In this paper, I evaluate the claim that Karl Philipp Moritz’s conception of inner/ideal purposiveness anticipates Kant’s notion of subjective purposiveness, as Salomon Maimon first claimed in 1791 and as commentators have continued to assert ever since. In section 1, I consider the historical background to this claim and survey the two opposed positions on offer in the extant literature: that Moritz, indeed, anticipates Kant; and Paul Guyer’s recent interdiction into this debate, according to which Moritz espouses an objectivist theory of beauty that is at odds with Kant’s conception of beauty. In section 2, I analyse Moritz’s considered view of artistic beauty qua ideal/inner purposiveness, drawing from his mature publications on aesthetics. Here, I demonstrate that, contra Guyer, Moritz’s considered view is one that dovetails both subjectivist and objectivist aspects. However, I also argue that Guyer’s implied conclusion, that Moritz does not anticipate Kant’s view, is also correct – albeit for different reasons than Guyer proffers.
In section 3, I turn to §15 of the Analytic of the third Critique, where Kant writes that ‘[o]bjective purposiveness is either external, i.e., the utility of the object, or internal, i.e., its perfection’ (CPJ, 5: 227).Footnote 1 Kant here takes great care to distinguish Moritz-type internal objective purposiveness from his own subjective purposiveness. He demonstrates that Moritz’s perfectionist account ultimately remains committed to the ‘concept of an internal end, which contains the ground of the internal possibility of the object’ (ibid.). I conclude by observing that appreciating this distinction illuminates the truly groundbreaking nature of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement, according to which no (determinate) concept exhausts the object of beauty.
1.
In his response to Moritz’s (Reference Moritz, Hollmer and Meier1997 [1791a]) ‘Über des Herrn Professor Herz Versuch über den Geschmack’ (‘On Professor Herz’s essay on taste’), Maimon introduces the claim that Moritz’s concept of ‘ideal purpose’ (idealischer Zweck) prefigures Kant’s conception of subjective purposiveness, or purposiveness without purpose, as introduced in the then recently published third Critique (Maimon 1791 [Reference Maimon and Verra1962]: 408).Footnote 2 This claim has had considerable and lasting influence. Commentators like Szondi (Reference Szondi1974), Woodmansee (Reference Woodmansee1996), Costazza (Reference Costazza1999), Plotke (Reference Plotke2003), Schreiber (Reference Schreiber2012), and Erlin (Reference Erlin2016) have, wittingly or not, repeated Maimon’s claim. This is epitomised by Mattias Pirholt’s recent article in which he argues that ‘Moritz … anticipate[s] Kant, seeing as he also construes beauty and the inner purpose of art to be a result of aesthetic judgement, that is, disinterested, contemplative observation’ (Pirholt Reference Pirholt2021: 273).Footnote 3 Some commentators have gone as far as to argue that this confluence is no coincidence, as Moritz published his essay, ‘Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schonen Künste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten’ (‘Toward a unification of all the fine arts and letters under the concept of self-sufficiency’) in 1785, in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, five years before the publication of Kant’s third Critique and that there is little doubt that Kant was familiar with the essay; the implication therein is that Kant was directly influenced by Moritz’s conception of ideal purpose.Footnote 4 It is thus widely accepted in the Moritz scholarship that Moritz’s 1785 essay, which argues that artworks please us due to their inner purposiveness, independent of any utility-based, external purpose, anticipates Kant’s account of aesthetic disinterestedness.Footnote 5
However, Guyer has recently pointed out a critical difference, writing that:
In 1791, close to the end of his life, Moritz dedicated a review of the Essay on Taste by ‘our mutual friend’ Herz to Salomon Maimon … arguing that his conception of beauty as the internal perfection of a work of art as it strikes the senses and imagination is essentially the same as their conception of beauty as ‘sensible perfection’ … but also tries to paper over any difference between himself and Kant, whose Critique of the Power of Judgment had also appeared the year before, by claiming that Kant’s concept of ‘purposiveness without purpose is nothing other than an ideal purpose,’ and thus that Kant’s concept of beauty is essentially the same as … his own. (Guyer Reference Guyer2014: 417)
Guyer here seems to have confused Maimon’s response to Moritz’s review with the latter’s writing – as nowhere in the 1791 review does Moritz deploy or coin the term ‘ideal purpose’ (idealischer Zweck), though Maimon produces the exact line that Guyer quotes in a response to Moritz (Maimon 1791 [Reference Maimon and Verra1962]: 408). Yet, the point nevertheless obtains, as Maimon’s response produces an apt summary of what he and others took to be at the core of Moritz’s own perfectionist view.Footnote 6 Guyer then goes on to write that the claim that Moritz anticipates Kant
…is not true, because Moritz’s conception of the beauty of an individual work of art is that it is an intimation of the true and objective order of nature as a whole, while Kant’s notion of purposiveness without purpose will point us toward a subjective state of mind in which our mental powers of imagination and understanding are in a free harmony that does not by itself represent anything at all; at least in what Kant calls the ‘pure’ judgement of taste, the experience of beauty is pleasurable without meaning anything or conveying any truth. (Guyer Reference Guyer2014: 417)
Guyer draws the distinction that, following Moritz’s conception of beauty, the ideal or inner purposiveness of artworks is fundamentally representational, while this is not the case with Kant’s conception of ‘purposiveness without an end’, or ‘subjective purposiveness’ (CPJ, 5: 227). Specifically, Guyer motivates his reading that Moritz’s notion of ‘ideal’ or ‘internal purposiveness’ amounts to an artwork intimating a representation of ‘the perfection of the world as a whole, and that we enjoy it precisely as such an intimation’ (Guyer Reference Guyer2014: 412). Citing ‘Outlines of a complete theory of the fine arts’ (Grundlinien zu einer vollständigen Theorie der schönen Künste) (1789), Guyer argues that Moritz’s putative aesthetic objectivism, or ‘“objectivist” view’, rejects the possibility of artistic and natural beauty, or the pleasure they elicit, involving the percipient’s mental faculties (Guyer Reference Guyer2014: 412).
Indeed, in ‘Outlines’, Moritz does claim that ‘[t]he genuinely beautiful is not merely in us and in our manner of representation, but is to be found outside us in the objects themselves’ (Moritz Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1962 [1789b]: 124). However, as will become more evident in section 2, this erroneously sidelines the more subjective aspects of Moritz’s perfectionism, treating Moritz’s notion of inner purpose as one where an artwork’s beauty is subordinated to a real, objective concept that subsists independently of the percipient. We will see how Moritz’s view is more balanced than Guyer makes it out to be, involving a fair deal of subjectivism. In fact, one can already begin to appreciate that Moritz is not a bog-standard objectivist aesthetic realist if we consider his qualification that ‘[t]he genuinely beautiful is not merely in us’ (ibid., emphasis added). This qualification indicates that the objective ground of beauty stands as a complement to its realisation by our mental faculties.
However, as we shall also see, it is also true that Kant’s conception of ‘“subjective” or “formal” purposiveness’ indeed amounts to a ‘repudiation’ of Moritz’s view, as Guyer claims (Guyer Reference Guyer2014: 412). In turn, Guyer is correct, contra the received view in Moritz scholarship, to conclude that Moritz does not anticipate Kant. Yet, it is important to also appreciate that Kant holds that Moritz-type ‘objective inner purposiveness … comes closer to the predicate of beauty’ than other perfectionist accounts, such as those that reduce it to external purposiveness (CPJ, 5: 227, emphasis added). Appreciating what Moritz’s view gets correct and its shortcomings, in turn, well equips us to appreciate the advancement that Kant’s subjective purposiveness accomplishes.
In the next section, I will analyse Moritz’s considered view of artistic beauty qua ideal and internal purposiveness, drawing from his mature writings on aesthetics. I demonstrate that Moritz’s considered view is one that attempts to consolidate subjectivist and objectivist aspects of aesthetic beauty and pleasure. As a perfectionist broadly following Baumgarten’s formulation of extensive clarity, however, Moritz’s concept of unity accounts for harmony in the aesthetic object and in the percipient’s imagination as they contemplate and admire artworks, rendering him accountable to Kant’s critique.
2.
In this section, I will attend to Moritz’s theory of aesthetic pleasure and beauty, demonstrating exactly why he does not espouse a merely objectivist view of pleasure and beauty. For Moritz, beauty and pleasure are grounded in mind-independent structure – specifically, that of the objective natural order, or world-whole. However, this structure cannot be fully represented; rather, its existence can only be indicated through the phenomenological experience of aesthetic pleasure. The degree of beauty is, for Moritz, analogous to the degree of perfection the object enjoys such that a more perfect artwork will better indicate the natural order by illuminating more interconnections within the whole of nature. I will begin with a review of Moritz’s conception of ideal purpose, his theory of aesthetic pleasure, and that of beauty; this will also involve relating and distinguishing Moritz’s framework from the Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalist aesthetic tradition and, specifically, Baumgarten’s perfectionist aesthetics that it emerges out of.
In 1791, Karl Philipp Moritz wrote a review of the second and expanded edition of Markus Herz’s Versuch über den Geschmack und die Ursachen seiner Verschiedenheit, which had been published just a year before, in 1790. Moritz addressed his review to Maimon, who was then co-editor of the final two volumes of the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde and the Annalen der Akademie der Künste und Mechanischen Wissenschaften, where it was published. Indeed, the 1791 review includes not only a summary of Herz’ position but also is characteristic of Moritz’s mature view concerning Wolffian perfectionist aesthetics.Footnote 7 Although Moritz’s writing was largely overlooked upon its immediate publication, Maimon found it incredibly fecund.Footnote 8 This is evinced in Maimon’s response, also published in the Annalen der Akademie der Künste und mechanischen Wissenschaften zu Berlin in 1791. It is here that Maimon identifies a conception of ‘ideal purpose’, ‘which consists in the practicality or agreement of the manifold to a single, albeit ideal, purpose’, going on to write that he ‘fully agree[s] with this Kantian definition of beauty’ where ‘[t]he beautiful is not an object of the will at all, but merely of the faculty of judgement, in regard to the relation of the means to an end in general’ (Maimon Reference Maimon and Verra1962 [1791]: 408). Here, Maimon adverts to Moritz’s ‘essay on the imitation of beauty in art’ (ibid.), by which he means the 1788 essay, ‘On the artistic imitation of the beautiful’ (Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen). It is here that Maimon locates Moritz’s conception of internal perfection, where he paraphrases as follows:
purpose may therefore not apply anywhere, but be merely imagined or ideal, so that the harmony of the manifold with a purpose in general, which can be thought of as a consequence of this harmony, is always beauty. But since beauty also occurs where this agreement has a specific real purpose as a consequence, only that in this case one does not have to take the purpose into account, as you express in your essay on the imitation of beauty in art … [b]eauty is the sensual correspondence of the manifold to a purpose, so that it can comprehend both cases. … This definition … agrees precisely with Kant’s: beauty is purposefulness without purpose, in that purposefulness without purpose is nothing other than an ideal purpose. (Maimon Reference Maimon and Verra1962 [1791]: 408)
As Maimon recognises, Moritz’s conception of perfection attends to the internal harmony of an object of beauty and can transpire in purposive artefacts and non-purposive artworks/objects of nature alike. However, as far as the former are concerned, beauty does not belong to the concept of its utility, such that the external purpose, or the object’s teleological means-end use, cannot involve beauty. There is a different kind of usefulness, however, that beautiful artworks licence. Moritz is markedly pellucid in ‘On the artistic imitation of the beautiful’ that, indeed, the unity-amidst-variety that his perfectionism picks out is a kind of ideal agreement orthogonal to external purpose. Insofar as artworks are concerned, the constituent elements of the work, Moritz’s thinking goes, reflect the unity or connection of the component pieces of objective nature in their unity. In turn, the purpose, or usefulness, of an artwork lies in how it, as a form composed of perceptual relations, consists in connections that reflect the possible relations of an objective natural order. The artwork’s perceptual relations indicate a glimpse at the connective tissue of the world-whole, which, as such, remains imperceptible. As Moritz writes:
For we think of the useful as the relation of a thing, seen as a part, to a connection of things, which we think of as a whole. And the relation must be of such a type that the connection of the whole steadily increases and is maintained; the more of these relations a thing has to the connection wherein it is found, the more useful it will be. (Moritz Reference Moritz and Bernstein2003 [1788a]: 137)Footnote 9
Hence, a painting where the artist depicts a great degree of perceptually connected relations along the picture plane realises, in additive fashion, a great degree of unity. In his Herz review, Moritz writes of the plastic arts, which he calls ‘objects of sight’ (Moritz Reference Moritz, Hollmer and Meier1997 [1791a]: 1030). It is ‘the form’, he says, that is responsible for the pleasure that is elicited in viewers who admire them; in turn, ‘[t]he pleasant in form, or the beautiful, consists in the proportional harmony of the parts to the whole’, which renders such an artwork ‘immediately pleasing’ (ibid.).Footnote 10 Proportional-harmony-cum-perfection should not, however, be reduced to unity-amidst-variety as a sufficient reason or as a structural or formal feature of an object. Rather, Moritz’s perfectionism involves conceiving or apprehending some set of perceptual relations as cohering with one another, a (mental) act of conceptual unification.
As Boubly notes, ‘the most vital single influence’ for Moritz’s thinking during his youth was Mendelssohn (Boulby Reference Boulby1979: 74). It is thus no coincidence that Moritz dedicates his 1785 essay to ‘Herrn Moses Mendelssohn’ (Moritz Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1962 [Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1785]: 3).Footnote 11 To properly appreciate Mendelssohn’s influence, it is helpful to consider Baumgarten’s Wolffian distillation, where ‘beauty is perfection that is represented without distinctness’ (McAndrew Reference McAndrew and McQuillan2021: 90).Footnote 12 We find this definition in §662 of Baumgarten’s Metaphysics as the ‘perfectio phaenomenon’ (perfection of an appearance) (Reference Baumgarten1750 [1739]: 216)Footnote 13 As opposed to the definition of beauty in Baumgarten’s Aesthetics, as the ‘perfection of sensuous cognition (perfectio cognitionis sensitivae)’ (Reference Baumgarten1750: Pt. I, Section 1, §14, p. 6), it is the Metaphysics definition that Mendelssohn broadly adopted.Footnote 14 This is echoed in Mendelssohn’s claim that ‘[b]eauty rests … on the indistinct representation of a perfection’ (Reference Mendelssohn and Dahlstrom2009 [1755]:12). According to Baumgarten’s Wolffian formulation, the constituent facets of a poem, such as its thematic content, descriptions, metre, rhyme, and rhythm, are poetic to the extent that they ‘contribute to the perfection’ of the poem (Baumgarten Reference Baumgarten1954 [1735]: §11, 58).
Baumgarten does not particularly underscore the role of judgement, which Moritz will home in on.Footnote 15 Throughout, Baumgarten maintains that the poem, to the extent that it is beautiful, must contain ‘clear representations’, which, per Leibniz and Wolff, means that a representation can be sufficiently recognised as something and distinguished from others, contra an obscure representation (Baumgarten Reference Baumgarten1954 [Reference Baumgarten1735]: §13, 41).Footnote 16 For Baumgarten, poetic representations are clear and confused (rather than clear and distinct, as in the case of logic). Baumgarten writes, ‘[c]onfused representations derived from elements separated and combined in the imagination are images and therefore poetic’ (§50, 55). These confused representations, which are derived from elements that are separated and combined in the imagination, are ‘poetic’ or ‘clear’ and confused representations (§15, 42), which are opposed to distinct representations. A distinct representation is one where I not only recognise a thing and distinguish it from others but also where I can also enumerate and analyse each of its distinguishing features. With a confused representation, as in the case of poetic discourse, I cannot enumerate/analyse each distinguishing feature, but, in confused representations, all the distinguishing features are thought together. What Baumgarten deems the ‘perfect sensate discourse’ of a poem does not consist in its distinct representations (§7, 39). What we perceive through our senses is clear but not distinct, as the senses do not analyse the distinguishing properties of a thing but perceive their intermingled elements. A confused representation has more extensive clarity than another when it represents more than the other; extensive clarity is in direct proportion to confusion, the number of marks represented together in a single representation or, as Baumgarten puts it, the ‘extensive clarity’ of a poetic representation means that ‘[t]he more determinate things are, the more their representations embrace’ (§18, 43). This extensive clarity comes from thinking together and at once many marks (notae) of a thing, not from thinking them separately or at different times.
We can now turn to Mendelssohn. In ‘On the main principles of the fine arts’, he argues against Batteux’s thesis in The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (Reference Batteux2015 [1746]), according to which ‘[g]reat artists display in their works the features of belle nature’ (Batteux Reference Batteux2015 [1746]: 59). Mendelssohn’s rejoinder is summarised in his quip: ‘[i]s not nature pleasing as well, without imitating?’ (Mendelssohn Reference Mendelssohn and Dahlstrom2009 [1757]: 171). Moritz, too, would argue that while the artist should ‘strive to emulate’ nature, this must be pursued by depicting how it gives ‘shape’ to things before highlighting that ‘[t]he highest enjoyment of beauty can only be experienced in its world through one’s own power. Any subsequent enjoyment of it is merely a consequence of its existence’ (Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1962 [1789b]: 121). Mendelssohn also rejected the view that an artwork’s percipient should long ‘merely to be moved’, if that emotional ‘movement and stirring’ is to be thought of as independent from our cognitive processes, or what Mendelssohn calls our ‘thinking projection’ (Reference Mendelssohn and Dahlstrom2009 [1755]: 137).Footnote 17 For Mendelssohn, what we take pleasure in is not simply the elicitation of an emotion, but the exercise of our cognitive capacities in comprehending, assessing, and judging the suitability of the diverse forms of human feeling. Mendelssohn argues that, insofar as we take pleasure in how artworks imitate nature, it is not the veridicality of an artistic representation that we enjoy but, instead, the experience of our mental activity where the latter is precipitated by our being aware that the art object is but an imitation.
For Mendelssohn, the objective natural order cannot be contracted into a single viewpoint, but the artist can offer a kind of ideal beauty in their artwork that approaches this stereoscopic position. An artist can create an ‘ideal beauty’ by gathering ‘together in a single viewpoint what nature has diffusely strewn among various objects, forming himself a whole from this and taking the trouble to represent it just as nature would have represented it if the beauty of this limited object had been its sole purpose’ (Mendelssohn 1997 [1757]: 176). This will be of great importance for Moritz, who will not champion Batteux’s view that beautiful artworks imitate nature but, instead, by way of Mendelssohn: although the natural order is not representable, artworks can espy their connections.Footnote 18
Following Baumgarten, Moritz remains committed to the notion of perfectionist extensive clarity to some degree, as an artwork is able to be more perfect if it represents more relations, therein thematising the objective natural order.Footnote 19 A beautiful extensive whole’s form will not strike the percipient as individuated, discretely represented features or marks. Notably, however, betraying Mendelssohn’s influence, Moritz believes that artistic beauty does not consist in purely (extensive) relations qua relations but in their ability to facilitate judgements – judgements that result in the aforementioned thematisation, where the spectator takes the array of relations to stand under some end. It is this act of judging, Moritz writes, that ‘can endow every individual part of any whole with the dignity of the end and give the whole a relation to it’ (Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1962 [1786]: 11). This end, which produces aesthetic pleasure, is, specifically, one that Moritz sees as analogous to a form of natural order, where this recognition is achieved through the faculty of judgement’s mediation. Moritz does not regard extensive clarity or beauty’s representation of nature as objectively self-standing. Nor does he think that we can have an imitation of the complete order of nature, or the world-whole, taking the endeavour of judgement to be an asymptotic endeavour where we are always liable to discover ‘a better standpoint than the other from which to view things, and in this way’, come ‘ever closer to the actual centre, or the actual goal of all human thought, without perhaps ever quite reaching it’ (Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1962 [1786]: 11).
What Moritz inherits from Baumgarten is the belief that some sensible cognitions, qua sensible cognitions, are more perfect than others. If I have a sensible cognition where I am clearly representing discrete elements that thematise the might of God and the frailty of man, then this is a more perfect sensible cognition than one that just represents man’s frailty, as the latter suffers from having less variety. A sensible representation with more extensive clarity figures as a more perfect sensible representation than one that has less extensive representation.
For Moritz, when we have a sensory experience, we obtain information about the world and discriminately experience, through sensation/perception, objects that are more perfect or less perfect – i.e., more or less beautiful. Yet, although Moritz is, like Baumgarten, concerned with the relative perfection of the object, arguing that we experience pleasure when we sensibly perceive its perfection, he does not believe that sensible representations themselves can indicate the artwork’s purpose. He thus writes that:
If there were something whose sole purpose was pleasure itself, I could judge the purposefulness of that thing solely from the pleasure I derive from it. But my pleasure itself must first arise from this judgement. (Moritz Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1962 [1785]: 8–9)
It is the sensible cognition, rendering a judgement of reflection, that is the indicator of perfection, but only within a unified wholeness. Such judgement will only be elicited when there are more relations to reflect, judge, and thereby unify with these relations, thematising the possible objective order of nature. It is also from judging that pleasure arises. Where Baumgarten’s enterprise seeks to produce a doctrine of aesthetics that is analogous to the ‘higher faculty’ of logic, with aesthetics understood as the science of improving our sensible cognition – our sensible faculty therein an analogue of reason – Moritz does not believe in the prospects of such a science of cultivating sensibility. He is more interested in cultivating cognitive judgements.
Yet, judge as we may, there will remain a marked inexplicability to the true object of judgement, i.e., that which grounds the aesthetic object’s perfection. This evidences that Moritz does not belong to what Guyer deems the rationalist tradition of the ‘aesthetics of truth’ (Guyer Reference Guyer2014). In ‘Die Signatur Des Schönen’ (‘The signature of the beautiful’) (1788), Moritz argues that perfection, and therein beauty, cannot be fully described, determined, or predicated. Because the subjectively received beauty is immediately comprehensible (unlike the objective order of the world-whole), Moritz writes that:
For therein lies the essence of beauty, that one part always speaks and signifies through the other and the whole through itself—that it explains itself—describes itself through itself—and thus, apart from the mere hinting … requires no further explanation or description.
As soon as a beautiful work of art … requires a particular explanation, it is already imperfect … for the first requirement of beauty is precisely its clarity, through which it unfolds itself to the eye …
Where true beauty unfolds before us, it is in itself the most perfect/complete explanation of the perfection that lies hidden within nature … and more or less eluding our gaze. (Moritz Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1962 [1788b]: 95)Footnote 20
This also distinguishes Moritz from Baumgarten, who lauds Homer’s description in the Iliad II whereby, ‘[i]n the Hymn to Apollo he lists the many places sacred to the god’ (Baumgarten Reference Baumgarten1954 [Reference Baumgarten1735]: §19, 43). In Moritz’s case, we cannot reduce beauty to merely increased representations or an array of descriptions. We are, rather, to conceive of beauty through the relations impressing themselves upon us. Impressed upon our imagination, sensible relations illuminate part of nature, although the objective order remains ‘hidden’ and, as such, eludes our gaze. This latter transcendental object,Footnote 21 the world-whole, cannot be fully conceptualised but only pointed or ‘hinted’ towards, such that, contra Guyer, we cannot conceive of it as objective in the sense of a determinate or determinable representation. But, subjectively speaking, the world-whole reveals itself to the percipient phenomenologically, ‘unfold[ing] itself to the eye’. This is why, although judgement can attend to the relations descried in an object, the concept it produces will remain inexponable and ineffable for Moritz. Moritz clarifies that:
we cannot attach the concept of beauty to the whole connection of things, all the more so because the connection, in its entirety, is given neither to our senses nor is grasped by our imagination, even if it can be thought by our understanding.
The concept of beauty, which for us has arisen from the fact that it need not be useful, thus requires not only that it exist as a self-contained whole, but that it be given as a self-contained whole to our senses, or can be grasped as such by our imagination.
And just as the useful has its degrees, the beautiful must have them too; for the more connection-enhancing relationships a useful thing has to the situation wherein it exists, the more useful it is; and the more such relationships the beautiful thing has from its parts to its nexus, that is, to itself, the more beautiful it is. And just as the beautiful can be useful without losing any of its beauty, though it is not there to be useful; the useful can have a certain degree of beauty even though it is only there to be useful. (Moritz Reference Moritz and Bernstein2003 [1788a]: 138, emphasis added)
There are two other issues here: one is the question of external purpose, as we already saw. Again, whether or not an object is beautiful does not hang on its utility or the concept of what the object, as a means-end instrument, ought to be.Footnote 22 Thus, a broken vase or stopped grandfather clock can, despite not functioning, very well be beautiful.Footnote 23 More importantly, however, the true ‘connection of things’, or the natural relations that obtain in the world-whole, are not possible to fully conceptualise. Full conceptualisation of beauty according to Moritz requires more than merely instancing an object of beauty vis-à-vis the understanding by attaching the concept of beauty to it. It requires the world-whole’s order being adequately ‘imagined’ or ‘sensed’, which we are foreclosed from executing. The world-whole is, in turn, a transcendental posit that can be thematised by artworks. In the same essay, Moritz directly turns towards the example of the artist, whom he argues through their ‘hand’ turns ‘[r]eality … into appearance’ that is ‘manifold relations of parts’, where the artwork indicates, but only indicates, ‘a sense of the highest beauty in the harmonious structure of the whole’ (Moritz Reference Moritz and Bernstein2003 [1788a]: 140). Both the artist and the artwork’s percipient are unable to conceptualise this world-whole’s order, and thus the proper concept of the beautiful, which remains an ideal. In a ‘beautiful work [of art], the ‘manifold relations of parts to the whole’, Moritz writes, ‘must be grasped by our imagination, our tools of perception’, by way of which they ‘prescribe a measure for the beautiful’ (139). While Guyer reads Mortiz’s aesthetics to imply that all beauty is ultimately about the same thing, namely the world-whole – a static objective order of nature as such – Moritz’s mention of ‘measure’ indicates that he thinks that we always end up judging the beautiful artwork, as we initially perceive it, in relation to an ideal limited by the kinds of relations we can impute to it. Not every percipient will impute the same relations or content, and hence the subjective approximation of the world-whole will vary.
Moritz emphasises that the ‘measure for the beautiful’ consists in our imagination’s activity, where we are impressed by the ‘beautiful whole coming from the hand of the artist’ (Reference Moritz and Bernstein2003 [1788a]: 139). He also notes the manifold relations ‘are only given to our external senses’ (ibid.), which indicates that how beauty is phenomenologically received does, in fact, elicit the subject’s cognitive faculty. The pleasure does not, on its own, indicate the artwork’s perfection but galvanises our processes of imagination and reflection, such that it is an indirect pointer towards the objective order which, for the artwork’s percipients, will remain partially conceptually elusive.
We can now assess Guyer’s argument that Moritz favours an ‘objectivist’ view rather than the ‘subjectivist’ view that our pleasure in artistic and natural beauty is due primarily to the way in which it freely engages our own mental powers’ (Guyer Reference Guyer2014: 412). Indeed, although Guyer’s argument does seem to find support in the aforementioned passage from ‘Outlines of a complete theory of fine art’ – that ‘[t]he genuinely beautiful is not merely in us and in our manner of representation, but is to be found outside us in the objects themselves’ (Moritz Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1962 [1789b]: 120) – we can now see that Moritz’s appeals to the objective order amount to grounding claims. Yet, Moritz’s emphasis on cognitive activity demonstrates that he also accounts for the subjectivist view. In fact, Moritz begins ‘Outlines of a complete theory of fine art’ by indicating that there are seemingly opposed but, in the final instance, compatible ‘general propositions’ (allgemeinen Sätze) (120n1). The first proposition is that the grounding of the beautiful is not in our imaginative capacity but in objects themselves (or, more precisely, in their totality). The second concerns what Moritz calls the ‘genuine theory of beauty, whereby the eye is fixed on a certain point from which beauty must necessarily be observed if it is to be properly appreciated and felt’ (120).Footnote 24 In turn, our manner of representation and phenomenology not only licences our contemplation of the interconnection of the whole of nature but is what allows us to appreciate beauty. Moritz’s subsequent two propositions directly involve artworks, as he writes that:
for every genuine work of art has such a point within itself whereby all its parts and their positions in relation to one another become necessary, and when viewed from this point of view, they also appear to us as necessary … the more necessary their positions in relation to each other, the more beautiful the work is. (Moritz Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1962 [1789b]: 120)
The beautiful artwork which enjoys a great degree of perfection thus espouses an internally necessary nexus, or ‘point’, of structural connection, which licences our phenomenology and guides our cognitive activity. In ‘On the artistic imitation of the beautiful’, Moritz calls this cognitive activity the ‘power of action’, where, as a ‘mediated impression’, the beautiful artwork motivates our ‘power of thought’, which motivates our attempting to think of the natural objective order of relations that comprise the world-whole (Moritz Reference Moritz and Bernstein2003 [1788a]: 140). Here, we are met with a cognitive shortcoming that indicates the natural objective order’s ultimately non-conceptualisable status and, thus, the conceptually indeterminable status of what grounds the beautiful object or, as Moritz says, ‘the reality outside’ (ibid.). For, try as we may, we cannot, Moritz notes, ‘subsume’ the perceptually descried ‘concepts’ through the power of judgement; this is because our imagination cannot ‘set them [viz., all natural representations] side by side’, meaning we cannot represent how perceptual relations, in total, comprise the world-whole, and, therefore also cannot conceptualise the objective natural order (ibid.). This is why we cannot achieve a ‘complete concept of the beautiful’, which ‘presupposes … order, harmony, and form [Bildung] in a small domain that we otherwise perceive scattered here and there in the great whole that surrounds us’ (Moritz Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1962 [1789a]: 122). The ‘great whole’ can only be perceived in scatterings.
Although we cannot have a complete concept of the world-whole, the beautiful artwork approximates and exhibits – or, as Moritz puts it, is a ‘compressed and reflected’ (zusammendrängt und spiegelt) image of it (Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1962 [1789a]: 122) – the genuine order of the world-whole in a way that our mental faculties of sensing, imagining, and judging, in their usual activity, are foreclosed from, therein stimulating a kind of cognitive activity we do not usually undertake. Hence, the ‘ultimate purpose’ (seinen Endzweck) of ‘every beautiful artwork’ is that it ‘elevates our spirit’ in its stimulating our cognitive activity, therein becoming ‘truly useful’ (ibid.). This cognitive use is not orthogonal to what is represented in the artwork, which is why Moritz writes that:
In order to view every beautiful work of art as a self-contained whole, it is necessary to find within the work itself the point of view through which each individual element is revealed in its necessary relationship to the whole, and through which it becomes clear to us that nothing in the work is superfluous or lacking. (Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1962 [1789a]: 122)
How should we understand the relationship between Moritz’s claim that the artwork is a self-contained whole and his claim that it points beyond itself to a different whole (namely, the world-whole)? Some readers might think that if the artwork is a self-contained whole, then there’s no reason to see it pointing beyond itself; this is not, however, what Moritz means. Before Cranach’s Lucretia (1528), I may conceptualise the relations between the tortured wife of Collatinus and her pride following the assault exacted by Sextus Tarquinius, prompting her suicide. The nexus point at which the relations coalesce is where her knife meets the centre of her disrobed chest. That the work depicts the pregnant moment prior to her suicide may then motivate me to think of that which awaits Lucretia after death, or whether her act of suicide will be rewarded or punished by God. I can set these concepts in relation to one another, but they will not, and cannot, conceptually exhaust the structural order of the objective world-whole – of heaven’s relation to mortality, retribution’s justness to one’s duty to themselves, etc. Yet, there is value to the cognitive activity of conceptualising the relations between artistic representations, as it stimulates one to think that these relations do, in some way, enjoy a complete order where they fit together; however, we will inevitably, in trying to cognise how they fit together, find points that strike us as contradictory or exclusionary, demonstrating the ineffable conceptual status of the natural world. This cognitive activity brings to bear the extensive clarity of the beautiful artwork but also shows that the grounding is not an object of representation. Moritz terms this ‘reflection’s power of action, through the differentiating power of thought’, wherein ‘the more perfect/complete [vollendet] and vivid the concepts become … the more they also eclipse and exclude each other’ (Moritz Reference Moritz and Bernstein2003 [1788a]: 141).
Guyer emphasises the objective order, but Moritz concedes that ‘[t]he connection between all of nature would be the highest beauty for us if we could comprehend it for a moment’, yet, because we cannot, what the ‘beautiful whole’, or ideal purpose, consists in is that perfection that is ‘in miniature, an imprint of the highest beauty in the great whole of nature’ (Moritz Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1962 [1789b]: 120). Moritz’s theory of aesthetic pleasure states that ‘[t]he highest enjoyment of beauty can only be felt in its becoming [Werden], through its own power’, whereby ‘calm contemplation of nature and art as a single great whole’ produces ‘a harmonious effect on us’ (121). There is a calm phenomenal state, distinct from the initial sensible pleasure that galvanises our initial reflecting and judging, that we settle into when we come to terms with the natural order’s ultimate ineffability.
Because we cannot cognise the world-whole (and God, its creator), Moritz argues that we are led to appreciate the genius responsible for the artwork.Footnote 25 In turn:
Our consideration of the creative imitation of the beautiful, combined with the pure pleasure of the beautiful artwork itself, can, to be sure, create a lively concept in us which heightens the pleasure the artwork creates in us; – but since our highest pleasure in the beautiful still cannot grasp the becoming of this beauty from its own power, the single highest pleasure remains the creative genius himself who produces it. And the beautiful has therefore already reached its highest purpose in its generation. (Moritz Reference Moritz and Bernstein2003 [1788a]: 142)
As we have seen, Moritz’s conception of the beautiful whole accounts for the compatibility of an objective natural order, indicated by the artwork, and the cognitive activity that takes place in the percipient’s imagination as they contemplate and admire artworks. Moritz’s theory of beauty and aesthetic pleasure readily strikes a balance between subjectivist and objectivist orders. Guyer’s account elides this critical cognitive activity, primarily drawing from objectivist passages such that Guyer can conclude that Moritz ‘puts the human audience for art in the position of its servant’ (Guyer Reference Guyer2014: 413). However, in context, such passages evince that, for Moritz, artworks have percipient-independent value, which is distinct from their beauty. Guyer cites Moritz’s ‘On the artistic imitation of the beautiful’ to demonstrate that he conclusively hews towards the objectivist view. However, if we appreciate that the ultimately non-conceptualisable objective world-whole’s order grounds the beautiful artwork’s perfection, then we can also appreciate why it is that Moritz makes claims such as ‘the beautiful insofar as the beautiful does not need an end, a purpose for existing, except itself, but finds its whole worth, the end of its existence, within itself’ (Moritz Reference Moritz and Bernstein2003 [1788a]: 136). Relatedly, in ‘Toward a unification of all the fine arts and letters under the concept of self-sufficiency’ (‘Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schonen Künste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten’) (1785), Moritz writes:
When contemplating beauty, however, I transfer the purpose from myself back to the object itself: I regard it as something that is not complete in me, but in itself, and which therefore constitutes a whole in itself and gives me pleasure for its own sake; in that I do not so much give the beautiful object a relation to myself as I give myself a relation to it. (Moritz Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1962 [Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1785]: 3)
As Erdmann Waniek highlights, Moritz here escapes the ‘pitfall … of an objective aesthetics which might indeed pretend to give an analysis of the work of art without acknowledging the perceived subject’ (Waniek Reference Erkan1983: 215). Moritz treats the viewer’s cognitive activity as actualising the artwork’s ‘perfection/completion [vollendet] in itself’ (Moritz Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1981 [Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1793]: 153). This actualisation consists of a process where I recognise that:
the beauty of a work of art is not pure and unadulterated until I completely disregard its special relationship to me and regard it as something that was created solely for its own sake, so that it is something perfect/complete [vollendet] in itself. (Moritz Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1962 [Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1975]: 5)
Our contemplative process consists in our recognition that the artwork does not objectively represent the natural objective order but that the artwork indicates the latter. Moritz writes that, through this process, we contemplate that ‘everything that constitutes the beautiful … whether in its large or small scope, … reflects the relationships between things’ (Moritz Reference Moritz, Hollmer and Meier1997 [Reference Moritz, Hollmer and Meier1791b]: 197). However, although artworks ‘teach us this’ interconnection between things, this is not what Moritz takes to be their primary purpose – which is, instead, to enjoy their own sense of unity; Moritz therefore adds, ‘for it is precisely because teaching is not its [viz., the artwork’s] purpose that it teaches better, because teaching itself is subordinate to beauty’ (ibid.).
The artwork precipitates the percipient’s subjective process of contemplating the complete world-whole. Because the artwork does not objectively represent the world-whole, taking it to indicate this involves what Moritz, in his 1785 essay, deems ‘transferring’ that which is represented in my subjective cognitive-contemplative activity to the object. The artwork’s manner of representing, thus, contra Guyer, involves subjective and objective aspects.Footnote 26
This is also related to the value of art for Moritz. The totality of relations that the world-whole enjoys may not be percipient-dependent, but the realisation of the artwork’s value requires percipient participation, which is why it ‘invites’ percipients to participate with it and ‘teaches’ us about the existence of a world-whole. Following Moritz, an object that espouses a significant degree of unity will stimulate cognitive activity and thereby have value. There is a similarity between Moritz’s position and that of Nozick on ‘[u]nity in diversity’ as ‘organic unity’, according to which something has value to the degree that it exhibits organic unity, and something that has more organic unity will be more valuable (Nozick Reference Nozick1984: 84). Similarly, for Moritz, an artwork’s value consists in its efficaciously exhibiting organic unity – its effectivity consisting in the fact that this presentation does not strike us as its primary purpose.
Following Moritz, the beautiful artwork stimulates our conceptualising the relations that subsist within the universe, or the world-whole, by precipitating our contemplative reflection on the artwork’s connection of points. The artwork’s representations emulate the relations of nature as a whole, albeit the latter ultimately remains non-representable. Although we recognise it as the grounding, we can only regard this world-whole as a transcendental posit; yet, as a grounding, we also recognise it as what is truly beautiful and thus truly valuable. But to realise any of its value in the world requires subjective participation. Thus, again, even if ultimate value is grounded in the objective order, without participation – and, therein, the efficacity of the subjective order – it remains opaque. In Moritz’s theory of artistic value, as in his theory of beauty and pleasure, we find both subjectivist and objectivist aspects. We can now, having demonstrated how Moritz’s theory of aesthetic pleasure and beauty strikes a balance, assess Maimon’s claim that Moritz’s notion of ideal purpose anticipates and prefigures Kant’s subjective purposiveness in the CPJ.Footnote 27
3.
Homing in on §15 of the third Critique’s Analytic of the Beautiful, titled ‘The judgement of taste is entirely independent from the concept of perfection’, we can appreciate how, for Kant, it is of extreme importance to distinguish internal perfection from what he regards as beauty proper. By differentiating Moritz and Kant’s views, we can appreciate not only why Moritz should not be taken as anticipating Kant’s account of beauty as purposiveness without purpose but, more importantly, what exactly Kant’s critique of objective inner purposiveness entails. In §15, Kant writes:
Objective purposiveness can be cognized only by means of the relation of the manifold to a determinate end, thus only through a concept. …
Objective purposiveness is either external, i.e., the utility of the object, or internal, i.e., its perfection. That the satisfaction in an object on account of which we call it beautiful could not rest on the representation of its utility is sufficiently obvious from the two preceding main sections, since in that case it would not be an immediate satisfaction in the object, which latter is the essential condition of the judgment about beauty. But an objective inner purposiveness, i.e., perfection, already comes closer to the predicate of beauty, and has therefore been held to be identical with beauty even by philosophers of repute, though with the proviso if it is thought confusedly. (CPJ, 5: 226–7, italic emphasis added)
Moritz’s account, according to which the beauty in artworks consists in ‘perfection in itself’ (in sich selbst Vollendetes) (Moritz Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1962 [Reference Moritz and Schrimpf1785]: 3), comports with what Kant calls ‘objective inner purposiveness’. Kant recognises that, unlike external, means-end purposiveness such as an artefact’s utility, the perfectionist concept of objective inner purposiveness is ‘of an internal end, which contains the ground of the internal possibility of the object’, where this internal end is that ‘the concept of which can be regarded as the ground of the possibility of the object itself’ (CPJ, 5: 227). For Moritz, to properly countenance an artwork as beautiful, the concept of its perfection, or its unity-amidst-diversity – here understood as the artistic stimulus’s evincing the relations of an objective natural order – is determinative. An artwork that betrays less of these connections will have less harmony/unity and, in turn, exhibit less extensive clarity and be less beautiful. Kant, therefore, correctly observes that, with an account like Moritz’s:
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; and the agreement of the manifold in the thing with this concept (which supplies the rule for the combination of the manifold in it) is the qualitative perfection of a thing. (CPJ, 5: 227)
For Kant, Moritz, as one of various ‘philosophers of repute’, has nonetheless closely approached ‘the predicate of beauty’ with this conception of objective inner purposiveness. Nevertheless, following Kant, it errs insofar as it conceives of a concept – such as the order of the world-whole – that, however indirectly, will determine the qualitative perfection of an object of beauty.Footnote 28
Does this critique truly apply to Moritz? In Moritz’s case, while we cannot ascertain a representation of the grounding of beauty, or the world-whole’s natural, objective order, it is ultimately through the concept of the world-whole that we qualitatively judge artworks. Indeed, Moritz resists the Baumgartian picture of, vide Homer, increased descriptive/perceptual elements licencing more extensive clarity; Moritz prefers to focus on the ‘harmonious agreement’ of relations, or ‘proportionate harmony of the manifold elements … into a harmonious whole’ (Moritz Reference Moritz, Hollmer and Meier1997 [1791a]: 1033). Yet, this nevertheless results in a concept of the perfect itself.
For Kant, although it closely approaches the predicate of beauty, Moritz’s account of objective inner purposiveness does not make good on it; in turn, Kant offers his theory of adherent judgements. Insofar as Moritz’s account is primarily concerned with beautiful artworks rather than nature, we should home in on Kant’s account of adherent beauty to best consider the advances exacted by Kant’s conception of subjective purposiveness over Moritz’s ideal beauty. For Kant, free beauty and pure judgements of taste, which apply to objects of nature, presuppose ‘no concept of what the object ought to be’ (CPJ, 5: 229). But what of our adherent judgements, which we formulate in the case of artworks and which do adhere to a concept?Footnote 29 Unlike with objects of natural beauty, we, in the case of artworks, take the original elements/aesthetic attributes of an artwork to stand under a particular adherent concept/end.
Kant writes, in the CPJ’s First Introduction, that ‘the faculty of aesthetic reflection judges only about the subjective purposiveness … of the object’ (FI, 20: 229), where the ability to so judge is indicated by the feeling of pleasure in the object that signals that the object is pleasurable for the percipient. That is, subjective purposiveness judges ‘by means of the pleasure or displeasure which is felt in it’ (ibid.) rather than by means of a subordinating concept. According to Kant’s account of the free play of the imagination and the understanding in the third Critique, a consequent adherent judgement of taste will not be subtended by a perfectionist concept such as that of unity-amidst-variety exhibiting the relations of the natural order. That is, viewing a beautiful artwork, the understanding and imagination’s free play is not guided by any determinative concept ‘under which to subsume the stimulus’ (Carroll Reference Carroll2024: 187).
Following Kant’s mature account, it is ‘feeling’ (Gefühl) that guides the free play of the faculties and elicits the pleasure (Lust) that is connected to the object of beauty, which, Kant tells us, is ‘purposive … only because its representation is immediately connected with the feeling of pleasure’ (CPJ, 5: 189). ‘Feelings’, so conceived, neither refer to objects nor express anything about an object but instead express a relation to the subject and how they are affected. The ‘feeling’ of pleasure transpires as a percipient ‘lingers’ over a ‘particular [that] is given’ (5: 179). In the faculties’ free play, this pleasurable lingering activity stimulates the productive imagination to relate the beautiful artwork’s manifold elements into a unified, Gestalt-like form. For Kant, this ‘linger[ing] over the consideration of the beautiful’ is associated with the pleasure of taste (5: 222). Licence a judgement of reflection, the pleasurable wandering/lingering activity does not involve conceptual subsumption of that which is perceived. Rather, as Matherne describes in her recent account, ‘[a]s we reflectively linger over the object, we, as it were, ‘try on’ different imaginative and intellectual perspectives on the object, which lead us in new and surprising cognitive directions’ (Reference Matherne and Moyar2024: 26). The concept that I ultimately land on, however, will not amount to the rational idea that the genius artist communicates through their artwork (and via the feeling it elicits) ‘a maximum’ (CPJ 5: 233), leaving room for further unities yet.
Consider how this might transpire viewing Cranach’s painting, The Garden of Eden (1530), a famous depiction of the oneness of man, nature and God. In the faculties’ free play, I create a unity that consists in the contrast of prelapsarian man (e.g., Adam and Eve being warned by God to not consume the apple) and postlapsarian destruction (e.g., their torment after having consumed it).Footnote 30 I apply the concepts of man’s mortality and selfishness. But this will not fully subsume the form that the productive imagination has, in its wandering activity, rendered. There are further unities yet, including those that subordinate Cranach’s prelapsarian scenes to the upper-right scene of God’s floating head before an agonised Adam and Eve, flanked by death and woe. One might apply concepts such as <man’s worldly ignorance>, <epistemic humility>, or <God’s sanctioning due punishment> to Cranach’s painting and, in the free play’s interpretative activity, still not have conceptually exhausted the work in such a way that a determinative thought/concept is adequate to the stimulus. That is, the concept will never attain to the idea of reason, and whatever concept a percipient’s understanding may apply in the free play, there will always be a further unity yet that the productive imagination has not formed.Footnote 31
For Moritz, however objectively inexponable the world-whole remains, the percipient’s cognitive activity is still bounded/determined by the concept of objective order of the world-whole, and this carries across all artworks, which will exhibit it with varying degrees of success. For Kant, however, because no aesthetic attribute is ‘fully adequate’ to the rational idea approximated by the artwork, the work will always elicit, at the register of the free play, ‘more … than can be comprehended in a concept’ (CPJ, 5: 315).Footnote 32 Thus, a productive imagination will create a form that lingers/draws on the artwork’s oddly original aspects, where this form is ‘represented as purposive for the presentation of the given concept’ (5: 318) but ‘never attains to the given concept’ (5: 344). Relatedly, the understanding ‘by means of its concepts, never attains to the complete inner intuition of the imagination which it combines with a given representation’ (ibid.). Thus, the art object remains open to further unities and further adherent judgements that might apply yet different concepts.
This openness, wherein no determinative concept exhausts the stimulus, demonstrates the radicality of Kant’s project in the CPJ. Initially, when his aesthetics hewed closer to a broadly Wolffian-Leibnizian programme, Kant sought to equate beauty to a kind of objective perfection. In passages from the 1750s to the 1760s, we see Kant working within the perfectionist framework that he would come to reject. Consider, for instance, the following Reflexionen:
If one notes not only the similarities and differences of things, but also how a manifold merges into a unity and forms its ground, then one recognizes perfection. This is called judging …. [S]uch judgment is quite certainly possible through the lower faculties of knowledge. (Refl 606, 15: 161–2)Footnote 33
The inner perfection of a thing has a natural relation to beauty. For the subordination of a manifold to a purpose requires its coordination according to common laws. Therefore the same property through which a building is beautiful contributes as well to its perfection. (Refl 628, 15: 273)Footnote 34
In his critical thinking, however, Kant comes to reject this account where there is a concept that subordinates the perceptual manifold. For Moritz, we do find such subordination: the inner perfection that licences our judging a stimulus as beautiful consists in a concept of the natural order. Admittedly, within this concept of the world-whole, there is a fundamental openness concerning how it is thematised/exhibited; furthermore, Moritz’s account does not anchor the world-whole in the objective features of the stimulus but instead recognises the subjectivist contribution that the percipient makes. This is why Kant appreciates how accounts like Moritz’s approach the predicate of beauty, even though they do not make good on it.
It is worth noting, however, that there is a similarity in Kant and Moritz’s theories of pleasure, as both take pleasure to stimulate judgement/reflection. For Kant, in judgements of beauty the ‘feeling’ of pleasure transpires as the mind wanders, or ‘lingers’ over a ‘particular [that] is given’ (CPJ, 5: 179), with this pleasurable activity relating the beautiful object’s perceptual elements into a unified spatial form. This ‘linger[ing] over the consideration of the beautiful’ is associated with the pleasure of taste (5: 222). Licence a judgement of reflection, the pleasurable wandering/lingering activity does not involve conceptual subsumption/determination of that which is perceived; hence, a percipient can arrive at myriad interpretations. For Kant, subjective purposive activity has a tendency to maintain itself in the subject. As Kant explains in the Anthropology, ‘[w]hat directly (through sense) urges me to leave my state (to go out of it) is disagreeable to me’ (Anth, 7: 342); and ‘[w]hat drives me to maintain my state (to remain in it) is agreeable to me, I enjoy it’ (7: 231). For Moritz, ‘pure pleasure of the beautiful artwork itself, can … create a lively concept in us which heightens the pleasure the artwork creates in us’ (Moritz Reference Moritz and Bernstein2003 [1788a]: 142). One difference here, however, is that for Moritz there are two pleasures to be had: one in the perfection of the artwork and another in thinking about the objective order of nature. In Moritz’s perfectionism, the determinative concept, which subsumes the perceptual manifold, is that of the existence of the objective natural order, or the world-whole, as it consists ‘only [in] the consequence of its being’ (143). While the objective order, itself, remains non-conceptualisable, the second pleasure, stimulated by the understanding, consists in the second-order concept that the artwork’s relations indicate: ‘the great plan of nature’, though this plan remains, itself, opaque to us (ibid.). Though it remains opaque, its existence is revealed through the artwork’s producing a pleasure in us that precipitates our thinking about how the artwork exhibits the natural order’s intermingled relations.Footnote 35
Critically, Moritz’s account of inner purposiveness conceives of pleasure as promoting cognitive activity – specifically, that of reflection on the relation between the unity of represented elements and the natural order. Though this is subordinated by a concept that is not open to yet further unities, it inspires judgements concerning the relation of the perceptual manifold to the natural order. Contra Guyer, it is only by appreciating Moritz’s subjectivism that we can understand why Kant thought such perfectionist accounts, trafficking in objective inner purposiveness, meaningfully approached the predicate of beauty.Footnote 36 The comparative advancements that belong to Kant’s account of subjective purposiveness, particularly as it concerns artworks, consist in how, whatever concept a percipient may apply, the object is never conceptually exhausted.
Conclusion
In this paper, we have seen that, contra Guyer, we should not take Moritz to espouse a purely objectivist view, as his theories of aesthetic pleasure, beauty, and value significantly involve the percipient’s faculties of imagination and reflection. However, as a perfectionist working in the Baumgartian tradition of extensive clarity, Moritz nevertheless treats what objects of beauty exhibit as subordinate to a determinate concept – specifically, that of the objective order of nature, which the artwork’s harmonious elements thematise. For Kant, who was familiar with Moritz’s account, although this framework productively approached the predicate of beauty, it ultimately remained affixed to a perfectionist concept that subordinated the aesthetic object’s manifold in a determinative fashion. In turn, passages like §15 of the Analytic of the Beautiful find Kant exactingly distinguishing his account of subjective purposiveness from Moritz-type objective inner purposiveness.
