Beautiful Surfaces: Kant on Free and Adherent Beauty in Nature and Art

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Notes

¹References to the third Critique follow the pagination of Vol. 5 of the Akademie edition. The translation is Guyer and Matthews' (Kant, 2000) unless noted otherwise.

²See especially, Gammon (1999) and Allison (2001) 138–43, 271–301.

³It might seem as if Kant's attempt to distinguish different kinds of beauty and to demarcate them from perfection or utility is a reflection of certain proposals in the eighteenth-century literature about the classification of the arts. As Kristeller (1952) has shown, the division into mechanical and fine arts – the former governed by the idea of utility, the latter aimed primarily at pleasure – became widely accepted by mid-century. (Kant obviously adopts this classification in the Critique of Judgment.) Sometimes, for example, in Batteux, a third, ‘mixed’ category of arts was introduced in order to accommodate fields such as architecture and eloquence – arts which combine the aim of utility with that of pleasure in a way that does not allow a clear subordination of one purpose under the other (see Batteux, 1770, Vol. 1; the French original was published in 1746, the first edition of J. A. Schlegel's German translation in 1751).

Such tripartite classifications of the arts may reflect some of the concerns that motivated Kant's introduction of different kinds of beauty, the adherent sort corresponding to, for example, Batteux's category of the ‘mixed’ arts. But the correspondence is not perfect. While Kant talks about kinds of beauty in nature and art, Batteux is interested in distinguishing products of human activity according to the primary purpose of the activities. Furthermore, the ‘mixed’ arts constitute a separate class of arts but for Batteux they are not distinguished by a genuinely different sort of beauty. (See also the survey of eighteenth-century debates concerning beauty and utility in Guyer, 2002b.)

⁴See, for example, Gregor (1983).

⁵Sulzer's work is quoted from the ‘enlarged’ second edition of 1792–4; the text of the first edition of 1771–4, however, is preserved in the later one and additions (by Blankenburg) have been placed after Sulzer's original entries. All translations from Sulzer are mine.

⁶Although Schlapp (1901) has collected an enormous amount of more or less likely sources for Kant's views in earlier eighteenth-century literature, it seems he did not notice these connections between Sulzer and Kant; nor did Zammito (1992).

⁷Note that Kant in his discussion of the ‘ideal of beauty’ (in §17) agrees with Sulzer's view (quoted above) that ‘we don't have the particular Ideal which each [plant or animal] is supposed to be’ (IV, 307). Note also that Kant's view of the human figure as the only object of which such an ideal can be conceived reflects Sulzer's account (s.v. ‘Schönheit’: IV, 319–27).

⁸Similar interpretations of Kant's distinction have been presented with different supporting arguments by Budd (1998: 10–12), Gammon (1999), and Allison (2001: 138–42, 290–8). This view seems superior to Guyer's account (1997: 218–20; 2002a; 2002b: 445ff.) which suggests that in the case of adherent beauty the free play of the faculties is constrained by a concept of what the object is meant to be, i.e. the freedom of the imagination is actually limited but only to such an extent ‘that pleasure may yet be produced by its [the imagination's] free harmony with the understanding's demand for unity’ (1997: 219; cf. 2002b: 450. In the latter publication Guyer seems to move closer to the ‘additive’ view). It is already a difficult and controversial question of how to understand the free play of the faculties; it may seem preferable not to compound the problem by postulating differing degrees of freedom in this play. If the free play could remain free even though a (vague) concept of what the object is meant to be is involved, it seems somewhat mysterious why Kant should insist on the no-concept requirement for pure judgements of taste in the first place. Furthermore, even though Kant does not give a deduction for impure judgements of taste (see 5: 289), there is a reasonable presumption that the deduction of pure judgements of taste has at least some relevance for judgements about adherent beauty. On Guyer's view, it is not clear how this could be while on the conjunctive view the deduction secures the claim to universal validity of the pure part of the judgement of adherent beauty.

For a different interpretation of the free–adherent beauty distinction, see Wicks, 1997.

⁹This has been emphasized by Gammon, 1999.

¹⁰See Crawford (1974: 114–17) for a defence of this view.

¹¹See Brandt (1994) who alone seems to have recognized the wider significance of the discussion of crystal formation in the Critique of Judgment.

¹²This is, after all, how Kant introduces the distinction between aesthetic and teleological judgements. Purposiveness, he says, can be represented either in aesthetic judgements ‘on a merely subjective ground’ or in teleological judgements ‘as an objective ground, as a correspondence of its form with the possibility of the thing itself, in accordance with a concept of it which precedes and contains the ground of this form’ (5: 192). In teleological judgements, ‘nature is no longer judged as it appears as art, but to the extent that it really is art (albeit superhuman) … ’ (5: 311).

¹³Guyer–Matthew translation modified.

¹⁴My translation.

¹⁵It is in these cases, he points out, that taste can ‘demonstrate its greatest perfection in projects of the imagination’ (ibid.).

¹⁶‘[T]he beautiful representation of an object … is really only the form of the presentation of a concept by means of which the latter is universally communicated’ (5: 312). See also Schlapp (1901: 329).

¹⁷See Rueger and Evren (2005) and further references there. Compare also a Reflexion from (supposedly) 1776–8 which emphasizes the role of ideas in the free play of the faculties: ‘Thus even in play we have to have an idea or a theme, a single representation, which permeates the whole activity so that, through unification, the stimulation [of our faculties] is more complete’ (R 811; 15.1: 361).

¹⁸Cf. Sulzer, s.v. ‘Regeln; Kunstregeln’: IV, 74ff.

¹⁹Quite apart from obvious problems with applying the surface-whole distinction to, for example, works of poetry.

²⁰See Allison, 2001: 297. Allison uses Kant's remarks on the differences between architecture and sculpture in §51 to argue for a distinction of free and adherent beauty ‘within the sphere of fine art that is functionally equivalent to the original distinction’ (emphasis added). The criterion is whether the expression of aesthetic ideas is the artist's main concern or whether other purposes (as in the case of architecture) take this role. Although Kant clearly sets up this contrast, it is not obvious how any work of fine art, in so far as it is the product of an intention not only to express aesthetic ideas but also to exemplify an art form can, on this account, qualify as a free beauty (see the discussion of art forms above).

²¹In this context Kant is discussing the ‘art of pleasure gardens’ and ‘merely aesthetic painting’. Besides musical ‘fantasias (without a theme)’ and ‘all music without a text’ (5: 229), these seem to be the only examples he provides of free beauty in fine art.

²²The claim that not only works of art but also beautiful natural objects can express aesthetic ideas (cf. 5: 320) is often considered obscure. For a more detailed interpretation of the claim and further discussion see Rueger/Evren (2005).

²³Kant never puts things this way, except perhaps in one passage in the Introduction (often regarded as obscure) where he remarks that ‘the power of judgment's concept of a purposiveness of nature’ is occasioned by ‘the aesthetic judgment on certain objects (of nature or of art)’ (5: 197, emphases added). Cf. Allison's attempt to interpret this passage: 2001: 214f.

²⁴Thanks to Sahan Evren, without whom this paper would not have been written, and to Glenn Parsons and an anonymous referee for helpful comments.