Kant’s System of Judgment
Art and beauty were considered synonymous. During Kant’s time, the criteria for the “beautiful” was a simple—and specific one—based upon and derived from the supposed Greek ideal of nature perfected. Art theorists of the Eighteenth Century believed that the ancient Greek artists had started from nature and perfected its imperfections, creating, through the medium of art, a sublime and perfect beauty. The role of art and the artists was to follow the lessons of Greek art, attempt to emulate it, and achieve the Greek standards of “perfection”. According to the first art historian, Johann Winckelmann, “To take the ancients for models is the only way to become great.”
The idea of copying the Greeks, the ancients, is also stated by Quatremère de Quincy in “An Essay on the Nature and Means of Imitation in the Fine Arts” (1823). De Quincy wrote that the final perfection of art is to reproduce, not things as seen with all their faults and imperfections, but ideally beautiful nature, never experienced in the actual but “corrected” by the Greeks into “superior beauty” which is the goal of all art. The equation of the Greeks with idealized beauty will establish a standard, or a canon, that would be challenged by the later generation. The quarrel between the old generation and the new will be termed the “Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns.” The new generation, the Romantics, would not only reject the ancient as subject matter but would also refute the notion of idealized ‘beauty”.
At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, the idea of “beauty” as being an attempt to renew the artistic quest for perfection of the natural, based upon Greek models, was firmly entrenched and frozen into academic dictum and practice. But academic practice had confused great art with great ideas and great subjects with large works of art whose merit began to rest more and more upon excellence of technique and morals rather than upon inherent greatness. The problem for Kant was to separate worthy subject matter from a worthy work of art, for subject matter that is meaningful in one era may be meaningless in another. The worth of any work of art must be transcendent and universal, allowing the viewer of any time and place to appreciate the work of art in its own inherent terms which, for Kant, were excellence of drawing (line) and design (composition), without consideration of color which was subjective and emotional and content which was extrinsic to form. The role of color was solely to enhance form. The argument over line or color was somewhat related the Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns, as the Ancients, Line and disciplined behavior were linked to strong ruling régimes and color and feelings were related to the new and dangerous ideas of freedom and democracy. From Kant’s perspective, however, color is secondary to preserve the universality of line, which is unchangeable and, supposedly, beyond interpretation.
Kant sought a universal standard for judgment in the realm of art, a set of values that would be independent of personal likes and dislikes, of subject matter which was bound up in its own time, of morality or fashion or passion. Upon what can universal judgments that are timeless and absolute be based? Kant wove certain prevailing ideas into a coherent system, which differentiates the Judgment of aesthetic pleasure from other pleasures. Aesthetic judgments are both subjective, that is, not provable in any scientific way, and also universal, that is, agreed upon by everyone. A thing can be “proved” to be beautiful because it belongs to a certain class of things or characteristics. A phenomenological judgment is the result of a direct aesthetic experience. The subjective aesthetic judgment is the feeling or the response of the subject when the object is apprehended, contemplated, and then judged.
Even though subjective (not empirical), the aesthetic judgment is opposed to a relativistic doctrine in which beauty is dependent upon individual likes and dislikes. Kant was quite opposed to such relativistic judgments, for they are based upon personal responses, which are tied to a particular place and time as well as to the individual. Kant also rejected the concept of “interest” as the basis for determining beauty and art. Interest is desire, a concern for the existence of a thing; it is a utility judgment: this thing is “good” for something, especially sensory pleasure. Kant excluded sensory pleasure: “That taste is still barbaric which needs an added element of charm and emotion in order that there may be satisfaction and still more so if it adopts these as the measure of its approval.” He denied aesthetic pleasure or value to beautiful tones in music and to the beauty of color in art.
Kant advocated disinterest and indifference to content or subject matter and appreciated only design and composition. Purity in tone or color make form more definite and clear and easily intuitable. Form, clearly and purely delineated, sustains attention to the object itself. Thus, Kant puts forward the concept of “free beauty,” or pure aesthetic beauty, which has its own internal or inherent or intrinsic purposiveness: “The beautiful is that which pleases apart from a concept.” For the judgment of the beautiful to be universally valid, it must be detached from individual and personal feelings. For this aesthetic judgment to claim to be correct, it must not be singular or unique to a particular object. “Art” must rest upon the principle of disinterestedness. This judgment, from a universal standpoint, assumes the existence of common sense, which is universally communicable.
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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.
