1 Outline of the third Critique
Now that we’re a few weeks into our project, I think it would be useful to pause and take a glance at the structure of the whole work. Here’s the basic design:
- Introduction, §§I–IX
- Part I: Critique of aesthetic judgment
- Division I: Analytic of aesthetic judgment
- Book I: Analytic of the beautiful, §§1–22
- Book II: Analytic of the sublime, §§23–29
- Deduction of pure aesthetic judgments, §§30–54
- Division II: Dialectic of aesthetic judgment, §§55–60
- Division I: Analytic of aesthetic judgment
- Part II: Critique of teleological judgment, §61
- Division I: Analytic of teleological judgment, §§61–68
- Division II: Dialectic of teleological judgment, §§69–78
- Appendix: Methodology of teleological judgment, §§79–91
We have a critique of reflective judgment, and it has two parts:
- one corresponding to the aesthetic (the beautiful and the sublime) and
- another to teological judgment.
And each part has two divisions:
- an analytic, which tells me what each sort of judgment is, and
- a dialectic, which explores some relevant problem pertaining to each sort of judgment.
One of the reasons I wanted to look at this outline at this point is that we are in a strange place. First of all, you may notice in the outline that aesthetic and teleological judgment seem to have the same basic structure, but something’s missing: Only aesthetic judgment has a deduction, and then—if you recall—of the two sorts of judgment only those of beauty. Now, if we were to go back and look at the text from last time, we would find that §38 is the “deduction,” and, together with that, that there is more or less this sort of division internal to last week’s selection:
- §§30–38: Introduction and deduction
- §§39–42: On the social dimension of beauty
Let’s go into our discussion today aware of the possibility that we are in strange terrain between the analytic and the dialectic.
I’ve abbreviated the sections I want to look at; just §§43–45 and 48.
2 Art
Kant lists three criteria for something’s being ‘art’: - Art is a “production through freedom,” and wherever there is such work, there is a purpose involved (p. 170). - Art seems to involve other than theoretical knowledge. Kant puts this point oddly on pp. 170–171. - But art (Kant calls it “free art” here) doesn’t seem to be “craft” (which Kant calls “mercenary art”). And first he distinguishes them by saying the latter are things people would do only if they were paid. He doesn’t do a particularly good job of it here (in fact I can’t really tell what he’s doing here), but, intuitively, Kant is distinguishing things like painting and sculpture from things like furniture and watches. I think you could probably devise arguments settling the line between art and craft everywhere along any number of spectra (you could devise also arguments constructing spectra of all sorts). I don’t know that this would matter for a reason that I think will be plain in a moment.
Kant then distinguishes (p. 172) between ‘mechanical’ and ‘aesthetic art’ by describing the purpose of each:
- The purpose of mechanical art is “to make a possible object actual, adequately to our cognition of that object”
- The purpose of aesthetic art is “[to arouse] the feeling of pleasure
Then the latter has two subdivisions (ibid.):
- The purpose of agreeable art is to induce pleasure that accompanies sensations: “enjoyment”
- The purpose of fine art is to induce pleasure that accompanies “ways of cognizing”; that arises from “reflection” rather than “mere sensation” (p. 173)
The thing to note, generally, is this emergent problem or quandary:
- We were supposed to enjoy beauty as if it were governed by a purpose, but
- Art—which, let’s say, provides at least one of the occasions in which beauty is possible—is distinctively, not only purposive, but purpose-governed
Is there—as some philosophers hold—synonym ## Art imitating nature If the purposiveness of a beautiful object were the design or intention of the artist, then strictly speaking there would be no ‘as if’ of the purpose of the object of aesthetic appreciation (at least in the case of works of art).
You could see this as a reason why Kant prefers to think of beauty primarily in terms of the beauty of nature (nature, that is, in the Kantian sense of the sum of appearances, governed by natural law). Nature has no purposes. So the feeling of purposiveness associated with aesthetic experience cannot be put down to objective determination. Kant wants this same basic structure to hold of fine art, too. Thus pp. 173–174.
And see how Kant acknowledges the seeming issue and responds to it on p. 174 in green.
3 Genius
But now consider your favorite artist. They produce compelling works of art as if they were making watches or tables. The tempting structure Kant is refusing is that the artist has, say, knowledge—determinate judgment—about what induces pleasure of the aesthetic sort, and reproduces this knowledge in the form of works of art.
Kant has to go another way. He instead describes a capacity he calls genius for producing beautiful work. Kantian genius can’t be learned; it is a “natural endowment.” It is a talent for producing beautiful art. Fine art—beautiful art—must be a product not of knowledge but of genius. See the definition at the bottom of p. 174 and the summary at the top of p. 175.
4 Taste and genius
The sort of ‘relation of genius to taste’ in this section Kant decidedly does not want is one in which genius produces a work, say, with some idea in mind, and an audience thereafter receives it and this very same idea along with it.
Genius is a talent for making beautiful things; taste is a talent for judging them to beautiful. In the case of natural beauty, only the second is required; in the case of artistic beauty both are necessary. Further:
- To find beauty in nature, I need not have a concept; see p. 179
- To find beauty in art, however, I must first make out “what the thing is [meant] to be,” and judge the work in reference to a standard relevant to it; see p. 179 green.
What Kant seems to mean here is something like judging in reference to the sort of work of art we’re considering. A Bach cantata is a beautiful piece of music, say; beauty is always judged in reference to a standard, a piece of music in general. This sort of thing, Kant thinks, doesn’t happen in the case of natural beauty.
Kant seems to come fairly close to the alternative model in his description of taste and genius at the end of this section, pp. 180–181.