In §42 of the third Critique, On the Intellectual Interest in the Beautiful, Kant claims that it is ‘always the mark of a good soul’ (5: 298)Footnote 1 to take an ‘immediate interest’ in natural beauty because it indicates a moral interest in harmony between nature and moral freedom. In the same pages, however, he denies the possibility of a similarly morally significant interest in artistic beauty. I will argue that, according to his own theory of fine art, Kant ought not to deny this value to artistic beauty. In the pages that immediately follow his discussion of immediate interest Kant defines artistic beauty as the joint product of a ‘natural gift’ (Naturgabe) (5: 307) of genius and a freely exercised discipline of skill and taste. This, I will show, commits him to the claim that artistic beauty embodies and expresses a harmony between nature and freedom in the productive act of a human being, and thus to the claim that one can take an immediate and morally significant interest in artistic beauty, just as much as in natural beauty.
1. Nature and Purposiveness
Kant argues that an intellectual interest in natural beauty is morally good because it is an interest in harmony between nature and morality, an interest ‘that the ideas [of reason] … have objective reality, i.e., that nature should at least show some trace or give a sign that it contains in itself some sort of ground for assuming a lawful correspondence of its products with our satisfaction that is independent of all interest’ (5: 300).
This ‘trace’ or ‘sign’ that the rational ideas (of God, freedom, etc.) are objectively real indicates a harmony between nature's ‘products’ – including human behaviour – and the moral law. For Kant, natural beauty serves as such a sign because it exhibits purposiveness without a determinable purpose. This is obscure unless we know what he means by ‘purposiveness’. His account emerges from a comparison between determinate cognitive judgements and judgements of taste. He argues that there is a pleasure in successful cognition that is caused by the mutually harmonious activity of the faculties involved in judgement: the imagination and the understanding. In ordinary cognition this harmony is no more or less than the agreement of an intuited particular with a concept that determines it, and thus pleasure in successful cognition. However, we also encounter objects that elicit this pleasure in a way that cannot be accounted for by conceptual determination or cognitive success. As Kant puts it, they elicit a ‘merely formal purposiveness in the play of the cognitive powers of the subject’ (5: 222). We call these objects beautiful. In the case of natural beauty, this purposiveness is an object of immediate interest because it
shows itself as art, not merely by chance, but as it were intentionally, in accordance with a lawful arrangement and as purposiveness without an end, which latter, since we never encounter it externally, we naturally seek within ourselves, and indeed in that which constitutes the ultimate end of our existence, namely the moral vocation. (5: 301)
Purposiveness without a (determinable) purpose in natural beauty leads us to seek that purpose within ourselves. For Kant we do this ‘naturally’ because it falls under reason's demand to find the unconditioned for any condition; given ‘purposiveness’, reason demands to know the purpose. Unable to find one in nature, we look to ourselves. There we find a purpose that would explain it: ‘the moral vocation’. This is not the means to the discovery of our moral vocation, which requires no special means; it is a sign that this vocation is reflected in nature because nature seems to have been designed to harmonize with our manner of judging. Natural beauty thus intimates that it is reasonable to believe that nature is animated by a purpose that harmonizes with our moral vocation, and thus that we do not will the moral law in vain.Footnote 2
Kant denies that it is possible to take a similarly immediate interest in artistic beauty. He writes: ‘the thought that nature has produced that beauty must accompany the intuition and reflection, and on this alone is grounded the immediate interest that one takes in it’ (5: 299). An intimation of design in an artistic object has no special significance because we know it is designed. It is therefore not significant to find that it seems to have been created intentionally. Here, Kant presents art solely under the guise of an artist's determinate intention and argues that any interest in art is mediated by awareness of this intention. Interest in art is thus limited to interests born of social inclinations to communication and ornamentation, such that a Crusoe (sans Friday) could take no interest in it.
On this basis, Kant reduces art to two possibilities: works intended to imitate natural beauty, or works ‘obviously intentionally directed toward our satisfaction’ (5: 301). I will argue that this misses the moral significance of artistic beauty, and is incompatible with his later account of art as beautiful insofar as it ‘seems like nature’. We will see that, for Kant, art seems like nature not due to what in an artist's creative act can be attributed to nature, but due to the discipline freely exercised upon it by the artist, and that this grounds an intellectual interest in artistic beauty by embodying and expressing a harmony between nature and freedom.
2. Art, Nature and Freedom
Kant presents this more nuanced account of fine art immediately following the section we have been considering. All art, he writes, is a ‘production through freedom … a capacity for choice that grounds its actions in reason’ (5: 303). But beautiful art,Footnote 3 he writes shortly thereafter, is the ‘art of genius’ (5: 307), which is a natural gift. But fine art is still art, according to the first definition. Artistic beauty is thus a joint product of the natural gift of genius and an exercise of freedom that takes the form of a discipline exercised on the products of genius by means of judgements of taste and acquired skills. Kant concludes that neither artistic production that exhibits genius without taste and skill, nor that exhibits taste and skill without genius, can be beautiful (5: 311, 313).Footnote 4 Genius and taste, individually, are necessary but not sufficient conditions for artistic beauty. Only jointly are they sufficient. As such a joint product, I will argue, artistic beauty indicates a harmony between nature and freedom just as much as does natural beauty. For this reason Kant's claim that an intellectual interest in beauty must be grounded by the thought that the beautiful object is produced by nature is not correct. In the case of natural beauty the thought that nature produces the beautiful object might ground the interest, but what truly interests the subject is the sign of a harmony between nature and freedom. If there is more than one way for beauty to express such a harmony, then there is more than one possible basis for taking an immediate moral interest in beauty.Footnote 5
Genius as nature
Kant writes that genius is an ‘inborn productive faculty of the artist … the inborn predisposition of the mind (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art’ (5: 307). This presents genius as natural in two ways. First of all, it is inborn, meaning that it is not acquired through practice or training, and cannot be improved through practice or training. One innately possesses genius, or one does not. What one can improve are one's skills, knowledge of exemplars, and judgement.
Second, genius is an inborn predisposition of the mind (Gemütsanlage). It is what Kant elsewhere calls a ‘natural predisposition’ (Naturanlage), a term that occurs frequently in his natural teleology, and which shapes his account of the intellectual interest in natural beauty as an interest in natural ends that accord with moral ends.Footnote 6 He often uses the term to indicate a drive or interest ‘implanted’ by nature that serves (or can serve) a morally good purpose. In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, for example, he contrasts humanity's natural predisposition to the good with its propensity (Hang) for evil. A Hang is a ‘predisposition (Prädisposition) to crave a delight which, when once experienced, arouses in the subject an inclination to it’ (6: 28n.). It is a passive tendency, like the way an alcoholic is predisposed to become addicted to alcohol, but will not if he or she is never exposed to it. Anlagen – at least those attributed to nature – are different; similarly to the word's colloquial use to mean a facility or manufacturing plant, it indicates an arrangement set up for a purpose.Footnote 7 For example, in Religion Kant claims that human beings are ‘radically evil’, but quickly adds that this is not a condemnation of natural drives. Natural drives, which comprise our original predisposition (ursprünglichen Anlage) to animality, are good (6: 26). As he puts it in the teleology of the third Critique, they have been given to us by nature ‘merely for guidance in order not to neglect or even injure the determination of the animality in us’ (5: 432). They become evil only when vices are ‘grafted’ onto them, vices that ‘do not spring from this predisposition itself as a root’ (6: 27).
Generally, then, natural or original Anlagen are contrivances of nature that unless corrupted contribute to human preservation, procreation and progress.Footnote 8 From them arise the principal ‘incentives’ of human action, including, Kant claims, a predisposition to the moral law, which he offers as an explanation of his claim in the Groundwork that the moral law is a sufficient incentive for action.Footnote 9 Importantly, though, this incentive is not sufficient to determine the will, because the will must determine itself in order to be free. The incentive must be incorporated into one's maxim – one must decide to make it a rule of one's action – if it is to determine the will. Kant's account of incentives and maxims is notoriously difficult to interpret, but we need not iron it out for our purposes. What is important for us is that Anlage here indicates an incentive for action, a ‘drive’ that, when implanted by nature, is good in the sense that acting on it contributes to the fulfilment of natural ends that correspond to the moral end, provided it is not corrupted.
As such a natural predisposition, the activity characteristic of genius occurs independently of its possessor's will. Thus, a genius ‘does not know himself how the ideas for [a work] came to him, and also does not have it in his power to think up such things at will or according to a plan’ (5: 308). The will comes into the picture in the artist's decisions about what to do with the products of his or her genius. These products, the ‘ideas’ that come to the genius, Kant calls ‘aesthetic ideas’, and characterizes in two ways. First, he calls them aesthetic ‘counterparts’ to the rational ideas of God, freedom, substantial being, and immortality, and second, he describes them as intuitions that cannot be cognized adequately by determinate concepts. These two characterizations converge:
[B]y an aesthetic idea … I mean that representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it … One readily sees that it is the counterpart (pendant) of an idea of reason, which is, conversely, a concept to which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate. (5: 314)
But Kant does not only describe genius as producing representations. He also describes it as the animating force of the mind (spirit, or Geist), and describes its products, aesthetic ideas, as provoking the mind into a multitude of thoughts that ‘strive toward something lying beyond the bounds of experience, and thus seek to approximate a presentation of concepts of reason’ (ibid.). Genius, like reason, manifests as a demand for the unconditioned that provokes the mind to an activity that strives beyond possible experience. It is therefore not surprising that Kant adopts a critical attitude towards it. As a natural predisposition it conduces to the good as long as it is properly directed. But if it is not properly directed its possessor at best fails to achieve artistic beauty, and at worst comes to believe he or she possesses privileged knowledge of metaphysical entities. So Kant reminds us that ‘this faculty … considered by itself alone, is really only a talent (of the imagination)’ (ibid.).Footnote 10 To achieve beauty this talent, this natural predisposition that animates the mind and incites creative activity, must be kept within its proper epistemic bounds and the creative activity it incites must be disciplined by a free exercise of skill and taste.
Discipline as freedom
In Kant and the Experience of Freedom, Paul Guyer asks why fine art, as the product of a natural gift, should not be equivalent to natural beauty as a trace or sign of nature's harmony with our purposes: ‘Why is the very existence of fine art not as much evidence of nature's hospitality to our interests, aesthetic and moral, as the existence of natural beauties in the more ordinary sense?’ (Guyer Reference Guyer1993: 114). I argue that it is such evidence, but to see this we must note that the relevant question for Kant is not why products of genius fail to produce the same interest as natural beauty, but why genius on its own fails to produce beauty at all.
Untempered by learnt skill and taste, genius produces neither artistic nor natural beauty. It produces obscure works that express aesthetic ideas, but only to similarly situated geniuses, examples for ‘emulation by another genius’ (5: 318), but not beauty. To everyone else they are works that ‘break one's neck’, as Kant colourfully puts it (5: 334).Footnote 11 The discipline of taste is needed for the artist to render the aesthetic idea owed to genius universally communicable: ‘Taste is the discipline (or corrective) of genius … [B]y introducing clarity and order into the abundance of thoughts it makes the ideas tenable, capable of an enduring and universal approval’ (5: 319). The aesthetic idea demands a communicative act, but taste is required for this act to be available to all. A work of art is like an utterance. Genius speaks like an oracle; taste translates oracular speech into a cosmopolitan vernacular.
Kant is thus committed to an account of artistic beauty as embodying a harmony between nature and freedom, in the form of the natural products of genius tempered by the freely exercised discipline of skill and taste. Artistic beauty so understood, however, is not sufficient to elicit an immediate interest in its audience. To do so, it must also make this harmony apparent to its audience. (Such an appearance, of course, does not constitute objective evidence.) It is not enough for art to embody a harmony between nature and freedom; it must also make it universally communicable. Otherwise, it would at best be recognizable to the artist who creates it, and to similarly situated geniuses.
3. What does Artistic Beauty Display?
How does artistic beauty make this harmony apparent? Here a comparison with the account of artistic genius of Kant's contemporary Moses Mendelssohn is illuminating. In many ways, Mendelssohn is a creature of the classical aesthetics of objective perfection according to which beauty is a ‘clear but confused’ perception of a perfection imitated by the artist. But he innovates on that view in at least one way that echoes in Kant. He argues that works of genius reveal not only the perfections the artist imitates; they reveal the artist's own ‘soul’: ‘In and of itself, each imitation already conveys with it the concept of a perfection … [but] added to this in the imitations of art is the artist's perfection that we perceive in them … visible imprints of the artist's abilities which, so to speak, put his entire soul on display’ (Mendelssohn Reference Mendelssohn1997: 174). For Mendelssohn, in a work of genius we discern ‘the perfection of all the powers of the soul as well as their harmonization for a single, final, purpose’ (ibid. 175).
Mendelssohn is responsible in part for introducing the focus on the ‘soul’ of the artist in ways that will echo strongly in later idealistic aesthetics, but in doing so he follows a way of thinking about art that goes back at least to Renaissance humanism: human creativity as a finite imitation of the act of the Creator. For example, Leon Battista Alberti writes in 1435 that painters ‘in modeling or painting living things, behaved like a god among mortals … the virtues of painting … are that its masters see their works admired and feel themselves to be almost like the Creator’ (Alberti Reference Alberti1972: 61). This, of course, derives from the much older natural theological idea that God's attributes can be seen in nature as creation. Mendelssohn explicitly places his account in this context, treating God as the genius par excellence: ‘The pleasure we take in the beauties of nature itself is inflamed to the point of ecstasy by the reference to the infinite perfection of the master who produced them’ (Mendelssohn Reference Mendelssohn1997: 174–5).
The parallel between the artist and the Creator is quite important for Mendelssohn, but he would reject it in the form Alberti presents it, which is introduced into German aesthetics in Winckelmann's Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (Winckelmann 1987: 20–1). Alberti writes about the ancient painter Zeuxis, who modelled together ‘five outstandingly beautiful girls, so that he might represent in his painting whatever feature of feminine beauty was most praiseworthy in each of them’, producing an image more beautiful than any individual person (Alberti Reference Alberti1972: 91).Footnote 12 For Mendelssohn this would not be an achievement analogous to the divine act of creation, because it is essentially imitative. By contrast, he presents the achievement of an artist who produces a representation that outstrips the beauty of a corresponding natural object counterfactually, in terms of contrasting aims of human and divine authorship. He writes that the artist aims to ‘depict a certain object just as God would have created it if sensuous beauty had been his supreme, final, purpose and no more important final purposes were able to cause him to deviate’ (Mendelssohn Reference Mendelssohn1997: 176). An artist aims only at aesthetic achievement while natural objects are determined by the ends of nature; the basis for comparison with the Creator is thus not between the form of a natural object and its artistic representation, but between creating an artwork, and creating nature itself as a systematic whole.
This consideration stands behind Mendelssohn's definition of beauty as a ‘sensuously perfect representation’ that goes beyond the shallow ‘perfection’ of successful imitation.Footnote 13 Successful imitation displays only the perfection of a draftsman's skill; an original work of beauty, by contrast, displays the harmony of the artist's powers, directed at a single purpose in a worthy, though finite, imitation of the divine act of creating the whole of nature. The idea that art displays the soul or spirit of the artist thus provides a model for artistic beauty as a sign of harmony between nature and freedom that may be applied, with some caveats, to Kant: in apprehending a work of art we apprehend the ‘soul’ of its author in creative activity, the ‘harmonization’ of his or her powers with the purpose to which they are put, which is a finite analogy to the divine purpose in authoring the teleological system of nature.
We may also suggest a line of influence, if tentatively: Mendelssohn's thought influences his close friend and collaborator Gotthold Lessing's account of imitative art in Laocöon, which in turn appears to influence Kant's account of genius as opposed to the ‘spirit of imitation’ (Lessing Reference Lessing2005: 16–17).Footnote 14 Lessing criticizes artists who use other artists’ work as a model for copying a common original, such as imitating Homer's manner of describing ships, as opposed to taking his work ‘as an independent original’ (ibid. 52). They mistake ‘the universal imitation which constitutes the very essence of … art’, for the mere display of a copyist's skill, which ‘degrades [the artist] utterly’, reducing him to an imitator of imitations (ibid. 49–50). The worthy artist looks to Homer in an attempt to learn how to create like Homer, as opposed to merely imitating his practice in certain particulars. Kant appears to follow this distinction when he writes, ‘the product of a genius … is an example, not for imitation (Nachahmung) (for then that which is genius in it and constitutes the spirit of the work would be lost), but for emulation (Nachfolge) by another genius, who is thereby awakened to the feeling of his own originality’ (5: 318).Footnote 15
To place the model suggested by Mendelssohn correctly in Kant's context we must look at how he objects to Mendelssohn's aesthetics. His objections are two-fold: he rejects aesthetics of perfection and the claim that genius is a sufficient condition for artistic success. His rejection of aesthetics of perfection is, however, more qualified than it might first appear. Kant defines perfection as ‘objective purposiveness’ and writes, ‘in order to represent an objective purposiveness in a thing the concept of what sort of thing it is supposed to be must come first’ (5: 227). This rejects perfection as an aesthetic ideal in a sense that Mendelssohn also rejects, and for similar reasons: the judgement that a representation fulfils a determinate concept, or that an artist has achieved a successful likeness, is not the basis for an aesthetic experience beyond the trivial sense that a pleasure is connected to it.Footnote 16 Kant, like Mendelssohn, rejects a crudely imitative ideal of art, and would also not accept the idealized versions of it found in Alberti and Winckelmann. But when we turn to aesthetics of perfection in the sense Mendelssohn favours, ‘sensibly perfect representation’, the relationship with Kant is subtler. For Mendelssohn beauty is a clear but confused perception of perfection understood in terms of an emphatic analogy with the divine authorship of the world. Now, Kant has no aversion to thinking in terms of teleological perfection, but he cannot accept the metaphysical premises that animate Mendelssohn's account. Indeed, for Kant the interest we take in natural beauty is as a sign or trace of a harmony that is no longer available to us as a metaphysical claim if we accept the results of the first Critique. One of the main aims of the third Critique is to make teleological judgement consistent with the critique of metaphysics. As we have seen, to achieve this aim Kant appeals to an analogy between human and divine art.Footnote 17 He cannot, however, accept that natural beauty constitutes evidence of teleological perfection.
Natural beauty is thus for Kant the ‘sign’ of an intention, but an indeterminable intention. We apprehend something that seems intentionally designed without an apparent designer. However, there is a similarly indeterminable intention in arts of genius: we apprehend an object we know to be the work of human art, and thus the product of an intention, but which, as the expression of an aesthetic idea, we cannot completely determine by reference to the artist's intention. This is the key to Kant's account of how natural and artistic beauty ‘seem like’ one another (5: 306–7) and it underpins a relationship between nature and freedom in artistic beauty that we may bring out more clearly by looking at Kant's rejection of Mendelssohn's claim that genius is sufficient for artistic achievement. Mendelssohn writes, in ‘On the Sublime and the Naïve in the Fine Arts and Sciences’:
Minute brushstrokes testify … to the artist's finishing touch, the toil and the care he took to please us. But the sublimity that warrants our awe and admiration is certainly not to be sought in them. Awe is a debt that we owe the extraordinary gifts of spirit. These gifts are called, in the narrowest sense of the word, ‘genius’. (Mendelssohn Reference Mendelssohn1997: 214–15)
He goes on to say that we ‘deduct’ from our estimation of an artist any marks of ‘toil’ in the artwork. In one respect Kant agrees; art seems like nature in part because no marks of toil are noticeable in it. (As we've seen, it also means that it cannot be grasped completely as the product of a determinate intention.) Kant, however, claims we do not regard the genius per se with awe or admiration. An artist of genius is only worthy of regard insofar as he or she tempers that genius with skill and taste. Qua genius, he or she is simply the beneficiary of a natural predisposition. Kant thus accepts – in part – Mendelssohn's account of the subjective character of our apprehension of the artist in his or her work, but he does not attribute it solely to genius. (He also, of course, does not share Mendelssohn's definition of sublimity as an extraordinary degree of intellectual perfection.) He attributes the artistic achievement Mendelssohn lays at genius's feet to the discipline of genius by taste and skill. For Kant what an artist does to make a work ‘seem like nature’ is not given by nature. If he or she relies solely on nature's gift of genius, what is produced is manneristic obscurity.
Guyer notes that ‘[Kant's] theory of genius seems to break down the traditional boundary between nature and art’. This is true, and important, but his analysis of Kant on this point does not accord with the account of the genesis of an artwork we see here. Guyer writes: ‘the genius cannot achieve his artistic aim unless nature helps him get beyond concepts and techniques, so he is at the mercy of nature and can hardly symbolize its rule by human freedom’ (Guyer 1993: 114). But Kant does not imagine an artist trying to get beyond technique, aided in this quest by genius. Genius's ideas come unbidden, whether the artist wants them or not, and demand to be expressed. For Kant the successful artist goes beyond genius by means of the discipline of taste. Guyer is right that genius provides something beyond technique; the artist who lacks genius cannot accomplish what a genius does. But the important moment for Kant, in which beauty is achieved, is the moment when an artist of genius disciplines him or herself and expresses the aesthetic idea owed to genius universally. But in this moment the product of this joint exercise of nature and freedom looks like nature, i.e. not like the product of a determinate intention.
The claim that we like a work of art insofar as it ‘seems like nature’ thus at first seems to follow Mendelssohn's claim that the emblem of genius is the absence of the marks of toil. Kant, however, reverses this: it is not genius that is responsible for the way artistic beauty seems like nature. Genius by itself produces ‘original nonsense’ (5: 319), manneristic pieces with the artist's fingerprints all over it. What produces the appearance of effortless grace, of nature, is genius disciplined by taste. This is the key to an immediate interest in artistic beauty: genius, for Kant, is nature's contribution to art, but on its own it produces art that seems artificial. The discipline of taste by contrast comprises acts of freedom, which, when exercised on genius, produce artwork that seems natural. Thus, artistic beauty embodies and displays a harmony between nature and freedom in the artist's productive act. Artistic beauty, as the joint product of genius and taste, is analogous to the joint product of good natural incentives and free moral judgement adumbrated in the Religion. But it differs from a moral act in that its character is written on its face. Nothing about a moral act, from the perspective of a witness, clearly distinguishes it from a self-interested act. Artistic beauty, on the other hand, is available to the subjective experience of its witnesses, putting the artist's ‘entire soul on display’ in its harmony with nature.
