§ 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.

§ 46. Fine art is the art of genius

Genius is the talent (the gift of nature) that gives art the rule. Since talent, as the artist's innate productive faculty, itself belongs within nature, one could equally frame it thus: genius is the inborn cast of mind (ingenium) through which nature hands art its rule.

However this definition may stand, and regardless of whether it is purely arbitrary or, on the contrary, suited to the concept that people habitually connect with the word genius (a question to be taken up in the following §): even so, it can be shown beforehand that, given the sense of the word assumed here, the fine arts must of necessity be viewed as arts of genius.

For every art presupposes rules, through the laying down of which a product is in the first place represented as possible if it is to be called a product of art. The concept of fine art, however, does not permit that the judgment upon its product's beauty be traced back to some rule resting on a concept as its determining ground, one that would therefore ground the product in a concept of how it might come to be possible. Fine art therefore cannot itself think up the rule by which it is to bring its product into being. Yet since, in the absence of a rule going before it, a product can never bear the name of art, it is nature in the subject (and by way of the attunement of that subject's faculties) that must give art its rule; in other words, fine art proves possible solely as a product of genius.

One gathers from this that genius is 1) a talent for producing something to which no determinate rule can be assigned: not a disposition of skill toward what may be learned according to some rule; consequently, that originality must be its foremost characteristic. 2) That, because originality can also yield nonsense, its products must be at once patterns, that is, exemplary; and so, while not arising through imitation on their own part, they must nonetheless serve others precisely to this end, namely as a measure or rule for appraisal. 3) That it can neither describe for itself, nor indicate scientifically, the way in which it brings its product to completion, but instead furnishes the rule in the guise of nature; so that the author of a product he has to thank his genius for remains himself unaware of how the ideas for it take shape within him, and likewise lacks the power to devise the like deliberately or by plan at his pleasure and to impart it to others in such prescriptions as would put them in a position to bring forth products of equal kind. (This is presumably also why the word genius is derived from genius, the peculiar spirit allotted to a person at birth, the protecting and guiding one, from whose prompting those original ideas were held to arise.) 4) That nature, through genius, prescribes the rule not to science but to art, and this too only insofar as the latter is to be fine art.

§ 47. Elucidation and confirmation of the above explanation of genius

On this point everyone is agreed: that genius stands wholly opposed to the spirit of imitation. Now since learning is nothing but imitating, even the greatest aptitude—teachableness (capacity) taken as teachableness—still cannot count as genius. Yet even where a person thinks or writes poetry on his own, rather than simply absorbing what others have already thought, and indeed contributes various inventions of his own to art and science, this still furnishes no proper ground for calling such an (often eminent) head (as against the one who, since he is never able to do anything beyond mere learning and copying, goes by the name of dullard) a genius: for even that could have been picked up by learning, and hence still lies upon the natural road of investigation and reflection guided by rules, being in no way specifically distinct from what industriousness can acquire through imitation. Thus everything that Newton laid out in that immortal work of his on the principles of the philosophy of nature—no matter how great a head was needed to invent such things—can be learned quite well; but one cannot learn to write poetry with spirit, however exhaustive all the precepts for the art of poetry, and however excellent its models, may be. The reason is that Newton was able to demonstrate every one of his steps, from the first elements of geometry all the way to his great and profound discoveries, not only to himself but to everyone else, fully intuitively and determinately enough to be followed; whereas no Homer or Wieland can show how his imaginative and yet at the same time thought-laden ideas arise and come together in his head, for the reason that he himself does not know it and therefore cannot teach it to anyone else either. In scientific matters, then, the greatest discoverer differs from the most painstaking imitator and apprentice only in degree, whereas he differs specifically from one whom nature has endowed for fine art. This, however, involves no belittling of those great men—men to whom humankind is indebted for so much—as set against nature's favorites in view of their talent for fine art. That very fact—namely, that the former talent is directed toward the steadily progressing, ever fuller perfection of our cognitions, together with every benefit that hangs upon them, and equally toward instructing others in these self-same branches of knowledge—constitutes a signal superiority they hold over those who earn the honor of bearing the name of geniuses: for in the case of the latter, art at some point halts, a boundary having been fixed for it past which it can advance no further, a boundary in all likelihood attained long ago and incapable of any further widening; and besides, a proficiency of this sort admits of no communication, but insists rather on being conferred upon each person straight from nature's own hand, so that it perishes along with him, until such time as nature again bestows an equal endowment upon someone else, who requires no more than a single example to set the talent he is aware of possessing into operation in a like fashion.

Since the natural endowment must give art (as fine art) its rule, of what kind, then, is this rule? Set down in no formula, it can serve as no prescription; for were it otherwise, the judgment about the beautiful would admit of determination by way of concepts: instead, the rule has to be drawn from the deed, that is, from the product—on which others may put their own talent to the test, in order to let that product stand for them as a model, not of copying but of imitation. How this is possible is hard to explain. The artist's ideas arouse similar ideas in his apprentice, provided nature has furnished the latter with a similar proportion of the powers of mind. The models of fine art are therefore the only means of transmission for carrying it on to posterity: something that could not be done through mere descriptions (above all not in the field of the verbal arts); and even among these, only the ones in ancient, dead languages, now preserved merely as learned tongues, can become classical.

Although mechanical and fine art are very different from one another—the first as a mere art of diligence and of learning, the second as that of genius—there is nevertheless no fine art in which something mechanical, capable of being grasped and followed according to rules, and hence something academic, does not constitute the essential condition of the art. For in it something has to be thought of as a purpose, since otherwise its product could be credited to no art whatever; it would be nothing but a product of accident. Yet in order to carry a purpose into execution, definite rules are called for, and from these one is not at liberty to release oneself. Since, then, the originality of talent makes up one—though not the sole—essential ingredient in the character of genius, superficial minds imagine that they cannot better display themselves as blossoming geniuses than by renouncing the scholastic compulsion of all rules, convinced that one cuts a finer figure on a skittish horse than upon one broken in at the riding school. Genius can supply only rich material for the products of fine art; the working-up of that material and the form require a talent schooled through training, so as to make a use of it that can hold up before the power of judgment. But when someone, even in matters of the most careful inquiry of reason, speaks and pronounces like a genius, then it becomes utterly ridiculous; one hardly knows whether to laugh more at the charlatan who spreads so much haze about himself—amid which one can judge nothing distinctly, yet imagine all the more—or more at the public that guilelessly persuades itself that its inability to recognize and grasp this masterpiece of insight distinctly comes about because new truths are being tossed at it in whole heaps, against which the detail (by way of measured explanations and methodical examination of the principles) seems to it to be mere botchwork.

§ 48. On the relation of genius to taste

The judging of beautiful objects as such calls for taste; fine art itself, however — namely the bringing-forth of such objects — calls for genius.

If genius is taken to be a talent for fine art (this being the sense that properly belongs to the word), and if, on that understanding, one wants to break it down into the faculties whose combination is required to make up such a talent, then one must first fix precisely the difference between beauty in nature — for judging which taste alone is enough — and beauty in art, whose very possibility (a matter that judging such an object must likewise keep in view) presupposes genius.

Beauty in nature is a beautiful thing; beauty in art is a beautiful representation of a thing.

To judge something in nature as beautiful, I do not first require a concept of what kind of thing the object is supposed to be; in other words, I need not be acquainted with its material purposiveness (its end), for the bare form, even where the end is unknown, is what pleases on its own account in the judging. If, on the other hand, the object is presented as something produced by art and is to be pronounced beautiful in that capacity, then — since art always assumes an end in the cause (and in its causality) — one must first lay down a concept of what the thing is supposed to be; and because the perfection of a thing consists in the agreement of its manifold with an inner determination of it as an end, the judging of beauty in art will have to reckon with that perfection as well, something about which the judging of a beauty in nature (as such) raises no question whatever. — Admittedly, in judging above all the living objects of nature — say, a human being or a horse — one usually also takes objective purposiveness into account in order to pass verdict on their beauty; but in that case the judgment is no longer purely aesthetic, that is, a mere judgment of taste. Nature is then judged not as it seems to be art, but insofar as it genuinely is art (even if of a superhuman kind); and the teleological judgment supplies the aesthetic one with its ground and condition, on which the latter has to rely. Here too, when someone remarks, for instance, "that is a beautiful woman," what is actually being thought is nothing but this: that nature, in this shape, gives a beautiful presentation of the ends of the female frame; for one has to look past the bare form toward a concept, so that the object comes to be thought in this manner by way of a logically conditioned aesthetic judgment.

It is exactly here that fine art displays its excellence: it renders in beautiful description things that, in nature itself, would be ugly or displeasing. The Furies, diseases, the ravages of war, and suchlike can, taken as harmful things, be given a very beautiful description, and may even be depicted in a painting; there is but one species of ugliness that cannot be rendered true to nature without wrecking all aesthetic satisfaction, and with it beauty in art: namely, the kind that stirs up disgust. For in that strange sensation, which rests on sheer imagination, the object is presented as if it were pressing itself upon us to be enjoyed, a thing against which we nevertheless strive with all our force; and so, within our sensation, the artistic representation of the object ceases to be told apart from the nature of the object itself, whereupon the former can no longer possibly count as beautiful. The art of sculpture, likewise, because in its works art is nearly mistaken for nature, has barred from its figures any direct representation of ugly objects, allowing them instead — death, say (in the guise of a beautiful genius), or the courage of war (in the figure of Mars) — to be presented only through an allegory or through attributes that make a pleasing impression, and thus only indirectly, by way of an interpretation supplied by reason and not for a merely aesthetic power of judgment.

This is what may be said about the beautiful representation of an object — a representation that is, strictly, nothing more than the form of the presentation of a concept, the manner by which that concept comes to be communicated to everyone. — Yet the giving of this form to a product of fine art demands taste and nothing more; against taste the artist gauges his work, once he has trained and refined it on all sorts of examples drawn from art or from nature, and through repeated, frequently toilsome efforts to meet its demand he arrives at the form that satisfies him: so the form is not, so to speak, a matter of inspiration or of some free surge of the mental faculties, but of a slow and downright vexing correction, whose aim is to render it fit for the thought while still doing no harm to the freedom in the play of those faculties.

Taste, however, is only a power of judging, not a productive power; and something's being in accordance with it does not on that account make it a work of fine art: it might be a product that belongs to useful and mechanical art, or indeed to science, turned out in keeping with settled rules — rules that admit of being learned and have to be observed to the letter. The pleasing form one confers on it merely serves as a vehicle for communication and, so to say, a mode of presentation, in regard to which a certain latitude still remains, even where the thing is in other respects tied to a fixed end. So we require of a table service, or of a moral treatise, or even of a sermon, that it carry this form of fine art in itself, without on that account appearing affected; and yet we shall not for all that name such things works of fine art. Under that heading, by contrast, we count a poem, a musical composition, a gallery of pictures, and the like; and in a putative work of fine art of this sort one may frequently observe genius without taste in the one case, and taste without genius in the other.

§ 49. On the mental powers that make up genius

Of certain products, from which one expects that they should present themselves, at least in part, as fine art, one says: they are without spirit; even though, as far as taste is concerned, one finds nothing in them to censure. A poem can be quite pretty and elegant, yet it is without spirit. A story is precise and orderly, yet without spirit. A solemn address is thorough and at the same time refined, yet without spirit. Many a conversation is not without entertainment, yet still without spirit; even of a woman one may say: she is pretty, talkative, and well-mannered, yet without spirit. What, then, is it that one understands here by spirit?

Spirit, taken in its aesthetic sense, denotes the enlivening principle within the mind. But the means by which this principle animates the soul—the material that it puts to this use—is what sets the mind's powers purposively astir, that is, into a play of the sort that keeps itself going and of itself reinforces the powers directed to it.

Now I contend that this principle is nothing other than the faculty for presenting aesthetic ideas; and by an aesthetic idea I mean a representation of the imagination that occasions much thought without any determinate thought, that is, concept, being capable of being adequate to it, so that no language can ever wholly attain it and make it intelligible. — One sees readily enough that it is the counterpart (pendant) to a rational idea, which is, the other way about, a concept for which no intuition (imaginative representation) could ever prove adequate.

For the imagination, taken as a productive cognitive faculty, is exceedingly potent in fashioning, so to speak, a second nature out of the stuff supplied to it by the actual one. We divert ourselves with it wherever experience strikes us as too commonplace; and we recast that experience too—still, to be sure, on analogical laws, yet also on principles seated higher up, in reason (principles no less natural to us than those whereby the understanding grasps empirical nature)—and in doing so we are sensible of our liberty from that law of association which clings to the empirical use of the said faculty, a law under which nature does indeed lend us material, though this material can be worked up by us into something wholly other, namely into what outstrips nature.

Representations of the imagination of this sort one is entitled to call ideas: in part because they do at least strive after something that lies beyond the frontier of experience, thus attempting to approach a presentation of the concepts of reason (the intellectual ideas), which lends them the semblance of an objective reality; and, on the other side—indeed principally—because, as inner intuitions, they can have no concept fully answering to them. The poet makes bold to give sensible embodiment to rational ideas of invisible beings—the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of the damned, eternity, the creation, and suchlike; or else to bring within the reach of sense, past the barriers of experience, things that do have their instances in experience, such as death, envy, and every vice, and likewise love, renown, and suchlike, by means of an imagination that vies with reason's anticipatory play in reaching toward a maximum, doing so in a completeness for which nature affords no instance; and it is, properly speaking, the art of poetry wherein the faculty of aesthetic ideas can manifest itself in its full extent. This faculty, however, considered by itself alone, is strictly no more than a talent (belonging to the imagination).

When, now, a representation of the imagination is subsumed under a concept—one belonging to the concept's presentation, yet by itself provoking so much thought as could never be gathered into a determinate concept, and thereby enlarging the concept itself aesthetically without limit—then the imagination proves creative here and sets the faculty of intellectual ideas (reason) into activity, prompting it, on the occasion of a representation, to think more (something that does belong to the object's concept) than can be grasped and rendered distinct within it.

Forms which do not of themselves make up the presentation of a given concept, but which—merely as accessory representations of the imagination—give expression to the consequences tied to it and to its affinity with others, one terms attributes (aesthetic ones) of an object whose concept, being a rational idea, admits of no adequate presentation. Thus Jupiter's eagle, the lightning in its talons, serves as an attribute of the mighty sovereign of the heavens, and the peacock as an attribute of the splendid queen of heaven. They set before us not (as the logical attributes do) what our concepts of the sublimity and majesty of creation contain, but something else, which prompts the imagination to range over a host of kindred representations that awaken more thought than can be captured in any word-determined concept; and thereby they furnish an aesthetic idea, which serves that rational idea in lieu of a logical presentation, though properly in order to quicken the mind, insofar as it discloses to it the vista of a boundless field of kindred representations. But fine art accomplishes this not in painting or sculpture alone (where the term "attributes" is commonly employed); poetry and eloquence, too, draw the spirit that animates their works entirely from the aesthetic attributes of their objects, which run parallel to the logical ones and lend the imagination an impetus to think, in connection with them—though in an undeveloped fashion—more than admits of being gathered into a concept, and therefore into a determinate verbal expression. — To keep things brief, I must confine myself to just a few instances.

When the great king gives expression to himself in one of his poems thus: »Let us take our leave of life without murmuring and with nothing to regret, leaving the world behind us even then still heaped with our benefactions. Even so the sun, having run its daily course, still sheds a gentle light across the heavens; and the final rays, which it dispatches into the air, are its parting sighs for the welfare of the world«: thus does he quicken his rational idea of a cosmopolitan cast of mind, at the very close of life, by an attribute which the imagination (recollecting all the pleasant things of a lovely summer's day now spent, such as a cloudless evening summons up in our minds) links to that representation, and which rouses a multitude of sensations and accessory representations to which no words answer. Conversely, an intellectual concept can, the other way round, serve as attribute to a representation of the senses, and so animate the latter through the idea of the supersensible—yet only insofar as the aesthetic element subjectively bound up with the consciousness of that representation is drawn upon for the purpose. Thus, to take an example, a certain poet, describing a fair morning, writes: »The sun poured forth, as peace pours forth from virtue.« The consciousness of virtue—even where one only imaginatively puts oneself in the position of a person of virtue—diffuses through the mind a wealth of sublime and tranquillizing feelings, together with a limitless prospect of a glad futurity such as no expression suited to a determinate concept can wholly capture.¹⁵

In a word, the aesthetic idea is a representation of the imagination adjoined to a given concept and combined with so rich a manifold of partial representations, in its free deployment, that no expression marking out a determinate concept can be discovered for it—an idea that accordingly lets one think, over and above a concept, a great deal that cannot be named, whose feeling animates the cognitive faculties and weds spirit to language, which is otherwise mere letter.

The mental powers, then, whose combination (in a certain proportion) makes up genius, are the imagination and the understanding. Only—since in employing the imagination for cognition the imagination stands under the coercion of the understanding and under the restriction of matching the latter's concept, whereas for aesthetic purposes the imagination is free to supply, over and above that agreement with the concept, unsought yet copious undeveloped material that the understanding disregarded in framing its concept, material which the understanding then turns to account not so much objectively, for cognition, as subjectively, for quickening the cognitive powers, and hence indirectly for cognitions after all—genius consists, strictly, in that fortunate relation, teachable by no science and learnable by no diligence, of lighting upon ideas for a given concept and, on the other hand, of striking the expression for them whereby the subjective disposition of mind so produced, as the accompaniment of a concept, may be imparted to others. It is this latter talent, strictly, that goes by the name of spirit; for to render the unnameable in the state of mind attending a given representation, and to make it universally communicable—whether the expression reside in words, in painting, or in sculpture—demands a faculty for seizing the fleeting play of the imagination and fusing it into a concept (one that is, just on that account, original, and that at the same time discloses a fresh rule derivable from no antecedent principles or examples), a concept that lets itself be communicated without any coercion of rules.

When, in the light of these analyses, we cast a backward glance at the explanation given above of what we term genius, the following emerges: first, that genius is a gift for art and not for science, where distinctly cognized rules have to precede and govern the procedure; second, that, being an artistic gift, it presupposes a determinate concept of the product as an end—hence understanding—but likewise a representation (indeterminate though it be) of the material, that is, of the intuition serving to present this concept, and thus a certain relation of imagination to understanding; that, third, it displays itself not so much in carrying out the intended end by presenting a determinate concept as rather in the delivery, or the expression, of aesthetic ideas that supply abundant material for that intention, and hence exhibits the imagination, in its emancipation from every rule-guided direction, as nonetheless purposive for presenting the given concept; and that, fourth and lastly, the unsought, undesigned subjective purposiveness in the free concord of the imagination with the lawful character of the understanding presupposes a proportion and disposition of these powers such as no observance of rules—be it of science or of mechanical imitation—could ever effect, and such as the subject's own nature alone can bring forth.

According to these presuppositions, genius is the exemplary originality of a subject's natural endowment in the free employment of its cognitive faculties. So considered, the product of a genius (with respect to what in it falls to genius rather than to learning that might be acquired or to schooling) is a model—not for imitation (for then the very thing in it that is genius, and that makes the work's spirit, would be forfeited), but for emulation by another genius, in whom it rouses the sense of his own originality to bring into art a freedom from rule-constraint of such a kind that art thereby gains for itself a fresh rule, and the talent shows itself thereby to be exemplary. But since genius is a favorite of nature, such as can be looked upon only as a rare phenomenon, its example gives rise, for other fine minds, to a school, that is, methodical instruction by rules, so far as these admit of being extracted from such products of spirit and their distinctive character; and for these persons fine art is to that degree an imitation, one for which nature, by way of a genius, furnished the rule.

But this imitation turns into aping when the pupil copies everything down to the very flaws that the genius was obliged to permit merely because they could not readily be removed without enfeebling the idea. This audacity is a merit in the genius alone; and a certain boldness of expression, and in general many a departure from the common rule, well befits it, yet is in no way worthy of imitation, but remains always, in itself, a defect that one is bound to try to remove—one for which, nonetheless, the genius is as it were licensed, since the inimitable quality of its flight of spirit would suffer under anxious circumspection. Mannering is a second sort of aping—that of mere peculiarity (originality) as such, undertaken so as to get as far as one possibly can from imitators, yet without possessing the talent to be, therewith, exemplary as well. — There are, admittedly, two sorts (modus) of arranging one's thoughts in delivery, the one termed manner (modus aestheticus), the other method (modus logicus), and they differ in this: that the former has no measuring-rod but the feeling of unity in the presentation, whereas the latter follows determinate principles in the matter; and so for fine art only the former holds good. But a product of art earns the name mannered only when the exposition of its idea in it is contrived for the sake of oddity, rather than made appropriate to the idea. The showy (the precious), the tortuous and the affected, resorted to merely in order to set oneself apart from the commonplace (but without spirit), resemble the demeanor of a man of whom it is said that he listens to himself talk, or who stands and moves as though he were on a stage to be gaped at—conduct that unfailingly gives away a bungler.

§ 50. On the combination of taste with genius in products of fine art

When the question is which matters more in things of fine art, whether that genius shows itself in them or that taste does, this amounts to just the same as if one were to ask whether in this more turns on imagination than on the power of judgment. Now since, with respect to the former, an art rather deserves to be called spirited, but with respect to the latter alone a beautiful art: the latter is at least, as the indispensable condition (conditio sine qua non), the foremost thing to which one must attend in judging an art as fine art. For the sake of beauty it is not so indispensably necessary to be rich and original in ideas; what is required, rather, is that this imagination, in its freedom, should accord with the lawfulness of the understanding. For, in its lawless freedom, all the abundance of the former produces nothing but nonsense; by contrast, the power of judgment is the capacity for suiting it to the understanding.

Taste, just like the power of judgment as such, is the discipline (or chastening) of genius; it trims its wings severely and renders it civil or refined; yet it likewise supplies it with guidance about what, and how far, it may spread itself so as to stay purposive; and, by introducing clarity and order into the abundance of thought, it renders the ideas enduring, fit for a lasting and withal universal acclaim, for emulation by others, and for a culture that ever presses forward. If, therefore, in the clash of these two properties within a single product something has to be surrendered, it ought sooner to occur on genius's side: for it is the power of judgment—delivering its pronouncement in matters of fine art from principles all its own—that will more readily countenance a curtailment of the imagination's freedom and wealth than of the understanding.

For fine art, then, imagination, understanding, spirit, and taste would be required¹⁶.

§ 51. On the division of the fine arts

Beauty in general — be it the beauty of nature or of art — may be called the expression of aesthetic ideas: save that in fine art this idea has to be occasioned by a concept of the object, whereas in beautiful nature mere reflection on some given intuition, apart from any concept of what the thing is meant to be, is enough to awaken and communicate the idea for which that object counts as the expression.

So, if we mean to divide the fine arts, we can find — at least for a trial — no principle more convenient than the analogy between art and that manner of expression which human beings use when they speak, so as to communicate to one another, as fully as can be done, not their concepts alone but their sensations too¹⁷. — Such expression lies in the word, the gesture, and the tone (that is, articulation, gesticulation, and modulation). Only the joining of these three modes of expression yields the speaker's complete communication. For thereby thought, intuition, and sensation are carried over to the other person at one and the same time and in union.

Accordingly there exist just three sorts of fine art: the verbal, the formative, and that of the play of sensations (taken as outer impressions of sense). One might also set up this division dichotomously, so that fine art would be split into the art expressing thoughts and the art expressing intuitions, and this last again according merely to its form or else its material (sensation). But it would then turn out too abstract and less answerable to ordinary concepts.

1) The verbal arts comprise rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the skill of pursuing a task of the understanding as though it were a free play of imagination; poetry, the skill of executing a free play of imagination as though it were a task of the understanding.

The orator, then, gives notice of a task and executes it as though it were nothing but a play with ideas, meant to divert his listeners. The poet gives notice of nothing but an entertaining play with ideas, and yet the yield for the understanding turns out as great as if his aim had merely been to carry on its work. The union and concord of the two cognitive faculties — sensibility and understanding — which, though they cannot dispense with one another, still cannot readily be brought together except under compulsion and reciprocal damage, must seem to come about unintentionally and to fall into place of its own accord; otherwise it is not fine art. For this reason all that is contrived and painstaking must be kept out of it; for fine art has to be free art in a twofold sense: first, that it not be a wage-earning labor whose extent could be assessed, exacted, or remunerated by some fixed measure; and second, that the mind, while engaged, should nonetheless — with no eye to any further end — feel itself (regardless of pay) satisfied and stirred.

The orator, then, does supply something he never pledged, namely a diverting play of imagination; yet he also curtails what he did pledge, and what is after all his declared task, namely to keep the understanding purposively engaged. The poet, by contrast, pledges little and gives notice of a bare play with ideas, yet delivers something worthy of a task, namely to feed the understanding as if in sport and, through imagination, to breathe life into its concepts: so that the one, at bottom, gives less, and the other more, than is promised.

2) The formative arts — those that express ideas in sensory intuition (not by way of representations of mere imagination, which words call forth) — fall either under sensory truth or under sensory semblance. The first is termed plastic art, the second painting. Both turn shapes in space into the expression of ideas: the former makes shapes recognizable to two senses, sight and touch (though to touch not on the score of beauty), the latter to sight alone. The aesthetic idea (the archetype, the original image) underlies both in imagination; but the shape that gives it expression (the ectype, the after-image) is furnished either through its corporeal extension (the way the object exists in itself) or through the manner in which it depicts itself to the eye (its appearance across a surface); or — this coming to the same as the former — either the reference to an actual end, or merely the semblance of one, is made the condition for reflection.

Under plastic art, the first species of the fine formative arts, fall sculpture and architecture. The first is the one that renders in bodily form concepts of things as they might exist in nature (yet, being fine art, with an eye to aesthetic purposiveness); the second is the art whose task is to render — for this aim, though at once in an aesthetically purposive manner — concepts of things possible only through art, things whose form takes as its determining ground, not nature, but some arbitrary end. With the latter a certain use of the artificial object is the chief matter, to which, as a condition, the aesthetic ideas stand confined. With the former the bare expression of aesthetic ideas is the chief aim. Thus statues of men, gods, animals, and suchlike belong to the first species; whereas temples, or splendid edifices meant for public gatherings, and likewise dwellings, triumphal arches, columns, cenotaphs, and suchlike raised for commemorative honor, pertain to architecture. Indeed every article of household furnishing (the cabinetmaker's work and suchlike things for use) may be reckoned here: because the product's fitness for a certain use makes up the essence of a work of building; whereas a bare sculptural work, fashioned solely to be looked at and meant to please in its own right, is, considered as a corporeal presentation, nothing but an imitation of nature, though still with an eye to aesthetic ideas: in which the sensory truth must not be pressed so far that the thing ceases to look like art and a product of choice.

Painting, the second species of formative art, which sets forth sensory semblance artificially bound up with ideas, I would separate into the beautiful depiction of nature and the beautiful assembling of her products. The former would be proper painting, the latter landscape gardening. For the first gives merely the semblance of corporeal extension; the second gives that in truth, but only the semblance of employment and use toward ends other than the bare play of fancy in the beholding of its forms¹⁸. This latter amounts to nothing more than decking the ground with that same variety (grasses, flowers, shrubs, and trees, and even waters, hills, and dales) with which nature sets it out for intuition, only put together in another way and to suit certain ideas. Yet the beautiful assembling of corporeal things, too, is offered to the eye alone, just as painting is; the sense of touch can supply no intuitive representation of a form of that kind. Under painting in the wide sense I would further reckon the adorning of rooms with tapestries, ornamental fixtures, and every kind of beautiful furnishing that serves only for viewing; likewise the art of dressing with taste (rings, snuffboxes, and the rest). For a bed of every sort of flower, a room with every sort of trinket (even the ladies' finery included) make up, at some grand celebration, a kind of picture which, like the pictures properly so named (those not perhaps aiming to teach history or natural science), is there only to be gazed at, so as to keep the imagination busy in its free play among ideas and, with no fixed end, to engage the aesthetic power of judgment. However much the workmanship in all this ornamentation may differ mechanically and call for wholly different artificers, the judgment of taste is, as to what is beautiful in this art, still settled in one and the same way: namely, to appraise the forms alone (with no regard for any end), in the way they offer themselves to the eye, whether singly or in combination, by the effect they work upon the imagination. — That formative art may, on the analogy, be reckoned as gesture within a language finds its warrant in this: through such shapes the artist's spirit lends a corporeal expression to what he has thought and how, and gets the thing itself, as it were, to speak in mime — a most everyday play of our fancy, which reads into lifeless things, in keeping with their form, a spirit uttering itself out of them.

3) The art of the beautiful play of the sensations (sensations produced from without, and which must all the same admit of universal communication) can bear on nothing but the ratio among the several degrees of attunement (tension) belonging to the sense in which the sensation resides, that is, on its tone; and in this wide acceptation of the term it may be split into the artificial play of the sensations of hearing and of those of sight, hence into music on the one hand and the art of color on the other. — It is a striking thing that these two senses, over and above the receptivity for impressions needed to derive something from outer objects by means of their concepts, are further capable of a special sensation coupled with that receptivity, one of which it cannot rightly be settled whether it rests on sense or on reflection; and that this affectibility can nonetheless at times be wanting, even though in other respects the sense, so far as its employment for cognizing objects goes, is not in the least defective, but on the contrary quite exceptionally refined . That is to say, one cannot declare with certainty whether a color or a tone (sound) is a merely agreeable sensation, or is already of itself a beautiful play of sensations that, as such, brings with it in aesthetic judging a satisfaction in the form. If one reflects on how fast the tremors of light — or, in the second case, of the air — occur, a rapidity that in all likelihood far outstrips our whole capacity to appraise, directly in perception, the ratio of the temporal division they involve, one would suppose that only the effect of these oscillations upon the elastic portions of our body is felt, while the temporal division they produce goes unremarked and undrawn into judging, so that with colors and tones only agreeableness, and not beauty of their composition, is conjoined. If one weighs, on the other side, first, the mathematics that may be stated concerning the ratio of these vibrations in music and their appraisal, and appraises the contrast of colors, as is only fair, on the analogy with music; if one calls to mind, secondly, the admittedly rare cases of persons who, though blessed with the keenest eyes in the world, could not tell colors apart, and with the sharpest ears could not tell tones apart, and likewise, for those capable of it, the noticing of an altered quality (and not just of the sensation's intensity) across the different tensions on the color-scale or tone-scale, and likewise that the number of these is fixed for comprehensible distinctions: then one might well feel driven to view the sensations of both, not as a bare sense-impression, but as the effect of an appraisal of form within the play of many sensations. The difference made by adopting the one view or the other in judging the ground of music would, however, alter only the definition to this extent, that one would declare it either, as we have done, the beautiful play of sensations (through hearing) or the play of agreeable sensations. On the first mode of explanation alone is music represented wholly as beautiful, whereas on the second it comes out as agreeable art (at least in part).

§ 52. On the combination of the fine arts in one and the same product

Eloquence, in a play, admits of union with a pictorial rendering of its subjects and no less of objects; poetry unites with music in song, and song, in turn, with pictorial (theatrical) staging in an opera; while in a dance the play of sensations within music is matched with the play of figures — and so on. So too the presentation of the sublime, so far as it counts as fine art, may be joined with beauty in a rhymed tragedy, a didactic poem, or an oratorio ; and though such couplings render fine art still more ingenious, whether they render it more beautiful as well — given that so many differing sorts of satisfaction here intersect — may in several of these instances be called into question. In all fine art, however, what is essential resides in the form that proves purposive for observing and appraising it — where the pleasure is at the same time culture and tunes the spirit toward ideas, thereby rendering it open to yet more such pleasure and diversion — and not in the matter of sensation (in charm or emotion), where the aim is mere enjoyment, which leaves nothing lasting in the idea, blunts the spirit, comes to sicken one of the object by degrees, and, through the mind's awareness of a disposition that reason's judgment finds counter-purposive, turns it discontented with itself and capricious.

Should the fine arts fail to be linked, whether nearly or distantly, to moral ideas — which alone bring with them a satisfaction that stands on its own — then this latter outcome proves their final destiny. Thereafter they merely furnish diversion, a need that grows all the greater the more one resorts to it so as to banish the mind's discontent with itself — and one thereby only grows ever more useless and still more discontented with oneself. On the whole, nature's beauties best serve that first purpose when one is trained from early on to watch them, to appraise them, and to admire them.