The significance of beauty in Kant’s philosophical system.

• Kant’s philosophy of beauty is the culmination of his philosophical system.
• Kant viewed beauty as a “bridge” between the world as it appears and the world as it is.
• Beauty, for Kant, is a vision of heaven on earth.

Kant’s third critique, The Critique of Judgement, was published in 1790, two years after the Critique of Practical Reason. Although it did not receive the immediate attention of the previous two critiques—some even dismissed it as the product of senility—its historical impact has been significant. Kant himself looked upon it as “bridge between realms”, and the completion of his critical project.

Hierarchy of the fine arts

Kant established a hierarchy of fine arts based on the capacity to engage the imagination and understanding and their potential for moral and intellectual improvement and the stimulation of afterthought [Nachdenken]. First came the speaking arts of poetry and rhetoric, then the ‘formative arts’ such as painting, sculpture, and architecture, and finally the ‘arts of the play of sensations’ such as music.

Nature as a model

For Kant, nature, which appears purposive [Zweckmäßig] to the human mind, is the model or standard for artistic beauty. An appreciation of natural beauty suggests a moral disposition, whereas even “a hardened old usurer” could take an interest in art—pointing to the pre-eminence of natural beauty. The artist (genius) aims to create art that appears as if it were a product of nature.

The core of aesthetic judgement of both nature and art is the perception of “formal purposiveness”, or “purposiveness without a purpose” [Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck], which allows for the “free play” of the cognitive faculties and leads to aesthetic pleasure. When Friedrich Schiller (d. 1805) wrote that a person “is only fully human when he is at play,” he was building on Kant.

The four moments of a pure aesthetic judgement

For Kant, a pure aesthetic judgement has four complementary aspects, or ‘moments’, based on the logical functions of judgement: quality, quantity, relation, and modality. These are, respectively, disinterested satisfaction, universal subjectivity, purposiveness without a purpose, and necessary delight.

Disinterestedness: Our satisfaction in beauty must be purely disinterested, that is, without any consideration for instrumentality (for example, the utility of the vase, the worth of the painting), moral significance, or even existence. Our focus ought to be purely on the contemplative experience of the object itself. In other words, we ought to look upon the object, or its beauty, not as a means-to-an-end but as an end-in-itself. If something merely satisfies or gratifies our appetites, it is agreeable rather than beautiful. Thus, “Canary-wine” is merely agreeable—unless, it has been argued, we adopt a disinterested attitude towards it, swishing it and spitting it out. In his Anthropology, Kant noted that moderate consumption of wine can facilitate conversation and promote “virtuous sociability”.

Universal subjectivity: When we call out something as beautiful, we expect other disinterested, right-thinking people to agree with our judgement, as if beauty were an inherent property of the object. The agreeable on the other hand is a ‘private feeling’, and we are not indignant if others do not share our penchant for blue cheese or anchovies. Whereas the judgement of the agreeable is born out of our personal characteristics, the judgement of beauty is disinterested and born out of the same pure reason that we have in common with every other rational being. Here again, in his aesthetics, is this Kantian notion of the objectivity of inter-subjectivity. Judgements of taste are neither purely subjective (based solely on individual pleasure), as Hume believed, nor purely objective (based on a perfect standard in the object itself), as Baumgarten believed. Instead, they are an expression of the free play of the cognitive faculties that all human beings have in common.

Purposiveness without a purpose: Beauty does not reside in an object’s instrumentality. Nor is it an inherent property of the object. Instead, the judgement of beauty arises from the object’s form displaying a ‘purposiveness without a purpose’. The object’s form appears to have been designed with some indeterminate purpose, exhibiting order and harmony. ‘Beauty is a form of purposiveness in an object, so far as this is perceived in it apart from the representation of an end.’ Kant argued, controversially, that the ingenu is at greater liberty to enjoy the beauty of a flower than the botanist, who gets caught up in the various ends of the flower and its parts. Kant’s philosophy of beauty significantly influenced the development of a movement in art criticism known as formalism, which emphasises compositional elements such as form, colour, and spatial arrangement over content or context.

Necessary delight: The object is the source of necessary pleasure or satisfaction. Even though this pleasure not an objective property of the object, it is grounded in an a priori principle of the mind, namely, the free play of the cognitive faculties, not least, the intuitions of time and space. As such, it ought to be universally shared and acknowledged. The feeling of beauty, uniquely, bridges the divide between the objective, deterministic world of nature and knowledge, and the subjective, free world of judgement and morality. That’s why computers, and non-rational beings, could never experience beauty.

In conclusion: Why we should value beauty

The experience of beauty and purposiveness without a purpose arises whenever the deterministic and indifferent phenomenal world appears to align or harmonise with the noumenal world of reason and morality and conspire with the moral ideal that we, humanity, are working at. In other words, beauty is a vision of heaven on earth—which is why we should value beauty and surround ourselves with beautiful things.

Beauty and beautiful things make the world feel like a better place, a place, finally, that feels like home.