§ 28. On nature as a might

Might is a capacity that surpasses great obstacles. This same thing is called a dominion when it also surpasses the resistance of something that itself possesses might. Nature, regarded in aesthetic judgment as a might over us that yet wields no dominion, is dynamically sublime.

If nature is to be judged by us as dynamically sublime, then it must be presented as inspiring fear (though the reverse does not hold, that every object inspiring fear is deemed sublime in our aesthetic judgment). For within aesthetic appraisal (which proceeds without a concept), superiority over obstacles can be gauged solely by the magnitude of the resistance. Now what we strive to withstand is an evil, and, should we find our powers unequal to it, it becomes an object of fear. Hence nature, for the aesthetic power of judgment, can pass as a might — and thus as dynamically sublime — only to the extent that it is looked upon as an object of fear.

One can, however, regard an object as fearful without being afraid of it, namely when we judge it in such a way that we merely think the case in which we might wish to offer it resistance, and that then all resistance would be utterly in vain. So the virtuous person fears God without being afraid of him, since he does not think of wishing to resist him and his commandments as any case worrisome on his part. But for every such case that he thinks not impossible in itself, he recognizes it as fearful.

Whoever is afraid can pass no judgment at all on the sublimity of nature, just as little as one taken up by inclination and appetite can judge of the beautiful. The former takes flight from the sight of any object that strikes dread into him; nor can any satisfaction be found in a terror meant in earnest. Hence the agreeableness arising from the cessation of a hardship is gladness. This, however, on account of deliverance from a danger, is a gladness accompanied by the resolve never to expose oneself to it again; indeed, one has no wish even to recall that sensation fondly, far from seeking out the occasion for it oneself.

Bold, overhanging crags that all but menace us, thunderclouds heaping themselves up in the heavens and rolling onward amid lightning and thunder, volcanoes in the whole of their destroying force, hurricanes that leave devastation behind them, the boundless ocean thrown into an uproar, the lofty cascade of a mighty river, and things of this kind — set against their might, these shrink our power of resistance to an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them grows all the more compelling the more frightful it is, so long as we ourselves stand secure; and we readily name such objects sublime, since they lift the soul's fortitude above its ordinary measure and let us uncover within us a power to resist of a wholly different order, one that emboldens us to pit ourselves against the apparent all-power of nature.

For just as, faced with the immeasurability of nature and the insufficiency of our own capacity, we found our own limitation when we sought a measure suited to the aesthetic estimation of its domain's magnitude, yet at the same time found, in our power of reason, a second, non-sensible standard that keeps that very infinitude beneath it as one unit, before which the whole of nature is small, and so found in our mind a superiority over nature itself even in its immeasurability: so likewise the irresistibility of its might, though it makes us, viewed as beings of nature, acknowledge our physical powerlessness, at the same time uncovers in us a capacity to judge ourselves independent of it, together with a superiority over nature upon which rests a self-preservation of a wholly different sort than the one that can be challenged and imperiled by the nature beyond us; and in all this the humanity in our person is left undegraded, even though the human being would be bound to succumb to that dominion. In this manner nature, in our aesthetic judgment, is deemed sublime not on the ground that it excites fear, but because it calls forth in us a power of our own (which is no part of nature), so that we treat as trifling the things we are anxious about (goods, health, and life), and thereby treat its might (to which, as regards these matters, we are certainly subject) as being nonetheless, for us and our personhood, no such dominion as would require us to bow beneath it whenever our supreme principles and their upholding or surrender were at stake. Nature, then, is styled sublime in this place solely because it elevates the imagination toward exhibiting those very cases in which the mind is able to make felt to itself the sublimity proper to its own vocation, a sublimity even above nature.

This self-esteem loses nothing by the fact that we must see ourselves in safety in order to feel this exhilarating satisfaction, and hence that, because the danger is not in earnest, the sublimity of our spiritual power might also (as it may seem) be just as little in earnest. For the satisfaction at issue here bears only upon the vocation of our capacity that comes to light in such a case, inasmuch as the disposition toward it resides in our nature; whereas the developing and exercising of it are left to us and laid upon us as our charge. And there is truth in this, however conscious the human being may be of his present actual impotence when he extends his reflection this far.

This principle does indeed look too far-fetched and over-refined, and thus too exorbitant for an aesthetic judgment; and yet the study of the human being demonstrates the reverse, and reveals that it can lie at the base of the most commonplace assessments, however little one is always aware of it. For what, after all, is that which even to the savage counts as an object of the greatest admiration? A human being who is not startled, who is not afraid, and so does not give way before danger, yet at the same time sets to work vigorously with full deliberation. Even in the most highly civilized state this exceptional regard for the warrior endures; save that one demands besides that he should, together with it, exhibit every peaceful virtue — mildness, compassion, and even a becoming solicitude for his own person — and this precisely because it is here that the indomitability of his mind in the face of danger comes to be recognized. Hence one may dispute as much as one likes, in comparing the statesman with the general, over the superiority of the respect that the one deserves over the other; the aesthetic judgment decides for the latter. War itself, provided it is waged with order and a hallowed respect for the rights of citizens, carries something sublime within it, and renders the cast of mind of a people that wages it in such a fashion all the more sublime the greater the perils to which it stood exposed and beneath which it managed to bear itself bravely; whereas a protracted peace is wont to give the upper hand to the mere trading spirit, and with it low self-seeking, cowardice, and effeminacy, and to degrade a people's cast of mind.

It appears to militate against this analysis of the concept of the sublime, so far as the sublime is attributed to might, that we are wont to picture God — in the thunderstorm, in the tempest, in the earthquake, and the like — as presenting himself at once in wrath and in his sublimity, whereas the fancy of any ascendancy of our mind over these effects, and, so it appears, even over the designs of such a might, would be at one and the same time folly and sacrilege. In this case the frame of mind suited to the appearance of such an object seems to be, not any feeling of the sublimity belonging to our own nature, but rather submissiveness, despondency, and a sense of complete powerlessness — a disposition that is, moreover, ordinarily associated with the idea of that object whenever a natural event of this kind occurs. In religion generally, prostration, adoration with bowed head, with contrite, anxious gestures and voices, seems to be the only fitting conduct in the presence of the deity, which most peoples have therefore adopted and still observe. This disposition of mind, however, is in itself and of necessity very far from being tied to the idea of a religion's sublimity and of its object. That human being who is genuinely afraid, because he discovers within himself a ground for it — aware, that is, that through his blameworthy cast of mind he transgresses against a might whose will cannot be withstood and is at once just — stands in no way in that settledness of mind requisite for admiring the divine greatness, a thing that calls for a temper disposed to tranquil contemplation and for a wholly unconstrained judgment. It is solely then, once he becomes conscious of his own upright disposition pleasing to God, that those workings of might come to stir the idea of this being's sublimity in him — to the degree that he acknowledges within himself a loftiness of disposition answering to that being's will, and is by this means lifted above any fear of such workings of nature, which he does not take to be eruptions of its wrath. Humility, too — taken as an unsparing appraisal of one's own shortcomings, which, where the consciousness of good dispositions is present, might otherwise be readily glossed over as the frailty of human nature — is a sublime cast of mind: to subject oneself, of one's own accord, to the pain of self-reproach so as by degrees to root out the cause of it. In this way alone does religion inwardly distinguish itself from superstition, the latter of which grounds in the mind not reverence for the sublime, but fear and dread before the overpowering being to whose will the terrified human being sees himself subjected without, however, holding it in high esteem — from which of course nothing but ingratiation and flattery can spring, in place of a religion of good conduct of life.

Sublimity, accordingly, resides in no object of nature, but is contained in our mind alone, to the extent that we can grow conscious of standing superior to the nature within us, and by that very means to the nature outside us as well (insofar as it flows in upon us). Everything that arouses this feeling in us — to which belongs the might of nature that calls forth our powers — is then called (though improperly) sublime; and only under the presupposition of this idea within us, and in relation to it, can we ascend to the idea of the sublimity belonging to that being which works within us a heartfelt respect not merely through its might, as displayed in nature, but still more through the capacity, laid within us, to judge that might without fear and to think of our vocation as sublime above it.

§ 29. On the modality of the judgment on the sublime of nature

There are countless objects of beautiful nature regarding which we may straightaway require of everyone an agreement of judgment with our own and, without going much astray, may also expect it; but with our judgment about the sublime in nature we cannot so easily count on gaining acceptance from others. For to be capable of rendering a judgment upon this excellence in natural objects, there seems to be needed a culture far greater in degree — one belonging not solely to the aesthetic power of judgment but likewise to the cognitive faculties on which it rests.

For the mind to be tuned to the feeling of the sublime, it must be receptive to ideas; for what is forbidding to sensibility — though at the same time alluring — consists precisely in nature's incommensurability with those ideas, and thus arises only on the presupposition of them together with an exertion of the imagination that handles nature as a schema for them: since this is a force that reason wields upon sensibility, merely so as to expand it in keeping with reason's proper territory (the practical) and to make it gaze out upon the infinite, which to sensibility yawns as an abyss. In fact, to anyone still crude, what we — schooled beforehand by culture — term sublime will, absent any cultivation of moral ideas, appear nothing more than forbidding. In the evidences of nature's dominion in its devastation, and in the great scale of its might, against which his own vanishes into nothing, he will see nothing but hardship, danger, and distress that would beset the person banished to such a place. Thus the good, and otherwise sensible, Savoyard peasant (as Mr. de Saussure recounts) unhesitatingly called all lovers of the glaciers fools. And who knows whether he would have been so entirely wrong, if that observer had taken on the dangers to which he exposed himself here merely, as most travelers are wont to do, out of a hobbyist's enthusiasm, or in order one day to be able to give affecting descriptions of them? But as it stood, his intention was the instruction of humankind; and the soul-uplifting sensation was one that the excellent man both had himself and instilled, as something over and above their purchase, in the readers of his travels.

But although the judging of nature's sublimity calls for culture (to a greater degree than the judging of the beautiful), it is nevertheless not for that reason something that culture originally brought forth, nor a mere convention established within society; its ground lies instead in human nature itself — specifically in what, along with sound understanding, may be expected and demanded of each person alike, that is, in the disposition toward a feeling for (practical) ideas, in a word, toward what is moral.

On this, now, is grounded the necessity of others' judgment about the sublime agreeing with our own — a necessity that we include within our own judgment at the same time. For just as we reproach with a want of taste anyone who stays indifferent when appraising a natural object we find beautiful, so of whoever remains unmoved before something our judgment pronounces sublime we declare that he possesses no feeling. Yet both we demand of every human being, and we likewise assume them present in him once he possesses some culture — with this one distinction: the first we require flatly of anyone at all, since in this the power of judgment ties the imagination purely to the understanding, taken as the faculty of concepts; the second, however, since therein the power of judgment relates the imagination to reason as the faculty of ideas, we require only on a subjective presupposition (one we nonetheless deem ourselves justified in expecting of anyone), namely the presupposition of moral feeling within the human being, and in this way we attach necessity to this aesthetic judgment too.

It is in this modality of aesthetic judgments — that is, in the necessity they presume to claim — that the critique of the power of judgment finds one of its chief moments. For it is just this that brings to light an a priori principle at work in them, raising them up out of empirical psychology — where they would otherwise stay buried, amid the feelings of enjoyment and pain (marked off merely by the vacuous label of a finer feeling) — in order to set them, and through them the power of judgment, within the class of those grounded upon principles a priori, and, as such, to carry them across into transcendental philosophy.

General remark on the exposition of the aesthetic reflecting judgments

As regards the feeling of pleasure, any object is to be reckoned as belonging to one among the agreeable, the beautiful, the sublime, and the good (absolutely) (iucundum, pulchrum, sublime, honestum).

The agreeable, as an incentive of the desires, is throughout of one and the same kind, no matter from where it comes and however specifically different the representation (of sense and of sensation, considered objectively) may be. Hence, in judging its influence upon the mind, what matters is only the multitude of charms (simultaneous and successive) and, as it were, only the mass of agreeable sensation; and this, accordingly, can be made intelligible through nothing other than quantity. Nor does it cultivate; it pertains solely to enjoyment. — The beautiful, on the other hand, calls for the representation of a certain quality in the object, one that admits of being made intelligible and brought under concepts (even though the aesthetic judgment does not in fact bring it there); and it cultivates us, since it teaches us at once to attend to purposiveness in the feeling of pleasure. — The sublime lies purely in the relation wherein the sensible within nature's representation is appraised as fit for a possible supersensible employment of it. — The absolutely good, when it is appraised subjectively according to the feeling it inspires (as the object of moral feeling)—namely, as the determinability of the subject's powers by the representation of an absolutely necessitating law—differs above all through the modality of a necessity that rests upon concepts a priori and that harbors within itself not a mere claim but likewise a command of assent binding on everyone; and of itself it pertains not to the aesthetic power of judgment but to the pure intellectual one, being ascribed, moreover, not in a merely reflecting judgment but in a determining one, and not to nature but to freedom. Yet the determinability of the subject by this idea—that of a subject able to feel within itself obstacles posed by sensibility, and at the same time, through surmounting them, a superiority over it as a modification of its state—that is to say, the moral feeling, stands nonetheless in such kinship with the aesthetic power of judgment and with its formal conditions that it can help to exhibit the lawfulness of an action done from duty as itself aesthetic, namely as sublime, or indeed as beautiful, without any loss to its purity: something that fails to happen were one to bring it into natural union with the feeling of the agreeable.

Should one extract the upshot of the exposition given thus far of the two kinds of aesthetic judgment, the following concise explanations would emerge from it:

Beautiful is what gives pleasure in the mere act of judging (hence not through the sensation of sense following a concept of the understanding). It follows of its own accord from this that it must please devoid of all interest whatsoever.

Sublime is that which, by its resistance to the interest of the senses, pleases without mediation.

The two of them, taken as explanations of an aesthetic judging that holds universally, point back to subjective grounds—on one side to those of sensibility, so far as it serves the contemplative understanding, on the other to those of sensibility so far as it works against itself yet in behalf of the ends of practical reason, both grounds being nevertheless combined in one and the same subject, and purposive with a view to the moral feeling. The beautiful makes us ready to cherish something—nature itself included—apart from any interest; the sublime, to prize it even in defiance of our (sensible) interest.

The sublime admits of the following description: it is an object (in nature) whose representation determines the mind to conceive nature's unattainability as a presentation of ideas.

If taken to the letter and viewed logically, ideas admit of no presentation. But once we enlarge our empirical faculty of representation (whether mathematically or dynamically) for the intuition of nature, reason unfailingly enters as the faculty of the independence of absolute totality, and gives rise to the mind's endeavor—vain though it is—to render the representation of the senses commensurate with that totality. This striving, together with the feeling that the idea stays out of the imagination's reach, is itself a presentation of how our mind is subjectively purposive when it puts the imagination to work for its supersensible vocation, and it obliges us to think nature itself, subjectively, taken as a whole, as a presentation of something supersensible, though we cannot render this presentation objectively.

For we soon become aware that nature in space and time entirely lacks the unconditioned, and hence also absolute magnitude, which is nevertheless demanded by the most common reason. Precisely thereby we are further reminded that our concern is only with a nature qua appearance, and that this nature must itself still be looked upon as no more than the presentation of a nature in itself (a nature that reason holds in the idea). This idea of the supersensible, though—one we cannot determine any further, so that we can accordingly not cognize nature as its presentation but only think it—is roused in us by an object whose aesthetic judging strains the imagination up to its boundary, be it of extension (mathematically) or of its might over the mind (dynamically), since it rests upon the feeling (the moral feeling) of a determination of the mind that wholly transgresses the province of the former, in view of which the representation of the object comes to be appraised as subjectively purposive.

Indeed, a feeling for the sublime of nature cannot well be thought without connecting with it a disposition of the mind similar to that for the moral; and although an immediate pleasure in nature's beauty likewise both presupposes and fosters a certain liberality in the manner of thought, that is, an independence of the satisfaction from mere enjoyment of the senses, freedom is thereby represented still more as in play than under a lawful business: which is the genuine character of the morality of the human being, where reason must do violence to sensibility, only that in the aesthetic judgment about the sublime this violence is represented as exercised by the imagination itself, functioning as an instrument of reason.

Hence, too, the satisfaction felt in nature's sublime is merely negative (whereas in the beautiful it is positive)—that is, a feeling that the imagination robs itself of its own freedom, in being purposively determined according to a law other than that of its empirical use. Thereby it acquires an extension and might that is greater than the one it sacrifices, but whose ground remains hidden from it, whereas it feels both the sacrifice, or the deprivation, and, along with it, the cause to which it is thereby made subject. The astonishment verging on fright, the dread and the holy shudder that grips the beholder before the spectacle of mountain masses climbing skyward, of deep gorges with their raging torrents, of deeply shaded solitudes that invite melancholy meditation, and so forth, is—so secure does he know himself to be—no genuine fear, but merely an endeavor to enter into it through the imagination, so as to feel the might of this very faculty, to bind the stirring of the mind thus aroused together with the mind's repose, and thereby to prevail over the nature within ourselves, and consequently over that outside us as well, so far as it is able to bear upon the feeling of our well-being. For the imagination, in keeping with the law of association, renders our contented condition physically dependent; the same power, however, in keeping with the principles of the schematism of the power of judgment (and hence so far as it stands subordinate to freedom), serves as a tool of reason and of its ideas, and as such as a might for asserting our independence in the face of nature's influences, for belittling as small what counts as great by the former standard, and so for situating the absolutely great only within the subject's own determination. This reflective act of the aesthetic power of judgment—the act of lifting itself to a commensurateness with reason (though without any determinate concept of the latter)—nonetheless exhibits the object itself as subjectively purposive by way of the objective incommensurateness of the imagination, at its utmost expansion, with reason (as the faculty of ideas).

One must here in general attend to what was recalled already above—namely, that the transcendental aesthetic of the power of judgment must treat exclusively of pure aesthetic judgments, and that no examples may accordingly be borrowed from those beautiful or sublime objects in nature which presuppose the concept of an end; for in that case there would be a purposiveness that is either teleological or grounded on mere sensations of an object (gratification or pain), and thus in the former case not aesthetic and in the latter not merely formal. Thus if one calls the sight of the starry heavens sublime, one must not lay at the ground of its judging concepts of worlds inhabited by rational beings, and then the shining points with which we behold the space over our heads filled up, as their suns moving in orbits arranged very purposively for them, but rather merely as one sees it, as a vast vault that encompasses everything; and merely under this representation must we place the sublimity that a pure aesthetic judgment ascribes to this object. Likewise the sight of the ocean, not as we, enriched with all sorts of knowledge (which, however, is not contained in the immediate intuition), think it; say as a vast realm of aquatic creatures, as the great treasury of water for the vapors that impregnate the air with clouds for the benefit of the lands, or also as an element that indeed separates parts of the world from one another yet nonetheless makes possible the greatest community among them: for that yields nothing but teleological judgments; rather one must, merely as the poets do, according to what the sight of it shows—say, when it is contemplated at rest, as a clear mirror of water bounded only by the sky, but, when it is turbulent, as an abyss threatening to swallow up everything—nevertheless be able to find the ocean sublime. Precisely the same is to be said of the sublime and beautiful as found in the human figure, in whose case we must not, as determining grounds of the judgment, revert to concepts of the ends for which all its members are there, nor allow the agreement with them to enter into our (then no longer pure) aesthetic judgment—even though the fact that they do not conflict with those ends is, to be sure, a necessary condition of aesthetic satisfaction as well. Aesthetic purposiveness consists in the lawfulness of the power of judgment as it stands in its freedom. The satisfaction taken in the object hangs upon the relation in which we would place the imagination: only that, of itself, it must keep the mind engaged in a free occupation. If instead something else—whether a sensation of sense or a concept of the understanding—settles the judgment, then, lawful though it be, it is not the verdict of a free power of judgment.

Hence, whenever one talks of intellectual beauty or of intellectual sublimity, first, these expressions are not fully accurate, since what is at issue are aesthetic modes of representation that would not be encountered in us at all were we mere pure intelligences (or transposed ourselves in thought into that quality); second, although the two of them, being objects of an intellectual (moral) satisfaction, are indeed compatible with the aesthetic so far as they rest upon no interest, they are nonetheless once again hard to reconcile with it, because they are meant to produce an interest which, supposing the presentation is to accord with the satisfaction in aesthetic judging, could in the latter come about in no other way than through an interest of sense that one connects with it in the presentation, whereby, however, the intellectual purposiveness suffers damage and is rendered impure.

The moral law, in the might it wields within us over any and all incentives of the mind preceding it, is what constitutes the object of a pure, unconditioned intellectual satisfaction; and since this might properly renders itself aesthetically recognizable only by way of sacrifices (a deprivation, albeit one on behalf of inner freedom, which on the other hand discloses in us an unfathomable depth of this supersensible faculty, whose consequences reach out into the unsurveyable), the satisfaction, viewed from the aesthetic side (in reference to sensibility), is negative—that is, opposed to this interest—yet viewed from the intellectual side, positive and joined with an interest. It follows from this that the intellectual good, which is purposive in itself (the morally good), when judged aesthetically, must be represented less as beautiful than rather as sublime, in such a way that it awakens the feeling of respect (which disdains charm) more than that of love and familiar affection; for human nature does not fall into accord with that good on its own, but only through the violence that reason inflicts upon sensibility. Conversely, whatever we name sublime in the nature outside us, or likewise within us (e.g., certain affects), comes to be represented—and thereby to grow interesting—solely as a might of the mind to lift itself above certain obstacles of sensibility through moral principles.

I will dwell a little on the latter. The idea of the good conjoined with affect goes by the name of enthusiasm. Such a condition of the mind appears to be sublime, to such a degree that people commonly claim: apart from it nothing great can be brought about. But now every affect⁹ is blind—either in choosing its end, or, when the end has indeed been furnished by reason, in carrying it out; for it is that movement of the mind which renders the mind unable to conduct a free deliberation of principles so as to determine itself thereby. Thus it can in no way merit a satisfaction of reason. Aesthetically, nonetheless, enthusiasm is sublime, because it is a straining of the powers through ideas that give the mind a momentum which acts far more powerfully and enduringly than the impulse through representations of sense. But (which seems strange) even absence of affect (Apatheia, Phlegma in significatu bono) in a mind that emphatically pursues its unalterable principles is sublime, and indeed in a far more excellent way, because it at the same time has the satisfaction of pure reason on its side. A mind of this kind alone is called noble: an expression that is afterward applied also to things, e.g., buildings, a garment, a style of writing, bodily bearing, and the like, when these arouse not so much astonishment (affect in the representation of novelty that exceeds expectation) as admiration (an astonishment that does not cease with the loss of novelty), which happens when ideas, in their presentation, accord unintentionally and without art with aesthetic satisfaction.

Every affect of the brave sort (namely the sort that rouses the awareness of our powers to surmount any resistance whatever (animi strenui)) is aesthetically sublime, e.g., anger, even despair (namely the indignant sort, though not the despondent one). But the affect of the melting kind (which makes the very striving to resist an object of displeasure (animum languidum)) has nothing noble about it, though it can be counted as belonging to the beautiful in the manner of sensing. Hence the emotions that can grow strong enough to become affects are also very diverse. There are courageous emotions, there are tender ones. The latter, when they rise to the level of affect, are worth nothing at all; the inclination to them is called sentimentality. A commiserating pain that refuses to be comforted, or into which—when it bears on invented ills—we knowingly let ourselves be drawn, right up to the deception of fancy that treats them as though they were real, both proves and produces a tender yet at the same time feeble soul, one that displays a beautiful side and may indeed be termed fanciful, though not so much as enthusiastic. Novels, maudlin stage-plays, vapid moral maxims that trifle with dispositions (falsely, to be sure) called noble, but that in truth leave the heart shriveled and unfeeling toward the stern precept of duty, and render it devoid of every reverence for humanity's dignity in our own person and for the right of human beings (which is quite a different thing from their happiness) and, generally, of all steadfast principles; even a sermon on religion that commends a groveling, base soliciting of favor and fawning, one that surrenders every reliance on one's own capacity to resist the evil in us, in place of the vigorous determination to put to the test those powers that, for all our frailty, still remain to us for mastering the inclinations; the false humility that sets, in self-contempt, in a whimpering and dissembled repentance, and in a merely suffering cast of mind, the one way in which alone one might come to please the supreme being—all of these are not even consonant with what might be reckoned to beauty, far less with what might be reckoned to the sublimity of the mind's cast.

But even stormy agitations of the mind—be they bound up, under the name of edification, with ideas of religion, or, as belonging merely to culture, with ideas that carry a social interest—can, however greatly they may strain the imagination, in no way lay claim to the honor of a sublime presentation, unless they leave behind a frame of mind that bears, if only indirectly, upon the awareness of one's strength and resolve toward that which brings with it a pure intellectual purposiveness (the supersensible). For otherwise all these emotions amount to nothing but motion, which one is happy to have for the sake of one's health. The pleasant weariness that ensues upon such a jostling through the play of the affects is a relishing of well-being springing from the restored equilibrium of the manifold vital forces within us—an enjoyment that in the end comes down to just the same as the one the voluptuaries of the Orient find so cozy when they have their body, so to speak, kneaded through and through and let all their muscles and joints be gently pressed and flexed; save that there the moving principle lies for the most part within us, while here it lies wholly outside us. Thus one person or another now fancies himself edified by a sermon in which nothing whatever is built up (no system of good maxims), another bettered by a tragedy, though he is merely pleased at boredom fortunately chased away. The sublime, accordingly, must at all times bear a relation to the way of thinking, that is, to maxims that secure for the intellectual and for the ideas of reason a supremacy over sensibility.

There is no cause to fear that the feeling of the sublime stands to lose through such a detached mode of presentation, one that turns wholly negative in regard to the sensible; for the imagination, though beyond the sensible it lights on nothing it can cling to, yet feels itself unbounded precisely by this doing-away with its own barriers: and that setting-apart is therefore a presentation of the infinite, which precisely on that account can never be anything other than a bare negative presentation, and yet enlarges the soul. There is perhaps no passage more sublime in the Jews' book of law than this commandment: You shall make yourself no graven image, nor any likeness at all, whether of what is in heaven, or on the earth, or beneath the earth, and so on. This commandment by itself is able to account for the enthusiasm that the Jewish people, during its civilized era, felt toward its religion whenever it set itself alongside other nations, or for the pride that Mohammedanism instills. The very same holds also of the representation of the moral law and of the predisposition to morality within us. It is a wholly erroneous apprehension that, were one to strip it of all that might commend it to the senses, it would then bring with it none other than a cold, lifeless assent, and no stirring force or emotion whatever. The truth is exactly the opposite; for there, where the senses now behold nothing further before them while the unmistakable and inextinguishable idea of morality yet persists, it would be needful rather to temper the impetus of an unbounded imagination, lest it climb as high as enthusiasm, than, out of a fear that these ideas want force, to seek aid on their behalf in pictures and childish apparatus. Hence governments too have gladly permitted religion to be amply furnished with the latter accessories, and have thus sought to relieve the subject of the trouble, but at the same time also of the capacity, of extending his powers of soul beyond the limits that one arbitrarily sets for him and by means of which one can more easily handle him as merely passive.

This pure, soul-elevating, merely negative presentation of morality, on the contrary, carries no danger of fanaticism, which is a delusion of craving to see something past every bound of sensibility, that is, to dream in accordance with principles (to rave with reason), to will it; and that, precisely because with the former the presentation remains merely negative. For the inscrutability of the idea of freedom cuts off entirely every avenue to positive presentation: the moral law, on the other hand, is of itself sufficient in us and determining from the outset, so much so that it does not so much as allow us to cast about for a determining ground lying outside it. If enthusiasm is to be compared with madness, then fanaticism is to be compared with derangement, of which the latter is the least compatible of all with the sublime, because it is broodingly ridiculous. In enthusiasm, as an affect, the imagination is unbridled; in fanaticism, as a deep-rooted, brooding passion, it is ruleless. The former is a passing accident that occasionally befalls even the healthiest understanding; the second is a disease that deranges it.

Simplicity (artless purposiveness) is, as it were, nature's style in the sublime, and so too the style of morality, which is a second (supersensible) nature whose laws alone are known to us, while we cannot reach, through intuition, the supersensible faculty within ourselves in which the ground of this legislation resides.

It remains to be observed that, even though the satisfaction in the beautiful, no less than that in the sublime, is not merely marked off recognizably from the other aesthetic judgings by universal communicability, but through this very property also gains an interest with regard to society (within which it admits of being communicated), the separation from all society is nevertheless likewise looked upon as something sublime, provided it rests on ideas that see past all sensible interest. To suffice for oneself, and thus to stand in no need of society, yet without being unsociable—that is, without fleeing it—is something that draws near to the sublime, as does every raising of oneself above needs. To flee one's fellow human beings, on the other hand, from misanthropy, because one bears them enmity, or from anthropophobia (shyness of humankind), because one dreads them as enemies, is in part ugly, in part contemptible. Nonetheless there is a (very improperly so-called) misanthropy, the predisposition to which tends to settle with age in the mind of many a right-thinking person, one who, as regards benevolence, is philanthropic enough, but who through a long, sad experience has been drawn far away from satisfaction in human beings: to which the leaning toward seclusion bears witness, or the fanciful longing for a remote country seat, or else (in young persons) the fancied bliss of passing one's lifetime with a small family upon some isle of which the rest of the world knows nothing, a wish that the novel-writers and poets of Robinsonades know so well how to turn to account. Falsehood, ingratitude, injustice, the childish character of those ends that we ourselves deem weighty and grand—ends in whose pursuit human beings do one another every imaginable harm—stand so at odds with the idea of what they might be were they willing, and run so counter to the keen wish to see them improved, that, so as not to hate them, seeing that one cannot love them, the surrender of all the joys of society seems only a slight sacrifice. This sadness—not over the evils that fate imposes upon other human beings (of which sympathy is the cause), but over those that they inflict upon themselves (which rests on antipathy in principles)—is, because it rests on ideas, sublime, whereas the former can likewise count only as beautiful. — The equally ingenious and thorough Saussure says, in the description of his Alpine journeys, of Bonhomme, one of the Savoyard mountains: »There prevails there a certain insipid sadness.« He was therefore acquainted, after all, with an interesting sadness that the sight of a wasteland inspires—into which human beings might well wish to transport themselves in order to hear or learn nothing further of the world—which then need not be so entirely inhospitable as to offer human beings only a most toilsome sojourn. — I offer this observation solely with the aim of calling to mind that affliction as well (not a downcast sadness) may be numbered among the vigorous affects, when it is grounded in moral ideas; whereas, if it rests on sympathy and as such is likewise lovable, it belongs merely among the melting affects: so as thereby to draw notice to the frame of mind that is sublime in the former case alone.

One may now set the transcendental exposition of aesthetic judgments just carried through alongside the physiological one, as a Burke and many sharp-witted men among us have elaborated it, so as to see where a purely empirical exposition of what is sublime and beautiful would lead. Burke¹⁰, who merits being named the most eminent author in this manner of treatment, arrives by this route (p. 223 of his work) at the following: »that the feeling of the sublime is founded upon the impulse toward self-preservation and upon fear, that is, upon a pain which, since it does not reach the point of a real disruption of the bodily parts, brings forth movements that—inasmuch as they purge the finer or coarser vessels of perilous and troublesome obstructions—are able to arouse agreeable sensations, not pleasure indeed, but a species of gratifying shudder, a certain repose that is blended with terror.« The beautiful, which he grounds on love (from which, however, he wants desire to be kept separate), he traces (pp. 251–252) »to the slackening, relaxation, and enfeeblement of the fibers of the body, and hence a softening, dissolution, exhaustion, a sinking away, a dying away, a melting away with pleasure.« And now he confirms this manner of explanation not only through cases in which the imagination in connection with the understanding, but even in connection with sensation of sense, can arouse in us the feeling of the beautiful as well as of the sublime. — As psychological observations, these dissections of the phenomena of our mind are exceedingly fine and provide rich material for the most favored investigations of empirical anthropology. Nor is it to be denied that all representations within us, be they objectively nothing but sensible or else wholly intellectual, can yet subjectively be tied to gratification or pain, however unnoticeable each may be (for they collectively affect the feeling of life, and none among them, so far as it constitutes a modification of the subject, is capable of being indifferent); indeed, that, as Epicurus contended, gratification and pain are at bottom always corporeal in the end, whether they set out from imagining or even from representations of the understanding: for life, deprived of the feeling of the bodily organ, would be nothing but a consciousness of one's own existence, and no feeling of faring well or ill, that is, of the furtherance or checking of the vital forces; for the mind, taken by itself alone, is wholly life (the life-principle itself), and obstacles or furtherances have to be sought beyond it and yet within the human being himself, and hence in the union with his body.

But if one places the satisfaction in the object entirely and wholly in the fact that it gratifies through charm or through emotion, then one may also not expect any other person to agree with the aesthetic judgment that we pass; for about this each rightly consults only his own private sense. But then all censorship of taste also entirely ceases; unless one were to make the example that others give through the accidental agreement of their judgments into a command of approval for us—a principle against which we would nevertheless presumably resist and appeal to the natural right of subjecting the judgment that rests on the immediate feeling of one's own well-being to one's own sense and not to that of others.

If, then, the judgment of taste must of necessity hold not as egoistic, but, by its inner nature—that is, on its own account, and not on account of the examples of their taste that others put forward—as pluralistic, once one accords it the standing of a judgment that may at once require everyone to fall in with it: then there must lie at its ground some principle a priori (whether objective or subjective), one at which no ferreting out of empirical laws of the mind's changes can ever arrive: for such laws only let it be known how judging occurs, but do not prescribe how one ought to judge, and this, moreover, in such a manner that the prescription is unconditioned—which is just what the judgments of taste presuppose, in that they would have the satisfaction bound up immediately with a representation. The empirical exposition of aesthetic judgments may therefore always be what makes the start, so as to furnish the material for a loftier inquiry; a transcendental treatment of this faculty is nonetheless possible and belongs essentially to the critique of taste. For unless it had principles a priori, it could not possibly sit in judgment over the judgments of others and pass verdicts of approval or rejection upon them with even a semblance of right.

What remains, of all that pertains to the analytic of the aesthetic power of judgment, comprises first and foremost the

Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments

§ 30. The deduction of aesthetic judgments concerning nature's objects must be directed not at what we call sublime in nature, but solely at the beautiful

The claim that an aesthetic judgment makes to universal validity for every subject, being a judgment that has to be grounded on some principle a priori, stands in need of a deduction (that is, a legitimation of its pretension), one that has to be supplied beyond the mere exposition of that judgment — namely, whenever it concerns a satisfaction or displeasure in the object's form. The judgments of taste passed upon nature's beauty are precisely such judgments. For the purposiveness then, even so, has its ground in the object and in its shape, granted that it does not point to that object's relation to other objects by way of concepts (with a view to a cognitive judgment); instead it merely concerns the apprehension of this form, insofar as that form, within the mind, proves commensurate with the faculty both of concepts and of their presentation (this latter being one and the same as the faculty of apprehension), taken quite generally. With regard to nature's beauty, accordingly, one can likewise pose a variety of questions bearing on the cause of this purposiveness of its forms: for instance, how one is to account for nature's having scattered beauty so prodigally on every side, even upon the ocean floor, which the human eye — the sole thing for which such beauty is after all purposive — but seldom reaches, and so forth.

The sublime in nature, however — if we pronounce a pure aesthetic judgment upon it, one not blended with concepts of perfection understood as objective purposiveness, since were that the case the judgment would instead be teleological — may be taken as altogether formless or shapeless and yet as something in which a pure satisfaction is found, and may display a subjective purposiveness belonging to the given representation; and so the question now presents itself: whether, for an aesthetic judgment of this sort, over and above the exposition of what gets thought within it, one may further demand a deduction of its claim to some (subjective) principle a priori.

The answer to this runs as follows: that the sublime in nature bears that name only in a loose sense, and that strictly it must be attributed merely to the manner of thinking, or rather to the foundation for it lying in human nature. The apprehension of an object that is otherwise formless and devoid of purposiveness does no more than provide the occasion for becoming conscious of this — an object that in this fashion gets employed subjectively and purposively, yet is not judged as such an object in its own right and for the sake of its form (as it were, species finalis accepta, non data). Our exposition of the judgments upon the sublime in nature was thus at the same time their deduction. For once we had taken apart how the power of judgment reflects within such judgments, we came upon in them a purposive relationship among the cognitive powers — one that has to be laid a priori at the basis of the faculty of ends (the will) and is on that account itself purposive a priori: a relationship that thereupon immediately carries with it the deduction, that is, the vindication of such a judgment's claim to a universally necessary validity.

We shall accordingly have merely to look for the deduction of judgments of taste, that is, of the judgments concerning the beauty of natural things, and in this way discharge the task set for the aesthetic power of judgment in its entirety.

§ 31. On the method of the deduction of judgments of taste

A deduction—that is, the warranting of the lawfulness—of a kind of judgment becomes requisite only where that judgment stakes a claim to necessity; and this holds too whenever it calls for subjective universality, in other words the concurrence of everyone: although it remains, all the while, no cognitive judgment but only one concerning the pleasure or displeasure taken in a given object, that is, the pretension to a subjective purposiveness that shall hold without exception for each person, a purposiveness meant to rest on no concepts of the matter, since it is a judgment of taste.

For, in the latter of these cases, what lies before us is no cognitive judgment at all—not a theoretical one, which takes as its ground the concept of a nature as such by way of the understanding, nor a (pure) practical one, which posits as its ground the idea of freedom as given a priori through reason; and hence, as regards its validity a priori, we have to vindicate neither a judgment that sets forth what some thing is, nor the demand that, in order to produce it, I ought to perform something: and so, for the power of judgment in general, it will merely be the universal validity of a singular judgment—one that voices the subjective purposiveness belonging to an empirical representation of an object's form—which has to be exhibited, so as to explain how it may be possible that something should please simply in the appraising of it (apart from sensation of the senses or concept), and how, just as the appraisal of an object on behalf of a cognition in general is governed by universal rules, so too the satisfaction felt by each individual may be held forth as a rule for everyone besides.

Now, supposing that this universal validity is to rest not upon a gathering of votes and an inquiring around among others as to their way of sensing, but as it were upon an autonomy belonging to the subject that passes judgment on the feeling of pleasure (within the given representation)—that is, upon its very own taste—while nevertheless not being derivable from concepts either: then a judgment of this kind—as the judgment of taste indeed is—carries a twofold peculiarity, and a logical one at that: namely, first, a universal validity a priori that is yet not a logical universality proceeding by concepts, but rather the universality proper to a singular judgment; second, a necessity (one that must in every instance rest on grounds a priori) which all the same hinges on no grounds of proof a priori by whose representation the assent that the judgment of taste requires of everyone might be extorted.

The unraveling of these logical peculiarities—those wherein a judgment of taste sets itself apart from every cognitive judgment—will of itself be enough for the deduction of this peculiar faculty, so long as we here, to begin with, leave aside the whole of its content, that is, the feeling of pleasure, and set the aesthetic form side by side merely with the form that objective judgments take, as logic lays it down. We therefore wish first of all to bring these characteristic properties of taste before the mind, illustrated by examples .

§ 32. First peculiarity of the judgment of taste

In determining its object as regards satisfaction (as beauty), the judgment of taste lays claim to everyone's assent, just as if it were objective.

To say: this flower is beautiful amounts to nothing more than ascribing to it its own claim upon everyone's satisfaction. Through the agreeableness of its scent it has no claims whatever. This scent delights the one, while to the other it makes the head swim. What, then, could one surmise from this, other than that beauty must be taken to be a property of the flower itself, one that does not conform to the diversity of minds and of so many senses, but to which these must conform if they wish to pass judgment upon it? And yet this is not how matters stand. For the judgment of taste consists precisely in this, that it calls a thing beautiful only according to that constitution by which the thing accommodates itself to our manner of taking it in.

Moreover, of every judgment that is meant to prove the subject's taste it is required that the subject judge on its own, without needing to grope its way through experience among the judgments of others and to inform itself beforehand of their satisfaction or dissatisfaction in the same object, and hence that it pronounce its judgment not as imitation, on the grounds that a thing does, as it happens, really please universally, but rather a priori. Yet one might expect that an a priori judgment would have to include a concept of the object for the cognition of which it supplies the principle; the judgment of taste, however, rests on no concepts whatsoever and is nowhere cognition at all, but merely an aesthetic judgment.

For that reason a young poet is not to be turned from his conviction that his poem is beautiful, neither by the public's judgment nor by that of his friends; and if he does grant them a hearing, it happens not because his estimate of the matter has now changed, but because — even supposing (at least as concerns him) that the whole public were of a false taste — he still, in his hunger for applause, finds cause to conform himself to the common delusion (even against his own judgment). Only later, once his power of judgment has been sharpened further through practice, does he freely depart from his earlier judgment; just as he also handles those of his judgments that rest wholly upon reason. Taste lays claim to autonomy alone. Were one to let the judgments of others serve as the determining ground of one's own, that would be heteronomy.

That one rightly extols the works of the ancients as models and calls their authors classical, like a certain nobility among writers who by their precedent give laws to the people, seems to point to sources of taste that are a posteriori and to refute its autonomy in every subject. Yet with equal justice one could say that the ancient mathematicians, who even now pass for models — scarcely to be dispensed with — of the utmost thoroughness and elegance in the synthetic method, no less gave proof of an imitative reason on our side and of its inability to generate, out of itself, rigorous proofs endowed with the greatest intuition by means of the construction of concepts. No employment of our powers, however free it might be — and this holds even of reason, which is obliged to derive all its judgments a priori from one common source — would keep clear of faulty attempts, if every subject had always to begin wholly from the raw endowment of its native temper and no others had gone before it with their own; and that precedence was aimed not at turning those who come after into mere imitators, but rather, by the way they proceeded, at putting others onto the trail, so that these might search out the principles in their own selves and thereby follow their own, and often better, course. Even in religion, where surely each one must take the rule of his conduct from himself, since he also remains answerable for it and cannot shift the blame for his transgressions onto others as teachers or predecessors, still nothing is ever achieved by general precepts, whether one has received them from priests or philosophers or drawn them from oneself, so much as by an example of virtue or holiness, which, set forth in history, neither renders dispensable the autonomy of virtue drawn from the proper and original idea of morality (a priori), nor transforms it into a mechanism of imitation. Following after, which relates to a precedent, and not imitation, is the correct expression for every influence that the products of an exemplary author can have upon others; which signifies no more than this: to draw from the same sources from which that author himself drew, and to learn from one's predecessor merely the manner of conducting oneself therein. Yet of all our faculties and talents it is taste, above all, that — since its judgment admits of no determination by concepts or rules — has the greatest need of examples of whatever, in the onward march of culture, has held its place longest in approval, lest it should soon lapse back into coarseness and sink to the rawness of those first attempts.

§ 33. Second peculiarity of the judgment of taste

The judgment of taste cannot be settled by any grounds of proof whatever, as though it were merely something subjective.

Should someone judge a building, a prospect, or a poem to be without beauty, then, in the first place, he refuses to let a hundred voices, however loudly they all extol it, press their approval inwardly upon him. He may indeed pretend that it pleases him too, so as not to be taken for someone lacking taste; he may even fall to doubting whether his taste has been adequately formed through familiarity with a large enough range of objects of some given sort (much as a person who thinks he can make out something far off as a forest, while everyone else takes it for a town, comes to distrust the judgment of his own eyes). This much, however, he grasps quite clearly: that the applause of others furnishes no proof holding good for the estimation of beauty; that at most they may look and take note in his stead, and that whatever a crowd has seen in one and the same manner can, for him who supposes he has seen it differently, count as a sufficient ground of proof toward a theoretical and therefore logical [judgment], yet that what has given others pleasure is never able to furnish the basis of an aesthetic judgment. The unfavorable judgment others pass on us may, to be sure, quite justifiably give us pause about our own, though it can never bring us to see it as mistaken. Hence there is no empirical ground of proof by which to compel a judgment of taste from anyone.

Secondly, still less can a proof a priori according to determinate rules determine the judgment about beauty. Suppose someone recites his poem to me, or brings me along to a drama that, in the end, simply refuses to sit well with my taste: he is welcome to summon Batteux or Lessing, or critics of taste older and more celebrated still, along with every rule these have set up, as proof that his poem is beautiful; and even should particular passages, the very ones that displease me, chime perfectly with rules of beauty (in the shape there laid down and generally recognized): I stop up my ears, refuse to hear any reasons or subtle reasoning, and will sooner suppose those critics' rules to be false, or at least inapplicable to the case at hand, than let my judgment be fixed by grounds of proof a priori , seeing that what is at issue is to be a judgment of taste, not one of understanding or of reason.

This appears to be one of the principal reasons why the name of taste, of all names, has been fastened upon this aesthetic capacity for judging. For a person may list off for me every ingredient in a dish and observe of each that each of them is otherwise agreeable to me, and may over and above this rightly praise the wholesomeness of this fare; yet I stay deaf to all such grounds, I put the dish to the test of my own tongue and palate: and it is on that basis (not on universal principles) that I pass my judgment.

Indeed, a judgment of taste is invariably rendered, in each instance, as a singular judgment concerning the object. By setting the object, in respect of its pleasing quality, alongside the judgment of others, the understanding is able to arrive at a universal judgment: for instance, all tulips are beautiful; that, however, is then no judgment of taste but a logical one, which makes the bearing of an object upon taste into a predicate belonging to things of a certain kind as such; whereas what alone constitutes the judgment of taste is that through which I find a single given tulip beautiful, that is, find my satisfaction in it to be universally valid. Its peculiarity, however, consists in this: that, even though it has merely subjective validity, it nonetheless lays claim to all subjects just as thoroughly as could ever be the case if it were an objective judgment resting on grounds of cognition and capable of being enforced through a proof.

§ 34. No objective principle of taste is possible

By a principle of taste one would mean a fundamental proposition on whose condition the concept of an object might be brought under it, so that one could then, by inference, arrive at the result that the object is beautiful. But this is flatly impossible. For it is directly in the representation of the object that that I must feel the pleasure, and no grounds of proof can talk me into having it. Thus although critics, as Hume remarks, can reason more plausibly than cooks, they nonetheless share one and the same fate with them. The determining ground of their judgment cannot be looked for in the strength of proofs, but only in the reflecting that the subject carries out upon its own state (of pleasure or displeasure), with all prescriptions and rules set aside.

But that about which critics can and nevertheless should reason, in such a way that it serves toward the correction and extension of our judgments of taste, is not to lay out the determining ground of this kind of aesthetic judgment in a universally usable formula, which is impossible; rather it is to conduct an inquiry into the cognitive faculties and their business in these judgments, and to set forth in examples the reciprocal subjective purposiveness, of which it was shown above that its form in a given representation is the beauty of that representation's object. Thus the critique of taste is, in itself, merely subjective as regards the representation whereby an object comes to be given to us: that is, it is the art or the science of subsuming under rules the mutual bearing that understanding and imagination have on each other within the given representation (leaving aside any prior sensation or concept), and thus their agreement or disagreement, and of determining them as regards their conditions. It is art when it shows this only through examples; it is science when it traces the possibility of any such judging back to the very nature of these faculties, taken as faculties of cognition as such. It is with the latter, as a transcendental critique, with which alone we are here concerned throughout. It is to develop the subjective principle of taste, and to justify it, as a principle a priori of the power of judgment. Criticism practiced as an art merely seeks to bring to bear, on the judging of its objects, the physiological (here psychological), and hence empirical, rules by which taste in fact operates (without pausing to consider how they are possible), and it passes critical judgment on the products of fine art; just as the former passes judgment on the faculty itself by which they are judged.

§ 35. The principle of taste is the subjective principle of the power of judgment as such

What distinguishes the judgment of taste from the logical judgment is this: the latter places a representation under concepts of the object, whereas the former brings it under no concept whatever, for otherwise the necessary universal assent it demands would admit of being forced by proofs. Nevertheless, it is like the logical judgment in professing a universality and necessity—though not one drawn from concepts of the object, and therefore only a subjective one. Now because what makes up a judgment's content (all that pertains to cognition of the object) is its concepts, whereas the judgment of taste cannot be settled by any concept, this latter rests solely upon that subjective formal condition which any judgment whatever requires. Underlying every judgment as its subjective condition is the very faculty of judging, or the power of judgment. Brought to bear on a representation by which an object is given, this power calls for two representational faculties to be in agreement: the imagination (which supplies the intuition together with the assembling of its manifold) and the understanding (which supplies the concept whereby the unity of that assembling is represented). Here, because no concept of the object serves as the judgment's basis, the judgment can amount only to placing the imagination itself—with a representation whereby an object is given—beneath the condition that understanding as such arrives from intuition at concepts. That is to say: since the imagination's freedom lies precisely in its schematizing apart from any concept, a judgment of taste has to rest upon the bare sensation of imagination in its freedom and understanding with its lawfulness reciprocally quickening one another—thus on a feeling which allows the object to be judged according to the purposiveness of the representation (through which an object is given) in regard to the furthering of the cognitive powers in their free play; and a principle of subsumption is what taste, being a subjective power of judgment, harbors—though not one of intuitions under concepts but rather of the faculty of intuitions or presentations (that is, the imagination) under the faculty of concepts (in other words, the understanding), so far as the first of these in its freedom accords with the second in its lawfulness.

To track down this legitimating ground through a deduction of the judgments of taste, nothing can guide us but the formal peculiarities belonging to judgments of this sort—that is, taken merely so far as their logical form comes under consideration.

§ 36. On the task of a deduction of judgments of taste

With the perception of an object, the concept of an object in general — of which that perception contains the empirical predicates — can be immediately combined into a cognitive judgment, and thereby a judgment of experience be produced. Underlying this there now are concepts a priori of the synthetic unity belonging to the manifold of intuition, concepts through which that manifold gets thought as an object's determination; and these concepts — the categories — demand a deduction, which was in fact furnished in the Critique of Pure Reason as well, and by means of which the task could then be resolved: How are synthetic cognitive judgments a priori possible? This task, then, bore upon the a priori principles of the pure understanding and its theoretical judgments.

Yet a perception, too, may have immediately combined with it a feeling of pleasure (or displeasure) and a satisfaction, which attends the object's representation and takes the place of a predicate for it, so that an aesthetic judgment — one that is not a cognitive judgment — thereby arises. In the case of such a judgment — provided it is no mere judgment of sensation but rather a formal judgment of reflection, which requires of everyone this satisfaction as necessary — there must lie at the basis something serving as a principle a priori, something that may perhaps be merely subjective (in case an objective one should prove impossible for judgments of that sort), yet that, even so, stands in need of a deduction, in order that it be grasped how an aesthetic judgment can lay claim to necessity. On this now rests the task with which we are now occupied: How are judgments of taste possible? This task, accordingly, bears upon the principles a priori of the pure power of judgment as they hold in aesthetic judgments — that is, in judgments of the kind where it is not merely charged (as it is in the theoretical ones) with subsuming things beneath objective concepts of the understanding while standing under a law, but where it is, for itself and subjectively, at once the object and the law.

One may also present this task in the following way: How is there possible a judgment that, drawing solely upon one's own feeling of pleasure in an object and setting aside any concept of it, would appraise this pleasure a priori — that is, without needing to await the concurrence of anyone else — as something pertaining to the representation of that same object in every other subject?

It is easy to see that judgments of taste are synthetic, for they reach past the object's concept and even past its intuition, appending to that intuition, as a predicate, something that is not even cognition — namely, a feeling of pleasure (or displeasure). But that they are nonetheless — although the predicate here, namely the own pleasure that the representation carries with it, is empirical — judgments a priori as regards the required assent of everyone , or wish to be taken for such, this too is already contained in the very terms of their claim; and so this task of the critique of the power of judgment falls under transcendental philosophy's general problem: How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?

§ 37. What is actually asserted a priori of an object in a judgment of taste?

The fact that the representation of an object stands in immediate connection with a pleasure is something that can be noticed only inwardly, and, if one meant to point to nothing beyond this, it would furnish no more than an empirical judgment. For there is no representation with which I could combine a priori a determinate feeling (of pleasure or displeasure), save where some principle determining the will a priori underlies it in reason; and in that case the pleasure (in moral feeling) follows from that principle, yet precisely on that account admits of no comparison whatever with the pleasure of taste, since it requires a determinate concept of a law: the latter, by contrast, is meant to attach itself immediately to the bare act of judging, in advance of any concept. For this reason, too, every judgment of taste is a singular judgment, since it ties its predicate of satisfaction not to a concept but to a single empirical representation that has been given.

Hence what a judgment of taste represents a priori—as a rule holding universally for the power of judgment and valid for everyone—is not the pleasure itself, but the universal validity of this pleasure, which the mind apprehends as bound up with the bare appraising of an object. This is an empirical judgment: that I perceive and judge an object as accompanied by pleasure. This, however, is a judgment a priori: that I regard it as beautiful, which is to say, that I am entitled to require of everyone that same satisfaction as something necessary.

§ 38. Deduction of judgments of taste

Granting that, within a pure judgment of taste, the satisfaction in the object goes hand in hand with the mere judging of its form: then it is simply that form's subjective purposiveness for the power of judgment, which we sense in the mind as united with the representation of the object. Now the power of judgment, where the formal rules of judging are at issue and all matter is set aside (whether sensation of sense or concept), can be directed only toward those subjective conditions under which the power of judgment is exercised at all (conditions confined neither to some particular manner of sensing nor to any particular concept of the understanding), and hence toward that subjective element which one may presuppose in every human being (as requisite for any possible cognition whatever); and so it must be possible to assume a priori, as valid for everyone, that a representation agrees with these conditions of the power of judgment. That is to say, in the judging of any sensible object whatever, the pleasure — in other words, the representation's subjective purposiveness for the relation among the cognitive faculties — is something one may justly ask of every person¹¹.

Remark.

The reason this deduction proves so effortless is that it has no need to justify any objective reality belonging to a concept; for beauty is not a concept of the object, and a judgment of taste is no cognitive judgment. Its whole claim is this: that we are entitled to take the very subjective conditions of the power of judgment which we discover in ourselves and to presuppose them, quite generally, in every human being; and, beyond this, only that we have rightly, under these conditions, subsumed the given object. Now even though this last point brings with it inescapable difficulties that never burden the logical power of judgment — for there one subsumes things under concepts, while in the aesthetic case one subsumes them under a merely sensible relation between imagination and understanding, which mutually attune themselves to one another as the object's presented form is beheld, so that the subsumption can readily deceive — none of this, all the same, strips away anything from the rightful claim of the power of judgment to reckon on universal assent, a claim amounting to no more than this: that the principle's correctness is, on subjective grounds, to be judged valid for everyone. For where the difficulty and the doubt bear upon whether the subsumption under that principle has been carried out correctly, this leaves the legitimacy of the claim to such validity in an aesthetic judgment at large — and thus the principle itself — every bit as little in doubt as a mistaken subsumption on the part of the logical power of judgment beneath its own principle (a lapse just as possible there, though neither so frequent nor so easy) could cast doubt upon that objective principle behind it. Were the question instead to be: How is it possible to assume a priori that nature forms a totality of objects of taste? then such a task bears upon teleology, for the setting-up of forms purposive for our power of judgment would have to count as a purpose of nature, one bound up essentially with the concept of nature itself. But the correctness of this assumption remains very much open to doubt, whereas the actuality of natural beauties lies plainly before experience.

§ 39. On the communicability of a sensation

When sensation, as the real element of perception, is referred to cognition, it is called sense-sensation; and what is specific in its quality can be represented as thoroughly communicable in the same manner only if one assumes that everyone possesses a sense identical to our own: yet this simply cannot be presupposed of a sense-sensation. Thus this kind of sensation cannot be imparted to a person in whom the sense of smell is absent; and even when he does not lack it, one still cannot be sure whether he has exactly the same sensation of a flower as we have of it. But we must picture human beings as differing still more with respect to the agreeableness or disagreeableness in the sensation of one and the very same object of the senses; and it is quite impossible to demand that the pleasure in objects of this sort be granted by everyone. Since a pleasure of this kind reaches the mind by way of sense, so that we are thereby passive with regard to it, one may term it the pleasure of enjoyment.

The satisfaction, on the other hand, that an action affords on account of its moral constitution is not a pleasure of enjoyment but one of self-activity and of the latter's agreement with the idea of one's determination. This feeling, which goes by the name of the ethical, nevertheless demands concepts and exhibits not a free but a law-governed purposiveness; it can therefore be imparted universally in no other manner than by way of reason, and—should the pleasure be of one and the same kind in everyone—through quite specific practical concepts of reason.

As a pleasure belonging to ratiocinating contemplation, the pleasure in the sublime of nature does, to be sure, also make a claim upon universal participation, and yet it already presupposes a further feeling—namely that of one's supersensible vocation—which, however dark it may be, rests upon a moral foundation. But that other human beings will take this into account and find a satisfaction in contemplating the raw magnitude of nature (a satisfaction that truly cannot be ascribed to the sight of it, which is rather forbidding) is something I am not entitled to presuppose outright. Notwithstanding this, in view of the fact that those moral predispositions ought to be taken into account on every fitting occasion, I may still require that satisfaction of everyone as well—though solely through the moral law, which on its side is once again grounded on concepts of reason.

The pleasure in the beautiful, by contrast, is not a pleasure of enjoyment, nor one of some lawful activity, and just as little one of ratiocinating contemplation according to ideas, but rather one of mere reflection. With no end or principle whatever to serve it as a guiding standard, this pleasure accompanies the ordinary apprehension of an object through the imagination, as the faculty of intuition, in reference to the understanding, as the faculty of concepts, by way of a procedure of the power of judgment that it must carry out even on behalf of the commonest experience: with the sole difference that in the present case it is constrained to this for an empirical objective concept, whereas there (in aesthetic estimation) it is constrained merely so as to apprehend how suited the representation is to the harmonious (subjectively purposive) occupation of the two cognitive powers in their freedom, that is, to sense the representational state with pleasure. This pleasure must of necessity rest upon the very same conditions in every person, since they are the subjective conditions under which any cognition whatever becomes possible, and the proportion of those cognitive powers demanded for taste is likewise demanded for the common and sound understanding that may be presupposed in everyone. For precisely this reason the one who judges with taste (provided only that, in this consciousness, he does not err and does not mistake the matter for the form, charm for beauty) is likewise entitled to require of every other that subjective purposiveness—that is, the satisfaction he takes in the object—and to hold his feeling to be universally communicable, and that too without any mediating concepts.

§ 40. On taste as a kind of sensus communis

We frequently confer on the power of judgment the title of a sense — doing so whenever what strikes us is not so much its reflection as simply the outcome to which that reflection leads — and we go on to talk of a sense for truth, a sense for decency, for justice, and the like; and this although we know, or at any rate ought reasonably to know, that no sense could serve as the seat of such concepts, and far less could possess even the slightest capacity for issuing universal rules: on the contrary, that a representation of this sort — of truth, fittingness, beauty, or justice — could never so much as occur to us in thought, unless we were capable of lifting ourselves beyond the senses toward higher faculties of cognition. Common human understanding, viewed as merely sound (not yet cultivated) understanding and taken to be the very least one may ever expect of whoever would claim for himself the title of a human being, thus incurs as well the mortifying honor of having the name of common sense (sensus communis) fastened upon it; and this in such fashion that under the word common (not only in our own tongue, which genuinely harbors an ambiguity here , but likewise in many another) one takes it to mean roughly the vulgare, that which is encountered on every side, and to possess which is quite simply neither a merit nor a distinction.

By sensus communis, however, one must understand the idea of a shared sense, i.e., a faculty of judging that in its reflection takes account, in thought (a priori), of everyone else's way of representing, so as as it were to hold its judgment up against collective human reason and thereby escape the illusion that, arising from subjective private conditions which could readily be taken for objective, would exert a detrimental influence on the judgment. This is accomplished when one measures one's judgment less against the judgments others actually make than against those they might merely make, and transposes oneself into each other person's position, doing so precisely by discounting the restrictions that happen, by chance, to cling to one's own judging: and this, in turn, is achieved by setting aside, so far as one can, whatever within the state of representation counts as matter, that is, as sensation, and by heeding solely the formal features of one's representation or of one's state of representation. This procedure of reflection may, to be sure, appear far too contrived for us to attribute it to the faculty we designate common sense; yet it presents such an appearance only once it is cast in abstract formulas, whereas nothing could be more natural in itself than to leave charm and emotion out of account whenever one is in search of a judgment meant to serve as a universal rule.

The maxims of common human understanding set out below do not, admittedly, belong here as portions of the critique of taste, and yet they may help to illuminate its principles. These are they: 1. To do one's own thinking; 2. To think from the standpoint of every other person; 3. To think, at all times, in accord with oneself. The first is the maxim of the unprejudiced, the second of the enlarged, the third of the consistent way of thinking. This first one is the maxim belonging to a reason that never turns passive. The inclination toward the latter, and thus toward a heteronomy of reason, goes by the name of prejudice; and the weightiest prejudice of them all consists in picturing nature as exempt from those rules which the understanding, through its own essential law, sets at its base: namely, superstition. Liberation from superstition is called enlightenment¹²: for although this designation applies to liberation from prejudices in general as well, superstition still, in a preeminent sense (in sensu eminenti), merits the label of prejudice, since the blindness into which superstition casts one, indeed which it even demands as an obligation, renders especially recognizable the need to be guided by others, and hence the condition of a passive reason. As for the second maxim of the way of thinking, we are otherwise quite accustomed to calling someone narrow (limited, the opposite of enlarged) whose talents do not suffice for any great use (especially the intensive kind). What is at issue here, however, is not the faculty of cognition, but rather the way of thinking that puts such a faculty to a purposive use: a way of thinking that, however modest the range and extent reached by a person's natural gift, nonetheless betokens a man of enlarged way of thinking once he lifts himself above those subjective private conditions of the judgment, amid which so many other people remain as though boxed in, and, from a universal standpoint (which he can fix only by transposing himself into another's position), reflects upon his own judgment. The third maxim in turn, the one bearing on a consistent way of thinking, proves the hardest of all to reach, and it can be won only by joining the two earlier maxims together and by following them so habitually that such compliance has ripened into a settled skill. One might put it thus: the first of these maxims belongs to the understanding, the second to the power of judgment, the third to reason. —

Resuming now the thread that this digression led me to drop, I would say the following: that taste, with greater justification than sound understanding, may be termed sensus communis; and that the aesthetic power of judgment, rather than the intellectual, is entitled to carry the name of a shared sense¹³, if indeed one insists on using the word sense for an effect wrought upon the mind by mere reflection: for in such a case what one means by sense is the feeling of pleasure. Indeed, one might define taste as that faculty of appraising which renders our feeling, given some particular representation, universally communicable apart from any mediation by a concept.

Human beings' aptitude for imparting their thoughts to one another calls, too, for a certain relation between imagination and understanding, so as to join intuitions to concepts and, conversely, concepts to these, such that they coalesce into a cognition; in that case, however, the concord of the mind's two powers is lawful, subject to the compulsion of determinate concepts. It is solely where the imagination, in its freedom, rouses the understanding, and the latter, dispensing with concepts, casts the imagination into an orderly play, that the representation communicates itself — not as a thought, but as an inner feeling of the mind in a purposive state.

Taste, accordingly, is the faculty for judging a priori the communicability of the feelings that attach to a given representation (in the absence of any mediating concept).

Were we entitled to suppose that the sheer universal communicability of one's feeling must, of itself, already bring an interest along with it for us (something one is nevertheless not warranted in concluding from the character of a merely reflecting power of judgment), we should then be in a position to explain why the feeling in a judgment of taste is demanded of everyone, as it were, in the manner of a duty.

§ 41. On the empirical interest in the beautiful

That the judgment of taste, whereby a thing is pronounced beautiful, is required to rest on no interest as its ground of determination, has been established sufficiently above. Yet it in no way follows from this that no interest whatever can be bound up with the judgment once it has been put forward as a pure aesthetic one. Yet this connection can never be more than indirect, that is, taste must first be conceived in conjunction with something else, so that to the satisfaction of mere reflection upon an object there may be joined a further pleasure in the existence of that object (in which all interest consists). For here in the aesthetic judgment what holds is what is said of the cognitive judgment (concerning things in general): a posse ad esse non valet consequentia. This further element may, then, be of an empirical kind — an inclination belonging by nature to the human being — or else of an intellectual kind, namely a characteristic of the will whereby it can be determined a priori through reason; and each of the two harbors a satisfaction in an object's existence, thereby able to furnish the basis of an interest in something that has pleased already on its own and apart from all regard to any interest whatever.

The beautiful is of empirical interest only in society; and if one concedes the drive toward society to be natural to the human being, and concedes the fitness and the propensity for it, that is, sociability, to be a requirement of the human being as a creature destined for society, and thus a property belonging to humanity, then it cannot fail to come about that taste too is regarded as a faculty for judging everything through which one is able to communicate even one's feeling to everyone else, and hence as a means of furthering what the natural inclination of each demands.

Left to himself alone, a man cast away on a barren island would deck out neither his hut nor his own person, nor would he go in search of flowers, still less cultivate them in order to adorn himself with them; rather, only in company does it occur to him to be not just a human being but also, in his own manner, a refined one (the beginning of civilization): for one judges to be such a person the one who is disposed and skilled to share his pleasure with others, and whom no object satisfies unless he can feel the satisfaction in it in fellowship with others. Each person, moreover, looks for and demands from everyone else this regard for universal communication, as though on the strength of an original covenant prescribed by humanity itself; and so, to be sure, in the beginning it is merely charms that acquire importance within society and become tied to a great interest — colors, for one, with which to paint oneself (roucou among the Caribs, cinnabar among the Iroquois), or else flowers, shells, brightly hued birds' feathers, and in course of time beautiful shapes too (upon canoes, garments, and so on) that carry with them no delight of any kind, that is, no satisfaction of enjoyment: until at length a civilization that has climbed to its uttermost point makes of this well-nigh the chief business of refined inclination, and sensations come to be held worth only so much as they admit of being universally shared; at which stage, even though the pleasure that anyone takes in such an object is slight and in itself devoid of any noticeable interest, the idea of its universal communicability nonetheless enlarges its worth almost past all measure.

This interest, indirectly appended to the beautiful through the inclination toward society and thus empirical, is however of no importance to us here, we who have only to attend to whatever may stand in relation a priori, even if only indirectly, to the judgment of taste. For should an interest bound up with it come to light even in this form, then taste would reveal a passage of our faculty of judging from sensory gratification to moral feeling; and not merely would one be the better guided to occupy taste in a purposive way, but there would likewise be presented, as such, an intermediate member in the chain of human faculties a priori upon which all legislation must rest. This much may well be said of the empirical interest taken in the objects of taste, and in taste itself: that, since taste therein indulges inclination, however refined the latter may be, it nonetheless gladly coalesces with all the inclinations and passions that, within society, reach their greatest diversity and highest degree, and that the interest in the beautiful, when it rests upon this, can afford but a very ambiguous passage from the agreeable to the good. But whether this passage might not, after all, be furthered by taste, when taste is taken in its purity, we have reason to examine.

§ 42. On the intellectual interest in the beautiful

With kindly intent it came about that those who liked to steer every occupation of humankind—occupations to which the inner disposition of our nature impels us—toward mankind's final end, that is, the morally good, regarded a concern for the beautiful in general as betokening a good moral character. Yet this view has met with well-founded objection from others, who invoke experience: that the virtuosos of taste are, not just frequently but as a matter of course, conceited, willful, and given to corrupting passions, and might lay claim to the merit of an attachment to ethical principles even less readily than the rest; whence it seems that the feeling for beauty is not only specifically different from moral feeling—as in truth it is—but that whatever interest can be linked with it may be reconciled with the moral one only with difficulty, and assuredly not by way of any inner affinity.

I now readily grant that the interest in the beauty of art (under which I also count the artificial use of natural beauties for adornment, and hence for vanity) affords no proof whatsoever of a cast of mind attached to the morally good, or even merely inclined toward it. Against this, however, I hold that to take an immediate interest in nature's beauty (and not merely to possess taste for judging it) is at all times a mark of a good soul; and that, where this interest is habitual, it indicates at least a frame of mind favorable to moral feeling, if it gladly joins itself to the contemplation of nature. One must, however, keep well in mind that here I really mean the beautiful forms of nature, whereas the charms that nature is wont to bind up so abundantly with those forms I still set aside, because the interest in them, though likewise immediate, is nonetheless empirical.

Someone who, alone (and with no aim of sharing his remarks with anyone else), gazes at the lovely form of a wild flower, a bird, an insect, and so on, so as to admire and cherish it, and would not willingly do without it in nature at large—even should this bring him a measure of harm, still less yield him any visible profit—thereby takes an immediate, indeed intellectual, interest in nature's beauty. That is, not only its product as regards form, but also the existence of that product pleases him, without any sensory charm having a part in it, or his connecting any end with it.

What is noteworthy in this connection, however, is that were someone to hoodwink this admirer of the beautiful behind his back—planting in the soil artificial blossoms (which can be fashioned to resemble real ones exactly) or perching artificially carved birds on the boughs of trees—and were he thereupon to detect the fraud, the immediate interest he had earlier felt in them would promptly fade, while in its stead there might well arise a different one, namely the interest of vanity in adorning his room with such things for others to see. That such beauty is nature's own production—this thought must attend the intuition together with the reflection; and it is upon this alone that the immediate interest one takes in the thing rests. Otherwise there remains either a mere judgment of taste devoid of all interest, or only one bound up with a mediate interest, namely one referred to society: which latter yields no sure indication of a morally good cast of mind.

This precedence of natural beauty over artistic beauty—that, even where the latter should in respect of form actually surpass the former, it nonetheless alone arouses an immediate interest—agrees with the purified and thorough cast of mind of all human beings who have cultivated their ethical feeling. Should a man possessing taste enough to appraise the products of fine art with the utmost accuracy and finesse readily quit the room where one comes upon those beauties that nourish vanity and, at best, social amusements, and turn himself toward the beauty of nature so as to find there, as it were, a rapture for his spirit within a train of thought that he can never fully develop: then we ourselves shall view this choice of his with high regard, and presume in him a beautiful soul, upon which no connoisseur or lover of art can stake a claim on account of the interest that his objects awaken in him. — What, then, is the difference in the so very different estimation of two kinds of object which, in the judgment of mere taste, would scarcely dispute precedence with one another?

We possess a capacity of the merely aesthetic power of judgment for appraising forms apart from concepts and for finding, in the bare appraisal of them, a satisfaction that we simultaneously erect as a rule binding on everyone, without that judgment either resting on an interest or generating one. — On the other side, we likewise possess a capacity of an intellectual power of judgment, able, for the mere forms of practical maxims (so far as these of their own accord qualify for universal legislation), to fix a priori a satisfaction that we lay down as a law for everyone, our judgment grounded on no interest whatsoever, and yet bringing one forth. In the former judgment the pleasure or displeasure goes by the name of taste, in the latter by that of moral feeling.

But because it also matters to reason that the ideas (in which, within moral feeling, reason effects an immediate interest) should possess objective reality too—that is, that nature should at least give a trace or drop a hint of harboring in herself some ground for us to assume a law-governed correspondence of her products to that satisfaction of ours which stands independent of every interest (the very satisfaction that we acknowledge a priori as valid law for all, though we cannot rest it upon any proofs): reason is bound to take an interest in each manifestation by nature of a correspondence akin to this; and hence the mind is unable to ponder the beauty of nature without discovering itself, in that very act, to be interested. This interest, however, is by its kinship moral; and whoever takes it in the beauty of nature can take it therein only insofar as he has already beforehand well grounded his interest in the ethically good. Thus in one whom the beauty of nature immediately interests, one has cause to presume at least a predisposition to a good moral disposition.

It will be said: this construal of aesthetic judgments as akin to moral feeling looks far too studied to pass for the true decipherment of the cipher-script through which nature, in her beautiful forms, speaks to us in figures. But in the first place, such an immediate interest in nature's beauty is genuinely far from widespread, belonging solely to those whose way of thinking is either already schooled toward the good or exceptionally open to such schooling; and, secondly, the kinship linking the pure judgment of taste—which, beholden to no interest at all, allows a satisfaction to be felt while presenting it a priori as fitting for humanity at large—with the moral judgment, which accomplishes exactly this out of concepts, gives rise, even absent any clear, refined, and intentional deliberation, to an interest, equally immediate, in the object of the one just as in that of the other: save that the first interest is free, whereas the second rests upon objective laws. There is joined to this, besides, our admiration for nature, which manifests itself in her beautiful products as art—arising not by mere chance but, so to speak, on purpose, in accordance with an orderly arrangement conforming to law and as a purposiveness devoid of purpose: and this last, given that we come upon it nowhere in the outer world, we look for as a matter of course within our own selves, specifically in what makes up the final end of our being, that is, our moral determination (although the question concerning the ground of the possibility of such a purposiveness in nature will not be broached until teleology).

It is likewise readily explained why the satisfaction in fine art, taken in the pure judgment of taste, is not tied to an immediate interest in the manner that the satisfaction in beautiful nature is. For fine art is either an imitation of nature carried to the point of illusion: in which event it works upon us as natural beauty (or what passes for it); or else it is an art openly aimed with intent at our satisfaction: yet in that event, though the satisfaction in the product would arise at once through taste, it would kindle no more than a mediate interest in the cause lying beneath it—namely, an art capable of engaging us solely by way of its end, and never on its own account. Perhaps someone will object that the same holds when a natural object arouses interest by its beauty merely to the extent that a moral idea is linked with it; but what interests immediately is not this, rather the object's own inner make-up, whereby it lends itself to such a linkage—a make-up that thus pertains to it intrinsically.

Those charms in beautiful nature that one so often meets seemingly melted into one with beautiful form pertain either to the modifications of light (in the giving of color) or to those of sound (in tones). For these are the only sensations that permit not only a sense-feeling but, beyond that, reflection on the form of such sensory modifications, and thus contain within themselves, as it were, a language that nature conveys to us and that seems to bear a higher meaning. In the same way the lily's white hue appears to tune the mind toward ideas of innocence, and—proceeding through the sequence of the seven colors from red all the way to violet—toward the idea 1) of sublimity, 2) of boldness, 3) of frankness, 4) of friendliness, 5) of unassumingness, 6) of constancy, and 7) of affection. A bird's singing announces cheerfulness and a contentment with its own existence. At least so we construe nature, whether or not anything of the kind be its intention. This interest, however, which we here bestow on beauty, positively demands that the beauty be nature's own; and the moment one perceives oneself deceived, that nothing but art is at hand, it fades away altogether—to such a degree that thereafter taste itself can discover nothing beautiful in it, nor the eye anything charming. What is more highly prized by poets than the enchantingly beautiful song of the nightingale in a solitary thicket on a still summer evening by the gentle light of the moon? There are recorded cases, nevertheless, in which—where no such singer was to be had —some jovial host had, to their greatest delight, tricked the guests who had stopped in with him to relish the country air, by concealing in a bush a playful young fellow who could reproduce this call (a reed or rush held in his mouth) so as to resemble nature perfectly. The instant it dawns on someone, though, that a fraud is afoot, nobody will bear to keep listening for long to a song deemed so delightful before; and matters stand no differently with any other songbird. The thing must be nature, or be held by us to be such, if in the beautiful, as beauty of that sort, we are to take an immediate interest; and all the more if we may even expect of others that they too should take one in it: which indeed comes to pass, inasmuch as we count the mentality coarse and base of those in whom there is no feeling for beautiful nature (for by that name we designate the susceptibility to an interest in contemplating her) and who, at table or over the bottle, cling to the enjoyment of mere sensations of sense.

§ 43. On art in general

1) Art is distinguished from nature just as doing (facere) differs from acting or operating at large (agere); and what the former yields, its product or upshot, counts as a work (opus), whereas what issues from the latter counts as an effect (effectus) .

By rights, one ought to call art only that bringing-forth through freedom, that is, through a power of choice that grounds its actions in reason. For even though we like to call the product of bees (those regularly constructed combs of wax) a work of art, we do so merely because of its analogy with the latter; for the moment it occurs to us that they found their labor upon no reasoning of their own, we promptly declare their handiwork to be an outgrowth of their nature (of instinct), and only their creator is credited with the art.

When, in searching through a peat bog, one comes upon a piece of hewn wood, as has occasionally happened, one does not call it a product of nature at all, but of art; the cause that brought it forth had an end in view, to which the thing owes its shape. In other respects one is indeed inclined to recognize an art in anything whose constitution is such that, within its cause, a representation of the thing had to run ahead of its actual existence (as happens even with bees), though without the effect's needing on that account to have been genuinely thought by the cause; but whenever one simply calls something a work of art, so as to set it off from a natural effect, one invariably means by it a work of human beings.

2) Art as a human skill is also distinguished from science (being able from knowing), as a practical faculty from a theoretical one, as technique from theory (as the art of surveying from geometry). And here too that which one can do, as soon as one merely knows what is to be done and is thus sufficiently acquainted with the desired effect, is not exactly called art. Only that for which, even when one knows it in the most complete way, one nevertheless does not thereby at once possess the skill to make it, belongs to that extent to art. Camper describes very precisely how the best shoe would have to be constructed, yet he certainly could not make one¹⁴.

3) Art, too, is distinguished from handicraft; the former one terms free, whereas the latter might equally be termed remunerative art. One regards the first as though it could turn out purposively (succeed) only as play, that is, an occupation that is agreeable in itself; the second in such a way that, as labor, that is, an occupation that is in itself disagreeable (burdensome) and alluring only through its effect (e.g., the wages), it can accordingly be compulsorily imposed. Whether, in the ranking of the guilds, watchmakers should count as artists but smiths as craftsmen: that requires a different point of view for judging than the one we adopt here, namely the proportion of the talents that must underlie one or the other of these occupations. Whether some of the so-called seven liberal arts that were included ought rather to be reckoned among the sciences, and certain others to be likened to handicrafts: on that question I shall not dwell here. Yet it is not unwise to recall that in every free art there is still required something of the compulsory sort — or, as it is called, a mechanism — without which the spirit, which in art must be free and which alone animates the work, would possess no body at all and would evaporate entirely (for instance, in poetic composition, grammatical correctness and a wealth of language, and equally prosody and metrical measure), for a number of modern educators suppose that they most effectively advance a free art when they strip every constraint from it and turn it out of labor into sheer play.

§ 44. On fine art

There is neither a science of the beautiful, but only a critique of it, nor is there any fine science, but only fine art. For as regards the first, it would have to be established within it scientifically, that is, through grounds of proof, whether or not something is to be counted as beautiful; hence the judgment about beauty, were it to belong to a science, would be no judgment of taste. As for the second, a science that is supposed to be beautiful as a science is an absurdity. For if, treating it as a science, one asked after grounds and proofs, one would be put off with tasteful sayings (bons mots). — The ordinary phrase fine sciences has surely arisen from nothing but the perfectly correct remark that fine art, brought to its full perfection, calls for a great deal of science — such as familiarity with the ancient tongues, wide reading in the authors held to be classic, history, an acquaintance with antiquity, and so forth — so that these historical branches of learning, since they furnish fine art with its indispensable groundwork and preparation, and partly, too, since they themselves take in the knowledge of the products of fine art (eloquence and poetry), have through a slippage of words come to be styled fine sciences in their own right.

When art, suited to the cognition of a possible object, does no more than perform the operations needed to bring that object into being, it is mechanical; should it, however, take the feeling of pleasure directly for its purpose, it is termed aesthetic art. The latter is either agreeable or fine art. It is the former when its end is that pleasure should accompany the representations as mere sensations, the latter when it should accompany them as modes of cognition.

Agreeable arts are ones whose sole aim is enjoyment; to them belong all the charms that can amuse a company gathered at table: telling stories in a diverting manner, prompting the company to open and animated talk, and, through joking and laughter, setting it in a certain merry key, where, as people say, all sorts of things may be prattled into the carousing while nobody means to answer for what he utters, since the whole is calculated only on the entertainment of the moment and not on any abiding material for later thought or retelling. (To this also belongs the manner in which the table is furnished for enjoyment, or indeed, at great banquets, the table music: a curious thing, which is meant only as an agreeable noise to sustain the mood of the minds toward cheerfulness and which, without anyone devoting the slightest attention to its composition, fosters the free conversation of one neighbor with the other .) To this belong, further, all games that carry with them no further interest than to make the time pass unnoticed.

Fine art, by contrast, is a mode of representation that is in itself purposive and that, although without an end, nevertheless furthers the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication.

The universal communicability of a pleasure already carries with it in its very concept that this pleasure must be one not of enjoyment arising from mere sensation, but of reflection; and thus aesthetic art, as fine art, is of a kind that takes the reflecting power of judgment, and not sensory sensation, as its standard.

§ 45. Fine art is an art insofar as it at the same time seems to be nature

In a product of fine art one must become aware that it is art and not nature; and yet the purposiveness in its form must seem so free of all compulsion of arbitrary rules as though it were a product of nothing but nature. That pleasure — uniquely capable of being shared with everyone, and this without resting on any concept — has its basis in the sense of liberty we feel as our cognitive powers play, a play that must at the same time still be purposive. Nature was beautiful when it at the same time looked like art; and art can be called beautiful only when we are conscious that it is art and it yet looks to us like nature.

For we may state quite generally — whether the point at issue be natural beauty or artistic beauty — that beautiful is whatever, in the mere act of judging (not in sensory sensation, nor by means of a concept) gives pleasure. Now art always has a determinate intention of bringing something about. But if this were mere sensation (something merely subjective), which was meant to be accompanied by pleasure, then this product would please in the judging only by means of the feeling of sense. Were the intention directed at the bringing about of a determinate object, then, if it is attained through the art, the object would please only through concepts. Yet in either case the art would give its pleasure not in the mere act of judging, that is to say, it would please as a mechanical art and not as a beautiful one.

The purposiveness residing in a work of fine art, therefore, though it is admittedly deliberate, must all the same not look deliberate; fine art, in other words, has to be capable of being regarded as nature, notwithstanding that we remain aware of it as art. A product of art, however, appears as nature by virtue of this: that all punctiliousness is indeed met with in its conformity to the rules by which alone the product can turn out to be what it is meant to be, yet without painful exactitude, without the academic form showing through, that is, without betraying a trace that the rule hovered before the artist's eyes and laid fetters upon his powers of mind.