Of the four moments, as he calls them, i.e. the four determinations, he accords to Beauty, the two negative are directed, one against the sensationalists, the other against the intellectualists. "That is beautiful which pleases without interest": "That is beautiful which pleases without concepts."[19] Here he asserts the existence of a spiritual region, distinct on one side from the pleasurable, the useful and the good, and on the other from truth. But this region, as we know very well, is not that of art, which Kant attaches to the concept: it is the region of a special activity of feeling which he calls judgement or, more exactly, æsthetic judgement.
Mystical features in Kant's theory of Beauty.
The other two moments give some kind of a definition of this region: "That is beautiful which has the form of finality without the representation of an end": "That is beautiful which is the object of universal pleasure."[20] What is this mysterious sphere? What this disinterested pleasure we experience in pure colours and tones, in flowers, and even in adherent beauty when we make abstraction from the concept to which it adheres?
Our answer is: there is no such sphere; it does not exist; the examples given are instances either of pleasure in general or of facts of artistic expression. Kant, who so emphatically criticizes the sensationalists and the intellectualists, does not show the same severity towards the neo-Platonic line of thought whose revival we remarked in the eighteenth century. Winckelmann in particular exercised strong influence over his mind. In one course of his Lectures we find him making a curious distinction between form and matter: in music melody is matter and harmony form: in a flower the scent is material and the shape (Gestalt) is form (Form).[21] This reappears slightly modified in the Critique of Judgment. "In painting, statuary and all the figurative arts in architecture and gardening, so far as they are fine arts, the drawing is the essential; in which the foundation of taste lies not in what gratifies (vergnügt) in sensation, but in that which pleases (gefällt) by its form. The colours which illuminate the drawing belong to sensuous stimulus (Reiz) and may bring the object more vividly before the senses, but do not render it worthy of contemplation as a thing of beauty; they are, moreover, often limited by the exigencies of the beautiful form, and even where their sensuous stimulus is legitimate, they are ennobled only by the beautiful form."[22] Continuing in pursuit of this phantasm of beauty which is not the beauty of art nor yet the pleasing, and is equally detached from expressiveness and pleasure, Kant loses himself in insoluble contradictions. Little inclined to submit himself to the charm of imagination, abhorring "poetic philosophers" like Herder,[23] he makes statements and refuses to commit himself to them, affirms and immediately criticizes his affirmations, and wraps up Beauty in a mystery which, at bottom, was nothing more than his own individual incertitude and inability to see clearly the existence of an activity of feeling which, in the spirit of his sane philosophy, represented a logical contradiction. "Necessary and universal pleasure" and "finality without the idea of an end" are the organized expression in words of this contradiction.
By way of clearing up the contradiction he arrives at the following thought: "The judgement of taste is founded on a concept (the concept of a general foundation of the subjective teleology of nature through judgement); but it is a concept by which it is impossible to know or demonstrate anything of the object, because the object in itself is indeterminable and unsuited to cognition; on the other hand, it has validity for every one (for every one, I say, in so far as it is an individual judgement, immediately accompanying intuition), since its determining reason reposes, perhaps, in the concept of that which may be regarded as the supersensible substrate of mankind." Beauty, then, is a symbol of morality. "The subjective principle alone, that is the indeterminate idea of the supersensible in us, can be considered the only key able to unlock this faculty springing from a source we cannot fathom: excepting by its aid, no comprehension of it can possibly be reached."[24] These cautious words, and all others here used by Kant to conceal his thoughts, do not hide his tendency to mysticism. A mysticism without conviction or enthusiasm, almost in spite of himself, but very evident nevertheless. His inadequate grasp of the æsthetic activity led him to see double, even triple, and caused the unnecessary multiplication of his explanatory principles. Although he was always ignorant of the genuine nature of the æsthetic activity, he was indebted to it for suggesting to him the pure categories of space and time as the Transcendental Æsthetic; it caused him to develop the theory of imaginative embellishment of intellectual concepts by the work of genius; finally it forced him to acknowledge a mysterious faculty of feeling, midway between theoretical and practical activity, cognitive and yet not cognitive, moral and indifferent to morality, pleasing yet wholly detached from the pleasure of the senses. Great use of this power was made by Kant's immediate successors in Germany who were delighted to find their daring speculations supported by that severe critic of experience, the philosopher of Königsberg.
[1] B. Spaventa, Prolus. ed introd. alle lezioni di filosofia, Naples, 1862 pp. 83-102; Scritti filosofici, ed. Gentile, pp. 139-145, 303-307.
[2] Kritik d. rein. Vernunft (ed. Kirchmann), i. 1, § 1, note.
[4] Extract from Kant's lectures of 1764 and later, in O. Schlapp, Kant's Lehre vom Genie, passim, esp. pp. 17, 58, 59, 79, 93, 96, 131-134, 136-137, 222, 225, 231-232, etc.