Aesthetics, Imagination and the Unity of Experience

R.K. Elliott, edited by Paul Crowther

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351960496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

This is the first book to gather together R. K. Elliott's important essays on aesthetics. These essays put forward a number of common themes that together constitute a unified approach to aesthetics. A theory of imagination is developed and ideas concerning the practice of art criticism are explored before the relevance of aesthetics for ethics is discussed. Throughout his writing Elliott combines analytic rigour with sympathy for ideas in continental philosophy. He values subjectivity but his analytic stance prevents this from falling into mere personal opinion; he is also able to show how art and aesthetic theory is of complex relevance to broader areas of experience such as education, freedom, and moral action. In the course of his discussion Elliott offers an in-depth analysis of Kant's Critique of Judgement, Clive Bell's aesthetic theory, and the relevance of Wittgenstein for aesthetics. Study of Elliott's essays presented in this book powerfully illuminates the unifying role of imagination and the aesthetic in human experience.

Part I

1
The Unity of Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement

There is a tendency to regard the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement as lacking in unity, not just in comparison with the first two Critiques but by much less rigorous standards. I think we get this impression chiefly because we take Kant to have stated his theory of aesthetic judgement once and for all in the Analytic of the Beautiful, whereas this doctrine is modified first by the considerations he adduces in the Deduction (§30–54) and then again by his Solution of the Antinomy of Taste (§57). There is an argument which extends through the whole work and which is meant to establish the thesis Kant states in its concluding paragraph. As Prof. D. W. Gotshalk recognises in an important article ‘Form and Expression in Kant’s Aesthetics’ (The British Journal of Aesthetics, July 1967), there are two major problems which must be solved if we are to be able to see the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement as a unity: (i) that of reconciling the last paragraph of the work, in which Kant asserts that the universal validity of aesthetic judgement depends on its connection with morality, with the doctrine of the Analytic of the Beautiful, which includes no such assertions: (ii) that of showing how natural beauty, like beauty in art, is the expression of Aesthetic Ideas. If either problem is insoluble, Kant’s whole aesthetic theoiy is confused. If both can be solved, this may elucidate the argument which is central to the book.

In the last paragraph of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (ed. Meredith, §60, p. 227) Kant says that in the ultimate analysis taste judges the rendering of moral ideas in terms of sense, and that this rendering and the enhanced sensibility for moral ideas which it produces are the source of the universal validity of aesthetic pleasure. In the Analytic of the Beautiful he makes no reference - except in one enigmatic passage - to this dependence of the aesthetic upon the moral. He maintains only that the judgement of taste presupposes a ‘common sense’ (a common capacity to determine what pleases and displeases, not through concepts but feeling only, yet with universal validity); and that the existence of this common sense may be assumed as a condition of cognition in general (§21, pp. 83–4). If cognition is to be possible, the Imagination in gathering up the manifold given to sense must stimulate the Understanding to give this synthesis the unity of a concept, and this accord of the cognitive powers must be universally communicable in every particular case. The ‘ratio’ of the cognitive powers will differ for different objects perceived, but there must be one such ratio which is most suitable for their mutual quickening not in a particular cognition but ‘in respect of cognition generally’. This is one in which Imagination freely conforms to the Understanding’s general demand for orderliness without being governed by any particular concept (General Remark, p. 86). That this ratio which is most suitable for cognition generally has actually come into being can be determined by feeling only; but since cognition is universally communicable, this ratio, and therefore the feeling of it, must also be universally communicable. It is this feeling which we enjoy in aesthetic experience, and which in our judgements of taste we assert to be valid for everyone. Kant did not intend the optimal ratio of the cognitive powers to be conceived in too restricted a fashion. Nevertheless to presuppose a common sense as a condition of experience in general is to presuppose that all possible forms within a certain indeterminate range can be experienced as beautiful by anyone who contemplates them disinterestedly, and that only forms within this range can be so experienced.

The intricacy of Kant’s argument does not conceal its inadequacy. There is no reason why there need be any ratio of the cognitive powers which is most suitable for their quickening in respect of cognition in general, and therefore no reason why we should suppose the existence of such a ratio to be a condition of cognition in general. And even if we assume that all men are capable of aesthetic experience, and that aesthetic experience involves the feeling of an optimal ratio of the cognitive powers, this ratio need not be the same for each individual. One person may find disinterested pleasure in the contemplation of comparatively more regular, another in that of comparatively less regular, forms, without prejudice to either’s capacity for ordinary perceptual activity. There may be such a common sense as Kant describes, but he has not shown that we are justified in presupposing it.

Kant must have been aware of the inadequacy of his argument. He did not believe that the existence of a natural common sense is a condition of the universality and necessity of aesthetic judgement or that Taste, if it is based simply upon the presupposition of such a common sense, can survive sceptical doubt induced by the Antinomy of Taste. His theory of aesthetic judgement, as finally developed, does not depend on the argument which would make this common sense a condition of experience in general. Even in the Analytic of the Beautiful he is anxious that we should not place too great a reliance on this argument. Immediately after advancing it he points out that the judgement of taste claims not that everyone will agree with it but that everyone ought to, it therefore presupposes a common sense as an ideal norm, which it claims to exemplify (§22, pp. 84–5). But then he asks whether this norm must exist as a condition of the possibility of experience or whether it is ‘formed for us as a regulative principle by a still higher principle of reason, that for higher ends first seeks to beget in us a common sense’. Taste may not be an actual natural faculty but the idea of an acquired faculty, and the claim of the judgement of taste nothing but a demand of Reason that we create a universal community of taste. If so, then the ‘ought’ of the judgement of taste indicates not that everyone ought to agree with our judgement as they agree with our perceptual judgements, but only that it is possible for us to aim at ‘some sort of unanimity in these matters’. The judgement of taste would then be exemplary not of a natural common sense but of a response to the demand of Reason. Since this passage is in complete conformity with the concluding paragraph of the book, Kant did not intend it as the statement of a mere logical possibility but as a warning to his readers not to commit themselves to the argument which justifies the universality of the judgement of taste by presupposing a common sense as the condition of experience.

In the early sections of the Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgements Kant reaffirms the universal communicability of the feeling of pleasure in aesthetic experience but adds that if we could show that this universal communicability of feeling must carry with it an interest, ‘we should then be in a position to explain how the feeling in the judgement of taste comes to be exacted from every one as a sort of duty’ (§40, p. 154). He still main’ tains that the universal validity of aesthetic judgement is based on the justifiable presupposition of a common sense, but no longer regards this universal validity as a sufficient basis for the kind of universal agreement to which the judgement of taste lays claim. He thought of the judgement of taste as making a claim to positive agreement, not merely the claim that disagreement would be unjustified. If the judgement of taste takes its stand simply upon the presupposition of a natural common sense, its claim for universal agreement cannot be stronger than that of any perceptual judgement. But while the perceptual judgement implies that anyone who disagrees with it is mistaken, it makes no demand upon others to confirm it. If I have no interest in the colour of a particular house, there is no reason why I should go and look at it in order to associate myself with the judgement of a person who declares it to be white. Thus the analogy between aesthetic and ordinary perceptual judgement is insufficient for Kant’s purpose and inadequate, also, to explain our tendency to censure those who take no interest in beauty whatsoever. In this respect the ‘ought’ of aesthetic judgement is more like the ‘ought’ of moral judgement than that of perceptual judgement.

In §42 (pp. 157–62) Kant argues that provided we have cultivated our moral sensibility to a certain degree, the experience of natural beauty awakens an immediate intellectual interest in the existence of beauty in Nature. An intellectual interest is ‘a property of the will whereby it admits of a rational determination a priori’ (§41, p. 155), i.e. an interest which is not created by experience itself but which must be aroused in us, simply as rational beings, on the occasion of an experience of an appropriate kind. Kant offers two explanations of the production of this interest which, granted certain conditions, is necessarily connected with our experience of aesthetic feeling in the contemplation of natural beauty. First, that Reason has a necessary interest in the reality of its moral Ideas, and that it is therefore of interest to Reason that Nature ‘should at least show a trace or give a hint that it contains in itself some ground or other for assuming a uniform accordance of its products with our disinterested delight’. For this reason the mind cannot reflect on the beauty of Nature without at the same time finding its interest engaged. Kant does not further elaborate the rather astonishing idea that we assume the beauty of everything in Nature, and I shall not consider it any further here. Secondly, he invokes the analogy between our mode of reflection in the judgement of taste and our mode of reflection in moral judgement, as one which ‘without any clear, subtle and deliberate reflection conduces to a like immediate interest being taken in the objects of the former judgement as in the latter’. Later, he says that through this analogy the beautiful object becomes a symbol of the morally good (§59, pp. 221–5). In §42 he goes on to say that it is not the natural object itself which is of immediate interest to us but rather the inherent character of its beauty which qualifies it for entering into partnership with a moral idea, and that this character ‘belongs to the very essence of beauty’. Thus the beautiful cannot be adequately conceived except in the light of its necessary but indirect (i.e. analogical) connection with the good, and whether we are clearly aware of it or not, the interest necessarily produced by our disinterested delight in natural beauty is an interest in this beauty as a symbol of the good. One wants to say that this is not an interest in beauty for its own sake but for the sake of the good, ‘that intelligible to which … taste extends its view’ (§59, p. 224); but Kant has made this relation to the good a defining characteristic of beauty. We cannot take delight in beauty except by the process of reflective Judgement, and in this process reflection is necessarily ‘transferred’ from the beautiful to the good (S59, p. 223). Kant does not mean that the beautiful object ceases to be the object of our attention but that we have at least an implicit awareness of it in its relation to the good. It appears as a rendering of the moral idea in terms of sense. Any enjoyable experience (of a natural object or phenomenon) which does not involve such a connection with the good is not an experience of beauty in the full sense; not, since it will lack the right to claim positive agreement, can it be the basis of a judgement of taste. Furthermore, any experience which can be the basis of a judgement of taste will not be an experience of the harmony of Imagination and Understanding alone, but of their harmony with each other and with Reason (§59, p. 224).

Granted that someone has an interest in the existence of beauty in Nature, an assertorie imperative of the type: ‘Since you have an interest in natural beauty you ought to share my delight in this beautiful thing’, will be valid for him. But we have, as yet, no right to demand agreement from anyone who has no interest in natural beauty. So even when we admit the connection between the beautiful and the good, and allow that the contemplation of natural beauty produces an intellectual interest in its objects, still we cannot justify the claim of the judgement of taste to positive universal agreement. Taste cannot be the source of a categorical imperative enjoining its own exercise. But we are under obligation to cultivate our moral sensibility, and the cultivation of a feeling for the beautiful in Nature is a means to this end. In the Metaphysic of Morals Kant says that a propensity to destroy the beautiful in Nature is opposed to man’s duty to himself, since it weakens or destroys his disposition to love things without regard for their utility. ‘And while this feeling is not in itself moral, it is still a disposition that greatly promotes or at least prepares the way for morality.’¹ Thus we have an obligation to take an interest in beauty, and it is upon this that the claim of the judgement of taste for universal agreement ultimately depends. Kant makes this point quite explicitly in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. In the Introduction (IX, p. 39) he says that aesthetic feeling ‘promotes the sensibility of the mind for moral feeling’. In §59 he says that we think that everyone has a duty to regard the beautiful as the symbol of the morally good, and that ‘only in this light… does it give us pleasure with an attendant claim to the agreement of eveiy one else’. In the last paragraph of the book he says that it is the rendering of moral ideas in terms of sense and the increased sensibility for moral feeling which this rendering promotes which are ‘the origin of that pleasure which taste declares valid for mankind in general and not merely for the private feeling of each individual’.

Thus without abandoning the presupposition of a common sense Kant maintains in the Deduction that the claim of the judgement of taste for universal agreement depends upon a connection between taste and morality. His account of aesthetic judgement is still not definitive, for the challenge of scepticism has yet to be faced. This will affect only the presupposition of a common sense, however, not the connection Kant has established between the aesthetic and the moral. His argument in the Deduction shows his awareness of the peculiar logical character of aesthetic judgement and is characteristically scrupulous. If we believe that others ought to agree with our aesthetic judgements, that they ought to try to see things as we do, that they ought to cultivate their taste, or if we look down on them in so far as they are philistine, these attitudes stand seriously in need of a justification. Kant says that if it were not for the analogy between the beautiful and the good, there would be an open contradiction between Reason and the claims put forward by taste (§59, p. 224). I take him to mean, in part, that if we demand of others anything which is not demanded of them by the Moral Law, or blame them for any fault that does not involve a moral defect, we violate their freedom.

If the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement has an overall unity, we must be able to give a firm content to Kant’s remark that ‘Beauty (whether it be of nature or of art) may in general be termed the expression of Aesthetic Ideas’ (§51, p. 183). If we do not understand the affinity which he believed to exist between natural beauty and beauty in Art, we cannot even be sure that we understand his account of natural beauty. A work of art is not itself an Aesthetic Idea but the expression of an Aesthetic Idea. An Aesthetic Idea is a representation of the Imagination (i.e. a mental image) which in giving a sensible embodiment to some rational idea becomes inexhaustibly significant and evocative.² When the image is brought into relation with the idea, the Imagination and the ‘faculty of intellectual ideas’ (Reason) quicken each other; the Imagination produces a multitude of further representations and Reason contributes a wealth of thought. I take it that Imagination also gathers or strives to gather the developing manifold into a synthetic unity. To express the Aesthetic Idea the artist must produce an object which when contemplated disinterestedly gives rise to a free play of Imagination and Reason in the spectator; but this will not occur unless the form of the object is such that in synthesising the given manifold the Imagination is in free play in conformity with the general demand of the Understanding for orderliness (§52, p. 190). Thus the experience of a work of art as the expression of an Aesthetic Idea involves the harmony of all our cognitive faculties (Imagination, Understanding and Reason). Imagination in the artist gives the original idea a sensible representation which goes beyond a thing that Nature can offer, and which strains to become a perfect presentation of the idea. For example, the Nike of Samothrace makes the idea of Victory more completely accessible to sense than does any exultant gesture: the Hermes of Praxiteles gives a more perfect sensible embodiment to the idea of human kindness than does any kindly act.³ In this respect, however, Imagination is bound to fall short of its aim since, unlike concepts of the Understanding, rational ideas cannot be adequately presented to sense. But because it occasions a free play of Imagination and Reason the created image (as the object of the spectator’s aesthetic perception) becomes a sort of nucleus around which the multiplicity of further representations of the Imagination are gathered, and acquires a significance which goes far beyond that of the idea which it strives to present. The additional ideas supplied by Reason are nevertheless germane to the given idea (§49, p. 177).

Our problem is to discover how a natural beauty can express an Aesthetic Idea. If we are to experience the Aesthetic Idea expressed by the Nike of Samothrace, we must first see the work as intended to present the idea of Victory; but Kant asserts that natural beauty pleases independenüy of any concept of what the object is intended to be (§51, p. 184). He does not mean that we must respond to natural beauty without even being aware of the object as the work of Nature; but that if our judgement is to be a pure aesthetic judgement, we must not judge the object according to any standard of perfection. We must experience it as a ‘free’ beauty, not as a beautiful example of a rose or butterfly or tree. He even maintains that it is requisite for the interest that we take in natural beauty that we should be conscious of the object as Nature’s handiwork and that if we discover that what we believe to be natural is in fact artificial, our interest in the object will vanish ‘so completely that even taste can then no longer find in it anything beautiful nor sight anything attractive’ (§42, p. 162). In the Introduction he says that natural beauty may be regarded as a presentation of the concept of the purely subjective fi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Critical Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Bibliography of the Works of R. K. Elliott
• Index