On Kant’s “Aesthetic Judgment”

The only thing that would be more ponderous and difficult than trudging through Kant’s prose in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment would be attempting to put his aesthetic philosophy found within to the test. Kant delivers a paucity of practical examples to make his recondite and ostensibly inconsistent abstractions all the more difficult to assimilate. In an attempt understand and make his knowledge mine, and perhaps include commentary on the more lucid sections, this essay will attempt to define and cross-reference some of his key critical terms.

Part One of The Critique of Judgment contains two sections: one on the beautiful and one on the sublime. While both are discerned through judgments in taste, the former, Kant explains, is concerned with the quality of an aesthetic experience— “a feeling of the furtherance of life”—while the latter, “a negative pleasure,” involves an immense quantity. The beautiful contains, or is compatible with, “charms and … playful imagination,” while the sublime invokes an admiration within the observer (91). Indeed, both experiences happen within the mind of the observer, drawing upon a “rich stock of ideas” and precipitating an aesthetic experience (92).

Kant separates the aesthetic experience, or judgment of taste, from the agreeable and the good. The agreeable addresses sensation: “what the senses find pleasing in sensation” (44). Agreeableness is purely subjective and based on individual pleasure and gratification. Objective sensation, e.g. the dark brown color of coffee, does not factor into a judgment of agreeableness, but one’s pleasure, or displeasure, upon tasting the brew measures agreeableness.

The judgment of good rests upon reason and interest in an object and whether it pleases as a means or intrinsically (46). An object that is useful has a mediate goodness, and that which pleases by its very existence has a moral goodness. Each of these judgments is based upon concepts first; i.e., an idea of what an object is supposed to be must precede the object for a judgment of good to be placed upon it (46-7). Translation: I must have an idea of a coffee mug before I can judge whether or not I am using a good one. Based upon my experience with a plethora of coffee cups during my short life, I know a cup must be basically leak-proof and able to be held easily; this idea allows me to judge the goodness of my coffee cup. The agreeable becomes good when it can be brought under the auspices of reason (47). Moral goodness does not rely upon the agreeable or the useful, but is a concept based unmotivated by pleasure. (I might be a cynic, but I cannot think of an example here; I’m not sure altruism exists. Yet, moral goodness does not seem to be a factor in our present discussion.) Kant concludes by stating that “the good is the Object of will, i.e. of a rationally determined faculty of desire” (48).

A judgment of taste, Kant explains, is a person’s capacity for “estimating the beautiful” without a cognitive or logical intervention (41). A judgment of taste, too, has no interest in the real object of perception and any interest the real object might actuate, but only in the subjective response caused by the character, or representation, of the object within the mind of the perceiver. Therefore, unlike judgments of agreeableness and goodness, an aesthetic response arises neither from cognition nor sense, but from an ineffable combination of the two, what Kant calls “a universal rule incapable of formation” (81). Judgments of taste can never be proven or governed by rules since they are subjective and exist only in the mind of the observer (56). Despite the judgment of taste’s necessary subjectivity, there exists, also out of necessity, a “subjective universality” in estimations of the beautiful. Kant provides a pithy summation: “The beautiful is that which, apart from a concept, pleases universally” (60).

Kant attributes his subjective universality to a sensus communis, or common sense (82). Since judgments of taste cannot be reduced to convenient rules and axioms, Kant assumes that since taste is a subjective universal, there must exist a public sense that preceded judgments of taste. This sense, made up of private feeling, “must have a subjective principle, and one which determines which pleases and displeases, by means of feeling only and not through concepts, but yet with universal validity” (82). Continuing this mode of necessary contradiction, Kant concludes his ineffable argument: “The beautiful is that which, apart from a concept, is cognized as object of a necessary delight” (85).

Kant makes some closing remarks in part one that support imagination. Judgments of taste, seemingly, are supported with the imagination, for anything that allows the imagination to stretch its wings allows the growth of the individual, and by association, the community (88). These ideas seem a precursor to romantic aesthetic sensibilities. Wordsworth and Coleridge especially use the sublime in many of their poems. The Romantics believed in a sensus communis where all humans have a voice and the capacity to create and wonder. The smallest object looked at with the imagination, becomes fresh and beautiful. The judgment of taste I can best liken to a child’s perception. The child is not yet a slave to dogmatic codes and structure, but is still capable of tasting beauty unencumbered by reason.

Finally, Kant’s discussion on “finality” and “end,” in other translations “purposiveness” and “purpose,” was exceedingly difficult. I interpret the latter to be the reality of particular object—the outcome, or end, of the idea. The particular, then, is conceptualized and rational because of its realization. The former concept, that of finality, is the universal idea of the particular without the particular; the finality, then, is based on non-cognative realization and universality, or the disinterested realization, while the end is the particular object of interest. Therefore, “beauty is the form of finality in an object, so far as perceived in it apart from the representation of an end” (80).

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