A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, and Consciousness: Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment Part 6

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Judgment is a power but not one that can always be observed directly. Powers generally manifest themselves in their effects and sometimes their causes are hidden to those seeking to discover what they can about the puzzling world. For the empirical investigator, who discovers causes, judgment is registered in terms of facts relating to how men actually do make judgments about the world but theses facts do not always reveal the legitimacy or validity of these judgments. Kant is not particularly interested in such empirical investigations because he is seeking after the conditions necessary for how we ought to judge aesthetically and teleologically. Kant, in other words, is conducting transcendental and metaphysical investigations. This is why what we encounter in his work “The Critique of Judgment” resembles more a deduction in the legal sense of the term than a description of a causal sequence of events. A legal deduction tells us with what right a concept is used or a charge brought. Deductions prove to someone the right that one has to use a particular concept, make a particular judgment, etc. This is why the discussions we find in Kant’s work have such a transcendental quality about them, why, that is, his discussions look like arguments from a tribunal. These discussions focus on a certain type of judgment which possesses the characteristics of universality and necessity. In our previous essay, we noted the role of these two aspects in the formulation and use of the categorical imperative.

Categorical judgments, whether they be moral or scientific indicate the presence of an interplay of two rational faculties of our mind, namely reason, and understanding. These are not the kinds of judgments that Kant discusses in his third Critique. Rather his task in this work is to discuss what he calls reflective judgments–judgments that leave the existential status of the objects of these judgments open. Aesthetic judgments, for example, are reflective because although they are caused by a current perception of an aesthetic object the “meaning” of this object is related to the operation of the faculties of the understanding and the imagination in combination with one another. The presence of the understanding ensures that even if this operation is “reflective” and not constitutive of the object(as would be the case if a concept “determined” the manifold of intuition) the consequence nevertheless has universal and necessary aspects. The harmony of these faculties in reflective judgments produces, then, not a sensation-like feeling but an emotion-like state(involving pleasure or pain) which is cognitive in the sense that the state in question is selective with its objects. Indeed, in a work of fine art, there is another mechanism of selection insofar as this object is concerned and that is the aesthetic idea that motivates the work. It is also relevant in this context to point out that art critics evaluate works of art in much the same way individuals in a melancholic mood reject and accept events and activities that are inconsistent or consistent with the mood. Martin Heidegger in his work Being and Time claims that every mood has its understanding and perhaps it is this selectivity that he has in mind. Heidegger also suggests, partly in criticism of Kant, that the primary work of the mind in all cognitive work is not done by the faculties of the understanding and reason but rather by what Heidegger calls the “Transcendental Imagination”. Kant would, of course, have rejected this approach which transformed everything ontological and metaphysical into something experiential or psychological (instead of ideas of reason and categories of understanding).

There has been no shortage of critics of Kant’s aesthetic ideas throughout the ages and Dewey is one of these critics. Dewey, like Heidegger, wanted to inflate the work of the faculty of the imagination to the point that it could be held responsible for the work that Kant claims is done by the faculties of the understanding and reason. Dewey, also like Heidegger refers to moods as being the motivating mechanism behind the selection of relevant elements for the aesthetic experience. Dewey’s approach creates difficulties for the Kantian idea of the harmony of the faculties because this implies that the faculties of the mind are like the faculties of a university, embedded in a holistic continuum which ties the faculties together into one network(one mind, one university). Kant similarly speaks of the continuum of the faculties of intuition, imagination, understanding, and reason whilst simultaneously respecting the integrity of each of the faculties. In Dewey’s eyes, Kant is also indirectly accused of denying the role of emotion in the experience of art and aesthetic experience but in this context, it can be said that Dewey fails to register correctly what Kant is claiming in the name of the aesthetic idea and its role in the aesthetic experience in relation to the selection and rejection of the elements of the object of the experience. Dewey also fails to register that Kant locates the value and meaning of aesthetic the experience of the sublime not in the imagination(which is transcended in this experience) but in the faculty of reason. In the experience of the mathematically sublime, for example, objects and events of great magnitude are in reflective judgments associated with the presence of a super-sensible element that can only be related to our power or faculty of reasoning: a faculty or power that strives to provide a meaning of that which transcends the imagination:

“For here a feeling comes home to him of the inadequacy of his imagination for presenting the idea of a whole within which that imagination attains its maximum and, in its fruitless efforts to extend this limit, recoils upon itself, but in so doing succumbs to an emotional delight.”(Critique of Judgment p100)

Similarly in the experience of the dynamically sublime, e.g. in the presence of a powerful waterfall that so overwhelms the imagination that the mind is “quickened” into transforming this feeling of being overwhelmed by nature into a feeling of respect for the moral power and freedom of humanity. In these two examples, we can see clearly at play his respect for the continuum of the mental faculties involved. There is also respect for the Platonic intuition that knowledge is somehow involved in all aesthetic experience. In the case of the experience of the beautiful, the understanding sees in the elements of what is being intuited or imagined, suitability of the material for conceptualisation, which is, of course, one of the first stages of knowledge lying behind the knowledge claim that “S is P”. In such claims, something general is being predicated of something particular. The aesthetic experience of “free beauty” is thus, in reality, an experience of the pre-conceptual in which the process involved gives rise to a boundless pleasure at an object that has harmonised very different faculties of the mind. Dewey criticises Kant for being an old fashioned “critic” or “night watchman” who makes judgments dogmatically because he does not fully understand the roles of emotion and imagination in the aesthetic experience. Kant, were he to have had the opportunity to respond to this criticism of Dewey, would probably in his turn have criticised Dewey for being too sceptical or impressionable in his approach. In particular, Kant would have complained that Dewey’s criticisms completely overlook the importance of the super-sensible in aesthetic appreciation. Returning to the example of the mathematically sublime, Kant states the following:

“Nature, therefore, is sublime in such of its phenomena as in their intuition convey the idea of their infinity. But this can only occur through the inadequacy of even the greatest effort of our imagination in the estimation of the magnitude of an object.”(P.103)

And he further relates the notion of the infinite to the super-sensible in the following way:

“But the infinite is absolutely(not merely comparatively) great…But the point of capital importance is that the mere ability even to think it as a whole indicates a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense…Still the mere ability to think the given infinite without contradiction is something that requires the presence in the human mind of a faculty that is itself super-sensible.”(P. 102-3)

Both Dewey and Heidegger are at a disadvantage in discussions of the sublime because the poverty of their theories in relation to the faculties of the mind and their continuity with each other stretch the available faculties beyond recognition. Both are sceptical with respect to the functions of the Kantian faculties of understanding and reason. Neither believes in the important role of Logic in the investigations of the world or the mind. The task of Reason, for Kant, is one which must arrive at a totality of conditions or the unconditioned in accordance with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Many philosophers dismiss Kantian Philosophy without appeal to these principles because they are skeptical about a transcendental and metaphysical approach which minimises the role of experience and emotion. The notions of the super-sensible and noumenal reality are seen as resting points about which nothing further can be said, resting points that rest on dualistic assumptions that threaten both the world of experience and all investigation into the physical world. What such critics fail to see in Kant’s philosophy is a manifestation of a golden mean between dogmatic and skeptical criticism which allows the integration of diverse faculties of the mind as well as diverse areas of investigation such as science, morality, politics, religion, psychology, and aesthetics. It is, in fact, this hallmark of the integration of areas of discourse and faculties of mind that place Kant at the zenith of the Enlightenment tradition.

Kant opens his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment with the treatment of its different moments in terms of categories of the understanding. He begins with the moment of Quality:

“If we wish to discern whether anything is beautiful or not we do not refer the representation of it to the Object by means of the understanding with a view to cognition but by means of the imagination( acting perhaps in conjunction with the understanding) we refer the representation to the Subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure. The judgment of taste, therefore, is not a cognitive judgment and so not logical but is aesthetic–which means that it is one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective(P. 41-2)

Kant also refers to this feeling of pleasure as the feeling of life and it:

“forms the basis of a quite separate faculty of discriminating and estimating, that contributes nothing to knowledge.”(P.42)

In this reflective feeling, there is, Kant argues, no interest in the object concerned in the sense of a concern to conceptualize the existence one apprehends before one. One is rather concerned with the meaning of the representation in a disinterested fashion that distinguishes this mode of interaction from relating, for example, to an agreeable object such as a glass of wine or a moral object such as “the good”. In the latter two cases, the pleasure or displeasure involved is clearly related to interested desires for the objects concerned. In such cases, it seems as if what the objects are for, is the primary issue insofar as the pleasure is concerned: whereas in the case of the beautiful our delight is disinterested and free.

The second moment of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, the moment of quantity is characterized in the following definition:

“The beautiful is that which, apart from concepts, is represented as the Object of a Universal delight.”(P.57)

Kant here claims that the judgment of taste involves a claim to validity for all men and can not, therefore, be grounded upon a private feeling such as we encounter in judgments upon agreeable objects(e.g. a glass of wine). The man who judges something to be beautiful judges for all men and not merely himself: his judgment is subjectively universal. Because of this fact, he speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things and claims agreement from his fellows. If such agreement is not forthcoming, he attributes to them a lack of taste, meaning by this that they lack an understanding of, and a sensibility to the object in question. He does not, as is the case when we fail to agree upon what is morally good, demand agreement on the grounds of a concept of the Good. He nevertheless hopes for agreement because the grounds here are subjective and aesthetic. Judgments which possess this characteristic of subjective universality are for Kant generally valid but this does not entail that the judgment joins the predicate of beauty to the concept of the Object. It rather means that we extend the predicate over the whole field of judging subjects. Kant also points out that judgments of taste are logically singular judgments that are asserted universally with what Kant calls a “universal voice” the ground of which is not sought in conceptual agreement but rather in the universal communicability of the mental state of the free play of the faculties of the understanding and the imagination(sensibility). The grounds of this communicability lie in the fact that this pre-conceptual mental state is cognitive because it involves being able to discriminate between and select elements from a manifold of intuitions. This form of judgment, then, is. in a sense cognitive, but not in the sense of being a universal logical judgment in which the generalisation involved is about the external world: the aesthetic judgment rather is a subjective feature of our experience which also is both universal and necessary. The role of the imagination and the understanding are therefore different from the role they play when we conceptualize an object in order to make true judgments about the world of the form “S is P” where the end result is to say something that is true about the object. Here, the imagination is that organising power which holds together the manifold of intuitions in a schema. If we are viewing a house, for example, the intuitions of it’s inside and outside are organised into a schema which is such that we intuit that it is possible for a house, in general, to look like this particular house we are viewing. Something is represented in this schema. It is a preliminary insight, immediate, prior, to conceptualisation, and simultaneously revelatory of something about a house in general. This schema is the index of a concept, and subsumption, when it occurs, represents one element in which several particulars agree. Concepts are for use on more than one occasion and therefore possess an a priori property of applying to many particulars. In such instances, the particularity of the schema, its singularity, is sublimated, over-ruled, as it were but the substance of this singularity remains present in some form permitting, for example, the switch from thinking conceptually about an object to aesthetically referring its representation to our feeling of life.

The third moment of the Judgment of taste concludes with the following definition:

“Beauty is the form of finality in an object, so far as it is perceived apart from the representation of an end.”(P. 80)

The end being referred to is the object as it is thought to be possible through a concept of what sort of thing the object is to be. Here, the object of the concept is the effect of a cause which is the concept itself. Excluding this kind of cause from the judgment results in a state of mind, that may be described as a present consciousness of the presence of an object or alternatively the consciousness we have of the present-ness of an object. Whatever we are dealing with here it is clear that it is a feeling produced by the harmony of the faculties of the imagination and the understanding. Kant, as we have seen, denies that the representations involved are related to the end of the Good, whether these ends be utilitarian or the end of perfection. It is, for example, obvious to Kant that the object of aesthetic pleasure cannot be regarded as a means to the satisfaction of one’s desires(as in the case of enjoying a fine wine) or the means to something more objective such as the using of a hammer for fixing a tabletop. In both cases, the representation of the object is as a means to something else, and cannot, therefore, be a source of immediate pleasure. This is an elaboration upon Kant’s idea that in cases where representations of ends are involved we are dealing with the principle of causality. Any a priori connection is then lost since causal relations can only be cognized a posteriori. It becomes clear as his text proceeds that for Kant the foundation of the judgment of taste resides in a way in which the object is represented. If the way in which we represent an object involves thought about the matter of our sensations rather than their form, as is the case when we take pleasure in the greenness of a plot of grass or the tone of a violin, then this way of representing the object is not the way of the beautiful. According to Kant, such a representation is empirical and therefore only entitled to be called agreeable.

Our attention is also drawn in this section of Kant’s text to a distinction between a judgment of taste(of free beauty) and judgments of beauty that are tied to a kind of object such as man, a house, or a horse( dependent beauty).

The fourth moment of the modality of delight in a judgment of taste begins with a discussion of the kind of necessity involved. It is not, Kant argues, a theoretical objective necessity because it is not the case that we feel that everyone does, as a matter of fact, feel delight in any object judged by others to be beautiful. Neither is it the case that the necessity involved is a practical necessity where the delight is a consequence of an objective categorical law that provides agents with a rule to ground claims that one ought absolutely to act in a certain way. In the case of judgments of beauty we are not “interested” and propelled by our desire to bring about some end consistent with a law but there is a sense in which when we speak with a universal voice in our judgment we are insisting that everyone ought to feel the way we feel about the object in question in virtue of the fact that this object provokes the harmony of the faculties of the understanding and the imagination. Kant claims that the nature of the necessity involved in the judgment of taste is an exemplary necessity. That is, the judgment is an example of a universal rule which is incapable of formulation. The fact that such a rule is involved, however indeterminate it may lead one to insist that everyone ought to give the object concerned their approval and judge it to be beautiful. This ought, however, is not asserted unconditionally as is the case of the practical necessity that is involved in moral judgment. The judgment of taste, then, Kant argues, is asserted on the basis of an indeterminate principle of common sense and Kant is uncertain whether this rule or principle is constitutive of the experience of the beautiful or merely regulating the experience.

Kant further discusses the faculty of the imagination in a section entitled “General Remark” and distinguishes between what he calls “reproductive imagination” which is subject to the empirical laws of association and the “productive imagination” which he claims to be the “originator of arbitrary forms of possible intuition”. The latter is the kind of imagination involved in judgments of beauty and Kant points out that the imagination is not totally free because the form of a given object of the judgment must be more than an occasion of the activity of the imagination. The object, that is, must possess a structure capable of forming the manifold of intuition in harmony with the understanding.

Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime” begins by pointing out the kinship and contrasts between judgments of the beautiful and judgments of the sublime. Features in common are:

1. Both are judgments of reflection.
2. Both please on their own account.
3. Both refer to ideas of a particular kind.

The features which serve to differentiate the beautiful from the sublime are the following:

1. The beautiful presents us with an indeterminate idea of the understanding while the sublime presents us with an indeterminate idea of reason.
2. The beautiful in nature is concerned with the form of an object whereas the sublime seems to be found in objects devoid of form.
3. The delight in the beautiful is immediate and related to a feeling of the furtherance of life whereas the delight in the sublime arises more indirectly as part of the reflective process.
4. The beautiful is contained in sensuous form whereas the sublime concerns ideas of reason which we are not capable of adequately representing in sensuous form.
5. The ground of the beautiful in nature must be sought outside our minds whereas the ground of the sublime is to be found in an attitude of mind that introduces sublimity into the representation of nature.
6. The feeling of the sublime contains a mental movement of the mind combined with an estimate of the object. The feeling associated with the judgment of the beautiful on the other hand is one where the mind restfully contemplates its object.

In his discussion of the Mathematically sublime which is concerned with the magnitude of natural or artificial objects, Kant discusses the difficulty the imagination has with the estimation of objects of considerable magnitude. The logical estimation of magnitude cannot provide us with an absolute concept because, any standard we use is in itself subject to comparison with some other numerically greater standard and this because of the relation of our concept of number to our concept of infinity (The vastness of the size of our galaxy pales in comparison with the vastness of the universe). Ideas of Reason relate to the super-sensible and the noumenal aspect of reality and we find in the sublime an attitude of mind and indeterminate ideas of reason that sublimate the imagination’s displeasurable activity of attempting to comprehend what for it is “the incomprehensible”. Kant argues that as a consequence of this failure a kind of respect attaches to our apprehension and the organising idea of Reason. This feeling may then be projected onto infinitely extended objects such as the starry heavens and may even result in the projection of the idea of an intelligent design and designer onto the spectacle.

The dynamically sublime differs in that at the foot of an immensely powerful waterfall that I am apprehending I may well experience a fear that I do not in my apprehension of the starry heavens. This fear, however, rapidly dissipates in the subsequent process of contemplating this phenomenon: a process in which we distance ourselves from the object and involute our attention instead upon ourselves and our own freedom to act morally( a freedom nature does not possess). Viewing nature in this way probably entails the possession of a sublime character, Kant argues. This frame of mind is:

“conscious of having a disposition that is upright and acceptable to God”(P.113-4)

the telos of the above disharmony of the faculties of imagination and reason is then an awareness of the super-sensible unconditioned.

Kant also discusses the judgment of the beauty of a work of fine art(an object of dependent beauty). This kind of judgment is guided by a process of rational deliberation that has the goal of stimulating the harmony of the faculties which in its turn produces a feeling of disinterested pleasure. Fine art is constituted by intentional action of a certain kind that produces an object of a certain kind.

This reference to disinterestedness raises the issue, in Kant’s mind, of the relation of morality to the beautiful, both of which are characterised by this rational state of mind which appears to demand agreement from participators in the experience. Kant states that Beauty is the symbol of morality because of the congruence of these states of mind. Another interesting corollary of this line of thought is that both the deliberative processes involved in moral and aesthetic thinking result in the postulation of an intelligent designer.

The form of finality of a work of fine art involves, then, creating an object whose form or design does not immediately suggest a particular interest or purpose but rather leads to a process of apprehension in which we, the appreciators, detect the design as part of the object’s “purposiveness without a purpose”. Genius is therefore required in fine art for this reason but also because the work needs to suggest the super-sensible aspect of reality and simultaneously quicken the super-sensible substrate of the faculties of our minds. Such works, therefore possess a spirit which has been involved in the design of the matter in relation to the above-mentioned indeterminate aesthetic ideas. Kant characterises these aesthetic ideas in the following manner:

“In a word, the aesthetic idea is a representation of the imagination, annexed to a given concept with which, in the free employment of imagination, such a multiplicity of partial representations are bound up, that no expression indicating a definite concept can be found for it–one which on that account allows a concept to be supplemented in thought by much that is indefinable in words and the feeling of which quickens the cognitive faculties, and with language, as a mere thing of the letter, binds up the spirit(soul) also. The mental process whose union in a certain relation constitutes genius are imagination and understanding….. genius , properly consists in the happy relation, which science cannot teach nor industry learn, enabling one to find ideas for a given concept, and besides to hit upon the expression for them–the expression by means of which the subjective mental condition induced by the ideas as the concomitant of a concept may be communicated to others.”(S 49 P. 179)

The genius behind the work of fine art is for Kant analogous to the genius at work in nature insofar as the snowflake and seashell are concerned. The foundation of artistic genius and aesthetic ideas is found in the mind in what Kant calls the super-sensible substrate of the mind which unifies sensibility, imagination, understanding, and reason. It is this structure that guarantees the universality and necessity of aesthetic judgments. The super-sensible substrate is significantly related to Reason and its search for the unconditioned. Given the importance of practical reasoning and morality in the structure of our minds it is also clear that morality is grounded in the super-sensible substrate in which faculties interact with each other. For Kant, divine intelligence not only designs and produces snowflakes but also guarantees a flourishing life to those agents who think morally and divinely(using the super-sensible substrate of their minds?) in relation to the actions they perform and the judgments they make. In both aesthetic and moral contexts it is important to understand the role of the ought, important to understand its idealistic role. Kant is not saying that everyone, as a matter of fact, will do what they ought to do whether it be a matter of morality or a matter of aesthetically appreciating objects of free and dependent beauty. He is merely making the judgment that we ought to do these things. Both morality and aesthetics are ideal realms, not scientific realities. Yet there is a sense in which ideals are perhaps more important and therefore more real than the picture of a mechanical world conceived as a totality of facts. If, Kant argues, we had to learn the laws of morality and the design of objects from the observation of causes in nature there would be no logical unity of the cause and effect that we find in our moral, aesthetic and teleological judgments. We, finite beings, he argues, can only perceive cause and effect phenomenally, and because this must be the case it is only our moral, aesthetic and teleological judgments that reach into the super-sensible realm of noumena via Platonic allegories. We are forced to postulate the super-sensible “as if” it possessed the powers of divine genius.

The Critique of Judgment attempts to build bridges over the divide left by the first two Critiques on Science and Morality. Many have seen the Critique of Teleological Judgment as an attempt to anthropomorphize nature but these commentators fail to appreciate the Platonic allegory involved in saying that a blade of grass involves such a large network of causalities that it is “as if” and intelligent designer(knowing how the totality of causes in the universe operate) selected just those causes necessary to produce this blade of grass. The conclusion to be drawn here is that our minds are finite because they are limited in the number of variables they can comprehend and this fact, in turn, may decisively limit our comprehension of the noumenally based continuum/network of reality.

Aristotle, we know insisted on the universality and necessity of final cause explanations in response to perhaps this very problem. For Aristotle, water on earth is for the formation of the clouds in the air which are for the production of rain which is for the growth of the plants which is for the sustenance of the animals which is for the sustenance of human beings which is for….? Commentators who fail to understand Aristotle’s concept of teleology have misinterpreted the above as a process of backward causation because they believe that the world is a network of linear causes that can operate only in one direction. If this was true morality and aesthetics would both be relative because the connection between individual causes and effects could never be logically related as they are in one blade of grass.

Kant thought of the harmony of the faculties as an end-in.itself and he may well have been contemplating the work of Aristotle when he suggested this idea. Given the fact of the finitude of human comprehension, there may be no choice but to humanise the universe we live in: if that is, we may wish to grasp anything about it.

Teleological causality is of course at odds with the more mechanical laws of material and efficient causality that the scientist believes are the only forms of causality we need to understand if we wish to accurately understand the world. Kant begins by discussing natural purposes and how living things manifest such purpose. The ensuing discussion is very reminiscent of the discussion of the concept of psuche that we find in Aristotle. Teleological judgment differs from aesthetic judgments in that it is not just purposive but possesses purposes. The blade of grass has roots that serve the purposes of nourishment. If, however, one abstracts from the universal purpose or teleology of nature we are left with a picture of Aristotle dissecting his animals, examining their organ systems and the lives that are made possible by the biological structures he observes. What we have here, it should be insisted is a picture of an investigator who is convinced that the purposiveness of the phenomena he is investigating can not be sufficiently explained by reference to material and efficient causes. Living phenomena, in particular, require, Aristotle argues, all four forms of explanation that Aristotle includes in his hylomorphic theory of change. The teleological form of explanation partially explains how psuche or “Life” manifest self-sufficiency and determination that is allegorical of human intelligence and personality. The logic of the relation between material and final cause is illustrated by Kant’s example of a house which was built for the purpose of generating an income in contrast to the house as a material object that exists spatially at a particular period in time. In this example, this materially existing object before being built was an ideal object possessing a form of existence by being a part of the architect’s mind, an existence best defined by Aristotelian formal and final causes. The actual building of the house operating in accordance with material and efficient causation appears to be, then, a merely mechanical process being guided by the formal and final causes involved. Similarly with respect to human activity and the human being, the material and efficient causes would appear to be secondary forms of explanation compared to formal and final causes. It is important to recognise that there is here no denial about the importance of material and efficient causes when it comes to explaining the biological and some psychological aspects of human activity. Indeed all 4 causes may be necessary for some forms of understanding that require the operation of the principle of sufficient reason.

One of the problems that emerge with Kant’s characterisation of natural purpose and its explanation in terms of the teleology of the divine or sensible, is that when it comes to psuche or the life principle (that supposedly determines an organism to do what it does), the principle is compromised if the final cause is going to reside directly in God or the super-sensible. This, however, is not a contradiction because the freedom of the organism to determine itself can in its turn be the direct result of an efficient and material cause that lies at the origin of the life of the individual. There is, in other words, no contradiction in insisting that God is the repository of the laws that govern life. Such life has its own formal and final causes, its own self-determination and autonomy. On the contrary, natural purposes lead us naturally to the realm of the super-sensible we think of as divine, or Aristotle thought of as the result of divine thinking activity. The preference for formal and final causal explanation over material and efficient causal explanation is for Kant a modal issue relating to necessity. The physical phenomenal universe(the universe as we know it to be) does not necessarily exist because the condition of its existence is a noumenal actuality. This is the unconditioned that our faculties of understanding and reason lead us toward. The divide between noumena and phenomena can, then, according to Kant, only be bridged by Platonic allegory(the sun, the divided line, the cave). The phenomenal world of objects and events in space and time operating in accordance with a deterministic mechanical causality is not on this account, the world in itself, the unconditioned world of noumena. The principle of the purposiveness of nature, then, actually reaches further into the realm of the noumenal or the super-sensible than our scientific theories and this is shown by the limitations of scientific explanation to explain completely the forms of the snowflake and the seashell,(not to mention life, and the moral law). The world then is being conceived as a totality of forms and purposes which can be explained at different levels by material, efficient, formal, and final causation. Here we should bear in mind that the term in ancient Greek, aitiai (for Aristotle) meant “explanation”.

The kind of judgment that Kant is referring to here in characterizing teleological and aesthetic reasoning is a reflective judgment whose ground is subjective, but it is a form of judgment to which both universality and necessity attach as defining conditions.

Kant then makes the surprising claim that Theology is the tribunal that will settle all questions of morality and science and perhaps settle political questions as well, given the fact that Politics is fundamentally dependent upon morality for its final justification. It is perhaps interesting to note that in this political context the political telos of political processes is a kingdom of ends that carries with it a connotation of a “holy end” for man.

For Aristotle, and perhaps also for Kant, everything in existence is ideally both what it is and what it ought to be without necessity or possibility. The world is actualised and at least for Aristotle is better characterised by thinking than by any physical process or state. God apparently does not think of anything actual outside of himself but is rather engaged in a process of thinking about himself and this is an actuality and not a mere potentiality. The key faculty involved in explanation for both Aristotle and Kant is the faculty of reason and both see human reasoning and rationality as the actualising of a potentiality that is not always and inevitably actualised. Indeed for Kant, rationality will not be fully actualised in the species of man for one hundred thousand years. Kant is thinking here of the long road of improvement it is necessary for man to travel if we are to reach a Kingdom of Ends in which there is a full acknowledgment of our moral and intellectual virtues. What, we may wonder, is the role of Beauty and the Sublime in this actualisation process? If Beauty and the Sublime involve a way of being aware of the world as it is and simultaneously the super-sensible substrate of our faculties then the kingdom of ends will surely contain great-souled citizens capable of aesthetic contemplation to a greater extent than we are capable of today. This will include an awareness of the sublimity of a designer of the universe. Similarly, with respect to works of fine art, the citizen of the kingdom of ends will be more capable, for example of detecting the soulless work and be more capable of detecting works of genius. Kant claims in this context that the Soul is “the originating principle in the mind”: a mind independent of any determination by nature (that contemplates nature as a phenomenon), a mind that thinks in the light of aspects which are “a sort of schema for the super-sensible”.

It is clear, then, for Kant, that the indeterminate aesthetic idea which we are operating with, in making judgments of beauty and the sublime refers to both the super-sensible substrate of all phenomena as well as to the super-sensible substrate of the faculties of the Subject. It is, however, the latter which is the best clue to what an aesthetic idea might be. In Remark 1 of the “Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment” Kant discusses along with the topics of beauty, morality, and symbolism “The Idealism of the finality alike of Nature and Art”. He claims here that ideas are not cognitions but rather “representations referred to an object according to a certain principle(subjective or objective)”. It is Kant claims, an intuition for which no adequate concept can be found, an “inexponible representation of the imagination”. As is the case with so-called rational ideas, where the principle involved is objective, there is a principle, albeit a subjective one, responsible for the production of aesthetic ideas. By subjective principle, Kant means “the super-sensible substrate of all the Subject’s faculties”. Idealism is obviously an important issue in this discussion and Kant claims that idealism must be presupposed in order to explain the universality of the judgment of taste. Idealism in its turn presupposes symbolic representations that have a particular cognitive structure. A symbolic representation, it is claimed is one “where the concept is one which only reason can think and to which no sensible intuition can be adequate”. The relation that exists between the concept and the intuition is such that agreements between them supervene only through a process of reflection in which judgment performs a double function: firstly, it attempts to apply the concept to the object of the sensible representations concerned, and secondly, in the reflection involved it becomes aware that the representations are not an adequate presentation of the concept Further, there is a basis in the reflective process for this representation to merely symbolise something. This discussion is a prelude to answering the question posed earlier relating to the symbolic relationship between the beautiful and morality. There are, Kant argues, fundamental similarities between these two domains of judgment. In both cases, for example, the pleasure which the mind takes in its representations is more noble than the pleasure which it is possible to take in relation to one’s sense impressions(pleasure in drinking a glass of wine). By “more noble” Kant means that the maxims of the judgment or the grounds for the judgment can be the cause of an appraisal of our worth as judgers. This appraisal will, of course, differ in the two cases in that, in the case of the beautiful, those whose judgments are not well-founded will not necessarily have their rationality impugned, merely their sensibility or sensitiveness. In both cases, the pleasure is immediate, though the sources differ. Both please apart from interest even though moral pleasure does create an interest. The imagination is free in both instances and universality is characteristic of both types of principles. Kant also points out interestingly that there is a tendency to use the language of moral estimation in the realm of the beautiful:

“Even common understanding is wont to pay regard to this analogy: and we frequently apply to beautiful objects of nature or of art names that seem to rely upon the basis of a moral estimate. We call buildings or trees majestic or stately, or plains laughing or gay: even colours are called innocent, modest soft because they exercise sensations containing something analogous to the consciousness of the state of mind produced by moral judgment.”(p225)

It is clear that in this discussion of the analogies and differences insofar as the beautiful and moral are concerned, it is Kant’s intention to emphasise the analogies. This position is reinforced in the following quote:

“Taste is in the ultimate analysis, a critical factor that judges of the rendering of moral ideas in terms of sense(through the intervention of a certain analogy in our reflection on both): and it is this tendency also, and the increased sensibility, founded upon it for the feeling which these ideas evoke(termed moral sense), that are the origin of that pleasure which taste declares valid for mankind in general and not merely for the private feeling of each individual.”(P. 227)

Kant goes on to insist that it is “only when sensibility is brought into harmony with moral feeling that genuine taste can assume a definite unchangeable form”. This can be done in fine art by the representation of the human form in human contexts and we are also told in this context that the propaedeutic to fine art lies in the development of those mental powers which are produced by the humaniora–i.e. those studies concerned with the feeling of sympathy and the universal communication of those subjective properties which contribute to the social spirit and advancement of mankind. Whilst the propaedeutic for the laying of the foundations of taste must lie in “the development of moral ideas and the culture of the moral feeling”. The conclusion which we are meant to draw from this is that the feeling involved in taste is significantly analogous to moral feeling to warrant a special investigation. The investigation referred to was not undertaken by Kant.

The Fine Arts are obviously a branch of the humaniora and one of the first tasks of those concerned with these arts ought to be a search for a classification system or system of categories. Kant embarks on this task in a sub-section entitled “The Division of the Fine Arts” and he opens his investigation with a major distinction based on the presence or absence of Language in the Art concerned. Linguistic communication and what occurs in this process is the source f his divisions of the Arts into the Expressive Arts, the Formative Arts, and the Arts of the play of Sensations. The basis here is obviously that in linguistic communication we communicate thoughts and intuitions by words, gestures, and tones. The arts of speech are divided into Poetry and Rhetoric. Kant discusses Rhetoric and dismisses it as a candidate for serious art on the grounds of it being a mechanism for persuading and deluding others. Poetry, on the other hand, is regarded as the Queen of the Arts. It functions by presentations of a concept coupled with “a wealth of thought to which no verbal expression is completely adequate”. Here again, we find a reference to noumena. Kant claims that the mind, independent of any determination by nature, contemplates in the light of aspects which form “a sort of schema for the sensible”. The next major subdivision is the division of the Formative Arts that use figures in space for the expression of ideas in a similar way to gestures. This is a deep insight into how it is that painting, sculpture, and architecture bear their meanings. They do so in ways similar to the way in which human action bears a meaning. Upon being confronted by an action where it is not immediately evident what the intention is, we search for the maxim of the action. In the formative arts, we are confronted with traces of action and the individuals who created these works are not present and may even be dead: the maxims of their actions are therefore hidden and require acts of interpretation. Nothing that occurs in these arts can be randomly occurring or accidental, it is argued. Therefore it must be true that there must be a meaning or a maxim behind every element we encounter in such works. Such maxims or meanings intend to put the truth to work in a context of sensory experience. Kant argues that sculpture and architecture concern themselves with sensuous truth, perhaps in the spirit of the Greek term “aletheia”(unconcealment). Here the elements must in some sense “reveal” their maxims or meaning. Painting, for Kant, is analysed in a Platonic spirit and concerns itself not with sensory truth but rather a sensory semblance(for Plato the sensory is already an imitation of an underlying reality which would make Painting or any art which imitates the sensory an imitation of an imitation). In spite of this seeming logical limitation, Kant maintains that Painting is the art of design because it reaches further into the realm of ideas that provides the groundwork for all the other formative arts. Sculpture, Kant insists, in moving from an indefinite idea to its presentation in sensation “presents concepts of things corporeally as they might exist in nature“. Architecture too moves from an indefinite idea to its presentation in sensation but it is unlike sculpture in that the determining ground of its form is something we use. This use is a constraining factor in what can be expressed in the creation. With regard to the connection of these forms of art to action or gestures, Kant has the following to say:

“The justification, however, of bringing formative art(by analogy) under a common head with gesture in a speech, lies in the fact that through these figures the soul of the artist furnishes a bodily expression for the substance and character of his thought, and makes the thing itself speak, as it were, in mimic language–a very common play of our fancy, that contributes to lifeless things a soul suitable to their form, and that uses them as their mouthpiece.”(P. 188)

So the gesture has meaning in the way language has meaning. The gesture is a linguistic gesture. The meaning is similar to the soul behind or in the words.

The third division of the Sensation -based arts is illustrated by music and visual comedy. There is no element of reflection in either of these arts because they are more a matter of enjoyment than culture.

The above classification scheme obviously testifies to the diversity of the arts and the different ways in which aesthetic ideas transport us into the realm of the super-sensible where that is their intention. Plato certainly believed that the form of Beauty was timeless and a feature of the super-sensible substrate of the faculties of our minds, but he also believed(and this is probably true of Kant too) that the principle of Beauty could not of itself reveal the moral, political, and religious dimensions of our world and our minds. This was evident in the difference in the education of the warrior-rulers and the philosopher rulers in the Republic where different virtues were being cultivated. The warrior, we should recall would not study philosophy and dialectic and would need music to quench possible aggressive impulses toward their own fellow citizens. This kind of conditioning was not necessary for the philosophers whose knowledge of the Good sufficed for controlling themselves.

Modern Aesthetic Philosophy is not influenced by Kant for a number of reasons connected with the failure of the Enlightenment to pursue the moral, religious aesthetic program outlined by Kant’s work. Perhaps modernity is well illustrated by the work of Martin Heidegger entitled “The Origin and Essence of a Work of Art”. Heidegger uses the Greek concept of aletheia and formal and material causation in a discussion about a pair of workers shoes. Here he claims that the matter is manipulated for the purposes of displaying a piece of equipment that reveals the contours of the world of the worker. The worker who uses these shoes, it is argued is involved in a world without being thematically aware of either the equipment that is used nor the world as is revealed to the appreciator. This lack of awareness is one of the consequences of Heidegger’s concept of our involvement in equipmental contexts in which objects are, as he put the matter in his seminal work “Being and Time” “ready-to-hand”. The appreciator of the painting of the shoes, on the other hand, must reflect upon the shoes and the world in which they are embedded thematically using, according to Heidegger, principally their imagination. The resultant construction of the imagination reveals, argues Heidegger, what the world was like for the wearer of the shoes and perhaps also what equipment is in its Being. Equipment, it is argued, is something to be relied upon. Heidegger then asks the important question “How has this truth been revealed to us?” and provides us with the answer that it is the essence of a work of art to set the truth of beings to work. In the work of appreciation, truth is put to work by the setting up of a world. The materials used by the artist is obviously important for this to be successful. There is something stony in a work of architecture, argues Heidegger, something spoken in a literary work, something colourful in a painting, and something sonorous in a musical composition. This material in itself is not being used as equipment because the material that equipment is made of does not reveal itself in the process of its use. In such processes, it is only when something goes wrong with the material in the process that it appears as material. In works of art, on the other hand, the material stands out in its appropriateness. The essence of a work of art then, is characterised in the formula “setting-the-truth-of beings.to-work”. Heidegger invokes the Greek concept of aletheia (unconcealment) in order to clarify this process of revelation through material. The artist embodies a way of knowing in his work with the material he has chosen, and it is this mode of knowing that we encounter in the created-ness of a work of art. This is the mode of beauty.

Language is as important for Heidegger as it was for Kant and perhaps both believe that there is something poetic in all works of art, thereby giving linguistic works a privileged position in any system of classification of the arts. Language is best suited, it is argued, to bring beings into the realm of unconcealedness, revealing truth to the appreciator. For Heidegger, nonlinguistic arts perform the same function in virtue of the operation of something analogous to but also different from what is at work in the case of linguistic art-objects.

What is disclosed by the work is made possible only through the beauty of art, its mode of knowing. Beauty is a way in which truth occurs, in other words. But how then is beauty and truth related? It must be admitted that when we encountered in Kant’s Critique of Judgment the harmony of the faculties of the imagination and the understanding a similar question arose. Perhaps the question arises as a consequence of an ambivalent or ambiguous notion of the Truth. Perhaps, it has been argued, the notions of the truth as “correctness” or “correspondence” or “verification” that has dominated philosophical discourse since scholastic Philosophy in the Middle Ages was the problem? The Latin term Veritas contained no trace of the idea of truth as unconcealment or aletheia, according to Heidegger, and was, therefore, part of the reason why the above notions prevailed after Latin became the dominant language in Europe. This was part of what Heidegger referred to as the cultural forgetfulness that had been occurring since the time of Aristotle. It is not exactly clear what role Heidegger thought Aristotle played in this process but it is clear that Aristotle would have questioned the above account of Art in much the same way Kant would have. The concepts of matter and form are in origin Aristotelian notions which Heidegger referred to in his work and these as we know were a part of his hylomorphic theory of change. Both Kant and Aristotle would have been puzzled by Heidegger’s concentration upon the material aspect of the work of art at the expense of its form or principle. Both would have found the emphasis interesting but would have stopped short of endorsing the thesis that it was the work of the faculty of imagination that was the primary agent of the process. They would have been puzzled by the absence of the faculties of understanding and reason in the account. Let us remind ourselves of how Kant would have characterised the reflective process involved in the appreciation of the sublime, an aesthetic response that involves the imagination only negatively:

“But the most important and vital distinction between the sublime and the beautiful is certainly this, that is, as is allowable, we have to confine our attention in the first instance to the sublime in objects of nature(that of art being always restricted by the conditions of the agreement with nature), we observe that whereas natural beauty(such as is self-subsisting) conveys a finality in its form making the object appear, as it were, preadapted to our power of judgment, so that it thus forms of itself an object of delight, that which without our indulging in any refinements of thought, but simply in our apprehension of it, excites the feeling of the sublime, may appear indeed, in point of form, to contravene the ends of our power of judgment, to be ill-adapted to our faculty of presentation and to be as it were, an outrage of the imagination, and yet it is judged all the more sublime on that account. From this, it may seem that we express ourselves on the whole inaccurately if we term any object of nature sublime, although we may with perfect propriety call such an object beautiful.”(P.91)

The beautiful of course gives rise to judgments that are the product of the imagination and the understanding and it is undoubtedly the categories of the latter that are used to analyse the logical nature of Judgment. Reason is also operating in the judgment of taste via the regulating idea of common sense, in conjunction with the imagination. There is no sense, however, in which the imagination can be given the primary role in the production of the judgment of taste because the idea of common sense that is being referred to in Kant, must be an idea of Reason.

Stanley Cavell in his works takes up the Kantian discussion of the resemblance between the language we use to characterise beautiful objects and the language we use in moral discourse. He claims that when it comes to fine art we treat the objects concerned in ways normally reserved for the treatment of persons, i.e. in terms of the moral categories of intention, honesty, authority, profundity, personal style, etc. We do not, Cavell argues, turn to Art for information about the world, but rather to see what someone wants to present to us in the medium they have chosen to work with. This position also echoes the Kantian sentiment of the formative arts being “gestural”. Cavell continues his aesthetic reflections by claiming in Heideggerian spirit that all Art is revelation. His concept of revelation, however, is more psychological than philosophical, and claims that the revelation is manifested in a process of interpersonal acknowledgment(which appears to fall under the heading of the Heideggerian concept of “Care”). According to Cavell acknowledgment is an existentiale by which he means a category in terms of which a given type of response is evaluated. The revelation involved in such judgments of acknowledgment is not, Cavell argues, a true statement, dependent upon evidence for its truth but rather a truthful statement: something that one responds to gesturally by accepting or rejecting what is put forward in similar ways to the way in which one accepts or rejects statements in accordance with principles of truthfulness or fraudulence. The issue of fraudulence is clearly connected to personal gestures. According to Cavell, it is the imagination that “reads” the work of art and this raises the problem of whether the imagination on its own can be a knowledge bearing faculty. If so, an enormous burden is placed upon the artist. It is not sufficient to produce a sonnet or a painting of a landscape or a fugue, the artist, according to Cavell must also raise very general questions about Art as such. Perhaps it is because of this requirement that an artist needs to be a genius. There are clearly strands of Kantian thinking here if we ignore the question of the epistemological capacity of the imagination(the mark of an existential analytic of Art). The beautiful prepares us to love something, Cavell claims Kant has said. It is not clear that Kant would have emphasised this point in the way that Cavell does, especially given the Kantian account of the sublime in which the concept of respect is paramount. One should also remember in this context that for Kant the primary form of acknowledging another person is via respect for their relation to the moral law, the categorical imperative. For Cavell this would appear to be a prime example of avoiding the other person, but it is not clear that this is so if one sees the relation of Kant’s idea to the Aristotelian idea of friendship between the citizens of a polis. These citizens, according to Aristotle, love each other in a metaphorical sense that probably resembles respect more than any other emotion. Cavell’s existential analytic or phenomenological approach to Aesthetic judgments is obsessed with an epistemological perspective that denies the importance of reason, aesthetic ideas and the relation of aesthetic experience to the super-sensible. If acknowledgment is meant to serve the purpose of an organising principle it clearly lacks the universality and necessity we expect from a principle. Even a practical principle or law such as freedom for Kant must prove its universality and necessity by its effect on reality. In the end acknowledgment for Kant must be characterised in terms of the practical principle of freedom which demands that people acknowledge each other by respecting each other’s freedom and their use of understanding and reason. These faculties involve the maxims of actions whose purpose it is to treat others and oneself as an end-in-itself. This is what is involved in understanding others. There is, of course, a role for the imagination of concrete possibilities in this kind of account, but it is clearly the case that the primary focus of the principle must be the faculties of reason and the understanding. No empirical/descriptive approach will in such circumstances engage with the problems that arise requiring transcendental and metaphysical solutions. There is, in other words, no serious alternatives to the hylomorphic Philosophy of Aristotle and the Critical Philosophy of Kant especially when it comes to investigating the nature of aesthetic and teleological judgments.

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