2. A limited freedom

Kant lists two conditions that must obtain for the faculty of the imagination to be harmonised with the faculty of the understanding: the imagination must be free, and the understanding must be lawful (KU 5: 287).Footnote ⁴ Since the focus of this essay is the first constituent, namely the freedom of the imagination, only a few words will be addressed to the second. The lawfulness of the understanding denotes ‘the condition that the understanding in general [überhaupt] advance from intuitions to concepts’ (ibid.). Lawfulness becomes an issue in the context of aesthetic experience because of the absence of a determinate concept of the understanding grounding the judgement of taste. When a judgement is grounded on a determinate concept of the understanding, the power of judgement ‘subsumes’, in Kant’s language, the given manifold in intuition under that concept. In other words, it accords or corresponds the intuitable unity of the manifold to the discursive unity denoted by a determinate concept of the understanding; this being the operation of the so-called determinative power of judgement, typically found in the cognitive judgements of ordinary empirical cognition. However, in the case of a judgement of taste, as in any other case where the power of judgement is faced with a given particular without a corresponding universal (concept, rule, principle) (5: 179), it ‘reflects’; meaning, it holds together and compares the given representation with the faculty of cognition itself, rather than with any particular concept or rule (FI 20: 15). In the judgement of taste, then, as a reflective judgement, such comparison takes place between the manifold apprehended by the imagination and the power of judgement’s own faculty for relating intuitions to concepts (KU 5: 287). The power of judgement deems whether or not the intuitable unity of the manifold is such that it can potentially correspond with the discursive unity of determinate concepts of the understanding in general. In other words, it judges the possibility of complete (empirical) conceptualisation of the given manifold. That is the meaning of Kant’s repeatedly employed notion of a ‘cognition in general [überhaupt]’ that is claimed to be secured in a judgement of taste without an actual subsumption of the manifold of intuition under a determinate empirical concept and is often glossed as the presentation of an undetermined concept of the understanding (FI 20: 221). That is also what is meant by Kant’s famous claim in §35 that the whole faculty of intuitions, the imagination, is subsumed under the whole faculty of concepts, the understanding (KU 5: 287).Footnote ⁵ All the above formulations condense in equivalent ways Kant’s notion of the lawfulness (Gesetzmäßigkeit) of the understanding in the harmony of the faculties, a requirement expressing understanding’s need in regard to complete and thorough empirical cognition.Footnote ⁶

Nonetheless, the satisfaction of the lawfulness of the understanding alone does not amount to an experience of beauty, despite being a necessary ingredient of it. An object being beautiful does not follow from a positive judgement on the possibility of securing cognition in general. Otherwise, every empirically cognisable object whatsoever could potentially be found beautiful, as the threat of pan-aestheticism suggests. It is precisely the addition of the second constituent of the harmony of the faculties, namely the freedom of the imagination, that elevates an object from the status of being merely empirically cognisable to that of being beautiful.

Yet, existing accounts often attempt to explain the harmony of the faculties without properly demarcating the two constituent conditions and their independent contributions towards the end result. In what follows, I will criticise existing accounts by referring to Guyer’s (Reference Guyer and Kukla2006) well-known classification, dividing the different interpretations of the harmony of the faculties into three camps: pre-cognitive, multi-cognitive, and meta-cognitive interpretations.Footnote ⁷

The starting point for pre-cognitive interpretations, in understanding the freedom of the imagination, is Kant’s statement in §9 that ‘the cognitive powers … are here in a free play [freien Spiele], because no determinate cognition restricts them to a particular rule of cognition [Erkenntnisregel]’ (KU 5: 217), suggesting a conceptually unguided apprehending activity of the imagination on the manifold of intuition, and thus free from determination by the understanding. Pre-cognitive interpretations usually also add Kant’s glossing in §35 of free imagination as an imagination ‘schematizing [schematisiert] without a concept’ (5: 287). Hence, the imagination is seen as acting, even though unguided, in an orderly way when apprehending forms of beautiful objects: its activity expresses an order immanent in its pattern of apprehension that has the potential of becoming the universal rule (schema) leading to a concept. What is thus indicated is a kind of provisional formation of a proto-rule of apprehension, pointing to a yet-to-be concept.Footnote ⁸

Despite the fact that the absence of conceptual guidance on imaginative apprehension is indeed a condition of aesthetic experience for Kant (and despite the scholarly importance of the above readings in regard to empirical concept formation), pre-cognitive accounts cannot evade the pitfall of the ubiquity of beauty. If freedom of the imagination is merely the absence of a determinate rule guiding its apprehension, coupled with its schematising function of tracing a universal proto-rule of apprehension, then such activity can be executed on any empirical object of a sufficient orderliness in its form. But that is the case with any empirically cognisable object of experience, and the difference between a beautiful and a non-beautiful object vanishes. Kant’s famous examples of beautiful objects, such as a wildflower or an exotic bird, present cases of unguided schematising apprehension just as much as any empirically cognisable object that is experienced without a grounding determinate concept. This is emphatically revealed in several of Kant’s own counterexamples. In the footnote at the end of the third moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful, for instance, Kant remarks that his current definition of beauty might mistakenly lead someone to consider objects like artefacts from antiquity or foreign civilisations, such as stone utensils, as beautiful (KU 5: 236). This is a notable case of unguided schematising apprehension, since such objects are, by definition, unknown to the experiencing subject, and thus, the specific concept under which the intuitable manifold can be subsumed is not available. Yet, Kant excludes them from the realm of beauty because of what they ‘betray by their shape’ (ibid.). Similarly, in §22, Kant derides Marsden’s view that an observer accustomed to the wild jungle of Sumatra would find a standard regular pepper garden beautiful as part of a change of scenery (5: 243). What is, on the contrary, implied is that such an object is never beautiful, irrespective of whether one’s imagination can apprehend it under conceptual guidance. Evidently, something other than the absence of conceptual guidance by the understanding or the schematising function of the imagination is needed to do justice to imagination’s freedom.

The metacognitive view claims to be able to specify properties of beautiful objects not shared by all empirically cognisable objects. However, it does so by deepening the notion of the lawfulness of the understanding, rather than by pursuing the notion of the freedom of the imagination beyond the above pre-cognitive assumptions. The beautiful object is thought of as going beyond what is required for ordinary empirical cognition by demonstrating a greater degree of unity and coherence than what allows an object to be a member of its kind. Whereas understanding’s lawfulness involves the minimal unity and coherence that would allow an object to fall under an empirical concept, this is surpassed by the meta-cognitive stipulation of a degree of unity and coherence greater than that.Footnote ⁹ Unity and coherence, though, are qualities pointing to cognitive desiderata and referring again to cognitive needs of the faculty of the understanding. On the contrary, the meta-cognitive account says very little about the freedom of the imagination per se: it takes Kant’s free play to mean that there is no particular way of demonstrating that greater degree of unity required, echoing again the condition of the absence of a particular rule of cognition, with imagination’s freedom coming down to such freedom from particular rules. The above criticism of precognitive accounts applies here as well.

Multi-cognitive interpretations attempt to assign more weight than this to the freedom of the imagination. They build on Kant’s statements in section VII of the first Introduction about an ‘undetermined’ (FI 20: 221) concept – or some concept ‘indeterminate which’ (20: 220) – under which the manifold is brought, to propose a play between a multitude of conceptual possibilities offered by the intuitable manifold at hand. The freedom of the imagination is precisely that free play between the multiple ways in which the manifold of intuition can be conceptually unified, despite no such unification actually concluding the process. The beautiful object is, thus, seen as offering the prospect of a rich perceptual contemplation when surveying the relation of its parts and exploring different configurations in which such relation can constitute a synthesisable unity. In apprehending, the imagination is often portrayed as constantly rearranging and reordering the given manifold in an unconstrained fashion, and, in doing so, exhibiting different patterns corresponding to the synthetic unity required for empirical conceptualisation.Footnote ¹⁰

Tying the activity of the imagination to features of an object that make it beautiful constitutes an upgrade over pre-cognitive and meta-cognitive views. However, multi-cognitive interpretations also face problems. The most obvious objection is that the beauty of the object is reduced to its ability to sustain unending cognitive exploration, since imagination’s freedom is thought of as a freedom of ranging over conceptual possibilities. That notably leads to odd paradigms of beauty: why should one consider, for instance, a tulip or an exotic bird as offering more conceptual possibilities than a perceptually intricate and complex artefact from antiquity, like the ones Kant alludes to in the footnote to the third moment (KU 5: 236)? Or objects like Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit, whose form naturally invites more than one potential conceptualisation?Footnote ¹¹ Such objects invite a constant survey of their perceptual features with respect to the matter of possible conceptualisation. Yet, they are not beautiful.

Multi-cognitive accounts seem, therefore, to conflate imagination’s sustained survey of the manifold of the beautiful object with the cognitive objective of bringing the manifold under concepts. The deeper problem indicated by such conflation is the relegation of the freedom of the imagination to an activity directed towards the needs of the faculty of the understanding; the free or unconstrained activity takes place so as to construe synthesisable unities leading to concepts. That goal is, nevertheless, no other than the goal of the advancement from intuitions to concepts and is already captured by the notion of understanding’s lawfulness. In that sense, the freedom of the imagination is, at least partially, appended to the lawfulness of the understanding: the imagination is free in the way in which it satisfies the lawfulness of the understanding, yet directed towards such satisfaction.

The last point can be given as an objection against pre-cognitive and meta-cognitive accounts as well, but also against other accounts that do not fit the guiding taxonomy.Footnote ¹² It is ultimately immaterial whether the cognitive goal is understood as that of minimal empirical cognisability or as a cognisability of greater degree. What is important is that, in all the above explanations, imagination’s free activity is understood as directed towards cognitive needs of the understanding. One might arguably normally be justified in considering the imagination as a lower faculty, delegated with the task of serving the interests and needs of the higher faculty of the understanding. However, this begs the question as to how, after all, the imagination can be said by Kant to become animated or enlivened if it merely performs an activity directed towards needs that are not its own but rather belong to another faculty.Footnote ¹³ The element missing from such a picture of its freedom is precisely the needs of the faculty of the imagination that are satisfied in the experience of a beautiful object. Revealing those needs, and the independent requirements they entail, can shed light on the true meaning of Kant’s notion of imagination’s freedom.Footnote ¹⁴

3. Identifying the freedom of the imagination

I contend that one only finds the fully-fledged meaning of the notion of freedom in relation to imagination’s independent needs in the pages of the General Remark, following the conclusion of the Analytic of the Beautiful in §22. The opening paragraph of that section contains the following enlightening passage:

The passage is of paramount importance, as it contains a number of notable insights on aesthetic imagination not to be found anywhere else in the text of the Critique.Footnote ¹⁵

In order to be understood, however, a brief recourse to Kant’s theory of imagination as given in his anthropological corpus is needed.Footnote ¹⁶ As early as the reflections of the late 1760s, and up until the Critical period, Kant refers to two distinct powers of empirical imagination. The first is the power of forming images in relation and in reference to the given in sense, based on the so-called (empirical) rules or laws of association (Assoziation).Footnote ¹⁷ This power enables the imagination to correctly place, based on association, one sense impression after, or before, another so as to generate a continuous and coherent manifold in intuition and, thus, compile a total image of the manifold of sensations affecting the experiencing subject in the form of an object in empirical intuition.Footnote ¹⁸ In Kant’s Critical writings, this power appears in the form of the well-known operations of apprehension of, or running through (Durchlaufen), and comprehension of, or taking together (Zusammennehmung), a manifold in intuition (KrV A99).Footnote ¹⁹ Kant eventually calls this power the reproductive (reproduktiv) power of imagination (Einbildungskraft).

The reproductive power of imagination is contrasted to another power: the power of forming images independently of, and not in reference to, the given in sense. This second power is inventive and enables the imagination to manipulate the contents of the senses so as to create a novel image; what Kant calls invention, or fiction (Erdichtung). While the imagination cannot generate matter or invent new senses, it is able to recombine or rearrange matter so as to create a possible, but not actual, form.Footnote ²⁰ Contrary to the case of reproductive operation, the invented images do not have their cause in real objects affecting the senses but in the activity of the soul itself (Refl 314, 15:124). Kant divides this power into an involuntary (unwillkürlich) and a voluntary (willkürlich) part, with the imagination consciously combining representations by an act of ‘free volition [freie willkür]’ (ibid.) in the latter case.Footnote ²¹ Kant earlier calls this power the poetic or fictive faculty (Dichtungsvermögen) of the human mind and, from the early 1780s onwards, the productive (produktiv) power of imagination (Einbildungskraft).Footnote ²² The distinction between the two contrasting powers of empirical imagination is preserved through the decades, despite Kant’s shifting terminology.Footnote ²³

Let us now return to the passage and attempt to extract all of Kant’s key claims one by one. The first is the attribution of freedom and free play to the productive power of imagination and its lack to the reproductive. The faculty of the imagination, Kant claims, does not have free play when it is subjected to the empirical laws of association, which happens every time it is called to reproductively apprehend (auffassen) a given manifold of intuition. In such a task, the apprehending imagination inevitably becomes ‘bound’ (gebunden) to the determinate form of the object given in sense. It is important not to misunderstand this claim as implying a passive reception of empirical forms of objects of the senses. The reproductive imagination is, instead, active in all the functions required to compose a form according to the empirical laws of association.Footnote ²⁴ However, the boundness to the given, and the lack of freedom it entails, can be understood precisely on the basis of the fact that the imagination does not ‘decide’ for itself the empirical form of the manifold but merely compiles it with the aid of the laws of association. We already saw that the reproductive power is defined in Kant’s anthropology as the power of forming images in relation and in reference to the given in sense. Here, we additionally learn that the obligation to refer to the given in sense, and thus operate according to the laws of association, renders the imagination unfree. This conclusion considerably widens the scope of the meaning of the lack of freedom: the imagination is not only unfree when it has to operate under the guidance of concepts of the understanding but also, and perhaps more fundamentally so, when it merely has to form images in reference to the given in intuition.Footnote ²⁵

Quite to the contrary, the imagination is free and has free play, Kant states, when it is left to itself to design (entwerfen), when it itself voluntarily (willkürlicher) authors forms of possible intuitions; namely, in invention (Dichten). This is no other than the inventive or fictive operation of the productive power of imagination detailed in Kant’s anthropology, an activity that takes place irrespective of what is given in sense and with no obligation to refer to it. The freedom of the fictive activity consists in the fact that the imagination is free to select and manipulate material at will – something that is not the case when the imagination is obliged to adhere to the laws of association – and decides for itself and for itself the possible form invented. This is eloquently captured by Kant’s formulation that the productive imagination is independent or self-active (selbsttätig) when it invents, a formulation denoting, in Kant’s faculty psychology, not merely an active faculty, but a faculty active according to its own inner conatus, its own native spontaneity, satisfying a need of its own.Footnote ²⁶ I will call this the productive freedom of the imagination. In its original fictive activity according to its own spontaneity, the productive imagination is liberated from the boundness to sense and the empirical laws of association, something impossible for the reproductive imagination.

Yet, Kant does not stop there, as he continues with a key claim: there exist certain objects of the senses – the beautiful objects – with such composition (Zusammensetzung) of their manifold in intuition as that which the productive imagination itself would have designed by way of its own fictive capacity. In other words, even when the imagination is called to apprehend manifolds of intuition – which means to reproductively compile their form according to the laws of association – it happens that the composition of the manifold of the beautiful object contingently coincides with the very kind of compositions the productive imagination voluntarily authors in general. I will call this the coincidence thesis.Footnote ²⁷ This key thesis contains the quite remarkable suggestion that a reproductive task, like apprehension, provides a glimpse of imagination’s own spontaneity, which can typically be witnessed only in its productive operation.

Let us look at the argument more closely. Kant suggests that the imagination can be considered to be productive and self-active in the judgement of taste because of the above coincidence, a position that comes out very clearly from Kant’s wording in the first lines of the passage that the imagination must be considered in its freedom and thus ‘taken [angenommen] as’ (KU 5: 240–1) productive, and not that the imagination actually is productive. The whole argument by Kant runs as follows:

1. 1. The imagination must be taken to be free (and, by consequence, productive) in the judgement of taste.

2. 2. The imagination is, however, reproductive (and, thus, unfree) in any task of apprehension – and, thus, also in apprehending the form of the beautiful object.

3. 3. Yet, the composition of the form of the beautiful object contingently coincides (or, it is conceivable to think this way, in Kant’s words) with the composition of the forms the productive imagination would design (although the imagination is not actually designing in this case).

It is evident that Kant tries to reconcile two apparently contradictory positions: that the imagination must be free – which only happens when it is productive – and that the imagination is tasked with apprehension – a reproductive task that by definition renders the imagination unfree.Footnote ²⁸ The reconciliation takes place via the coincidence thesis. The peculiar but insightful conclusion drawn by Kant is that, in the judgement of taste, the imagination can be considered to be free without actually performing its productive activities of designing novel forms, and despite being engaged in the reproductive task of apprehension. I will call this type of freedom the reproductive freedom of the imagination – to distinguish it from the productive freedom of invention – noting that it only emerges in the experience of beauty.Footnote ²⁹ Thus the pertinent aesthetic form Kant associates with the freedom of the imagination in the experience of beauty is not a fictive invention of the productive imagination, but rather the very form of the beautiful object the reproductive imagination apprehends.Footnote ^30,Footnote ³¹

Kant is disclosing through the coincidence thesis something very important about the nature of the imagination in aesthetic experience. The imagination is typically free, self-active, operating on its own spontaneity, and directed towards its own needs when it productively invents. Yet, it is possible that the imagination can also become free and self-active in a reproductive operation, in the special case of the experience of beauty. That is the reason why beautiful forms stand out, compared to any other empirical forms, as far as the faculty of the imagination is concerned: the imagination finds its own inner spontaneity expressed; even without actively expressing it, it satisfies its inner need even without actively catering to it. The unique contribution of the opening paragraph of the General Remark to the interpretation of Kant’s freedom of the imagination is precisely the ample light shed on the role of the perceptual form of the beautiful object itself, the specific composition of its manifold, in enacting that freedom.Footnote ³²

4. The phenomenology of free play

Kant’s intriguing argument in the opening paragraph of the General Remark is still not informative as to how exactly the particular apprehension of beautiful forms renders the imagination free, or what exactly such reproductive freedom amounts to. Here, we need to turn to Kant’s use of the term ‘free play’ to explicate imagination’s activity of apprehending beautiful forms.Footnote ³³ Free play was assumed up to this point to come down to imagination’s productive freedom, or the freedom to select and manipulate material at will, since it is used by Kant in the passage to refer to imagination’s designing activity. However, the coincidence thesis gives us the hint that perhaps a different meaning underlies the free play in question, a meaning that is not to be found in the liberality and authority of imagination’s inventive capacity, since it is a free play, following Kant’s argument, that should also somehow apply to the apprehension by the reproductive imagination of beautiful forms of nature. It is, therefore, imperative to determine the exact meaning of free play that can apply to the operation of reproductive apprehension.

I propose that the meaning of free play is specified by Kant in the thread unrolled in the rest of the General Remark as a continuation of the opening paragraph, in the very informative examples and counterexamples of beauty, and in the justifications given for them. Let us start with the counterexamples: geometrically regular shapes, like a circle, a square, or a cube, which were hailed by critics of the time as typical examples of beauty (KU 5: 241); Marsden’s pepper garden made of stakes forming parallel rows (5: 243); and things ‘that are possible only through an intention’, like buildings or even animals (5: 242), are all non-beautiful objects. Kant condenses all these cases into a succinct dictum: ‘All stiff regularity [Steif-Regelmäßige] (whatever approaches mathematical regularity [mathematischen Regelmäßigkeit]) is of itself contrary to taste’ (ibid.). Put differently, all objects displaying mathematically, or quasi-mathematically, regular forms in intuition are not beautiful.

In justifying the dictum, Kant makes an insightful juxtaposition of the different requirements set by the two faculties. The faculty of understanding becomes satisfied in experiencing mathematically regular forms, as it is ‘disposed by means of the regularity [Regelmäßigkeit] to the order [Ordnung] that it always requires’ (KU 5: 243). The understanding seeks the formal regularity that expresses the unity (Einheit) of the intuition that can lead to the concept of an object, to cognition proper (5: 242). Kant is, thus, claiming that when the understanding is readily presented with perceptible qualities, such as unity and order, which betray the governance of the manifold by intuitable rules – rules themselves exemplifying discursive concepts in intuition – then it edges closer to its cognitive aim of always subsuming objects of experience under determinate concepts. In other words, Kant is giving in these lines a very clear indication of the kind of perceptual forms that – among all forms of empirical objects – are optimal in regard to the satisfaction of no other than the prime need of lawfulness of the understanding: advancing from intuitions to concepts, or securing cognition in general in the context of the absence of determinate concepts.Footnote ³⁴

Nevertheless, Kant continues, such satisfaction concerns ‘only common understanding, and not taste at all’ (KU 5: 241). It is a satisfaction not grounded on the immediate view of the shape (Gestalt) of the object but rather on its usefulness for all sorts of aims (5: 241–2), with the contemplation of the shape resulting in boredom rather than providing lasting entertainment (5: 242–3). Kant explains the above as follows: the faculty of the imagination is subjected to ‘coercion [Zwang] from artificial rules’ and imposed upon by a ‘burdensome constraint [lästigen Zwang]’ (5: 243) when experiencing stiff and mathematically regular forms. In other words, the dictum against mathematical regularity is justified because of what the imagination suffers, irrespective of the immediate satisfaction of the understanding. We see, therefore, a clear stipulation of requirements emanating from the faculty of the imagination alone and, even more than that, going against the requirements set by the faculty of the understanding. While the understanding requires unity and order for the forms of manifolds in intuition, such formal qualities constrain and coerce the imagination and eventually induce boredom as an end result of their consideration.

Kant subsequently gives us a key description of the perceptible features the faculty of the imagination seeks in intuition: ‘By contrast, that with which the imagination can play [spielen] in an unstudied [ungesucht] and purposive way is always new for us, and we are never tired of looking at it’ (KU 5: 243). Note the use of the term ‘play’ here, and in particular ‘unstudied play’, pointing to the answer we seek about the meaning of ‘free play’ in apprehension; this is not the only place in the Critique where Kant uses the term ‘play’ to refer to the imagination specifically in apprehension.Footnote ³⁵ It is not regular forms, Kant continues, but forms of a nature that is ‘extravagant in its varieties to the point of opulence [Üppigkeit]’ that provide the imagination with lasting nourishment (beständig Nahrung) (ibid.). Therefore, the wildflowers, the wild forests, the crustaceans, and the crystal formations – all extravagant and opulent natural forms given by Kant as prime examples of beauty in the Critique – provide the imagination with material to play in an unstudied and unsought way. This contradistinction between the perceptual features that satisfy each faculty has rarely been taken by commentators as an interpretative clue towards the freedom of the imagination.Footnote ³⁶ However, in the aforementioned juxtaposition, and in Kant’s characterisation of the activity of the apprehending imagination with respect to the extravagant forms of nature as unstudied play, an interpretative path opens up.

I suggest that the answer lies in the phenomenology of apprehending a beautiful form. Every apprehension of a manifold in intuition eventually comes down to a certain pattern of movement by the imagination, made up of the totality of the successive actions it executes at every moment in time, registered by the organ of inner sense, constituting thus a temporal phenomenology. The contradistinction between the different forms given by Kant in the General Remark as examples and counterexamples of beauty becomes illuminating when seen as a contradistinction between different phenomenologies of apprehension: the phenomenology of free play or freedom in apprehending beautiful forms is revealed when contrasted to the respective phenomenology of coercion in apprehending non-beautiful regular forms.

In the latter case, the imagination apprehends a mathematical form in intuition in an orderly fashion, because the manifold is eventually perceived as displaying a mathematical rule. In successively taking up the units of the manifold one after another, and in order for the form of the object to be perceived as mathematical, the imagination has to inevitably move in a rule-abiding pattern, which is registered as such by the organ of inner sense. For example, in apprehending the outline of a square figure in space, the imagination will repeat an identical movement for each of the four sides of the figure, traversing the same distance in the same number of strides (of the arbitrary unit that the imagination gives to itself in apprehension), due to the rule that all sides of a square should have the same length. This results in a symmetry in the very pattern of movement of the imagination from one point of the outline to the next until the whole gets comprehended. Plainly speaking, if the imagination did not conduct such movement, one would not perceive a square figure. Such orderly and regular movement is to be witnessed in the activity of apprehension of any manifold displaying mathematical regularity, irrespective of the specific underlying rule.Footnote ³⁷ It is a movement characterised by uniformity and predictability at every moment in time, where each new unit to be apprehended does not change the expected course according to the sequence of the preceding moments. Such phenomenology of uniformity and predictability in apprehension, despite immediately satisfying understanding’s needs, can only coerce and impose a burdensome constraint upon the imagination, Kant asserts.

Quite to the contrary, all of Kant’s prime examples of free beauties in nature, like wildflowers, exotic birds, crystal formations, etc., defy this picture of an orderly uniformity in their phenomenology of apprehension. Rather, their beautiful forms display varied structures that entail very different patterns of movement by the imagination. It is not an accident that Kant uses the Latin word vaga to name the free beauties of nature – pulchritudo vaga as opposed to pulchritudo adherens (adherent beauty) in §16 (KU 5: 229): they constitute spatiotemporal forms of such variety that entail a vague and aimless movement by the apprehending imagination, that being the very movement constituting reproductive freedom.

Let us illustrate the above via an extended example: the Sumatra wild jungle, the beauty of which Kant defends against Marsden (KU 5: 243). The wild form of the object is witnessed in the structure of the trees and their foliage, as well as the vista of the tropical rainforest as a whole when regarded from some distance. In a single Sumatran tree, the lines formed by each branch stemming from the trunk are not straight but spread rather unevenly and asymmetrically from the centre. Such a pattern of delineation is multiplied with each sub-branching until the endpoints of the twigs, giving the impression Kant describes as ‘lines aimlessly [ohne Absicht] intertwined with each other’ (5: 207). Likewise, the foliage itself is composed of numerous leaves that are positioned irregularly relative to each other, thus forming a crown of a rich surfeit in terms of shape: an irregular outline filled with exuberant inner figurations. The jungle as a whole, composed of numerous such trees, erratically positioned, constitutes a panorama of abundantly rich figurations coming together in a total form that echoes Kant’s characterisation of natural beauty as extravagant to the point of opulence (5: 243).

When the imagination is then tasked with the apprehension of such form – which means that the imagination actively makes out that form, rather than passively receives it – it will inevitably have to execute an aimless, irregular, and at the same time rich, movement. Having to gather the sense impressions of the object in their totality and from all different viewpoints so as to construe the form, it will have to traverse different lengths and compile different shapes and angles of intertwinement. Such apprehension can only take place in an irregular fashion, both in the numbers of strides taken for construing each branch of the tree or each tree of the jungle and in the direction and orientation taken at each moment of apprehension – a shorter length will stop the apprehension of a certain unit earlier than expected, a different angle will change orientation, a different curve will introduce a new trajectory to follow, etc. Such movement is characterised by constant surprise and unpredictability, since each moment of apprehension defies the expectation created by the preceding one; with this unpredictability constituting a certain liberation from the anticipation of the future based on the present and the past – this liberation being precisely the liberation from the empirical laws of association Kant talks about in the opening paragraph.Footnote ³⁸ At the same time, such free movement of the imagination can be said to look like play: in surveying the manifold from one part to another, and from different viewpoints, the imagination moves in an unintentional, or unstudied manner, wandering aimlessly over the rich figurations of the beautiful form it is tasked to compile without evident direction or course.

It is important to note that such wandering movement does not take place merely out of the obligation to complete the empirical apprehension of what is given in sense but also, and even more importantly, out of the animation the faculty of the imagination itself enjoys in that very movement. The imagination, by virtue of such aimless and surprising movement, enjoys a certain liberation from the empirical laws of association, even if it still reproductively apprehends. Since such liberation from the laws of association paradigmatically occurs in the inventive activity emanating from imagination’s own spontaneity, it can be said that the reproductive imagination in this case satisfies – via its apprehending movement, and despite not actually inventing – the very need of expressing its own spontaneity. Hence, the imagination gets constantly enlivened in conducting its apprehending movement, it experiences reproductive freedom, and that is the reason it becomes interested in preserving it. Here we find a strong justification, from the point of view of the imagination, of Kant’s central claim that the subject lavishes their attention on the beautiful object by way of maintaining their mental state (KU 5: 222).Footnote ³⁹ The imagination has an interest in prolonging the movement, in surveying the manifold again and again from all different viewpoints – and, thus, the perceiver lingers over the contemplation of the beautiful object – precisely because the movement is beneficial for the imagination itself, rather than for fulfilling the purpose of exploring conceptual possibilities, as multi-cognitive interpretations hold.Footnote ⁴⁰

Similar phenomenological descriptions can be given for all Kantian examples par excellence of free beauties in nature, like crustaceans, crystal formations, colour combinations of bird feathers, etc. The phenomenology of free play, this varied movement of surprise and unpredictability, is the exact opposite of the phenomenology of predictability and uniformity witnessed in the apprehension of mathematical forms. The contrast a free beauty in nature offers to a mathematical form is the contrast between play and uniformity, between aimless and ordered movement, between surprise and predictability, and eventually between self-maintaining lingering contemplation and boredom on the part of the perceiver. It is this phenomenology of free play in the apprehension conducted by the faculty of the imagination that sets beautiful apart from non-beautiful objects.Footnote ⁴¹