play of the cognitive activities (that is, for an easy combination of the
manifold into unity) the beautiful object is purposive for us, for our
function of apprehension; it is--here we obtain a determination of the
judgment of taste from the standpoint of relation--
_purposive without a
definite purpose_. We know perfectly well that a landscape which attracts
us has not been specially arranged for the purpose of delighting us, and we
do not wish to find in a work of art anything of an intention to please.
An object is perfect when it is purposive for itself (corresponds to its
concept); useful when it is purposive for our desire (corresponds to a
practical intention of man); beautiful when the arrangement of its parts
is purposive for the relation between the fancy and understanding of
the beholder (corresponds in an unusual degree to the conditions of our
apprehension). Perfection is internal (real, objective) purposiveness, and
utility is external purposiveness, both for a definite purpose; beauty,
on the other hand, is purposiveness without a purpose, formal, subjective
purposiveness. The beautiful pleases by its mere form.
The satisfaction in
the perfect is of a conceptual or intellectual kind, the satisfaction in
the beautiful, emotional or aesthetic in character.
The combination of these four determinations yields an exhaustive
definition of the beautiful: The beautiful is that which universally and
necessarily arouses disinterested satisfaction by its mere form
(purposiveness without the representation of a purpose).
Since the pleasurableness of the beautiful rests on the fact that
it establishes a pleasing harmony between the imagination and the
understanding, hence between sensuous and intellectual apprehension, the
aesthetic attitude is possible only in sensuous-rational beings. The
agreeable exists for the animal as well, and the good is an object of
approval for pure spirits; but the beautiful exists for humanity alone.
Kant succeeded in giving very delicate and felicitous verbal expression
to these distinctions: the agreeable gratifies _(vergnügt)_ and excites
inclination _(Neigung)_; the good is approved _(gebilligt)_ and arouses
respect _(Achtung)_; the beautiful "pleases" _(gefällt)_
and finds "favor"
_(Gunst)_.
In the progress of the investigation the principle that beauty depends on
the form alone, and that the concept, the purpose, the nature of the
object is not taken into account at all in aesthetic judgment, experiences
limitation. In its full strictness this applies only to a definite and, in
fact, a subordinate division of the beautiful, which Kant marks off under
the name of pure or _free_ beauty. With this he contrasts _adherent_
beauty, as that which presupposes a generic concept to which its form must
correspond and which it must adequately present. Too much a purist not
to mark the coming in of an intellectual pleasure as a beclouding of the
"purity" of the aesthetic satisfaction, he is still just enough to admit
the higher worth of adherent beauty. For almost the whole of artificial
beauty and a considerable part of natural beauty belong to this latter
division, which we to-day term ideal and characteristic beauty. Examples of
free or purely formal beauty are tapestry patterns, arabesques, fountains,
flowers, and landscapes, the pleasurableness of which rests simply on the
proportion of their form and relations, and not upon their conformity to a
presupposed significance and determination of the thing.
A building, on the
contrary--a dwelling, a summer-house, a temple--is considered beautiful
only when we perceive in it not merely harmonious relations of the parts
one to another, but also an agreement between the form and the purpose or
generic concept: a church must not look like a chalet.
Here the external
form is compared with an inner nature, and harmony is required between form
and content. Adherent beauty is significant and expressive beauty, which,
although the satisfaction in it is not "purely"
aesthetic, nevertheless
stands higher than pure beauty, because it gives to the understanding also
something to think, and hence busies the whole spirit.
The analytical investigations concerning the nature of the beautiful
receive a valuable supplement in the classical definition of genius. Kant
gives two definitions of productive talent, one formal and one genetic.
Natural beauty is a beautiful thing; artificial beauty, a beautiful
representation of a thing. The gift of agreeably presenting a thing which
in itself, perhaps, is ugly, is called taste. To judge of the beautiful
it is sufficient to possess taste, but for its production there is still
another talent needed, spirit or genius. For an art product can fulfill
the demands of taste and yet not aesthetically satisfy; while formally
faultless, it may be spiritless.
While beautiful nature looks as though it were art (as though it were
calculated for our enjoyment), beautiful art should resemble nature, must
not appear to be intentional though, no doubt, it is so, must show a
careful but not an overnice adherence to rules (_i.e._, not one which
fetters the powers of the artist). This is the case when the artist bears
the rule in himself, that is, when he is gifted. Genius is the
innate disposition (through) which (nature) gives rules to art; its
characteristics are originality, exemplariness, and unreflectiveness. It
does not produce according to definite rules which can be learned, but
it is a law in itself, it is original. It creates instinctively without
consciousness of the rule, and cannot describe how it produces its results.
It creates typical works which impel others to follow, not to imitate. It
is only in art that there are geniuses, _i.e._, spirits who produce that
which absolutely cannot be learned, while the great men of science differ
only in degree, not in kind, from their imitators and pupils, and that
which they discover can be learned by rule.
This establishes the criteria by which genius may be recognized. If we ask
by what psychological factors it is produced the answer is as follows:
Genius presupposes a certain favorable relation between imagination and
reason. Genius is the faculty of aesthetic Ideas, but an aesthetic Idea is
a representation of the imagination which animates the mind, which adds to
a concept of the understanding much of ineffable thought, much that belongs
to the concept but which cannot be comprehended in a definite concept. With
the aid of this idea Kant solves the antinomy of the aesthetic judgment.
The thesis is: The judgment of taste is not based upon concepts; for
otherwise it would admit of controversy (would be determinable by proofs).
The antithesis is: It is based upon concepts; for otherwise we could not
contend about it (endeavor to obtain assent). The two principles are
reconcilable, for "concept" is understood differently in the two cases.
That which the thesis rightly seeks to exclude from the judgment of beauty
is the determinate concept of the understanding; that which the antithesis
with equal justice pronounces indispensable is the indeterminate concept,
the aesthetic Idea.
The freest play is afforded the imagination by poetry, the highest of
all arts, which, with rhetoric ("insidious," on account of its earnest
intention to deceive), forms the group termed arts of speech. To the class
of formative arts belong architecture, sculpture, and painting as the art
of design. A third group, the art of the beautiful play of sensations,
includes painting as the art of color, and music, which as a "fine" art is
placed immediately after poetry, as an "agreeable" art at the very foot of
the list, and as the play of tone in the vicinity of the entertaining play
of fortune [games of chance] and the witty play of thought. The explanation
of the comic (the ludicrous is based, according to Kant, on a sudden
transformation of strained expectation into nothing) lays great (indeed
exaggerated) weight on the resulting physiological phenomena, the
bodily shock which heightens vital feeling and favors health, and which
accompanies the alternating tension and relaxation of the mind.
Besides free and adherent beauty, there is still a third kind of aesthetic
effect, the Sublime. The beautiful pleases by its bounded form. But also
the boundless and formless can exert aesthetic effect: that which is great
beyond all comparison we judge sublime. Now this magnitude is either
extensive in space and time or intensive greatness of force or power;
accordingly there are two forms of the sublime. That phenomenon which mocks
the power of comprehension possessed by the human imagination or surpasses
every measure of our intuition, as the ocean and the starry heavens, is
mathematically sublime. That which overcomes all conceivable resistance,
as the terrible forces of nature, conflagrations, floods, earthquakes,
hurricanes, thunderstorms, is dynamically sublime or mighty. The former
is relative to the cognitive, the latter to the appetitive faculty. The
beautiful brings the imagination and the understanding into accord; by
the sublime the fancy is brought into a certain favorable relation, not
directly to be termed harmony, with reason. In the one case there arose a
restful, positively pleasurable mood; here a shock is produced, an indirect
and negative pleasure proceeding from pain. Since the sublime exceeds the
functional capability of our sensuous representations and does violence to
the imagination, we first feel small at the sight of the absolutely great,
and incapable of compassing it with our sensuous glance.
The sensibility is
not equal to the impression; this at first seems contrary to purpose and
violent. This humiliating impression, however, is quickly followed by a
reaction, and the vital forces, which were at first checked, are stimulated
to the more lively activity. Moreover, it is the sensuous part of man
which is humbled and the spiritual part that is exalted: the overthrow of
sensibility becomes a triumph for reason. The sight of the sublime, that
is, awakens the _Idea of the unconditioned, of the infinite_. This Idea can
never be adequately presented by an intuition, but can be aroused only
by the inadequacy of all that is sensuous to present it; the infinite is
presented through the impossibility of presenting it. We cannot intuit the
infinite, but we can think it. In comparison with reason (as the faculty of
Ideas, the faculty of thinking the infinite) even the greatest thing that
can be given in the sense-world appears small; reason is the absolutely
great. "That is sublime the mere ability to think which proves a faculty
of the mind surpassing every standard of sense." "That is sublime which
pleases immediately through its opposition to the interest of the senses."
The conflict between phantasy and reason, the insufficiency of the former
for the attainment of the rational Idea, makes us conscious of the
superiority of reason. Just because we feel small as sensuous beings we
feel great as rational beings. The pleasure (related to the moral feeling
of respect and, like this, mingled with a certain pain) which accompanies
this consciousness of inner greatness is explained by the fact that the
imagination, in acknowledging reason superior, places itself in the
appropriate and purposive relation of subordination. It is evident from the
foregoing that the truly sublime is reason, the moral nature of man, his
predisposition and destination, which point beyond the present world.
Schiller declares that "in space the sublime does not dwell," and
Kant says, "Sublimity is contained in none of the things of nature, but
only in our mind, in so far as we are conscious of being superior to nature
within us and without us." Nevertheless, since in this contemplation we fix
our thoughts entirely on the object without reflecting on ourselves, we
transfer the admiration of right due to the reason and its Idea of the
infinite by subreption to the object by which the Idea is occasioned, and
call the object itself sublime, instead of the mood which it wakes in us.
If the sublime marks the point where the aesthetic touches on the boundary
of the moral, the beautiful is also not without some relation to the good.
By showing the agreement of sensibility and reason, which is demanded by
the moral law, realized in aesthetic intuition (as a voluntary yielding of
the imagination to the legitimacy of the understanding), it gives us the
inspiring consciousness that the antithesis is reconcilable, that the
rational can be presented in the sensuous, and so becomes a "symbol of the
good."
%(b) Teleological Judgment.%--Teleological judgment is not knowledge, but
a way of looking at things which comes into play where the causal or
mechanical explanation fails us. This is not the case if the purposiveness
is external, relative to its utility for something else.
The fact that the
sand of the sea-shore furnishes a good soil for the pine neither furthers
nor prevents a causal knowledge of it. Only inner purposiveness, as it
is manifested in the products of organic nature, brings the mechanical
explanation to a halt. Organisms are distinguished above inorganic forms by
the fact that of themselves they are at once cause and effect, that they
are self-productive and this both as a species (the oak springs from the
acorn, and in its turn bears acorns) and as individuals (self-preservation,
growth, and the replacement of dying parts by new ones), and also by the
fact that the reciprocally productive parts are in their form and their
existence all conditioned by the whole. This latter fact, that the whole is
the determining ground for the parts, is perfectly obvious in the products
of human art. For here it is the representation of the whole (the idea of
the work desired) which as the ground precedes the existence and the form
of the parts (of the machine). But where is the subject to construct
organisms according to its representations of ends? We may neither conceive
nature itself as endowed with forces acting in view of ends, nor a
praetermundane intelligence interfering in the course of nature. Either of
these suppositions would be the death of natural philosophy: the hylozoist
endows matter with a property which conflicts with its nature, and the
theist oversteps the boundary of possible experience.
Above all, the
analogy of the products of organic nature with the products of human
technique is destroyed by the fact that machines do not reproduce
themselves and their parts cannot produce one another, while the organism
organizes itself.
For our discursive understanding an interaction between the whole and the
parts is completely incomprehensible. We understand when the parts precede
the whole (mechanically) or the representation of the whole precedes
the parts (teleologically); but to think the whole itself (not the Idea
thereof) as the ground of the parts, which is demanded by organic life,
is impossible for us. It would have been otherwise if an intuitive
understanding had been bestowed upon us. For a being possessing
intellectual intuition the antithesis between possibility and actuality,
between necessity and contingency, between mechanism and teleology, would
disappear along with that between thought and intuition.
For such a being
everything possible (all that it thinks) would be at the same time
actual (present for intuition), and all that appears to us
contingent--intentionally selected from several possibilities and in order
to an end--would be necessary as well; with the whole would be given
the parts corresponding thereto, and consequently natural mechanism
and purposive connection would be identical, while for us, to whom the
intuitive understanding is denied, the two divide. Hence the teleological
view is a mere form of human representation, a subjective principle. We may
not say that a mechanical origin of living beings is impossible, but only
that we are unable to understand it. If we knew how a blade of grass or
a frog sprang from mechanical forces, we would also be in a position to
produce them.
The antinomy of the teleological judgment--thesis: all production of
material things and their forms must be judged to be possible according to
merely mechanical laws; antithesis: some products of material nature cannot
be judged to be possible according to merely mechanical laws, but to judge
them requires the causality of final causes--is insoluble so long as both
propositions are taken for constitutive principles; but it is soluble when
they are taken as regulative principles or standpoints for judgment. For it
is in no wise contradictory, on the one hand, to continue the search for
mechanical causes as far as this is in any way possible, and, on the other,
clearly to recognize that, at last, this will still leave a remainder which
we cannot make intelligible without calling to our aid the concept of ends.
Assuming that it were possible to carry the explanation of life from life,
from ancestral organisms (for the _generatio aequivoca_
is an absurd
theory) so far that the whole organic world should represent one great
family descended from one primitive form as the common mother, even
then the concept of final causes would only be pushed further back, not
eliminated: the origin of the first organization will always resist
mechanical explanation. Besides this mission of putting limits to causal
derivation and of filling the gap in knowledge by a necessary, although
subjective, way of looking at things, the Idea of ends has still another,
the direct promotion of knowledge from efficient causes through the
discovery of new causal problems. Thus, for example, physiology owes the
impulse to the discovery of previously unnoticed mechanical connections
(cf. also p. 382 note) to the question concerning the purpose of organs.
As doctrines mechanism and teleology are irreconcilable and impossible;
as rules or maxims of inquiry they are compatible, and the one as
indispensable as the other.
After the problem of life, which is insoluble by means of the mechanical
explanation, has necessitated the application of the concept of ends, the
teleological principle must, at least by way of experiment, be extended to
the whole of nature. This consideration culminates in the position that
man, as the subject of morality, must be held to be the final aim of the
world, for it is only in regard to a moral being that no further inquiry
can be raised as to the purpose of its existence. It also repeats the
moral argument for the existence of a supreme reason, thus supplementing
physico-theology, which is inadequate to the demonstration of one
absolutely perfect Deity; so that the third _Critique_, like the two
preceding, concludes with the Idea of God as an object of practical faith.
* * * * *
There are three original and pregnant pairs of thoughts which cause Kant's
name to shine in the philosophical sky as a star of the first magnitude:
the demand for a critique of knowledge and the proof of _a priori_ forms
of knowledge; the moral autonomy and the categorical imperative; the
regulative validity of the Ideas of reason and the practical knowledge of
the transcendent world. No philosophical theory, no scientific hypothesis
can henceforth avoid the duty of examining the value and legitimacy of its
conclusions, as to whether they keep within the limits of the competency of
human reason; whether Kant's determination of the origin and the limits of
knowledge may count on continued favor or not, the fundamental critical
idea, that reflection upon the nature and range of our cognitive faculty is
indispensable, retains its validity for all cases and makes an end of all
philosophizing at random.[1] No ethical system will with impunity pass by
the autonomous legislation of reason and the unconditional imperative (the
admonition of conscience translated into conceptual language): the nature
and worth of moral will will be everywhere sought in vain if they are not
recognized where Kant has found them--in the unselfish disposition, in that
maxim which is fitted to become a general law for all rational beings.
The doctrine of the Ideas, finally, reveals to us, beyond the daylight of
phenomenal knowledge, the starlit landscape of another mode of looking at
things,[2] in which satisfaction is afforded for the hitherto unmet wishes
of the heart and demands of the reason.
[Footnote 1: "_Reason_ consists just in this, that we are able to give
account of all our concepts, opinions, and assertions, either on objective
or subjective grounds."]
[Footnote 2: Those who regard all future metaphysics as refuted by the
Critique of Reason are to be referred to the positive side of the Kantian
doctrine of Ideas. Kant admits that the mechanical explanation does not
satisfy reason, and that, besides it, a judgment according to Ideas is
legitimate. When, therefore, the speculation of the constructive school
gives an ideal interpretation of the world, it may be regarded as an
extended application of "regulative principles," which exceeds its
authority only when it professes to be "objective knowledge."]
The effect of the three _Critiques_ upon the public was very varied. The
first great work excited alarm by the sharpness of its negations and its
destruction of dogmatic metaphysics, which to its earliest readers appeared
to be the core of the matter; Kant was for them the universal destroyer.
Then the Science of Knowledge brought into prominence the positive,
boldly conquering side, the investigation of the conditions of empirical
knowledge. In later times the endeavor has been made to do justice to both
sides, but, in opposition to the overbold procedure of the constructive
thinkers, who had fallen into a revived dogmatism, more in the spirit of
caution and resignation. The second great work aroused glowing enthusiasm:
"Kant is no mundane luminary," writes Jean Paul in regard to the _Critique
of Practical Reason_, "but a whole solar system shining at once."
The third, because of its subject and by its purpose of synthetic
reconciliation between fields heretofore sharply separated, gained the
sympathy of our poet-heroes Schiller and Goethe, and awakened in a young,
speculative spirit Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature.
Schelling reclaimed
the intuitive understanding, which Kant had problematically attributed to
the primal spirit, as the property of the philosopher, after Fichte had
drawn attention to the fact that the consciousness of the categorical
imperative, which Kant had not thoroughly investigated, could be nothing
else than intellectual intuition, because in it knowing and doing coincide.
Fichte, however, does not derive the material for his system from the
_Critique of Judgment_, though he also had a high appreciation of it, but
from the two earlier _Critiques_, the fundamental conceptions of which
he--following the hint that practical and theoretical reason are only
different applications of one and the same reason--
brings into the closest
connection. He unites the central idea of the practical philosophy, the
freedom and autonomous legislation of the will, with the leading principle
of the theoretical philosophy, the spontaneity of the understanding, under
the original synthesis of the pure ego, in order to deduce from the
activity of the ego not only the _a priori_ forms of knowledge, but also,
rejecting the thing in itself, t