# Is Beauty More Than Opinion?

Speaker: Reed Winegar
Course: Kant’s Three Questions
Watch: https://ergo.org/videos/reed-winegar-is-beauty-more-than-opinion
Transcript: https://ergo.org/videos/reed-winegar-is-beauty-more-than-opinion/transcript/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg0n4klj-ME

When quoting, name the speaker and link to the watch URL.

Philosophy has long concerned itself with the true, the good, and the beautiful. In this lecture, Reed Winegar examines Kant's account of beauty and aesthetics as developed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Winegar begins by identifying two logical peculiarities of judgments of taste: they are grounded in pleasure yet claim universal validity. He traces how Kant distinguishes beauty from the merely agreeable and from perfection or goodness, arriving at the concept of "purposiveness without a purpose." The lecture explores how this concept connects to a broader principle: that nature has a structure amenable to cognition by minds like ours. Winegar then explains how the free play of imagination and understanding generates a distinctive pleasure that grounds our sense of beauty. The lecture culminates in Kant's claim that beauty carries moral significance, hinting at a vision of nature, both inside and outside us, that can align with the demands of the moral law.

## Introduction to Aesthetics and the Third Critique

Philosophy oftentimes has been thought of as dealing with the notions of the true, the good, and the beautiful. And the notion of the beautiful and aesthetics more generally is something that plays a very important role in Kant's overall philosophy. The place where he treats it most thoroughly is in the third and final critique, the *Critique of the Power of Judgment*. And what I'm going to do in this particular lecture is explain Kant's views regarding beauty, and his views regarding the intersubjective validity of judgments of beauty, or as he refers to them, judgments of taste.

And for Kant, beauty is not merely an aesthetic property of aesthetic interest, but he also thinks that it has a kind of moral significance. And indeed, much of his interest in discussing beauty in the first place seems to be driven by his concern with its relationship to this moral interest. So I'll conclude by explaining the moral ramifications that Kant sees in his notion of beauty and theory of taste.

There's a lot of different aesthetic notions that we can refer to. We can refer to things like the grand, the sublime, the charming, the novel, the beautiful. And the notions that Kant himself is primarily focused on when he's talking about aesthetics are the beautiful and the sublime. I talk about the sublime a bit in another one of the lectures, so I'm going to leave it to the side here, and instead just focus on the notion of the beautiful.

I do think it's important when we're talking about Kant's notion of beauty not to mistake it as the catchall for any and all notions of aesthetic value or for any and all notion of a kind of aesthetic merit. Again, Kant himself distinguishes between different aesthetic notions like the beautiful and the sublime. And more generally, Kant, when he's talking about beauty, he's talking about a specific aesthetic notion. And I think that one should be attentive to the specific aesthetic notion that Kant himself is focused on. I'll come back a bit to this later, when I'm talking a little bit about the relationship between beauty and art, and how Kant's theory maybe relates to some developments in the arts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

## Two Logical Peculiarities of Judgments of Taste

For Kant, judgments of beauty are judgments of taste. That's the standard way that he refers to them. And Kant thinks that judgments of taste are characterized by two peculiar properties. He calls these logical peculiarities of judgments of taste.

On the one hand, Kant thinks that judgments of taste are intersubjectively valid, that when I make a claim that this flower is beautiful, that I'm not expressing a mere personal liking, that I happen to like this flower, it doesn't matter if anyone else does. But rather, I'm saying something like everyone should agree that this flower is beautiful. My claim that the flower is beautiful has a kind of intersubjective validity. If you came along and said, "No, that flower is ugly," then we wouldn't just be like, "You have your opinion, I have mine." One of us would count as being correct and the other as off base. So first, there's this intersubjective validity.

Now, for a lot of claims that are intersubjectively valid, we might think that we can provide something like demonstrative evidence or a proof of the correctness of the claim. So if I say that a Euclidean triangle has a hundred and eighty degrees, then I'm going to be able to give you a proof and argument to show you that that's correct, where we should all intersubjectively agree on the correctness of that claim. But Kant thinks that judgments of beauty are not like that. He thinks that when it comes to judgments of taste, we're never able to offer something like demonstrative arguments that one judgment is correct and another judgment is false.

We can, in many cases, point out different features of an artwork or say something like, "Attend to this aspect of the painting. Do you see it now?" But that's different than providing something like a proof, or an argument, to convince someone that a particular painting is beautiful or not. And so judgments of taste have intersubjective validity, but we're not able to demonstrate them the way that we demonstrate many other claims that we take to be intersubjectively valid. Indeed, for cases of beauty, there's oftentimes what we call a je ne sais quoi, a kind of I know not what element, that makes one thing really stand out as beautiful, that another maybe similar artwork or aspect of nature is somehow missing, but that we're not really able to even fully put into words or conceptually grasp.

## The Paradox of Pleasure-Based Judgments

Given that judgments of taste are not the sorts of things that are subject to proof or argument, what is it that they're based on? Kant claims that judgments of taste are based on feelings of pleasure. So when I say that something is beautiful, that claim, this object is beautiful that I'm expressing, I'm basing it on a particular feeling of pleasure that I'm experiencing in observing or attending to the object.

The philosophical difficulty, paradox, or conundrum here is that to say that something is based on a feeling of pleasure might seem close to saying that it amounts to a kind of personal liking. Maybe I'm set up one way where there's certain things that I take pleasure in. You're set up in a different way. There's other things that you take pleasure in or find enjoyable. Why should we think that one of us is right and the other one is somehow wrong or making an improper claim? Why not just something like each has its personal liking, to each their own?

Normally, if something has intersubjective validity, then Kant thinks that it's the sort of thing that's related to concepts and based on concepts in meaningful and substantive sorts of ways. But judgments of taste are not being based on concepts in that manner. Rather, they're just being based on this feeling of pleasure. So how can there be intersubjective validity for judgments of taste given that they don't seem like they're based on concepts, but rather they're based on pleasure?

If they're based on pleasure, why not think actually there are no intersubjectively valid judgments of taste. There's just mere personal likings, and we're wrong to think there's any kind of intersubjective validity or lack thereof. And so what Kant wants to do is he wants to provide a philosophical analysis that's going to be able to, as he puts it, resolve these two logical peculiarities to show that judgments of taste are based on a pleasure, but at the same time do possess a kind of intersubjective validity. And so that's the goal that he sets himself.

## Pleasures of the Agreeable vs. Beauty

In order to properly understand the way he goes about this, we need to note a few further types of pleasure that Kant refers to, and that he wants to distinguish the pleasure of beauty from. Some pleasures Kant refers to as pleasures of the agreeable. And pleasures of the agreeable are where one is pleased in sensation. So a standard example that Kant likes to give is the example of canary wine. It's a sweet wine. If one person drinks it and enjoys it, another person doesn't, Kant would say something like, one person likes the sweetness. The other person just finds it too sweet.

Neither one of these people counts as right or wrong. Maybe just the taste buds on their tongues are different, or maybe their senses of smell are a little bit different from one another, and that accounts for why one person likes it and the other doesn't. But it's not like one of them is right, that canary wine's great, and the other one is somehow wrong in not liking it. So pleasures of the agreeable that are simply based in sensation are not candidates for intersubjective validity. They're just personal likings.

## Perfection, the Good, and Beauty

The other notion that Kant talks about that he wants to distinguish beauty from is the notion of taking pleasure in something that's good or taking, another way he oftentimes puts it is taking pleasure in something on the basis of its perfection. So the perfection here would be that an object is living up to what the object is supposed to be or intended to be. Let's say that I set out to make a table, and the table's really solid. The table's really good at supporting books. The table provides a good surface for eating on. It's not too wobbly.

In this case, we would say that the table is doing a good job of living up to the concept of what it's supposed to be. And I might take a pleasure in the table recognizing that this is a good table, a good item of this sort. Whereas if I have a table that one of the legs is shorter than the others and it's at a weird angle and every time I sit down to eat at it, it's flopping around, then I'm not going to take pleasure in that table. The table seems poorly constructed. It's not matching with the concept of the kind of thing it's supposed to be.

So Kant oftentimes indicates that people will take pleasure in something because it has a perfection to it, or it's a good instance of the kind. But that's a different kind of pleasure than the pleasure of beauty. The pleasure of beauty is supposed to be different than the pleasure of the merely agreeable where we're getting pleased in mere sensation. And it's also different from the kind of pleasure we might take in the perfection of something.

In the case of perfection, note that one's employing a concept, namely a concept of the kind of thing the object is supposed to be. It's supposed to be a table, and in being a table, it's supposed to do this and that. A judgment of taste, Kant wants to say, a judgment of beauty, is not supposed to be based on a concept of what the object is supposed to be. And in this way, it's different from a judgment of the good or a judgment of perfection.

So another way of seeing the setup here is that the agreeable is associated with mere sensation. Perfection is associated with conceptual stuff. And the pleasure of beauty is supposed to be a kind of pleasure that's not based on mere sensation, but isn't based on these kinds of conceptual considerations or evaluations. So then what on earth is it based on, if it's not sensation and it's not conceptual content? And how on earth is it intersubjectively valid?

## Purposiveness and Nature's Amenability to Cognition

Kant aims to answer this question by relating the notion of beauty to the notion of purposiveness. And this is going to take a little bit of explanation. It might feel for a minute here like a little bit of a detour, but it's not. We'll relate it directly back to beauty in just a little bit. In the front matter to the *Critique of the Power of Judgment*, so in the published introduction and then in an earlier version of the introduction known as the first introduction, Kant gives a discussion of what he calls the principle of purposiveness.

The discussion that he's giving here is in a way similar to when he is talking in the first *Critique* about the idea of God serving as a regulative idea for inquiry into nature. What he says in both the published and first introductions to the third *Critique* is the following. We, in attempting to gain knowledge of the natural world around us, need to work under the presupposition that nature has the sort of structure that is amenable to being cognized and known by beings with minds like ours. If we worked under the presupposition that nature was so chaotic that we couldn't even begin to grasp it, then that inquiry or pursuit into knowledge of nature wouldn't make sense. Rather, it's because we work under a presupposition that nature is amenable to human cognition and human acquisition of knowledge, that it makes sense or is rational for us to engage in inquiry into nature and standard scientific pursuits.

Kant puts this general notion in a few more specific ways. He notes, for example, on the one hand, that the *Critique of Pure Reason* has shown some very general claims in what he calls pure natural science. The *Critique of Pure Reason* has shown that we're justified in claiming that every alteration in time is the result of some cause in accordance with a necessary rule, some kind of law of nature. But that's a really general statement. It doesn't say anything about what the particular laws of nature that hold in the actual world are. It just says that everything that happens follows some law of nature, but doesn't tell us what the individual laws of nature are.

In a work called *The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science*, Kant does attempt to derive a few more specific laws of nature, but just a handful. And he by no means thinks that those encompass all the laws of nature that seem to be out there. Kant thinks that if we're conducting scientific inquiry into nature, a big part of that is seeking out the more specific particular laws of nature that we're not able to know a priori. We know them on the basis of observation and experiment. And this means that we need to presuppose that there's going to be these kinds of particular laws that we're able to discover. That the particular laws are ones that are not so chaotic or complex that it's impossible for us to even begin to discover them. But rather that we'll be able to get some traction in that pursuit.

The second thing that he mentions here is the notion that we should think of these laws as forming a system of particular laws. That there should be a systematic relationship between these different laws. And again, if we're going to try to conduct this scientific inquiry into nature, then nature needs to have the kind of structure that we're able to comprehend. And so it needs to be the case that it has a systematic structure, where we can have some specific laws as instances of more general laws. Because that matches the structure of our minds, because our minds are conceptual, and we operate with some more specific concepts that fall under more general concepts that fall under more general concepts.

And so the structure of our conceptual discursive minds is such that we're going to seek in nature for some kind of structure that is lawful and systematic, and in doing so correlates with the fact that we operate with concepts that are general rules, laws of a kind, and that concepts exist in this taxonomic structure of more specific concepts and more general concepts. We should think of the laws, the general rules in nature, as being in a similar kind of system with more specific laws falling under more general laws and falling under more general laws. Again, a long-winded way of saying that we're supposed to presuppose that nature has the kind of structure amenable to cognition by minds like ours.

Well, there's nothing that guarantees that nature is going to have a structure amenable to minds like ours. It could be the case that we got plopped in a world that is disorderly and chaotic and random in all sorts of ways and frustrates what nature would need to be like in order for it to be the kind of thing that we could properly inquire into. And Kant recognizes that. So he says, we don't have any guarantee that nature's going to have a structure that's amenable to human cognition. But nevertheless, we're going to operate under this presupposition that nature will have this sort of structure.

And now we are also led to ask what would need to be the case in order for nature to have this kind of structure? What would need to be the ground of a nature that had this kind of structure? And here, Kant proposes that the only way that we can make the existence of this systematic structure of nature intelligible to ourselves is if we think of it as though it were grounded on some kind of divine mind that had given it this particular structure. Again, he's not claiming that we know that there's any such divine mind. Rather, he's making this much more limited claim that the only way that we could render a ground of nature, and in particular of this systematic structure, that was intelligible to us, would be if we thought of that ground in terms of a divine mind.

## Defining Purposiveness

This then gets to the notion of purposiveness. When Kant defines purposiveness in the third critique, he says that something is purposive if it has a structure that could only be intelligibly explained by us in terms of some mind acting for the sake of some end. Say that again. Something is purposive if the only kind of intelligible explanation that we could give for its existence would be in terms of a divine mind, or a mind, acting for the sake of some end. So you say, "Well, why is there a lamp in the corner?" And we don't think that just happened by accident. Rather, we think that there must have been some agent that had the end of placing the lamp in the corner.

Now, in the case of nature's systematic order, it's really important to emphasize that Kant is not claiming that the only way nature could have a systematic order would be if there were some divine mind grounding it. Rather, he's just saying that the only kind of explanation that would be intelligible to us for how nature ended up with a structure amenable to human cognition would be a divine mind that had created nature for the purpose of according with the human mind and the human faculties of cognition. So again, this is supposed to be, metaphysically speaking, a very weak claim. Kant doesn't think that just because something is required in order to be intelligible to us that that by any means entails that it's true or correct. He thinks there's a gap between the conditions of human intelligibility and the way that reality itself might be.

To say that something's purposive is not to say that it was created by some agent for the sake of an end. It's just to say that the only kind of explanation for its existence that would be intelligible to beings with minds like ours would be in terms of some agent acting for the sake of an end. With nature, if nature just happened to have a structure amenable to human cognition, by chance, then that might strike us as, Kant thinks, fantastic, or just shocking. How could that be? How could it be the case that nature just happens to have the sort of structure amenable to human cognition?

Indeed, Kant thinks that that would be so surprising or shocking that we would feel a pull to give an explanation for why nature had this kind of structure, and the only explanation that we could give that would be intelligible to ourselves would be in terms of, oh, there must be some mind that had designed nature for the purpose of according with the requirements of human cognition or the structure of human cognition. Again, that doesn't mean that we can claim there is such a mind. It's just to say that nature has a kind of structure that if we were to try to explain it, the only explanation intelligible to beings like us would be in terms of some agent creating it for the sake of an end.

## Aesthetics and Natural Philosophy in Context

What might we ask, does any of that have to do with beauty? And it's important to recognize that in Kant's context, aesthetics was still very tightly wound up with what is often called natural philosophy. So early modern discussions of the natural world and of philosophical aspects of the natural world were oftentimes very heavily tied up with discussions of beauty.

One finds this, for example, in Shaftesbury, a really important British aesthetician of the eighteenth century. One finds it in later important aestheticians with whom Kant was also familiar, like Hutcheson, who was a Scottish aesthetician, and one finds it in many of Kant's own early writings. His early writings are oftentimes described as scientific writings, because he'll be writing about the formation of the solar system, or he'll be writing about the nature of fire. But throughout these early scientific writings, there's a lot of references to notions of beauty, really integrating what we might think of as aesthetic notions into this natural philosophy, was really typical of the time period.

So we shouldn't be surprised that Kant wants to see a connection between his discussion of aesthetics, and then this conception of nature that's been presented in the introduction. But what is the particular relationship between the two in the third critique itself?

## Subjective vs. Objective Principles of Taste

What Kant says is he says that we can't prove judgments of taste, and so there is no what he calls an objective principle of taste. An objective principle of taste would be some kind of standard or rule that we could use to demonstrate that something was beautiful or wasn't beautiful. But Kant says there can be a subjective principle of taste, and he seems to identify the subjective principle of taste with the principle of purposiveness from the introduction to the third critique. That principle of purposiveness was this principle of presupposing that nature has the kind of structure that would be amenable to the human cognitive faculties, would be amenable to human cognition.

What does he mean when he is talking about an objective principle versus a subjective principle? In a lot of the context of the third critique, when he's using the term objective, he has in mind that it's related to a concept. And when he has in mind that something is subjective, he's thinking that it's not related to a concept. So the objective-subjective distinction here, there's a lot of different contexts in which Kant talks about subjective and objective. But in this particular context, objective means conceptual and subjective means non-conceptual.

So when Kant says that there's no objective principle of taste, what he's saying is that there's no conceptually articulated standard of taste. If there were a conceptually articulated standard of taste, then it wouldn't actually be a judgment of taste, it would be a judgment of perfection. I would have some concept of what the object was supposed to be, and if it met that concept, lived up to the standard, then it would be satisfying the standard. That's a judgment of perfection in Kant's language, not a judgment of taste. So it needs to be not an objective conceptual principle, but rather a principle that is not conceptually articulated. So what might that mean here?

## Free Play of Imagination and Understanding

I take it that what Kant has in mind is that in our experience of certain objects, our mind is in a situation where we have a kind of non-conceptual awareness of the fact that nature is amenable to the requirements of human cognition. And that non-conceptual awareness is a feeling of pleasure. In other words, Kant's view is that there are certain circumstances where I'm observing an object and that object is in accord with the requirements of human cognition in such a way that it results in a feeling of pleasure. And that pleasure is my non-conceptual awareness of the fact that the object I'm being presented with is one that is in this way amenable to the requirements of human cognition.

What is this particular way that the object is amenable to the requirements of human cognition, and why does it result in a feeling of pleasure? What Kant says is that in the case of beautiful objects, in our perception of them, they give rise to what he calls a free play of our cognitive faculties, a free play of the imagination and the understanding. In this case, Kant's associating the imagination with intuition, that the imagination is presenting us with the intuitive, sensible aspects. And then the understanding as a faculty of concepts, where concepts are taken to be rules of synthesis, and therefore the understanding as a faculty of rules.

What do I mean by rules of synthesis? If I have this object here, and I see this part of the object, and I see this part of the object, then I can use my concept chair to synthesize these different elements and to say that this object is a chair. I relate these different elements of the object to one another, combine them in a way with one another to say this is a chair. So Kant thinks that concepts are rules of synthesis, rules that specify when a synthesis is proper or improper, and that the understanding thus can be characterized as a faculty of rules.

In some cases, I am presented with an object where I am able to quickly subsume it under a concept. I look over here and I see this object, and I immediately subsume it under the concept chair. But in other cases, I'm presented with objects where the object has some kind of regularity or order to it, but not one that's able to be captured by a specific concept. And so Kant will indicate that, in certain cases, an object is sort of law-like or has a kind of regularity to it, but not one that can be captured in the form of a specific rule or of a specific concept. It's like it exhibits the form of lawfulness as such.

And in those cases, I don't simply subsume the intuition under a concept because there's no specific concept the intuition can be subsumed under. But the kind of regularity and lawfulness of the object as it's being presented to me accords with the general lawfulness of the understanding, with the general rule-like character of the understanding, in a way that Kant claims gives rise to a free play between these two cognitive faculties, a free play between the imagination and the understanding.

Kant maintains that this free play yields a feeling of pleasure. There's a number of different interpretations for why it yields a feeling of pleasure. I'm going to skip over the different competing interpretations, but he definitely maintains that the free play gives rise to a feeling of pleasure. So in the case of beauty, beauty is the pleasure, the feeling of beauty, the pleasure of beauty is the pleasure resulting from a free play of the imagination. It's a pleasure where we have an object that accords with the human cognitive faculties in such a way that it gives rise to this free play between the cognitive faculties.

And so the pleasure counts as a kind of awareness of the fact that the object is in accord with my cognitive faculties in such a way that it is able to occasion this free play of my cognitive faculties. So the pleasure then can be seen as a non-conceptual, that is, subjective awareness of the fact that the object being presented to me has the kind of structure amenable to the human cognitive faculties, and that was what the principle of purposiveness had presupposed, that nature would have the kind of structure amenable to the human cognitive faculties. And so it's a subjective awareness that, in this particular case, the principle of purposiveness is being satisfied.

## Why the Pleasure of Beauty Is Universal

I take it then that this is Kant's core argument for what the pleasure of beauty is grounded on and why the pleasure of beauty is intersubjectively valid. The pleasure of beauty is grounded on this free play of the cognitive faculties, which is related to this principle of purposiveness. And so the pleasure is an awareness that the principle of purposiveness is being satisfied. But we all have to operate, Kant claims, with this principle of purposiveness. And the fact that the object accords with the principle of purposiveness for me, should, Kant thinks, entail that it accords with the principle of purposiveness for you as well.

After all, we're all beings with the same cognitive architecture. We're all beings that have faculties of understanding, faculties of rules. It's not like the form of a rule is something for me and something different for you. The form of a rule is just what it is. So if an intuition is according with the lawfulness of my understanding, then it would accord with the lawfulness of your understanding as well. There's nothing different about our understandings in this case. Rather, they both have the same basic character of being faculties of lawfulness.

If you were having the same representation, it would accord with your faculty of lawfulness. Kant thinks it would give rise thus to the free play of the imagination for you as well. You would experience that pleasure. That pleasure, therefore, is intersubjectively valid. It's not a mere personal liking that's idiosyncratic to me. It's not something just based on my physiognomy or how many, my particular sense organs. Rather, it's based in the character of human understanding as a faculty of concepts which we all share.

Now, I don't know how successful this argument is. It seems like in principle it's open to a number of particular worries. So for example, even if Kant's right to suggest that the understanding is the same for different people, he seems to be presupposing as well that the imagination's going to operate similarly in different people. So maybe I'm presented with an object and look at it, and it gives rise to a free play of the imagination in me. Maybe somebody else steps into that same position, looks at the same object, has the exact same representation of the object, but their imagination is just really lazy.

And even though it's in a condition where it could start to engage in this activity of free play, it just doesn't. It's tired. It doesn't enter into that process of free play, and thus that person doesn't experience that pleasure. So this is just one avenue of potential criticism where one might worry if Kant's argument actually succeeds, in showing that the pleasure is really intersubjectively valid the way he claims, that anybody who is having that same representation would be able to experience that pleasure as well.

Regardless, this basic notion of a kind of free play of the imagination and the understanding has been a really influential notion in the history of aesthetics. And this basic notion that there is some kind of lawfulness, but one that can't be captured in determinate concepts, has also been a really influential notion in the tradition of aesthetics.

## Beauty in Art: Genius and Aesthetic Ideas

Now, Kant talks about beauty in the context of nature and also in the context of human artworks. And I'm going to talk for just a minute here about human artworks. The case of human artworks is a little less central at times to him, because it isn't as directly in his mind associated with some of what he takes to be the moral interest of the notion of beauty. So he's actually very interested in natural beauty in relation to this, what he takes to be this moral interest of beauty. But he does talk about artworks as well. And at the end of the day, he might see them as connected to that moral interest too, but in a more complex or complicated way.

Kant thinks that artworks are not the sorts of things where an artist can have a determinate concept of what exactly it is that they're trying to render. Rather, he thinks that artists, people who produce beautiful artworks, are people who have what he calls genius. And genius is this gift of nature, where, given the artist's nature, given the artist's just character, they have this tendency to be able to come up with certain types of representations in their minds and then to be able to communicate these representations to others.

The representations that Kant has in mind here are what he calls aesthetic ideas. There's various places where Kant characterizes aesthetic ideas in earlier texts that are anticipating the third critique notion of aesthetic ideas, where he sometimes describes them as like wavering sketches in an artist's mind that an artist can't fully communicate or fully pin down. So he seems to think that in the artist's mind, there's some sort of inspired representation that's a little bit of this wavering sketch, can't fully be pinned down. But the artist is able to look to that aesthetic idea and to produce an artwork that in some way does a good job of communicating the aesthetic idea to other people.

Kant thinks that when we're looking at an artwork and it's giving rise to aesthetic ideas, that it's characteristic of these representations that there's no single concept under which they can be fully subsumed. So if I'm having an aesthetic idea, an example Kant likes is the notion of a rendering of a peacock as portraying the notion of the queen of heaven. And Kant thinks that this gives rise to a bunch of thinking and imagining and associations and various processes. But it's not like we're ever able to come to a terminus in that process. It's not like we're ever able to fully subsume the content of the aesthetic idea under a single concept that somehow seems to fully capture it. There's always something more that it seems could be said, maybe some further interpretation that could be provided, some further association that comes to mind. And so these are the kinds of representations that Kant sees at work in the production of artworks, where artworks that are able to express these aesthetic ideas are able to be beautiful artworks.

## The Moral Significance of Beauty

Now, what then is it about beauty that matters to Kant? There's one way of reading the text and thinking that Kant's just really concerned about if somebody's judgments of taste are right or wrong, and he's really concerned about people going to the museum and being right about if a certain painting is beautiful or not. But I actually think that that's in many ways a limited or misleading presentation of Kant's interests here in talking about beauty in the third critique. Again, beauty's just one aesthetic notion. There's others that Kant mentions. I mentioned the sublime before. He'll also mention various types of pleasures that people take in the arts that are different from beauty that he thinks are lacking intersubjective validity, but that he doesn't necessarily disparage.

So he'll talk about different artworks having charms. He seems to think those charms are like pleasures of the agreeable. They're not intersubjectively valid, but he doesn't say they're terrible or they're bad. Indeed, sometimes he seems to indicate that maybe if a work has charms, that can get us to look at it a bit more and then maybe find the beauty in the work. Or if I'm looking at a painting, I might be experiencing a lot of different types of pleasures. Maybe I'm appreciating the beauty of the painting. Maybe I'm experiencing charms. Maybe I'm experiencing some further types of pleasure associated with some kind of conceptual activity.

What is it then that's so special about beauty, where Kant singles it out? It's not even clear that Kant thinks an artwork somehow counts as better because it's beautiful. He never actually says that certain things are better because they're beautiful. Well, what Kant does say is that there's something about beauty that has a special kind of interest. And I would suggest that it's because of this special kind of interest that Kant is focused on beauty in particular as this intersubjectively valid type of pleasure. The interest that he refers to, he calls this intellectual interest, and it's a moral interest regarding beauty.

Here we have to be a little careful. Kant claims that judgments of taste themselves are disinterested, and that might make you think, why is he so suddenly claiming there's a moral interest in beauty? But what we can say is we can say that judgments of taste are disinterested, but the fact that we're able to make these intersubjectively valid judgments of taste is of interest. And the reason it's of interest to Kant is because he sees strong parallels between what's going on with the understanding and the imagination and what's going on with the relationship between the human mind and nature in beauty and what's going on in moral cases with agreements between the moral law and nature, both human nature and nature outside us.

So here's what I have in mind. In the moral case, Kant thinks that it needs to be the case at the end of the day that there is a proper relationship between the moral law and our faculty of sensibility, or we might call it nature inside us, our desires, our inclinations. Oftentimes, Kant will note that we can always do that which we ought to do. And that might make it seem like at the end of the day, there can always be a guarantee that our will will end up being able to follow the moral law in the right sort of way. But even though Kant does say those sorts of things a lot, he also will emphasize the importance of cultivating the sensible side of our being in order to make it easier for us to perform our moral duties.

So the examples that Kant likes in works like *The Metaphysics of Morals* are things like visiting hospitals and poor houses, which he thinks will help us cultivate our sympathetic feelings for other people. And in cultivating those feelings, we'll find it easier to carry out our duties of benevolence towards others in everyday life. So this picture where the sensible aspect of the human will needs to be cultivated in order to be brought into a kind of agreement with the demands of the moral law, relies on the idea that human nature is the sort of thing that can be cultivated in those sorts of ways, that human nature is amenable to being brought into a kind of accord with the moral law and with these moral duties.

Similarly, oftentimes Kant talks about a relationship between the moral law and nature outside of us, like external nature. So maybe the most obvious case is when he talks about the notion of the highest good, to be realized in nature, that he talks about us needing to believe that God has directed nature in such a way that we'll end up receiving happiness in proportion to our virtue. So that's a presentation of saying that nature writ large needs to providentially, so to say, end up agreeing with or being in a harmony with the moral law. So in Kant's moral philosophy, it's really important that both nature inside us, human nature, and nature outside us are able to be in a kind of alignment with the moral law.

In the case of beauty, Kant thinks what we have is a situation that's very suggestive of these sorts of alignments. The moral law is a law that comes from the intellectual side of our being. Our faculty of practical reason legislates the moral law. And so this is a kind of agreement between the intellectual and the sensible, the intellectual and the natural. In the case of beauty, what we have is this free play between the imagination and the understanding. The understanding is an intellectual faculty, an intellectual faculty of lawfulness. Imagination, according with the lawfulness of the understanding, we can see as akin to the sensible desires and inclinations, the sensible aspect of the human will as being in accord with this intellectual principle, the moral law.

So the imagination's a part of our sensible faculty. There's this agreement between the sensible faculty, the imagination, and the lawfulness of the understanding that's suggestive of the idea that human nature can be in a kind of alignment with an intellectual lawfulness with the moral law, that our desires and inclinations could be, in principle, cultivated or brought into a condition where they would be in alignment with the moral law. Similarly, if I'm looking at a natural object in the world, and it's a beautiful object, so it's an object that's providing me with an intuition that is leading to this free play of the imagination and understanding, then that's an indication that nature, external nature, is the sort of thing that can be in accord with this intellectual principle. And again, seems suggestive of the notion that external nature outside of us could be in a kind of accord with this intellectual principle, the moral law.

Kant by no means thinks that our experience of beauty provides something like a proof that nature is ultimately the sort of thing that can be brought into line or will be brought into line with the moral law. And he doesn't think that our experience of beauty is providing us with any kind of knowledge about a providential order of nature. But he thinks that our experience of beauty is highly suggestive of an agreement between nature and an intellectual principle, nature and the moral law as an intellectual principle in a way that makes the experience of beauty especially significant or interesting, or he thinks helps to account for people's ongoing fascination with beauty that they find in the world around them.

So for Kant, judgments of taste are not themselves interested. They're disinterested. But the fact that we're able to render judgments of taste on the basis of this free play of the imagination and the understanding is interesting. And it's especially interesting, because of its relationship to morality and the ways that Kant thinks that it hints or gestures at a picture of nature both inside and outside us as being able to align with the requirements of the moral law. Thanks.