Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic

VIII Immanuel Kant

I. Kant.

Of all these writers, Winckelmann and Mengs, Home and Hogarth, Lessing and Goethe, none was a philosopher in the true sense of the word: not even those who like Meier laid claim to the title, nor those who had some gifts for philosophy like Herder or Hamann. After Vico, the next European mind of real speculative genius is Immanuel Kant, who now comes before us in his turn.

Kant and Vico.

That Kant took up the problem of philosophy where Vico laid it down (not, of course, in a directly historical, but in an ideal, sense) has already been noted by others.1 How far he made an advance upon his predecessor and how far he failed to reach the same level it is not here our business to inquire; we must confine ourselves strictly to the consideration of Æsthetic questions.

Summarizing the results of such a consideration, we may say at once that though Kant holds an immensely important place in the development of German thought; though the book containing his examination of æsthetic facts is among his most influential works; and though in histories of Æsthetic written from the German point of view, which ignore practically the whole development of European thought from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Kant can pose as the man who discovered the problem of Æsthetic or solved it or brought it within sight of solution; yet in an unprejudiced and complete history whose aim is to take broad views and to consider not the popularity of a book or the historical importance of a nation but the intrinsic value of ideas, the judgement passed on Kant must be very different. Like Vico in the serious tenacity with which he reflected upon æsthetic facts, more fortunate than he in having a much larger stock of material gathered from preceding discussion and argument, Kant was at once unlike and less successful than Vico in that he was unable to attain a doctrine substantially true, and unable also to give his thoughts the necessary system and unity.

Identity of the concept of art in Kant and Baumgarten.

In fact, what was Kant’s idea of art? Strange as our reply may seem to those who recollect the explicit and insistent war waged by him against the school of Wolff, and the concept of beauty as a perfection confusedly perceived, we must assert that Kant’s idea of art was fundamentally the same as that of Baumgarten and the Wolffian school.2 In that school his mind had been trained; he always had a great respect for Baumgarten whom in the Critique of Pure Reason he calls “that excellent analyst”; he chose the text of Baumgarten for two of his University lectures on Metaphysics, and that of Meier for his lecture on Logic (Vernunftlehre). Kant, like them, therefore considered Logic and Æsthetic (or theory of art) as conjoined sciences. They were thus described by him in his Scheme of Lectures in 1765, when he proposed, while expounding the critique of reason, to “throw a glance at that of taste, that is to say, at Æsthetic, since the rules of one apply to the other and each throws light upon the other.”

Kant’s “Lectures.”

In his University lectures he distinguished æsthetic truth from logical truth in the style of Meier; even citing the example of the beautiful rosy face of a girl which, when seen distinctly, i.e. through a microscope, ceases to be beautiful.3 It is æsthetically true (said he) that a man once dead cannot come to life again, although this is in opposition to logic and moral truth: it is æsthetically true that the sun plunges into the sea, but it is false logically and objectively. To what degree it is necessary to combine logical truth with æsthetic the learned have never yet been able to decide; not even the greatest æstheticians. In order to become accessible, logical concepts must assume æsthetic forms; a garb to be abandoned only in the rational sciences which seek profundity. Æsthetic certainty is subjective: it is content with authority, i.e. the citation of the opinions of great men. On account of our weakness, for we are strongly attached to the sensible, æsthetic perfection often helps us to render our thoughts distinct. In this, examples and images co-operate; æsthetic perfection is the vehicle for logical perfection; taste is the analogue of intellect. There are logical truths which are not æsthetic truths: and on the other hand we must exclude from abstract philosophy exclamations and other sentimental commotions proper to the other truth. Poetry is a harmonious play of thoughts and sensations. Poetry and eloquence differ in this: in the former, thoughts adapt themselves to sensations; in the latter the contrary is the case. In these lectures Kant sometimes taught that poetry is anterior to eloquence because sensations come before thoughts; and he observed (perhaps under Herder’s influence) that the poetry of Eastern peoples, lacking concepts, is wanting in unity and taste although rich in imaginative detail. Poetry formed out of the pure play of sensibility is doubtless a possibility, e.g. love-poems: but true poetry disdains such productions, concerned as they are with sensations which every one knows ought to be expelled from our breasts. True poetry must strive to present virtue and intellectual truth in sensible form, as has been done by Pope in his Essay on Man, in which he attempts to vivify poetry by means of reason. On other occasions Kant definitely says that logical perfection is the basis of every other, æsthetic perfection being merely an adornment of the logical; something of the latter may be omitted in order to appeal to the audience, but it must never be disguised or falsified.4

This is Baumgartenism pure and simple; unless we are prepared to look on these Lectures as representing a pre-critical period of thought, or an exoteric doctrine superseded eventually by Kant’s own original esoteric ideas in his Critique of the Judgment (1790). Not to open such a controversy, let us put these Lectures on one side (although they often throw no little light on the signification of Kantian phrases and formulæ), and refuse to raise the question what pages of the Critique of the Judgment are derived from Baumgarten and Meier; he who reads the works of these disciples of Wolff and passes immediately to the Critique of Judgment often has the impression that the atmosphere surrounding him is unchanged. But if the Critique of Judgment itself be examined without prejudice it will be seen that Kant always adhered to Baumgarten’s conception of art as the sensible and imaginative vesture of an intellectual concept.

Art in the “Critique of Judgment.”

According to Kant, art is not pure beauty wholly detached from the concept, it is adherent beauty, which presupposes and attaches itself to a concept.5 This is the work of genius, the faculty of representing æsthetic ideas. An æsthetic idea is “a representation of the imagination which accompanies a given concept: a representation conjoined with such truthful representation of particulars as to be unable to find for it any expression that may mark a determinate concept, thereby endowing the given concept with something of the ineffable; a feeling which stimulates the cognitive faculties and reinforcing the tongue, which is simply the letter, with the spirit.” Genius, then, has two constitutive elements, imagination and intellect; it consists in “that happy disposition, which no science can teach or diligence attain, to find ideas for a given concept and, also, to select the expression by which the subjective commotion it excites as accompaniment to a concept may be communicated to others.” No concept is adequate to the æsthetic idea, as no representation of the imagination can ever possibly be adequate to the concept. Examples of æsthetic attributes are found in the eagle of Jupiter with the thunderbolt in its claws, and the peacock of the proud Queen of Heaven: “they do not, like logical attributes, represent that which is contained in our concepts of the sublimity or majesty of creation, but something else which gives occasion to the imagination to run riot over a multitude of kindred representations which make us think more than we can express in a given concept by means of words, and give us an æsthetic idea, which serves to this rational idea instead of a logical representation, precisely with the aim of quickening our feelings by throwing open to them a view over a vast field of kindred representations.” There are a modus logicos and a modus æstheticus of expressing our thoughts: the first consists in following determinate principles: the other in the mere feeling of the unity of the representation.6 To imagination, to intellect and to spirit (Geist) we must add taste, the link between imagination and intellect.7 Art may therefore represent natural ugliness: artistic beauty “is not a beautiful thing but a beautiful representation of a thing”: although the representation of ugliness has limits varying with the individual arts (a reminiscence of Lessing and Winckelmann), and an absolute limit at the disgusting and nauseating, which kill representation itself.8 In natural things, too, there is adherent beauty which cannot be judged by the æsthetic judgement alone but demands a concept. Nature thus appears as a work of art, though superhuman art: “the teleological judgement is the basis and condition of the æsthetic.” When we say “this is a beautiful woman,” we merely mean that “nature beautifully represents in the form of this woman her purpose in the construction of the female body”: it is necessary therefore, besides noting simple form, to aim at a concept, “so that the object may be apprehended through an æsthetic judgement logically conditioned.”9 By this means is formed the ideal of beauty in the human face, the expression of moral life.10 Kant admits that there may also be artistic productions without a concept, comparable with the free beauties of nature, flowers and some birds (parrot, humming-bird, bird of paradise, etc.): ornamental drawings, cornice-mouldings, musical fantasies without words, represent nothing, no object reducible to a determined concept, and must be reckoned among free beauties.11 But does not this necessitate their exclusion from true and proper art, from the operation of genius in which fancy and intellect must both, according to Kant, have a place?

Imagination in Kant’s system.

This is Baumgartenism transposed into a higher key, more concentrated, more elaborated, more suggestive, until from moment to moment it seems about to burst into a wholly different conception of art. But it is still Baumgartenism, from whose intellectualistic bonds it never escapes. Nor was escape possible. A profound concept of imagination was entirely lacking to Kant’s system and his philosophy of the spirit. Glancing over the table of faculties of the spirit which precedes his Critique of Judgment, we see that Kant co-ordinates with it the cognitive faculty, the feeling of pleasure and pain, and the appetitive faculty; to the first corresponds intellect, to the second, judgement (teleological and æsthetic), to the third, reason;12 he finds no place for imagination amongst powers of the spirit but places it among the facts of sensation. He knows a reproductive imagination and an associative, but he knows nothing of a genuinely productive imagination, imagination in the proper sense.13 We have seen that, in his doctrine, genius is the co-operation of several faculties.

The forms of intuition and the Transcendental Æsthetic.

Yet sometimes Kant had an inkling that intellectual activity is preceded by something which is not mere sensational material, but is an independent non-intellectual theoretical form. He obtained a glimpse of this latter form not when he was reflecting on art in the strict sense but when he was examining the process of knowledge: he does not treat of it in his Critique of Judgment, but in the first section of his Critique of Pure Reason, in the first part of the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements. He says here that sensations only enter the spirit when the latter itself gives them form; a form not identical with that which intellect gives to sensations, but much simpler, namely pure intuition, the totality of the a priori principles of sensibility. There must therefore be “a science which forms the first part of the transcendental doctrine of elements, distinct from that which contains the principles of pure thought and is named transcendental Logic.” Now, what name does Kant confer upon this science whose existence he has deduced? None other than Transcendental Æsthetic (die transcendentale Ästhetik). In a note he even insists that this is the right name for the new science of which he treats, and censures the Germans for their habit of applying it to the Critique of Taste, which, as he thought at that time, could never become a science. Thus, he concludes, we approach more closely to the usage of the ancients, among whom the distinction between αἰσθητὰ καὶ νοητά14 was well known.

Nevertheless, after having so rightly postulated the necessity for a science of the forms of sensation or pure intuition, purely intuitive knowledge, Kant went on, simply because he had no exact idea of the nature of the æsthetic faculty and of art, to fall into an intellectualistic error by reducing the form of sensibility or pure intuition into the two categories or functions of space and time, and by asserting that the spirit emerges from the chaos of sensation by organizing its sensations in space and time.15 But space and time as such are very far from being primitive categories; they are relatively late and complex formations.16 As examples of the matter of sensation Kant quoted hardness, impenetrability, colour and so forth. But the mind only recognizes colour and hardness in so far as it has already given form to its sensations; considered as brute matter, sensations fall outside the cognitive spirit, they are a limit; colour, hardness, impenetrability and so on, when recognized, are already intuitions, spiritual elaborations, the æsthetic activity in its rudimentary manifestation. The characterizing or qualifying imagination which is æsthetic activity ought to have occupied in the Critique of Pure Reason the pages devoted to the discussion of space and time, and would thus have constituted a real Transcendental Æsthetic, a real prologue to the transcendental Logic. In this manner Kant would have achieved the truth aimed at by Leibniz and Baumgarten and would have joined hands with Vico.

Theory of Beauty distinguished by Kant from that of Art.

His repeatedly announced opposition to the school of Wolff concerns not the concept of art but that of Beauty; two concepts for Kant entirely distinct. First of all, he did not admit that sensation could be called “confused knowledge,” a confused form, that is, of intellectual cognition; rightly judging this to be a false account of sensibility, since a concept, however confused, is always a concept or a rough sketch of a concept, never an intuition.17 But he further denied that pure beauty contained a concept, and therefore denied that it was a perfection sensibly apprehended. These reflexions have no doubt some connexion with those concerning the nature of art in the Critique of Judgment; but the connexion is far from close, still less are they actually fused into a single whole. That Kant was minutely familiar with eighteenth-century writers who had discussed beauty and taste is shown by his Lectures, wherein they are all quoted and used.18 Of these the greater part, especially the English, were sensationalists, others intellectualists; some few, as we have noted, were inclined towards mysticism. Kant began by tending towards sensationalism in æsthetic problems, then became the adversary of sensationalists and intellectualists alike. This development can be traced in his Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime, as well as in his Lectures; its final expression is reached in the Critique of Judgment.

Of the four moments, as he calls them, i.e. the four determinations, he accords to Beauty, the two negative are directed, one against the sensationalists, the other against the intellectualists. “That is beautiful which pleases without interest”: “That is beautiful which pleases without concepts.”19 Here he asserts the existence of a spiritual region, distinct on one side from the pleasurable, the useful and the good, and on the other from truth. But this region, as we know very well, is not that of art, which Kant attaches to the concept: it is the region of a special activity of feeling which he calls judgement or, more exactly, æsthetic judgement.

Mystical features in Kant’s theory of Beauty.

The other two moments give some kind of a definition of this region: “That is beautiful which has the form of finality without the representation of an end”: “That is beautiful which is the object of universal pleasure.”20 What is this mysterious sphere? What this disinterested pleasure we experience in pure colours and tones, in flowers, and even in adherent beauty when we make abstraction from the concept to which it adheres?

Our answer is: there is no such sphere; it does not exist; the examples given are instances either of pleasure in general or of facts of artistic expression. Kant, who so emphatically criticizes the sensationalists and the intellectualists, does not show the same severity towards the neo-Platonic line of thought whose revival we remarked in the eighteenth century. Winckelmann in particular exercised strong influence over his mind. In one course of his Lectures we find him making a curious distinction between form and matter: in music melody is matter and harmony form: in a flower the scent is material and the shape (Gestalt) is form (Form).21 This reappears slightly modified in the Critique of Judgment. “In painting, statuary and all the figurative arts in architecture and gardening, so far as they are fine arts, the drawing is the essential; in which the foundation of taste lies not in what gratifies (vergnügt) in sensation, but in that which pleases (gefällt) by its form. The colours which illuminate the drawing belong to sensuous stimulus (Reiz) and may bring the object more vividly before the senses, but do not render it worthy of contemplation as a thing of beauty; they are, moreover, often limited by the exigencies of the beautiful form, and even where their sensuous stimulus is legitimate, they are ennobled only by the beautiful form.”22 Continuing in pursuit of this phantasm of beauty which is not the beauty of art nor yet the pleasing, and is equally detached from expressiveness and pleasure, Kant loses himself in insoluble contradictions. Little inclined to submit himself to the charm of imagination, abhorring “poetic philosophers” like Herder,23 he makes statements and refuses to commit himself to them, affirms and immediately criticizes his affirmations, and wraps up Beauty in a mystery which, at bottom, was nothing more than his own individual incertitude and inability to see clearly the existence of an activity of feeling which, in the spirit of his sane philosophy, represented a logical contradiction. “Necessary and universal pleasure” and “finality without the idea of an end” are the organized expression in words of this contradiction.

By way of clearing up the contradiction he arrives at the following thought: “The judgement of taste is founded on a concept (the concept of a general foundation of the subjective teleology of nature through judgement); but it is a concept by which it is impossible to know or demonstrate anything of the object, because the object in itself is indeterminable and unsuited to cognition; on the other hand, it has validity for every one (for every one, I say, in so far as it is an individual judgement, immediately accompanying intuition), since its determining reason reposes, perhaps, in the concept of that which may be regarded as the supersensible substrate of mankind.” Beauty, then, is a symbol of morality. “The subjective principle alone, that is the indeterminate idea of the supersensible in us, can be considered the only key able to unlock this faculty springing from a source we cannot fathom: excepting by its aid, no comprehension of it can possibly be reached.”24 These cautious words, and all others here used by Kant to conceal his thoughts, do not hide his tendency to mysticism. A mysticism without conviction or enthusiasm, almost in spite of himself, but very evident nevertheless. His inadequate grasp of the æsthetic activity led him to see double, even triple, and caused the unnecessary multiplication of his explanatory principles. Although he was always ignorant of the genuine nature of the æsthetic activity, he was indebted to it for suggesting to him the pure categories of space and time as the Transcendental Æsthetic; it caused him to develop the theory of imaginative embellishment of intellectual concepts by the work of genius; finally it forced him to acknowledge a mysterious faculty of feeling, midway between theoretical and practical activity, cognitive and yet not cognitive, moral and indifferent to morality, pleasing yet wholly detached from the pleasure of the senses. Great use of this power was made by Kant’s immediate successors in Germany who were delighted to find their daring speculations supported by that severe critic of experience, the philosopher of Königsberg.

Notes

1 B. Spaventa, Prolus. ed introd. alle lezioni di filosofia, Naples, 1862 pp. 83-102; Scritti filosofici, ed. Gentile, pp. 139-145, 303-307.

2 Kritik d. rein. Vernunft (ed. Kirchmann), i. 1, § 1, note.

3 See above, p. 244.

4 Extract from Kant’s lectures of 1764 and later, in O. Schlapp, Kant’s Lehre vom Genie, passim, esp. pp. 17, 58, 59, 79, 93, 96, 131-134, 136-137, 222, 225, 231-232, etc.

5 Kritik d. Urtheilskraft (ed. Kirchmann), § 16.

6 Kritik d. Urth. § 49.

7 Op. cit. § 50.

8 Op. cit. § 48.

9 Krit. d. Urth. § 48.

10 Op. cit. § 17.

11 Op. cit. § 16.

12 For the historical genesis of this tripartition, cf. remarks in Schlapp, op. cit. pp. 150-153.

13 See also Anthropol. (ed. Kirchmann), §§ 26-31; cf. Schlapp, op. cit. p. 296.

14 Kritik d. rein. Vernunft, i. I, § 1 and note.

15 Op. cit. §§ 1-8.

16 See above, pp. 4-5.

17 Krit. d. r. Vern. § 8, and introd. to § ii.; cf. Krit. d. Urth. § 15.

18 See catalogue in Schlapp, op. cit. pp. 403-404, and passim.

19 Krit. d. Urth. §§ 1-9.

20 Op. cit. §§ 10-22.

21 Schlapp, op. cit. p. 78.

22 Krit. d. Urth. § 14.

23 For Kant’s judgement of Herder, see Schlapp, op. cit. pp. 320-327, note.

24 Kritik d. Orth. §§ 57-59.
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