Aesthetics and Art
Lecture 5
PHIL 2618
Professor David Macarthur
Immanuel Kant:
Modern Aesthetics is Footnotes to Kant
Pure vs Accessory Beauty
• Pure beauty – judged “without a concept” (of the
object’s purpose, end or perfection). Cp. The
rationalist conception of beauty of Wolff.
• Art is an accessory or dependent beauty. It involves
various concepts: e.g., of art; of the category of art.
• But both pure and accessory beauty must induce a
“free play” of the imagination and understanding,
even if it is more constrained in the latter case.
• In the case of art this is occasioned by trying to see
how this ‘content’ is related to this form.
Kant on Art
• Art vs Nature: art, unlike nature, is a product
of human intention and skill.
• Art vs Science: art is a practical ability;
science theoretical.
• Art vs Mere Craft: art is inherently satisfying;
it involves a higher degree of skill/talent.
• The last distinction is dubious. Better to
appeal to the lack of a predetermined end
(Collingwood).
Kant on Fine Art
• Fine Art vs Mechanical Art: fine art aims to
arouse pleasure whereas mechanical art is
useful for a preconceived purpose [craft].
• Fine Art vs Agreeable Art: agreeable art aims at
arousing pleasure through mere sensation; fine
art aims at arousing reflective pleasure through
representations (“ways of cognizing”).
Cp. Collingwood on art proper vs pseudo-art.
Tension: art & nature
• For something to be art we must be conscious
of it as art. We must see it under the concept of
art and, also, under some category of art.
BUT
• Kant argues that for something to be art it must
seem like nature (spontaneous, unstudied,
unintentional).
• Suggestion: Art must be both intentional and
seemingly not intentional at the same time!
• Is there an insight here?
Aesthetic Ideas
• Genius is the twofold imaginative capacity
to discover and express “aesthetic ideas”,
which are peculiarly stimulating images.
• They are imaginative intuitions for which we
have no adequate concept.
• Kant contrasts aesthetic ideas with
“rational ideas” which are concepts for
which we have no adequate intuition.
A feeling that cannot adequately be put
into words
• Kant writes, ”by an aesthetic idea, however,
I mean that representation of the
imagination that occasions much
thinking though without it being possible
for any determinate thought, i.e., concept,
to be adequate to it, which, consequently,
no language fully attains or can make
intelligible.”
Kantian Beauty vs Ordinary Beauty
• Remember that ‘the fine art’ = the beautiful arts.
• For Kant, beauty is the expression of aesthetic
ideas.
• That is, beauty (as Kant sees it) involves taking
pleasure in the free play of imagination and
understanding inspired by an artwork (or nature).
• Suggestion beyond Kant: the term ”beauty” is
popularly used to designate a pleasant sensory look
or sound – appealing to the taste of sense not the
aesthetic taste of reflection.
• “The poet ventures to make sensible rational
ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the
blessed, the kingdom of hell, eternity,
creation, etc., as well as to make that of which
there are examples in experience, e.g., death,
envy, and all sorts of vices, as well as love,
fame, etc., sensible beyond the limits of
experience, with a completeness that goes
beyond anything of which there is an example
in nature.”
Art & Paradox
• Artists give a sensible form to rational ideas
(e.g. of God, heaven, hell) which, however,
cannot be adequately captured in sensible
terms.
• Moreover, artists attempt to give sensible form
to certain important human experiences (e.g.
death, love, fame) but with a completeness
that transcends all experience.
• NOTE: both projects are deeply paradoxical.
Going beyond Kant
• Suggestion: perhaps engaging in a fruitful
paradox is the source of art’s open-endedness
of interest for us.
• The idea is that we can be endlessly fascinated
by a compelling but irresolvable paradox.
Artistic Genius
• Definitive characterization: “the exemplary
originality of the subject’s natural
endowment in the free use of his cognitive
faculties.”
• The imagination must be “free”, that is, not
pinned down by concepts of the
understanding – but, somehow, still be in
harmony with its powers of conceptualizing.
Freedom
• Genius consists in the ability to come up with
ideas that artworks express (present?
suggest?) and imaginative means for their
expression.
• The relation between content and form
manifests the freedom of the imagination of
the artist but must also leave room for, and
stimulate, the freedom of the imagination of
the audience.
Leonardo Da
Vinci
Michelangelo
Buonarotti
Shakespeare
Wolfgang
Mozart
George Eliot
Henri Matisse
Samuel
Beckett
Paula
Rego
Art and Sociability
• Why does art “foster the free flow of
conversation”?
• The freedom of aesthetic response and
judgment is tied to its capacity to express
one’s true self, that part of oneself that is
most free, hence most truly one’s own.
Aesthetic Intimacy
• Perhaps this is the beginning of an
explanation of the peculiar intimacy of
shared aesthetic judgment.
• The lack of guaranteed agreement makes
the surprizing discovery of de facto
agreement under the artistic conditions of
freedom all the more satisfying and
rewarding. (cf. Cavell)
The Paradox of Originality
• Kant: originality is the capacity for producing
something for which no determinate rule can be given.
Problem: “original nonsense.”
• The paradox of originality:
- If something is absolutely “new” and totally unique
then it risks being incomprehensible. Meaning often
depends on seeing the present use as a continuation or
extrapolation from past uses.
- But if it isn’t new or unique it risks being a copy, an
imitation of something else hence not original at all.
The Problem of Art
• The problem of art is to produce something
new, unique, distinctive (a creation of the
imagination) which offers something to be
understood (content?) – yet something that is
not reducible to whatever content one has so
far found.
• If it were, then the content could have been
conveyed differently in various ways and the
content would be the end, the communication
of it a mere means.
Art as Product or Process?
• Collingwood and Kant both claim that art is
not about achieving a predetermined end.
• But Kant goes deeper in suggesting that art
is not about achieving ANY end at all.
• It is, rather, a matter of a process of
engagement, a feeling responsiveness to
sensuously embodied ideas – ideally
without end.
Sensuous Content?
• It is at this point that one wants to say art is
not just communicated content (e.g.
speech) but content in a sensuous form: art
is en-formed content (Danto says
“embodied meaning”).
• BUT talk of a fixed or determinate “content”
is misleading given the proliferation of
meanings that artworks stimulate in
different viewers.
Not Content but Contentfulness
• The Kantian way of thinking is not that there
is a fixed and determinate meaning or
“content” to be understood.
• The emphasis falls, rather, on there being an
open-ended imaginative and feeling
engagement with meaningful form –
perhaps in the manner of a fruitful paradox.

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