24. FINALITY AND THE MYSTERY OF BEAUTY Today I will begin by sharing with you an experience I had early one morning when I was living in England. Shortly before dawn one crisp winter morning my young daughter woke up crying. It was my turn to do "night duty", so I dragged myself out of bed and comforted her as best I could. Before too long she was quiet again, and a bit later she was fast asleep. Usually on such occasions I am so tired myself that I have no trouble falling asleep again once my task if finished. This time, however, I left the room feeling wide awake. Even though it was, as I recall, not yet 6am, I decided to go sit in the living room instead of going back to bed. As I looked out the window of our cozy flat, I could see that the dark sky was beginning to lighten ever so slightly in the east. Everything was quiet, inside and out. Three stories below, just on the other side of the tree whose branches nearly touched the window of our flat, the main road into the city center had not yet begun to fill up with its daily traffic of noisy commuters. The beauty of the scene which then unfolded before my eyes was truly unforgettable. Beyond the leafless branches and over the housetops across the street emerged a deep purple glow gradually pushing the blackness to its home in the west. Before long the purples faded into deep red, and then brightened to a pastel orange. When the whole sky was ablaze in a strange mixture of reds, oranges, and yellows, a band of bright blue began to rise up as if from the depths of the sea. It was breathtaking. I could hardly move, much less think or speak. As I sat there in silence, on the boundary line between nighttime and daytime, time itself seemed to stand still amidst the changeless changes unfolding before me. Looking back, I would guess that the transformation I observed took an hour or more, though it might have been less than fifteen minutes for all I know. When I finally came to my senses, I decided I should try to capture this "moment" on film before it was too late. That way perhaps those who were now sleeping might later be able to appreciate the awesome scene I was witnessing. A camera can be an effective tool for artists, if it is used to distort a natural scene in such a way as to reveal an underlying beauty that would remain hidden to the naked eye. However, when we use the same machine in hopes of copying the beauty of a natural scene which is already manifested before our eyes, the result is often the very antithesis of artistic beauty. Unfortunately, this photo, taken that morning, probably illustrates the latter principle better than the former. (A mere copy of nature is bad enough, but a copy of the copy is even worse. Nevertheless, I have reproduced my photograph in black and white on the following page, in hopes of sparking the reader's imagination to fill in the missing colors. Let's just imagine that this photo is good enough to put you in touch with the beauty of the boundary-experience I had that morning. Why is it that we judge such a scene to be "beautiful"? What does the word "beauty" mean when we use it in a proposition such as "That sunrise is beautiful"? How are judgments of beauty related to other kinds of judgment? Answering such questions is the task of the branch of philosophy called "aesthetics" (from the Greek word, aisthetikos, meaning "sense perception"). The leaves of experience which grow on this branch of the philosophical tree are so healthy, and so familiar to us all, that such questions are better dealt with in terms of ontology than in terms of science. In other words, although we will never know enough to construct a science of beauty, we can experience enough to construct an ontology of beauty. And that is, in fact, what many philosophers have done when dealing with questions of aesthetics. The aesthetic question asked most frequently in my students' insight papers goes something like this: Is there an objective standard of beauty? or Is there a fixed set of guidelines we can use to test whether such a judgment is right or wrong? Students nearly always answer these questions in the negative. But philosophers--especially good philosophers--are not so quick to assume that aesthetic judgments are based on nothing more than mere personal opinions. Any attempt to construct an ontology of beauty would assume that beauty is something, and would seek first and foremost to discover the nature of that hidden essence. So let's look today at one example of how philosophers answer such questions. Since I have already taken Kant's ideas as exemplary of "good" philosophy in several previous lectures, I will again use his approach to illustrate how aesthetic questions can be answered. Although there are many other philosophers whose views on aesthetics would be worth considering here, Kant's views, as in so many other areas of philosophical inquiry, represent a major turning point in the history of aesthetics, and the issues he struggled with are still relevant to contemporary issues in aesthetics. Moreover, examining Kant's views on aesthetics will enable us to gain a more complete understanding of his overall system of "Critical" philosophy. In Lecture 7 we saw how Kant's first Critique defines a theoretical standpoint in terms of the "faculty" (or power) of "cognition" (i.e., knowing). In Lecture 18 we saw how his second Critique defines a distinct practical standpoint in terms of the power of "desire" (or willing) . We will now be able to examine how Kant's third and final Critique, the Critique of Judgment (1790), defines a third standpoint in terms of the power of feeling. Because the first two powers adopt the opposite standpoints of theory and practice, Kant claimed a third standpoint is necessary in order to form a bridge between these two. This third standpoint must be both free (as in our moral judgments) and yet based on a sensible object (as in our cognitive judgments). In its most general sense, this "third thing" in Kant's System always consists of experience itself; but in the third Critique Kant's particular focus is on specific types of judgments, so I call this third, mediating standpoint the "judicial". The judicial standpoint focuses on the judgments we make about the kinds of experience we cannot interpret straightforwardly in terms of scientific knowledge or moral practice--in particular, the judgments which arise out of our power to feel "pleasure and pain". Thus, if we think of Kant's first two Critiques as viewing experience from the perspectives of the head and heart, respectively, then we can think of the third Critique as viewing experience from the perspective of the belly. For most people do, in fact, feel the power of pain and pleasure most intensely in their belly. Moreover, just as the belly and head are at opposite ends of the body, so also aesthetic judgments, according to Kant, are always noncognitive--i.e., they do not produce knowledge, the way logical (i.e., theoretical) judgments do (see e.g., Judgment, p.228). Whereas in a logical judgment our thinking controls our imagination in order to show us truth, in an aesthetic judgment our imagination controls our thinking in order to show us beauty. This account of the relationship between Kant's three systems can now be used to label the map given in Figure 7.1 with more descriptive terms: [Figure 24.1: Feeling as Kant's Bridge between Knowing and Willing] The main idea governing Kant's third Critique is "finality" or "purposiveness" (two ways of translating the German word endlichkeit). In either case, the term refers to the feeling we have that certain contingent objects or events have a goal or end towards which they necessarily point: an intrinsic purpose they must fulfill in order to realize their final reason for existing. The first half of the book deals with the "subjective" finality we experience whenever we judge something to be "beautiful" or "sublime". The second half deals with the "objective" finality we experience whenever we judge some natural object to have a purpose or design. Today we will have time to examine only the first of Kant's two examples of subjective finality. Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment is based on a perfect 2LAR distinction between four ways of experiencing "delight", each of which produces a distinct type of aesthetic judgment: "an object is to be counted either as agreeable, or beautiful or sublime, or good (absolutely)" (Judgment, p.266). Kant saw a direct correspondence between this distinction and the distinctions between the four main categories (see Figure 7.6) and between the four main faculties of the mind (sensibility, understanding, judgment, and reason): the "agreeable" is that which "pleases immediately" (p.208), and relates primarily to the quantity of a judgment, as revealed in sensation; the "beautiful" requires a "quality" that "permits of being understood"; the sublime posits a "relation" between "the sensible" and "a possible supersensible employment" of understanding in human judgment; and the good consists in "the modality of a necessity", requiring everyone to agree with a "pure intellectual judgment" (pp.266-267, my italics). Whereas the agreeable and the beautiful both result from a "judgment of taste", the sublime and the good both stem from "a higher, intellectual feeling" (p.192). If we regard this as defining the second term in each 2LAR component, with the first term being defined by the question, "Is this form of delight universal?", then the following map can be constructed: [Figure 24.2: Kant's Four Forms of Aesthetic Judgment] In his attempt to explain what is unique about our judgments of beauty, what distinguishes them from all other types of judgments we make, Kant distinguished between four "moments" (or essential elements) of any such judgment of taste. These correspond, of course, to the pattern determined by his special set of four categories. But because beauty itself is most like the category of quality, he began his ontology of beauty with a description of the "moment of quality" (p.203), which stipulates that the delight experienced in an object judged to be beautiful must be disinterested. An "interest" is any "delight which we connect with the representation of the real existence of an object" (p.204). The judgments that determine "the agreeable and the good" are both "invariably coupled with an interest in the object" (p.209): the former depends on the existence of something "which the senses find pleasing in sensation" (p.205), and the latter on the existence of something which "reason recommends ... by its mere concept" (p.207). By contrast, a judgment of beauty, being a pure judgment of taste, "relies on no interest" (p.205n): a person making such a judgment ought to have "complete indifference" as to "the real existence of the thing" (p.205). Otherwise, Kant warned, our judgments of taste will be "biased" in favor of our own interest, instead of assessing whether or not our feeling truly merits the ascription of "beauty" to the object. Perhaps an illustration will help clarify this first, and perhaps most important, of Kant's points. Let's imagine three possible situations in which a person might refer to the sun's "beauty". First, imagine that the weather was so fine this morning that you decided to skip your classes and go to the beach for the day. In that case, you might be laying on the sand right now with your closest friend, soaking up the warm sun. If you turned to your friend and said "The sun feels beautiful right now", then, according to Kant, you would be misusing the word "beautiful". Your feeling of pleasure would be a direct result of your interest in the existence of the sun's existence, aroused by your sensation of its warmth on your body. So it would be better to say the sun feels "agreeable" (or "nice") in such a situation. For the second scenario, imagine you are now walking along the road with your geography teacher, talking about the various forms of life on earth. Suddenly you become aware of the sun shining brightly all around you, so you exclaim, "Isn't the sun beautiful, the way it sustains life on earth?" This too would be a misuse of "beautiful". For once again, your feeling of pleasure would be a direct result of your interest in the sun's existence, though this time your interest would be aroused by your intellectual grasp of the sun's goodness. The third scenario could be the one I described at the beginning of today's lecture. Only if, as I sat there gazing at the sunrise, the pleasure welling up in me had nothing to do with the sun's objective existence, only if my judgment was based not on my agreeable sensations (I was actually quite cold at the time!) nor on my appreciation of the sun's usefulness (I was too tired to think so clearly!), was I justified in exclaiming: "This sunrise is beautiful!" But if my judgment was not based on my own interest in the object, what was it based on? Kant answered this question in his discussion of the other three essential characteristics of any judgment of beauty. Although a judgment of beauty is always subjective, and thus has "no bearing upon the Object" (p.215), Kant argued that the "quantity" of such a judgment requires that some object "pleases universally" (p.219). The second characteristic is therefore a special kind of subjective universality. By contrast, judgments of the agreeable express a delight which is subjective but not universal, and judgments of the good express a delight which is universal but objective. The criterion of subjective universality means that a person must regard delight in the object as resting on what he may also presuppose in every other person; and therefore he must believe that he has reason for demanding a similar delight from everyone. Accordingly, he will speak of the beautiful as if beauty were a quality of the object and the judgment logical [even though it is not] ... (p. 211). Unlike a truly logical judgment, a judgment of taste "does not postulate the agreement of every one ...; it only imputes this agreement to everyone" (p.216). We assume everyone will agree that the sun is good because it sustains life, but we do not assume everyone will agree that sunbathing is an agreeable experience. These two kinds of judgment are quite straightforward. But when we judge something to be beautiful, we feel everyone ought to make the same judgment if placed in the same position: for we adopt the "idea" that our judgment extends "to all subjects, as unreservedly as it would if it were an objective judgement" (p.285), even though we may know very well that, as a matter of fact, everyone does not agree. The third characteristic of all judgments of beauty deals with the relation of "ends" (p.219): the object of such judgments must exhibit "the form of finality [i.e., purposiveness] ... apart from the representation of an end [i.e., purpose]" (p.236). This paradox requires that, in judging an object to be beautiful, we regard it as existing for a reason, because we perceive an inner purposiveness; yet no external purpose can be found. This is no illusion, according to Kant, but part of what it means for something to be called beautiful: judging something to be beautiful means judging that it points to itself rather than to some agreeable sensation or good state of affairs outside of the object. Since the "determining ground" of such a judgment "is simply finality of form" (p.223), our delight in something beautiful is based solely on the conviction that "the state of the representation itself" is intrinsically worth preserving (p.222). By contrast, our delight in experiencing something agreeable or good is determined by the external goal towards which it points, such as the pleasant sensation of tasting well prepared food, or the ability of food to satisfy our hunger. In other words, delight in the beautiful means delight in something we do not wish to consume but to preserve, just as in the case of the "timeless moment" I described at the beginning of this lecture. The fourth and final characteristic, the "moment" of modality in any judgment of beauty, is that the experience must produce "a necessary delight" (p.240). Kant carefully distinguished between the "theoretical objective necessity" of empirical knowledge, the "practical necessity" of moral action, and the "exemplary" necessity of aesthetic judgment (pp.236-237). An experience of delight in a beautiful object can be regarded as a necessary example only when we presuppose "the existence of a common sense" (i.e., a common way of sensing the world), corresponding to the "common understanding" that enables us to agree on cognitive judgments (p.238). (The latter, by the way, is closer to the traditional notion of "common sense" than is the former.) All but the most skeptical people assume this common sense to be "the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our knowledge", so it can also serve as an "ideal norm" on which to base the necessity of our aesthetic judgments (p.239). Kant also referred in a similar way to an internal "archetype of taste" which serves as "the highest model" for aesthetic judgments, but explained that not everyone has equal access to it, since "each person must beget [this archetype] in his own consciousness" (p.232). What we do all have access to, Kant believed, is "a universal voice" telling us "only the possibility of an aesthetic judgment capable of being ... deemed valid for every one" (p.216). Having now examined Kant's fourfold attempt to define the principles essential to the ontological nature of our judgments of beauty, we can summarize it with this map: [Figure 24.3: The Four Moments in a Judgment of Beauty] Note that the two characteristics mapped onto the horizontal line are both expressed in terms of synthetic logic, while those on the vertical line both conform to analytic logic. Taken together, these four characteristics of all judgments of beauty suggest that such judgments point not to some obvious purpose, but to a mystery hidden deep within certain objects we experience: our aesthetic ideas "strain after something lying out beyond the confines of experience" (p.314). In addition to using the word "finality" (or purposiveness) to describe this mystery, Kant also claimed that, ultimately, "the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good" (p.353). By this Kant did not mean that the experience of beauty is in any way dependent upon the experience of goodness, but only that, just as respect for the moral law gives moral goodness a foothold in the will, so also the "analogy" between beauty and morality can give morality a foothold in nature. In so doing, such experiences serve to resolve the tension between our theoretical and practical standpoints (as shown in Figure 18.2). Let's now take a step back from Kant's theory and ask: Do such basic characteristics establish an objective standard of beauty? Yes and no! On the one hand, they do demonstrate that we use the word "beauty" at precisely those times when we are acting as if everyone else ought to agree. And this means judgments of beauty require us to adopt the universal standpoint of "common sense"--or, as we could also call it, the unifying standpoint, through which the diversity of our ordinary experience is held together by a common, gut- level feeling. But on the other hand, Kant fully recognized that this feeling is subjective, which means people are bound to disagree about what ought to be regarded as beautiful (see p.239). In such a case, he argued, if both parties are truly judging aesthetically, then "both would ... be judging correctly" (p.231)--which is possible, of course, only if we interpret such experiences in terms of synthetic logic. So, although his account of the four essential elements in any judgment of beauty cannot be said to give us an objective standard, in the sense of a set of universal criteria that can be externally forced upon all possible objects, it does give us a universal standard, in the sense of a set of criteria which is internally applicable to all possible subjects who hope to experience beauty. And this is no small achievement! This means our ability to experience beauty depends not so much on the objective characteristics of the objects we meet every day, as on the extent to which we are able to adopt this standpoint when the appropriate situations present themselves. In other words, like all the unifying experiences we will discuss here in Part Four, an experience of beauty is likely to "hit" us only when we are prepared internally to receive the mystery of such a gift. It is therefore entirely possible that people living near me on that bleak winter's morning in England might have woken up at the same time as me, looked out the window, and noticed nothing beautiful. Had I met them, I would have felt quite strongly that they ought to have noticed the beauty of the sunrise, and would have noticed it, had they adequately nurtured the "common sense" that gives us our taste for beauty; but I could have done nothing to force them to agree with my judgment. Kant's ontology of beauty therefore suggests that the old saying "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" has some measure of truth. However, this saying is grossly misinterpreted if we associate it with a saying such as "different strokes for different folks", and thereby take it to mean that "it doesn't really matter what different people think about what is and isn't beautiful, because beauty is different for everyone". This all-too-common view, which assumes that because beauty is not scientific it must be a mere illusion, strips beauty of the mystery which makes it what it is. For, as Kant has shown us, the subjective character of such judgments (i.e., the fact that they depend primarily on our own eyes) does not imply that our experiences of beauty are all merely relative; on the contrary, such experiences put us into contact with an absolute reality, a mystery which our imagination glimpses but our thoughts cannot fully comprehend. Just because beauty is not in my eye at one particular moment does not mean it is not there, waiting to be seen and tasted, if only I am willing to feel its presence. QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT 1. Can we ever know that a certain object is beautiful? 2. Must judgments of beauty be applied only to objects of sense perception? 3. If our imagination controls our thinking, how can we avoid falling into illusions? 4. What are the essential characteristics of a judgment that something is sublime? RECOMMENDED READINGS 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, tr. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), especially Part I, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, sections 1-22, "Analytic of the Beautiful", pp.203-244. (Page numbers refer to the original German pagination, given in the margins of Meredith's text.) 2. Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981[1952]). 3. Erazim Koh k, The Embers and the Stars: A philosophical inquiry into the moral sense of nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 4. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1961).