Paying Attention To The Sky

 

I studied Bonsai in Japan for fourteen years, learning the practical skills as well as the aesthetics behind this most unique Japanese art. If my road to conversion was first paved by a literary imagination, it was later smoothed and widened by the awareness of a Beauty that is a reality itself. It can take one outside of himself or herself and into a deeper appreciation of the form behind the beauty which ultimately leads us to the LORD God of the cosmos.

I picked up a Roger Scroton book the other day on Beauty and followed a chapter on aesthetics. Kant usually causes me to glaze over but I found another chapter in another Scruton book (A Very Short Introduction to Kant) that led me to the understanding I needed. The following  is convoluted enough but preserves Kant’s fidelity to a supersensible realm that, while inaccessible to concepts, direct us towards a transcendental apprehension of the world.

It is not God’s command that binds us to morality. but morality that points to the possibility of a ‘holy will’. Kant warns against the fanaticism indeed the impiety, of abandoning the guidance of a morally legislative reason in the right conduct of our lives, in order to derive guidance directly from the idea of the Supreme Being.’ Kant’s writings on religion exhibit one of the first attempts at the systematic demystification of theology. He criticizes all forms of anthropomorphism, and expounds, in his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793). a ‘hermeneutical rule’ of ‘moral interpretation’.

All scripture and religious doctrine that conflict with reason must be interpreted allegorically, so as to express moral insights that gain vivacity, rather than validity, from their religious expression. The attempt to make the idea of God intelligible through images, and so to subsume God under the categories of the empirical world, is self-contradictory. If God is a transcendental being, then there is nothing to be said of him from our point of view except that he transcends it.

If he is not a transcendental being, then he no more deserves our respect than any other work of nature. Under the first interpretation we can respect him only because we respect the moral law that points towards his existence. On the second interpretation, we could respect him only as a subject of the moral law that governs his activity.

Kant’s demythologized religion was not uncommon among his contemporaries. He differed, however, in appropriating the images of traditional religion for the veneration of morality. The worship due to God becomes reverence and devotion for the moral law. The faith that transcends belief becomes the certainty of practical reason that surpasses understanding. The object of esteem is not the Supreme Being, but the supreme attribute of rationality. The moral world is described as the ‘realm of grace’, the actual community of rational beings as the ‘mystical body’ in the world of nature and the Kingdom of God to which mortals aspire is transmuted into the Kingdom of Ends that they make real through their self-legislation. It is not surprising to learn from one of Jachmann’s letters that ‘many evangelists went forth [from Kant’s lectures on theology] and preached the gospel of the Kingdom of Reason’.

Nevertheless, Kant accepted the traditional claims of theology. and even tried to resuscitate them under the obscure doctrine of the ‘postulates of practical reason’. Moreover, he felt that one of the traditional arguments for God’s existence, the argument from design, contains a vital clue to the nature of creation. It is in the third Critique, at the end of an account of aesthetic experience, that Kant attempts to reveal his meaning.

The Third Critique
The Critique of Judgment is a disorganized and repetitious work, which gains little from Kant’s struggle to impose on its somewhat diffuse subject matter the structure of the transcendental philosophy. A contemporary who attended Kant’s lectures on aesthetics recorded that ‘the principal thoughts of his Critique of Judgment (were) given as easily, clearly, and entertainingly as can be imagined’. Kant was 71 when he came to write the work, however, and there seems little doubt that his mastery of argument and of the written word was beginning to desert him. Nevertheless, the third Critique is one of the most important works of aesthetics to have been composed in modern times; indeed, it could fairly be said that, were it not for this work, aesthetics would not exist in its modern form. Kant’s most feeble arguments were here used to present some of his most original conclusions.

Kant felt the need to explore in the Critique of Judgment certain questions left over from the first two Critiques. Moreover, he wished to provide for aesthetics its own ‘faculty’, corresponding to understanding and practical reason. The faculty of judgment ‘mediates’ between the other two. It enables us to see the empirical world as conforming to the ends of practical reason, and practical reason as adapted to our knowledge of the empirical world. Kant believed that ‘judgment’ has both a subjective and an objective aspect, and divided his Critique accordingly. The first part, concerned with the subjective experience of ‘purposiveness’ or ‘finality’, is devoted to aesthetic judgment. The second, concerned with the objective ‘finality’ of nature, is devoted to the natural manifestation of design.

The eighteenth century saw the birth of modern aesthetics. Shaftesbury and his followers made penetrating observations on the experience of beauty: Burke presented his famous distinction between the beautiful and the sublime; Batteux in France and Lessing and Winckelmann in Germany attempted to provide universal principles for the classification and judgment of works of art. The Leibnitzians also made their contribution and the modern use of the term ‘aesthetic’ is due to Kant’s mentor A. G. Baumgarten. Nevertheless, no philosopher since Plato had given to aesthetic experience the central role in philosophy that Kant was to give to it. Nor had Kant’s predecessors perceived, as he perceived, that both metaphysics and ethics must remain incomplete without a theory of the aesthetic. Only a rational being can experience beauty; and, without the experience of beauty, the exercise of reason is incomplete. It is only in the aesthetic experience of nature, Kant suggests, that we grasp the relation of our faculties to the world, and so understand both our own limitations, and the possibility of transcending them.

Aesthetic experience intimates to us that our point of view is, after all, only our point of view, and that we are no more creators of nature than we are creators of the point of view from which we observe and act on it. Momentarily we stand outside that point of view, not so as to have knowledge of a transcendent world, but so as to perceive the harmony that exists between our faculties and the objects in relation to which they are employed. At the same time we sense the divine order that makes this harmony possible.

The Problem Of Beauty
Kant’s aesthetics is based on a fundamental problem, which he expresses in many different forms, eventually giving to it the structure of an ‘antinomy’. According to the ‘antinomy of taste’, aesthetic judgment seems to be in conflict with itself: it cannot be at the same time aesthetic (an expression of subjective experience) and also a judgment (claiming universal assent). And yet all rational beings, simply in virtue of their rationality, seem disposed to make these judgments.

On the one hand, they feel pleasure in an object, and this pleasure is immediate, not based in any conceptualization of the object, or in any enquiry into cause, purpose, or constitution. On the other hand, they express their pleasure in the form of a judgment, speaking ‘as if beauty were a quality [Beschaffenheit] of the object,’ thus representing their pleasure as objectively valid. But how can this be so? The pleasure is immediate, based in no reasoning or analysis; so what permits this demand for universal agreement?

However we approach the idea of beauty, we find this paradox emerging. Our attitudes, feelings, and judgments are called aesthetic precisely because of their direct relation to experience. Hence no one can judge the beauty of an object that he has never heard or seen. Scientific judgments, like practical principles, can be received ‘at second hand’. I can take you as my authority for the truths of physics, or for the utility of trains. But I cannot take you as my authority for the merits of Leonardo, or for the beauties of Mozart, if I have seen no work by the one or heard none by the other.

It would seem to follow from this that there can be no rules or principles of aesthetic judgment. ‘A principle of taste would mean a fundamental premise under the condition of which one might subsume the concept of an object, and then, by a syllogism, draw the inference that it is beautiful. That, however, is absolutely impossible. For I must feel the pleasure immediately in the perception of the object, and I cannot be talked into it by any grounds of proof.”

It seems that it is always experience, and never conceptual thought, that gives the right to aesthetic judgment, so that anything that alters the experience of an object alters its aesthetic significance (which is why poetry cannot be translated). As Kant puts it, aesthetic judgment is ‘free from concepts,’ and beauty itself is not a concept. Hence we arrive at the first proposition of the antinomy of taste: ‘The judgment of taste is not based on concepts; for, if it were, it would be open to dispute (decision by means of proofs).’

However, such a conclusion seems to be inconsistent with the fact that aesthetic judgment is a form of judgment. When I describe something as beautiful, I-do not mean merely that it pleases me: I am speaking about it, not about myself and, if challenged, I try to find reasons for my view. I do not explain my feeling, but give grounds for it, by pointing to features of its object. And any search for reasons has the universal character of rationality. I am in effect saying that others, in so far as they are rational, ought to feel just the same delight as I feel. This points to the second proposition of Kant’s antinomy: the judgment of taste is based on concepts; for otherwise… there could be no room even for contention in the matter, or for the claim to the necessary agreement of others.’

The Synthetic A Priori Grounds Of Taste
Kant says that the judgment of beauty is grounded not in concepts but in a feeling of pleasure; at the same time this pleasure is postulated as universally valid, and even ‘necessary’. The aesthetic judgment contains an ‘ought’: others ought to feel as I do, and, to the extent that they do not, either they or I am wrong. It is this that leads us to seek reasons for our judgments. The terms ‘universality’ and ‘necessity’ refer us to the defining properties of the a priori.

It is clear that the postulate that others ought to feel as I do is not derived from experience: it is, on the contrary, a presupposition of aesthetic pleasure. Nor is it analytic. Hence its status must be synthetic a priori. The argument is very slippery. The ‘necessity’ of the judgment of taste has little to do with the necessity of the a priori laws of the understanding, nor does its universality issue in a definite principle. Kant sometimes recognizes this, and speaks of aesthetic pleasure rather than aesthetic judgment as universally valid, and so a priori. Nevertheless, he was convinced that aesthetics raises precisely the same problem as all philosophy. ‘The problem of the critique of judgment…is part of the general problem of transcendental philosophy: How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?’

Kant offers a ‘transcendental deduction’ in answer. It is only fifteen lines long, and wholly inadequate. He lamely says: ‘what makes this deduction so easy is that it is spared the necessity of having to justify the objective reality application] of a concept.’. In fact, however, he argues independently for an a priori component in the judgment of taste, and for the legitimacy of its ‘universal’ postulate.

Objectivity And Contemplation
Kant’s concern is, as always, with objectivity. Aesthetic judgments claim validity. In what way can this claim be upheld? While the objectivity of theoretical judgments required a proof that the world is as the understanding represents it to be, no such proof was necessary for practical reason. It was enough to show that reason constrained each agent towards a set of basic principles. In aesthetic judgment the requirement is weaker still. We are not asked to establish principles that will compel the agreement of every rational being. it is sufficient to show how the thought of universal validity is possible. in aesthetic judgment we are only suitors for agreement.’.

It is not that there are valid rules of taste, but rather that we must think of our pleasure as made valid by its object. People may doubt that aesthetic judgment contains even a claim to objectivity. But that is usually because they fail to consider the aesthetic judgments that really matter to them. When a beloved landscape is vandalized or a beautiful old town laid waste, people feel affronted, wounded, and indignant. They agitate for laws that will prevent such things, form committees to protect what they love, and campaign with all their energies to deter the spoilers. If this does not suggest a claim to objective validity, it is hard to know what does.

Kant distinguishes sensory from contemplative pleasures. The pleasure in the beautiful, although ‘it is ‘immediate’ (arising from no conceptual thought), nevertheless involves a reflective contemplation of its object. the pure judgment of taste ‘combines delight or aversion immediately with the bare contemplation of the object.’… Aesthetic pleasure must therefore be distinguished from the purely sensuous pleasures of food and drink. It can be obtained only through those senses that also permit contemplation (which is to say, through sight and hearing).

This act of contemplation involves attending to the object not as an instance of a universal (or concept), but as the particular thing that it is. The individual object is isolated in aesthetic judgment and considered ‘for its own sake’. But contemplation does not rest with this act of isolation. It embarks on a process of abstraction that exactly parallels the process whereby practical reason arrives at the categorical imperative. Aesthetic judgment abstracts from every ‘interest’ of the observer, who does not regard the object as a means to his ends, but as an end in itself (although not a moral end). The observer’s desires, aims, and ambitions are held in abeyance in the act of contemplation, and the object regarded ‘apart from any interest.’. This act of abstraction is conducted while focusing on the individual object in a ‘singular [einzelne] judgment.’

Hence, unlike the abstraction that generates the categorical imperative, it leads to no universal rule. Nevertheless, it underlies the ‘universality’ of the subsequent judgment. It is this that enables me to ‘play the part of judge in matters of taste.’. Having abstracted from all my interests and desires, I have, in effect, removed from my judgment all reference to the ‘empirical conditions’ that distinguish me, and referred my experience to reason alone, just as I refer the ends of action when acting morally. ‘Since the delight is not based on any inclination of the subject (or on any other deliberate interest)…he can find as reason for his delight, no personal conditions to which his own subjective self might alone be party.’ In which case, it seems, the subject of aesthetic judgment must feel compelled, and also entitled, to legislate his pleasure for all rational beings.

Disinterest is the sign of an ‘interest of reason’, and occurs whenever rational agents set aside their own desires and strive to look on the world as God might look on it, with a view to judgment. This we do when deciding what is right when presiding in a court of law, when assessing a proof, and — strange though it may seem — when contemplating the world of appearances. Disinterested contemplation is a recognition that the object matters — matters so much that our interests have no bearing on our judgment. If you find this thought both strange and persuasive, then you will also recognize the genius of Kant, in making it the central premise of his aesthetics.

Imagination And Freedom
What aspect of rationality is involved in aesthetic contemplation? In the ‘subjective deduction’ of the first Critique), Kant had argued for the central role of imagination in the ‘synthesis’ of concept and intuition. Imagination transforms intuition into datum; we exercise imagination whenever we attribute to our experience a ‘content’ that represents the world. When I see the man outside my window, the concept ‘man’ is present in my perception. This work of impregnating experience with concepts is the work of imagination.

Kant thought that imagination could also be ‘freed from’ concepts (that is, from the rules of the understanding). It is this ‘free play’ of the imagination that characterizes aesthetic judgment. In the free play of imagination, concepts are either wholly indeterminate, or if determinate not applied. An example of the first is the imaginative ‘synthesis’ involved in seeing a set of marks as a pattern. Here there is no determinate concept. There is nothing to a pattern except an experienced order, and no concept applied in the experience apart from that indeterminate idea. An example of the second is the ‘synthesis’ involved in seeing a face in a picture. Here the concept ‘face’ enters the imaginative synthesis, but it is not applied to the object. I do not judge that this, before me, is a face, but only that I have imaginative permission, as it were, so to see it. The second kind of ‘free play’ is at the root of our understanding of artistic representation. Kant was more interested in the first kind, and this led him to a formalistic conception of the beautiful in art.

The free play of the imagination enables me to bring concepts to bear on an experience that is, in itself, ‘free from concepts’. Hence, even though there are no rules of taste, I can still give grounds for my aesthetic judgment. I can give reasons for my pleasure, while focusing on the ‘singularity’ that is its cause.

Harmony And Common Sense
Kant valued art less than nature, and music least among the arts, ‘since it plays merely with sensations.’ Nevertheless the example of music provides a good illustration of Kant’s theory. When I hear music, I hear a certain organization. Something begins, develops, and maintains a unity among its parts. This unity is not indeed there in the notes before me. It is a product of my perception. I hear it only because my imagination, in its ‘free play’, brings my perception under the indeterminate idea of unity. Only beings with imagination (a faculty of reason) can hear musical unity, since only they can carry out this indeterminate synthesis. So the unity is a perception of mine.

But this perception is not arbitrary, since it is compelled by my rational nature. I perceive the organization in my experience as objective. The experience of unity brings pleasure, and this too belongs to the exercise of reason. I suppose the pleasure, like the melody, to be the property of all who are constituted like me. So I represent my pleasure in the music as due to the workings of a ‘common sense,’ which is to say, a disposition that is at once based in experience, and common to all rational beings.

But how is it that the experience of unity is mixed with pleasure? When I hear the formal unity of music, the ground of my experience consists in a kind of compatibility between what I hear and the faculty of imagination through which it is organized. Although the unity has its origin in me, it is attributed to an independent object. In experiencing the unity I also sense a harmony between my rational faculties and the object (the sounds) to which they are applied. This sense of harmony between myself and the world is both the origin of my pleasure and also the ground of its universality.

one who feels pleasure in simple reflection on the form of an object, without having any concept in mind, rightly lays claim to the agreement of everyone, although this judgment is empirical and a singular judgment. For the ground of this pleasure is found in the universal, though subjective, condition of reflective judgments, namely the final harmony of an object . with the mutual relation of the faculties of cognition (imagination and understanding), which are requisite for every empirical cognition.

Form And Purposiveness
It seems, then, that our pleasure in beauty has its origin in a capacity, due to the free play of imagination, first to experience the harmonious working of our own rational faculties, and secondly to project that harmony outwards on to the empirical world. We see in objects the formal unity that we discover in ourselves. This is the origin of our pleasure, and the basis of our ‘common sense’ of beauty. And it is ‘only under the presupposition … of such a common sense that we are able to lay down a judgment of taste.’

Kant distinguishes ‘free’ from ‘dependent’ beauty, the first being perceived wholly without the aid of conceptual thought, the second requiring prior conceptualization of the object. When I perceive a representational picture, or a building, I can have no impression of beauty until I have first brought the object under concepts, referring in one case to the content expressed, in the other to the function performed.

The judgment of such ‘dependent’ beauty is less pure than the judgment of ‘free’ beauty, and would become pure only for the person who had no conception of the meaning or function of what he saw. The purest examples of beauty are therefore ‘free’. Only in the contemplation of such examples are our faculties able to relax entirely from the burdens of common scientific and practical thought, and enter into the free play that is the ground of aesthetic pleasure. Examples of this free beauty abound in nature, but not in art.

The unity that we perceive in the free beauties of nature comes to us purified of all interests: it is a unity that makes reference to no definite purpose. But it reflects back to us an order that has its origin in ourselves, as purposive beings, Hence It bears the Indeterminate marks of purpose. As Kant put it, aesthetic unity displays ‘purposiveness without purpose’. Aesthetic experience, which leads us to see each object as an end in itself, also leads us to a sense of the purposiveness of nature.

The perception of ‘purposiveness’, like the regulative ideas of reason, is not a perception of what is, but a perception ‘as if’. However, it is an inescapable ‘as if’: we must see the world in this way if we are to find our proper place in it, both as knowing and as acting creatures. Aesthetic judgment, which delivers to us the pure experience of design in nature, frees us both for theoretical insight and for the endeavors of the moral life. It also permits the transition from the theoretical to the practical: finding design in nature, we recognize that our own ends might be realized there. Moreover, and again like the ideas of reason, the concept of purposiveness is ‘supersensible’: it is the idea of a transcendental design, the purpose of which we cannot know.

Aesthetic experience is the vehicle of many such ‘aesthetic ideas’. These are ideas of reason that transcend the limits of possible experience, while trying to represent, in ‘sensible’ form, the inexpressible character of the world beyond. There is no true beauty without aesthetic ideas; they are presented to us both by art and by nature. The aesthetic idea imprints on our senses an intimation of a transcendental realm. The poet, even if he deals with empirical phenomena. ‘tries by means of the imagination … to go beyond the limits of experience and to present [these things] to sense with a completeness of which there is no example in nature.’

This is how Kant explains the effect of aesthetic condensation. For example, when Milton expresses the vengeful feelings of Satan, his smoldering words transport us. We feel that we are listening not to this or that, as one might say, ‘contingent’ emotion, but to the very essence of revenge. We seem to transcend the limitations contained in every natural example and to be made aware of something Indescribable that they palely reflect. When Wagner expresses through the music of Tristan the unassuageable longing of erotic love, it is again as though we had risen above our own circumscribed passions and glimpsed a completion to which they aspire. No concept can allow us to rise so far: yet the aesthetic experience, which involves a perpetual striving to pass beyond the limits of our point of view, seems to ‘embody’ what cannot be thought.

Teleology And The Divine
Kant attempts, then, to move from his philosophy of beauty to an account of our relation to the world that will be free of that limitation to our own perspective that he had argued, in the first Critique, to be a necessary condition of self-consciousness. In aesthetic experience we view ourselves in relation to a supersensible (that is, transcendental) reality that lies beyond the reach of thought. We become aware of our own limitations, of the grandeur of the world, and of the inexpressible good order that permits us to know and act on it. Kant has recourse to Burke’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. Sometimes, when we sense the harmony between nature and our faculties, we are impressed by the purposiveness and intelligibility of everything that surrounds us. This is the sentiment of beauty. At other times, overcome by the infinite greatness of the world, we renounce the attempt to understand and control it. This is the sentiment of the sublime. In confronting the sublime, the mind is ‘incited to abandon sensibility.’

Kant’s remarks about the sublime are obscure, but they reinforce the interpretation of his aesthetics as a kind of ‘premonition’ of theology. He defines the sublime as ‘that, the mere capacity of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of taste.’ It is the judgment of the sublime that most engages our moral nature. It thereby points to yet another justification of the ‘universality’ of taste, by showing that, in demanding agreement, we are asking for complicity in a moral sentiment. In judging of the sublime, we demand a universal recognition of the immanence of a supersensible realm. A person who can feel neither the solemnity nor the awesomeness of nature lacks in our eyes the necessary sense of his own limitations. He has not taken that ‘transcendental’ viewpoint on himself from which all true morality springs.

It is from the presentiment of the sublime that Kant seems to extract his faith in a Supreme Being. The second part of the Critique of Judgment is devoted to ‘teleology’: the understanding of the ends of things. Here Kant expresses, in a manner that has proved unsatisfactory to many commentators, his ultimate sympathy for the standpoint of theology. Our sentiments of the sublime and of the beautiful combine to present an inescapable picture of nature as created. In beauty we discover the purposiveness of nature; in the sublime we have intimations of its transcendent origins. In neither case can we translate our sentiments into a reasoned argument: all we know is that we know nothing of the transcendental. But that is not all we feel.

The argument from design is not a theoretical proof, but a moral intimation, made vivid to us by our sentiments towards nature, and realized in our rational acts. It is realized, in the sense that the true end of creation is intimated through our moral actions: but this intimation is of an ideal, not of an actual. world. So we prove the divine teleology in all our moral actions, without being able to show that this teleology is true of the world in which we act. The final end of nature is known to us, not theoretically, but practically. It lies in reverence for the pure practical reason that ‘legislates for itself alone’. When we relate this reverence to our experience of the sublime, we have a sense, however fleeting, of the transcendental.

Thus it is that aesthetic judgment directs us towards the apprehension of a transcendent world, while practical reason gives content to that apprehension, and affirms that this intimation of a perceptiveness vision of things is indeed an intimation of God. This is what Kant tries to convey both in the doctrine of the aesthetic Ideas and In that of the sublime. In each case we are confronted with an ‘employment of the imagination in the interests of mind’s supersensible province’ and a compulsion to ‘think nature itself in its totality as a presentation of something supersensible, without our being able to put this presentation forward as objective.’

The supersensible is the transcendental, it cannot be thought through concepts, and the attempt to think it through ideas’ is fraught with self-contradiction. Yet the ideas of reason — God, freedom, immortality — are resurgent in our consciousness, now under the guise of imperatives of action, now transformed by imagination into sensuous and aesthetic form. We cannot rid ourselves of these ideas. To do so would be to say that our point of view on the world is all that the world consists in, and so to make ourselves into gods.

Practical reason and aesthetic experience humble us. They remind us that the world in its totality, conceived from no finite perspective, is not ours to know. This humility of reason is also the true object of esteem. Only this is to be reverenced in the rational being that he feels and acts as a member of a transcendental realm, while recognizing that he can know only the world of nature. Aesthetic experience and practical reason are two aspects of the moral: and it is through morality that we sense both the transcendence and the immanence of God.