4.5. 18th-Century Aesthetics
4.5.1. Introduction
4.5.2. Joseph Addison
4.5.3. Edmund Burke
4.5.4. David Hume
4.5.5. G. E. Lessing
4.5.6. Immanuel Kant
4.5.1. Introduction
We are going to deal now with a different aspect of eighteenth-century criticism: the pre-romantic elements. Pre-romanticism is largely contemporaneous with neoclassicism in England, and provides a complementary perspective. Pre-romantic tendencies became dominant towards the second half of the eighteenth century. The difference between the neoclassical and the pre-romantic aesthetic could be summarized thus:
Neoclassical Pre-romantic
Conceptually based Perceptually based
Taxonomic Experiential
Abstract and general Subjectivist
Rational Emotional
In many of Johnson's contemporaries the shift from the traditional, conceptual, neoclassic standards to a new cognitive and perceptual grounding of literature is clearer than in Johnson himself, because they are less concerned with classical theory and more with the actual experience of the audience. Pre-romantic aesthetics are often linked to the influence of Locke's empiriticist philosophy. Elements of empiriticist pre-romanticism can be found in Addison, Hume, Burke, Alexander Gerard, Lord Kames, Joseph Priestley, Hugh Blair, James Beattie, Edward Young, Richard Hurd, Joseph Warton, Archibald Alison and Adam Smith (also the founder of political economy). Their theories are aesthetic, that is to say, they deal with the object as it is perceived, and sentimentalist : they are concerned above all with the emotions awakened in the receiver. Empiricist critics place the source of aesthetic emotion in fancy, not in the judgement of the audience. They are not too much concerned with the moral value of art; they are trying rather to explain the pleasure produced by art, a pleasure without any pretensions to deep meaning. Addison affirms that aesthetic pleasures do not have any cognitive value. The French critic Du Bos holds that reading poetry is different in motive from reading history or any genre concerned with practical teaching. Poetry is appreciated by its style rather than its teaching. The main end of literature for the empirical critics is to please. Poetry has somehow retreated from its pretensions to rational knowledge. Sometimes, they include teaching in their definitions, but only as a means. Or moral value is present only in a shadowy way: Shaftesbury speaks of the refinement of the moral sensibility which is effected through taste. Even when an ultimate moral value is still recognized, pleasing is said to be the end which differenciates literature as such among the belles-lettres. Warton, Gerard, Hurd and Twining are downright hedonists: not the first, however, since hedonism had already appeared in the theories of Castelvetro, Cowley, Temple, St. Evremond and sometimes Dryden. But for the first time we find a whole school that does not take for granted the need of direct moral instruction in fiction. We find instead a theory of the so-called "moral sense" (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Gerard, Kames). This sense is seen as distinct from judgement or knowledge: it is rather a question of feelings, of emotions, which are believed to be moral in themselves. Here we have a crude theory of the unconscious influence of literature (already foreshadowed in the "sugared pill" theory, which however was never really taken seriously). Literature may educate our morals, but it is by acting on our emotions, not on our judgement. Johnson himself always insists on the role of judgement in the perception and comprehension of a work; in this sense he is more classical than these critics.
So, we have on the one hand the traditional, neoclassical, conceptual standard: a work has unity because it is subject to a design transmitted by literary tradition, and its style is correct because it is the style generally accepted by this tradition to deal with a given subject. On the other hand we have the perceptual standard: form and style are an organic growth which is transmitted to the work from the direct experience of the subject, the artist, the writer. The work has order because it reflects an orderly process of thought. Critical thought in the 18th century had come to rely more on the latter, on rule, imitation and tradition, while the latter was more organically related to the philosophy and the taste of the time and formed an undercurrent which will become the romantic reaction against neoclassicism. Poetry will no longer be seen as ornamented language, "ornament" is rather the necessary reflection of an individual sensibility and mode of conceiving.
We find throughout the Neoclassical age an underlying opposition between elaborate styles and natural styles (the standard classical locus being the opposition between Lysias vs. Demosthenes). Dryden, Pope and Johnson view Shakespeare as a somewhat savage and disorderly product of nature, but they recognize his greatness and abundance. Johnson said that "Corneille is to Shakespeare as a clipped hedge is to a forest." Johnson, particularly, argues that elaborate styles estrange the poet from an immediate knowledge of nature and prevent his reaching the highest effets of art. Johnson draws an opposition between clear minds and minds distorted by "wit" and verbal elaboration, like Cowley. "Refinement entails a departure from the intuitive level of experience" (Edinger 170). He is against learned styles: poetry must not be a discursive, but a dramatic communication of experience.
We may link this insistence on feeling to some ideas of the 17th-century libertines (Bouhours, La Bruyère, St. Evremond, and in England, Sir William Temple) who had opposed learning through rules and favoured instead learning through experience (Rousseau will develop these ideas much further in Emile). They oppose "art," and favour the natural ease of style and energy, and they oppose "false wit" which plays with words having nothing to do with the experience of the object they are dealing with. These ideas will become more and more diffused during the eighteenth century. Sublimity or pathos are often said to proceed from the representation of subjective states of consciousness. The same emphasis is found in France in Arnauld's Port-Royal Logic : the orator must offer an image of the things "which not only represents the things barely as they are, but also the Motions and Affections with which they are conceived." The expressive function of language is valued alongside with the referential one.
Connotation and its conceptual opposition to denotation are also emphasized. Rhetorical figures are accepted by Arnauld and Addison as a kind of mark of subjective feeling; they add an element of connotation to the denotative meaning of words. The terms "connotation" and "denotation" themselves are not used as yet, but a distinction similar to this between "principal" and "accessory" meanings of words is also found in Fénelon, Johnson or Wordsworth. Adam Smith inverses the traditional relationship between figures and beauty of expression. Beauty comes from a sentiment of sympathy; figures will follow spontaneously. Reynolds himself distinguishes between a style in which words are used as means and another one in which words are used as ends in themselves: this is understood to be a vicious use.
Genius and originality is valued early enough by British critics such as John Dennis (The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry , 1701) and Edward Young ("Conjectures on Original Composition," 1759), together with Johnson himself, who points out that nobody was ever great by imitation. Gerard and Dennis advise the poet to feel passion, so that he may have the same associations of ideas as his classical models. There is a renewal of interest in the inspirational theories of Ion and in the criticism of Longinus.
The corresponding emotion on the side of the audience is ecstasis , a strong emotion of transport. Catharsis is now understood as a purifying and exalting of the emotions, in a rather sentimental way. This conception is linked to the Cartesian idea of the emotions in art, which considered them a useful exercise for the soul, an exercise which is safe because of the imitative nature of the passions awakened by art. But rationalism does not develop an influential aesthetics, and so it is the empiricist theories that flourish. This we may link to Locke's view of language: words do not convey ideas: they excite ideas. There is an insistence here on connotation, of that element in meaning which is linked to some particular experience; all this foreshadows romantic ideas. Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (above all, the later editions containing the doctrine of association, ca. 1700) provides the philosophical basis for this perceptual revolution against rhetoric; his distinction between primary and secondary (or subjective) qualities of objects, as well as his conception of the human mind and its associational processes are behind the aesthetic speculations of Addison or Burke. Associationism is also used in textual analysis; it is applied, for instance, to Hamlet's monologue, to the study of synecdoche (Addison) or as a theme and an organizing principle to the novel by Sterne. There is an urge to develop a connection between aesthetics and science: Burke and Hume will try to find a universal standard of taste; the effects on the receiver are sometimes explained in a mechanical way (according to Burke, beauty works by "relaxing the solids of the system"; Kames presents a similar mechanical model in his Elements of Criticism [1762]). Alison affirms that poetical descriptions are beautiful in proportion to their power to stimulate associations charged with emotion. The apparent non-analyzability of aesthetic emotions will lead some critics to postulate an internal aesthetic sense, simple, ultimate and infallible, after the model of Shaftesbury's "moral sense" (Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue ,1725).
4.5.2. Joseph Addison (1672-1729)
Addison may be considered as the first of the English aestheticians in the sense that he is interested above all on the effect of the work on the reader. He wrote in The Spectator (1712) a series of essays "On the Pleasures of the Imagination." We may note that among these aestheticians imagination is becoming a more important critical concept, and wit is less important ("wit," being linked to words, not to things, is an extrinsic way of invention). Imagination, or fancy, is the combination and alteration of memories. If this is done through a work of art, Addison speaks of "secondary imagination," the primary being that effected by the mind alone. "Secondary pleasures" come from a comparison between the ideas awakened by the original and those aroused by the imitation. Artistic imitation is most pleasing when it approaches nature; and nature is most pleasing when it approaches art. The role of the poet is an important one; he heightens and enlivens nature: Addison conceives this as a kind of directing the attention of the reader. But the role of the reader is also important, because his imagination and his judgement are also in question in the perception of the work. Descriptions please in two ways: as imitations, and as the object described. Descriptions of bad or disagreeable things may still please as descriptions; those of good things both as descriptions and as the object described. Actually, there are three kinds of objects proper for imitation: beautiful, great or uncommon objects (cf. the distinction which will become common later in the 18th between the beautiful, the sublime and the picturesque). The best objects, Addison says, are those that work on the passions of the reader, exciting them in a way that becomes pleasurable because it is recognized as secondary, not the real thing. The pleasures of imagination are less gross than those of sense and less refined than those of the understanding. Every man should develop the sphere of his innocent pleasures to its widest, Addison believes. But he favours a"light" and "lazy" aesthetics, valuing real resemblances more than metaphorical ones, and rejecting the metaphysical conceit because it represents "too violent a labour for the brain ."
Addison's classification of the arts sees sculpture as being the nearest to the object represented, the most concrete; painting follows, and then description. Music is the most abstract. Classifications such as this one will become almost standard during the eighteenth century and the romantic age, and will receive a philosophical backing: romantic thinkers will say that some arts are more objective and others (poetry and music among them) more subjective.
4.5.3. Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Burke was an important writer in the fields of law and political theory. His main work on aesthetics is A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).
Sublimity: The concept of the sublime becomes fashionable again in the eighteenth century, with the revival of Longinus. Boileau, in his Réflexions sur Longin, concluded that sublimity came only from Longinus' five possible causes of sublimity working together (great ideas, passion, use of figurative language, a careful composition). In English criticism, the concept of the sublime as opposed to beauty had been introduced by Dennis, and many others followed. "Sublime" is applied in two main senses: either to the genius of the poet who goes beyond the rules (cf. fashion of inspirationalism, Dennis' passion and Young's defense of original genius in his "Conjectures on Original Composition") or to some object which is big, irregular, frightening and surprising in an agreeable way. The ideas of irregularity and excess are present in both. For Burke, the sublime is linked to an excitement coming from terrible objects which produce strong emotions. In order to enjoy the excitement of sublimity, the observer must preserve some distance from these objects and feel secure from danger. As the Roman poet Lucretius said, it is pleasant to watch the power of a storm in the sea only if we are on firm ground, not from a sinking ship.
Beauty: According to Burke, a sense of beauty is proper to man; it is "a social quality ." It is linked to feelings of tenderness and affection. Burke feels unable to explain the end of beauty; he believes that it answers to a mysterious divine design.
Comparison :
The sublime Beauty
Individual Social
Vast Comparatively small
Rugged Polished
Right line or Insensible shunning of right strong deviation line
from it
Dark and gloomy Clear
Solid and massive Light and delicate.
They may appear united sometimes, Burke admits, but they are opposed principles.
Burke establishes a similar dichotomy in his discussion of style. Burke defines the opposite concepts of a "clear expression" which transmits things naturally, as they are, and a "strong expression" which transmits rather a thing as it is felt , that is, in such a way that it will act on the passions, and not the judgement, of the audience. We see here again the opposition between an objective and a subjectively medieated use of language. To affect the audience, Burke argues, we must transmit not so much the object (affection by imitation) as the way it affects a perceiver (affection by sympathy). He believes that a poetry of the emotions cannot be considered to be an art of imitation: Sir William Jones will soon use the word "expression" in this new sense: "music and poetry are expressive of the passions and operate in our mind by sympathy."
Taste: Burke believes that some kind of foundation can be established for a standard of taste. Taste he defines as "those faculties of the mind, which are affected by, or which form a judgement of, the works of imagination and the elegant arts" (303). He opposes the idea of taste as a separate faculty of the mind, different from imagination and judgement. Taste is a compound of the primary pleasures of sense, the secondary pleasures of the imagination and the conclusion coming from reason. Imagination is incapable of producing anything completely new, and things which are pleasurable to sense are more or less the same for all men, apart from the few variations which may be introduced by culture and custom. The same happens with imagination, whose works are a combination of sense data. The essence of taste is similar in all men, although they experience it in widely different degrees . So, Burke concludes, "The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment."
4.5.4. David Hume (1711-1776)
Hume tried, like Burke, to develop a standard of taste ("Of the Standard of Taste," 1757). He saw great difficulties: "Beauty", he says, "is not a quality in things themselves; it exists merely in the mind that contemplates them" (315). But he was unwilling to accept the total subjectivism and relativism of taste. Our common sense tells us that some tastes are absurd, so we are supposing a certain standard, even if it is a vague one. "Hume seems to propose a certain state of mind as the source of the standard of taste " (Adams 313). The standard is at its clearest when a mind free of prejudice and accustomed to judgement considers the aesthetic qualities of an object taking into account nothing but the object itself. Like Pope before him, Hume voices here the ideal neutrality favoured by humanist criticism of the bourgeois era-one which will be questioned by the ideological criticism of our century.
4.5.5. G. E. Lessing (1729-1781)
The term "aesthetic" means originally "sensitive", "related to perception." It was first used during the XVIII with reference to the study of the beautiful, of fine arts (in the Aesthetics of the German critic Baumgarten, 1750). Two important ideas here: the role of the receiver and his experience, and the search for a common grounds to aesthetic feelings and to the different arts.
There is a growing interest in the eighteenth century in the possibility of tracing the common elements of the different arts. A classical motto of the Greek poet Simonides becomes now popular: he had defined poetry as a speaking picture, and painting as silent poetry. This idea is not isolated: it can be related to the Platonic, Aristotelian and Horatian comparisons between poetry and painting. Horace's ut pictura poesis is taken out of its context and magnified: poetry and painting are now dealt with as if their subjects and techniques were the same. Aristotle's analogy between sketching and the designing of plots is put to good use: colour, the specifically pictorial element, is disdained (cf. Locke's "secondary qualities") and the emphasis is on figure and meaning. Now, the theory of painting makes a special emphasis on the use of allegory, which is a common element to both arts. Conversely, there is a fashion of descriptive or pictorial poetry. The common grounds of poetry and painting are pointed out by Du Bos, Du Fresnay's Arte Graphica and Dryden's Parallel between Poetry and Painting, (1695). This tendency will become in time a general movement which tends to look for analogies between the arts, with the side effect of occasionally blurring the differences between them. Wimsatt and Brooks point out the strange paradox by which painting was turned into the critical standard to measure poetry, while literary standards were applied to painting. The influence of pictorial theory on literature was non-intellectual, sensitive, while that of literary theory on painting was a kind of misapplied intellectualization. But the idea of an analogy between the arts goes beyond its more obvious limitations in eighteenth-century theory. All arts have a common source, genius, and a similar ideal of perfection in form and aesthetic elevation of the audience as their end. It is a typical impressionistic, subjective and Romantic kind of criticism, and it will gain strength during the Romantic period (cf. Wagner's ideal of the total work of art) in spite of some voices which pointed out the essential differences between the arts, rather than their similarities. The tendency to draw analogies between the arts may be represented in the mid-eighteenth century by the antiquarians J. J. Winckelmann (On the Imitation of Greek Art in Painting and Sculpture, 1754), Cayllus (Tableaux tirés de l'Iliade, de l'Odyssée d' Homère et de l'Enéide de Virgile, 1758) and Joseph Spence (Polymetis, 1747).
Lessing reacts against these theorists and against the extravagances of the analogy. He is a classicist and an Aristotelian, but a flexible one, not unlike Dryden in the English tradition: he recognises that the limits of the art are wider now than in classical Greece (for instance, in his Hamburg Dramaturgy he will react against the prevailing French brand of classicism, asking for a national German drama after the model of Shakespeare and the English theatre).
Lessing affirms that the classics knew that the arts have to be differenciated by their objects of imitation, as well as by their media, and complains that his contemporaries want to imprison poetry withing the narrow limits of painting. By "poetry" he means literature in general, and by "painting" all the plastic arts. His emphasis is on the essential differences between literature and the plastic arts, not on the analogies. This is the subject of his main work, Laocoon: or, on the limits of poetry and painting. Painting cannot imitate successive actions: only simultaneous ones. The proper object of painting is forms, physical bodies. On the other hand, poetry is not the best way of depicting forms: rather, it is concerned with actions which unfold in time. Poetry, then, is an art of time, while painting is an art of space. This difference comes from the very signs which are used in poetical or pictorial representation. The signs of poetry unfold in time, those of painting in space. Of course, Lessing says, the limits of poetry and painting are not here: painting can imitate actions through the imitation of bodies, and poetry can imitate forms to a certain extent through action, through a description of the objects as they are used or manufactured-but in a more limited way than painting.
Moreover, the signs used by painting are natural, and those used by poetry (linguistic signs) are conventional (a difference already noted by Du Bos). Lessing foresees one possible objection now. If the signs of poetry are arbitrary, they are not necessarily linked to actions; they could as well represent bodies as they exist in space. But, Lessing answers, this will be less vivid than a representation of actions. Poetry cannot give an overview of the whole of spatial distribution in the way painting can (though it can add other kinds of sensory impressions apart from visual ones). The proper organization for a descriptive poem is a series of feelings to which descriptions are added, not a series of descriptions to which feelings are added. Literature, then, is more subjective than painting. Lessing rejects the extremities of allegory in painting and visual description in poetry. Poetry cannot depict physical beauty in the way painting can. Painting has to offer a definite image; poetry will have to suggest beauty without definite descriptions, and let each reader imagine the object after his own ideals. Painting, for Lessing, cannot use artistically the images of ugly objects. Poetry has wider limits in this sense: it has the privilege of representing anger, sadness and ugliness; it can deal with a wider range of subjects, of human actions and feelings; its limits are at the same time different from those of painting and wider than them.
4.5.6. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
4.5.6.1. Kant's Philosophical Aesthetics
4.5.6.2. Transcendental Analysis of the Judgement of Beauty
4.5.6.3. Beauty and Sublimity
4.5.6.4. Art
4.5.6.5. Kant's Influence
4.5.6.1. Kant's Philosophical Aesthetics
Kant is not a critic or theorist of literature, but a philosopher who is driven to deal with aesthetics as a necessary component of his philosophy. It is the inner necessity of his system which demands an aesthetic theory. Indeed, he is the first philosopher in whose work aesthetics is a fundamental component (Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida will follow suit).
Kant had made an early approach to aesthetics in his treatise Considerations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), but his main work in this area is the late Critique of Judgement (1790). In this work, artistic experience is viewed as a kind of conciliation of the worlds of knowledge and morality, or of necessity and freedom, which had been separated by Kant in his two earlier great works, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788).
As a philosopher, Kant represents the conciliation of rationalism (Descartes-Spinoza-Leibniz-Wolff) with empiricism (Locke-Berkeley-Hume) in a new kind of philosophy, which he will say is not dogmatic but transcendental . We have to differenciate Kant's transcendental idealism from later "dogmatic" interpretations. That is, his philosophy is a theory of knowledge, and only in this sense it is also a theory of reality. Transcendental philosophy is an analysis of experience: it starts from the recognition of an act of knowing and goes on to inquire into the conditions which determine its possibility; it will find that moral knowledge is not the same as aesthetic knowledge or scientific knowledge. It is not, however, a psychological theory: Kant always traces a sharp division between the psychological and the transcendental interpretation. The transcendental interpretation deals not with actual knowledge, but with a priori principles, with the conditions which determine the very possibility of knowledge. For instance, in the area of perception, it shows how our sensitive experience takes place in the a priori molds of space and time; in the area of pure reason, it determines the way in which our understanding unifies the infinite variety of experience under the categories or pure ordering concepts by means of a judgement. Just as we cannot experience something without the categories of space and time, so we cannot think without casting our thought into the categories. For instance, "unity," "plurality," "totality," are the categories of quantity ; there are also other categories of quality, relation, and modality. In any synthesis of experiences we necessarily subsume sense impressions under one or more of these concepts.
Kant makes a difference beween the understanding or pure reason (a logical, discursive faculty which is able to organize impressions into knowledge) and practical reason (which does not deal with phenomena, with sensible impressions, but with noumena or the postulated, unknowable "things-in-themselves"; it may be usefully related to Shaftesbury's "moral sense"). The world of morality cannot be deduced from the world of phenomena: moral imperatives are not deduced from experience but from a "categorical imperative." The word of nature and the world of moral behaviour are separate.
But Kant saw that the first two critiques did not exhaust the area of transcendental philosophy. He had deduced a priori principles for knowledge in the world of phenomena and knowledge in the world of morality (faculty of knowing and faculty of desiring), but there is still one area of knowledge which cannot be reduced to any of them, and whose own a priori principles must be deduced separately, in a third Critique (the feeling of pleasure or disgust). With these principles of its own, art re-creates both nature and morality, opening a new area for culture. Kant believes that there is a peculiar kind of content to the aesthetic experience (both artistic and natural) which cannot be reduced to the principles of understanding or morality, that is, which has its own a priori principles.
We can see here the source of Edgar Allan Poe's three worlds of the human soul: that of knowledge, that of morals and that of art in between (indeed, the essentials of this conception can be found in Mendelssohn before they are developed by Kant). But note that Poe (and many other aesthetes in the 19th century) are calling for the idea of a pure artistic experience, independent from knowledge or morality. This does not make much sense in Kant, who is abstracting art from knowledge and reason only because of his transcendental purpose. Pure beauty, for Kant, is comparatively trivial, even if it does exist. What is important in Kant is precisely that art forms in some way a bridge between the concepts of nature and those of morality. And the subjects proposed by Poe he would not call instances of pure ("free") beauty, from the moment there is a human interest in them ("adherent" beauty, limited by a concept of what the object is supposed to be intended for). It is true that Kant declares in some way the independence of art from morals and knowledge, but it is, if we may say so, an essential , not an existential independence.
4.5.6.2. Transcendental analysis of the judgement of beauty
Kant analyzes the aesthetic judgement of beauty from the point of view of each kind of categories (of quantity, quality, modality and relation).
According to relation : This a priori basis for the analysis of aesthetic experience Kant looks for in the idea of finality . The foundation of aesthetic pleasure is the perception of a finality in things, the feeling that they answer a purpose. But the aesthetic finality is a kind of empty finality, a finality without an object, that is, a finality without end , a purposiveness without a purpose (Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck ). The finality is not to be found in the object, but in the state of the contemplating mind itself, which enters into a state of free play of the imagination. Aesthetic pleasure, then comes from a kind of pure play of the ability of judging, a delight in its own activity and in the consciousness of a harmony between imagination and judgement. There is also pleasure coming from the sense of freedom form a utilitarian necessity. "Beauty is the form of the finality of an object insofar as it is perceived in the object without the representation of an end." (I, § 17). Kant concludes from this that "To look for a principle of taste which offers a universal criterion of beauty, by means of certain concepts, is an useless task, because what it is seeking is a thing impossible and contradictory in itself" (I, § 17).
According to quality: Aesthetic judgements are not objective: they do not discover any qualities in the object, they do not help us to know its properties better; they refer to the subject and to a feeling which the representation awakens in him. In practical reason, the judgement is based on an imperative. Here no such imperative exists: beauty is perceived in a pure and disinterested contemplation. "TASTE is the faculty of judging an object or a representation with a feeling of satisfaction or disgust, without any interest whatsoever. The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful." (I, § 5). Here Kant opposes the disinterestedness of beauty to the interest which is present both in sensitive pleasure (the agreeable ) and in morals (goodness ). The distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable can be traced back to Plato or St. Thomas, but it comes more directly from Burke, and will be inherited by Coleridge. The beautiful is not (necessarily) agreeable nor good : it is only beautiful. Rationalism had tended to identify beauty and goodness, while empiricism leanded towards the identification of the beautiful and the agreeable. Idealism, Kant says, keeps the three clearly apart, making beauty independent from morals or sense.
According to quantity: The aesthetic judgement of beauty is universal . The aesthetic judgement of beauty is also special in that it is not based on concepts, like the judgements of pure reason: in pure reason, judgements link a representation and a concept; the aesthetic judgement of beauty links the representation directly with the feeling of the observer. Here, the aesthetic judgement of beauty agrees with the aesthetic judgement of the agreeable. The aesthetic judgement of the agreeable, however, is not universal: we recognize that different people may have different taste in this respect. But in spite of its subjectivity, the aesthetic judgement of beauty has pretensions of universality: in some way, we objectify our feeling and declare that the beautiful object is a source of necessary pleasure. We feel that everyone should find beautiful objects beautiful. Kant calls this a "pretension to subjective universality " (I, § 6).
According to modality: Beautiful things not only must please everybody: they please necessarily. That is because in making these aesthetic judgements, we suppose the existence of a "common sense" as a regulative principle which makes their communicability possible. "Beautiful is that which, without a concept, is known as the object of a necessary satisfaction" (I, § 22)
Art has principles of its own, but no contents of its own, says Kant. Rather, it uses the contents proper to pure reason (nature) and practical reason (morality) and relates them to one another, presenting nature as if it were subjected to morality and morality as if it were nature. In this way art effects a kind of imaginary conciliation of the two spheres of human activity. There is no necessary connection between art and morality, but as both follow a priori principles in much the same way, beauty is a proper symbol of morality. Science works with sense experience (intuition ) and phenomena; morality uses noumena but apart from intuition. "None of them can produce a theoretical knowledge of their object as a thing in itself" (I, § 2). But the world of liberty, of moral choice, must act in some way upon the world of phenomena, of nature:
The concept of freedom must accomplish in the world of sense the purpose dictated by its laws, and so there must exist the possibility for nature to be conceived in such a way that at least the conformity to law which has form agrees with the possibility of purposiveness (according to the laws of freedom) which must be realized in it. So, there must be a foundation for the unity of the suprasensible, which lies at the basis of nature, with the practical demands of the concept of freedom; the concept of that foundation, even if neither a practical nor a theoretical knowledge of it can be attained, and, consequently, it does not have a sphere of its own, makes possible nevertheless the circulation of the mode of thinking according to the principles of the former to the mode of thinking according to the principles of the latter. (I, § 2).
This circulation is very important, for judgements are the way in which we interpret the world and discover its laws, starting from a unification of experience which is thought of as if it answered to a purposiveness. Then, aesthetic pleasure is a kind of side effect of the general workings of knowledge, when there is no concept given for the object and no purpose give for the purposiveness. In aesthetic perception, the faculties of representation enter into "free play" with one another. "[Beauty provides] neither physical nor moral freedom. But it is allied to the supersensible conditions of freedom. In this supersensuous reality, the theoretical faculty and the practical faculty are mutually and mysteriously interwoven."
4.5.6.3. Beauty and Sublimity
The ability of aesthetic experience to use the contents of both nature and morality is related by Kant to a favourite eighteenth-century distinction: the one between beauty and sublimity. The contents of beauty are mainly natural, those of sublimity mainly moral, although both nature and morality are at play in both. Kant devotes a detailed transcendental analysis to the concept of sublimity. We will just repeat some of his conclusions. Beauty is that which seems to have a purpose. Sublime is that which seems to go beyond our judgement. "Sublime is that which, from the very fact that it can be thought, proves a faculty of the spirit which surpasses all limits of the senses" (I, § 25). The feeling of sublimity proves that there is a capability of man which goes beyond his physical limitations (mathematical sublime: the proof that our faculty of knowledge goes beyond our senses and intuition; natural or dynamic sublime, powerful and terrible objects make us see by contrast in our insignificance an spiritual superiority: we are small, but we can apprehend the immense in one single concept: we feel our existence as noumena; we are conscious of our dignity as moral beings. In the sense of sublimity, nature is used as a pattern for our ideas: it is a more intellectual perception (not related to taste , but to feeling ). "Sublime is that which pleases immediately because of its very resistance against the interest of our senses" (I, § 29).
4.5.6.4. Art
"Beautiful art . . . is a model of representation that, in itself, bears a conformity to an end, and , even though it has no finality, fosters the cultivation of the faculties of the spirit for social communication" (I, § 44)
We find again in Kant the idea that art must seem natural, even if we are not tricked into believing that it actually is nature: ""In a work of art we must realize that it is art and not nature; nevertheless, the finality in its form must seem as free from all violence of rule as if it were a product of mere nature" (I, § 45). Artistic beauty is set by Kant at a lower level than natural beauty. He says that a love for nature is a sure sign of a good soul, but that love for the arts is not. Kant sees the arts as the product of genius , the natural disposition of the spirit by which nature gives rules to art. Technique and imitation of models are necessary but it is not all: there is always a need of what can't be learnt, the spirit of the work, the undefinable. That is because the genius is not content with imitating other works and following the rules: he establishes new rules which cannot be deduced from previously existing ones. Genius cannot be imitated: only emulated. The imagination of the genius creates a second nature, with a mixture of laws analogic to those of nature and also moral principles coming from reason. The arts, and especially poetry, use nature as a symbol of morality or theology.
Kant classifies the arts into: arts of word, of figure and of play of forms:
· Arts of the word:
- Rhetoric is not highly valued by Kant. He defines it as the art which deals with a question of reason as if it were a mere play of the imagination (cf. the late 17th and 18th-century reaction against rhetoric)
- Poetry , on the other hand, presents itself from the very beginning as a play of the imagination, which nevertheless affords matter for reason.
· Arts of figure:
Sculpture, painting, landscape gardening, etc.
· Arts of play of forms:
In space: wallpaper
In time : music. Beauty is at its purest in these abstract arts, which are freest from concepts (free beauty). "It is worth noting that here was a system which conceived Homer and Shakespeare as less aesthetically pure than wallpaper" (Wimsatt and Brooks 372).
Kant also deals in his Critique with the lesser aesthetic emotions: among them, games and laughter, which is for him the result of an absurdity: "laughter is an emotion which is born from the sudden change of an anxious expectation into nothing" (I, § 54)
4.5.6.5. Kant's Influence
Kant's influence was enormous in the literary theory of the late eighteenth and of the nineteenthe century, for instance in later aesthetic approaches to "art for art's sake." It can also be traced out in modern critical schools, like the New Criticism, Structuralism and Deconstruction.
Kant's philosophy states forcefully the essential alienation of man as a thinking being from nature, and the need for a reconciliation which is somehow fulfilled by the aesthetic experience. This alienation will be a constant theme in romantic thought. Indeed,
it would not be a great exaggeration to say that all German romantic criticism is devoted to the problem of how literature reconciles sensory experience and ideas," "the worldly and the transcendental," "object and subject," "nature and will, morals," "history and contingence with system and necessity." (Wimsatt and Brooks 370)
In this sense, Kant's work is a powerful systematization of eighteenth-century aesthetics, a foreshadowing of Romanticism and an important influence on later critics.