History of Modern Philosophy / From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time

by Richard Falckenberg

In the progress of the investigation the principle that beauty depends on the form alone, and that the concept, the purpose, the nature of the object is not taken into account at all in aesthetic judgment, experiences limitation. In its full strictness this applies only to a definite and, in fact, a subordinate division of the beautiful, which Kant marks off under the name of pure or free beauty. With this he contrasts adherent beauty, as that which presupposes a generic concept to which its form must correspond and which it must adequately present. Too much a purist not to mark the coming in of an intellectual pleasure as a beclouding of the "purity" of the aesthetic satisfaction, he is still just enough to admit the higher worth of adherent beauty. For almost the whole of artificial beauty and a considerable part of natural beauty belong to this latter division, which we to-day term ideal and characteristic beauty. Examples of free or purely formal beauty are tapestry patterns, arabesques, fountains, flowers, and landscapes, the pleasurableness of which rests simply on the proportion of their form and relations, and not upon their conformity to a presupposed significance and determination of the thing. A building, on the contrary—a dwelling, a summer-house, a temple—is considered beautiful only when we perceive in it not merely harmonious relations of the parts one to another, but also an agreement between the form and the purpose or generic concept: a church must not look like a chalet. Here the external form is compared with an inner nature, and harmony is required between form and content. Adherent beauty is significant and expressive beauty, which, although the satisfaction in it is not "purely" aesthetic, nevertheless stands higher than pure beauty, because it gives to the understanding also something to think, and hence busies the whole spirit.

The analytical investigations concerning the nature of the beautiful receive a valuable supplement in the classical definition of genius. Kant gives two definitions of productive talent, one formal and one genetic.

Natural beauty is a beautiful thing; artificial beauty, a beautiful representation of a thing. The gift of agreeably presenting a thing which in itself, perhaps, is ugly, is called taste. To judge of the beautiful it is sufficient to possess taste, but for its production there is still another talent needed, spirit or genius. For an art product can fulfill the demands of taste and yet not aesthetically satisfy; while formally faultless, it may be spiritless.

While beautiful nature looks as though it were art (as though it were calculated for our enjoyment), beautiful art should resemble nature, must not appear to be intentional though, no doubt, it is so, must show a careful but not an overnice adherence to rules (i.e., not one which fetters the powers of the artist). This is the case when the artist bears the rule in himself, that is, when he is gifted. Genius is the innate disposition (through) which (nature) gives rules to art; its characteristics are originality, exemplariness, and unreflectiveness. It does not produce according to definite rules which can be learned, but it is a law in itself, it is original. It creates instinctively without consciousness of the rule, and cannot describe how it produces its results. It creates typical works which impel others to follow, not to imitate. It is only in art that there are geniuses, i.e., spirits who produce that which absolutely cannot be learned, while the great men of science differ only in degree, not in kind, from their imitators and pupils, and that which they discover can be learned by rule.

This establishes the criteria by which genius may be recognized. If we ask by what psychological factors it is produced the answer is as follows: Genius presupposes a certain favorable relation between imagination and reason. Genius is the faculty of aesthetic Ideas, but an aesthetic Idea is a representation of the imagination which animates the mind, which adds to a concept of the understanding much of ineffable thought, much that belongs to the concept but which cannot be comprehended in a definite concept. With the aid of this idea Kant solves the antinomy of the aesthetic judgment. The thesis is: The judgment of taste is not based upon concepts; for otherwise it would admit of controversy (would be determinable by proofs). The antithesis is: It is based upon concepts; for otherwise we could not contend about it (endeavor to obtain assent). The two principles are reconcilable, for "concept" is understood differently in the two cases. That which the thesis rightly seeks to exclude from the judgment of beauty is the determinate concept of the understanding; that which the antithesis with equal justice pronounces indispensable is the indeterminate concept, the aesthetic Idea.

The freest play is afforded the imagination by poetry, the highest of all arts, which, with rhetoric ("insidious," on account of its earnest intention to deceive), forms the group termed arts of speech. To the class of formative arts belong architecture, sculpture, and painting as the art of design. A third group, the art of the beautiful play of sensations, includes painting as the art of color, and music, which as a "fine" art is placed immediately after poetry, as an "agreeable" art at the very foot of the list, and as the play of tone in the vicinity of the entertaining play of fortune [games of chance] and the witty play of thought. The explanation of the comic (the ludicrous is based, according to Kant, on a sudden transformation of strained expectation into nothing) lays great (indeed exaggerated) weight on the resulting physiological phenomena, the bodily shock which heightens vital feeling and favors health, and which accompanies the alternating tension and relaxation of the mind.

Besides free and adherent beauty, there is still a third kind of aesthetic effect, the Sublime. The beautiful pleases by its bounded form. But also the boundless and formless can exert aesthetic effect: that which is great beyond all comparison we judge sublime. Now this magnitude is either extensive in space and time or intensive greatness of force or power; accordingly there are two forms of the sublime. That phenomenon which mocks the power of comprehension possessed by the human imagination or surpasses every measure of our intuition, as the ocean and the starry heavens, is mathematically sublime. That which overcomes all conceivable resistance, as the terrible forces of nature, conflagrations, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, thunderstorms, is dynamically sublime or mighty. The former is relative to the cognitive, the latter to the appetitive faculty. The beautiful brings the imagination and the understanding into accord; by the sublime the fancy is brought into a certain favorable relation, not directly to be termed harmony, with reason. In the one case there arose a restful, positively pleasurable mood; here a shock is produced, an indirect and negative pleasure proceeding from pain. Since the sublime exceeds the functional capability of our sensuous representations and does violence to the imagination, we first feel small at the sight of the absolutely great, and incapable of compassing it with our sensuous glance. The sensibility is not equal to the impression; this at first seems contrary to purpose and violent. This humiliating impression, however, is quickly followed by a reaction, and the vital forces, which were at first checked, are stimulated to the more lively activity. Moreover, it is the sensuous part of man which is humbled and the spiritual part that is exalted: the overthrow of sensibility becomes a triumph for reason. The sight of the sublime, that is, awakens the Idea of the unconditioned, of the infinite. This Idea can never be adequately presented by an intuition, but can be aroused only by the inadequacy of all that is sensuous to present it; the infinite is presented through the impossibility of presenting it. We cannot intuit the infinite, but we can think it. In comparison with reason (as the faculty of Ideas, the faculty of thinking the infinite) even the greatest thing that can be given in the sense-world appears small; reason is the absolutely great. "That is sublime the mere ability to think which proves a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of sense." "That is sublime which pleases immediately through its opposition to the interest of the senses." The conflict between phantasy and reason, the insufficiency of the former for the attainment of the rational Idea, makes us conscious of the superiority of reason. Just because we feel small as sensuous beings we feel great as rational beings. The pleasure (related to the moral feeling of respect and, like this, mingled with a certain pain) which accompanies this consciousness of inner greatness is explained by the fact that the imagination, in acknowledging reason superior, places itself in the appropriate and purposive relation of subordination. It is evident from the foregoing that the truly sublime is reason, the moral nature of man, his predisposition and destination, which point beyond the present world. Schiller declares that "in space the sublime does not dwell," and Kant says, "Sublimity is contained in none of the things of nature, but only in our mind, in so far as we are conscious of being superior to nature within us and without us." Nevertheless, since in this contemplation we fix our thoughts entirely on the object without reflecting on ourselves, we transfer the admiration of right due to the reason and its Idea of the infinite by subreption to the object by which the Idea is occasioned, and call the object itself sublime, instead of the mood which it wakes in us.

If the sublime marks the point where the aesthetic touches on the boundary of the moral, the beautiful is also not without some relation to the good. By showing the agreement of sensibility and reason, which is demanded by the moral law, realized in aesthetic intuition (as a voluntary yielding of the imagination to the legitimacy of the understanding), it gives us the inspiring consciousness that the antithesis is reconcilable, that the rational can be presented in the sensuous, and so becomes a "symbol of the good."

%(b) Teleological Judgment.%—Teleological judgment is not knowledge, but a way of looking at things which comes into play where the causal or mechanical explanation fails us. This is not the case if the purposiveness is external, relative to its utility for something else. The fact that the sand of the sea-shore furnishes a good soil for the pine neither furthers nor prevents a causal knowledge of it. Only inner purposiveness, as it is manifested in the products of organic nature, brings the mechanical explanation to a halt. Organisms are distinguished above inorganic forms by the fact that of themselves they are at once cause and effect, that they are self-productive and this both as a species (the oak springs from the acorn, and in its turn bears acorns) and as individuals (self-preservation, growth, and the replacement of dying parts by new ones), and also by the fact that the reciprocally productive parts are in their form and their existence all conditioned by the whole. This latter fact, that the whole is the determining ground for the parts, is perfectly obvious in the products of human art. For here it is the representation of the whole (the idea of the work desired) which as the ground precedes the existence and the form of the parts (of the machine). But where is the subject to construct organisms according to its representations of ends? We may neither conceive nature itself as endowed with forces acting in view of ends, nor a praetermundane intelligence interfering in the course of nature. Either of these suppositions would be the death of natural philosophy: the hylozoist endows matter with a property which conflicts with its nature, and the theist oversteps the boundary of possible experience. Above all, the analogy of the products of organic nature with the products of human technique is destroyed by the fact that machines do not reproduce themselves and their parts cannot produce one another, while the organism organizes itself.

For our discursive understanding an interaction between the whole and the parts is completely incomprehensible. We understand when the parts precede the whole (mechanically) or the representation of the whole precedes the parts (teleologically); but to think the whole itself (not the Idea thereof) as the ground of the parts, which is demanded by organic life, is impossible for us. It would have been otherwise if an intuitive understanding had been bestowed upon us. For a being possessing intellectual intuition the antithesis between possibility and actuality, between necessity and contingency, between mechanism and teleology, would disappear along with that between thought and intuition. For such a being everything possible (all that it thinks) would be at the same time actual (present for intuition), and all that appears to us contingent—intentionally selected from several possibilities and in order to an end—would be necessary as well; with the whole would be given the parts corresponding thereto, and consequently natural mechanism and purposive connection would be identical, while for us, to whom the intuitive understanding is denied, the two divide. Hence the teleological view is a mere form of human representation, a subjective principle. We may not say that a mechanical origin of living beings is impossible, but only that we are unable to understand it. If we knew how a blade of grass or a frog sprang from mechanical forces, we would also be in a position to produce them.