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The principle involved in Judgements of taste in relation to Art, on the other hand, is:
“The principle of nature’s formal finality for our cognitive faculties” (Kants Critique of Judgement, Trans Meredith, J.C., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973, Page 35)
The Critique of Judgement is also, however, concerned with teleological judgement which aims to provide us with the principle of the finality of nature, and this is especially relevant when we are dealing with psyche or life forms. Here the transcendental analogy that is operating is that of the operation of the changes we observe in Nature (living and inorganic)and these are analogous to the changes we bring about as human agents. This is certainly more relevant to the life form changes we observe, than for the purely physical changes we observe in a nature consisting of a multiplicity of inorganic causes which, it can be argued, do not possess any principle of self-causation (e.g. self-preservation) as is the case with life forms such as animals or even a blade of grass.
Life too has a multiplicity of causes and for Aristotle (who envisaged four different kinds of causes bringing about change) psyché was the focus of a number of different sciences including biological and philosophical investigations (which ranged over a number of different theoretical practical and productive sciences). Broadly speaking, however Metaphysics divided into two Great divisions, the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Morals. The Critique of Aesthetic and Teleological Judgement formed a bridge between these realms of the concepts of nature and the concepts related to freedom. Aesthetic Judgement, for example, prepares the sensible mind for moral feelings and it is this relationship which Kant refers to when he speaks of Beauty being the “symbol of morality”.
This position also connects with the Platonic claim that the pleasure we feel in the name of the Form of the Good is the highest of all the forms of human pleasure. We know that the sensible power of the imagination is in intimate communion with the pleasure-pain principle and the understanding and also know that this general characterisation does not refer to the Freudian pathological fantasy-laden cases Freud dealt with in his consulting rooms. In the case of the judgement of taste we are dealing with a power that discriminates and estimates in a contemplative mood disconnected with any practical interests we may have in the object that is being judged. In this case it is the meaning of the representation that is significant. Kant elaborates upon this power in the following manner:
“Here the representation is referred to the Subject, and what is more to its feeling of life—under the name of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.” (Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, Page 42).
The pleasure in The Good that Plato referred included objects connected to our interest (Page 46).
Joseph Campbell, one of the foremost commentators on the meaning of Mythological narratives and the meaning of life, has the following contribution to make about the meaning of our participation in the divine and our representations of the divine:
“The life of a mythology derives from the vitality of its symbols as metaphors delivering, not simply the idea, but a sense of actual participation in a realisation of transcendence, infinity and abundance…..Indeed, the first and most essential service of a mythology is this one,of opening the mind and heart to the utter wonder of all being. And the second service, then is cosmological: of representing the universe and the whole spectacle of nature, both as known to the mind and as beheld by the eye, as an epiphany of such kind that when lightning flashes, or a setting sun ignites the sky, or a deer stands alerted, the exclamation”Ah!” may be uttered as a recognition of divinity.” (Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Pages XX-XXI)
Campbell, of course, refers more to Carl Jungs work on archetypes than to Freuds more Kantian, analytical approach. Both of these Psychologists claim to be Kantian, but it appears as if the work of Freud is more closely aligned with the Philosophical Anthropology/Psychology we find in Kant’s work. The Unconscious is important for both theorists but Freuds account of instincts and their vicissitudes and the detailed characterisation we are given of some of these vicissitudes (including that of consciousness and that of sublimation) indicate a complex tie not just to Kantian Critical Psychology but also to Aristotelian Hylomorphism. This indicates that Freuds theories were more Philosophical than Jungs. Campbell does not see the complex relationship that exists between Philosophy and Mythology. Mythology is about our relation to God, and this is portrayed differently in Occidental and Oriental Mythology. In the latter there is, as Campbell puts it, a dialectical relation between the Supreme Being and our human form of being. One in which the relation is simultaneously immanent and transcendent (Occidental Mythology, London, Souvenir Press, 1964, Page 3):
“Prayers and chants, images, temples, Gods, sages, definitions and cosmologies are but ferries to a shore of experience beyond the categories of thought, to be abandoned on arrival; for as the Indian Kena Upanishad states :” To know is not to know, not to know is to know” and the Chinese Tao Te Ching: “Those who know are still.”. “Thou art that”, declares the Vedic Sage.” (Page 3)
Occidental Mythology, on the other hand is concerned with articulating the relation between the Supreme Being and the human form of being, and there are two roads leading from early Occidental Mythology. One leading from a Religious perspective typified in the Book of Job: a perspective of the renunciation of the significance of human judgement. The second road is that leading from Athens, from which the Philosophical spirit was born: a humanistic spirit in which man dares to confront his idea of Supreme Beings and question their character, i.e. subject the gods to a humanistic tribunal that demands areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time).
Campbell prefers to travel the religious route. The Trial of Socrates was a turning point for the Western World because we saw how a narrow-minded religion was capable of judging individuals whose concern was with opening our minds and widening our perspectives. This type of injustice would repeat itself in the persecution of Aristotle and murdering of heretics later in the process of the establishment of Christianity. The road from Athens was the road that valued the Law, Justice(dike), areté, episteme, Art,and Human Freedom above dogma.
Kants view of aesthetics and Art begins with the claim that aesthetic judgement, insofar as it is related to natural objects, is not conceptually mediated but is related to a type of estimation and discrimination that is important to prepare the mind for moral feeling. Kant refers here to a “formal finality” that is not related to the perfection sought by art which corresponds to what Kant called “dependent Beauty”: a form which seeks to unite taste and ideas of reason via artistic “intentions”, e.g. a beautiful building, a beautiful garden or a beautiful person. Mythology, however, is more concerned with the Sublime than Beauty because the former may be related to representations of what Kant called “limitlessness” whilst at the same time manifesting a reference to an indeterminate concept of reason. There are interesting differences between these two forms of experience:
“For the beautiful is directly attended with a feeling of the furtherance of life, and is thus compatible with charms and a playful imagination. On the other hand, the feeling of the sublime is a pleasure that only arises indirectly being brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful, and so it is an emotion that seems to be no sport, but dead earnest in the affairs of the imagination.” (Page 91)
The Sublime is an experience intimately connected to awe and wonder, that feeling the Ancient Greeks and Kant related to the external heavens above and the moral law within. The objects of the experience of the sublime are formless, but they “quicken” in us an appreciation of our own moral power and agency. This movement from sensible experience to a moral attitude of mind requires a cultural familiarity with moral ideas and the practical idea of freedom. Kant also refers to sublime inscriptions to be found on statues at the Temple of Isis and in the Old Testament, e.g.:
“Thou shallt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth etc.” (Page 127)
Images of the kind referred to in the above Biblical quote are products of both the imagination and the emotions and they therefore do not meet the logical criteria of universal validity that we can find, for example, in aesthetic judgements or judgements of taste relating to art objects. Some religious scholars would claim that such images connected as they are to perception and emotion, cannot be related to Logos and responded to in the medium of speech and thought. This line of argumentation is reminiscent of that which one can encounter in Platonic writings where it is claimed that the Theory of Forms is the work of the understanding and reason. For Aristotle too, it is the case that the powers of rationality and wisdom are not located in the faculty of sensibility, but rather in the faculty of thought where we find the forms (arché): a faculty that is a higher faculty than that of the Spirit where our emotions and passions are located.
Kant continues his discussion of the nature of Art Objects:
“By right it is only production through freedom, i.e. through an act of will that places reason at the basis of its action that should be termed art.” (Page 163)
It is, we would maintain, the intentionality of art objects that is part of the essence specifying definition of artistic activity, e.g., art objects are made with the intention of being responded to in particular ways involving particular human powers including the power of judgement and its relation to a universally valid form of the feeling of pleasure. Art objects are also obviously cultural objects insofar as they are “symbols of morality”. The production of these objects obviously occurs in accordance with principles of productive science, but their creation requires a power of genius which involves an ability to intentionally marshal aesthetic ideas in a concrete work in a concrete medium. In such works we are not presented with concepts but rather:
“The form of a presentation of a concept.” (Page 174)
The genius possesses a unique ability to make this form adequate to the aesthetic ideas that the work is expressive of:
“by an aesthetic idea I mean that representation of the imagination which induces much thought yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever, i.e.concept, being adequate to it, and which language consequently can never get quite on level terms with or render completely intelligible.” (Page 176)
In this process, it is argued, the power of the imagination remodels experiences partly for the purposes of entertainment, for the purposes of pleasure;
“Such representations of the imagination may be termed ideas. This is partly because they at least strain after something lying beyond the confines of experience and so seek to approximate to a presentation of rational concepts (i.e. intellectual ideas) thus giving to these concepts the semblance of an objective reality.” (Page 176)
This process is intuitive because no concept can be wholly adequate to the content of these intuitions. The artist-genius seeks that is seeks to express a sense of transcendence:
“The rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, hell, eternity, creation, etc., Or again, as to things of which examples occur in experience, e.g. death, envy, and all the vices as also love, fame and the like, transgressing the limits of experience he attempts with the aid of the imagination which emulates the display of reason in its attainment of the maximum…; and it is in fact precisely in the poetic arts that the faculty of aesthetic ideas can show itself to full advantage.”(Pages 176-7)
Kant elaborates upon this with the thoughts that the imagination animates the mnd “with the idea of the super sensible”(Page 178). In relation to the idea of the super sensible in the form of the Supreme Being, we can refer again to Kants reference to the Temple of Isis inscription:
“I am all that is , and that was, and that shall be and no mortal hath raised the veil before my face.” (Page 179)
This judgemental inscription is of course a work of genius: a power of the imagination animating the mind with an idea of the super sensible.