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Despite his love of hosting, conversation, and fine dining, Kant’s house was unadorned and austere. He had only one picture, which hung above his bureau. This picture was of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was only 12 years older than him. According to lore, the only time Kant failed to take his daily walk was when he received his copy of Rousseau’s Émile.

How did Rousseau’s outlook work its way into Kant’s moral philosophy? If for Rousseau, it is by following the “general will” that we can be said to be free, for Kant, it is by obeying those moral laws that we would will as universal laws. Moral laws that we would will as universal laws are given not by our individual will but by our rational will, which we have in common with all other rational beings.

We often experience this dichotomy in our minds: this is what I selfishly or frivolously want to do, and this is what I truly ought to do—because I want to live in a better society that abides by this rule, and would resent it if other people behaved in such a biased, thoughtless way.

To conform to the universal law is not to be a slave; on the contrary, it is to follow reason and free ourselves from our irrational and disordered appetites. For Kant, this capacity to overrule our individual will lies at the heart of our special dignity as human beings.

The Categorícal Imperative vs. the Golden Rule

When obeying those moral laws that we could consistently and rationally will as universal laws, we are following the so-called Categorical Imperative, which might be re-stated as, “Always act such that the maxim of your action can at the same time be upheld as a universal law.”

This is similar to the much older Golden Rule of the Bible, according to which we should treat others as we would want to be treated. But whereas the Golden Rule is based on personal desire, which is subjective (I might, for example, be a masochist, or be willing to tolerate a degree of mistreatment), the Categorical Imperative is based on reason, which is objective.

Hypothetical imperatives and consequentialism

Hypothetical imperatives are practical rules for achieving a desired outcome, for example, “If you want to lose weight, you should watch what you eat.” If you do not desire a particular outcome, you do not need to follow the rules. In this much, hypothetical imperatives are conditional and contingent. Categorical Imperatives, in contrast, are universal moral commands that bind everyone regardless of their aims, for example, “Do not lie” or “Do not steal.”

Hypothetical imperatives answer to the lower faculty of desire, which aims at pleasure. Categorical Imperatives answer to the higher faculty of will, which functions rationally and autonomously by following the laws which it legislates for itself, regardless of consequences or personal feelings.

For Kant, true moral actions must be motivated by duty, not some desired outcome. Thus, Kantian ethics are sometimes described as deontological, or duty-based, and contrasted with consequentialism (for example, utilitarianism), which is outcome-based. For Kant, moral systems based on outcomes or desires, such as utilitarianism, operate on hypothetical imperatives, not true moral law.

Perfect vs. imperfect duties

Kant provides some examples to add flesh to the bones of the Categorical Imperative. Imagine a person in financial need who borrows money and promises to pay it back, in the knowledge that they never will. If this action were universalised, promises of repayment would no longer be believed and the entire practice of lending would collapse. Kant also points out that abusing the lender in this way reduces a dignified being with ends of his own to a mere means to an end (“Act always treating humanity, in yourself and others, as an end and never merely as a means” is the second formulation of the Categorícal Imperative).

Second, imagine a person who does not intervene to help a person in distress. Were this maxim to be universalised, no one would ever help anyone, making the world into a worse place.

In the first case, not repaying a loan, the maxim cannot be universalised because it would involve a contradiction. In the second case, not helping a person in distress, there is no such contradiction. Nonetheless, it would not be rational to will a world in which no one ever helped anyone. Whereas repaying a loan is a “perfect duty,” helping someone in need is an “imperfect duty” in that we have some latitude in how we go about fulfilling it. Though we ought to be benevolent, we do not need to go about helping everyone all the time.

Failing in an imperfect duty, such as helping others or cultivating our talents, does not attract the same strict blame as violating a perfect duty, so long as we do not adopt a maxim contrary to the imperfect duty.

Kant’s example of the prudent grocer

When we do help someone, our action must be motivated by duty if it is to have moral worth. If I help someone from inclination, for example, from sympathy or because it makes me feel good, I am still doing a praiseworthy thing, but my action, being circumstantial rather than principled and reliable, lacks moral worth.

Imagine a grocer who always gives the correct change, but only to avoid being caught and losing his reputation. His behaviour, though not blameworthy, is lacking in moral worth. If he knew that he could not get caught, he may behave differently and dishonestly. Because his behaviour is prudential and circumstantial, rather than born out of duty, it is not categorical.

For Kant, a paradigm of moral worth is the person who hates life and longs to commit suicide, but stays alive purely out of duty. Because this person has no self-serving inclinations, he is acting purely from duty, rather than mere “conformity to duty.” Similarly, a hard-hearted person who has no other motivation than duty has a moral worth “beyond all comparison the highest.”

How to identify the Categorical Imperative

During his trial in Jerusalem in the 1960s, the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, a major organiser of the Holocaust, claimed to have been abiding by Kant’s Categorical Imperative—having interpreted “doing your duty” as blind obedience to superior authorities.

To identify the Categorical Imperative, we need to look inward to our rational self and engage in our own moral reasoning—asking whether the maxim guiding our action could be universalised—rather than delegate responsibility to some external authority such as a dictator (say, Hitler) or even a religious doctrine (say, the Ten Commandments).

So long as they reason correctly, every rational being, human or otherwise, should be able to arrive at the same Categorical Imperative. As pure rational wills, shorn of our attributes, temperaments, and desires, we are all the same. Whenever we carry out an action with a moral dimension, we implicitly universalise that action for all other wills.

In her analysis of the Eichmann trial, the philosopher Hannah Arendt introduced the concept of the “banality of evil,” highlighting that evil can be perpetrated not only by fanatics and psychopaths, but, more ordinarily, by “normal” people who fail to engage in critical self-reflection.

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The sublime: What is it and why are we so keen to experience it?

The distinction between the beautiful and the sublime goes back at least to Longinus (first century CE), who saw the sublime as an overwhelming, ecstatic force that uplifts the soul with grandeur. A flower is beautiful, and so is a great oak, but the great oak is also sublime, and it is its sublimity rather than its beauty that we retain.

Longinus and literary sublimity

At the heart of our attraction to natural grandeur is our desire for transcendence, which is then expressed through sublime art and language. In On the Sublime, Longinus laid out five sources of literary sublimity: noble concepts; passionate feeling; figures of speech; noble diction; and dignified composition. The first two, he claimed, are innate, while the last three are learnt.

Edmund Burke on the sublime, or why we ride rollercoasters

Later thinkers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant more sharply distinguished between beauty and sublimity, which they presented as antithetical. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1757), Burke associated beauty with the likes of smallness, smoothness, and delicate form; the sublime, in contrast, he associated with power, vastness, and obscurity.

Whereas the beautiful (like a flower or a gentle landscape) gives rise to feelings of love, pleasure, and relaxation, the sublime (like the open seas or a raging storm) gives rise to overwhelming feelings of awe, terror, and delightful horror.

However, the sublime is only delightful, awe-inspiring, and aesthetic when it is experienced from a certain distance or place of safety; otherwise, if it represents an imminent danger, it is simply terrible.

Many who partake in extreme sports like paragliding or bungee jumping, ride rollercoasters, or watch horror movies are really seeking the thrill of the sublime, triggering the atavistic fear of death in the full knowledge that they are safe.

Feelings associated with the sublime are far more powerful than feelings associated with beauty, because feelings associated with self-preservation are far more powerful than feelings associated with pleasure. Who, asked Burke, would choose a life of great pleasure if it were fated to end in slow torture?

Kant on the sublime: A bridge between two worlds

Kant read Burke and elaborated upon his ideas. He distinguished between two forms of the sublime, the mathematical sublime, which arises from the contemplation of immensity (like the starry heavens or the pyramids) and overwhelms our cognitive capacity, and the dynamical sublime (like a violent thunderstorm or raging waterfall), which arises from the contemplation of great power and overwhelms our practical capacity.

With the mathematical sublime, the failure of our senses awakens our divine reason, which can easily grasp the idea of infinity or absolute totality, even when our senses cannot. With the dynamical sublime, our feeling of helplessness and physical insignificance awakens our moral vocation, which is immune to natural forces, as well as the noumenal world (the world as it really is, beyond mere appearances), in which we too are powerful, majestic, and absolutely free.

In sum, the feeling of the sublime reminds us of the superiority of our rational, moral noumenal selves over the phenomenal world and our mortal, phenomenal selves. Whereas the beautiful makes the phenomenal world feel like a better place, the sublime reminds us that we belong to an altogether different world.

Both beauty and sublimity bridge the divide between the two worlds, the one through harmony, the other through disruption, or disjunction.

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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.