Kant's account of emotive art

ABSTRACT

For Kant, experiences of beauty, including experiences of beautiful art, are based on the feeling of disinterested pleasure. At first glance, garden-variety emotions don’t seem to play a constitutive role for beauty in art. In this paper I argue that they can. Drawing on Kant’s notion of aesthetic ideas, I will show that garden-variety emotions can function as a driving force for the free use of the imagination: they can enhance the beholder’s activity of freely associating and thus contribute crucially to the free play of the faculties. In doing so, I will develop a more emotion-oriented view of art than is commonly attributed to Kant. I will also argue that there is a lesson to be learned for contemporary aesthetics: emotions not only help us to understand some works of art and to direct our attention, but they also make us engage imaginatively with artworks and make our experiences of art more vivid.

KEYWORDS:

• Kant’s aesthetics
• Kant’s theory of fine art
• emotions
• aesthetic ideas

1. Introduction

For a long time, it was thought that Kant's transcendental philosophy had little room for emotions. Regarding ethics, Edmund Husserl paradigmatically accused Kant of an ‘extreme and almost absurd rationalism’ (Husserl 1988, 407; my translation). In recent times, there have been some attempts to vindicate the importance of emotions in Kant's moral philosophy.¹ Yet, when it comes to beauty, Kant still seems to ascribe a constitutive function only to disinterested pleasure whereas other affective states seem to render beauty impure.² Pure beauty is based on a ‘dry satisfaction’ (CJ: 225) and cannot be enhanced by more lively emotions (i.e. interests). Moreover, ‘[a]ny interest spoils the judgment of taste’ (CJ: 223). Much in line with this Guyer has accused Kant for the ‘exclusion of emotion from the proper response to beauty’ and for not recognising ‘the importance of emotion in our response to art’ (Guyer 2014, 437 & 443). To banish all emotion from the realm of beauty except for disinterested pleasure seems to conflict with our appreciation of many artworks.³ With Carroll we can ‘take it to be an empirical fact that much of what we correctly call art does traffic in arousing emotions’ (Carroll 2001, 218). Even more, some aestheticians claim that emotions contribute crucially to the aesthetic value of some artworks.⁴ Should we assume that Kant simply rejects the contribution of emotions to art?⁵ I don't think so. I will show that Kant's aesthetic theory does, in fact, contain a much overlooked approach to emotive art.

Why assume that disinterestedness poses a challenge to emotive art in the first place? For Kant all feelings of pleasure and displeasure (i.e. all emotions) can be divided into those that are interested and those that are disinterested. But the only disinterested feelings are the pleasure in the beautiful, the mixed feeling in the sublime and probably some disinterested displeasure in ugliness.⁶ This is how the whole setup of the first Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful works. Even the intellectual pleasures we take in the insights into some (natural) objects belong to the class of interested pleasures or interests, since they arise from the attainment of an aim.⁷ Thus, any feeling which is neither a pleasure in the beautiful, nor a mixed feeling in the sublime, nor a displeasure in ugliness is prima facie to be detached from the disinterested pleasure in the beautiful and, moreover, it might seem to hinder or spoil the judging of beautiful art.

There have been some recent attempts to identify a role for garden-variety emotions in Kant's theory of art or, more precisely, his theory of aesthetic ideas. For instance, Zuckert remarks (rather in passing) that aesthetic ideas ‘intellectually and emotionally “animate” the appreciator of the work’ and that they might include phenomena such as ‘metaphors, the themes of a work, emotional resonance, etc.’ (Zuckert 2007, 201; my emphasis). Regarding the case of music Matherne has presented us with what she calls expressive formalism, ‘according to which we can judge music as beautiful only if we are sensitive to the expression of emotion through musical form’ (Matherne 2013, 130). More specifically, she has argued that a composer will express the aesthetic idea of a dominant affect in her piece. For example, the composer might ‘convey a sense of joy’ by choosing ‘a major key’ (Matherne 2013, 134). A recent interpretation of aesthetic ideas, offered by Kuplen, also takes emotions into account. She argues that aesthetic ideas do not always exhibit rational ideas such as God, but also (abstract) concepts such as love, jealousy or hope whose ‘full meaning extends beyond [ordinary] experience’ because their content ‘largely involves experiential features, emotional aspects, and other introspective properties, such as beliefs, memories, intentions, goals’ (Kuplen 2021, 5; my emphasis). Moreover, she emphasises that it is a specific cognitive value of aesthetic ideas that they ‘appear to reveal the kind of content of concepts that involve introspective, emotional and affective properties’ (Kuplen 2021, 6). The account of emotive art I present in this article is not intended to contradict these earlier accounts. Yet, I will go beyond these in at least three crucial respects: First, unlike Matherne, my focus is not on music, but on art in general. My main concern is with literature and Kant's examples of emotive poetry. Second, I will identify three elements of aesthetic ideas – the (rational) idea, the aesthetic attribute, and the multitude of associations – and show how each of these can comprise emotions. Third, and most importantly, I will argue that emotions can play an important role in the free play of the faculties – the role of a driving force regarding the imagination's activity of freely associating.

I will proceed as follows: First, I will draw some distinctions borrowed from contemporary aesthetics. Second, I will briefly sketch Kant's theory of aesthetic ideas and, third, I will outline how emotions fit into this theory. Fourth, I will draw attention to Kant's examples of aesthetic ideas which amount to illustrations of emotive art. Finally, I will provide a definition of emotive artworks. My project is twofold: to show that Kant himself allows for the contribution of garden-variety emotions to our experiences of art, and to argue that the role he ascribes to these emotions is an interesting addition to the contemporary literature on emotions in art.

2. On the conception of emotive art

Generally speaking, emotions can relate to art in either of two ways:⁸ First, emotions can be manifested in, or communicated by, artworks so that these emotions belong either to the artist or some ‘persona;’ such artworks are expressions of emotion. On an ‘expression theory of arts’, such as Collingwood's, ‘the communication or expression of emotion [is] an essential or defining feature of art’ (Carroll 2001, 217), or, even stronger, ‘expression theories maintain that something is art only if it expresses emotions’ (Carroll 2002, 61). The nowadays more accepted thesis merely holds that some (but not all) artworks express emotions.⁹ Second, artworks can arouse emotions in their beholders, that is, they can have emotional effects. One single artwork can both express an emotion of the artist (or a persona) and arouse the same (or a similar) kind of emotion in its beholders – and, indeed, expressions of emotions and emotional effects often go hand in hand.¹⁰ My conception of emotive art embraces all three possibilities, that is, artworks that express emotions, arouse emotions, or both. Thus, my question is whether Kant's aesthetic theory has room for any of the three. My question is not whether emotions are necessary for art, but merely whether garden-variety emotions have anything to contribute to artworks or our experiences of them.

Most contemporary philosophers working on aesthetics do not claim that all art is or must be emotive in any of the three senses just mentioned. Emotions ‘are not a sine qua non for artistic achievement’ (Robinson 2023, 190; see also Robinson 2005, 102). For Kant, however, one particular emotion is the sine qua non for beauty: the feeling of disinterested pleasure. To feel disinterested pleasure while beholding an object is necessary and sufficient to call that object beautiful. Thus, to borrow Clive Bell's terminology, disinterested pleasure is for Kant the ‘aesthetic emotion’ – the one ‘peculiar emotion provoked by works of art’ (Bell 1914, 6 f.) and also by natural beauty.¹¹ We shall not, however, take the existence of this ‘aesthetic emotion’ as evidence that Kant does not allow for the contribution of non-aesthetic, everyday emotions to art. On the contrary, we will see that such ‘ordinary, "real-life’" emotions’ (Feagin 1996, 6) can partake in what Kant calls the free play of imagination and understanding. We should be aware that this does not turn everyday emotions into genuine aesthetic emotions. Yet, while contemporary approaches to emotive art tend to neglect the existence of one peculiar aesthetic emotion, Kant provides an account that unites the existence of such an aesthetic emotion with the contribution of everyday emotions.

One clarification is called for. If artworks arouse emotions, do these amount to genuine emotions or merely Waltonian quasi-emotions? On Walton's account, quasi-emotions are phenomenologically identical to real emotions, but since they are only part of a fictional world or a game of make-belief they do not count as genuine emotions. My fear of a monster in a horror movie might be qualitatively indistinguishable from fear in real life, but since both the monster and its dangerousness are merely fictional – part of a game of make-belief in which I participate – my fear is also merely fictional.¹² My suggestion is that emotive art on the Kantian account I am about to develop can include both genuine and quasi-emotions. When the reader of a poem enters a state of freely associating, these associations can comprise either quasi-emotions towards a fictional person or situation or real emotions or both. For example, if the poem is about death, the reader might be reminded of a recent loss and feel the genuine emotion of sadness. Or if a painting evokes the rational idea of God, a person of faith might feel her genuine emotion of awe towards God.¹³ Below I will base my account of emotive art on Kant's theory of aesthetic ideas. Although Kant understands the latter as a ‘representation of the imagination’ (CJ: 314 & 316), we should not take this to imply that all of their elements are merely fictional. Rather, they can be bound up with real life, like in terms of memories or genuine emotions.¹⁴

Let me draw your attention to a possible confusion that might prevent my account from getting off the ground in the first place. In § 14 of the third Critique Kant writes that ‘[t]aste is always still barbaric when it needs the addition of charms and emotions [Reize und Rührungen] for satisfaction, let alone if it makes these into the standard for its approval’ (CJ: 223).¹⁵ This has led Guyer to argue for ‘Kant's exclusion of emotion from the proper response to beauty’ (Guyer 2014, 437; see also Guyer 2020, 229 f.). Guyer assumes that the ‘feeling of pleasure in beauty does not involve any other "charms and emotions," and even as Kant analyzes the more complex forms of aesthetic response and judgment he by no means suggests that the experience of art can involve the experience of the full range of human emotions’ (Guyer 2014, 431). Kant asserts that ‘[e]motion [Rührung] […] does not belong to beauty at all’, but that it is sublimity ‘with which the feeling of emotion is combined’ (CJ: 226). Therefore, Guyer assumes ‘that emotion is an essential part of our response to the sublime’ where ‘we experience the sublime in response to nature, while art can represent the objects – or more precisely, the views – of nature that trigger the experience of the sublime but does not itself induce this experience’ (Guyer 2014, 443). Thus, Guyer's view that emotions are not essential to the experience of art.¹⁶ And, doesn't Kant explicitly tell us that ‘in all beautiful art what is essential consists in the form, which is purposive for observation and judging […] – not in the matter of the sensation (the charm or the emotion [Rührung]), where it is aimed merely at enjoyment’ (CJ: 326)?

My straightforward reaction is that ‘emotion’ is simply a very misleading translation of the German term ‘Rührung’.¹⁷ Even in ordinary German, of both our and Kant's times, ‘Rührung’ is neither equivalent to ‘Gefühl’ nor to ‘Emotion’, and, thus, it does not stand for ordinary, garden-variety emotions. According to Grimm's dictionary, it has the narrow meaning of a mixed feeling of pain and pleasure taken in this pain.¹⁸ Much in line with this Kant gives the following definition: ‘Emotion [Rührung], a sensation in which agreeableness is produced only by means of a momentary inhibition followed by a stronger outpouring of the vital force, does not belong to beauty at all’ (CJ: 226; see similarly CJ: 245). ‘Rührung’ is thus a mixed feeling consisting of a displeasure in the disagreeable and a pleasure in the agreeable. Quite obviously, this mixed feeling covers only a small part of what we would subsume under the term ‘emotion’.¹⁹ Matherne has therefore suggested to translate ‘Rührung’ as ‘being stirred’ (Matherne 2013, 132). Against the backdrop of its status as a mixed feeling, we can understand Kant's remark that it is not beauty (and, consequently, not fine art), but sublimity ‘with which the feeling of emotion [Rührung] is combined’ (CJ: 227).²⁰ For the feeling of the sublime is also a mixed feeling of displeasure and pleasure.²¹ But again, this does not mean that our judging of beauty or, rather, fine art cannot involve garden-variety emotions. In other words, Kant's claims about ‘Rührung’ do not preclude the possibility of emotive art.

3. Kant's theory of art and aesthetic ideas

For Kant, art is ‘the expression of aesthetic ideas’ (CJ: 320). Unlike intellectual ideas or ideas of reason, aesthetic ideas do not amount to concepts but to (sensible) representations: whereas an ‘idea of reason’ is ‘a concept to which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate’, an aesthetic idea is a ‘representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible’ (CJ: 314). My thesis is that part of that what cannot be fully attained by concepts are emotions. For Kant, ‘pleasure or displeasure […] are not kinds of cognition […] and are felt, not understood’ (FI: 232, my emphasis). Since all emotions divide into pleasure and displeasure or combinations thereof, emotions in general ‘are felt, not understood’. They are therefore well-suited to contribute to such representations to which no concept can be adequate, that is, representations which cannot be understood: aesthetic ideas.

To see in more detail how Kant conceives of aesthetic ideas, we shall have a look at the following definition:

the aesthetic idea is a representation of the imagination, associated with a given concept, which is combined with such a manifold of partial representations in the free use of the imagination that no expression designating a determinate concept can be found for it which therefore allows the addition to a concept of much that is unnamable, […]. (CJ: 316).

I suggest that aesthetic ideas comprise three elements:

1. The first element is ‘a given concept’, such as ‘the powerful king of heaven’ (CJ: 315). Some of these concepts amount to rational ideas such as ‘rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of hell, eternity, creation, etc.’ (CJ: 314); some of them amount originally to empirical concepts – ‘there are examples in experience’ –, but since the artist tries to make them visible ‘with a completeness that goes beyond anything of which there is an example in nature’ (CJ: 314), these concepts are employed as ideas in the sense of ‘the concept of a maximum’ (CPR: A327/B383).²² Among such empirical concepts are ‘death, envy, and all sorts of vices, as well as love, fame, etc.’ (CJ: 314).

2. The artist combines the given concept with an associated ‘representation of the imagination’ (CJ: 316), an aesthetic attribute. Kant explains: ‘Those forms which do not constitute the presentation of a given concept itself, but, as supplementary representations of the imagination, express only the implications connected with it and its affinity with others, are called (aesthetic) attributes of an object whose concept, as an idea of reason, cannot be adequately presented’ (CJ: 315). One might think of ‘images, memories, plots, colours, etc.’ (Matherne 2020, 25). In the case of ‘the powerful king of heaven’ the associated attribute might be ‘Jupiter's eagle, with the lightning in its claws’ (CJ: 315).

3. In the beholder, the attribute ‘arouses a multitude of sensations and supplementary representations for which no expression is found’ (CJ: 316). The beholder associates the attribute, for instance, Jupiter's eagle, with ‘a manifold of partial representations in the free use of the imagination’, such as power, a stormy night, a feeling of awe etc. Thus, aesthetic ideas are partially constituted by the beholder.²³

One might object that, for Kant, aesthetic ideas do not consist of these three components, but are to be identified with the aesthetic attribute. For Kant writes that ‘they [aesthetic attributes] yield [geben] an aesthetic idea, which serves this idea of reason instead of logical presentation, although really only to animate the mind by opening up for it the prospect of an immeasurable field of related representations’ (CJ: 315). Among other things, this quote contains the following proposition: ‘Aesthetic attributes yield an aesthetic idea’. One way of understanding the verb ‘to yield’ [geben] would be in terms of ‘to be’ [sein].²⁴ Thus, the proposition could be reconstructed as ‘Aesthetic attributes are aesthetic ideas’. This reconstruction would support the view that aesthetic ideas are to be identified with aesthetic attributes. But there is another way of understanding the above proposition. The verb ‘geben’ can also be interpreted in terms of ‘abgeben’, that is, ‘hervorrufen’ or ‘entstehen lassen’ with the meaning of ‘to bring forth’ or ‘to give rise to’.²⁵ Here we could reconstruct the proposition as ‘Aesthetic attributes give rise to aesthetic ideas’. And this second reconstruction leaves room for the interpretation that an aesthetic idea in the full-fledged sense is only yielded once the beholder (or the artist herself) enters a state of freely associating (iii). More importantly, there are systematic reasons for thinking that only the whole of all three elements counts as an aesthetic idea in the full-fledged sense. Recall that ‘by an aesthetic idea’ Kant means ‘that representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it’ (CJ: 314).²⁶ If we take again Kant's example of the eagle with a lightning in its claws and only look at this isolated image, there are certainly adequate concepts to it, viz., the concepts ‘eagle’ and ‘lightning’. It is only the ‘manifold of partial representations in the free use of the imagination’ which cannot be adequately grasped by a concept, because this manifold exceeds our conceptual capacities. Further support for this thesis is found in Kant's claim that aesthetic ideas are called ideas (primarily) ‘because no concept can fully be adequate to them, as inner intuitions’ (CJ: 314). Again, properly speaking, it is only the manifold of partial representations to which ‘no concept can fully be adequate’. Moreover, the aesthetic attribute, for instance, the eagle as being depicted in a painting, would be an outer representation, whereas only the partial representations as associated by the beholder (or the artist herself) would amount to inner intuitions.²⁷ Besides the partial representations, I assume that we should also include the ‘given concept’ or the rational idea (i) in the aesthetic idea. First, aesthetic attributes only gain their function by reference to an underlying rational idea, and second, it is only the underlying rational idea which makes the manifold of partial representations into a unified whole. I will explore this latter thought in more detail below.

I have emphasised the contribution of the beholder to aesthetic ideas. In this picture, the beholder and her activity of freely associating partial representations have a constitutive function for art. This may seem a rather contemporary thought. It recalls, for instance, the twentieth century notion of the beholder's share (or beholder's involvement) invented by the art historian Alois Riegl and further developed by his disciples Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich. One might also recall John Shearman's notion of transitive works of art, as being developed in relation to Renaissance art.²⁸ More generally, the contribution of the beholder to art might remind us of reception aesthetics and its focus on the reader or beholder. Despite the contemporary flavour of these theories, I think we can make good sense of Kant holding a similar view. Given Kant's general focus on the subject and its role, for instance, in constructing objects (by applying the forms of intuition and the forms of understanding), it does not seem too absurd to allow for a similar constructive role of the beholder with respect to art.

4. Aesthetic ideas and emotions

I suggest that emotions can be included in all three elements of aesthetic ideas – the given concept (i), the aesthetic attribute (ii), and the partial representations freely associated by the beholder (iii):

(i*)	The ‘given concept’ can be the concept of an emotion, such as ‘envy’ (CJ: 314).29 Since concepts of emotions are empirical concepts, in these cases an originally empirical concept is extended to ‘the concept of a maximum’.
(ii*)	The attribute can include emotions. For instance, the artist could portray Jupiter's eagle in an angry-looking way.

In these two cases, the artist communicates emotions via her artwork and, thus, the latter is primarily expressive of emotions. These emotions can either be felt by the artist herself – they can be sincere (to use Tolstoy's term)³⁰ – or they can be merely imagined or associated. And, as already seen, such expressions of emotions can often, but need not, arouse the same kind of emotion in the artwork's beholders. In the third case, artworks have primarily emotional effects on their beholders:

(iii*)

Emotions can be among the partial representations the beholder freely associates with the attribute, just as in the case of the beholder associating the feeling of an overwhelming awe with the representation of Jupiter's eagle. If the associated emotions are felt by the beholder, the artwork will have emotional effects. Note that these (garden-variety) emotions are to be distinguished from disinterested pleasure, that is, Kant's ‘aesthetic emotion’. Whereas disinterested pleasure is the felt awareness of the mental state that Kant calls the free and harmonious play of the faculties, garden-variety emotions figure in the free play, they are part of what we are playing with.

In all three cases, emotions can serve two functions: First, emotions can express what is lacking by conceptual expressions or what is in principle ‘unnamable’. In other words, emotions can convey to the beholder something that would otherwise be inexpressible, such as subjective or phenomenal aspects.³¹ This fits well with the following function of aesthetic ideas highlighted by Kuplen: ‘aesthetic ideas appear to reveal the kind of content of concepts that involve introspective, emotional and affective properties. These are the kind of properties that express subjective experiences and are more difficult to explicitly articulate in words and propositions’ (Kuplen 2021, 6). In the example of ‘the powerful king of heaven’, one might only fully engage with this concept when experiencing a feeling of overwhelming awe. In this way, emotions can contribute directly to the specific content of an aesthetic idea.

Although this function is certainly important, my focus in this paper is on a second function of emotions: the function of being a driving force with regard to the beholder's activity of the imagination. Emotions can enliven the free use of the imagination: the beholder can be enlivened to have more associations (or a more complex network of associations), and the partial representations can become more vivid. Emotions enhance our associative activity because they are, for instance, closely related to inner images, memories, etc. By acting as a driving force, emotions stimulate the beholder to further explore the theme of the aesthetic idea in all its richness; in this way, emotions indirectly contribute to the content of the aesthetic idea. Think of a painting of Jupiter's eagle with the lightning in its claws. Now imagine that you feel an overwhelming awe as you look at it. This feeling may awaken memories of sublime experiences, such as when you were a child and witnessed a violent thunderstorm. You hear the roar of the thunder, see yourself surrounded by dark clouds, interrupted by bright flashes of lightning. The feeling of awe may also remind you of religious experiences you once had. Note that such an aesthetic exploration and enlargement of the concept, in which the ‘imagination […] emulates the precedent of reason in attaining to a maximum’ (CJ: 314), is characteristic of aesthetic ideas. I call aesthetic ideas that include emotions as a driving force ‘emotionally laden aesthetic ideas’.

Having distinguished two functions of emotions in art, I would like to emphasise that I am not suggesting that the two must come apart. Indeed, I assume that both functions often go hand in hand, at least when it comes to emotive art proper. I argue below that in emotive artworks the emotions should not only animate the imagination to any activity of associating whatsoever, but they should contribute to the overarching theme of the artwork. And the latter is done by the emotions contributing to the content of the aesthetic idea. Here, however, I want to focus on the emotions’ function of being a driving force, because this explains the way in which emotions can enhance our experiences of beauty. Recall that, for Kant, beauty is constituted by the free play of the beholder's faculties, which includes, importantly, an activity of free playing carried out by the imagination.³² If it is true that emotions can function as a driving force for the free use of the imagination, then they can contribute decisively to the free play of the faculties and thus have a constitutive function for beauty. Note further that the free play of the faculties grounds the feeling of disinterested pleasure. Thus, by enhancing the free play, emotions can indirectly contribute to the feeling of disinterested pleasure. In this way, ordinary, non-aesthetic emotions and the aesthetic emotion of disinterested pleasure can be somewhat interrelated.

5. Some examples

So far, my account may seem rather abstract. By means of illustration, we shall have a look at some of Kant's examples of aesthetic ideas. Interestingly, Kant, like many contemporary philosophers working on emotive art, focuses on verbal art. (Unlike contemporary authors, however, he is interested in poetry rather than fictional literature.) But this does not exclude the possibility of other emotive artforms such as emotive painting or emotive music.³³

Let us begin with the emotions as being included in the ‘given concept’, that is, the first component of aesthetic ideas (i*). Kant lists the following concepts which a poet ‘ventures to make sensible’: ‘death, envy, and all sorts of vices, as well as love, fame, etc.’ (CJ: 314). Surely, envy and love (understood aesthetically, not practically) are feelings or involve feelings.³⁴ And, ‘death’ as well as some ‘vices’ (e.g. malicious joy, hatred) are commonly associated with emotions.

Kant illustrates his conception of aesthetic ideas with two examples from poetry. There is a rationale for this choice of examples: In one case, a sensible representation serves as the attribute of a rational idea, whereas, in the other case, ‘an intellectual idea’ serves ‘as the attribute of a representation of sense’ (CJ: 316). Let us begin with the second case. Here, Kant quotes ‘a certain poet’: ‘The sun streamed forth, as tranquillity streams from virtue’ (CJ: 316, my emphasis).³⁵ The sun streaming forth is a sensible representation, and virtue from which tranquillity streams serves as an aesthetic attribute. The first thing to note is that tranquillity, as contained in the aesthetic attribute, can be understood as an emotion (ii*), or at least it involves an emotional component (e.g. in terms of calm and peaceful feelings). In this way the aesthetic attribute does not consist only of an intellectual idea, but also includes a sensible (i.e. emotional) part. Second, Kant comments on this quote as follows:

The consciousness of virtue, when one puts oneself, even if only in thought, in the place of a virtuous person, spreads in the mind a multitude of sublime and calming feelings, and a boundless prospect into a happy future, which no expression that is adequate to a determinate concept fully captures. (CJ: 316)

Among the ‘partial representations’ associated on the beholder's side (iii*) are ‘a multitude of sublime and calming feelings’ as well as ‘a boundless prospect into a happy future’.³⁶ Thus, the content of the free play includes a variety of feelings which, I suppose, not only contribute to the theme of virtue, but also animate and enhance the imagination's activity of freely associating.

The other example of aesthetic ideas concerns the following passage from a poem by King Frederick the Great:

Let us depart from life without grumbling and without regretting anything, leaving the world behind us replete with good deeds. Thus does the sun, after it has completed its daily course, still spread a gentle light across the heavens; and the last rays that it sends forth into the sky are its last sighs for the well-being of the world, […] (CJ: 315 f.).³⁷

Kant comments on this passage with the following words:

he [Frederick] animates his idea of reason of a cosmopolitan disposition even at the end of life by means of an attribute that the imagination (in the recollection of everything agreeable in a beautiful summer day, drawn to a close, which a cheerful [heiterer] evening calls to mind) associates with that representation, and which arouses a multitude of sensations [Empfindungen] and supplementary representations for which no expression is found. (CJ: 316, translation altered)

In this example, an intellectual idea, viz., the ‘idea of reason of a cosmopolitan disposition’, is associated with the attribute of a sensible representation, that is, the attribute of a sunset. Interestingly both examples share a common sensible representation, viz., the sun, which serves as the given concept (i) in one case and as the aesthetic attribute (ii) in the other. But what about the emotions in the example of Frederick's poem? For Kant, the attribute (ii*) used by Frederick includes, or is based on, ‘the recollection of everything agreeable in a beautiful summer day … which a cheerful evening calls to mind’. The attribute thus not only includes the emotion of cheerfulness, but also the notion of the agreeable, the latter being constituted by a feeling of pleasure, or more precisely, a feeling of gratification (Vergnügen).³⁸ Note that Frederick is supposed to ‘animate’ the idea of a cosmopolitan disposition with this attribute. This fits well with my thesis that emotions can have an animating function, that is, the function of a driving force regarding the activity of the imagination. Here, my feelings of cheerfulness and gratification might bring back memories of past summer nights, e.g. they might make me re-experience the sound of laughter, the bright colours of the sunset, the touch of the slightly chill air on my skin etc.³⁹ Furthermore, Kant claims that the attribute ‘arouses a multitude of sensations [Empfindungen]’ in the beholder. It is plausible that the term ‘sensations’ here refers to what Kant calls ‘subjective sensation’ (CJ: 207), viz., the feeling of pleasure and displeasure. In this way, emotions would be among the partial representations associated by the beholder (iii*).

In sum: Kant's examples of aesthetic ideas provide good evidence that he allows for emotive art in the sense of emotionally laden aesthetic ideas.

6. A definition of emotive artworks

Do emotions always contribute to a work's status as beautiful art? In other words, how should we define emotive art proper? Kant himself does not provide such a definition of emotive art. Therefore, in what follows, I will go beyond the Kantian text. Let me first emphasise that garden-variety emotions are neither necessary nor sufficient for a work to qualify as an artwork.⁴⁰ In some cases, however, they will make a crucial contribution to a beautiful artwork. We have already seen that, for Kant, beauty is constituted by the free play of the faculties, including an activity of the imagination which is more vivid than in ordinary cases of cognition. Hence, by enlivening the activity of the imagination, emotions can contribute to beautiful art. However, not every emotion seems to have such an enlivening and stimulating character. Some emotions make us sink into a rather passive and depressive mood. This is in line with Kant's disregard for ‘sentimental plays’, which do not have ‘anything to do with that which can be counted as beauty […] of a mentality’ (CJ: 237). Yet, it seems absurd to disqualify any artwork which contains sentimental emotions from being beautiful art – just think of many artworks of Romanticism; rather, we should allow that an artist can embed such emotions in an active, stimulating framework.⁴¹ Here is a first necessary condition for emotive artworks:

(1)	If a work is an emotive artwork, then it makes use of emotions that are apt to set us into a rather active than passive state of mind (such as cheerfulness as opposed to sentimentality), or the artist embeds the emotions in a rather active framework.

There is another reason for including this first necessary condition. Recall that an aesthetic idea ‘is combined with […] a manifold of partial representations in the free use of the imagination’ (CJ: 316, my emphasis). To achieve such a free use of the imagination, the artist must not force the beholders of her work to feel a particular emotion or have particular associations. This is what happens, for instance, in propaganda, in certain kinds of advertisement, and in some forms of kitsch.⁴² If the artist however embeds the emotions within an overall stimulation framework, she will make room for the beholder using her imagination in a free, that is, unforced way.

Yet there are some boundaries to the beholder's imaginative activity. Emotive art should not merely animate ‘the fantasies with which the mind entertains itself’, as is the case with ‘the changing shapes of a fire in a hearth or of a rippling brook’ (CJ: 243). Despite animating a free-floating activity of the imagination, emotive art should invite the imagination to an inexhaustible play within the boundaries of a given theme. This points back not only to the first function of emotions for artworks (i.e. to express what is lacking by conceptual expressions), but also to the first component of aesthetic ideas (i), viz., the given (rational) concept which the artist seeks to make sensible. As Chignell puts it, the aesthetic idea is ‘constituted by an “inexhaustible” and “non-exponible” series or multitude of representations unified by a certain theme’ (Chignell 2007, 424, my emphasis).⁴³ Because of this unifying theme the imagination is in harmony with the understanding so that the relationship between these two faculties can be characterised as both free and harmonious. For emotive art this implies that the emotions must contribute to the artwork's theme instead of either contradicting or distracting from it (e.g. by consuming all the beholder's attention).⁴⁴ The second necessary condition for emotive art is thus as follows:

(2)	If a work is an emotive artwork, then it makes use of emotions that contribute to an overarching theme (a rational idea) which they should help to make sensible or palpable.

One might come up with the following objection: Probably the majority of emotions included in artworks belong to the agreeable (or disagreeable), for example, cheerfulness and envy. Such emotions seem to be bound to what Kant calls ‘charms’ (Reize). The latter are defined as (objective) sensations, such as colours and tones, which cause pleasure in the agreeable.⁴⁵ Charms, when added to a beautiful artwork, make beauty impure and sometimes even prevent the beholder from entering a state of the free and harmonious play, that is, an experience of beauty.⁴⁶ Therefore, the objection goes, emotive artworks should at best be understood as impure instances of beauty, made for a ‘barbaric’ taste (CJ: 223), or at worst they wouldn't be beautiful at all.⁴⁷ I concede that emotions can render a beholder's judgement of taste impure. The first thing to note is that not all responses to art must fit into the picture of pure beauty, and that Kant certainly conceives of the possibility of impure judgements about artistic beauty.⁴⁸ Second, emotions render judgements about, or experiences of, artistic beauty impure only when the beholder enjoys the (agreeable) emotions for their own sake, e.g. when the beholder simply enjoys feeling sad or happy while reading a poem or watching a play. Note, however, that when a charm attracts our attention ‘the mind is passive’ (CJ: 222). Obviously, this passive state of mind is very different from the case where an emotion stimulates and enlivens the activity of the imagination. I suggest the following: The case of emotionally laden aesthetic ideas differs crucially from the case of mere enjoyment of charms; for in the former case agreeable emotions are not enjoyed for their own sake. Rather, they contribute to the beholder's play with partial representations.⁴⁹ The emotion is not just passively received and enjoyed, but it is integrated into a mental activity, viz., the free and harmonious play of the faculties.⁵⁰ Since aesthetic ideas are partially constituted by the beholder (iii), we shall add the following further necessary condition for emotive art to our list:

(3)	If a work is an emotive artwork, then the beholder engages actively and imaginatively with the emotions included in, or aroused by, the work, instead of enjoying them in a merely passive way.

This third condition is not meant to preclude that, under real-life conditions, our experience of emotive artworks may also include some enjoyment of the garden-variety emotions themselves. My overall state when reading the lines of King Frederick might include a feeling of happiness which not only stimulates my activity of associating but is also enjoyable for its own sake. Perhaps it is even hard to see how we could not experience this enjoyment.⁵¹ It is just important to see that we should not ground our judgement of taste on it (since it is a pleasure in the agreeable) and that our overall experience would count as an impure experience of beauty.⁵² Moreover, I am fully aware that, under real-life conditions, experiences of emotive art are built on a somewhat slippery ground. Sometimes our emotional responses to artworks tend to be very strong (especially when they relate to our own memories, histories, or personal identities). It may all be a matter of subtle degrees. When watching Othello, I might feel an outburst of rage towards the character of Iago (perhaps because he reminds me of a person I know). Instead of furthering my activity of freely associating, this strong feeling of rage might even hinder any activity of freely playing and thus prohibit any aesthetic experience. However, this does not prove that in other cases emotions can contribute to the free play of the faculties. In the end, it just reveals that experiences of beauty are a very fragile mental state.⁵³

Combining all three conditions, we arrive at the following definition of emotive artworks:

A work is an emotive artwork iff (1) it makes use of emotions that are apt to set us into a rather active than passive state of mind, or the artist embeds the emotions in a rather active framework, (2) it makes use of emotions that contribute to an overarching theme (a rational idea) which they should make sensible or palpable, and (3) the beholder engages actively and imaginatively with the emotions included in, or aroused by, the work.

We shall, very briefly, return to our starting point, that is, art that either expresses emotions, arouses emotions, or both. From a Kantian point of view, one might object that artworks which arouse emotions in the beholder would turn beauty into something pathological, whereas the appreciation of artworks that express emotions would require the concept of that very emotion, and would thus contradict the non-conceptuality of beauty. The first part of the objection has already been addressed: the arousal of emotions would render beauty pathological only if the emotions were enjoyed merely for their own sake; but this is not the case if the beholder engages actively and imaginatively with her emotions (3). My response to the second part of the objection is that, in most (perhaps all) cases the appreciation of art (as opposed to natural beauty) involves many concepts.⁵⁴ This is already clear from Kant's examples, in which concepts such as ‘Jupiter’, ‘sun’, or ‘virtue’ figure. The crucial point is that these concepts are not used to arrive at determinate judgements. Rather, they contribute to the free play of the faculties by stimulating the activity of freely associating carried out by the imagination. And this is exactly what happens when the concepts of emotions figure in (emotionally laden) aesthetic ideas.

7. Conclusion

I have presented a more emotion-oriented view of art than is commonly attributed to Kant. He has an account of emotive art and allows for a constitutive role of ordinary emotions for beauty. This account draws on the notion of aesthetic ideas. We have seen that emotions can contribute to aesthetic ideas in either of three ways: they can make up the content of the given concept (i*); they can be among the aesthetic attributes associated by the artist (ii*); or they can be among the partial representations freely associated by the beholder (iii*). In each of the three cases, emotions can take over two functions: they can contribute directly to the content of the aesthetic idea by revealing aspects of the given concept which would otherwise be inexpressible, and they can take over the function of a driving force regarding the imagination's activity of playing. I have called aesthetic ideas of the latter kind emotionally laden.

This Kantian conception of emotive art differs crucially from contemporary conceptions in that it combines a constitutive role of ordinary emotions (i.e. enhancing the free playing of the imagination) with one peculiar aesthetic emotion (i.e. the feeling of disinterested pleasure as being grounded in the free play). Kant's approach is also innovative when it comes to the achievement of emotions for art. In contemporary approaches emotions are often assigned one of the following three roles:

(a)	Emotions direct our attention: Emotions sometimes operate like a ‘searchlight’, as Carroll puts it (Carroll 2001, 226). In short, the thesis is this: ‘The critically prefocused text gives rise, in the right circumstances, to emotive focus in the audience, where by emotive focus I am referring to the way in which the emotional state of the reader, viewer, or listener both fixes and shapes her attention’ (Carroll 2001, 228).55
(b)	Emotions contribute to the understanding of the artwork: Here, emotions have a cognitive function. Vendrell Ferran, for instance, develops a cognitive approach to emotions in fiction, which comprises the following three functions of emotions: (1) ‘The emotions we experience while engaging with fiction contribute to our processing of information and our obtaining knowledge about the fictional world’. (2) ‘some works and/or some aspects of the work require an emotional involvement in order to be fully understood’. (3) Emotions ‘make us acquainted with values. […] By engaging with fiction and responding to it emotionally we become aware of the particular values that it presents’ (Vendrell Ferran 2018, 218–221). Robinson has also highlighted the achievement of emotions for understanding artworks. She has argued that emotions help us filling in gaps in stories: ‘When we respond emotionally to a text, our attention is alerted to important information about character and plot that is not explicitly asserted in the text’ (Robinson 2005, 120). Thereby, our emotional responses to a text and our reflection upon them are an ‘important source of data’ for our interpretation of the work (Robinson 2005, 125).
(c)	It has been argued that emotive artworks contribute to our emotional education. Robinson suggests that emotions in literature not only help us to understand the several characters and situations, but also teach us about emotions in real life in that we get encouraged to reflect on our emotional experiences. For her, ‘a good novel encourages us to cognitively monitor or reflect back upon the whole emotion process, including affective appraisals, physiological responses, action tendencies, points of view, and foci of attention’ (Robinson 2005, 156). Similarly, when it comes to the arts (e.g. painting), she holds the view that ‘artistic expression is a kind of elucidation and articulation of emotion, and that it is a cognitive process of becoming clear about an emotion’ (Robinson 2005, 257). For instance, artistic expression can help us to understand what it is like to be in a certain emotional state. Moreover, literature provides us with certain coping mechanisms: through formal devices, ‘literature, unlike life, often provides us with the coping strategies that we need to deal with its deep and possibly troubling content’ (Robinson 2005, 219).

Since, for Kant, beauty and art are explicitly detached from understanding and cognition, emotions cannot, in his approach, take over the second function narrowly understood (b).⁵⁶ In a weaker sense, however, emotions can reveal something about the peculiar content of the artwork (i.e. the underlying rational idea). Here, emotions contribute to art's general business, viz., to make graspable or sensible what, in principle, cannot be understood. This is because, first, emotions themselves cannot be understood and can thus allow for an encompassing grasp on a certain theme; and second, they animate our imagination to freely associate and thereby explore the artwork's overarching theme.

When it comes to the first contemporary function of emotions in art, that of directing our attention (a), emotions, in a Kantian framework, do not draw our attention to features of the artwork understood as an external object, but to something beyond it: they direct our attention to the ‘features’ of the artwork which are contributed by the beholder herself – by the power of her imagination.

As for the third, educational function of emotions in art (c), I suppose that Kant's theory has a place for this. Especially when the theme of the artwork (the rational idea) amounts to an emotion, the emotive artwork will help us to become clear about our emotional experiences.

Finally, I suggest that Kant's account of emotive art helps us to see a fourth function of emotions for art:

(d)

Emotions have the power to stimulate and enliven our imagination and our associations. They are thus capable of enhancing our engagement with art and making our aesthetic experiences more vivid. More precisely, on this view, emotions do not fill in gaps, but they animate us to explore the wide horizon which relates to the artwork's theme, but is not yet implicitly contained in it.57

Importantly, emotions can take over this function even if we don't accept Kant's particular theory of art and aesthetic ideas. There is thus an important lesson to be learned from Kant's account of emotive art for contemporary aesthetics.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank members of fiph Hannover, the participants of a virtual panel on the third Critique organised by the North American Kant Society, and the audiences at the 2022 annual conferences of the American Society for Aesthetics and the European Society for Aesthetics for their helpful feedback on this paper. I am particularly grateful to Dieter Schönecker for his helpful comments. I would also like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this journal whose comments have helped to improve this paper a lot.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For instance, Sorensen argues that ‘moral emotions are intrinsic elements of human morality for Kant’ (Sorensen 2017, 125). See also Schönecker’s (2013) account of the ‘felt fact of reason’ as well as the essays in Cohen (2014).

2 By the terms ‘emotions’, ‘emotional’ and ‘emotive’ I refer to Kant's general notion of ‘Gefühl’, which encompasses the different feelings of pleasure and displeasure. Any contemporary distinction between (non-intentional, bodily) feelings and (intentional) emotions is not yet foreshadowed in Kant's writings. For a discussion of how some of the affective states described by Kant map onto the contemporary concept ‘emotion’ see Deimling (2012). Deimling enlists Kantian feelings and desires under the heading of affective states (see Deimling 2012, 110); in this article, I am only referring to feelings (i.e. pleasures and displeasures), although the latter often bear a relation to desires (see MM: 212; CJ: 204).

3 Kant introduces the notion of disinterested pleasure in the Analytic of the Beautiful which is not primarily concerned with beautiful art but with beauty in nature. There is some debate about whether Kant's account of beauty in nature is fully applicable to art, or whether he presents a different account of artistic beauty in the later sections of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. For instance, there has been a recent debate about whether artistic beauty, unlike natural beauty, is conceptually dependent (see Reiter and Geiger 2018; Halper 2020). I admit that there might be some differences between Kant's conceptions of natural and artistic beauty. But while the Kantian text provides some good evidence that the theory of aesthetic ideas introduces some important changes concerning the role of concepts, there is no such evidence when it comes to possible changes concerning the key-concept of disinterestedness. In a recent paper, Reiter and Geiger (2023) have presented modifications of all four moments of the Analytic of the Beautiful with regard to artistic beauty. Note that their modification of the first moment does not involve a rejection of disinterestedness, but rather a modification within the overall notion of disinterested pleasure: ‘The faculty employed for judging a work of art through satisfaction without any interest is taste. The object of an edifying satisfaction which provides aesthetic access to the conceptual wealth of an idea of reason is called a beautiful work of art’ (Reiter and Geiger 2023, 10). This modification relates to the fact that in judging artistic beauty we refer to an idea of reason and deepen our grasp of the latter. However, on this conception of disinterestedness, garden-variety emotions prima facie still seem to spoil the judgment of taste.

4 For instance, Feagin considers it common-sense that ‘[h]aving emotional and other affective responses to a work of fictional literature is a very important part of appreciating it, and the capacity of a work to provide such responses is part of what is valuable about it’ (Feagin 1996, 1). See similarly Vendrell Ferran (2018), 217–222.

5 One might suspect that two issues get confused: while contemporary authors working on emotions and art focus on the question of proper art appreciation, Kant investigates the nature of judgements of taste. However, the Kantian judgement of taste is grounded in the aesthetic experience of disinterested pleasure, and the latter is nothing other than what proper art appreciation, for Kant, amounts to.

6 For the problematic status of ugliness in Kant see Berger 2022, 1201–1220.

7 See CJ: 187.

8 See for this distinction Robinson 2005, 231; Robinson 2023, 184.

9 When it comes to Kant, Fricke explicitly denies an expressive function of art (see Fricke 1998, 683).

10 The following version of the expression theory, which Carroll calls ‘transmission theory’, would turn this into a requirement for any artwork: ‘x is a work of art if and only if x is (1) an intended (2) transmission to an audience (3) of the self-same (type-identical) (4) individualized (5) feeling state (emotion) (6) that the artist experienced (himself/herself) (7) and clarified (8) by means of lines, shapes, colors, sounds, actions and/or words’ (Carroll 2002, 65; for criticism of this theory see Carroll 2002, 66–79.).

11 I base my interpretation of emotive art on Kant's theory of aesthetic ideas and, thus, on his theory of art. I will say nothing about natural beauty.

12 See Walton 1978; Walton 1990, 195–204, 240–255.

13 Walton also allows that fictional works might induce genuine emotions in us (see Walton 1990, 202 & 252).

14 Notice that, in Kant, the terms ‘representation [Vorstellung]’ and ‘imagination [Einbildungskraft]’ are not restricted to fictional or made-up contexts but play important roles in our recognising and dealing with the real world.

15 Judgements about artistic beauty are always impure insofar as they belong to the category of dependent beauty. But this form of impurity is to be detached from the impurity evoked by the addition of charms and / or emotions [Rührungen] (see also footnote 48).

16 See Guyer 2014, 436 f.; 443. – Guyer admits, however, that in the case of music ‘emotions might be part of the normal response to art’ (Guyer 2020, 248; see also Guyer 2020, 250).

17 See similarly Matherne 2013, 132.

18 See the entry ‘Rührung’ in Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch (Grimm and Grimm 1852–1961).

19 Even Guyer admits that ‘Kant's definition of emotion here seems unusually narrow’ (Guyer 2014, 436).

20 For my analysis of this passage see Berger 2022, 789–791.

21 Experiences of the sublime might include some garden-variety emotions, most importantly some kind of fear (at least, in terms of the dynamical sublime; see CJ: 260). Since I am only concerned with art and since, strictly speaking, there is no sublime art, I will leave the sublime aside. Sublime objects can be represented in works of art, e.g. in a tragedy (see CJ: 325). Here, the corresponding garden-variety emotions (e.g. fear), I assume, would function in the same way as in emotive art in general.

22 These two options are also identified by Allison 2001, 256 f.

23 See similarly Pillow 2012, 200; Fricke 1998, 682. Kemal also highlighted the importance of the beholder for artworks, both in terms of the multitude of associations and of uniting them under a common theme (see Kemal 1988, 56 f.). – My interpretation differs crucially from Neal's who describes a ‘progress […] from rational idea to aesthetic attribute, to aesthetic idea, and thence to ever increasing mental activity and an overwhelming multiplicity of thought’ (Neal 2012, 356). For I argue that the whole process consisting of the rational idea, the aesthetic attribute, and the mental activity of the beholder is what constitutes the aesthetic idea. In that way, my account also differs from Guyer's who locates the aesthetic idea in between the rational idea and the whole of the aesthetic attribute and the multitude of associations: ‘First, there is the ‘idea of reason’ […]. Second, there are the particular images or intuitions which are presented such as Jupiter's eagle or Juno's peacock, and the apparently inexhaustible supply of other such images or intuitions that are suggested to the mind. Third, intervening between these two elements, is the aesthetic idea properly so-called, the idea of the imagination that suggests the idea of reason on the one hand and the indeterminate array of images on the other. In this case, that would be nothing other than the imaginative idea of Jupiter himself as the embodiment of majesty or sublimity’ (Guyer 1994, 279 f.).

24 See the entry ‘Geben’ in Adelung's Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart (Adelung 1811).

25 See again the entry ‘Geben’ in Adelung's dictionary (Adelung 1811).

26 Note that here Kant identifies the aesthetic idea with the ‘representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking’ which, again, might seem as if he was identifying the aesthetic idea with the aesthetic attribute. However, in the following passage Kant seems to suggest that it is the manifold of partial representations associated by the beholder which ‘occasions much thinking’: ‘They [aesthetic attributes] do not, like logical attributes, represent what lies in our concepts of the sublimity and majesty of creation, but something else, which gives the imagination cause to spread itself over a multitude of related representations, which let one think more than one can express in a concept determined by words’ (CJ: 315, my emphasis).

27 Here, ‘inner intuition’ would not refer to an intuition of the subject's soul or mental states but, negatively speaking, to something which is not an outer intuition, that is, an intuition that has not been affected by an external object. Positively speaking it would refer to something merely in the mind of the beholder, that is, to the beholder's imaginations.

28 With regard to Verrocchio's bronze Christ and Saint Thomas Shearman gives the following exemplary description: ‘To formulate that point slightly differently, to say that the spectator in the street finds himself in the position of the other Apostles, or in other words to say that Verrocchio’s subject is completed only by the presence of the spectator in the narrative, is to realize that the relationship between work of art and spectator is now fully transitive. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "transitive" as "taking a direct object to complete the sense, passing over to or affecting something else, operating beyond itself"’ (Shearman 1992, 33).

29 This option is also defended by Matherne, especially with regard to music (see Matherne 2020; 2013, 31–33). Savile similarly identifies the ideas expressed in music with emotions (see Savile 1993, 143).

30 See Tolstoy 2016, 125–127.

31 Emotions are states with phenomenal character, and this phenomenal character is of particular great importance. In the First Introduction, Kant claims that the feelings of pleasure and displeasure ‘since they are not kinds of cognition, cannot be explained by themselves at all, and are felt, not understood’ (FI: 213, my emphasis). It is true that we have names for particular emotions or can describe them with words. But unlike all other sensations emotions, for Kant, cannot contribute to any cognition (see CJ: 189 & 206) – they are purely subjective states – and in this way their core is always missing unless we feel the emotion ourselves. Therefore, I do not think that felt emotions (within a Kantian framework) are merely the sensible correlates or complements of a concept (e.g. the concept ‘sadness’). Rather, emotions essentially outstrip what can be conveyed by words. Yet, the given material in an artwork can pave the way for making the beholder enter the state of a particular emotion.

32 For my interpretation of the free play of the faculties see Berger 2022, 470–533. – As noted earlier, I admit that there are some differences between Kant's conceptions of natural and artistic beauty. I suggest that there are also some differences when it comes to the free play. In the case of natural beauty, the imagination plays freely with forms which are detected to be conceptualizable by the understanding, but without applying any determinate concept. In the case of artistic beauty, the imagination is playing freely with associations or partial representations (some of which might be conceptually grasped), and these associations are related both to the aesthetic attribute and some underlying rational idea (like the concept of the god Jupiter).

33 DeBord, for instance, provides the following example of a Kantian aesthetic idea: ‘Caravaggio's The Sacrifice of Isaac conveys a variety of ideal content: representations of power, obedience, freedom, and love are interlaced with a great deal of emotional force’ (DeBord 2012, 187). – Emotive music might provide a particularly clear case for the role of emotions in art. Indeed, for Kant, the underlying theme in a work of music always amounts to an affect or emotion (see CJ: 328 f.). I cannot discuss the case of emotive music and the corresponding notion of aesthetic ideas in detail here. But I think that the core idea of emotions functioning as a driving force regarding the imagination's activity of associating does apply to the case of music as well. For in judging music we still have a ‘a coherent whole of an unutterable fullness of thought, corresponding to a certain theme’ (CJ: 329).

34 See Kant's definition of envy in the Doctrine of Virtue: ‘Envy (livor) is a propensity to view the well-being of others with pain [Schmerz], even though it does not detract from one’s own’ (MM: 458, my emphasis).

35 In German: ‘Die Sonne quoll hervor, wie Ruh’ aus Tugend quillt’. – Kant takes this quote from the poem ‘Sinnliche Ergötzungen’ by Johann Philipp Lorenz Withof (Akademische Gedichte, Erster Theil. Leipzig: Friedrich Gotthold Jacobäer und Sohn, 1782, 70). Kant misquotes the poem which originally reads: ‘Die Sonne quoll hervor, wie Ruh aus Güte quilt’. Ironically, some 100 years later Georg Simmel would accuse these lines (and the fact that Kant quotes them) of ‘exceedingly bad taste’ [bodenlosen Ungeschmack] (Simmel 2017, 256).

36 It is thus by no means true that ‘Kant says nothing at all about the emotions that might ordinarily be thought to accompany or be stirred by such ideas [i.e. thoughts of the supersensible], although most people would thing such emotions to be a normal part of entertaining such ideas, and the aim of stirring them to be a normal part of the artistic expression of such ideas’ (Guyer 2020, 249).

37 Kant provides a German translation of the last lines of an originally French poem with the title ‘Épître XVIII, Au Maréchal Keith, Imitation du troisième livre de Lucrèce, Sur les vaines terreurs de la mort et les frayeurs d’une autre vie’.

38 See: ‘Agreeable is that which everyone calls what gratifies [vergnügt] him’ (CJ: 210).

39 In general, I assume that, throughout our lives, emotions become intimately connected and associated with objects, places, colours, sounds etc.

40 Could we, within a Kantian framework, come up with artworks that are purely unemotive? Surely both the underlying rational idea and the aesthetic attribute can be without direct reference to an emotion. And there are probably also artworks which make it at least unlikely that emotions will be among the free associations of the beholder. For example, one could think of artworks with a strong intellectual focus, such as the conceptual artwork One and Three Chairs by Joseph Kosuth.

41 What goes wrong then in the case of sentimental plays, is that the beholder simply enjoys being in a sentimental or sad emotional state and is not stimulated to enter an activity of freely associating which would contribute to an experience of the overall theme of the artwork.

42 We can also imagine this to happen in certain forms of rhetoric where it is the aim of the speaker ‘to rob them [the minds] of their freedom’ (CJ: 327).

43 See similarly Kemal 1988, 55; Kuplen 2021, 4; Vidmar Jovanović 2020, 263–265.

44 In contemporary accounts it is similarly acknowledged that ‘[e]motions experienced during the process of appreciation might indeed distract us from the work’ (Vendrell Ferran 2018, 221).

45 See: ‘the agreeable, which pleases merely in sensation through charm and excitement [Rührung]’ (Log: 37, translation altered). Charms, for Kant, are not to be identified with the pleasure in the agreeable, but with sensations (especially colours and tones) that cause a pleasure in the agreeable. See: ‘The charms in beautiful nature, which are so frequently encountered as it were melted together with the beautiful form, belong either to the modifications of the light (in the coloring) or of the sound (in tones). For these are the only sensations […]’ (CJ: 302). Suppose, for instance, I take a pleasure in the agreeable in a particular shade of yellow as being used in a painting. Here the particular shade of yellow would be the charm.

46 See CJ: 223 ff.

47 According to a related line of criticism, charms and, consequently, emotions have merely private validity, whereas the beauty of artworks should enjoy a claim to universality. This criticism touches on the problem of whether aesthetic ideas and partial representations are universally valid. Chignell differentiates between a stronger and a weaker reading: ‘According to the first [stronger] reading, we can rationally expect a token of the same type of aesthetic idea to be present in the mind of every disinterested beholder of a particular beautiful object or state. An alternate, weaker reading has tokens of different types of aesthetic ideas being occasioned in different subjects by perceptual experience of the same state of affairs. On the weaker reading, it is not necessary that the set of representations that yield the aesthetic idea be exactly the same for every beholder. Rather, every artwork that has Geist will necessarily be rich enough to provoke some set of ‘non-exponible’ associations in every properly-situated subject, and the fact that the object can evoke some aesthetic idea or other is sufficient to ground the aesthetic judgement's intersubjective validity’ (Chignell 2007, 428 f.). I am sympathetic to the second, weaker reading which can also be applied to emotions as being among the partial representations associated by the beholder (iii*).

48 Kant also claims that judgements about artistic beauty belong to the category of dependent beauty (see CJ: 311). In this way, judgements about artistic beauty are impure anyway. This kind of impurity which is conceived by judging the object's perfection differs from the impurity introduced by the addition of charms (see CJ: 221–231). Emotions can render judgements of taste impure in the latter sese of impurity, i.e. in terms of adding charms.

49 This becomes especially clear when artworks evoke emotions which would normally be unpleasant. When an artwork displays ‘things that in nature would be ugly or displeasing’, such as ‘[t]he furies, diseases, devastation of war’ or other ‘harmful things’, a beholder might experience negative emotions such as despair or rage (CJ: 312). Obviously, we do not enjoy such emotions for their own sake. But we can still take pleasure in those artworks and find them beautiful (see CJ: 312). This is the case, I suggest, because even unpleasant, negative emotions can function as a driving force regarding the imagination's activity of associating.

50 A similar line of reasoning can be entertained to meet the objection that aesthetic pleasure for Kant is disinterested, where disinterestedness seems ‘to imply dispassion, reading [or beholding] without passion, or emotionless reading’ (Robinson 2005, 132). Since Kant allows for the combination of interests (e.g. pleasures in the agreeable) with disinterested pleasure, the former does not in principle prohibit the latter. What is important on Kant's approach is simply that the interested pleasure is not enjoyed for its own sake, and that judgements of taste cannot be grounded on it.

51 In that way most of our experiences of emotive art might be impure in both regards, i.e. they are not only combined with judgements of perfection but also with some enjoyment of charms (see footnote 48).

52 This touches on the interesting psychological question of whether human beings can ever have something like pure experiences of beauty, that is, a state of purely disinterested pleasure which is not mingled with either the agreeable or judgements of perfection. Similarly, with regard to Kant's moral philosophy it is unclear of whether for human beings there can ever be such a thing as an action performed solely out of duty or respect for the moral law.

53 I have called this elsewhere Kant's ‘thesis of fragility;’ see Berger 2022, 741 f.

54 Again, Kant conceives of artistic beauty as dependent beauty. The view that judgements about artistic beauty are conceptual (which makes them unlike pure judgements of natural beauty) has recently been pushed by Reiter and Geiger (2018) and Halper (2020).

55 For a sophisticated account of how non-standard or intellectual emotions can put us in a second-order state of awareness of our mental states and, thereby, direct our attention to the relation of the non-aesthetic features and the aesthetic features of an artwork see Martínez Marín (2021).

56 Let me remark two things about the relationship between artistic beauty and cognition: First, judgements about artistic beauty belong to the class of adherent beauty and thus presuppose a judgement of cognition (i.e. a judgement of perfection). But we should not confuse this judgement of cognition with the aesthetic judging (the free play of the faculties), where the latter is explicitly detached from cognition. I have argued that emotions contribute to the free play. Second, there is a cognitive value to the free play as taking place on the occasion of artworks. Although the free play does not yield a cognition in the narrow Kantian sense, it leads us to expand our minds and explore some concepts more fully. In that way, Kant claims that the poet provides ‘nourishment to the understanding in play, and [gives] life to its concepts through the imagination’ (CJ: 321).

57 This function might be more important for artforms like poetry or painting than for novels or stories.