Immanuel Kant

 

Much of nineteenth century philosophy, as indeed our own, is a development of Kant's insights into the nature of reality and human reasoning. Beauty as disinterested pleasure is broadly accepted by the Anglo-American schools of aesthetics, but not by the continental, which stress intention and so the wider social and political dimensions. The divide is fundamental, and underlies the war that Postmodernism wages on the settled categories of academic thought.

Critique of Pure Reason 1781

Though Kant's writing is in places obscure and inconsistent, giving rise to varying interpretation, his main arguments are readily grasped. The central concern of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is metaphysics: how we can know things that lie beyond the bounds of experience? Kant's answer lay through what he called "a priori synthetic" concepts. To take a familiar example: mathematics is both a priori (logical) and synthetic (based on our sense perceptions). So with other things. The mind is always organizing impressions so as to make sense of its surroundings. Indeed the organization is already built into our impressions, presupposed by them. And since the organization is not provided by the world itself, it must come from us. In short, we do not see the world as it really is (noumena) but as the mind filters, combines and represents it to us (phenomena). Our concepts of causality, symmetry, number, etc. — all these unchanging features of experience are examples of the ways our senses are regimented by the mind.

Critique of Practical Reason: 1788

By his Critique of Pure Reason Kant had removed the grounds for belief in large parts of traditional metaphysics: immortality of the soul, existence of God, the freedom of the will. But these are important to us, not matters to be easily set aside. Well then, if Kant had shown the impossibility of proving their existence, he had not actually disproved their existence. Progressively, through his Principles of Moral (1785), his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), his Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone (1792) and Metaphysics of Morals (1797) Kant came to argue that we should act as though morality, justice, God, our duties and responsibilities to others were realities even though we can't prove them.

Critique of Judgement: 1790

Kant's first two Critiques had examined the questions: What must a self-conscious being think? and What must such a being do? The third addresses the question (in a repetitious and muddled way) of what must a human being find agreeable? And in this seemingly innocuous way Kant attempted not only to harmonize his two reasons, pure and practical, but to deal with the fundamental notions of purpose, theology, beauty and the sublime.

Kant proposed that aesthetics should have its own faculty, that of judgement, which would mediate between the other two faculties. And because judgement had both an objective and subjective aspect, Kant divided his third Critique in two. The first part considers the objective finality of nature, why it is ordered so as to be intelligible. Undoubtedly we find it so, and that surely hints at a supreme intelligence, and some divine purpose. We cannot translate our feelings into reasoned arguments without falling into contradictions, but to believe that our understanding adequately represents the world in all its immensity, beauty and complexity is surely unjustified. Just as practical reason suggests a moral purpose to the world, so does the sublime point to something transcendental.

Kant was notoriously indifferent to music and painting, but his views on art are an important and enduring contribution to aesthetics. He distinguished three types of pleasure: in the agreeable, in the good and in beauty. The first was a matter of gratification, and preferences were simply matters of taste. Our pleasure in the good was important but not disinterested. Beauty, however, was an immediate and disinterested pleasure. To find something beautiful we must respond to it as it presents itself, without reasoning or analysis.

Aesthetic judgement derives from experience (the beautiful is an harmonious union of our understanding and imagination) but it is not conceptual: no amount of argument can talk us into liking something which doesn't appeal. What such liking or disliking consists of may be very difficult to explain. There is nothing more fundamental we can appeal to, though we give grounds for our feelings by pointing to various features of the object represented.

But beauty is not mere feelings. Kant believed that though the sense of beauty was grounded in feelings of pleasure, this pleasure was universally valid and necessary. Other people ought to feel as we do. What did he mean by this imperative? Not that we could ever establish principles to compel admiration, but that we must think of our pleasure as validated by the beauty of the art object.

Kant also stressed the disinterestedness of that pleasure. Just as human beings should never be treated as merely means to an end, so aesthetic pleasure comes from the sheer joy of deploying of our imagination. Not for reasons of morality, or utility, or any other purpose. In a free play of our imagination we bring concepts to bear on experiences that would otherwise be otherwise free of concepts, thereby extending our pleasure in the world.

Contemporaries thought Kant had set philosophy on a new course, and they were largely right. Continental philosophy is heavily indebted to the nineteenth century thinkers who either developed or more commonly reacted against Kant's ideas

 


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Immanuel Kant

 

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