. 9, part 3, vol. 2, 382–8. Edith Landmann–Kalischer, “Über den Erkenntniswert ästhetischer Urteile: Ein Vergleich zwischen Sinnes- und Werturteilen,” Archiv für die Gesamte Psychologie (1905), 263–328. Landmann-Kalischer’s work is still relatively overlooked in aesthetics, but see Samantha Matherne, “Edith Landmann-Kalischer on Aesthetic Demarcation and Normativity,” British Journal of Aesthetics 60, no. 3 (2020): 315–34.



   ’ 

aesthetic theories. This difference may be attributed to the fact that his successors do not fully adopt both of the elements lying at the core of Kant’s aesthetic theory: his theory of pure aesthetic judgment as founded on an a priori principle of the purposiveness of nature, and the notion of free and harmonious mental play as a source of the pleasures of aesthetic experience. Perhaps the ugly can transform into the comical. I now turn to humor.

8 Playing with Humor

Kant is no Oscar Wilde.1 It may be a struggle to think of the transcendental philosopher as having a sense of humor. Yet Herder, who attended Kant’s courses between 1762 and 1764, praised Kant decades later for his “joking and wit and whim [Scherz und Witz und Laune].”2 Likewise, Johann Bernoulli admired the “great wit” of the philosopher from Königsberg (Br 13:96).3 Kant’s wit apparently extended beyond the classroom, for he was known to be an enlivening raconteur and valued party guest.4 Philosophers of humor and interdisciplinary empirical researchers alike acknowledge Kant as a prominent figure in the history of the study of humor.5 Yet, in the vast sea of Kant scholarship, there are only sporadic investigations of humor and laughter – an asymmetry that itself is noteworthy. Today it is still possible to read nearly all of the Kant scholarship on humor and laughter, although this may be changing soon.6 1

2

3 4 5

6

“Immanuel doesn’t pun, he Kant.” This is attributed to Oscar Wilde by John Pollack, The Pun Also Rises (New York: Penguin, 2011), xxiii. Also quoted in Clewis, Kant’s Humorous Writings, 118. Johann Gottfried Herder, Letters on the Advancement of Humanity, Letter 79, in Johann Gottfried Herder, Sämtliche Werke, 33 vols., ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913), vol. 17, 404. See also Baeumler, Das Irrationalitätsproblem, 260. See the translation in Kant, Correspondence, 565. Kuehn, Kant, 114. Steven Gimbel’s defense of a “play frame” in part draws from Kant. Steven Gimbel, Isn’t That Clever: A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy (New York: Routledge, 2018). Philosophy of humor is typically classified as a subdiscipline of “aesthetics,” which, in light of Kant’s significant contribution to the philosophy of humor, makes for another reason why humor is an appropriate topic for the present book. A few months after the release of Kant’s Humorous Writings in November 2020, Mojca Küplen published an article in which she disagrees mainly with John Marmysz, Patrick Giamario, and Annie Hounsokou. (Perhaps due to timing, she does not cite or mention Kant’s Humorous Writings.) She argues that laughter stands in a direct opposition to the Kantian experience of the sublime (59–61). I agree that laughter at humor and the experience of the sublime are distinct, and her interpretation is in many respects similar to the one I had given in the book, but I view humor and the sublime not as being in direct opposition but as analogous (e.g., both involve a resolution of an initially discordant relation between two cognitive faculties, viz., the imagination and either understanding





   ’ 

Kant’s remarks on laughter are not just tucked away in his pre-Critical writings or literary remains. They sit right in the middle of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. While at first glance it might seem odd that Kant discusses jokes and laughter over the course of seven pages in the third Critique, it would be a mistake to conclude that Kant’s account is irrelevant to his aesthetic theory or that it cannot be connected to his wider philosophical aims.7 In addition, if laughing at humor is an important and meaningful human experience, it merits philosophical analysis and attention.

The Principal Theories Shaping Kant’s Views of Humor Kant engages with the dominant theories of humor of his era. In order to understand his thoughts about humor, I review the three main theories of humor prevalent in his day, beginning with superiority theory.8 Superiority theory: People feel comic amusement because they feel or think they are better than the object or person laughed at or ridiculed.

In a narrative joke, something is said, something is done, and, occasionally, someone or something is the butt of the narrative. Superiority theory (sometimes called “disparagement” theory) picks up on this. According to the theory, we are amused by other people’s failings or inabilities to realize their aims. Or, we laugh at our former selves (as if – for a moment – a present self were laughing at a past self ). According to the theory, a joke establishes a hierarchy in which the teller of the joke is elevated above the butt of the joke or object of the laughter.9 Superiority theory has its roots in ancient Greece, and until it was heavily criticized in the eighteenth century, it was the dominant way of thinking about comedy, humor, and laughter. In Philebus, Plato discusses malicious (phthonic) laughter, a kind of rejoicing at the misfortunes of others, even the troubles of our friends.10 In Rhetoric, Aristotle makes statements that sound like they belong to superiority theory. He characterizes wit as a kind of insolence, even

or reason; give rise to a visceral oscillation; and require disinterestedness). See Clewis, Kant’s Humorous Writings, 54–7. Mojca Küplen, “Kant’s Theory of Laughter,” Debates in Aesthetics 16, no. 1 (2021): 50–62. Stephen Palmquist discusses Kant’s thoughts on humor in relation to paradox, and he finds even more jokes by Kant. Stephen Palmquist, “A Liar’s Guide to Humor: Kant on Paradoxical Playing with Perspectives,” unpublished manuscript. 7 As rightly noted by Wicks, Kant on Judgment, 141. 8 Though I sometimes refer to Kant’s “theory” or “account” of humor, strictly speaking he provides thoughts or considerations more than a fleshed-out theory. 9 Gimbel, Clever, 9. 10 Plato, Philebus, 49d.

  



if it is an “educated” or well-bred kind.11 In the Poetics, Aristotle maintains that comedy is an imitation (mimesis) of characters of an “inferior” or “lower” type.12 Superiority theory was also prevalent during the early modern period. In The Treatise on Human Nature, Hobbes denies that laughter is a response to jest alone. Rather, the passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly: for men laugh at the follies of themselves past.13

In The Passions of the Soul, Descartes analyzes laughter as an expression of scorn, a mixture of joy and mild hatred. Though Descartes touches on some of laughter’s other aspects, he tends to focus on its function in ridicule.14 In the eighteenth century, superiority theory slowly faded in popularity, as writers such as Hutcheson mounted compelling criticisms against it and defended versions of incongruity theory. Incongruity theory: People are amused by humor because they enjoy a mismatch between whatever is perceived and their ordinary expectations, norms, or concepts.

“Incongruity” refers to a violation of mental patterns, categories, or norms, or of expectations about them. Incongruities can be generated by mistakes or errors of all kinds, from category mistakes to spelling errors. The theory turns on the fact that people have expectations about the structure of reality and the patterns of language. When patterns, properties, categories, or the like are transgressed, one can enjoy those transgressions in themselves. According to this view, when finding something comically amusing, it is necessary to contemplate, or attend to, an incongruity in fun. The mismatch should not be a source of distress or too much concern. The confrontation with the incongruous, if one is to find it funny, cannot at the same time be the cause of serious or painful concern.15 In situations in which one is distressed by the event or narrative, or confused, one will not find the incongruity amusing or enjoy it in itself, but will simply become upset or frustrated.

11 12 13

14

15

Aristotle, Rhetoric, bk. 2, ch. 12 (1389b1). Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 5 (1449a31). See ch. 9, sec. 13, in Thomas Hobbes, The Treatise on Human Nature and That on Liberty and Necessity (London: McCreery, 1812), 65; emphasis and orthography modified. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, in Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. Elizabeth Haldane and George T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), art. 178. On laughter, see pt. 2, art. 124–7, and pt. 3, 178–81. Merrie Bergmann, “How Many Feminists Does It Take to Make a Joke? Sexist Humor and What’s Wrong with It,” Hypatia 1, no. 1 (1986): 63–82, 69.



   ’ 

To be most charitable to incongruity theory, it is best to interpret the perceived incongruity as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of comic amusement.16 On this reading, to achieve the result (comic amusement), some kind of incongruity must be perceived, but the perception of an incongruity is not sufficient to produce the amusement. If an old oak suddenly falls through your roof, you are likely to be shocked and upset, not comically amused. Incongruity lies at the core of Kant’s thinking about humor, and he provides several instances of humor that arises from a kind of mistake or ambiguity.17 Kant, as I will explain, is in part an incongruity theorist, but he was not the first one.18 Though he is sometimes incorrectly identified as the “pioneer” of the incongruity theory,19 there were important precedents in both the British and German traditions. In Reflections on Laughter (1725), Hutcheson defended a version of incongruity theory while criticizing (Hobbesian) superiority theory.20 Beattie and Gerard also presented incongruity theories before Kant. In 1764, Beattie writes, “Laughter seems to arise from the view of things incongruous united in the same assemblage.”21 A few years earlier, in Essay on Taste, Gerard had claimed that “wit, humour, and ridicule,” though distinct, are all “skillful imitations of odd and incongruous originals.”22 The object of the sense for what produces “mirth, laughter, and amusement,” according to Gerard, is “in general incongruity, or a surprising and uncommon mixture of relation and contrariety in things.”23

16

17

18

19

20

21

22 23

Noël Carroll, Humour: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 28. See, e.g., the Stuffed Aunt joke, in Clewis, Kant’s Humorous Writings, 117. As I discuss in Kant’s Humorous Writings, several of Kant’s jokes are ethically or otherwise problematic. The mistaken view is widespread: “The earliest proponent of the incongruity theory is Immanuel Kant.” Tom Brommage, Michael Cundall, and Elizabeth Victor, Florida Philosophical Review 15, no. 1 (2015): i–viii, iv. Giamario correctly notes that Kant was not the first incongruity theorist. Patrick Giamario, “‘Making Reason Think More’: Laughter in Kant’s Aesthetic Philosophy” Angelaki 22, no. 4 (2017): 161–76, 174 no. 6. Jim Holt, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 94. It is possible (but not certain) that Hutcheson’s incongruity theory influenced Kant’s thoughts about humor, for Kant was familiar with some of Hutcheson’s moral and aesthetic writings. Kant’s personal library contained copies of German translations of Inquiry (1725) and An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (1742). On Kant’s library, see Arthur Warda, Immanuel Kants Bücher. Mit einer getreuen Nachbildung des bisher einzigen bekannten Abzuges des Versteigerungskataloges der Bibliothek Kants (Berlin: Martin Breslauer, 1922), 50. James Beattie, “An Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition,” in his Essays: On Poetry and Music, As They Affect the Mind (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1778), 319–486, 344. Gerard, Taste (1759), 69; orthography and emphasis modified. Gerard, Taste (1759), 66. Like Kant after him, Gerard mentions both Samuel Butler (Hudibras) and Jonathan Swift. See Gerard, Taste (1759), 70 and 73, respectively. On Gerard and Kant on genius, see Chapter 4.

  



It seems best to read incongruity theory as claiming that surprise may, but need not, arise when one perceives an incongruity. The point is not that you are startled or surprised by the incongruity; you may have heard the joke before or already seen the comedy routine. Rather, the point is that the enjoyment of the incongruity is the cause of the amused response. In nearly all discussions of incongruity theory, Mendelssohn is ignored, yet his “Rhapsody” (1761) contains some remarks on laughter that should be classified as an incongruity theory. According to Mendelssohn, laughter is founded “on a contrast between a perfection and an imperfection.”24 Mendelssohn’s thought is partly shaped by the Wolffian tradition, and for Wolff, too, laughter is defined as arising from what, given one’s opinions, one finds absurd.25 In addition to Mendelssohn, some of Kant’s near contemporaries support the idea that contrast or incongruity underlies humor. Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy and Goethe’s Elective Affinities describe the laughable or ridiculous (lächerlich) as originating in a contrast.26 The third theory to be discussed is release (or relief ) theory: Release theory: People laugh at humor in order to release pent-up psychological energy or forces.

Aristotle, equipped with his notion of catharsis in response to tragedy, might have described a parallel release in response to comedy, but since his full treatment on comedy did not survive, it is difficult to say for sure. Many centuries later, using the science of his day, Shaftesbury (1709) suggests that what is comical releases constrained “animal spirits.” The natural free spirits of ingenious men, if imprisoned and controlled, will find out other ways of motion to relieve themselves in their constraint; and whether it be in burlesque, mimicry, or buffoonery, they will be glad at any rate to vent themselves, and be revenged upon their constrainers.27

Kant mentions Shaftesbury in some of his writings across his academic career, and he was also acquainted with Shaftesbury’s thoughts on wit, ridicule, and humor (e.g., MS 6:208–9).28

24

25 26

27

28

Moses Mendelssohn, “Rhapsody or Additions to the Letters on Sentiments,” in Philosophical Writings, 131–68; on laughter, see 149–50. The similarities between Kant’s account and Mendelssohn’s are considerable. Wolff, Psychologia empirica, §743. Lessing claims, “Every absurdity [Ungereimtheit], every contrast of reality and deficiency is laughable.” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Selected Prose Works, ed. Edward Bell (London: George Bell and Sons, 1889), 306. Goethe writes: “The ridiculous arises out of a moral contrast, in which two things are brought together before the mind in an innocent way.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities (New York: Henry Holt, 1872), 184. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, ed. Klein, 34. See also Carroll, Humour, 38. Terry Eagleton, Humour (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 10. See also ÜGTP 8:166; NEV 2:311; and Br 10:77.



   ’ 

There are other theories of humor out there, and even these three theories sometimes contain their own variations and subsets. Still, this overview should be sufficient to appreciate how Kant appropriates and develops previous ideas about humor. Although I have presented these theorists in a straightforward way, in reality many authors combine aspects of different theories. Kant, in fact, unites elements from all three theories as well as adds his own distinct twist.

The Critical Account of Humor Although Kant is clearly an incongruity theorist, his account also contains aspects of release theory and even some elements of superiority theory. Moreover, since the third Critique refers to a “mere play of representations” and a “play of thoughts” (Gedankenspiel), I would like to suggest that Kant synthesizes previous theories of humor and applies his own notion of aesthetic play, according to which the mind plays with an incongruity, thought, or idea.29 The incongruity aspects of Kant’s theory are easy to identify. He claims that comic laughter is an “affect” resulting from the “sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.” We laugh “because our expectation was heightened and suddenly disappeared into nothing” (KU 5:532–3). What causes this change of expectation is precisely the incongruity in the humor, something “nonsensical.” Here is a key passage: In everything that is to provoke a lively, uproarious laughter, there must be something nonsensical (in which, therefore, the understanding in itself can take no satisfaction). Laughter is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing. This very transformation, which is certainly nothing enjoyable for the understanding, is nevertheless indirectly enjoyable and, for a moment, very lively. The cause must thus consist in the influence of the representation on the body and its reciprocal effect on the mind; certainly not insofar as the representation is objectively an object of gratification (for how can a disappointed expectation be gratifying?), but rather solely through the fact that as a mere play of representations it produces an equilibrium of the vital forces in the body. (KU 5:332–3; original emphasis)

Accordingly, laughter in response to comic jest is pleasant (“indirectly enjoyable”). It is disinterested (not “objectively an object of gratification”).30 And it 29

30

The term “play” has been used in theories (proposed, e.g., by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Max Eastman) that see humor as a kind of relaxation or release from work and activity, but Kant’s sense of play differs from this. Building on Kant’s distinction between free and adherent beauty, Michel Canivet proposes a potentially useful distinction between free and adherent judging in laughter, though it should be kept in mind that adherent judgments can be disinterested. Michel

  



involves a disappearance of an expectation31 into nothing, as one perceives the humorous incongruity. Here are two more Kant jokes, both from the third Critique (KU 5:333) and translated freely to help Kant as much as possible. I call this one Happy Funeral Mourners: A man’s rich relative dies. Suddenly he is rich. To honor his relative, the man wants to arrange a solemn funeral service. But he keeps complaining that he can’t get it quite right. “What’s the problem?” someone asks. “I hired these mourners, but the more money I give them to look grieved, the happier they look.”

And here is Foam in a Bottle: A man from India watches an Englishman open a bottle of ale at the Englishman’s table in the city of Surat. When he opens up the bottle, it explodes in a wave of froth. The Indian looks amazed. “Well, what’s so remarkable about that?” asks the Englishman. “I’m not surprised at its getting out,” replies the Indian, “but at how you ever managed to get it all in.”32

The notion of an expectation “disappearing into nothing” is not immediately clear, so here is one way to understand it. Once we get into the mindset that we are listening to a joke, we attend to it with certain expectations that are based on how we think the world is or should be.33 (Most people are happy when they are paid. And most European adults in Kant’s era know about beer foam behavior.) We begin processing a joke with these normal default assumptions intact. That mode of interpretation is disrupted and then overthrown by the punch line, calling forth a more compelling, though fantastical, interpretation.34 (The funeral mourners are paid to look sad, not happy; the Indian gentleman leads us to think that he believes that beer froth has to be forced into a bottle.) In this way, when the story or narrative describes an incongruity relative to that framework, our expectation is not fulfilled. This lack of

31

32

33 34

Canivet, “Le rire et le bon sens,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 86, no. 3 (1988): 354–77, 365. Kant elsewhere writes that it is an “illusion” that disappears into nothing (KU 5:334). These two movements – disappointment of our expectations, and the disappearance of an illusion – can be seen as distinct (negative and positive) moments in the ongoing mental “play” with the content of the humor. Kant told this version of the joke as early as 1772/73 (V-Anth/Par 25:349). In Kant’s Humorous Writings, 86–8, I question the interpretation that it must be read as an ethically impermissible and racist joke. Carroll, Humour, 18. Noël Carroll, “Two Comic Plot Structures,” The Monist 88, no. 1 (2005): 154–83, 172.



   ’ 

fulfillment counts, loosely speaking, as a kind of “nothing.” In a more basic sense, of course, lack of fulfillment is something.35 The mind is playing with some content after all. Here is how Kant describes the mental play: It is noteworthy that in all such cases the joke must always contain something that can deceive for a moment: hence, when the illusion disappears into nothing, the mind looks back again in order to try it once more, and thus is hurried this way and that by rapidly succeeding increases and decreases of tension and set into oscillation: which, because that which as it were struck the string bounces back suddenly (not through a gradual slackening), is bound to cause a movement of the mind and an internal bodily movement in harmony with it, which continues involuntarily, and produces weariness, but at the same time also cheerfulness (the effects of a motion that is beneficial to health). (KU 5:334)

I also wish to point out the release or relief elements in Kant’s claims. The relief elements are evident even in the above quote. In listening to a joke or viewing a comic situation, tension builds. Upon hearing the punch line or resolution, we let it all out and “burst” into laughter. After we get the punch line, Kant maintains, a sudden relaxation starts an oscillating movement in the diaphragm and intestines. The play begins with thoughts which . . . insofar as they are to be expressed sensibly, also occupy the body; and since the understanding, in this presentation in which it does not find what was expected, suddenly relaxes, one feels the effect of this relaxation in the body through the oscillation of the organs. (KU 5:332)36

The reaction to the humorous “produces the successive movement of the mind in two opposite directions, which at the same time gives the body a healthy shake” (KU 5:335). The movement in the mind (“the play begins with thoughts”) is expressed through the body, namely, as oscillations of the viscera. The bodily vibration harmoniously corresponds to the mind’s bouncing back and forth, its play of thoughts as it goes from initial expectation, to

35

36

Jeremy Arnold considers, then rejects, this reading. He instead emphasizes “a sense for the nothing” and non-sense. Jeremy Arnold, “Laughter, Judgment and Democratic Politics,” Culture, Theory, & Critique 50, no. 1 (2009): 7–21, 10. Kant gives priority to the mental play: the play “begins with thoughts,” which then results in bodily oscillations. Recall too that Kant holds that the experience of the sublime involves an “oscillation,” which makes for one of the similarities between laughter at humor and the experience of the sublime – another reason to see laughter at humor as part of Kant’s aesthetic theory.

  



illusion or misconception, to a possible momentary explanation, and back again to the illusion. Now one can see how Kant could write that it is both an “expectation” and an “illusion” that disappears into nothing – an otherwise puzzling claim. These descriptions refer to distinct moments in the process of mental play. Our ordinary expectations disappear when the illusion is generated. When the illusion disappears, there is an apparent resolution, and on and on. The visceral oscillation corresponds to this mental play. The release element can also be seen in the Anthropology. Kant’s remarks on laughter at humor – remarkably similar to claims found in the third Critique – comes from a section revealingly called “On the affects by which nature promotes health mechanically.” Laughter’s jerky (nearly convulsive) exhaling of air . . . strengthens the feeling of vital force through the wholesome exercise of the diaphragm. It may be a hired jester (harlequin) who makes us laugh or a sly wit belonging to our circle of friends, a “wag” who seems to have no mischief in mind and does not join in the laughter, but with seeming simplicity suddenly releases a tense anticipation (like a taut string). The resulting laughter is always a shaking of the muscles involved in digestion, which promotes it far better than the physician’s wisdom would do. Even a great absurdity [Albernheit] of a mistaken power of judgment [einer fehlgreifenden Urtheilskraft] can produce exactly the same effect. (Anth 7:262; see also 301, 323–4)

This passage, including its reference to a “mistaken power of judgment,” can be read as compatible with the 1790 account, release elements and all.37 Kant does not focus exclusively on humor’s bodily effects. He holds that there are both bodily and intellectual elements in laughter at humor. The mind is the “source” of laughter, and the effect (convulsion) is in the body. The bodily reaction results from the intellectual play in response to an incongruous content, including a great “absurdity” (Albernheit) that, while arising from our mistaken judgment, does not trouble or puzzle us. The mind perceives the incongruity, enjoys it as such or by itself, and we laugh heartily in response to

37

Several commentators have noticed the release elements in Kant’s account. Carroll, Humour, 39. Cristina Larkin-Galiñanes, “An Overview of Humor Theory,” in The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor, ed. Salvatore Attardo (New York: Routledge, 2017), 4–16, 10. Simon Critchley, On Humour (New York: Routledge, 2002), 6. Eagleton, Humour, 10, 69. John Marmysz, “Humor, Sublimity and Incongruity,” Consciousness, Literature and the Arts 2, no. 3 (2001): no pagination. At www.dmd27.org/marm.html [accessed August 26, 2019]. See also John Marmysz, Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003). Paul Swift, “In-jestion: Intestinal Laughter in Kant and Nietzsche,” International Studies in Philosophy 27, no. 1 (1995): 97–103, 97.



   ’ 

it. The mind makes the diaphragm shake. Through laughter, we “can get at the body even through the soul,” and we can use the soul as a doctor for the body (KU 5:332). I now turn to the third approach, superiority theory, with which Kant was familiar in some form or other. In fact, in the third Critique, Kant appears to reject it. Commenting on Foam in a Bottle, he writes, “We do not laugh . . . because we find ourselves cleverer than this unknowing person [Unwissenden]” (KU 5:333; emphasis added). This claim, perhaps combined with Kant’s wider reputation as a rigid moralist, makes it easy to miss the fact that he finds a place for harmless ridicule, banter, and teasing. But hints of the superiority theory can even be seen in his very definition of a joke (Scherz): “Joke: a teasing [Necken] that leads to laughter” (R 466; early 1770s; 15:192).38 Needless to say, he thinks one should avoid outright contempt for others. “Good-natured laughter” is ethically permissible, but real contempt for others, or for humanity, is impermissible. In surveying humanity, one is permitted a “good-natured laugh,” but should avoid “contempt” (Anth 7:332). Kant takes a middle position, allowing a great deal of room for satirical jest but ultimately setting ethical bounds on ridicule.39 Though much more could be said about Kant’s appropriation of the superiority theory and its relations to his ethical theory, I now turn, finally, to what is perhaps the most innovative or distinct part of Kant’s account: free play theory. He states that laughter in response to a humorous joke is a kind of 38

39

Kant distinguishes between wholesome and malicious laughter. He even recommends poking fun at someone as long as one does not actually offend the person (Anth 7:211, 261, 265, 332). See also his practical writings, where he contrasts innocent and harmful ridicule (MS 6:467; cf. V-Mo/Collins 27:458; MS 6:208–9). On Schadenfreude, see V-MS/ Vigil 27:697–8; V-Anth/Mron 25:1350. Kant uses the notion of a disinterested play area or play space (Spielraum) to explain the ethical limits of humor, the area in which joking is permitted (Anth 7:281; KU 5:305). To illustrate this notion of a play area or frame, he tells another joke in the third Critique, The Merchant’s Wig (KU 5:333). The idea of a play frame for humor is also found in the anthropology lectures. Kant claims that if we hear about someone falling, it is not the story or fact that someone fell that makes us laugh (V-Anth/Fried 25:601), but the unexpected divergence from the ordinary course of events, an incongruity or absurdity that is relished or enjoyed in itself. On the “play frame” and latitude in humor, see Clewis, Kant’s Humorous Writings, 72–3, 83–7, 96–8, 100–2. For hints of this principle in the pre-Critical Observations, see GSE 2:234, 243 n. Mendelssohn had already made a similar point: “The foolishness of our friends commonly vexes us, pleases enemies, and amuses persons who are neutral.” Mendelssohn, “Rhapsody,” 150. And, with a vivid example, Hutcheson expresses a similar view: “To observe the contortions of the human body in the air, upon the blowing up of an enemy’s ship, may rise laughter in those who do not reflect on the agony and distress of the sufferers; but the reflecting on this distress could never move laughter of itself.” Hutcheson, “To the Author of the Dublin Journal,” in Townsend, British Aesthetics, 147.

  



“play of sensations.” Yet it is a play of sensations that is generated by a play of thoughts (Gedankenspiel) and “a mere play of representations” (KU 5:331, 333). Unfortunately, he never explains how a play of thoughts can produce a play of sensations. Perhaps the play of sensations occurs because in laughter at humor the movements of the body reflect those of the mind as it judges the content of the joke or object of humor, or, to put it another way, the oscillation in laughter at humor harmoniously corresponds to the mind’s bouncing back and forth. Since the mind cannot simultaneously retain both this violation and its resolution, it moves to-and-fro, resulting in a mental play.40 As noted, there is an initial expectation, followed by a misconception or illusion. We seek an explanation for the latter, settle on a potential candidate, then return to the misconception to test its fit, contemplate the illusion again, and so on. Kant uses a ball metaphor: “For a while we toss back and forth like a ball our own misconception about an object that is otherwise indifferent to us, or rather our own idea that we’ve been chasing, while we were merely trying to grasp and hold it firm” (KU 5:333–4). In responding to the humorous joke, the imagination and understanding are set into a harmonious play with the misconception and its resolution, if not a play with aesthetic ideas.41 In responding to humor, it is clear that Kant holds that the imagination and understanding are in play with each other in some general sense. But it is not immediately clear exactly what is in play or being “tossed” back and forth. Two candidates can be identified: (1) a misunderstanding or misconception, and (2) an aesthetic idea. In my view, both candidates enjoy textual support, so one need not decide between them.

40

41

Laughter occurs, Canivet writes, “after the violation of the norm of the harmonious proportion between the imagination and understanding.” Canivet, “Le rire et le bon sens,” 373; my trans. The mental play is prior to the bodily response (“the play begins with thoughts”) (KU 5:332). However, Stephen Nichols holds that in Kant’s account, the bodily response – laughter – comes first. Stephen G. Nichols, “Laughter as Gesture: Hilarity and the AntiSublime,” Neohelicon 32, no. 2 (2005): 375–89, 377: “The body, rather than the mind, engages the process much earlier than he [Kant] recognizes.” Nichols’s interpretation of Kant bears resemblance to the thesis (in Mike Martin and Joshua Shaw) that humor should not be conceptually detached from laughter. See Mike W. Martin, “Humour and Aesthetic Enjoyment of Incongruities,” British Journal of Aesthetics 23, no. 1 (1983): 74–85, 78. Joshua Shaw, “Philosophy of Humor,” Philosophy Compass 5, no. 2 (2010): 112–26, 118–23. But as far as Kant interpretation goes, this cannot be right (if it is understood in a chronological rather than logical sense). For Kant denies that, in nature, an effect can precede its cause. On causality, see KrV A144/B183, and above all see the Second Analogy (KrV A188ff./B232ff.), where Kant claims that causes typically determine in time and precede their effects. See also KrV A188/B234; A195/B240; and A211/ B256. On simultaneous causation, see A202–3/B248.



   ’ 

The first candidate for what is at play in the free play is misunderstanding or mistaken judgment. Following Godfrey, one can say that the free play is an imaginative play with a misapprehension.42 If the response to humor involves a “representation in understanding” (KU 5:332), it is precisely a misunderstanding. This gets the imagination going. Godfrey puts it well: “We see that the laughable consists in some paradox or incongruity, by which the understanding is entrapped and its concepts and train of thought spoilt, but the mind, leaving the ordinary standpoint of the understanding, preserves its poise through the imagination dwelling on the possibility of the absurdity.”43 The second candidate for the object of play is the aesthetic idea. The material for laughter, Kant writes, is a kind of “play with aesthetic ideas” (KU 5:332). Aesthetic ideas, it will be recalled, are representations of the imagination that are so rich that the understanding cannot bring them under a concept or rule (KU 5:314, 342–3). They are infinitely abundant in meaning, unable to be fully captured by a concept; they are conceptually indeterminate.44 That is why Kant says that in a joke ultimately “nothing is thought.” This phrase need not be taken as a reference to the merely physiological aspects of Kant’s account, but can be read as referring to aesthetic ideas – which are never brought to concepts.45 Technically, aesthetic ideas are not “thought.” Music and material for laughter are two kinds of play with aesthetic ideas or even representations of the understanding [Verstandesvorstellungen], by which in the end nothing is thought and which can gratify merely through their change, and nevertheless do so in a lively fashion; by which they make it fairly evident that the animation in both cases is merely bodily, although it is aroused by ideas of the mind, and that the feeling of health

42

43 44

45

F. la T. Godfrey, “The Aesthetics of Laughter,” Hermathena 25, no. 50 (1937): 126–38, 132. On play, see also Giamario, “Making Reason Think More,” 167. Schopenhauer attributes a similar view to Voltaire and quotes him as saying, “I think I have observed in the theatre that hardly ever is there a general burst of laughter except on the occasion of a misapprehension.” Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), vol. 2, 96. Godfrey, “Laughter,” 134. Some scholars have acknowledged the role of aesthetic ideas in laughter. Birgit Recki, “So lachen wir. Wie Immanuel Kant Leib und Seele zusammenhält,” in Kants Schlüssel zur Kritik des Geschmacks. Ästhetische Erfahrung heute, ed. Ursula Francke (Hamburg: Meiner, 2000), 177–87, 182. Peter Fenves, Late Kant (London: Routledge, 2003), 25. Fenves even refers to the material for laughter as “indeterminate” (as aesthetic ideas are). Marie Swabey thinks Kant is wrong to hold that in humor nothing is thought, since “at the very least there is negative learning, the discovery of what is finally excluded as contradictory from the structure of things, human character, and societies; while on the positive side our acquaintance is enriched with regard to the possibilities of actuality.” Marie Swabey, “The Comic as Nonsense, Sadism, or Incongruity,” Journal of Philosophy 55, no. 19 (1958): 819–33, 822. In my view, however, this criticism misconstrues Kant’s claim that “nothing is thought.”

  



resulting from a movement of the intestines corresponding to that play constitutes the whole gratification in a lively party, which is extolled as so refined and spirited. (KU 5:332)

A virtue of this option is again that, if the mental activity is a play with aesthetic ideas, it makes it clear how the imagination could be involved in the aesthetic play. (Finding a role for the imagination was also a virtue of the first option.) Aesthetic ideas are produced by the imagination, and they can give sensible expression to some ideas of reason. In the Anthropology, Kant makes a point about texts and speeches that also seems to apply to narrative jokes, at least interesting or good ones. If texts and speeches “are to be called spirited, then they must arouse an interest by means of ideas. For this sets the power of imagination in motion, which sees before it a great play area [Spielraum] for concepts of this kind” (Anth 7:225). Like liar’s paradoxes and logical puzzles, a good joke can lead to a mental process that goes on and on – even if one has heard it before. Kant gave his own examples of bull or contradictory statements.46 One of Kant’s favorite one-liners was: “My dear friends: There is no such thing as a friend” (Anth 7:152).47 Perhaps this is why Kant sometimes characterizes jokes in terms of paradox.

The Critical View of the Arts of Laughter: Wit, Naiveté, and Whim While there are physiological and mechanistic aspects to the third Critique’s account of laughter at humor, there are also intellectualist elements: Kant centers his account on the notion of a free play “with thoughts” and distinguishes this from a play “with sensations.” Due to the Critical account’s intellectualist aspects, it is tempting to conclude that the account found in the third Critique commits Kant to holding that the ability to provoke comic laughter is one of the fine arts (just as one might consider standup comedy an

46

47

As Kant observes, contradictions can sometimes be humorous. He considers the following to be an example of bull. A person says, “I went on a walk with someone – completely alone” (V-Anth/Mron 25:1265). Versions are also found at V-Anth/Fried 25:506 and V-Lo/Wien 24:813. On English and Irish bull, see also V-Anth/Mensch 25:967. In a stronger version, he endorses the view: “Hence Aristotle correctly said: My friends, there are no friends” (V-Anth/Fried 25:505). He is actually misquoting Aristotle here, and Kant repeats the misquote in The Metaphysics of Morals (MS 6:470) and in several anthropology lectures (V-Anth/Collins 25:106; V-Anth/Parow l25:330; V-Anth/Mensch 25:933). Kant states a version of it in his forthright letter to Maria von Herbert (dated Spring 1792) (Br 11:332). For a comment on what Fenves calls “Aristotle’s paradox,” see Fenves, Late Kant, 139.



   ’  Aesthetic arts Agreeable arts

Fine arts

(play of sensations)

(play of cognitions)

Arts of laughter

Figure 8.1

(wit, naiveté, whim)

Poetry

Art of colors

Painting

Dinnerware

Sculpture

Table arts

Theater

Background music

Music

Games

Dance

The aesthetic arts

artform today). In line with this, Annie Hounsokou holds that the Kantian arts of laughter do not just affect the body, but also “please intellectually.”48 There may be a way to construe comedy or the art of laughter as a fine art, but Kant does not pursue this connection.49 Indeed, there are two sides to Kant’s account of the arts of laughter, the intellectualist and the physiological or mechanistic. Technically, he calls laughter only one of the agreeable arts, since he focuses more on the bodily effects of laughter. Kant calls humor an art (Kunst). But he does not thereby mean that it is a fine (schön) art, a class that would include poetry, rhetoric, painting, theater, architecture, horticulture, sculpture, dance, and music.50 If the ability to elicit laughter is an art, it is strictly speaking an art of the “agreeable,” at least insofar as one keeps in mind the physiological, mechanistic conception of laughter’s effects on the body.

48

49

50

Annie Hounsokou, “Exposing the Rogue in Us,” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 16, no. 2 (2012): 317–36, 322. “The cause of wit is intellectual” (324). “With wit, we essentially express an intellectual pleasure in a bodily way” (327). For several thought-provoking reasons for construing humor (on Kant’s view) as a fine art, see Lauren Olin, “All in Good Taste,” Philosophy of Humor Yearbook 4 (Berlin: de Gruyter), forthcoming. As noted in Chapter 5, music occupies an ambiguous position in Kant’s view of the arts. Sometimes Kant calls music a merely agreeable art, sometimes a fine art: music moves the body and arouses stirring affects, yet at the same time it represents aesthetic ideas (KU 5:332). He distinguishes between agreeable and beautiful music (KU 5:329).

  



The agreeable arts and the fine arts fall under the concept of the “aesthetic arts,” which are defined by their aim: to arouse pleasure (see Figure 8.1). This enjoyment can be either agreeable or intellectual. It is an agreeable art if the pleasure it elicits comes from mere sensations or a play of sensations. It is fine art if the pleasure comes from ways of cognizing (Erkenntnisarten) or a play of cognitions (KU 5:305). Within the agreeable arts, three “table arts” involve wit and banter: recounting interesting stories, conducting an unrestrained and lively conversation, and creating a light and merry atmosphere. In addition, proper table setting, pleasant table music, and gaming are agreeable arts (KU 5:305–6) because, like the arts of laughter, they are diversions aimed at creating agreeable sensations. About thirty pages after introducing the notion of the agreeable arts, Kant specifies three ways of making people laugh via humor. These three ways of eliciting laughter (qua response to something comically amusing) are wit (Witz), naiveté (Naivität), and caprice/whim (Laune).51 Wit is the driving force behind the three jokes Kant tells in the third Critique. In the anthropology lectures and the published Anthropology, Kant uses the German Witz and the Latin ingenium to capture this capacity to generalize and to draw connections (Anth 7:201, 220). According to the Anthropology, wit is a “peculiar faculty of assimilating, which belongs to the understanding (as the faculty of cognizing the universal), insofar as it brings objects under genera” (Anth 7:220).52 In addition, Kant distinguishes two kinds of wit: superficial and profound.53 It is true that profundity is not a matter of wit; but insofar as wit, through the imagery [das Bildliche] that it adds to thought, can be a vehicle or garb for reason and its management of morally practical ideas, it can be thought of as profound wit (as distinguished from superficial wit). (Anth 7:222)54

Whereas superficial wit makes use of incongruity in a “play,” profound wit is more enduring because it appeals to reason. Profound wit dresses up ideas of 51

52

53

54

Kant discusses wit first and then presupposes it throughout the subsequent analysis of joking (KU 5:332). On naiveté and whim/caprice, see KU 5:335–6. On the sources and development of Kant’s conception of wit, naiveté, and whim, see Clewis, Kant’s Humorous Writings, 26–37. On wit, see especially §54 and §55 in the Anthropology (7:220–3). For a quasibiographical discussion of wit (including Witz as a source of jokes), see Wolfgang Ritzel, “Kant über den Witz und Kants Witz,” Kant-Studien 82, no. 1 (1991): 102–9. In “To the Author of the Dublin Journal,” Hutcheson likewise discusses “serious” wit. See Hutcheson, in Townsend, British Aesthetics, 143. Unlike Kant, Hutcheson does not ascribe to serious wit any moral content. The three jokes in §54 of the third Critique, on this view, would display superficial rather than profound wit. The jokes are lighthearted and play with an incongruity.



   ’ 

reason and presents them in concrete stories. Pope, Butler, and Voltaire mostly exhibit superficial or light wit and elicit amusement. Young, in contrast, has profound wit and evokes admiration. However, it is an easy wit (like that of Voltaire’s), and always only a play [Spiel]. On the other hand, the person who presents true and important principles in clothing (like Edward Young in his satires)55 can be called a very difficult [centnerschwerer] wit, because it is a serious business and arouses more admiration than amusement. (Anth 7:222; cf. V-Anth/Mensch 25:967; V-Anth/Busolt 25:1461)

Light, humorous wit risks becoming too cute. Jokes that merely make use of word play and puns are guilty here. (One might also add dad jokes and groaners.)56 Light wit can become nauseating. (In yet another way, then, humor connects with a theme from Kant’s aesthetics: disgust.) Just as engaging with beauty for too long can lead to feelings of saturation and nausea, exposure to too much light wit can cause a sense of weariness.57 The cognitive pleasure one gets from wit can become nauseating. But if it [mental pleasure] is forced on us and still as mental nutrition is not beneficial to us, the mind finds it repulsive (as in, e.g., the constant repetition of would-be flashes of wit or funniness [lustig], whose sameness can be unwholesome to us), and thus the natural instinct to be free of it is also called disgust by analogy. (Anth 7:157–8)58

Kant here finds fault with one author in particular: the French abbot, Nicolas Trublet. In Kant’s view, Trublet’s “Essay on Several Subjects of Literature and Morality” (1735) contains more cheap linguistic tricks than substance and insight.59 55

56 57

58

59

The Universal Passion is a collection of seven satires published by Young between 1725 and 1727. See, e.g., Edward Young, The Universal Passion, Satire 1 (London: J. Roberts, 1725). Kant also admires the profound (tief) wit in Young’s Night-Thoughts (published between 1742 and 1745) and he contrasts Young with Voltaire (V-Anth/ Mensch 25:967). Olin, “All in Good Taste.” Likewise, eighteenth-century psychologist David Hartley rejects out of hand “low similitudes, allusions, contrasts, and coincidences, applied to grave and serious subjects, [that] occasion the most profuse laughter in persons of light minds” and that “weaken” reverence for sacred things. David Hartley, “Of Wit and Humour,” in The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, ed. John Morreall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 41–4, 43. See also the Observations: “Nothing is so disgusting as pure sweetness” (GSE 2:246 n.) and the Critique of Practical Reason: “joking [Scherzen] easily becomes insipid” (KpV 5:153). See also: “When one reads the abbot Trublet’s gags [Einfälle], one becomes so weary and tired of the excessive bons mots” that one prefers something that is ordinary and without

  



Wit goes more for the sauce. Judgment goes for the sustenance. The hunt for witty sayings (bons mots), as the Abbot Trublet does so well, thereby putting wit on the rack, makes for shallow minds, or eventually disgusts well-grounded ones. (Anth 7:221)

Wit, as the capacity to find similarities, should remain subordinate to the understanding.60 If one is not to become nauseated, a witticism needs content supplied by reason in the form of “ideas.” The witticism should not be mere nonsense, but (analogous to the beautiful) should have a kind of form so that the imagination can play with thoughts, representations, or ideas. Kant sometimes writes about the products of wit as if they were artifacts that, like beautiful objects, are put forward for aesthetic contemplation – with the risk that the apprehender will not enjoy it or even find it repulsive and disagreeable: We can also be disgusted [verekeln] by it [i.e., wit], since its effect leaves nothing permanent. If all of these things and persons [i.e., texts, speeches] are to be called spirited, then they must arouse an interest by means of ideas. For this sets the power of imagination in motion, which sees before it a great play area [Spielraum] for concepts of this kind. (Anth 7:225)61

If and when there is a conflict between light wit and reason, Kant maintains, wit should be subordinated to reason.62 Ideally, wit should be well grounded and thorough. Despite containing a playful antithesis, a saying by Samuel Johnson is not in fact admirable because it does not support reason (Anth 7:222).

60

61

62

taste (V-Anth/Parow 25:388). Kant may here be following Voltaire, who engaged in a literary dispute with Trublet. Compare a fragment from 1769–71: “Wit must serve the understanding, either for invention (analogies) or for elucidation. Examples. Similarities. But it must not substitute the understanding. Image-rich wit, empty wit” (R 472; 15:194; my trans.). Some jokes fail simply because they involve cheap wordplay or contrasts, with little to no connection to “ideas” at all. See also the Observations (GSE 2:246–7), where Kant finds Trublet’s weaknesses to be typical of the French. Kant refers to Montesquieu and Jean d’Alembert to support his generalizations. Addison, one of Kant’s favorite authors on humor, adopts what might likewise be called an intellectualist position and assigns reason a governing role. “Humour should always lie under the check of reason, and . . . it requires the direction of the nicest judgment, by so much the more as it indulges itself in the most boundless freedoms.” Addison also distinguishes true from false humor. “For as True Humour generally looks serious, while every body laughs about him; False Humour is always laughing, whilst every body about him looks serious.” Joseph Addison, no. 35, April 10, 1711, in Addison and Steele, The Spectator, 41.



   ’ 

The second “art” of laughter, naiveté, is an eruption of a “natural” sincerity that, due to the human tendency to dissimulate, has been lost. It is “the resistance of the uprightness that is originally natural to humanity against the art of pretense that has become second nature” (KU 5:335).63 It is called “naive” when, in manners (Manieren), nature looks like art and art looks like nature (R 886; 1776–78; 15:387–8). Because of its affinity with morality, this art of laughter deserves something analogous to esteem. “But that something that is infinitely better than every assumed custom, namely purity of the way of thinking (or at least the predisposition to it), has not been entirely extinguished in human nature, adds seriousness and high esteem to this play of the power of judgment” (KU 5:335). Naiveté can be connected to the incongruity theory elements in Kant’s account, namely, his view that humor involves a disappearance of an expectation into nothing. When we encounter the naive person, our expectation that we will have to figure out the person’s (hidden) true intentions suddenly disappears.64 Naiveté is the simplicity that characterizes the absence of corruption by society’s customs and manners. The naive person comes across as innocent. The contrast between what we are used to or expect, and how the naive person appears, can seem funny or amusing. We are surprised by the naive person’s words or behavior, and our expectation of artifice is transformed into nothing.65 When we are made privy to such innocence, Kant writes, “the joker in ourselves is exposed, and this produces the successive movement of the mind in two opposite directions, which at the same time gives the body a healthy shake” (KU 5:335). In laughing at naiveté, we are ultimately laughing at ourselves. We then realize that, like nearly everyone else, we usually follow artifices that sometimes require us to dissemble or even encourage us to be dishonest or lie.66 Humor’s use for morality is never far from Kant’s account, and in his views of naiveté one can see his concern to find a link with morality. The uprightness revealed in naiveté is a moral phenomenon that happens to evoke laughter.67 This explains why in such cases we are not actually laughing at or mocking the naive person, and thus why such laughter does not imply our feeling superior to them. The naive person has a moral innocence, and, for Kant, it is impossible to be superior to morality. We are instead constrained by morality – even if it springs autonomously from reason – and we have a duty to strive to be morally upright. When we encounter naiveté, we stumble upon what seems to

63 64 65 66

67

See also V-Lo/Phil 24:371 and V-Anth/Busolt 25:1439. Marmysz, “Humor, Sublimity and Incongruity.” Hounsokou, “Rogue,” 326. Naiveté can also be connected to superiority theory, for the latter is sometimes used to make sense of laughing at oneself. It is as if, through naiveté, one part of ourselves (reason) is keeping another part (custom, habit) in check. Hounsokou, “Rogue,” 327.

  



be an agreement of nature with freedom. We chance upon a person in which simplicity takes on the look of morality. Given the link to nature and simplicity, Kant maintains, there can be no “art” of being naive. Naiveté cannot be placed among the fine arts, since naiveté is found rather than crafted. Still, naiveté can be represented or depicted in fictional works and literary writings. Kant writes: “An art for being naive is thus a contradiction; but it is certainly possible to represent naiveté in a fictional person, and this is a beautiful although also rare art” (KU 5:335). From the brief discussion in the third Critique, it is unclear which authors Kant thinks either depict or exhibit naiveté. Fortunately, the anthropology lectures reveal that he is thinking of Voltaire (V-Anth/Fried 25:627; V-Anth/ Mensch 25:967; V-Anth/Busolt 25:1487) and the author of Don Quixote, Cervantes (V-Anth/Collins 25:137).68 According to the lectures, Kant draws strong links between naiveté (simplicity) and wit. He appears to suggest that naiveté is a type of wit or way of being witty (V-Anth/Parow 25:345; V-Anth/Fried 25:627; V-Anth/Mensch 25:967; V-Anth/Busolt 25:1462). The late Busolt lecture also reports that naiveté is sometimes called air dégagé, suggesting an interesting connection to detachment or disinterestedness (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1439), and thereby relating naiveté to Kant’s broader aesthetic theory. The third art of laughter is whim or caprice (Laune).69 Like the naive, whim is discussed in just a single paragraph.70 The whimsical person sees life in a different way or discloses the world in a new light. Here it is more a matter of outlook than of a joke-telling ability. The

68

69

70

The sayings of Sancho Panza in Don Quixote are mentioned as an example of naiveté (VAnth/Collins 25:137). In Busolt, naiveté is called a noble simplicity; interestingly, the transcription adds that (representing) naiveté requires “genius” and mentions Voltaire (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1486–7). “Caprice” is a decent translation of Laune, but I prefer “whim” because it can be used alongside “whimsicality” and “the whimsical.” Laune could even be translated as “mood” or “humor” (in the ancient medical sense associated with the four temperaments). Meredith translates Laune as “humor,” thereby picking up the sense associated with the Hippocratic and Galenic four humors (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, blood). The three times Kant uses the term Humor, he does so in the Hippocratic-Galenic sense. See R 1490; 1775–78; 15:735; R 1540; 1799; 15:965; and BGSE 20:63. If one translated Laune with “humor” one would lose the ability to distinguish Laune from Humor (“humor” in its ordinary English sense), a word used by Schopenhauer, Sigmund Freud, and many other writers. In Giamario’s opinion, Kant’s analysis of naiveté and of whim (Laune, caprice) is less philosophically rich than Kant’s examination of the laughter generated by joking (wit). See Giamario, “Making Reason Think More,” 174 no. 5. Meredith, however, thinks that the (brief ) discussion of naiveté is “far the best in the whole section.” James Meredith, in Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), 305.



   ’ 

whimsical person takes some event, even a painful one, and makes us laugh about it. Whim in the good sense signifies the talent of being able to transpose oneself at will into a certain mental disposition in which everything is judged quite differently from what is usual (even completely reversed), and yet in accordance with certain principles of reason in such a mental disposition. (KU 5:335)

The adoption of a different perspective – this reversal – leads to the amusing situation. At the same time, whimsical people, Kant thinks, are not completely nonsensical but adopt “certain principles of reason.” Kant has early modern satirists in mind, but one could also expand this to include today’s comedians who recount an awkward or painful moment in a funny manner. Using observational humor, they see the world from a different or new vantage point, evoking comic mirth. Just as superficial, “shallow wit” can become disgusting (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1460), especially when forced upon us, Laune can go too far. An “eccentric” wit can sometimes prevail over the power of practical judgment. Having no character yet being fickle [wetterwendisch], whimsical [launisch], and (without malice) unreliable; willfully making enemies for oneself but without even hating anyone; and ridiculing one’s friend bitingly but without wanting to hurt him: this lies in a partly innate predisposition of eccentric [verschrobenen] wit ruling over the practical power of judgment. (Anth 7:249)

Although Kant makes conceptual distinctions between wit (as the capacity to use incongruity to evoke comic amusement), naiveté, and Laune, they are often found in the same person or author, a satirist such as Henry Fielding, Jonathan Swift, or Samuel Butler. They expose incongruities or absurdities while ridiculing what seems inferior or contemptible: But one can also make a comical contrast and express an apparent contradiction in the tone of truth, or express something obviously contemptible in the language of praise, in order to make the incongruity/ absurdity [Ungereimtheit] still more palpable – like [Henry] Fielding in his Jonathan Wild. (Anth 7:163)71

71

Kant gives the additional examples of Samuel Richardon’s Clarissa and Aloys Blumauer’s travesty of Virgil, Abenteuer des frommen Helden Aeneas (“Adventure of the Pious Hero, Aeneas”).

  



Whim can thus go hand in hand with superiority. Using ridicule or “persiflage” (i.e., light teasing) without hurting is actually a mark of the whimsical wit.72 In a rich passage from the Anthropology, all of these elements, while conceptually distinct, are mentioned: Whimsical [launichter] wit means one that comes from a mind disposed to paradox, where the (cunning) jokester peers from behind the trusting sound of simplicity in order to expose someone (or his opinion) to laughter by exalting, with apparent eulogy (persiflage), the opposite of what is worthy of approval – for example, [Pope’s] Art of Sinking in Poetry,73 or Butler’s Hudibras. Such a wit, which uses contrast to make what is contemptible even more contemptible, is very stimulating through the surprise of the unexpected. (Anth 7:221–2)

This passage contains all three elements examined in §54 of the third Critique.74 The (1) whimsical (2) wit uses (3) naiveté (“trusting sound of simplicity”) to expose someone to ridicule through the use of incongruity (“paradox,” “the unexpected”). And, as can be seen from a passage quoted above, the Anthropology contains another example of a combination of these elements: the whimsical and witty “wag” who appears to have no mischief in mind, yet (naive-like) does not join in the laughter but “with seeming simplicity” is able to cause a release of tension in us, as our expectations are not fulfilled (Anth 7:262).75 While Kant draws conceptual distinctions among the three arts of laughter, in reality they are often found together.76

The Development of Kant’s Views of Humor The main sources for learning about the evolution of Kant’s views of humor – or wit, whim, naiveté,77 and laughter – are the (anthropology) Reflections and lectures, especially the ones from the 1770s and 1780s. Kant published a satire of the visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766), and it contains a scatological joke that could be examined in

72 73 74

75

76 77

Ritzel, “Kant über den Witz,” 106. Kant follows the (at the time widespread) attribution of this work to Jonathan Swift. Although neither the first nor the second editions printed §54 for the “Remark,” I will (following convention) refer to this section as §54 since it is found between sections labeled §53 and §55. Kant calls the natural talent for wit (“mother-wit”) naive (R 480; about 1776–83; 15:203). On mother-wit, which is natural and unteachable, see also KrV A133/B172. Likewise, Kant calls Swift a “whimsical wit” (launiger Witz) (V-Anth/Mensch 25:967). References to Naivität can be found as early as Kant’s first anthropology lectures (VAnth/Collins 25:24; V-Anth/Parow 25:345).



   ’ 

a study of Kant’s views of humor.78 But rather than presenting claims about humor, Dreams at bottom aims to discuss (if in a stylized way) space, spirit, rational substance, the soul, matter, sensation, and related matters in metaphysics and epistemology. Its most widely quoted claim is likely the conclusion that “metaphysics is a science of the limits of human reason” (TG 2:367–8). More than being an investigation of wit or laughter, the satirical treatise (apart from its contributions to metaphysics or epistemology) enacts Kant’s very ideas about humor: he exhibits wit. Based on my examination of the early materials, then, I wish to draw two main conclusions. 1. The physiological-oriented, release aspect of Kant’s thinking develops early, and it is retained in the work of 1790. The more intellectual or cognitively rich notion of a “free play” in humor (drawing from Kant’s theory of aesthetic pleasure) emerges slightly later (around the mid to late 1770s), and it too appears in the third Critique. 2. Kant links whim (Laune) to genius in the 1770s, but this connection is repudiated in the third Critique. I begin with the first point. Kant provides a mechanistic-physiological explanation of laughter relatively early on. A marginal note from around 1764–66 states: “What is mechanical in laughter is the vibration of the diaphragm and the lungs as well as the contorted facial expression, for the mouth is pulled from another place” (BGSE 20:187; my trans.). The fragment continues: It seems that the cause of laughter consists in the vibrating of quickly pinched nerves, which propagates through the entire system; other pleasures come from uniform movements of the nerve fluid. Thus, if I hear something that has the appearance of a prudent and purposive relation, but which entirely cancels itself out [aufhebt] in trifles, then the nerve that is bent towards one side is, as it were, repelled and quivers. (BGSE 20:188; my trans.)

Kant claims that amused laughter is a response to a perceived mismatch or leap (Absprung), which results in a nervous response. According to an anthropology lecture of 1775/76, laughter is aroused in the mind by thoughts, by the livening up of life, or also mechanically. Laughter comes from the mind and convulses the body. . . . Every laughing matter is always a leap [Absprung]. First my nerves are led to a certain prospect; the mind now tries to follow after a rational thing. If now a leap from the prospect suddenly follows, and

78

Found in Clewis, Kant’s Humorous Writings, 151.

  



before the mind realizes what is happening, it is on the other side, then it bursts into laughter. (V-Anth/Fried 25:601)

This passage is consonant with the one from the third Critique that describes “rapidly succeeding increases and decreases of tension” and oscillation, causing “a movement of the mind and an internal bodily movement in harmony with it” (KU 5:334). It also is compatible with Kant’s characterization of laughter as an affect. This physiological-mechanistic aspect of Kant’s account of laughter at humor is also presented in the Anthropology, years after the publication of the third Critique. The analysis of harlequins and court jesters focuses on the mechanistic and physiological effects on the audience. By his antics [Einfälle] a harlequin who has a nimble wit produces a beneficial shaking of the diaphragm and intestines, by which the appetite for the ensuing social supper is whetted, and thrives as a result of the lively conversation. (Anth 7:263) The position of a court jester [Hofnarren], whose function is to tease the king’s distinguished servants and thus season the meal through laughter for the sake of the beneficial shaking of his diaphragm, is, depending on how one takes it, above or below all criticism [Kritik]. (Anth 7:265)

Consistent with the physiological aspect of the third Critique account, Kant here views laughter as an affect rather than a judgment or even an experience of mental play: the physiological, mechanistic side wins out. But, as noted, this mechanistic-physiological side is only part of Kant’s Critical account. There is also the intellectualist element that can be found in the notion of a “play” or “free play” with the content of the joke. This aspect is found in the early materials too. Kant’s emphasis on the intellectual component in laughter at humor goes at least as far back as 1764. Consider the passage from the Observations quoted on the previous page (BGSE 20:188). The cancellation of an expectation regarding what initially seems “prudent and purposive” functions like (without yet being called) a mental play and is close to the expectation’s “disappearance into nothing” described in the third Critique. In the Observations, Kant also makes use of the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, in order to claim that the understanding furnishes jokes with substantive content. “Jokes (Scherze) and cheerfulness go with the feeling of the beautiful. Nevertheless a good deal of understanding can show through, and to this extent they can be more or less related to the sublime” (GSE 2:214; emphasis added).



   ’ 

The anthropology lectures likewise contain numerous passages that resonate with the incongruity account. In the early 1770s, Kant holds that laughing at humor is a kind of “contrast” (Kontrast) to or “reversal” of the “idea” (or, according to the Parow version of this passage, a reversal of the “understanding”), but one that is apprehended from a disinterested perspective. Kant offers the following little narrative joke: In a snowstorm, a man rides around long enough to think he has reached his destination – only to find himself in front of his house again (V-Anth/Ham 25:184–5).79 In order to find the story funny, the Hamilton transcription states, the thing or event must be “indifferent” to apprehenders and not “interest” them. By 1772/73, therefore, Kant had in place the idea that in order to find the narrative humorous, one has to be disinterested (another core notion in his aesthetics).80 In a marginal note from the 1780s, too, Kant attributes an “ideal” component to comic amusement. “The cause of laughter starts out as ideal,” he writes, “yet only through bodily movement does it please” (R 1515; 15:853). As discussed throughout this book, Kant’s view that a harmonious play of the faculties is the source of the pleasure in beauty emerges in the mid-1770s. Starting in the mid to late 1770s, Kant applies this model to humor. As one might expect, after he proposed that there was an aesthetic, free harmonious play of the faculties in the mid-1770s, a corresponding view of free play emerges in his thoughts about humor. Kant characterizes humor in terms of play or free play in the anthropology lectures. According to these materials, wit involves a “play” of representations. This can be seen around 1777/78 – right when Kant writes a flurry of Reflections about genius, spirit, and ideas. “Wit can be seen as a play. A play that is already entertaining in itself, without having any kind of coercion” (VAnth/Pillau 25:754). In the 1781/82 lecture, Kant continues to see wit as play rather than work or business. “Truly witty thoughts are a play” (V-Anth/ Mensch 25:969). Several pages later, Kant describes spirit (Geist) as what “animates.” In a revealing passage, the Menschenkunde transcription states that the poet is able to set the mind into a free play and is able to give the understanding material or stuff (Stoff) to think about. “We observe that an expression in a poet can make an impression, that all of our mental powers are moved, that our wit begins to get into a play, and that our understanding 79

80

I did not discover this joke in time for the publication of Kant’s Humorous Writings. A longer version is found at V-Anth/Parow 25:380–1, where the transcription cites “Manstein”: Kant’s source is a 1771 travel book by Christoph Hermann von Manstein (see AA 25:185 no. 176). In the Parow version, a nobleman from Courland (modern day Latvia) travels for two years looking for Kamchatka, only to find himself in front of his house. Humor’s links to disinterestedness, combined with the fact that Kant here discusses laughter at humor right after discussing music, give further reason to examine humor here.

  



contains material to think about” (V-Anth/Mensch 25:1063; my trans.). Wit here refers to a capacity for response (the mental powers are set into play), rather than a poet’s creative capacity. Finally, the 1788/89 transcription claims that “wit pleases through free play” (V-Anth/Busolt 25:1459; my trans.). In these passages, Kant applies his free play model to humor, but without describing the mental activity as a play with aesthetic ideas. According to the third Critique, in contrast, what is being played with in humor is the aesthetic idea (or else an initial misconception). Although in various contexts Kant arguably presents precursors to “aesthetic ideas” throughout the 1770s lectures and marginalia, he does not apply aesthetic ideas to his thoughts about humor. Describing the response to humor as a play with aesthetic ideas thus appears to be an innovation of the third Critique. In viewing the play in judging at humor as a play with aesthetic ideas, Kant gives an even greater role to the imagination, as the faculty involved in finding aesthetic attributes to express ideas. In the third Critique, Kant ends up emphasizing the physiological and biological aspects of the response to humor and he views laughter as an affect – just as he had done in the anthropology materials. But he also draws from his earlier view that the response involves a free play with some cognitive content. If there are tensions in his account, they can already be found in the anthropology materials starting in the late 1770s. My second main point concerns Kant’s change of mind regarding whim/ caprice in relation to genius. Hounsokou regrets that Kant did not provide examples of what he meant by whim (Laune),81 but in fact there is a great deal of textual material on whim – just not in the third Critique. In an anthropology lecture from 1775/76, Kant is reported to have said: Writings that contrast comically are the most whimsical [launigsten], and they please greatly. . . . This way vice can be represented as revolting and incongruous [ungereimt]. The question is, what is better, to make vice look worthy of revulsion and anger, or, in a whim [Laune], to make it look incongruous, silly, and laughable. The latter is to be preferred. Humans are set straight more by being laughed at than from irate rebuke. The mind’s state and situation is better when one ridicules vice than when one regards it with anger and revulsion. (V-Anth/Fried 25:506)

Kant then adduces Henry Fielding as an example of an appropriate satirist or ridiculer:82 81 82

Hounsokou, “Rogue,” 325. In the published Anthropology, Kant confirms his admiration for Henry Fielding and refers to Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (Anth 7:164, 232). Perhaps Shaftesbury’s view of ridicule as a test for truth also shapes Kant’s position here.



   ’  Fielding writes so whimsically, he portrays the miser in the most laughable form, that he becomes more contemptible than he would have been had I portrayed his evil side. This kind of contrasting is the best way, as it sharpens the mind and at the same time makes the vicious person laughable. (V-Anth/Fried 25:506)83

In the pre-1790 materials, Kant draws a strong connection between Laune and genius, but in the third Critique he rejects this relation. In an anthropology lecture from 1784/85, Kant attributes “originality” to whim. “A wit is called whimsical [launigt] when an uncommon mental disposition underlies it. . . . The whimsical wit rests upon an original disposition of mind [Gemüths]” (V-Anth/Mron 25:1264). The “original disposition of mind” sounds very much like the principle of originality associated with (the thin version of ) genius. In fact, a decade earlier Kant explicitly associated whim with genius. In the early 1770s, the connection was very close. The genius, he wrote, has Laune. Kant also once jotted down “caprice of the genius [caprice des genies],” though he did not explain what he meant (R 466; 15:192). In another note from the 1770s, Kant wrote down that genius even depends on Laune (R 812; 15:361), perhaps because he was working out his ideas about genius around this time.84 In the third Critique, even if he still sees a connection between Laune and originality, he strictly distinguishes the contribution of Laune from that of genius. Laune is “part of the originality of spirit,” but it is “not on that account part of the talent for beautiful art” (KU 5:335). In other words, genius, not Laune, is the original force behind the creation of a beautiful artwork. Genius is the ability to create a unique kind of “sense” that becomes the infinite, boundless sense – the aesthetic idea – expressed in the work of art. Let me make a few general observations before concluding. One finds something comically amusing, Kant thinks, when we enjoy an incongruity or mismatch between the way things are and the way we expect them to be. His view is not that we are comically amused by all incongruities. Instead, the claim is that when we are comically amused, it is typically because we are responding to some perceived incongruity that is enjoyed in itself, that is, without any discomfort or real concern about what we hear or perceive. In other words, we take the joke as a joke.

83

84

On contradiction and contrast in humor, see also V-Anth/Collins 25:142 and V-Anth/ Pillau 25:811. See even the Anthropology: “in order to succeed in his work,” a lucky or positive Laune “needs to come over the artist, just like a moment of inspiration [Eingebung]” (Anth 7:248).

  



Kant recognizes both the physical and the intellectual elements in humor, though his official view comes down on the side of the physical and corporeal, the physiological and mechanistic. He thinks that laughter at a joke releases the tension that was built up as we created expectations about what we were apprehending. This release is agreeable, and laughing at humor involves a workout for both body and mind. When the mind “playfully” considers the content of the joke or gag (the humor), the body responds with a pleasurable release. Key aspects of Kant’s thoughts on humor developed years before he arrived at the central doctrines of transcendental idealism. In particular, the physiological-release account is thoroughly empirical and fits in well with his pragmatic anthropology. This aspect may well be compatible with transcendental philosophy, but that is a bigger topic than can be discussed here.85 In any case, recall that in the third Critique Kant clearly praises Burke’s psychological and physiological approach to the sublime (KU 5:277) as an exemplar of the empirical method. In the work of 1790, for whatever reason, Kant focuses on laughter’s physiological aspects. Maybe this was because Kant was thinking mostly of the anthropological-empirical aspects of humor he had emphasized in lectures and in marginal notes, rather than adopting a transcendental perspective that analyzes the mental activity in humor in terms of a free play between the imagination and understanding and in terms of a play with aesthetic ideas. Yet the published work of 1790 does not skip over the latter aspect altogether. Kant identifies intellectual and rational elements within humorinduced laughter. He characterizes the judging in laughter as a free play with rich aesthetic ideas, and thus of potential interest to reason. From a transcendental vantage point, he can be said to describe the psychologically real (though not necessarily self-conscious or self-aware) activities of the mind that he thinks make possible the normative experience of laughter at humor. A necessary condition of such laughter is the disinterested free play of aesthetic ideas and/or the play of thoughts (Gedankenspiel), that is, a play between the imagination (a source of the aesthetic ideas) and the 85

Kant’s principled distinctions between the transcendental and the empirical (and numerous distinctions corresponding to these) in practice sometimes look fuzzy. Consider the kindred empirical discipline, geography. The transcendental/empirical distinction is important to Kant’s geography course, for he does not treat geography as an a priori, transcendental discipline. See Robert R. Clewis, “Kant’s Natural Teleology? The Case of Physical Geography,” Kant-Studien 107, no. 2 (2016): 1–29. Still, in presenting some of his transcendental and philosophical doctrines in the Critiques, Kant makes use of many empirical claims or purported facts, and he incorporates geographical metaphors. In turn, the geography course contains some claims about the nature and structure of space. See Robert R. Clewis, “Kant’s Physical Geography and the Critical Philosophy,” Epoche: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 22, no. 2 (2018): 411–27.



   ’ 

understanding (the capacity for concepts and thoughts), faculties presumed to be standardly shared by human beings. At one point, Kant endorses provoking laughter in “rational people” (KU 5:334). Kant’s explanation of laughter, insofar as it is transcendental, appeals to the interaction between the mental capacities, rather than to the merely empirical and agreeable physiological elements in the affect, laughter. Since his account of humor refers to a “play with thoughts” and a play with “aesthetic ideas,” perhaps humor could have played more of a role in his thought. But Kant held back.

The Third Critique Reconsidered The shift from art to nature (arc 1) and Kant’s emphasis on pure (free) beauty as self-standing (arc 2) seem less relevant in the case of humor, so I will set them aside here. In contrast, Kant’s growing attention to aesthetic ideas (arc 3) is quite evident when one examines his views of humor. He sometimes sees the play in laughter at humor as a play with an aesthetic idea or ideas presented in or by the content or context of the material found to be humorous. As with music, he could have pursued this thought about humor, but he tends to see laughter as an affect and does not pick up on the judging activity in response to humor. When it comes to the fourth arc, what one says about the sources of the pleasure in humor depends on whether one focuses on the physiological or instead on the intellectual side, namely, the free play of the faculties. If one looks to the physiological and mechanistic aspect, the pleasure in humor lies in the release of the “vital forces.” In that case, there is little normativity: the pleasure in laughter is a mode of the agreeable. As discussed, this is Kant’s official version of laughter at humor and its associated arts. If, on the other hand, one views the source as the free play of the faculties, or a play with aesthetic ideas (thoughts, representations), matters are different. There would be a normativity linked to this intellectual aspect: the judging in appreciating humor would be similar to the judging in a pure aesthetic judgment.86 Again, Kant holds back and does not call the play in response to humor a kind of aesthetic judging. The physiological (release) aspects of his theory developed quite early and remained in place. But once Kant proposed that there was an aesthetic play of the faculties in the mid-1770s, he was able to propose a corresponding “play” in humor. I have found some passages from the anthropology lectures applying this model of the source of aesthetic pleasure. In light of Kant’s late December 1787 letter to Reinhold, scholars can be relatively confident about the timing of the “transcendental” turn, which involves the “sudden discovery” of an a priori principle of the faculty of feeling pleasure and displeasure – which is of utmost importance to Kant’s new vision 86

Clewis, Kant’s Humorous Writings, 45–51.

  



of a “Critique of Taste” and ultimately to the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Now, this turn had the potential to affect Kant’s thoughts on humor, but it seems that he did not make the connection. Although several lecture notes characterize wit as “free play,” there seems to be no clear textual evidence that the discovery of 1787 had an effect on the normative aspect of Kant’s thoughts on humor. Indeed, in the published work, he emphasizes the mechanistic-physiological aspects of his account. Finally, Kant does not pursue how humor could help make the transition from lawfulness according to nature to that according to freedom. Arguably, he could have done more with humor in the context of his own philosophical aims, as Hounsokou and Recki have both pointed out.87 Kant writes that without a connection to morality, the “play of the power of judgment” in humor seems to lack “seriousness” (KU 5:335). Insofar as he saw laughter as a mere affect and as just a physiological phenomenon, he could not connect it to freedom and morality. But he may have missed an opportunity here, at least given his own systematic goals and the problematic he had laid out for himself. Humor has an important socio-anthropological dimension acknowledged by writers from Hutcheson and Kant to early twentieth-century authors such as Henri Bergson.88 While humor can be a weapon of exclusion, it can also be a tool for inclusion. Humor offers a meaningful way to be with others – to laugh with (not just at) others, to exercise our abilities for socialization. Sociability is not the same as morality, for Kant, but is a step in that direction, an aid to it. He could have elaborated how humor could provide some indirect support to morality. Moreover, if (or insofar as) laughter at humor involves a free play with an aesthetic idea, and if the latter is an overabundant intuition or representation of imagination that is the aesthetic-sensible counterpart to an idea of reason, reason in general will take an interest in some instances of laughter at humor, that is, in the fact that humans engage in this kind of aesthetic play. Though clearly not the same as a morally good act or intention, that is still something.

Concluding Remarks Kant arrived at his final, considered view of the source of the pleasures in aesthetic judgments and beauty – a free play of the faculties – around the mid87

88

Recki, “So lachen wir,” 184–6. Hounsokou, “Rogue,” 332. One could push the significance of humor for Kant in yet another direction: Meredith suggests that humor offers a reminder that the world is just an appearance in the transcendental idealist sense. Meredith, in Kant’s Critique, 304. I find the approach of Recki and Hounsokou more plausible, however. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (Oxford: Macmillan, 1911).



   ’ 

1770s. I have found some passages in notes and anthropology lectures (from Pillau to Busolt) that reveal Kant’s view that, like the response to beauty, laughter at humor involves a free play of the mental powers. A version of this makes it into the third Critique. In the “Remark” or §54, Kant applies his free play model to his thoughts about laughter at humor. Seen in this light, Kant’s thoughts on humor can be viewed as belonging to his wider aesthetic theory. Perhaps his discussions of humor and laughter will even one day be seen as resources that are useful for understanding Kant’s aesthetics as a whole.89

89

As suggested by Olin, “All in Good Taste.”

u Closing Reflections

Instead of a conclusion, I close with three points for further reflection. First, Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment is full of inner tensions, and some of them can be traced back to his working through various sources and to his drawing from different aspects of his earlier views. He engaged with many previous writers and, as my five arcs have charted, his thoughts developed over decades of consideration of core issues in aesthetic theory. Now that more textual resources have become available and more accessible to Kant’s readers, that trajectory has become even more visible, and I hope to have depicted it accurately. The great work of 1790 is not all patchwork, but it does contain some internal conflicts. Just consider how the third Critique treats formalism (Chapter 2) or how it handles genius – torn between the thick and the thin (Chapter 4). Or look at Kant’s multiple attempts to classify the fine arts within the same book, let alone over time (Chapter 5). Yet Kant’s attempt to solve a given aesthetic problem, despite the risk of failure, can still be instructive. So my second observation is that Kant’s early aesthetics may have more to offer than scholars and commentators realize. As readers of this book may have noticed, its potential arises largely because there are philosophically attractive ideas in eighteenth-century Scottish–Irish– English aesthetics and in German rationalist aesthetic theory – the main traditions that Kant synthesizes in his early period. Perhaps critics of Kant’s transcendental philosophy would be interested in learning more about this different Kant. But then the question, following Joseph Margolis, could be raised: Would the pre-Critical philosopher just be “Kant without Kant”? I submit that it is acceptable to see the philosopher from Königsberg as more than the author of the transcendental works, even if the latter is surely his intellectual legacy. Perhaps there is value to some of his early ideas and arguments. In particular, the empirical rule-based approach of the early aesthetics (Chapter 1) might attract those who want to give up the idea of strict universality in aesthetics while still having some guidelines in matters of taste – though I have not defended that option here. Or consider music. Perhaps one could apply, in a non-universalistic direction, Kant’s view that music arouses a moving play of thoughts or emotions; music in this sense 



   ’ 

would not elicit “pure” (universal) judgments of taste. Again, defending this would be a task for another time. In any case, the mature or Critical account continues to inform current discussions in the philosophy of art and art criticism. As Kant noticed at the end of §16, the distinction between free and partly conceptual beauty might be able to help resolve some disputes in taste and guide art criticism (Chapter 3). His ideas about genius are favorably invoked in creativity studies (Chapter 4), and his views of the sublime continue to inspire theories today (Chapter 6). In humor studies, Kant is seen as a leading incongruity theorist, even if he was preceded by Hutcheson and Mendelssohn (Chapter 8). My last point is negative. Not all of Kant’s ideas, whether early or late, can be applied so readily. Though some research on art and beauty in empirical aesthetics might use a bottom-up approach that is allied with a version of Kantian formalism, it seems difficult to defend narrow or strong formalism in contemporary criticism and art theory. The conception of art or what counts as fine art has likewise moved far beyond Kant’s (usually) restrictive framework. His view of painting and the visual arts is frequently limited by eighteenth-century notions that art must in some sense represent nature and that it must do so in a beautiful way. A pro-beauty or beauty-centric view of art surely constrains Kant’s account of the sublime. Only if the non-mimetic elements of his position were extracted and highlighted could a Kantian account of the sublime be applied to non-representational Barnett Newman paintings and Richard Serra sculptures, not to mention cityscapes and land art, which Kant naturally did not consider. Finally, in light of contemporary art, where, as Danto noted, beauty is no longer always to be found, Kant’s decision to not develop a substantive aesthetic theory of ugliness seems to be out of sync with aesthetic theory and artistic practice today (Chapter 7), even if he may have had good, or at least coherent, reasons for his view that there are no pure or free aesthetic judgments of ugliness, that is, even if his position follows from the twofold core of his aesthetic theory: the principle of the purposiveness of nature, and the theory of the free and harmonious mental play as an open-ended response to aesthetic ideas in art and nature. So, if by discussing humor in the final chapter I finished Part III on a positive note, I conclude the present reflection on a negative one.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aagaard-Mogensen, Lars, ed. On the Ugly: Aesthetic Exchanges. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. Adair, Stephanie. The Aesthetic Use of the Logical Functions of Kant’s Third Critique. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018. Addison, Joseph and Steele, Richard. The Spectator; with Notes, and a General Index. The Eight Volumes Comprised in One. Philadelphia: Hickman and Hazzard, 1822. Alexander, Samuel. Beauty and Other Forms of Value. New York: Crowell, 1933. Allison, Henry. Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ameriks, Karl. “Ginsborg, Nature, and Normativity.” British Journal of Aesthetics 56, no. 4 (2016): 389–95. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae, 61 vols. Cambridge and New York: Blackfriars and McGraw-Hill, 1964–80. Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton Pegis. New York: The Modern Library, 1945. Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Poetics, On the Sublime, On Style, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell, W.H. Fyfe, Donald Russell, Doreen C. Innes, and W. Rhys Roberts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Armstrong, Meg. “‘The Effects of Blackness’: Gender, Race, and the Sublime in Aesthetic Theories of Burke and Kant.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54, no. 3 (1996): 213–36. Arnold, Jeremy. “Laughter, Judgment and Democratic Politics.” Culture, Theory, & Critique 50, no. 1 (2009): 7–21. Babich, Babette, ed. Reading David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste.” Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019. Baeumler, Alfred. Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft. Bd I. Das Irrationalitätsproblem in der Ästhetik und Logik des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur Kritik der Urteilskraft. Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1923. Batteux, Charles. The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle, trans. James Young. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.







Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Metaphysica. Halle: Carl Hemmerde, 1739. Ethica philosophica. Halle: Carl Hemmerde, 1740. Aesthetica. Francofurti ad Oderam: I. C. Kleyb, 1750. Initia philosophiae practicae primae acroamatice. Halle: Carl Hemmerde, 1760. Texte zur Grundlegung der Ästhetik, ed. Hans Rudolf Schweizer. Hamburg: Meiner, 1983. Aesthetica/Ästhetik, ed. and trans. Dagmar Mirbach. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007. Metaphysics, trans. Courtney Fugate and John Hymers. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Beattie, James. “An Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition.” In Essays: On Poetry and Music, As They Affect the Mind. Edinburgh: William Creech, 1778, 319–486. Beiser, Frederick. Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Berger, David. Kant’s Aesthetic Theory: The Beautiful and Agreeable. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Bergmann, Merrie. “How Many Feminists Does It Take to Make a Joke? Sexist Humor and What’s Wrong with It.” Hypatia 1, no. 1 (1986): 63–82. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. Oxford: Macmillan, 1911. Berkeley, George. Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher: In Seven Dialogues: Containing an Apology for the Christian Religion, against Those Who Are Called Free-Thinkers. New Haven: Sidney’s Press, 1803. Bett, Richard. “Beauty and Its Relation to Goodness in Stoicism.” In Ancient Models of Mind, ed. Andrea Nightingale and David Sedley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 130–52. Bodmer, Johann J. Kritische Betrachtungen über die poetische Gemälde der Dichter. Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1971. Boileau, Nicolas (Despréaux). “Preface to His Translation of Longinus on the Sublime.” In The Sublime Reader, ed. Robert R. Clewis. London: Bloomsbury, 2019, 58–61. Bolzano, Bernard. Über den Begriff des Schönen: Eine philosophische Abhandlung. Prague: Borrosch and André, 1843. Bosanquet, Bernard. “The Æsthetic Theory of Ugliness.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1, no. 3 (1890): 32–48. Three Lectures on Aesthetics. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. Boswell, Terry. “On the Textual Authenticity of Kant’s Logic.” History and Philosophy of Logic 9, no. 2 (1988): 193–203. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Brady, Emily. The Sublime in Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.





Brandt, Reinhard. Kritischer Kommentar zu Kants Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798). Hamburg: Meiner, 1999. Brandt, Reinhard and Stark, Werner. Autographen, Dokumente und Berichte: Zu Edition, Ambtsgeschäften und Werk Immanuel Kants, Kant-Forschungen, vol. 5. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1994. Brandt, Reinhard and Stark, Werner, eds. Kant-Forschungen, vol. 1. Hamburg: Meiner, 1987. Breitenbach, Angela. “The Beauty of Science without the Science of Beauty: Kant and the Rationalists on the Aesthetics of Cognition.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 56, no. 2 (2018): 281–304. Bruno, Paul. Kant’s Concept of Genius: Its Origin and Function in the Third Critique. London: Continuum, 2010. Buchenau, Stefanie. The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment: The Art of Invention and the Invention of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: Dodsley, 1757. Canivet, Michel. “Le rire et le bon sens.” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 86, no. 3 (1988): 354–77. Cannon, Joseph. “The Moral Value of Artistic Beauty in Kant.” Kantian Review 16, no. 1 (2011): 113–26. “Reply to Paul Guyer.” Kantian Review 16, no. 1 (2011): 135–9. Carroll, Noël. Engaging the Moving Image. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. “Two Comic Plot Structures.” The Monist 88, no. 1 (2005): 154–83. On Criticism. New York: Routledge, 2009. Humour: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Caygill, Howard. “Kant’s Apology for Sensibility.” In Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Brian Jacobs and Patrick Kain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 164–93. Celkyte, Aiste. “The Stoic Definition of Beauty as Summetria.” Classical Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2017): 88–105. Chignell, Andrew. “Kant on the Normativity of Taste: The Role of Aesthetic Ideas.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85, no. 3 (2007): 415–33. Clewis, Robert R. “Greenberg, Kant, and Aesthetic Judgments of Modernist Art.” AE: Canadian Aesthetics Journal 18 (2008): 1–15. The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. “A Case for Kantian Artistic Sublimity: A Response to Abaci.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 2 (2010): 167–70. “Kant’s Distinction between True and False Sublimity.” In Kant’s Observations and Remarks: A Critical Guide, ed. Susan Meld Shell and Richard Velkley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 116–43. “The Place of the Sublime in Kant’s Project.” Studi kantiani 28 (2015): 149–68.





ed. Reading Kant’s Lectures. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015. “Kant’s Natural Teleology? The Case of Physical Geography.” Kant-Studien 107, no. 2 (2016): l–29. “What’s the Big Idea? On Emily Brady’s Sublime.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 50, no. 2 (2016): 104–18. “Beauty and Utility in Kant’s Aesthetics: The Origins of Adherent Beauty.” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 56, no. 2 (2018): 305–36. “The Feeling of Enthusiasm.” In Kant and the Faculty of Feeling, ed. Kelly Sorensen and Diane Williamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, 184–207. “Kant’s Physical Geography and the Critical Philosophy.” Epoche: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 22, no. 2 (2018): 411–27. “On Serena Feloj’s Estetica del Disgusto.” Critique 2019: no pagination. https:// virtualcritique.wordpress.com/2019/07/15/robert-r-clewis-on-serenafelojs-estetica-del-disgusto/ [Accessed August 19, 2021]. “The Sources and Development of Kant’s Views on Aesthetic Normativity.” Contemporary Studies in Kantian Philosophy 4 (2019): 1–19. “Towards a Theory of the Sublime and Aesthetic Awe.” In The Sublime Reader, ed. Robert R. Clewis. London: Bloomsbury, 2019, 340–54. “How to Distinguish and Reconcile Sensitive and Conceptual Taste.” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 43, no. 1 (2020): 43–53. “The Importance of Translating Kant’s Physical Geography Lectures.” In Kants Schriften in Übersetzungen, ed. Gisela Schlüter. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2020, 717–20. Kant’s Humorous Writings: An Illustrated Guide. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. “The Majesty of Cognition: The Sublime in Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, and Kant.” In Baumgarten’s Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. J. Colin McQuillan. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021, 241–72. “Schwärmerei and Enthusiasmus in Recent English Translations of Kant’s Lectures and Writings on Anthropology.” In Kants Schriften in Übersetzungen, ed. Gisela Schlüter. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2020, 649–75. “Why the Sublime is Aesthetic Awe.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 79, no. 3 (2021): 301–14. “Aesthetic Normativity in Freiburg: Jonas Cohn as an Alternative to Kant.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 39, no. 2 (2022): 183–97. “Kant on the Fine Arts: Reply to a Social Practices Objection.” In Kantian Readings, ed. Nina Dmitrieva. Dordrecht: Springer, forthcoming. “Imagination, Vital Forces, and Self-Consciousness in the Kantian Sublime.” In Kant and the Feeling of Life, ed. Jennifer Mensch. Albany: SUNY Press, forthcoming. Coate, Matthew. “‘Nothing but Nonsense’: A Kantian Account of Ugliness.” British Journal of Aesthetics 58, no. 1 (2018): 51–70. Cohen, Alix. “Kant on the Possibility of Ugliness.” British Journal of Aesthetics 53, no. 2 (2013): 199–209.





Cohen, Alix, ed. Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Cohen, Hermann. Werke, ed. Hermann-Cohen Archiv. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2005. Cohn, Jonas. Allgemeine Ästhetik. Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1901. Conrad, Elfriede. Kants Logikvorlesungen als neuer Schlüssel zur Architektonik der Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994. Costelloe, Timothy, ed. The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. The Imagination in Hume’s Philosophy: The Canvas of the Mind. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Crawford, Donald. Kant’s Aesthetic Theory. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974. Critchley, Simon. On Humour. New York: Routledge, 2002. Crowther, Paul. “Kant and Greenberg’s Varieties of Aesthetic Formalism.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42, no. 4 (1984): 442–5. The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. The Kantian Aesthetic: From Knowledge to the Avant Garde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Dahlstrom, Daniel O., ed. Kant and His German Contemporaries: Volume 2, Aesthetics, History, Politics, and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Danto, Arthur. The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2003. De Boer, Karin. Kant’s Reform of Metaphysics: The Critique of Pure Reason Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Denis, Lara and Sensen, Oliver, eds. Kant’s Lectures on Ethics: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987. “Economimesis.” In Continental Aesthetics, ed. Richard Kearney and David M. Rasmussen. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, 431–51. Descartes, René. The Passions of the Soul. In Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. Elizabeth Haldane and George Ross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Diderot, Denis. “Laideur.” Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 9. Neuchâtel: Samuel Faulche, 1765, 176. Oevres Complètes, ed. Jules Assézat. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1876. Dumouchel, Daniel. Kant et la genèse de la subjectivité esthétique: esthétique et philosophie avant la Critique de la faculté de juger. Paris: J. Vrin, 1999. Eagleton, Terry. Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Humour. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019.





Eco, Umberto, ed. On Ugliness, trans. Alastair McEwen. New York: Rizzoli, 2007. Eldridge, Richard. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Feloj, Serena. Estetica del disgusto: Mendelssohn, Kant e i limiti della rappresentazione. Roma: Carocci editore, 2017. Il sublime nel pensiero di Kant. Brescia: Morcelliana, 2013. Fenves, Peter. Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth. London: Routledge, 2003. Forster, Michael. “Kant’s Philosophy of Language?” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 74, no. 3 (2012): 485–511. Foucault, Michel. Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Roberto Nigro. Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2007. Fritz, Martin. Vom Erhabenen. Der Traktat ‘Peri Hybsous’ und seine aesthetischreligiöse Renaissance im 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Mohr Siebek, 2011. Fugate, Courtney D., ed. Kant’s Lectures on Metaphysics: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Gabriel, Gottfried. “Der ‘Witz’ der reflektierenden Urteilskraft.” In Urteilskraft und Heuristik in den Wissenschaften. Beiträge zur Entstehung des Neuen, ed. Frithjof Rodi. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2003, 197–210. Gasché, Rodolphe. “‘Kants Ästhetik, denke ich, eröffnet eine Möglichkeit, noch die Experimente der zeitgenössischen Kunst zu beurteilen’.” In Form: Zwischen Ästhetik und künstlerischer Praxis, ed. Avanessian Armen, Hans Stauffacher, Susanne Leeb, and Franck Hofmann. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2009, 285–98. Gaut, Berys. “Education for Creativity.” In The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, ed. Eliot Paul and Scott Kaufman. New York: Oxford University Press, 265–87. Gerard, Alexander. An Essay on Taste: with Three Dissertations on the Same Subject by Mr. De Voltaire, Mr. D’Alembert, and Mr. De Montesquieu. London: A. Millar, A. Kincaid, and J. Bell, 1759. Versuch über den Geschmack, trans. Karl Friedrich Flögel. Breslau: Johann Ernst Meyer, 1766. An Essay on Genius. London: W. Strahan, 1774. Versuch über das Genie, trans. Christian Garve. Leipzig: Weidmann, 1776. An Essay on Genius, ed. Bernhard Fabian. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1966. Giamario, Patrick. “‘Making Reason Think More’: Laughter in Kant’s Aesthetic Philosophy.” Angelaki 22, no. 4 (2017): 161–76. Gilson, Étienne. The Arts of the Beautiful. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1965. Gimbel, Steven. Isn’t That Clever: A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy. New York: Routledge, 2018. Giordanetti, Piero. “Kant e Gerard: Nota sulle fonti storiche della teoria Kantiana del ‘genio’.” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 46, no. 4 (1991): 661–99. “Kants Entdeckung der Aprioriät des Geschmacksurteils. Zur Genese der Kritik der Urteilskraft.” In Aufklärung und Interpretation. Studien zu Kants Philosophie und ihrem Umkreis, ed. Heiner F. Klemme, Bernd Ludwig,





Michael Pauen, and Reinhard Brandt. Würzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1999, 171–96. L’estetica fisiologica di Kant. Milano: Mimesis, 2001. Gjesdal, Kristin. Herder’s Hermeneutics: History, Poetry, Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Godfrey, F. la T. “The Aesthetics of Laughter.” Hermathena 25, no. 50 (1937): 126–38. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Elective Affinities. New York: Henry Holt, 1872. Goldthwait, John, ed. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime by Immanuel Kant. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1960. Gracyk, Theodore. “Kant’s Shifting Debt to British Aesthetics.” British Journal of Aesthetics 26, no. 3 (1986): 204–17. “Sublimity, Ugliness, and Formlessness in Kant’s Aesthetic Theory.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45, no. 1 (1986): 49–56. Graham, Daniel J. and Redies, Christoph. “Statistical Regularities in Art: Relations with Visual Coding and Perception.” Vision Research 50, no. 16 (2010): 1503–9. Gregor, Mary. “Aesthetic Form and Sensory Content in the Critique of Judgment: Can Kant’s ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’ Provide a Philosophical Basis for Modern Formalism?” In The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, ed. Richard Kennington. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1985, 185–99. Grier, Michelle. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Grote, Simon. The Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory: Religion and Morality in Enlightenment Germany and Scotland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Guyer, Paul. “Thomson’s Problems with Kant: A Comment on ‘Kant’s Problems with Ugliness’.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50, no. 4 (1992): 317–9. Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays in Aesthetics and Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. “Beauty, Freedom, and Morality: Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology and the Development of His Aesthetic Theory.” In Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Brian Jacobs and Patrick Kain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 135–64. “Kant on the Purity of the Ugly.” In Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 141–62. Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. “Genius and Taste: A Response to Joseph Cannon, ‘The Moral Value of Artistic Beauty in Kant’.” Kantian Review 16, no. 1 (2011): 127–34. “Gerard and Kant: Influence and Opposition.” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 9, no. 1 (2011): 59–93.





A History of Modern Aesthetics, 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. “Play and Society in the Lectures on Anthropology.” In Reading Kant’s Lectures, ed. Robert R. Clewis. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015, 223–41. “Kant’s Aesthetics in his Lectures on Metaphysics.” In Kant’s Lectures on Metaphysics: A Critical Guide, ed. Courtney Fugate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, 156–78. Reason and Experience in Mendelssohn and Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Guyer, Paul and Wood, Allen. “Interview with Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood.” In Kants Schriften in Übersetzungen, ed. Gisela Schlüter. Hamburg: Meiner, 2020, 53–72. Hammermeister, Kai. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hartley, David. “Of Wit and Humour.” In The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, ed. John Morreall. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Hayn-Leichsenring, Gregor and Chatterjee, Anjan. “Colliding Terminological Systems – Immanuel Kant and Contemporary Empirical Aesthetics.” Empirical Studies of the Arts 37, no. 2 (2019): 197–219. Henderson, Gretchen E. “The Ugly Face Club: A Case Study in the Tangled Politics and Aesthetics of Deformity.” In Ugliness, ed. Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich. London: I.B. Tauris, 2014, 17–33. Henrich, Dieter. Konstellationen. Probleme und Debatten am Ursprung der idealistischen Philosophie (1789–1795). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Sämtliche Werke, 33 vols., ed. Bernhard Suphan. Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913. Hills, Alison and Bird, Alexander. “Against Creativity.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99, no. 3 (2019): 694–713. “Creativity without Value.” In The Routledge Handbook on Creativity and Philosophy, ed. Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran. New York: Routledge, 2018, 95–107. Hobbes, Thomas. The Treatise on Human Nature and That on Liberty and Necessity. London: McCreery, 1812. Hogarth, William. The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Holt, Jim. Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. Home, Henry (Lord Kames). Elements of Criticism, ed. Peter Jones, 2 vols. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2005. Hounsokou, Annie. “Exposing the Rogue in Us.” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 16, no. 2 (2012): 317–36. Hume, David. A Treatise on Human Nature and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1874. Enquiries concerning the Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902.





“Of the Standard of Taste.” In Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987, 226–49. “The Sceptic.” In Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987, 159–80. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Other Writings, ed. Dorothy Coleman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2004. Johnson, Jonathan. “Understandings of Ugliness in Kant’s Aesthetics.” In On the Ugly: Aesthetic Exchanges, ed. Lars Aagaard-Mogensen and Jane Forsey. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019, 47–66. Juchem, Hans-Georg. Die Entwicklung des Begriffs des Schönen bei Kant unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Begriffs der verworrenen Erkenntnis. Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1970. Kant, Immanuel. Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, 29 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1900–. Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon, 1911. Die philosophischen Hauptvorlesungen Immanuel Kants. Nach den aufgefundenen Kollegheften des Grafen Heinrich zu Dohna-Wundlacken, ed. Arnold Kowalewski. Munich and Leipzig: Rösl, 1924. Theoretical Philosophy before 1770, ed. and trans. David Walford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Correspondence, trans. Arnulf Zweig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Notes and Fragments: Logic, Metaphysics, Moral Philosophy, Aesthetics, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Lectures on Anthropology, ed. Allen W. Wood and Robert B. Louden, trans. Robert R. Clewis, Robert B. Louden, G. Felicitas Munzel, and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Kants Vorlesungen über Anthropologie. www.online.uni-marburg.de/kant_old/ webseitn/gt_ho304.htm# [Accessed September 24, 2021]. Kirwan, James. The Aesthetic in Kant. London: Continuum, 2004. Sublimity: The Non-Rational and the Irrational in the History of Aesthetics. London: Routledge, 2005. Kivy, Peter. “Kant and the Affektenlehre.” In The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 250–64. De Gustibus: Arguing About Taste and Why We Do It. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Kleingeld, Pauline. Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.





“On Dealing with Kant’s Sexism and Racism.” SGIR Review 2, no. 2 (2019): 3–22. “Me, My Will, and I: Kant’s Republican Conception of Freedom of the Will and Freedom of the Agent.” Studi Kantiani 33 (2020): 103–123. Klemme, Heiner and Kuehn, Manfred, eds. The Reception of British Aesthetics in Germany: Seven Significant Translations, 1745–1776, 7 vols. Bristol: Thoemmes, 2001. Koller, Aaron. “Mendelssohn’s Response to Burke on the Sublime.” In Moses Mendelssohn’s Metaphysics and Aesthetics, ed. Reinier Munk. Dordrecht: Springer, 2011, 329–50. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics, Part I.” Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (1951): 496–527. “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics, Part II.” Journal of the History of Ideas 13, no. 1 (1952): 17–46. Kronfeldner, Maria. “Explaining Creativity.” In The Routledge Handbook on Creativity and Philosophy, ed. Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran. New York: Routledge, 2018, 213–229. Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Küplen, Mojca. “Disgust and Ugliness: a Kantian Perspective.” Contemporary Aesthetics 9, article 10 (2011): no pagination. https://digitalcommons.risd .edu/liberalarts_contempaesthetics/vol9/iss1/10 [Accessed August 29, 2021] Beauty, Ugliness and the Free Play of Imagination: An Approach to Kant’s Aesthetics. Dordrecht: Springer, 2015. “Kant’s Theory of Laughter.” Debates in Aesthetics 16, no. 1 (2021): 50–62. Landmann–Kalischer, Edith. “Über den Erkenntniswert ästhetischer Urteile: Ein Vergleich zwischen Sinnes- und Werturteilen.” Archiv für die Gesamte Psychologie (1905): 263–328. Lanford, Michael. “Ravel and ‘The Raven’: The Realisation of an Inherited Aesthetic in Bolero.” Cambridge Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2011): 243–65. Larkin-Galiñanes, Cristina. “An Overview of Humor Theory.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor, ed. Salvatore Attardo. New York: Routledge, 2017, 4–16. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Confessio philosophi: ein Dialog, ed. Otto Saame. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994. Leppert, Richard. “Ugly.” In German Aesthetics: Fundamental Concepts from Baumgarten to Adorno, ed. J.D. Mininger and Jason Michael Peck, London: Bloomsbury, 2016, 219–26. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Selected Prose Works, ed. Edward Bell. London: George Bell and Sons, 1889. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocöon, An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.





Lohmar, Dieter. “Das Geschmacksurteil über das faszinierend Häßliche.” In Kants Ästhetik, Kant’s Aesthetics, L’esthetique de Kant, ed. Herman Parret. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998, 498–512. Lu-Adler, Huaping. “Constructing a Demonstration of Logical Rules, or How to Use Kant’s Logic Corpus.” In Reading Kant’s Lectures, ed. Robert R. Clewis. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015, 137–58. Kant and the Science of Logic: A Historical and Philosophical Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. Makkai, Katalin. Kant’s Critique of Taste: The Feeling of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Makkreel, Rudolf. Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the “Critique of Judgment.” Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Marmysz, John. “Humor, Sublimity and Incongruity.” Consciousness, Literature and the Arts 2, no. 3 (2001): no pagination. www.dmd27.org/marm.html [Accessed August 26, 2109]. Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003. Martin, Mike W. “Humour and Aesthetic Enjoyment of Incongruities.” British Journal of Aesthetics 23, no. 1 (1983): 74–85. Matherne, Samantha. “Edith Landmann-Kalischer on Aesthetic Demarcation and Normativity.” British Journal of Aesthetics 60, no. 3 (2020): 315–34. McConnell, Sean. “How Kant Might Explain Ugliness.” British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 2 (2008): 205–28. McQuillan, J. Colin. Early Modern Aesthetics. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. “The Science of Aesthetics, the Critique of Taste, and the Philosophy of Art: Ambiguities and Contradictions.” Aesthetic Investigations 4, no. 2 (2021): 144–62. Meier, Georg Friedrich. Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften, Zweyter Theil. Halle: Carl Hemmerde, 1749. Thoughts on Jesting, ed. Joseph Jones. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1947. Mendelssohn, Moses. Philosophical Writings ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. “On the Sublime and Naive in the Fine Sciences.” In The Sublime Reader, ed. Robert R. Clewis. London: Bloomsbury, 2019, 91–100. Mensch, Jennifer, ed. Kant and the Feeling of Life. Albany: SUNY Press, forthcoming. Menzer, Paul. Kants Ästhetik in ihrer Entwicklung. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1952. Meredith, James Creed, trans. Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Oxford: Clarendon, 1911. Mirbach, Dagmar. “Magnitudo aesthetica, Aesthetic Greatness: Ethical Aspects of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Fragmentary Aesthetica.” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics nos. 36–7 (2008/2009): 102–28.





Monk, Samuel. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1935. Morreall, John, ed. The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Naragon, Steve. “Kant in the Classroom.” https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/ SSNaragon/Kant/Home/index.htm [Accessed September 7, 2021] “Kant in the Classroom: Anthropology.” https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/ SSNaragon/Kant/Notes/notesAnthropology.htm [Accessed October 4, 2021]. “Kant in the Classroom: Dohna-Wundlacken.” https://users.manchester.edu/ Facstaff/SSNaragon/Kant/Notes/notesAnthropology.htm#Dohna-Wundlacken1 [Accessed October 6, 2021]. “Kant in the Classroom: Logic Notes.” https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/ SSNaragon/Kant/Notes/notesLogic.htm [Accessed July 25, 2021]. “Kant in the Classroom: Moral Philosophy Notes.” https://users.manchester .edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Kant/Notes/notesMoral.htm [Accessed October 3, 2021]. Nichols, Stephen G. “Laughter as Gesture: Hilarity and the Anti-Sublime.” Neohelicon 32, no. 2 (2005): 375–89. Olin, Lauren. “All in Good Taste.” Philosophy of Humor Yearbook 4. Berlin: de Gruyter, forthcoming. Ostaric, Lara. “Genius and the ‘Moral Image of the World’: The Artist and Her Work as a Source of Moral Motivation.” In Recht und Frieden in der Philosophie Kants: Akten des X. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, ed. Margit Ruffing, Guido de Almeida, Ricardo Terra, and Valerio Rohden. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008, 667–76. Palmquist, Stephen R. “A Liar’s Guide to Humor: Kant on Paradoxical Playing with Perspectives.” Unpublished manuscript. Paris, Panos. “The Deformity-Related Conception of Ugliness.” British Journal of Aesthetics 57, no. 2 (2017): 139–60. Park, Kap H. Kant über das Erhabene: Rekonstruktion und Weiterführung der kritischen Theorie des Erhabenen Kants. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009. Pascal, Roy. The German Sturm und Drang. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953. Phillips, James. “Placing Ugliness in Kant’s Third Critique: A Reply to Paul Guyer.” Kant-Studien 102, no. 3 (2011): 385–95. Pillow, Kirk. Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Pinder, Tillman. “Zu Kants Logik-Vorlesung um 1780, anläßlich einer neu aufgefundenen Nachschrift.” In Kant-Forschungen, ed. Reinhard Brandt and Werner Stark. Kant-Forschungen, vol. 1. Hamburg: Meiner, 1987, 79–114. Plato. Complete Works, ed. J. M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997.





Pollack, John. The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics. New York: Penguin, 2011. Pollok, Konstantin. Kant’s Theory of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pollok, Anne. “Gazing Upwards to the Stage: Mendelssohn’s Notion of Admiration and Its Consequences.” In The Moral Psychology of Admiration, ed. Alfred Archer and André Grahle. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, 79–94. Pop, Andrei and Widrich, Mechtild, eds. Ugliness. London: I.B. Tauris, 2014. Procuranti, Lucia. La percezione del bello da Descartes a Kant. Trento: Verifiche, 2009. Recki, Birgit. “So lachen wir: Wie Immanuel Kant Leib und Seele zusammenhält.” In Kants Schlüssel zur Kritik des Geschmacks. Ästhetische Erfahrung heute – Studien zur Aktualität von Kants “Kritik der Urteilskraft,” ed. Ursula Francke. Hamburg: Meiner, 2000, 177–87. Redies, Christoph. “Beauty: Neglected, but Alive and Kicking.” British Journal of Psychology 105, no. 4 (2014): 468–70. Ritzel, Wolfgang. “Kant über den Witz und Kants Witz.” Kant-Studien 82, no. 1 (1991): 102–9. Rosenkranz, Karl. Ästhetik des Hässlichen. Königsberg: Bornträger, 1853. Aesthetics of Ugliness, trans. Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Rueger, Alexander. “Beautiful Surfaces: Kant on Free and Adherent Beauty in Nature and Art.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 16, no. 3 (2008): 535–57. Santayana, George. The Sense of Beauty. New York: Scribners, 1896. Scarré, Geoffrey. “Kant on Free and Dependent Beauty.” British Journal of Aesthetics 21, no. 4 (1981): 351–62. Schlapp, Otto. Kants Lehre vom Genie und die Entstehung der ʻKritik der Urteilskraft’. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1901. Schöndörffer, Otto. Kant’s Briefwechsel, ed. Rudolf Malter and Joachim Kopper. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1986. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1969. Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper). Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Shaw, Joshua. “Philosophy of Humor.” Philosophy Compass 5, no. 2 (2010): 112–26. Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. London: Routledge, 2017. Shell, Susan Meld and Velkley, Richard, eds. Kant’s Observations and Remarks: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Shier, David. “Why Kant Finds Nothing Ugly.” British Journal of Aesthetics 38, no. 4 (1998): 412–8. Simonton, Dean K. “So You Want to Become a Creative Genius? You Must Be Crazy!” The Dark Side of Creativity, ed. David H. Cropley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.





Sorensen, Kelly and Williamson, Diane. Kant and the Faculty of Feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Stark, Werner. Nachforschungen zu Briefen und Handschriften Immanuel Kants. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993. Steenhagen, Maarten. “Explaining the Ugly: Disharmony and Unrestrained Cognition in Kant.” Esthetica 11 (2010): no pagination. http:// estheticatijdschrift.nl/files/2014/09/09/3-Esthetica-ExplainingtheUglyDisharmonyand-UnrestrainedCognitioninKant-2010-11-24.pdf [Accessed January 5, 2022] Strub, Christian. “Das Häßliche und die ‘Kritik der ästhetischen Urteilskraft’: Überlegungen zu einer systematischen Lücke.” Kant-Studien 80 (1989): 416–46. Sulzer, Johann Georg. Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste. Leipzig: Weidmann, 1792. Swabey, Marie. “The Comic as Nonsense, Sadism, or Incongruity.” Journal of Philosophy 55, no. 19 (1958): 819–33. Swift, Paul. “In-jestion: Intestinal Laughter in Kant and Nietzsche.” International Studies in Philosophy 27, no. 1 (1995): 97–103. Tatarkiewicz, Władysław. A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1980. Thomson, Garrett. “Kant’s Problems with Ugliness.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50, no. 2 (1992): 107–15. Thorndike, Oliver. “Kant’s ‘Theory of Music’.” Con-textos Kantianos: International Journal of Philosophy 14 (2021): 416–38. Tonelli, Giorgio. “La formazione del testo della Kritik der Urteilskraft.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 8, no. 4 (1954): 423–48. “Kant’s Early Theory of Genius Pt. 1 (1770–1779).” Journal of the History of Philosophy 4, no. 2 (1966): 109–32. “Kant’s Early Theory of Genius Pt. 2 (1770–1779).” Journal of the History of Philosophy 4, no. 3 (1966): 209–24. Townsend, Dabney. Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics. Amityville, NY: Baywood Pub, 1999. Hume’s Aesthetic Theory: Taste and Sentiment. New York: Routledge, 2001. Tumarkin, Anna. “Zur transscendentalen Methode der Kantischen Asthetik.” Kant-Studien 11, no. 1–3 (1906): 348–78. Tuna, Emine Hande. “Self-Standing Beauty: Tracing Kant’s Views on PurposeBased Beauty.” Southwest Philosophy Review 35, no. 1 (2019): 7–16. Warda, Arthur. Immanuel Kants Bücher. Mit einer getreuen Nachbildung des bisher einzigen bekannten Abzuges des Versteigerungskataloges der Bibliothek Kants. Berlin: Martin Breslauer, 1922. Wenzel, Christian. “Kant Finds Nothing Ugly?” British Journal of Aesthetics 39, no. 4 (1999): 416–22. “Beauty, Genius, and Mathematics: Why Did Kant Change his Mind?” History of Philosophy Quarterly 18, no. 4 (2001): 415–32. An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics: Core Concepts and Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008.





“Do Negative Judgments of Taste Have a priori Grounds in Kant?” KantStudien 103, no. 4 (2012): 472–93. “The Art of Doing Mathematics.” In The Routledge Handbook on Creativity and Philosophy, ed. Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran. New York: Routledge, 2018, 313–30. Wicks, Robert. “Kant on Fine Art: Artistic Sublimity Shaped by Beauty.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53, no. 2 (1995): 189–93. “Dependent Beauty as the Appreciation of Teleological Style.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 4 (1997): 387–400. Kant on Judgment. London: Routledge, 2007. Willaschek, Marcus. Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics: The Dialectic of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Wolff, Christian. Vernünfftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen (“German Metaphysics”). Halle: Renger, 1720. Psychologia empirica, methodo scientifica pertractata. Frankfurt and Leipzig: Renger, 1738. Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General, trans. Richard J. Blackwell. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. Wolterstorff, Nicolas. Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Young, Edward. The Universal Passion, Satire 1. London: J. Roberts, 1725. Conjectures on Original Composition: In a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison. London: Millar and Dodsley, 1759. Young, James O. “Kant’s Musical Antiformalism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78, no. 2 (2020): 171–82. Young, Michael, trans. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Zammito, John. The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Zöller, Günter. “‘Without Hope and Fear’: Kant’s Naturrecht Feyerabend on Bindingness and Obligation.” In Reading Kant’s Lectures, ed. Robert R. Clewis. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015, 346–61. Zuckert, Rachel. “A New Look at Kant’s Theory of Pleasure.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60, no. 3 (2002): 239–52. “The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant’s Aesthetic Formalism.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 44, no. 4 (2006): 599–622. Kant on Beauty and Biology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. “Kant’s Rationalist Aesthetics.” Kant-Studien 98, no. 4 (2007): 443–63. “Kant on Practical Fanaticism.” In Kant’s Moral Metaphysics, ed. Benjamin Lipscomb and James Krueger. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010, 291–318. Herder’s Naturalist Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

INDEX

absurdity, 215, 219–20, 222, 230 Addison, Joseph, 52, 88, 111, 118, 155, 164, 227 adherent beauty, 2, 18, 54–5, 62, 69–71, 77–8, 80, 92, 94, 96–7, 99–100, 145, 202, 216 adherent sublimity, 176 Adickes, Erich, 10, 137 admiration, 28, 108, 116, 156, 160–1, 169, 173, 176, 200, 226, 235 aesthetic experience, 13–14, 16–17, 19, 49, 96, 99, 114, 153, 160, 169, 175, 210 aesthetic ideas, 7, 14, 17, 19, 49, 61, 67, 69, 96, 99, 125, 130, 133–4, 137, 143, 146, 176, 190, 208, 221–2, 224, 234–8, 242 fine art, and, 141 genius, and, 106, 108–10, 126 as object of play, 222 aesthetic judgment, 6, 12, 15, 25–7, 38, 60, 146, 208 adherent, 99 adherent sublimity, 175 autonomy of, 46 deduction, 49 disinterested, 192 formalism, and, 189 free, 54–5, 175 Hume, 27 humor, and, 238 models, and, 146 normativity, 6, 14, 23–5, 40, 48 perfection, and, 78 a priori principle of, 25, 46, 210 of reflection, 60–1 of the sublime, 153, 155, 173–4, 183

of ugliness, 181, 186–8, 202, 204, 206 of ugliness, Hume on, 199 universal validity, 60, See also beauty, sublime, taste aesthetics and teleology, 17 affect, 133–4, 138–9, 168–9, 172 laughter, and, 216, 233, 235, 238–9 agreeable, 25, 33–4, 65, 95, 237 art, 7, 130, 132, 136, 146, 224–5 vs. beauty, 64 Hume, 74 vs. beauty and the good, 18, 65, 92–3, 206 vs. the disagreeable, 200, 205 laughter, 238 vs. the good, 54, 66 music, 129, 133, 224 Allison, Henry, 10, 12, 46, 49, 57, 59, 65–6, 80, 103, 113, 117, 128, 181, 187 Ameriks, Karl, 4 analogy, 190 between beauty and morality, 16, 60, 87, 95–6, 145 between evil and ugliness, 190, 192, 201 Analytic of the Beautiful, in contrast to Analytic of the Sublime, 164 Analytic of the Sublime composition of, 151 in contrast to the ugly, 183 Analytic of the Ugly, lack of, 183 Announcement of his Lectures (M. Immanuel Kant’s Announcement of the Program for his Lectures for the Winter Semester 1765–1766), 16, 37, 96, 215



 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 7, 57–8, 67, 94, 105, 110, 119, 125, 143, 164, 173, 175, 183–5, 194, 219–20, 223, 225–7, 230–1, 233, 235 architecture, 34, 56, 75, 79, 83, 93, 130–1, 138, 140–1, 148, 155, 159, 183 Aristotle, 7, 72, 91, 105, 193, 196, 212, 215–16, 223 arousal theory, 139 artistic sublimity, 174 astonishment, 80, 163 asymmetry, 191, 209 Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy, 185, 200–1, 206 autonomist model, of beauty and goodness, 73–4, 80, 93 autonomy, 46 awe, 116, 160–1, 172 Batteux, Charles, 4, 19, 47, 60, 134–5, 139, 187 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 4, 12, 14, 19, 29–30, 41–2, 52–3, 55, 76, 82, 136, 156–9, 162, 167, 176, 178, 193, 196, 198 Beattie, James, 52, 214 beauty addition theory, 79 adherent, 62, 70, 77–8, 100 aesthetic ideas, and, 68, 143, 177, 190 vs. the agreeable, 65 Aquinas, 72 in art, 135, 193, 207 autonomism, 73 Baumgarten, 30, 157, 196 Berkeley, 74 blocking, and, 79, 87 blocking-unificationism, 73 Burke, 74 comprehensibility, and, 33–5, 139–40, 177 Diderot, 195 disgust, and, 226 disinterestedness, and, 66 dysfunction, and, 73 eighteenth-century models of, 73

 empirical generalizations about, 40, 48 empirical research, and, 69, 242 fine art, and, 130, 133, 137, 142, 145 form, and, 50–1, 59, 68 formalism, and, 63 free, 2–3, 18, 54–7, 83, 88, 96–7, 126, 145 genius, and, 118, 122 Gerard, 114–15 goodness, and, 85, 93–5 grandeur, and, 155 Hogarth, 198 human, 78, 99 Hume, 28, 74–5, 198 Hutcheson, 52–3, 198 hypostatic, 92 ideal of, 17 intellectual, 71, 90, 96 intellectual vs. sensible, 1 Kames, 75 life, and, 81 in the magnificent sublime, 164 as magnitude, 200 Mendelssohn, 76, 135, 160, 197 morality, and, 14, 69, 87, 145, 192, 209 natural, 57, 98 necessary conditions of, 155 of object, 58 order, and, 199 Plato, 72 perfection, and, 14, 31, 79, 83, 156, 208 a priori proof, and, 46–7 proportion, and, 168 pure, 83, 86 purpose-based, 49, 85, 90, 100 purposiveness, and, 98 rationalism, and, 52 in relation to ugliness, 180, 202 as relative, 1 Rousseau, and, 123 self-standing, 13, 70–1, 82, 84–5, 87–91, 97, 207 Shaftesbury, 73 sociality as source of pleasure in, 43 source of the pleasure in, 14–15, 35, 122, 208, 234, 239





beauty (cont.) strong formalism, and, 56, 69 vs. the sublime, 154, 167 Sulzer, 77 symmetry, and, 83 taste, and, 185 teleology, and, 17 ugliness, and, 184–5, 188, 200, 207 unity amidst diversity, 52 universal validity of, 35, 37, 39, 60, 64 utility, and, 71–2, 74, 84, 91 wit, and, 227 Wolff, 76, 196 Beiser, Frederick, 12, 30, 53, 86, 116, 127, 134–5, 156, 160, 162 body humor, and, 219, 221, 224, 228, 233, 237 Brandt, Reinhard, 182, 206 Buchenau, Stefanie, 13, 135, 157 Burke, Edmund, 4, 19, 25–6, 73–4, 84, 136, 138, 154–6, 158, 160, 164, 166–7, 172, 237 Butler, Samuel, 214, 226, 231 C.F.R. (unidentified author), 1–2, 4, 49, 51, 155 Cannon, Joseph, 103, 106–7, 116, 127–8 canon, 28, 36, 42 Carroll, Noël, 23, 55, 100, 214–15, 217, 219 charm of beauty, 43, 68 vs. beauty, 58, 64–5, 85, 88, 134 bodily, 67 color, and, 89 in dance, 138 formalism, and, 56 color charm, and, 89 figure, and, 83 form, and, 133 Kames, 76 colossal, 194 comedy, 6, 132, 170, 174, 212, 215 common sense, 6, 26, 41 Hume, 26

containment model, of beauty and goodness, 73, 80, 84, 86, 96 critics (art) Critical Kant, 47, 100, 187 early Kant, 40, 46 Hume, 27–8 Critique of Practical Reason (second Critique), 129, 154, 178, 226 Critique of Pure Reason (first Critique), 25, 37, 41, 46–7, 63, 66, 90, 129, 170, 177, 200, 221, 231 Critique of Taste, 16–17, 25, 37, 41–2, 44–5, 98, 239 Dahlstrom, Daniel O., 12, 116, 159, 161 dance, 56, 130, 138, 140, 142, 148, 224 deduction, 178 of the principle of taste (aesthetic judgment), 15, 49, 58, 98, 170, 186 of the sublime, 151 dependent beauty. See adherent beauty Descartes, René, 52, 213 diaphragm, shaking in laughter, 218–19, 232–3 Diderot, Denis, 195 disgust (Ekel), 3–4, 19, 166, 178, 192–3, 195, 197–8, 204, 226 Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, 129, 185, 231 Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste, 135, 168 dynamical sublime, 17, 152–3, 163, 183 Eldridge, Richard, 23, 49, 126, 181 emotion, 56, 65, 86, 88, 154, 166, 168–9, 178 enthusiasm (Enthusiasmus), 112, 122 fanaticism (Schwärmerei), 112, 122 Feloj, Serena, 3, 151, 155, 166, 169–70, 182, 193 Fielding, Henry, 230, 235 fine art adherent beauty, and, 145 vs. agreeable art, 134, 224–5 genius, and, 117–18, 143, 146 vs. handicraft, 132, 138, 144, 146 humor, and, 130

 imitation, and, 242 ugliness, and, 185, 192, 207 First Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment, 10, 24–5, 46, 48, 55, 59–61, 98, 184, 186 Fugate, Courtney, 3, 9, 12–13, 196 gardening (horticulture), 56, 130, 132–3, 140–1, 146, 148, 183 Gerard, Alexander, 16, 18, 52, 67, 75, 103–4, 107, 112–15, 117–19, 121, 126, 141, 164, 214 Gestalt (figure, figuration), 35, 38, 83 Giamario, Patrick, 214, 222, 229 Godfrey, F. la. T., 222 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 127, 215 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 76, 136 Gracyk, Theodore, 27, 52, 182 Gregor, Mary, 56, 63, 66 grotesque, 165, 185, 194, 201 Guyer, Paul, 10–13, 15–17, 26, 37, 39, 42, 44, 54–5, 61, 85, 91, 181 on Baumgarten, 156–8 on beauty and morality, 99 on beauty and utility, 73, 75, 77–8, 80 on beauty as adherent, 55 on the deduction, 49 on form, 61 on genius, 106–7, 120, 127 on Gerard, 52, 103, 113–14 on Hume, 27 on Kames, 29 on Kant’s development, 3, 11, 15, 43–4, 49, 55, 95, 97 on Mendelssohn, 4, 160 on meta-cognitivism, 54 on modern aesthetics, 26, 30–1 on rules, 33, 35, 37 on source of aesthetic pleasure, 43 on systematicity, 6 on the sublime, 158, 165, 176 two-act view, 24 on ugliness, 182–4, 187, 200, 206 on Wolff, 135 Haller, Albrecht von, 129, 164, 170 Hamann, Johann Georg, 127, 135, 156



handicraft, 19, 124, 132, 134, 138, 142, 144, 146 harmony of the faculties (imagination and understanding), 26, 61, 122, 133, 186, 208 Hay, William, 202 heautonomy, 46, 98 Heidegger, Johann Jakob, 179–80, 195, 203 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 8, 12, 211 genius, and, 19, 109, 112, 122, 127 Hamann, and, 156 Kant’s failure to comprehend, 128 lecture notes, 89, 167, 176 on Shaftesbury, 112 the sublime, and, 164 praising Kant’s wit, 211 Herz, Marcus, 18, 37 Hobbes, Thomas, 134, 213 Hogarth, William, 93, 198 Home, Henry, Lord Kames, 1, 24, 26, 29, 41–2, 52, 73, 75, 96, 140, 155, 164 Homer, 92, 109, 125, 129, 174 horticulture. See gardening Hudibras (Samuel Butler), 185, 214, 231 Hume, David, 4, 26–9, 52, 74, 88, 93, 96, 112, 117, 140 on beauty, 2, 18, 83, 89, 199 on beauty and utility, 73–5, 199 on consensus, 24, 26–8 on critics, 27–8 on fanaticism, 112 German translation of, 29 Kant on, 27, 70, 88, 117 on rules, 28 on taste, 27–8, 32 thonged key, 27 on ugliness, 198–9 humor transcendental philosophy, and, 237 Hutcheson, Francis, 2 on beauty, 51–3, 90, 191 on beauty and utility, 73–4 geometrical shapes, and, 53 on humor, 213–14, 220, 225, 239, 242





Hutcheson, Francis (cont.) on internal sense, 52 on ugliness, 198 ideas of reason, 223, 226 illusion in humor, 217–18, 221 imagination, and, 123 transcendental, 177 imagination, 58, 60, 184, See also free play aesthetic ideas, and, 14, 190, 235 aesthetic pleasure, and, 89 alleged foul play, and, 186–7, 209 disgust, and, 193 fine art, and, 130, 134, 141–2, 144 form, and, 33, 57–8, 67 free play, and, 14, 16, 18–19, 46, 50, 55, 60–1, 78–9, 82, 95, 99, 104, 144, 146, 177, 185–8, 205, 208, 223, 227, 237 genius, and, 104, 106, 110, 113–15, 119–20, 123–4 the grotesque, 194 Hume, 199 humor, and, 7, 221–2 poetry, and, 147 the sublime, and, 152–3, 163, 172, 174, 176, 178, 183 ugliness, and, 184, 193 unbounded, 110, 119 imitation in art, 143 disgust, and, 197 humor, and, 213 Hutcheson, 53 Mendelssohn, 161 of predecessors, 36, 105, 107, 119, 124, 135, 189 Inaugural Dissertation, 33–4, 39, 65–6 incongruity theory, 213–15, 228 incongruous, the, 213–14, 219, 235 ingenium (wit, ingenuity), 105, 112–13, 225 Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Ethics, 167 inspiration, 105, 108, 111–12, 116, 119, 122

intersubjective validity, 26, 37, 97, 155, 209 Jäsche Logic, 42–3, 96 jokes, 212, 214, 217, 223, 225, 233 Kames. See Henry Home, Lord Kames Klopstock, Friedrich, 162 Kowalewski lecture transcriptions, 86, 88, 179 Laune (whim, caprice), 211, 223–5, 229–32, 235–6 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 6, 203 laws of sensibility, 15, 33, 35, 37–8, 40, 42, 63–4, 66, 168, 202 Lecture on Philosophical Encyclopedia, 120 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 4, 26, 51–2, 76, 160, 195 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 4, 136, 197 alleged irrationalism of, 127 as Burke translator, 154 Kant on, 47, 136, 187 on humor, 215 on ugliness, 7, 136, 193, 197 logical judgment, 30 Contrast to aesthetic judgment Longinus (pseudo-Longinus), 1, 4, 155–6, 159 magnificent (prächtig) sublime. See splendid sublime Margolis, Joseph, 126, 241 mathematical sublime, 152, 165, 171, 177, 183 McQuillan, J. Colin, 13, 44, 134, 136–7, 157 Meier, Georg Friedrich, 4, 31, 34, 39, 164 Mendelssohn, Moses, 1, 4, 19, 30, 52, 74, 77, 116, 135, 154, 157, 159, 161–2, 173, 175, 197, 215 on the arts, 136, 160 on awe, 161, 173 on beauty, 51, 76, 90, 135, 160 on Burke, 160 on fanaticism, 112 on genius, 116

 on humor, 215, 220, 242 on perfection, 160 on the sublime, 156, 159, 161–3, 178 on ugliness and disgust, 136, 193, 196–7 Menzer, Paul, 3, 5, 12, 14–15, 18, 32, 43, 63, 82, 103, 106, 116, 118–22, 129–30, 132, 148, 171, 180 Meredith, James Creed, 10, 127, 151, 229, 239 Metaphysics of Morals, 65, 220, 223 Milton, John, 109, 124–5, 129, 170, 174, 194, 208 moderate formalism, 56–8, 66–7 Monk, Samuel, 164 monstrous, the, 194 moral feeling, 98, 164, 170, 172–4 moral ideas, 17, 96, 99–100, 133, 147, 172 moral law, 155, 163, 178, 190 moral sublime, 163–4, 173 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 4, 26, 132 music, 109, 130–1, 142, 224 aesthetic value, and, 133 affects, and, 83, 139 agreeable table, 225 arousal theory, and, 139 beat, and, 140, 144 charm, and, 139 compared to humor, 238 dance, and, 139 fantasy, and, 58 formalism, and, 51, 60, 139–40 as free beauty, 145 harmony, and, 34, 83, 85, 138 Hume, 74 humor, and, 234 Hutcheson, 198 Kant’s ambivalent view of, 134, 224 Kant’s exposure to, 129 Leibniz, 195 Mendelssohn, 159, 161 play, and, 7 positive view of, 132 as play of impressions, 141 as play of sensations, 133 Rameau, 137 Ravel, 23

 sensible comprehension, and, 140 song, and, 130

naiveté, 225, 228–31 Naragon, Steve, 3, 9, 167, 169, 179, 186, 205 negative pleasure, 152, 154, 172, 177–8, 183 noble sublime, 164–5, 172, 178 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 1, 9, 31, 81, 96, 112, 152, 164, 166, 174, 185, 194, 201, 226–7, 233 On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World (Inaugural Dissertation), 33–4, 39, 65–6 On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy, 203–4, 215 Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God, The, 39 oratory, 16, 94 oscillation, 154, 218–19, 221, 233 painting proper, 133, 143, 147 perfectionism, 39, 46, 176 phases of Kant’s development, 15–18 physical geography Kant’s lectures on, 11, 31, 237 Plato, 18, 72, 109, 111, 123, 195, 212 play area (Spielraum), 220, 223, 227 Plotinus, 72 poetry, 16, 82, 124, 129–31, 141–4, 147, 174, 224 aesthetic value, and, 133, 136, 144, 147 Haller, 170 Kames, 29 Lessing, 197 Mendelssohn, 159 music, and, 144 as part of song, 130 ugliness, and, 193–4, 197, 205 Young, 112 Pollok, Anne, 160, 162 Pollok, Konstantin, 4, 23, 31, 46 Pope, Alexander, 118, 156, 200, 226, 231





principle of purposiveness, 125, 190–1, 204, 207, 210 principle, a priori of the faculty of feeling pleasure and displeasure, 18, 44–5, 47–9, 97, 146, 238 of the power of judgment, 47–8, 209 purposiveness of form, 59 purposiveness of nature, 13, 45, 47–8, 98, 170, 204, 209, 242 Recki, Birgit, 222, 239 reflecting power of judgment, 155 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard on Du Bos, 135 Kant’s letter to, 17, 44–5, 48–9, 97–8, 238 release theory, 215–16 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 190 remarks in the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 27, 32, 39, 123, 138, 142, 151, 166, 170, 185, 229, 232–3 rhetoric, 16, 92, 94, 123–4, 130, 133, 144, 147 ridicule, 7, 212, 220, 231 Descartes on, 213 Gerard on, 214 harmless, 220, 231 Shaftesbury on, 112 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4, 8, 19, 93, 109, 123, 137, 166 Rueger, Alexander, 77–8, 100 satire, 129, 185, 226 Schlapp, Otto, 12, 15, 47, 103, 108, 121, 128 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 222, 229 science aesthetics as, 17, 24, 31, 38, 41–2, 48 genius, and, 106 rules, and, 118 sculpture, 56, 130–1, 136, 142, 147, 183, 193, 197, 205, 224 sensible comprehension, principle of, 32–40, 63–6, 84, 114, 137–40, 146, 168, 177, 202, 208

Shaftesbury, third Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 4, 52, 96, 112 on beauty, 73 on common sense, 6 on enthusiasm, 112 on humor, 215 on ridicule, 112 on ugliness, 198, 203 Shakespeare, William, 109, 111, 124–5, 129, 162 Shell, Susan Meld, 165 skeptic (aesthetic normativity), 25 spirit (Geist), 96, 106, 117–19, 143, 146, 205, 234 splendid sublime, 155, 163–4, 169, 174, 201 Stark, Werner, 2, 182, 206 strong formalism, 56, 63, 69, 140 Sturm und Drang, 109, 112, 122, 127 subjective purposiveness, 58, 61, 98, 155, 170 sublime, adherent judgment of, 176 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 2, 4, 18, 26, 28, 30, 39, 52, 73, 77, 87, 89, 96, 104, 116, 121 summary of chapters, 18–20 superiority theory, 20, 212, 216, 220, 228, 231 Aristotle, 212 Descartes, 213 Hobbes, 213 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 231 Swift, Jonathan, 111, 156, 214, 230–1 symbol beauty and morality, 17, 95 ugliness and evil, 192, 209 taste, principle of, 6, 15, 18, 30, 32, 42–4, 58 teleology, moral, 15–16, 49 terrifying sublime, 136, 164–5, 175 Tonelli, Giorgio, 10, 103, 151, 179 tragedy (genre), 6, 132, 159, 170, 174, 215 Transcendental Aesthetic, 41, 48 transcendental philosophy, 99, 153, 237 critics of, 241 Trublet, Nicolas, 226–7 truth

 Baumgarten on, 157 beauty, and, 70, 84, 87 Baumgarten’s aesthetics of, 157 incongruity, and, 230 Mendelssohn on, 198 Plato on, 72 poetry, and, 147 Shaftesbury on, 73 ugliness, judgment of, 181–3, 188, 192, 199, 208 unificationist model, of beauty and goodness, 73, 79, 81–5, 91–5 unity amidst variety, 30, 51–3, 90–1, 162, 201 Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, 80, 163, 169, 199 universal validity, 24–5, 34, 36, 43, 48, 57–8, 60, 97, 155, 167, 171, 177–8, 186, 208 V-Anth/Brauer, 89 V-Anth/Busolt, 18, 32, 67, 91, 94–5, 106, 109, 124, 132, 144, 203, 205, 226, 228–30, 235 V-Anth/Collins, 7, 15–16, 18, 32, 35–8, 68, 86–8, 93, 118, 126, 134, 136–9, 143, 164, 168, 179, 202–4, 223, 229, 231, 236 V-Anth/Ding, 94 V-Anth/Dohna, 86–8, 205 V-Anth/Fried, 16, 27, 33, 90–2, 106, 112, 119, 122, 136, 169, 179–80, 190, 203, 220, 223, 229, 233, 235–6 V-Anth/Ham, 88, 234 V-Anth/Mensch, 6, 16, 18, 83, 93, 103, 106, 120, 144, 156, 170, 202–3, 223, 226, 229, 231, 234 V-Anth/Mron, 16, 18, 32, 79, 91–4, 106, 112, 120–1, 132, 156, 170, 179–80, 203–4, 220, 223, 236 V-Anth/Parow, 15, 27, 32–3, 35, 38–40, 67–8, 70, 88, 91–3, 112, 117–18, 126, 136–7, 140, 143, 164, 167–9, 178–9, 202–3, 223, 227, 229, 231, 234 V-Anth/Phil, 118, 202



V-Anth/Reichel, 68, 94–5, 206 V-Lo/Blom, 35–6, 42–3, 106, 118, 126, 146, 164, 202 V-Lo/Dohna, 92 V-Lo/Phil, 43, 64–5, 119, 146, 201, 228 V-Lo/Pölitz, 39–40, 67, 122, 203 V-Lo/Wien, 41, 146, 223 V-Met/Herder, 89 V-Met/L1, 6, 32, 35, 39, 43, 185 V-Met/Mron, 65 V-Met/Vig, 32, 67–8, 206–7 V-Mo/Collins, 220 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 4, 26, 222, 226–7, 229 V-PG/Holstein, 31–2 V-PP/Herder, 167, 176 weak formalism, 57–63, 67–9 Wenzel, Christian, 99–100, 119, 121–2, 182, 184, 188, 191, 200–1 whim (caprice, Laune), 211, 223–5, 229–32, 235–6 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 109, 125 Willaschek, Marcus, 8, 177 Witz (wit) humor, and, 225 ingenium, 225 Young, 112 Wolff, Christian, 4, 26 on the arts, 19, 134–5, 146 beauty, 30, 76 on humor, 215 on perfection, 53, 160 on ugliness, 196 on wit, 105 perfection, 76 Young, Edward, 19, 104, 111–12, 117–18, 226 Zammito, John, 3, 8, 10, 12, 14, 44–5, 79–80, 86, 103, 107, 122, 127, 135, 151, 180 Zöller, Günter, 9 Zuckert, Rachel, 12–13, 18, 49, 52, 56, 78, 80, 97, 99–100, 112, 127