The Beautiful

In aesthetic judgments, one judges something as: Beautiful, Pleasant / Agreeable, or Good.

“The Pleasant, the Beautiful, and the Good, designate then, three different relations of representations to the feeling of pleasure and pain … .  That which gratifies a man is called pleasant; that which merely pleases him is beautiful; that which is esteemed [or approved] by him, i.e. that to which he accords an objective worth, is good” (§5).

Beautiful ……… mere pleasure (enjoyed reflectively, cf. §44) ……… we judge it disinterestedly

Pleasant … pleasure as gratification (enjoyed sensationally, cf. §44)… judge it to satisfy wants

Good ……… pleasure as esteem ……… we judge it to be useful, thus with concepts

Only Judgments of the Beautiful are disinterested, that is, they are judged without bias.  Thus, the art object, in the sense of a true masterpiece, must be judged as Beautiful, not Pleasant or Good.

Four Moments of Judgment of Taste of the Beautiful

Disinterest        Quality

Universality        Quantity

Purposiveness without PurposeRelation

Necessity and Common SenseModality

Disinterest  - Judge or represent object by disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction

Interest: satisfaction in an object and representation of its existence (i.e., not speaking to feeling in subject, but something in object itself; existence implies we seek use from it or gratification by it).  Interest is partial; pure judgment of taste has no interest, only mere satisfaction.

Universality  -Expect all to agree; a demand of agreement but a presumption

Pleasure seems private, a subjective response, assumption that taste differs—e.g., compare: “I like coffee,” which assumes privacy, not all would agree, to “coffee is bitter,” with which we would assume all to agree.  Judgments of the Beautiful are like coffee is bitter—judgment of taste behaves as if judgment were a real, objective property of the thing judged, thus universal. 

Purposive without a Purpose  -Represented object must be understood as purposive (finality), but without an objective or determinate purpose (end).

Beauty in nature appears to the cognitive faculties to have purposivity, but its beauty has no purpose.

Beauty in art more challenging; there may be reasons why something was created behind the actual object represented, but these are not sufficient for an object to be judged to be beautiful (and, all these purposes behind the creation must be abstracted from consideration re: disinterest).

How concepts might relate to beauty: free beauty, dependent beauty, perfection, ideal of beauty.

Necessity and Common Sense  -Must necessarily presuppose “common sense”   (sum up all four moments)

Common sense: a sense shared in common—it is the feeling for certain states of our own mind (aesthetic pleasure).  This is to become, for Kant, an a priori condition of aesthetic judgment (here, called a “principle of taste” (§20)).  A principle implies that it is a rule by which aesthetic judgment legislates for feeling.  Thus, it seems that “common sense” is three distinct things: (1) An a priori faculty of a feeling of beauty; (2) A common aspect of feeling; (3) A subjective principle for judgment.  How do these relate together (sec. 22)?  By necessity—this is a necessity of judgment: if all the circumstances are present, then judgment necessarily follows.  This implies universality.  But, the necessity is not the judgment itself, but the conditions of judgment, i.e., according to the universal conditions of experience, i.e., the cognitive faculties involved.  This is why this moment is related to modality—it is modal in the sense of being the mode or manner in which I judge, not the conditions or content of the judgment itself.  How can we have necessity in judgments of taste if they have no concept?  Because the necessity is singular and exemplary.  Singular necessity: judgment does not rest on concepts, nor does it produce concepts; instead, it acts as if there were an universal rule incapable of expression that it follows.  Exemplary necessity: a conditioned necessity (§§18-9), something else must be the case prior to and in order for the judgment to be properly formed (in contrast: unconditioned necessity would be judgment in accord with logic or universal conditions of experience, thus, these are not really conditions at all).  Thus, beauty is necessary, BUT rests on conditions of a subjective a priori principle of feeling of taste (i.e., common sense).  Thus, we see the different meanings of common sense united in the harmony or free play of the imagination (the cognitive faculties here applicable). 

The Sublime

“We call sublime that which is absolutely great” (§25). 

“That is sublime which even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses” (§25).

“We may describe the Sublime thus: it is an object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to think the unattainability of nature regarded as a presentation of Ideas” (§General Remark, p.80).  That is, the sublime is that which overwhelms the rational capacities of the mind, temporarily freezing the mortal in awe and fear, before his apparatus reignites and grants a pleasurable overcoming of sensation by rational comprehension. 

The dynamic sublime is illustrated as the violent storm at sea, so fierce, man stands paralyzed at its display of incomprehensible force, before affirming himself as safe.  Awareness of his safety results from his capacity to rationally distance himself from the danger and grants him ecstatic power over its ferocity. 

Examples:

“… Bold, overhanging, as it were threatening cliffs, thunder clouds towering up into the heavens, bringing with them flashes of lightening and crashes of thunder, volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall on a mighty river …” (§28), and war and, occasionally, religion. 

The mathematical sublime is “… that in comparison with which everything else is small” (§25).  “The estimation of magnitude by means of concepts of number … is mathematical; but that in mere intuition (by the measurement of the eye) is aesthetical” (§26).  In the experience’s immediacy, one is incapable of assigning a concretion to the infinite or counting the miles or minutes of its depth.  “Nature is therefore sublime in those of its phenomena, whose intuition brings with it the Idea of their infinity” (§26).  But, then, one’s reason reawakens; one steps back and measures the scene in front of him/her as the power of knowledge pleasurably overcomes the previously un-fathomable magnitude. 

Examples:

A ravine cut across the earth, so deep, man stands aside it, overwhelmed by vertigo.  Approaching Pyramids in Egypt; St. Peter’s in Rome (§26)

“We hence see that true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the [subject] judging, not in the natural Object, the judgment upon which occasions this state.  Who would call sublime, e.g. shapeless mountain masses piled in wild disorder upon each other with their pyramids of ice, or the gloomy raging sea?  But the mind feels itself elevated in its own judgment if, while contemplating them without reference to their form, and abandoning itself to the Imagination and to the Reason—which although placed in combination with the Imagination without any definite purpose, merely extends it—it yet finds the whole power of the Imagination inadequate to its Ideas” (§26). 

In other words, the judgment of sublimity is a productive failure.  The productivity is an elevation of the mind.  The failure is Imagination’s incapacity to capture that which has sparked the experience of sublimity.  How does the productivity come to be?  Reason suggests that we can comprehend every phenomenon that can be given in intuition.  However, while Imagination exerts the greatest effort to do so, it confronts its own limitations and inadequacies when it tries to comprehend the formless totality of the object.  Nevertheless, this failure shows Imagination’s true destination: to make itself adequate to this Idea of Reason (thus achieve total comprehension).  How does this realization feel?  “The feeling of our incapacity to attain and Ideas, which is a law for us, is respect” (§27).  Respect initiates the receipt of the pleasure in the sublime; this pleasure “is respect from our own destination, which by a certain subreption we attribute to an Object of nature (conversion of respect from the Idea of humanity in our own subject into respect for the Object)” (§27).  [Subreption is an inference drawn from misrepresented facts or a purposefully concealment of facts to obtain a certain result; the term originally had ecclesiastical overtones.]  So, again, what happens in the judgment of the sublime?  Our confrontation with the object results in our quick oscillation between attraction and repulsion to the sublime; this feeling of awe is both pain from it being unthinkable and pleasure from the idea we can think it.  This quick vibration occurs when we overcome the lapse of our imaginative ability to think the unthinkable, even as an answer is impossible.  This conquer of pure passionate free play of the Imagination by the supposition of a conceptual answer produces a feeling of respect—seemingly for the object of raw nature, but truly it is for our ability to strive after and conquer the idea. 

Comparisons and Contrasts between the Beautiful and Sublime  (§23)

Commonalities between the beautiful and sublime:

(1) both please in themselves  (yield mere, indeterminate satisfaction)

(2) neither are a judgment of sense

(3) neither are a logically determined judgment

(4) both are a judgment of reflection

(5) their satisfaction depends neither upon sensation (as in pleasant) nor concept (as in good)

(6) neither yield knowledge, but only feeling of pleasure

(7) both singular, yet universal judgments

(8) both employ imagination in accord with and furthers the faculty of concepts in Understanding and Reason

Differences between the beautiful and sublime:

(1)  Beautiful: concerned with form of the object, has boundaries

Sublime: concerned with the formless, shows no boundaries yet invokes totality

(2)Beautiful: presentation of an indefinite (indeterminate) concept of the Understanding

Sublime: presentation of an indefinite (indeterminate) concept of Reason

(3)Beautiful: satisfaction bound up with quality

Sublime: satisfaction bound up with quantity

(4)Beautiful: positive pleasure—pleasure directly tied to furtherance of life; compatible with charms and play of imagination (freies Spiel)

Sublime: negative pleasure—pleasure had indirectly through its challenge to our vital powers and our conquering this challenge; compatible with the exercise of imagination, which is antithesis to the free play of imagination

(5)Beautiful: natural beauty has purposiveness in its form, which makes the object seem to be pre-adapted to our judgment

Sublime: seems to violate purpose in judgment, that is, it seems to be vehemently unsuitable for our capacity to judge and to do violence to imagination—and, from this, it is yet judged to be even more perfectly sublime  (he seems to say no purposiveness, but in §26, he affirms it does have such)

An object of nature, most properly speaking, is not sublime (although objects of nature may be beautiful).  The “sublime object” is an object fit to receive the presentation of a sublimity where the sublimity is actually found in the mind.  No sensible form can properly contain the sublime (but, this is only strictly speaking … we speak of sublime things and events, but this is how we speak … the sublime is the judgment in our minds).  “This [the sublime] concerns only Ideas of the Reason, which, although no adequate presentation is possible for them, by this inadequacy that admits of sensible presentation, are aroused and summoned into the mind.  Thus the wide ocean, agitated by the storm, cannot be called sublime.  Its aspect is horrible; and the mind must be already filled with manifold Ideas if it is to be determined by such an intuition to a feeling itself sublime, as it is incited to abandon sensibility and to busy itself with Ideas that involve higher purposiveness” (§23, p.62).

(6)Beautiful: has purposiveness (in nature and art) that extends our concept of nature (not our cognition of natural objects)

Sublime: lacks this extending aspect that leads one to objective principles and their corresponding forms in nature … instead, more so, nature excites ideas of sublime the most in its greatest chaos (p.63) (Again, he seems to say sublime has no purposiveness, but in §26, he affirms it does have such)

(7)Beautiful: its study is more important because its purposiveness leads us to seek an external ground (after the internal presentation of the representation to Reason through imagination)  (it is form that is the ground of pleasure in presentations)

Sublime: its study is a “mere appendix to the aesthetical judging” because it does not lead to any presentation of form in nature beyond itself, it leads us only back to an inner ground within ourselves to find its cause (p.63).