Aesthetic Angst.
Advisor: Graham Harman
To truly define (or not) what’s beautiful, one looks at The Judgements of Beauty according to the four moments described by Immanuel Kant, and one of the essential conditions for Kant is to not be interested in an object with an underlying concept or purpose in order to have a truly aesthetic experience. This paper is an attempt to question whether anticipating an aesthetic experience in an object gives it a purpose or a function, or creating an object in order to please one aesthetically is a purpose in itself. Before we get to those questions, we’re going to attempt to understand Kant’s idea of an aesthetic experience.
Kant lays out the vague criteria for us: He starts off by stating that the Judgement of Taste is Aesthetic. He distinguishes Aesthetic Judgement from a logical one. In a logical judgement, a concept or representation is painted over an object by the subject. The judgement then becomes objective. For a logical judgement the criteria are mere facts. These logical judgements may also include judgements associating goodness to things. Since facts are shared by multiple people and can be agreed upon, Kant proceeds to call these objective judgements, “judgements of the agreeable”.
In an aesthetic judgement, Kant claims that we do not use our cognitive abilities, we use our imagination instead. Let’s take this apart: A logical judgement would be “This is a house.” where one uses a conceptual judgement based on definitions and facts related to the form of a house. An Aesthetic judgement or “It’s beautiful” is merely said based on how the person is affected by the presentation of the house itself and is associated with the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and that is subjective. This is therefore in no relation to any concept. Therefore judgement of taste is subjective.
Kant goes further to explain that the Judgement of taste, is disinterested.
For Kant, Interest is basically liking, intertwined to the representation of existence of an object itself. The liking, according to Kant, refers to our power of desire, either as the basis that determines it, or at any rate as necessarily connected with that determining basis. Kant further continues by stating that when one questions if something is beautiful, what one wants to know is not if one cares about or might care about that thing’s existence, but how one judges it in one’s contemplation about the object. One of the main prerequisites for this possibility is leisure, since at that point one isn’t concerned about the existence of an object because there’s no lack of it, and one therefore takes function or utility out of the realm of said object more comfortably.
Kant then goes on to explain the three different kinds of pleasure, or liking:
Pleasure or liking in the Agreeable, is interested.
“Agreeable is what the senses like in sensation.”. Since all liking is itself sensation of a pleasure, whatever is liked, or disliked through sensation, is agreeable. In simple words, these agreeable judgements are what Kant would describe as the pleasure we feel in objects through only our senses and not in the form that said objects possess themselves through deep contemplation. Agreeable according to Kant would be an opinion you’d anticipate from someone other than yourself. There is a clear desire or interest in possession of said object in order to gain some benefit that may come to one’s senses through its possession; the object then, therefore has been given a purpose. Excitingly, this brings us to:
Pleasure or liking in the Good, is interested.
This is where one looks at a car and directly connects its shape and curves to how fast it may go. Nobody could blame one for that, as in this case the form and speed are directly related aerodynamically. But everyone does the same for a lot of different objects. One looks at an object, and through means of reason, one tends to like it through its mere possession of an underlying concept. This is where the use of the object comes in, and one starts to judge the object through how it could be used. (Ready-to-hand?) In order to call something good “This is a good car.”, one needs to know what the ideal version of an object should be or is meant to be. Therefore, one needs to assign a concept to the object that is to be then judged. Kant further says that one doesn’t need this in order to find beauty in something.
Kant further distinguishes between the agreeable and good through many examples, notably health and happiness, but doesn’t find anything common between the agreeable and the good other than their relation to the object that they share through interest. As both of the criteria carry the baggage of interest through an underlying concept with them.
The three sorts of liking
Kant argues that the first two criteria uphold the power of one’s desire and bring with them a common liking that is not independent of a certain stimuli or an underlying condition of the existence of the object itself. He argues that we therefore not only like the object but it’s existence as well. Judgement of Taste on the other hand is indifferent to the existence of said object, it’s contemplative, and therefore disinterested. It never produces a desire or an interest of any kind (agreeable or good) in possession of said object. It is “neither based on concepts, nor directed to them as purposes.”. This is the main distinguishable criteria of the pleasure in the beautiful. Judgement of Taste is therefore purely contemplative.
Universality of the Judgement of Taste
Kant then expands on the second moment of the Judgement of Beauty, where the Universality comes in. He claims that the Judgement of Taste is universal, and makes a claim to universal validity. Which would mean that one is then making judgements of beauty about an object assuming everyone else who perceives said object could also find it beautiful and therefore share the pleasure in it. But Kant claims that the universality of beauty of an object might not always be based on a concept that the object is given then. (Judgement of taste is not universal in the same way a logical judgement is.) One could then share a common judgement of beauty about an object itself that is not based on a purpose or concept, but there are no rules by which one is compelled to do so.
Kant claims that an aesthetic judgement is particular. One can never generalize an aesthetic judgement by giving it a set of rules, even when one classifies beauty as a characteristic itself. One must also be there in front of the object to make that judgement, that is an aesthetic one. The beauty of said object can not be conveyed through words in the form of criteria; “the object was so and so, therefore beautiful.”. Now, for universality in beauty to exist without a priori criteria in the form of concept defined by words, there must be something in common for it to be shared with everyone else. Therefore all minds must have a built-in system for an aesthetic judgement that doesn’t involve concepts or purposes as criteria to find something beautiful, and the systems in all the minds must have something in common, so that the pleasure in beauty itself could be shared, ie. universal. This common thing, for Kant, is knowledge - in general.
If we experience and interpret knowledge in a world with identical surroundings, we must experience it in a similar way, since the data is translated into the mind through the senses which are more or less coherent to every human body. Even if there are variances in said data being interpreted, a large part of the data translated and experienced by the mind should remain the same since what senses like in sensation is agreeable. Since the interpreted knowledge is the same (or similar, at the very least), the knowledge in the mind would be accumulated in a pattern that is coherent to everyone. Which would mean that if one finds an object beautiful, the beauty must be pre existing for the mind to realize it at that point in time and space, and hasn’t been manufactured by one person anew.
This is interesting because Kant then talks about purpose.
He questions what purpose is in itself, and calls it something that makes the object follow it and therefore brings it into existence. There’s a clear “in order to” given to the object by a purpose ie. the causality of a concept. (Now, there’s a clear reason why most inventions are claimed to be discovered rather than invented and we’ll get to that in a second.) Therefore now we have established that the purpose is pre existing. Then Kant takes it a step further and refers to something as if it may have a purpose but no specific purpose in his mind. In this case the object is then still derived from a purpose, but we simply don’t understand the purpose, we merely anticipate it. This is what he calls Purposiveness without Purpose. This is not the same as having a purpose because then it would be an agreeable judgement. In simple words, imagine holding something that you don’t have the certainty of what it is or if it could be used at all in any manner.
This makes one question if inventions really inventions or are they discoveries? The human mind is a very complex pattern recognition machine, and one day since a round object stumbled down the hill, all one had to do was connect the dots and make it into a wheel. One therefore manufactured a purpose for that round object, and brought the wheel to life and any reference to a wheel since then, has been an agreeable judgement that can be universally shared due to references and facts unless one tries to take it out of context and use it as something else (change the way it’s presented to oneself), but one would still call it a wheel.
Therefore once the purpose has been recognized, any judgement regarding the object within its context (which now cannot be separated; a wheel will always be referred to as a wheel or when one’s a child) becomes an agreeable one. So according to Kant one could only have had an aesthetic judgement about a wheel when it wasn’t a wheel or when one wasn’t interested in it as a wheel or anything, in that regard. This intermediate state that an object could rest in, that is called the formal Purposiveness without purpose, is not related to the senses or one’s intellect, not completely at least, according to Kant. It’s when both these services of our body harmonize through contemplation, are we truly using our Judgement of Taste. Lucky for us, this leaves anticipation of the objects that we may find aesthetically pleasing out of the equation. We can explore and look for objects that make us feel the pleasure to find them beautiful. Unlucky for us, at the speed that we’re currently running, we’ve run out of objects that arouse that harmony over time.
This state of tension between imagination and understanding is very tempting, but sadly we don’t experience that on a daily basis since we’ve experienced most of the world with pure naivety already. Not unless there’s something new in the market that you haven’t remotely come across even in the form of references, or dealt with yet. Which in the current world of the Internet is next to impossible. The downside of having such an aesthetic feeling, is that you only get to have it once per object. This would also imply that according to Kant the purest form of aesthetic judgement would be that from the mindset of a child.
Where the child has no clue about what the purpose of the object that it’s holding, nor has the child seen such a form before. At that point would Kant say that the child’s imagination and cognition are in harmony? Everyone of us has been in that state, where we pick up something for the first time and have the purest of aesthetic experiences with the object, but that feeling is fleeting. It cannot be manufactured again unless we have the pleasure of coming across something new like that everyday or somehow we magically lose all our memories of the object in question.
To explicate this idea further, assume one comes across a form that generates this aesthetic feeling of judgement for the first time (even though hearsay is strictly forbidden). One looks at the form and generates a sense of aesthetic discovery, which is the only time one could have a purely aesthetic experience of the object. Now, if one comes across that object again, one has that feeling as a reference, therefore an underlying concept of an aesthetic expectation from the object itself, therefore there is nothing left in the object for the observer to discover and contemplate. Consequently, that feeling isn’t reproduced every time one looks at that object after that moment. Sure, the aesthetic feeling resembles the one the person felt coming across the object for the first time, but it is never the same, even after deep contemplation since at that point there exists a preconceived notion of what was aesthetically pleasing about the object, that is now agreeable in one’s mind.
Now one could argue for one’s aesthetic taste in an artwork developing over time to counter that argument by stating that one could not like an artwork aesthetically the first time they see it, but maybe the next time one would have developed a sense of taste for the sort of art that is to be examined. But one could also argue that at that point it isn’t a truly aesthetic judgement as there is no pleasure in aesthetic form through the naivety that is required in the first moment when one formally examines the object or artwork. One is then burdened with references to examine the form, therefore there is an agreeable concept, and a certain form of interest at that point. Although this only pertains to formal aesthetics, it still gives one a lot of anxiety about anticipating pure aesthetic experience in objects or art in the current period. Does this anticipation now give the object to be found in the near future in order to be experienced aesthetically a purpose?
Works Cited
Gage, Mark. Aesthetic Theory: Essential Texts for Architecture and Design. W. W. Norton, 2011.
Ginsborg, Hannah. “Kant's Aesthetics and Teleology.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 13 Feb. 2013, plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/#2.3.6.
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason ; The Critique of Practical Reason and Other Treaties ; The Critique of Judgement. Encyclopædica Britannica, 1990.
Kant, www.protevi.com/john/Cjlect.