kants aesthetic revolution

KANT'S AESTHETIC REVOLUTION*

Albert Hofstadter

ABSTRACT

This paper interprets the Critique of Judgment as the culmination ofKant's contribution to our understanding of freedomthe humanmeaning of which is being-with-other-as-with-own. Central to that com-plex achievement and to the overarching role assigned by Kant to theaesthetic dimension (beauty, feeling, judgment, and art) is his revolu-tionary new way of seeing beauty and art as the expression of aestheticideasa definition of them which carries him beyond formalism toilluminate also the modern and romantic search for freedom. This movealso brings Kant to the threshold of religious ethics as man's ultimatefreedom, his being-with-the-infinitely-transcendent-as-with-own, is, inart and beauty, disclosed for imagination and made available for the lifeof feeling in this world.

The central matter of thinking, as of life, is freedom.Kant's aesthetic revolution, continuous with what he called his Copernican

revolution in thought, has to do with his effort to think freedom. Like everygreat thinker he is concerned eventually with the Froblem of the freedom of theindividual in relation to his membership in the free social whole. Kant is con-fronted with this problem in the context in which the enlightenment presentedit. He is the heir of Enlightenment thinking, French, English, and German, and

This study was written under a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment forthe Humanities. I am also gratefully indebted to the Research Committee of the Universityof California at Santa Cruz for funds allocated to specific research in this and allied fields.

JRE 3/2(1975), 171-191

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he is the great source of our tradition who has handed over to us the majorproblems.

During the Enlightenment period the idea of humanity as such, surpassingall nationalities, races, and religions, began to become explicit, ironically butintelligibly at the very time that national differences were firming up morestrongly than ever. During the same period the idea of the inalienable rights ofthe individual as such also began to become explicit. Within the human com-munity each individual self was seen as the bearer of rights attaching to his veryhumanity and on that account inalienable. These thoughts pervade the im-portant documents of the French and American Revolutions and pervade as wellthe thoughts, aspirations, and actions by which those revolutions were broughtaboutrecognizing, of course, that their realization was and still remains farfrom the ideal.

Above all other philosophers, Kant was the bearer of these thoughts. Hisphilosophizing was correlative to the revolution in socioeconomic, political andlegal practice that was taking place in and through the Enlightenment period,especially toward its end in the late 18th century and the very early 19th. Histhinking was part of the total European revolution of the time. The focus of hisphilosophical vision is the combination of the freedom of the human individualwith the social community of mankind, even with that of all rational beings. Histhinking penetrates to the sourcesupersensuous for himof the unalienablefreedom of the human individual, a source which is at the same time the groundof the individual's freedom as a human being, that is, as a member of the humancommunity, even of the community of all rational beings.

Despite any limitations existing during his agethe slave trade, developingclass differences between capital and labor, developing national differenceswhich were ultimately to lead to our century's world wars, developing colo-nialism in Africa, South America, and Asiathe idea of freedom is the bur-geoning idea of the time. Kant is the great bearer of it as it involves the dif-ference between the inalienable freedom of the individual and the rightful claimsof the human community, together with the possible and necessary unity of thetwo, and including in between the differences and the unity of the particularrights of estates, classes, peoples, and nations.

Kant initiated the attempt to think this idea of freedom as the centralsystematizing idea of philosophy itself. I am not speaking of his terminology,even though the word "Freiheit" played an important part in it. Part of Kant'slimitation was in fact that he did not fully comprehend that this word couldhave the more comprehensive employment about which I shall be talking. I amspeaking rather of the real content of Kant's thinking, which everywhere wasconcerhed first of all with man and human freedom. In his lectures on logic hesays that there are four philosophical questions: What can I know? What shouldI do? What may I hope? and What is man? And he adds that the last question,the anthropological one, comprehends the other three. His own Anthropologycarries the qualification in its title: "from a pragmatic viewpoint"; and he ex-

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plains in the preface that it differs from anthropology considered from a physio-logical viewpoint in that it examines what man makes, or can and should make,of himself as a freely acting being, as contrasted with examining what naturemakes of man.^ Thus the basic question of anthropology, the sum-total ofphilosophy, is: How does man-and how can he and must herealize his ownfreedom? When we look at Kant's doing of philosophy as well as his statementsabout it, we see that its actual content is man's freedom of self-determination,his self-articulation as a rational being.

Of course there are severe dangers in this Kantian way of dealing withfreedom as self-making and self-determination. The basic danger lies in a virtualor actual deification of man in theory and, in practice, man's overreaching ofhimself and his world, an overreaching which, as we see it before our very eyestoday, threatens to destroy man, his freedom, and his world in the process. Thisexperience of ours leads us back to the thought of freedom and to the need toreconstitute it in a more adequate way than we find it in Kant or his successors.But that is our problem. I am to speak here chiefly of Kant's.

Kant initiated the attempt to think freedom centrally and coherently. Hewas not able to formulate the enterprise in its full integrity, though he made aclose approach. He saw the parts of the problem and saw their interconnectionas well. One gets a glimpse of this from the table which he placed at the end ofthe present "Introduction" to the Critique of Judgment, similar to that at theend of the first introduction published separately as the essay, "On Philosophyin General."^ Here the domains of nature and freedom, of theoretical knowledgeand practical (moral) knowledge, are linked by way of the domain of art and theaesthetic. Understanding and reason are linked by judgment. Conformity to lawand final purpose are linked by purposiveness, that is, by beauty. Knowledge anddesire (and therefore practice) are linked by feeling, the feeling of pleasure anddispleasure. Beauty, feeling, judgment, artthese are the middle and mediumlinking man's theoretical and practical sides together so as to make it possible forhim to be humanly whole. The aesthetic dimension of man is given an over-arching role by Kant, one which some of his immediate contemporaries andsuccessors like Goethe, Schiller, and Schelling clearly understood. Fichte, too,saw the tremendous significance that had to be given to imagination in theconstitution of freedom and humanity. Hegel later tried to put'it together bymaking art the first member of the triad of absolute spirit, which latter itself wasthe ultimate form of the actualization of freedom.

Now in Kant, and generally in our modern tradition thereafter, freedom hasa' negative and a positive meaning: negatively it is absence of determination byanother, positively it is self-determination. Where I am not the author or causeof what I am or do, I am not free; where I am the author or cause, I am free.Most of the problems of freedom, metaphysical, ethical, political, and other,have tended to be treated as problems regarding determination, whether byother or by self. But if we investigate the word etymologicallythe English"freedom" or Kant's German "Freiheit"we make the interesting discovery that

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a different sense is attached to it, namely, the sense of Being-with-other-as-with-own. One can find the details in any available handbook for English (Partridge,1958) or German (Grebe, 1963). We learn there that free and friend are identicalin origin. The verb to free derives from Old English frebgan, and the noun friendderives from the Old English ffeond, itself shaped from the present participle ofthe verb frWon, which is a contraction of the verb frFogan, the same as that fromwhich to free is derived. And what is of decisive significance is that freoganmeans: to love.

Freogan is one of a close-knit family of words in the Anglo-Germanic lan-guages meaning love, peace, protection, care, preservation. There is nothingexplicitly referring to determination, whether by other or by self, in these. Theyemphasize protecting, caring for, preserving, loving, holding dear, cherishing. Onthis basis, the writer of the article in the Duden Etymologie points out, theGermans developed frei as a concept of the legal order, the order of right:"belonging to den Lieben, the dear or beloved ones." Those who are of the samekinship, consanguinity, clan, or tribethe friends-are protected, sheltered, keptsecure. When you are a member of the family, clan, or tribe, you are treated asone of the friends. It is the foreigners, the aliens, such as those captured in war,who are unfree, for they have no such right; they are right-less, out-lawed, andhence essentially slaves. For the Germans, the Slavs in particular were the alienswho were captured and used as befits Slavs-as Sklaven, slaves. The outsiderseems even not human but barbarian, fit to be used like other animals, as chattel,for economic burdens, mining, tilling, domestic labor, sexual exploitation. He iscaptured, held in bondage, kept unfree, just as he was to begin with.^

Originally then, and as I believe also basically in an ontological sense, free-dom is what we have when we are with our own, when the others about us areown to us and we are own to them. It is Being-with-other-as-with-own. The landin which we live is our land, the place our own place. Freedom is what we havewhen we are with kith and kin, the beloved ones, living our life together inmutual care and preservation. It is what we have when we are at home where webelong, or within the protective camp when we are abroad fighting, or when asnomads we travel together with herds, horses, and families across the wild wastesof the steppes, hanging together in common kinship and mutual support, orwhen, together with our band of hunters in the forest or fishers at the lake, wekeep with them in the bond of care and protection.

Freedom becomes undetermination by another and self-determination whenthe individual emerges more and more for himself over against the other, whenthe kinship-protection bond weakens. It becomes all the more undeterminationby another and self-determination in the development of what Marxism calledbourgeois-capitalist culture, when the individual was emerging as the entre-preneur whose aim was to achieve as much control of his own activity anddestiny as possible while using others as means toward his ends; and meanwhilethe others were losing the freedom of feudal belonging by being loosened fromlord and land and given over to the freedom of the labor market. The shift of


freedom from Being-with-other-as-with-own into Being-undetermined-by-otherand Being-self-determined accompanied the dissolution of culture into atomicindividuality.

In Kant, the development of the thought of freedom as pure self-determination has come a long way, especially in his ethics. But at the sametime, as philosopher and inheritor of the Enlightenment, he also sees the otherside of the picturethe Enlightenment's vision of mankind as a whole, the ideaof humanity as such. At the same time that modern civilization dissolves theolder bonds of clan, tribe, and (later) the feudal order, it fashions those ofnation and state. In essential relation and conflict at one and the same time, itlooks beyond the nations to the international whole of mankind. Kant alreadyproposes a league of nations. That is the universal moment at work, as con-trasted with the individual: the collectivity as contrasted with the particularsubjectivity.

Thus while in the Kantian ethics the fundamental presupposition of duty isthe freedom of the individual, it is also of the very essence of freedom that theindividual should behave in a rational manner, that is to say, a manner that isuniversally valid for all rational beings. In Kant the two sides of freedom cometogether: the self-determination of the individual agent and his Being-with-other,now all other men, all other rational beings, as-own. That is the basic meaning inthe Kantian notions of never treating others as mere means but always as endsand of acting always as a member of a kingdom of ends which counts all humanand rational beings among its citizens. It is the basic meaning of the categoricalimperative. True freedom for Kant is this absolutely universally valid Being-with-others-as-with-own which is attained by means of the autonomous rationalself-determination of each individual. He does not use our language, but thethought is the heart and soul of his thinking.

Kant struggled toward the development of a comprehensive vision of free-dom. His revolution in thought as a whole is this: for the first time freedombegins to show itself in a systematic way, integrating knowledge, practice, andart into a coherent picture of freedom facing in both its essential directions atonce: particular and universal, singular and collective. His thought reached onlyan abstract result. His understanding of knowledge, morality, and art remainedone-sidedsubjectivistic and chiefly formalbut he succeeded in the enormoustask of bringing them together in an integrated way of thinking freedom. This isour great debt to him.

In what remains of this paper I shall try to call to your attention the way inwhich this happens in his thought regarding natural knowledge, morals, andespecially art and the aesthetic. Plainly, the time allotted permits only the barestsketch.

The interest of the Critique of Pure Reason is metaphysics, man's com-prehension of the nature of reality in itself. Its conclusion is that man is in-capable of a genuinely cognitive grasp of reality in itself. The reason lies in the

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peculiarly finite character of man's freedom. This may sound odd, but that iswhat the fact of the matter is when we understand freedom as Being-with-other-as-with-own. For man's Being-with reality remains for Kant a separation that cannever be fully bridged in a purely theoretical way. The thing-in-itself remainsin-itself, ever eluding the grasp of the human mind as theoretical, ever alienatedand estranged. Man can be with reality only in an indirect way, by mediation ofits representation as appearance. He is like a citizen abroad, in touch with hisnative land only through its ambassador, or even like an exile who hears onlyrumors of it.

Man's fundamental impulse is toward freedom, to be with the other as withown, and in the dimension of knowledge it is to stand in that relationship bycognitive means. Hence man is led to reach the best arrangement he can with therecalcitrant reality: he produces an appearance of it, a phenomenal world, theworld of nature and experience. The real world comes to him only in the formof appearance, phenomenon. This world of nature suits his powers of intuition(spatial and temporal) and his powers of conception (categorial thinking) andeven his powers of reasoning (though only in the regulative use of Ideas). Butbecause of the finite nature of man's mind, signalized by the split in it betweenthe receptivity of sense and the spontaneity of understanding, this natural world,by being human, is prevented from being what the real is in itself. The naturalworld of experience is guaranteed to be conformable to human mentality, ac-cording to Kant's Copernican revolution, which declares that the world must fititself to human cognitive forms rather than the other way round. It becomes aworld intuitable in space and time and thinkable by the categories. But the pricepaid for its becoming own to man is that it becomes foreign to the realityin-itself. Man's cognitive homeland in his present life is that of a merely apparentworld of nature.

The source of man's freedom in the theoretical knowledge of nature whichis alone available to him lies in the spontaneity of the understanding as con-trasted with the receptivity of sensation. It is because man is essentially a splitbeing in his cognitive capacity that the freedom of his relation to reality be-comes finite. He is free in the spontaneity of conception or understanding, butunfree in sensation. Reality, as it gives itself to him in sensation, is essentiallyforeign and unnaturalizable as such: it comes as the brute otherness of sensorymatter. In order to make this foreign matter into something own, assimilable tohis cognitive capacity, man has to imagine it into intuitions in accordance withhis limited intellectual spontaneity. His freedom is therefore conditioned andfinite here. He remains imprisoned within the bars which he is forced to con-struct about his own self. It is as though he were a captive in war, compelled tobuild his own prison cell, within which thereafter he is to live out his deprivedlife. That cognitive cell cannot be regarded by man as his final dwelling-place. Hemust look beyond it to his true home, even though that may be a home he willnever see with the unclouded eyes of intellect. Only an intuitive intellect, whichcreates its own objects of intuition instead of being given the matter for them


from an outside source, only a god, could do what man can never do. Kant doesnot yet share the despair of the existentialist who would see man as a failed god;but the limitation of freedom in cognition in Kant's philosophy becomes one ofthe sources of this despair. Kant is still optimistic.

Man's cognitive freedom is conditioned by an other in the form of existentreality, the thing-in-itself, the world-in-itself, as ultimately unovercomeable. Hispractical or moral freedom- is conditioned by an other, too; but this other is hisown self, his self as other. For man is as split in his practical existence as he is inhis theoretical existence. In knowledge the split is between sense and intellect. Inmoral practice the split is between sense and reason, or between man as animaland man as rational. His divided nature shows itself here in the conflict betweeninclination and duty, the lure of desire and the command of reason. As man isnot and cannot be an intuitive intellect, so he is not and cannot be a holy will,which is a will whose maxims necessarily agree with the laws of autonomy.'*

A holy will would not need any commands or imperatives, because it wouldnot be attracted by the pleasure of satisfying inclination.^ It would not besusceptible to any maxims contradicting the moral law, not because it lackspower but because it lacks impotence, lacks defect and passivity. True, there is aholy element in our feeling-life: we are able to feel respect for the moral law andpleasure in the consciousness of having fulfilled our duty. Such a feeling Kantcalls "practical" because it rests on reason. But for the most part our feelings arewhat he calls "pathological," or conditioned on something passive, therefore notfree. Thus the pleasures of the life of inclinationfood, sex, egoism, profit, thesatisfaction of various desiresare all pathological: they contain an unfree, pas-sive moment (Kant, 1788: Book I, Section 3).

It is because man is such a divided creature, subject to the passivity offeeling, that he needs a moral imperative, which is a command to his will to obeythe law just because it is law. If there were no lure of pleasure, man would notneed to be called to virtue; he would simply do of his own free volition what wasright and good. It is this otherness within himself, his sensuous passion, desire,and inclination, which is really other as against his true nature, his rational will.And this alien element in him, however much it belongs to him, neverthelessdraws him away from himself, enslaving him to externality.

Only resistance to this alien source of moral enslavement can keep man freein the practical sense. For this, virtue is required. Virtue is "a human being'smoral strength of will in the pursuit of his duty: which is a morally obligingpressure by his own legislative reason, insofar as this reason constitutes itself intoan authoritative power for implementation or effectuation of the law." Inother words, virtue is the agreement of man's will with every duty, an agreementfounded on a fixed and stable state of mind or disposition (Abbott, 1909:306;Eisler, 1964:542). As Kant says:

The ethical level on which man (and indeed every rational creature, as we seeit) stands is respect for the moral law. The disposition which obliges him to

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follow this law is: to follow it out of duty, not out of voluntary inclination,and also, in any case, out of a striving which he willingly undertakes himselfwithout being commanded to it; and his moral condition, in which he canalways be, is virtue, that is to say, moral disposition in combat, and notholiness in a supposed possession of a complete purity of the dispositions ofhis will. (Kant, 1788:Book I, Section 3)

Only by maintaining this embattled position of his moral frame of mind doesman attain to the practical freedom which is his vocation. It is virtue that makesman free.

Man's practical freedom is not an object of natural theoretical knowledge.Freedom is a rational Idea that transcends all possibility of empirical recognition;it is problematical for theoretical reason. But in a practical sense we know its possi-bility a priori because we are conscious within ourselves of the obligation toobey moral law as such. We may not have theoretical insight into the ground ofthisapriori possibility of our transcendental freedom, but our whole moral life isbased on it.

This moral life implies a moral world which, for Kant, cannot be a merelynatural world. It is a world of moral persons, each possessing the pure practicalreason or rational will which makes him a member, so to speak, of the moralspecies. By his rational will man is own to man, rational being is own to rationalbeing; all are own to one another in moral kinship. This moral world is thepeople of freedom. I realize that Kant does not use this latter phrase; but it issurely the truest description of what he is talking about. It is a description that isinevitable when we grasp the scope and content of his doctrine. His own phrasefor it is the kingdom of ends. It is only as a member of this people of freedomthat the human individual can realize his humanity and rationality. Such apeople is not governed by an authority that exercises force from the outsideupon the members in order to keep them within the bounds of its law (heteron-omy). Rather, it governs itself anarchically, as it were, insofar as each memberrules himself by his own inner self-authority, which is the same for all: reason inits practical employment. That is why it is the people of freedom: its govern-ment is self-government, autonomy, self-determination of own among own.

When the French revolutionists envisaged the revolution as one in which theprime motive, force, spirit, and outcome was to be virtue, their vision was a realhistorical, if more earthly, counterpart to the ideal vision of the philosopher whomost deeply of all expressed the truth of the revolution at that stage of man-kind's development.

Kant's thinking is thinking in transition. He occupied the height of theEnlightenment from which the newer ilomantic period was emerging. In him theforces of the two are at work in living tension and movement. Despite the factthat in theoretical knowledge he assigns the priority of freedom to the under-standing and in practical knowledge he assigns the priority of freedom to reason,there is in his thinking a groundswell which brings into dominance subjectivity,life, movement, feeling, spirit. There is in him already the drive to surpass the

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dualisms of sense-intellect, passion-reason by a third force, leading to a truerhuman freedom; and this third force is adumbrated in the aesthetic dimension.Kant never got to the completion of this movement of thought. It is more fullydeveloped in Friedrich Schiller and Schelling. It is sublimated in Hegel. And inmore recent thought, and especially for us today, it becomes a significant prob-lem because of the impact of Darwin, Marx, and Freud, and because of the moreextensive development of scientific insight into the interplay of body and mind.

Kant was fully aware of the gap between nature and morality which histhinking exposed. Nature is the scene of necessary causal determination. Themoral world is the world of human freedom, in which man's action is imputableto him as its spontaneous author. The problem of how the two could coexiststood out in all obviousness. Kant had worked out his own solution In theCritique of Pure Reason, but only by separating the moral world of freedomfrom the natural world of necessity and so confirming the inner division andsplitness of man's being along with the separation of the worlds he inhabited.

But one unquenchable question still flamed up. Although the two worldsare separate, the moral world ought to influence the natural world. Even if notransition can be made from the one to the other by means of the theoretical useof reason, nevertheless:

the concept of freedom ought to make the purpose assigned by its laws actualin the sense-world, and nature must consequently also be so thought that thelawfulness of its forms at least agrees with the possibility of the purposes to beeffected in nature according to the laws of freedom. (Kant, 1790a: Introduc-tion II)

The very meaning of the laws of morals implies that they ought to be carried outin the world of nature. What sense is there in telling us that lying is wrong orthat we should treat others as ends and never as mere means, if we are notobliged to practice truth-telling in this natural existence of ours or if in thatnatural existence any treatment of others were permitted? The intention ofmoral law, as expressed in moral commandments, bears on what should be doneby us in the spatiotemporal causal world. If we were not members of the naturalworld we would have no feeling-life, our feeling-nature would have nothingpathological in it, and there would be no meaning in the idea of addressing amoral imperative to us.

But how is the relation of the two worlds to be thought? There must, Kantsays, be some ground of the unity of the supersensible that lies at the basis ofnature with the supersensible that is contained practically by the concept offreedom. The concept of this unity will not give us either a theoretical or apractical knowledge of it, but it should make it possible to go from the princi-ples of the one world to those of the other. It is not a third world, so to speak,which binds the first two together (Kant's word is "Gebiet," peculiar realm);rather, it is a bond that leads from freedom to nature and from nature tofreedom.

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Earlier, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had given a metaphysicalsolution of this problem of the relation of freedom to nature by his doctrine ofthe intelligible character of man, according to which man's choice of what he isto do in the natural world is made in the supersensuous world of freedom by aneternal act.' But he goes further than this. He is really concerned with thepossibility of a genuine interplay between freedom and nature, a real dimension,even if not a world, of human existence in which there would be a union ratherthan a gap between them. And he finds this in art.

Art mediates between nature and freedom, between the unhuman regularityof natural law and the human spontaneity of rational liberty, just as feelingmediates between knowledge and desire, and judgment between understandingand reason. Art and aesthetic experience give us a new dimension governed by anew kind of a priori structuring, whose fundamental mode is Zweci


which is the same in every human mind); and this proportioning remains evenwhen they are not engaged in the unaesthetic daily task of knowing. Thus withinourselves, in the free interplay of understanding and imagination, we experienceour mind existing and acting in unconstrained interaction with the sensiblematter derived from the mind's other, the external reality, when that sensiblematter is shaped in beauty and thereby itself freed from the need to serve as asign of the external reality.

Unlike the mind's Being-with-other-as-with-own in the case of definitetheoretical knowing, where there is a constraint on the mind by the real sensa-tions given to it and by the limited purpose of obtaining knowledge of theexternar world, and unlike the mind's Being-with-other-as-with-own in the caseof moral judgment and action, where there is again a constraint on the mind, thistime by the real inclinations and passions it has to resist because of the purposeof fulfilling the obligation of duty-unlike both those one-sided forms of free-dom, here, in the experience of beauty, there is freedom without constraint.Both the earlier constraints are removed. The sensuous-imaginative intuitiveform is freely made by the artist, or (as in nature) it is freely followed by themind just as if it had been the artist who created such a form; and no purpose ofobtaining knowledge or fulfilling duty compels the mind in its holiday play here.The judgment of taste is, as Kant puts it, "disinterested."

That is why the experience is one of free play as against every unplayingform of knowing and acting. This free play of the mind occurs within itselfbetween understanding and imagination. But by that very fact it obtains alsobetween the mind and the sensuous-imaginative aesthetic object. The aestheticcontemplator deals playfully, or disinterestedly, with the aesthetic object. Thisfree play, both inside the mind and between the mind and its object, hence bothsubjective and subjective-objective, is a foretaste of a truer freedom than can beexperienced in theory or in practice. Between the mind and the form of itsobject there is a Zweckmassigkeit, a fitness, which is to say a Being-with-as-own,which is itself free. It is not constrained by any definite purpose. It is a purpos-iveness which is experienced as unrelated to any definite purpose, a free purpos-iveness that lies at the core of a more intimate ownness than anywhere elseexperienced-so far. In beauty we see and feel the ownness of mind (spirit) andnature to one another, as though a deeper-lying mind had created them for eachother.

That is the mode of human freedom as Being-with-own which Kant firstarrives at in the Critique of Judgment. He advances it by means of the analysis ofthe judgment of taste or beauty in terms of its four moments: in quality it isdisinterested, in quantity it is subjectively universal, in relation the form of theobject is experienced as purposive though without any representation of a pur-pose, and in modality it is necessary in an exemplary fashion. The only one ofthese four moments I have not yet specifically pointed to is the second, thequantity of subjective universality. And once we contemplate the judgment oftaste in the context of freedom as just described, it becomes evident that this

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monnent of quantity represents the aspect of community in freedom. Thejudgment of taste is aesthetic. That means for Kant that it is based on the purefeeling of pleasure or displeasure as such. Therefore, it can only be made by aparticular individual in a particular case on the basis of his own particular feelingat that moment, and for himself as a feeling being in his pure subjectivity. It iswholly singular. It is never a matter of objectivity based on a scientific observa-tion or on a rule given to the individual from elsewhere, as from a critic. But theparadox of taste involves a unique combination of opposites: when I judgesomething beautiful I do it solely on the basis of my individual feeling and solelywith regard to this single object in the form of a singular judgment (logicalsingularity), and yet at the same time I demand that all other human beingsought, by an exemplary necessity, to agree with my judgment (aesthetic univer-sality). In my judgment of taste I give expression to a universal voice reflecting acommunal sense within me (einer gemeinschafttiche Sinn, not einer gemeineSinn: communal, not common merely).^ It is the voice and sense of mankind assuch. And it is only insofar as I make my judgment disinterested and attendsolely to the form of fitness of the object-and this means, only insofar as Imake myself a model representative of the human race as suchxhdX I have theaesthetic right to put forth my judgment's claim to universal validity for allhuman beings.

Whether in fact all human beings will agree with me is beside the point. Inever make that claim, any more than I claim that all human beings will beperfectly moral. What I do, according to Kant's analysis, is to put forth theclaim. More than anything else it is an appeal to others, grounded on my irre-pressible presupposition of our common humanity, and here in particular thecommon structure and operation of our cognitive faculties of imagination andunderstanding. The free play which I enjoy in aesthetic judgment is utterlyindividual to me; but at the same time it is utterly universal in its meaning andintention to speak with the voice of all humanity to the whole human com-munitythe people of freedom. In this experience I join myself to humanity andinvite humanity to join with me in Being-together-as-own-with-own in themutual freedom which beauty grants us. What Kant envisages is obviously agenuine human communion which, although it is restricted to atomically sepa-rated feeling-judging experiences because of its aesthetic nature, neverthelesstranscends the atomization ideally and has a transcendental-transcendent charac-ter. That is why beauty fits man for social life and social life fits him for thedevelopment of his taste. It is why beauty is the symbol of the good. And, as thetheory gets developed by Friedrich Schiller, it is why the means toward makinghuman culture civilized is afforded by the aesthetic education of mankind.

What Kant came to in the analysis of the judgment of taste, then, was adeeply-grounded adumbration in human experience of the possibility of genuinecommunion in the full actuality of man's existence. Beauty is the promise of thefull human freedom that can be reached only through full human communion.Beauty tells us that this fuller communion is not impossible.


But Kant went further still, probing into the deeper possibilities of humanfreedom as Being-with-other-as-with-own. There is still a certain finitsness affect-ing beauty, insofar as beauty (for Kant) is essentially formal. The beautifulobject is beautiful because the form of its intuitive-imaginative presentation hasa specific fitness to the form-capacities of the human mind: imagination andunderstanding in their mutual proportionality for cognition. Looking at thematter in terms of style-history, we can say that the beauty of form which Kantanalyzed in the four moments of the judgment of taste is the abstract expressionof beauty concretely present in classical, classicistic, neoclassical, and evenrococo art. It is beauty as object of taste, that is, as object of our capacity tojudge immediately the not-too-much and not-too-little but just-right, the je nesais quoi of the connoisseur. Such beauty is tied up with our estimates ofpropriety, rightness, fitness, good proportion, balance, harmony, orto use themost comprehensive and Insightful logical category in this context-measure andthe mean. The common voice that claims agreement in the judgment of taste isthe voice of universal communal propriety as it is represented in humanity'sform-capacities of imagination and understanding. In order that the human mindand spirit should find its object own to itself and itself own to the object, in fulluniversality, it needs an object which is exquisitely balanced in every respect(regular but not too regular, free but not too free), not too much and not toolittle. The object should exactly suit it, be zweckmassig to it, without the repre-sentation of any particular Zweck, purpose. This is the mind's need for definiteforms which will be own to and with it, in relation to which it can experience atrue Being-at-home.

But the mind has further demands. Because it is essentially freedom-theirrepressible need, demand, and impulse for freedom-no finite form will ever beable to satisfy it completely. Kant does not yet say this in so many words. Itremained for his successors, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, to mai

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nation of imagination Insulted and reason, which is the power of infinite con-ceptual comprehension, the power of Ideas, in a unitary tension of opposition.

What we experience in the sublime is, again, our freedom, but now a free-dom that rises above any mere Being-wlth-nature-as-with-own, any mere har-mony with nature, and which lies rather in our being above nature, with one'another in the rational and moral sphere of freedom. Peculiarly and paradoxi-cally the violation of form and measure in the sublime is itself that whichfitsi.e., measures rightly withthe human mind as a combination of sense andreason! It is an experience which, unlike beauty, starts with unpleasure; but ittranscends the unpleasure into pleasure again.

The case of the comic is analogous. In experiencing a joke our mind isstrained to attend to something that promises or threatens to be serious and thenis disappointed by being given a nothing, a triviality. Hence Kant speaks oflaughter as "an affect arising from the sudden transformation of a strained ortensed expectation into nothing" (1790a, Section 54). There is a play here withimaginative constructs which is absurd, in which the understanding finds nosatisfaction. What would fit the mind's powers of comprehension is changed intoits opposite, the unfit. And because the shock has to do with something trivialand not really harmful, we laugh. Kant believes that the reason for the laughteris traceable to the body and its reflex effect on the mindan argument which wemight wish to criticize. But what remains is the fact that here again the humanmind has triumphed over measure and fitness, this time in a " low" manner, thecounterpart to the "high" (erhabene) manner of the sublime. And here againpeculiarly and paradoxically, a joke, to be a good joke, has to be exactly pro-portioned and fit in its structure, meaning, and time to do the job! Here too, bythis suitable means, the human mind declares its freedom from any constraint ofmere measure, mere finite rightness, mere propriety.

In both the sublime and the comic a certain wrongness, entailing a certaininsult to the mind's capacities of finitude, the imagination and the under-standing, becomes, by a reaction, a source of satisfaction. This can only implythe mind has in its essential constitution an impulse that pushes beyond finitude.Kant already sees and says this with regard to the sublime, although his vision isstill restricted there to human self-satisfaction in its capacity to stand abovenature in reason and morality. But the truth is at work in his mind and it leadshim even further, beyond both the sublime and the comic, to a new way ofseeing beauty.'^'^ And if anything in Kant's thought deserves the special title ofan "aesthetic revolution" it is the move he now takes. The new definition ofbeauty is related proximately to genius rather thantaste and to expression ratherthan abstract form. Beauty is the expression of aesthetic ideas, and aestheticideas are the counterpart to rational Ideas. Whereas a rational Idea is a conceptfor which no intuition is adequate as presentation (not even a sublime intuition),an aesthetic Idea is an intuition (an imaginative configuration) for which no setof (definite) concepts suffices.

Genius is the capacity to imagine such aesthetic Ideas and perhaps also to


express them in the chosen medium.^ ^Kant's aesthetic here moves beyond the aesthetic of taste. It transcends the

aesthetic standpoint of classicism, neoclassicism, rococo, and moves toward thestandpoint of romanticism. It finds the supreme artistic-aesthetic category to lie,not in measure as such or merely, but in spirit, Geist, that which is the source ofthe vitality by which the intuitive image is capable of exceeding all power ofdefinite concepts to encompass it.^"' The means by which the image has thistranscending power is found in its infinite suggestiveness, the inciting power ofthe image to arouse thoughts and feelings beyond any finite limit, so that it isable to serve as a concrete representative for the infinite power of rational Ideas.Blake's Songs of Experience was published in 1794; Kant's Critique of Judgmentappeared in its first edition in 1790 and in its second and carefully revisededition in 1793, the third, in 1794, being a re-issue of the second. Both belongto a spiritual atmosphere that was spreading over Europe. Blake illustrates Kant.Such a poem as, for instance, "The Sick Rose" is an irrefragable example ofwhat Kant means by the expression of an aesthetic Idea:

0 Rose, thou art sick!The invisible wormThat flies in the night.In the howling stornn.

Has found out thy bedOf crimson joy.And his dark secret loveDoes thy life destroy.

No set of finite concepts, however much one is piled on the other, will suffice toexhaust the content of this poem. It has a content which is untranslatable intoconceptual terms. Even the verbal statement of infinitistic rational Ideas is insuf-ficient to encompass it. In its own magical way it overcomes the limitations ofthe sense-world, which cannot afford a direct literal presentation of infinitisticIdeas-of God, of freedom, of the true self, of infinity or immortality-andsomehow makes that infinity present. In its own idiosyncratic way the aestheticIdea or infinitely suggestive image, as expressed in a medium, gives us all therichness of the rational Idea in a sensuous presence that is alive with spirit itself.

Attainment of the aesthetic Idea and its expression by genius does not leavebehind the communion that is reached-out for in the judgment of taste. On thecontrary, Kant retains the operation of taste even in connection with the art ofgenius; he allows the wings of erratic and high-flying genius to be clipped by thejudgment of taste, so as to keep the product beautifuM^"* Kant is transitional;moving from Rococo to Romanticism, both directions of the aesthetic impulseare still equally alive in his mind as they were in his culture. Indeed the claim forcommunity is even stronger in regard to aesthetic Ideas than it is in regard totaste. For now the appeal is not merely to man's finitistic form-capacity for the

186 HOFSTADTER

measure of the intelligible, but to his infinitistic expression-capacity for theultimate that transcends his finite powers of comprehension, a capacity which allhuman beings share and which is the highest, or deepest, source of humanquality.

Man is human, not alone and not even primarily because he is an under-standing being, but because he is a truly rational being, called upon to behave inaccordance with the moral Ideasthe rational Ideasof duty. Law, and freedom.His truly human freedom occurs in his life within the ethical world, for onlythere is the law a true law of freedom. The ethical world is the world in whichIdeasGod, freedom, immortalityare constitutive, as compared with the worldof nature in which only categories, that is, concepts determinative of finitecontents, are constitutive.

The art of genius, surpassing the negativities of the sublime and the comic,which only promise an advance beyond the finite and natural by destroyingmeasure, now brings forth the positive form of the aesthetic Idea, which makespresent the meaning of the infinite and supernatural-supersensuous precisely in asensuous-imaginative figure, even if not in a literal presentation.

This art of genius leads man into the realm of his most genuinely humanfreedom. It opens up for him an intuitive grasp of the infinite that is ownmost tohim. In it, he is with the infinite as with his own, and he is with it now with histaste raised to the power of infinity. The aesthetic judgment, as practiced on theart of beauty as the expression of aesthetic Ideas, is one in which the rightness ofpurposiveness that is experienced, the measure that is judged, as in Blake's poem,is a supermeasure, judged by the vitality and liveliness of the spiritual movementand life evoked by the image. The image has become a symbol, not in theKantian sense defined in relation to beauty as symbol of the good, but in thesense which Romanticism was ultimately to discover for itself in the creation ofthe great symbolist works of the 19th century, from Mallarme and Baudelaire toWagner, the impressionists, the expressionists, and beyond. The aesthetic Idea assymbolic image of the intellectually inexpressible source, ground, and possibilityof the real, with which man can be united as own with own, remains a lastingresult of Kant's works, a concept of art that is the first step toward an aestheticscapable of handling the deepest questions of modern art and of bringing art intoits true place in the context of human freedom.

By means of art as expression of an aesthetic idea, man is able to mediatethe difference between himself and the content of the rational IdeasGod,freedom, immortality, the whole sphere of metaphysical ultimacyso as toappropriate them for himself, and himself to them, in immediate contact, indirect touch with sense. The greatest gap that exists in his life, that between thesensible present of the here and now and the ultimate eternal Beyond, betweenthe immediately given and the ultimate In-itself, is bridged by the aesthetic Idea,whose expression in an image brings into the human soul the vibrating vitality ofthe rational Idea without cutting it down or destroying it by shaping it accordingto any set of definite concepts. Through the image of beautiful art man is given


in this life a taste of what life could be in his true homeland, where he would befinally and irrevocably own among his own.

So the Kantian philosophical revolution attains a peak in the culmination ofthe aesthetic revolution. Art, as expression of aesthetic Ideas, becomes themedium by which man's ultimate freedom, his Being-with-the-infinitely-transcendent-as-own is disclosed for Imagination and made available for the lifeof feeling in this finite temporal world. Out of this new vision of art there risesthe surge of the romantic and modern spirit, which liberated art from the con-fines of the cultivated good taste of a neoclassical and rococo culture andopened it to the unceasing search of modernism for the fullness of humanfreedom.

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NOTES

The statement of the four philosophical questions is given in Section IIIof Kant's Logik, Ein Handbuch zu Vorlesungen. The English translation, byT. K. Abbott, is reprinted by the Philosophical Library (New York, 1963), cf.p. 15. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant had listed only the first three asquestions of philosophy, but not the question. What is man? See in that workthe section entitled, "The Ideal of the Highest Good, as a Determining Groundof the Ultimate End of Pure Reason," in the translation by Norman Kemp Smith(London: Macmillan, 1933), p. 635 (A804f, B833f). But surely the fourthquestion had to be at work in Kant's mind all the way through!

The table in the Critique of Judgment-henceforth abbreviated CJ\s:

All the Faculties of the Mind Cognitive Faculties Principles Application

Faculty of KnowledgeFaculty of Pleasure and

UnpleasureFaculty of Desire

UnderstandingJudgment

Reason

a priori toLawfulness NaturePurposive- Artness

Final FreedomPurpose

The table in the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment (Uber Philo-sophie Uberhaupt), in the translation by James Haden (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), is virtually identical.

'Compare the suggestive essay by Henri Levy-Bruhl, "Theorie de I'escla-vage," in M. I. Finley, ed.. Slavery in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Heffer,1960), where the thesis is maintained that in Roman law and custom "the slaveis nothing but a foreigner without rights," that formally "every slave is a for-eigner" and "every foreigner is a slave," so that the notion of slave, servus, isidentified with that of foreigner. Levy-Bruhl goes so far as to affirm that thisholds not alone for the ancient Romans but also for the Homeric Greeks, theancient Jews, and the ancient Germans. See pp. 159-160 in Finley.

Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, p. 70 in the Rosenkranz andSchubert edition of Kant's works. Volume VII I ; in the translation by T. K.Abbott, Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory ofEthics (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), p. 58; as reprinted in the Library ofLiberal Arts edition (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1949), p. 56.

p. 31.^Rosenkranz-Schubert, VI I I , pp. 37-38; Abbott, p. 31; Bobbs-Merrill,

KANT'S AESTHETIC REVOLUTION 18g

Metaphysik der Sitten. Tugendiehre. For the reference to the edition inthe Philosophischen Bibiiothek see R. Eisler, Kant-Lexikon (Hildesheim: GeorgOlms, 1964), p. VII and p. 542. Eisler is very useful for our subject Abbott(1909), p. 316.

Critique of Pure Reason, "The Antinomy of Pure Reason, Section 9, I I I ,Possibility of Causality through Freedom, in Harmony with the Universal Law ofNatural Necessity," in N. K. Smith's translation, pp. 467-469 (A538, B566).Sartre's underlying act by which freedom is supposed to choose its world in abasically a pr/or/ way is an echo of this Kantian doctrine.

Kant frequently uses the expression "Gemeinsinn," literally commonsense, with the meaning of a sense that is common to all mankind, as forinstance in sections 20-22 of Kant 1790a. There is no doubt that he thinks ofjudgment in its functioning in the uniquely proportioned combination of imagi-nation and understanding, as represented in the judgment of taste, as such acommon sense: we are able to have a common world of nature known in acommon manner because we have a common proportionality of imagination andunderstanding as basic cognitive equipment. But it is of interest in our presentcontext to observe that in Section 40 he explicitly turns to the other adjective,speaking of this common sense as a "gemeinschaftlicher" one, that is to say, onethat is communal, and he explains it as "a faculty of judgment which in itsreflection has regard to the mode of representation of everyone else in thoughts(a priori), in order, as it were, to keep its judgment to the whole of humanreason and thereby to avoid the illusion which would have an injurious influenceon the judgment stemming from subjective private conditions which could easilybe taken to be objective." From this we see that for Kant the common sense ismore than merely a sense that happens to exist as the same in each human being.It is communal in that it itself intends to keep to communion with the whole ofhumanity in its activity as judgment. This keeping to communion is done bycomparing our judgments with the possible, not merely actual, judgments ofothers and by putting ourselves in the place of every other person by abstractingfrom the limitations which contingently attach to our own personal judgment.Thus we abstract from charm or emotion in seeking a judgment that hashumanly universal validity. See Section 40, "On Taste as a kind oisensuscom-munis."

For the notion of a universal voice that expresses this communal sense orjudgment, see Section 8 of Kant, 1790a. "The universality of the satisfaction isrepresented in a judgment of taste only as subjective." "We wish to submit theobject to our eyes, as if the satisfaction in it depended on sensation; and yet ifwe then call the object beautiful, we believe we possess a universal voice, and wemake a claim to everyone's agreement, although on the contrary all privatesensation would be decisive only for the contemplator alone and his satis-faction."

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^Section 23 in the "Analytic of the Sublime" (Kant, 1790a). See also theend of Section VII of the "Introduction," where Kant speaks of our pleasure inthe sublime as "a purposiveness of the object, in accordance with the concept offreedom, in regard to the form or even the unform of objects."

^See Section 23, "Analytic of the Sublime," where Kant says that "themost important and inner difference between the sublime and the beautiful issurely this: that if, as is reasonable, we here consider at first only the sublime innatural objects (for the sublime in art is always limited to the conditions ofagreement with nature), the beauty of nature (independent beauty) carries withit a purposiveness in its form by which the object seems to be predetermined, asit were, for our power of judgment, and thus constitutes itself an object ofsatisfaction, whereas on the contrary that which arouses the feeling of the sub-lime in us, without our reasoning and merely in the apprehension of it, mayindeed appear in its form to be contrary to the ends of our power of judgment,unsuited to our power of presentation and, as it were, violent in its action on ourimagination, and yet it is judged to be all the more sublime on that account."

Z^* I am not referring to a chronological sequence in the composition ofKant, 1790a. It may be that Kant's first-reached definition of beauty wasactually the one in terms of aesthetic ideas. The point, rather, is the ontologicalsequence of the thought, which then has more than a biographical relation toartistic-aesthetic history. In a time of transition thoughts intermingle in theindividual's head in a varied manner until, socially, they settle down into pre-vailing patterns.

^^See Kant, 1790a, Section 49, and the Remark I to Section 57. Kantsometimes seems to restrict genius to being merely the faculty of havingaesthetic Ideas, anterior, so to speak, to any artistic expression of them in anindividual medium. In that case, in order for a genius to be an artist he wouldthen have to add to this faculty of genius the talent of spirit, which Kant treatsas the faculty for expressing in the medium, "whether the expression be inspeech or painting or statuary," the ineffable state of mind implied by theaesthetic Idea. See immediately below. Note 13.

^^"Geist, spirit, in its aesthetic meaning, denotes the animating principle inthe mind. . ,. Now I maintain that this principle is no other than the faculty ofpresentation of aesthetic Ideas; and by an aesthetic Idea I mean that represen-tation of the imagination which gives us much to think about although nodefinite thought, that is to say, concept, can be adequate to it, and whichconsequently no language can make intelligible or fully achieve. It is easilyseen that it is the counterpart (pendant) to a rational Idea, which conversely is aconcept to which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be ade-quate" (Kant, 1790a, Section 49). See also Remark I of Section 57 for further


definitory observations on the aesthetic Idea in its contrast with the rationalIdea.

e, like judgment in general, is the discipline (or training) of genius; itclips its wings closely and makes it civilized and well-bred or polished" (Kant,1790a, Section 50). After a few further remarks on the services of taste inadvancing the condition of genius, Kant decides that if something in an artworkshould be sacrificed in the conflict between the two, it should rather fall on theside of genius. Judgment, which in matters of fine art makes the decision on itsown principles, will rather let the damage be done to the freedom and riches ofthe imagination than to understanding!

REFERENCES

Abbott, T. K.1909

Eisler, R.1964

Grebe, Paul1963

Kant, Immanuel1781178517881790a1790b17971800

Partridge, Eric1958

T. K. Abbott (trans.). Critique of Practical Reason and otherWorks on the Theory of Ethics. London: Longmans, Green.

Kant-Lexikon. Hildesheim: Georg Olms.

(ed.) Duden Etymologie. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Insti-tut, Dudenverlag.

Critique of Pure Reason.Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.Critique of Practical Reason.Critique of Judgment.Uber Philosophie Uberhaupt.The Metaphysics of Morals, II.Logik, Ein Handbuch zu Vorlesungen.

Origins. New York: Macmillan.

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