THEORY OF ART AND BEAUTY

Kant’s most worked out presentation of his views on aesthetics appears in Critique of the Power of
Judgment (1790), also known as the “Third Critique.”

A. THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE SUBLIME

Three different types of aesthetic judgements:
1. Judgements of the agreeable - pertains simply to whatever objects happen to cause us
(personally) pleasure or pain.
2. Judgements of the beautiful - “judgments of taste”
Four Components or “moments”:
 subjective yet disinterested enjoyment - appreciation for the object without desiring
it.
 Universality - When we judge an object to be beautiful, implicit in the judgment is
the belief that everyone should judge the object in the same way.
 form of purposiveness, or “purposeless purposiveness” - Beautiful objects seem to
be “for” something, even though there is nothing determinate that they are for.
* Although this might be expected to lead to frustration, Kant instead claims that it
provokes a “free play” between the imagination and understanding.
 Necessity - When presented with a beautiful object, I take it that I ought to judge it
as beautiful.
Taken together, the theory is this: when I judge something as beautiful,
1. I enjoy the object without having any desires with respect to it,
2. I believe that everyone should judge the object to be beautiful,
3. I represent some kind of purposiveness in it, but without applying any
concepts that would determine its specific purpose, and
4. I also represent myself as being obligated to judge it to be beautiful.
3. Judgement of the sublime - occurs when we face things (whether natural or manmade) that
dwarf the imagination and make us feel tiny and insignificant in comparison.
Example : the “Deep Field” photographs from the Hubble Telescope.

B. THEORY OF ART
Kant suggests that natural beauties are purest, but works of art are especially interesting
because they result from human genius.

A beautiful work of art must display the “form of purposiveness” that can be encountered in the
natural world.

What makes great art truly great?

genius is the innate talent possessed by the exceptional, gifted individual that allows that
individual to translate an intangible “aesthetic idea” into a tangible work of art.

Three groups of arts:

1. the arts of speech (rhetoric and poetry)

 2. pictorial arts (sculpture, architecture, and painting)
3. the art of the play of sensations (music and “the art of colors”)

These can, of course, be combined together. For instance opera combines music and poetry
into song, and combines this with theatre (which Kant considers a form of painting).

Kant deems poetry the greatest of the arts

Music is the most successful if judged in terms of “charm and movement of the mind”

However, if the question is which art advances culture the most, Kant thinks that painting is
better than music.

One consequence of Kant’s theory of art is that the contemporary notion of “conceptual art”
is a contradiction in terms: if there is a specific point or message (a determinate concept) that
the artist is trying to get across.

C. RELATION TO MORAL THEORY

Aspect of Kant’s aesthetic theory is his claim that beauty is a “symbol” of morality, and
aesthetic judgment thereby functions as a sort of “propaedeutic” for moral cognition.

 immediacy and disinterestedness of aesthetic appreciation corresponds to the

demand that moral virtue be praised
 free play of the faculties involved in appreciation of the beautiful reminds one of the
freedom necessary for and presupposed by morality
 universality and necessity involved in aesthetic judgments correspond to the
universality and necessity of the moral law

Kant holds that a cultivated sensitivity to aesthetic pleasures helps prepare the mind for
moral cognition.

Aesthetic appreciation makes one sensitive to the fact that there are pleasures beyond the
merely agreeable just as there are goods beyond the merely instrumental.

PRAGMATIC ANTHROPOLOGY

Anthropology, for Kant, is simply the study of human nature.

His anthropology is built on faith in the perfectibility of man as a goal-directed being.

According to him:

The sum total of pragmatic anthropology, in respect to the vocation of the human being and the
characteristic of his formation, is the following: the human being is destined by his reason to live
in a society with human beings and in it to cultivate himself, to civilize himself, and to moralize
himself by means of the arts and sciences.