§ 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.

§ 53. Comparison of the aesthetic value of the fine arts with one another

Of them all, the art of poetry—indebted for its origin almost wholly to genius, and least willing of any to be steered by precept or by example—lays claim to the foremost rank. It broadens the mind in that it releases the imagination into freedom and, within the bounds of a given concept and among the unlimited variety of possible forms consonant with it, brings forward the one form that unites the presentation of that concept with a fullness of thought which no linguistic expression ever wholly matches, and so raises itself aesthetically to ideas. It strengthens the mind by letting it feel its own capacity—free, spontaneously active, and independent of any determination through nature—to survey and appraise nature as appearance under aspects that experience does not of its own accord offer, either to sense or to the understanding, and so to enlist it for the purposes of the supersensible and, as it were, as its schema. It toys with the semblance it calls forth at its own pleasure, and yet deceives no one in doing so; for it openly declares its occupation to be mere play, which all the same the understanding can turn to purposive account for its own business. — Eloquent oratory—taken as the art of persuasion, in other words of misleading through beautiful semblance (as ars oratoria), rather than as mere skill in speaking well (eloquence and style)—amounts to a dialectic that draws upon poetry only so far as it must, so as to sway minds toward the speaker, for his own benefit, before any judgment is reached, and to strip them of their freedom; hence it can be commended neither at the bar nor from the pulpit. For where civil laws are at stake, or the rights of particular individuals, or the enduring edification of minds and their direction toward a proper acquaintance with their duty and its scrupulous discharge, it falls below the dignity of so weighty an undertaking to betray even the faintest hint of exuberance in wit and imagination—and less still any trace of the art of talking people round and winning them over to someone's benefit. For granted that it may now and then be put to ends that are, in themselves, rightful and worthy of praise, it becomes reprehensible all the same, because in this fashion the maxims and dispositions are corrupted at the subjective level, however lawful the deed may be objectively: for merely doing what is right does not suffice; one must also carry it out on that ground alone—namely, because it is right. Besides, the plain distinct concept of such kinds of human business—joined to a vivid illustration through examples, and committing no breach of the rules governing the euphony of language or the seemliness of expression suited to ideas of reason (which taken together constitute fine speech)—already carries in itself influence enough upon human minds that there is no call to enlist, over and above it, the machinery of persuasion; and this machinery, precisely because it lends itself equally to varnishing over or masking vice and error, can never quite root out the covert suspicion of a contrived deception. In the art of poetry everything proceeds honestly and sincerely. It avows that it means to conduct a merely diverting play with the imagination, one whose form accords with the laws of the understanding; and it makes no claim to creep up on the understanding and ensnare it by means of sensible presentation.¹⁹

Next after poetry I would rank—where what is at issue is charm and the stirring of the mind—that art which, of all the speaking arts, stands nearest to it and blends with it, moreover, quite naturally, namely the art of tone. For though it does indeed speak by means of sensations alone, devoid of concepts, and thus, unlike poetry, leaves nothing behind for one to ponder, it nevertheless stirs the mind in more varied fashion and—transient though this be—more intimately; yet it is, to be sure, enjoyment rather than culture (the byplay of thought that it rouses along the way is nothing but the upshot of an association that is, so to speak, mechanical); and, weighed by reason, it ranks below every other of the fine arts in worth. Hence, like every enjoyment, it demands frequent change and does not bear repeated reiteration without producing weariness. The charm it exerts, being so universally communicable, appears to rest upon the following: that each expression of a language carries, within its connected use, a tone fitted to that expression's sense; that such a tone marks, to a greater or lesser degree, an affect in the one speaking and calls forth the same, reciprocally, in the one listening, in whom it in turn kindles the very idea that language voices by means of such a tone; and that, just as modulation amounts to a kind of universal language of sensations intelligible to every human being, so the art of tone wields this language by itself alone, in its whole force, that is, as the language of the affects, and in this way, obeying the law of association, imparts to all the aesthetic ideas that are by nature bound up with it; but that, since those aesthetic ideas are neither concepts nor determinate thoughts, the manner in which these sensations are put together (harmony and melody) takes the place merely of the form of a language, serving—through a proportioned attunement of those sensations (which, seeing that with tones it depends on the ratio between the number of vibrations of the air within one and the same span of time, insofar as the tones are joined whether simultaneously or in succession, can be set mathematically under certain rules)—to express the aesthetic idea of a coherent whole of an unnameable fullness of thought, answering to a certain theme that makes up the affect reigning in the piece. It is upon this mathematical form—even though determinate concepts do not represent it—that the whole of the satisfaction depends, the satisfaction which mere reflection upon so great a throng of sensations, whether these accompany or succeed one another, attaches to their interplay as a condition, holding for all alike, of its beauty; and this form alone is that by which taste may venture to lay claim, ahead of time, to a right over the judgment of every person.

Yet mathematics certainly plays not the least part in the charm and the emotional stirring that music brings about; it is merely the unavoidable prerequisite (conditio sine qua non) for the proportion among these impressions, both as they are joined together and as they succeed one another, which makes it possible to gather them into a unity, keeping them from cancelling each other out and letting them instead coalesce, through affects that resonate with them, into an uninterrupted stirring and animation of the mind, and so into an agreeable enjoyment of oneself.

If, by contrast, one appraises the worth of the fine arts according to the culture they impart to the mind, taking as one's yardstick the enlargement of those powers that have to converge, within the power of judgment, toward cognition, then music occupies, in that regard, the lowest rank among the fine arts (whereas among those prized at once for their agreeableness it stands perhaps at the top), since it does no more than play with sensations. The formative arts, accordingly, far outstrip it in this regard; for by setting the imagination into a play that is free and yet, at the same time, answerable to the understanding, they carry on a business alongside, since what they bring forth is a product that supplies the concepts of the understanding with a lasting vehicle, one commending itself to those very concepts, so as to advance their union with sensibility and thereby, so to speak, the urbanity of the higher powers of cognition. Arts of the two kinds follow wholly divergent paths: the one proceeds from sensations up to indeterminate ideas, whereas the other sets out from determinate ideas and moves toward sensations. An impression of the lasting sort belongs to the latter, whereas the former leave only a transitory one. The imagination can recall the latter and pleasantly entertain itself with them; the former, however, either fade away entirely, or, when they are involuntarily repeated by the imagination, are irksome to us rather than pleasant. Music, moreover, is dogged by a certain want of urbanity, in that—owing chiefly to the make of its instruments—it spreads its influence wider than is asked of it (into the neighborhood) and so, as it were, obtrudes itself, and thereby curtails the freedom of others who stand outside the musical gathering; the arts that address themselves to the eyes commit no such trespass, for one has merely to look away whenever one would rather not let their impression in. The case here is much like that of the pleasure one takes in a scent that diffuses itself far and wide. The person who draws his perfumed handkerchief from his pocket treats everyone around and beside him against their will and compels them, if they want to breathe, to partake at the same time; which is also why it has gone out of fashion.²⁰ — Of the formative arts my own preference would go to painting: in part because, being the art of drawing, it lies at the foundation of all the rest of them; in part because it can press far deeper into the region of ideas and, conformably to these, can widen the field of intuition to a greater extent than the others are allowed.

§ 54. Remark

There is, as we have repeatedly demonstrated, an essential difference between that which pleases merely in the judging of it and that which gratifies (pleases in sensation). This latter kind cannot be expected of everyone as the former kind can. Gratification (its cause may well lie even in ideas) appears in every instance to rest in a feeling that the whole of the human being's life is being promoted, and therewith his physical welfare too, that is, his health; and thus Epicurus, who declared all gratification to be fundamentally a bodily sensation, was to this degree perhaps not mistaken, erring only about himself when he counted intellectual and indeed practical satisfaction as gratifications. Once one keeps the latter distinction before one's eyes, one can explain how a gratification can itself displease the person who feels it (like the joy of a needy but right-minded person over the inheritance from his loving but stingy father), or how a deep pain can nonetheless please the person who suffers it (the sorrow of a widow over the death of her deserving husband), or how a gratification can please us over and above (like our gratification in the sciences we pursue), or a pain (e.g., hatred, envy, and vindictiveness) can moreover displease us. Here the satisfaction or dissatisfaction rests on reason and is one and the same as approval or disapproval; but gratification and pain can rest only on feeling, or on the prospect of a possible well-being or ill-being (on whatever ground it may be).

Because it promotes the feeling of health, every shifting free play of sensations (which has no purpose at its basis) gratifies: whether or not, in judging by reason, its object and even this very gratification meet with our satisfaction; and such gratification may climb as high as an affect, although the object as such holds no interest for us — at any rate none commensurate with the degree of that affect. We can divide it into the game of chance, the game of tone, and the game of thought. The first calls for an interest — of vanity or of self-interest — which is nevertheless nowhere near so great as our interest in the way we set about procuring it for ourselves; the second calls merely for the changing of the sensations, every one of which bears a relation to affect, though without reaching the degree of an affect, and rouses aesthetic ideas; the third arises solely from the changing of representations within the power of judgment, whereby no thought bearing any interest is produced, and yet the mind is thereby quickened.

How gratifying the games must be, without any need to lay an interested aim as their basis, is shown by all our evening companies; for without a game hardly any of them can keep itself going. Yet the affects of hope, fear, joy, anger, and scorn come into play here, since at every moment they exchange their roles, and are so vivid that through them, as an inner motion, the body's whole business of life seems to be furthered — as the resulting cheerfulness of mind attests — although nothing at all has been either gained or learned. But since the game of chance is not a beautiful game, we shall set it aside here. Music and matter for laughter, on the other hand, are two sorts of play with aesthetic ideas — or with representations of the understanding as well — by means of which nothing is ultimately thought, and which can nonetheless afford a lively gratification through their variation alone; and by this they make it tolerably clear that in both cases the enlivening is purely bodily, however much it be stirred up by ideas of the mind, and that it is the feeling of health, brought about by a movement of the viscera answering to that play, which makes up the entire gratification — so esteemed as refined and full of spirit — of a merry gathering. What makes up the gratification one takes in the fact that the body can be reached through the soul as well, so that the soul may serve as the body's physician, is not the judging of harmonies in tones or in flashes of wit — which, with its beauty, serves merely as an indispensable vehicle — but rather the promoted business of life in the body, the affect that sets the viscera and the diaphragm in motion, in short the feeling of health (which apart from some such prompting cannot otherwise be felt).

In music, this play proceeds from the body's sensation to aesthetic ideas (of the objects for affects), and from these it then returns once more, though with concentrated force upon the body. In jesting (which, no less than the former, deserves to be counted among the agreeable arts rather than the fine ones) the play begins from thoughts that, one and all, in so far as they wish to give themselves sensible expression, engage the body too; and inasmuch as the understanding suddenly slackens in this presentation, wherein it fails to find what it had expected, one feels the effect of that slackening in the body through the vibrating of the organs, which promotes the recovery of their equilibrium and exerts a salutary influence upon health.

There must be something absurd in anything meant to provoke a hearty, convulsive laughter (something, therefore, in which the understanding by itself can take no satisfaction). Laughter is an affect that springs from the abrupt conversion of a tensed expectation into nothing. This very conversion, which is certainly not delightful for the understanding, does nonetheless indirectly delight very vividly for a moment. The cause, then, must reside in the effect that the representation has upon the body, together with the body's reciprocal action upon the mind; and this not because the representation, objectively taken, is an object of gratification (for how could a deceived expectation gratify?), but purely because, being a mere play of representations, it produces within the body an equilibrium of the vital forces.

If someone recounts that an Indian who, at the table of an Englishman in Surat, saw a bottle of ale being opened and all this beer, changed into foam, rushing out, expressed his great astonishment with many exclamations, and, upon the Englishman's question: what is there here to be so astonished at? answered: I am not astonished either that it comes out, but rather at how you managed to get it in, then we laugh, and it gives us a hearty delight: not because we perhaps find ourselves cleverer than this ignorant person, or on account of anything else pleasing that the understanding lets us notice in it; but rather our expectation was strained and suddenly vanishes into nothing. Or take the heir of a wealthy kinsman who means to give him a thoroughly solemn burial, but laments that he simply cannot succeed at it; for, as he puts it, the more I pay my hired mourners to wear a grieving face, the more cheerful they come to look — at which we laugh aloud, and the reason lies in this: that an expectation is all at once turned into nothing. One must indeed observe: that it must convert itself not into the positive opposite of an expected object — for that is always something and can often grieve us, — but rather into nothing. For if someone stirs up great expectation in us with the telling of a tale, and at the close we at once see through its untruth, then it gives us displeasure; as, e.g., the tale of people who are supposed to have gotten gray hair in a single night from great grief. If, by contrast, another wag replies to a tale of that kind by relating in great detail the sorrow of a merchant who, on his way home from India to Europe with his entire fortune in goods, found himself forced during a violent storm to cast the whole cargo overboard, and who grieved to such a degree that his wig went gray in that very night: then we burst out laughing, and it affords us gratification, because for a time we go on knocking our own misstep — over an object that is anyway a matter of indifference to us, or rather the idea we keep chasing — to and fro like a ball, though all we intend is to catch hold of it and keep it. It is not here the dismissal of a liar or a blockhead that awakens the gratification: for even on its own the latter tale, told with assumed seriousness, would throw a company into bright laughter; and the former would ordinarily not even be worth the attention.

It is remarkable that, in every case of this sort, the jest must harbor within itself something capable of deceiving us for an instant; and so, once the semblance dissolves into nothing, the mind turns back to it to make the attempt yet again, and in this way, through a tensing and slackening that follow one another in quick succession, is flung back and forth and thrown into vacillation: which — since the recoil from what had, so to speak, drawn the string tight came about suddenly (and not by a gradual easing) — must generate a motion of the mind together with an inward bodily motion harmonizing with it, a motion that continues involuntarily and produces weariness, yet therewith also a cheering-up (the effects of an agitation that redounds to health).

For suppose that, along with all our thoughts, some movement or other in the organs of the body stands harmoniously conjoined: one will then more or less comprehend how that abrupt shifting of the mind — now to one standpoint, now to another, so as to regard its object — can be matched by an alternating tautening and slackening of the elastic portions of our viscera, which imparts itself to the diaphragm (just like what ticklish people feel): whereupon the lungs drive the air out in bursts following rapidly one on another, and thus produce a movement conducive to health — a movement that by itself, and not what goes on in the mind, is itself the real ground of the gratification afforded by a thought that at bottom represents nothing. — Voltaire remarked that, as a counterweight against the many toils of life, heaven has bestowed on us two things: hope and sleep. He could have added laughter to these; if only the means of arousing it in rational beings were as readily at hand, and the wit or the originality of temper required for it were not just as rare as the talent is frequent for composing in a head-breaking way like mystical brooders, in a neck-breaking way like geniuses, or in a heart-breaking way like sentimental novelists (and probably moralists of the same stripe).

One may therefore, as it appears to me, readily concede to Epicurus the following: that all gratification, even when brought on by concepts that awaken aesthetic ideas, is animal — that is, bodily — sensation; without on that account doing the least injury to the spiritual feeling of reverence toward moral ideas — a feeling that is no gratification but rather an esteem for oneself (for the humanity within us), one that lifts us above any need of it — nor even to the less noble feeling of taste.

A thing compounded of the two shows itself in naïveté, which is the breaking-forth of that sincerity, originally natural to humankind, against the art of dissimulation that has turned into a second nature. One laughs at the simplicity that does not yet understand how to dissemble; and yet one also delights in the simplicity of nature, which here draws a line through that art. One expected the everyday convention of the affected utterance carefully laid out for beautiful semblance; and behold! it is uncorrupted, guiltless nature that one was not at all prepared to meet with, and which the one who let it show through had no intention of laying bare. That the beautiful but false semblance, which ordinarily counts for a great deal in our judgment, is here suddenly converted into nothing, that the rogue in ourselves is, as it were, exposed, brings forth the movement of the mind in two opposed directions one after the other, which at the same time gives the body a wholesome shaking. But the fact that something infinitely better than all assumed convention — the purity of one's cast of thought (or at any rate the predisposition to it) — has, for all that, not been wholly extinguished in human nature, mingles into this play of the power of judgment a strain of seriousness and high esteem. Yet since it is only an appearance that shows itself for a brief while, and the veil of the art of dissimulation is soon drawn across once more, there mingles into it at the same time a certain regret — a stir of tenderness which, treated as play, blends very readily with such good-natured laughter, and in fact is commonly so blended with it, while it also serves to make good, to the person who supplies the occasion for it, his embarrassment at not yet having been made worldly-wise in the human manner. — An art of being naïve is for that reason a contradiction; to portray naïveté in a fictitious character, however, is indeed possible, and is a fine art, albeit likewise a rare one. Naïveté ought not to be confounded with that frank simplicity which refrains from artificializing nature merely because it fails to grasp what the art of social intercourse consists in.

To that which is heartening, closely akin to the gratification from laughter, and belonging to the originality of spirit but precisely not to the talent of fine art, one may also count the humorous manner . Humor in the good sense, that is, means the talent of being able to put oneself voluntarily into a certain disposition of mind in which all things are judged quite otherwise than usual (indeed inverted) and yet in conformity with certain principles of reason within such a frame of mind. Anyone who is subject to such alterations against his will is moody; but the one who can assume them at will and to a purpose (with a view to a vivid presentation by way of a contrast that provokes laughter), he together with his manner of delivery is termed humorous. This manner, though, has its place among the agreeable arts rather than the fine ones, since the object of the latter must invariably exhibit a certain dignity in itself, and for that reason calls for a measure of seriousness in the presentation, just as taste calls for it in the judging.

Of the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment

Second Section. Dialectic of the aesthetic power of judgment

§ 55.

For a power of judgment to be dialectical, it must first of all be ratiocinating; that is to say, the judgments it delivers have to claim universality, and to do so a priori²¹, since the dialectic lies precisely in the mutual opposition of judgments of that kind. That is why the incompatibility of aesthetic judgments of sense (regarding the agreeable and the disagreeable) is not, for its part, dialectical. The conflict of judgments of taste, too, insofar as everyone appeals merely to his own taste, constitutes no dialectic of taste: because no one intends to turn his own judgment into a universal rule. There thus remains no concept of any dialectic that could bear on taste except one belonging to a dialectic of the critique of taste (and not to taste itself) in regard to its principles: for with respect to the ground on which judgments of taste are possible at all, mutually opposed concepts arise in a natural and unavoidable manner. Accordingly, a transcendental critique of taste will contain a portion entitled to be called a dialectic of the aesthetic power of judgment, but only in the event that an antinomy turns up among the principles of this faculty—one that throws its lawfulness, and thus its inner possibility too, into doubt.

§ 56. Representation of the antinomy of taste

The first of taste's commonplaces is contained in that saying by which anyone devoid of taste thinks to guard himself against reproach: everyone has his own taste. This is as much as to say: what determines this judgment is purely subjective (gratification or pain), and the judgment can claim no necessary assent from others.

The second commonplace on the same subject, drawn upon even by those who allow the judgment of taste the right of pronouncing itself valid for everyone, is this: about taste there can be no disputing. This is as much as to say: the ground determining a judgment of taste might well be objective too, yet it cannot be reduced to determinate concepts; and so, by means of proofs, nothing can be decided regarding the judgment itself, even though one may quite rightly and with good reason contend about it. For contending and disputing are indeed one and the same in this, that through the mutual resistance of judgments they seek to produce unanimity among them, but they diverge in this, that disputing hopes to effect it by determinate concepts taken as grounds of proof, and hence posits objective concepts as the grounds of the judgment. But where this is regarded as impracticable, disputing too is judged to be equally impracticable.

One readily sees that between these two commonplaces a proposition is missing, one that is not indeed in proverbial circulation but is nonetheless contained in everyone's mind, namely: about taste one can contend (though not dispute). This proposition, however, contains the contrary of the topmost proposition. For wherever contending is to be allowed, there must be some hope of reaching mutual agreement; and thus one has to be able to rely on grounds of the judgment which possess more than a merely private validity and are therefore not purely subjective, a demand to which that very principle, everyone has his own taste, runs directly counter.

Thus with regard to the principle of taste the following antinomy shows itself:

1) Thesis. The judgment of taste rests upon no concepts; for were that not so, one could dispute about it (settle it by means of proofs).

2) Antithesis. The judgment of taste does rest upon concepts; for were that not so, then, whatever its diversity, no contention over it would even be possible (to make claim to the necessary concurrence of others in this judgment).

§ 57. Resolution of the antinomy of taste

The conflict of those principles that underlie every judgment of taste (they are simply the two peculiarities of such judgments set out earlier in the Analytic) admits of no removal save by making the following clear: that the concept by which, in judgments of this kind, one relates to the object is not employed in a single sense across both maxims of the aesthetic power of judgment; that this doubled sense, or standpoint of judging, is required by our transcendental power of judgment; but that the semblance arising when the one is confounded with the other, being a natural illusion, cannot be avoided either.

Some concept or other the judgment of taste must indeed involve; for without one it could lay no claim whatever to a necessary validity holding for everyone. Yet just for that reason it must not be demonstrable from a concept, for a concept may be either determinable, or else in itself indeterminate and, along with that, indeterminable. The concept of the understanding belongs to the first sort, being determinable by way of predicates drawn from a sensible intuition able to answer to it; to the second belongs the transcendental concept that reason forms of the supersensible, which underlies all such intuition and hence permits no further theoretical determination.

Now, the judgment of taste does bear upon objects of sense, though not so as to fix for the understanding any concept of them; for it is no judgment of cognition. Being an intuitive, singular representation tied to the feeling of pleasure, it is on that account only a private judgment: and to that extent its validity would reach no further than the individual doing the judging: the object is for me one in which I take satisfaction, whereas with others it may stand quite differently; — each has a taste of his own.

And yet the judgment of taste unquestionably harbors a wider relation of the object's representation (and, along with it, of the subject's), on which we rest the claim that judgments of this kind extend as necessary to everyone: a claim that must accordingly rest on some concept or other as its ground; but on a concept that no intuition can ever determine , by which nothing gets cognized, and from which, consequently, no proof for the judgment of taste can be conducted. A concept of that description is nothing but the pure rational concept of the supersensible, which underlies the object (and the judging subject as well) taken as an object of sense, and thus as appearance. For were such a regard left out of account, the judgment of taste's pretension to universal validity could not be rescued; and if the concept it rests upon were merely some confused concept of the understanding, of perfection perhaps, to which the sensible intuition of the beautiful might be joined as its correlate, then it would at least be intrinsically possible to base the judgment of taste on proofs — which runs counter to the thesis.

But now every contradiction disappears once I put it thus: the judgment of taste rests on a concept (that of a ground, generally, for nature's subjective purposiveness with respect to the power of judgment), from which, however, nothing about the object can be cognized or proved, since it is in itself indeterminable and useless for cognition; yet by this very concept the judgment at the same time gains validity for everyone (in each case, admittedly, as a singular judgment attending the intuition directly): because what determines it may well lie in the concept of that which one can take to be the supersensible substrate of humanity .

Resolving an antinomy hinges on nothing more than the possibility that two propositions, seemingly at odds, in truth fail to contradict each other and can stand together, even where explaining how their concept is possible outstrips our power of cognition. That this semblance is, moreover, natural and, for human reason, inescapable — and likewise why it is so and remains so, though after the apparent contradiction is dissolved it deceives no longer — can be rendered intelligible from the same considerations.

For in both of the conflicting judgments we take the concept, on which a judgment's universal validity has to rest, in one identical meaning, and nonetheless ascribe to it two contrary predicates. Hence the thesis ought properly to run: the judgment of taste has no basis in determinate concepts; and the antithesis: the judgment of taste does rest on a concept, albeit an indeterminate one (that, namely, of the supersensible substrate of appearances); whereupon no conflict remains between them.

Beyond settling this conflict among taste's claims and counterclaims, nothing further lies within our power. It is flatly impossible to furnish some determinate, objective principle of taste by which its judgments might be steered, examined, and proved; for the judgment would then cease to be one of taste. The subjective principle — that indeterminate idea of the supersensible within us — can be pointed to only as the one key for unriddling this power, whose sources stay concealed even from ourselves, and beyond that cannot be made intelligible at all.

What underlies the antinomy here erected and reconciled is the right concept of taste, that is, of taste as a merely reflecting aesthetic power of judgment; and on that basis the two ostensibly conflicting principles were brought together, since both can be true, which is enough. Were one instead to take, as what determines taste (on account of the singularity of the representation underlying the judgment of taste), either agreeableness, as some do, or, as others prefer (on account of its universal validity), the principle of perfection, and to shape the definition of taste to suit: then an antinomy springs up that admits of no reconciliation whatever, save by showing that both of the opposed (yet not merely contradictory) propositions are false: which then proves that the concept underpinning each is at odds with itself. One sees, then, that disposing of the antinomy belonging to the aesthetic power of judgment follows much the same route the Critique took when resolving the antinomies of pure theoretical reason; and that, here as likewise in the Critique of practical reason, the antinomies force us, despite ourselves, to look past the sensible and to search within the supersensible for the point where all our faculties come together a priori: since no other road is left for bringing reason into accord with itself.

Remark I.

Since in transcendental philosophy occasion arises so frequently to set ideas apart from the understanding's concepts, there may be some advantage in bringing in technical terms fitted to their distinction. I trust there will be no objection should I put a few forward. — Ideas, in the widest sense, are representations that relate to an object under a certain principle (subjective or objective), while nonetheless never coming to constitute a cognition of that object. Either they bear on an intuition under a principle that is merely subjective — the mutual accord of the cognitive powers (imagination and understanding) — and then bear the name aesthetic; or they bear on a concept under an objective principle while still never delivering any cognition of the object, and are named ideas of reason; and here the concept is a transcendent one, marked off from the concept of the understanding, beneath which an experience adequately answering to it may always be placed, and which is therefore styled immanent.

An aesthetic idea can never turn into a cognition, for it is an intuition (of the imagination) for which no adequate concept is ever to be had. An idea of reason can never turn into a cognition, for it holds a concept (of the supersensible) to which no commensurate intuition can ever be supplied.

I hold, accordingly, that one may term the aesthetic idea an inexponible representation of the imagination, and the idea of reason an indemonstrable concept of reason. Of each it is taken for granted that it is not simply baseless, but rather (following the account of an idea in general given above) produced in keeping with certain principles of the cognitive powers it answers to (for the one the subjective, for the other the objective principles).

Concepts of the understanding, precisely as such, have at every point to be demonstrable (taking demonstration, as in anatomy, to mean simply exhibiting); that is, whatever object answers to them has always to admit of presentation in intuition (pure or empirical): for it is by this route alone that they turn into cognitions. The concept of magnitude admits of being given a priori in the intuition of space — say, that of a straight line, and so on; the concept of cause in impenetrability, in the collision of bodies, and so on. Both, then, can be borne out by an empirical intuition — that is, the thought of them exhibited in an instance (demonstrated, displayed); and such exhibition must be able to occur: failing which one has no assurance that the thought is not vacant, that is, wanting any object whatever.

Logic ordinarily reserves the terms demonstrable and indemonstrable for propositions alone: though the first would be better named propositions certain only mediately, the second immediately certain ones; for pure philosophy likewise possesses propositions of each sort, understanding thereby true propositions that either do or do not admit of proof. From grounds a priori, however, philosophy as such can indeed prove but not demonstrate — unless one wholly abandons the word's sense, on which demonstrating (ostendere, exhibere) amounts to setting one's concept, in the very act (be it of proving or merely of defining), before intuition as well: an intuition that, where it is a priori, is termed the construction of the concept, but where it is empirical still counts as the display of the object, whereby objective reality is made secure for the concept. The anatomist, accordingly, is said to demonstrate the human eye when, by dissecting this organ, he makes intuitive the concept that he had previously presented in discursive form.

On this footing the rational concept of the supersensible substrate underlying all appearances whatever — or of that which has to be laid at the base of our power of choice in respect of moral laws, namely transcendental freedom — counts already by its very species as an indemonstrable concept and idea of reason, while virtue counts as such only by degree: for to the former nothing whatsoever answering to it in quality can be given in experience at all, whereas in the latter no experiential product of that causality reaches the degree that the idea of reason lays down as its rule.

As, with an idea of reason, the imagination and its intuitions fall short of the concept that is given: so, with an aesthetic idea, the understanding by its concepts never reaches the entire inner intuition that the imagination binds up with a given representation. And since bringing a representation of the imagination under concepts is nothing else than to expound it: the aesthetic idea may fairly be called an inexponible representation of that faculty (at play freely). Further on I shall find room to say more concerning ideas of this sort; for the present I note only this: that both kinds of idea, the rational no less than the aesthetic, must have their principles, and both in reason at that — the one in the objective, the other in the subjective principles governing its use.

On this basis genius, too, may be explained by way of the faculty of aesthetic ideas: which at once discloses why, in what genius produces, it is nature (the subject's), and not any deliberate end of art (the bringing-forth of the beautiful), that furnishes the rule. For since the beautiful is not to be appraised by concepts, but by the purposive tuning of the imagination toward accord with the faculty of concepts as such: it follows that neither rule nor prescription, but solely what is sheer nature in the subject — yet cannot be caught under rules or concepts, namely the supersensible substrate of all its powers (which no concept of the understanding reaches), and hence that in relation to which the final end bestowed by the intelligible in our nature is to bring all our cognitive powers into concord — can serve as the subjective measure for that aesthetic yet unconditioned purposiveness in fine art which is meant to lay a rightful claim to having necessarily to please everyone. It is on this footing alone, moreover, that a subjective and yet universally valid principle a priori can underlie this power, to which no objective principle admits of being prescribed.

Remark II.

A weighty remark presents itself here unbidden: namely, that pure reason has three kinds of antinomy, all of which nevertheless concur in forcing it to quit the otherwise entirely natural assumption that takes objects of sense for things in themselves, letting them pass instead as mere appearances and setting beneath them an intelligible substrate — something supersensible whose concept is a mere idea and yields no cognition properly so called. Lacking such an antinomy, reason could never resolve upon adopting a principle that so severely contracts the field of its speculation, nor upon sacrifices in which so many otherwise glittering hopes are bound to fade away entirely; for even now, when in recompense for this forfeiture a far larger employment opens to it on the practical side, it seems it cannot , without pain, take leave of those hopes and loosen itself from the old attachment.

That there should be three kinds of antinomy has its ground in there being three cognitive powers — understanding, the power of judgment, and reason — every one of them being obliged, as a higher cognitive power, to have its principles a priori; for reason, in passing judgment upon these principles and their use, unrelentingly demands with regard to them all the unconditioned to match the conditioned that is given, an unconditioned that can nevertheless never be found so long as one regards the sensible as belonging to things in themselves, and does not instead place beneath it, as mere appearance, something supersensible (the intelligible substrate of nature outside us and within us) as a thing in itself. Here, then, we have: 1) an antinomy of reason concerning the theoretical use of the understanding, ascending as far as the unconditioned itself, for the faculty of cognition; 2) reason exhibits another such antinomy where the power of judgment is put to aesthetic use, for the feeling of pleasure and displeasure; 3) yet another antinomy, concerning the practical use of reason as legislating for itself, for the faculty of desire: for all of these powers possess their higher principles a priori, and, in obedience to an unavoidable demand of reason, must likewise be able to judge unconditionally in accordance with those principles and to determine their object.

With regard to two such antinomies — the one belonging to the theoretical and the one belonging to the practical use of those higher cognitive powers — we have shown already, in another place, both their unavoidability, in cases where judgments of this sort refuse to look back to a supersensible substrate of the given objects as appearances, and equally their resolvability, as soon as that looking-back does occur. Turning now to the antinomy in the employment of the power of judgment as reason's demand raises it, together with the resolution offered here: there is no way of sidestepping it other than either to deny that any principle a priori underlies the aesthetic judgment of taste — so that every pretension to a necessary universal agreement would be a hollow, baseless fancy, and a judgment of taste would rank as correct merely because it turns out that many concur about it, and even that not really on the score that one suspects a principle a priori behind such concurrence, but (just as with the palate's taste) because the subjects chance to be alike in their make-up; or one would have to grant that the judgment of taste is at bottom a disguised judgment of reason upon a perfection detected in a thing and upon the reference of the manifold within it to an end, and gets called aesthetic solely because of the confusion clinging to this reflection of ours, though in truth it is teleological: on which supposition one might pronounce the resolution of the antinomy through transcendental ideas needless and void, and so reconcile those laws of taste with objects of sense not as bare appearances but as things in themselves as well. But just how little either shift accomplishes has been demonstrated at various points in the exposition of judgments of taste.

Yet if our deduction be allowed at least this much, that it moves along the correct path, however far it may still fall short of full clarity in every particular, then three ideas come to light: first, the supersensible taken at large, with no closer determination, as nature's substrate; second, that same supersensible as the principle of nature's subjective purposiveness for our cognitive power; third, that same supersensible again as the principle of freedom's ends and of the concord of those ends with that purposiveness in the sphere of morals.

§ 58. On the idealism of the purposiveness of nature, as well as of art, as the sole principle of the aesthetic power of judgment

One may, first of all, locate the principle of taste either in the claim that it always judges according to empirical determining grounds, and hence according to grounds given only a posteriori through the senses, or one may grant that it judges from a ground a priori. The former would amount to the empiricism of the critique of taste, the latter to its rationalism. On the first view, the object of our satisfaction would not differ from the agreeable; on the second, were the judgment to rest upon determinate concepts, it would not differ from the good; and so all beauty would be argued away out of the world, with nothing surviving in its place but a special designation, given perhaps to some blend of the two kinds of satisfaction just named. Yet we have demonstrated that grounds of satisfaction a priori likewise exist, grounds that may accordingly stand together with the principle of rationalism, notwithstanding that they admit of no capture in determinate concepts.

The rationalism of taste's principle, on the other hand, amounts either to the realism of purposiveness or to the idealism thereof. Since, now, a judgment of taste amounts to no cognitive judgment, and beauty , taken by itself, is no property of the object, the rationalism of taste's principle can never be located in supposing the purposiveness within this judgment to be conceived as objective—in other words, in supposing that the judgment refers theoretically, and hence logically as well (albeit only through a confused appraisal), to the perfection of the object, rather than referring merely aesthetically, within the subject, to the agreement of its representation in the imagination with those principles that are essential to the power of judgment as such. Consequently, even under the principle of rationalism, taste's judgment—together with the distinction between its realism and its idealism—can be located solely in this: that the subjective purposiveness in question is assumed, in the former case, to harmonize with our power of judgment as a genuine (deliberate) end of nature (or of art), or, in the latter case, merely as a purposive concordance that emerges spontaneously and fortuitously, devoid of any end, answering to the requirement of the power of judgment as regards nature and the forms it produces under particular laws.

The realism of the aesthetic purposiveness of nature—where, namely, one would like to assume that at the basis of the production of the beautiful there lay an idea of it in the producing cause, that is, an end in favor of our imagination—is very much advocated by the beautiful formations in the realm of organized nature. Flowers, blossoms, indeed the forms of entire plants; the gracefulness of animal formations of every sort of kind—superfluous for their own use, yet as though chosen for our taste; above all the variety, so agreeable and alluring to our eyes, and the harmonious arrangement of colors (on the pheasant, on shellfish, insects, down to the most common blossoms), which, inasmuch as they touch merely the surface—and not even, on that surface, the figure of the creatures, a figure that might still be requisite for their inner ends—seem to be directed wholly toward outward viewing: lend great weight to that mode of explanation which assumes actual ends of nature on behalf of our aesthetic power of judgment.

Opposed to this assumption, by contrast, stands not reason alone—with its maxims of forestalling everywhere, as far as may be, any needless multiplying of principles—but nature too displays throughout its free formations such an abundance of mechanical inclination toward producing forms that appear, so to speak, fashioned for the aesthetic use of our power of judgment, yet furnish not the least ground for conjecturing that anything beyond its mechanism, taken simply as nature, is needed for this, in keeping with which they can prove purposive for our judging even in the absence of any idea lying at their basis. By a free formation of nature, though, I mean that one whereby, once a portion of a fluid at rest has been driven off or separated out (at times merely the heat-matter), what remains takes on, in solidifying, a determinate shape or web (figure or texture)—one that varies with the specific diversity of the materials, yet within one and the same material proves precisely identical. For this, however, what one always understands by a true fluidity is presupposed—namely, that the matter in it is completely dissolved, that is, not to be regarded as a mere mixture of solid parts merely suspended within it.

The formation then comes about through shooting together, that is, through a sudden solidifying—not by a gradual passage out of the fluid into the solid condition, but as it were by a leap, a transition that also goes by the name of crystallization. The commonest example of this kind of formation is water in the act of freezing, wherein straight little ice-spikes are first generated, which conjoin at angles of 60 degrees while still others fasten on likewise at every point of them, until the whole has become ice: such that throughout this interval the water lying among the ice-spikes does not thicken by degrees, but stays as thoroughly fluid as it would be in far greater warmth, and nonetheless carries the utter coldness of ice. The matter that separates out, which slips away all at once in the instant of solidifying, is a sizable quantity of heat-stuff, whose departure—since it was required merely for being fluid—leaves this ice, now formed, no colder in the slightest than the water that had been fluid within it just before.

Numerous salts, and equally stones possessing a crystalline figure, arise in just the same manner out of an earthy substance dissolved in water through who knows what agency . In the same way the druse-like configurations of many minerals—of cubical galena, of ruby silver ore, and the like—are formed, in all likelihood also in water and through the shooting together of the parts: in that they are compelled by some cause to leave this vehicle and to unite with one another into determinate outer shapes.

But internally, too, all materials that were fluid merely through heat and have taken on solidity through cooling display a determinate texture in their fracture, and allow the inference that, had their own weight or contact with the air not hindered it, they would have displayed their specifically peculiar shape outwardly as well: something that has been observed in certain metals which, after melting, had hardened on the outside but were still fluid within, by drawing off the inner, still-fluid part and letting the remainder left behind inside shoot together quietly. Many of those mineral crystallizations, such as the spar-druses, hematite, and iron-flowers, often give exceedingly beautiful shapes such as art might ever devise; and the Glory in the grotto of Antiparos is merely the product of water seeping through layers of gypsum.

By all appearances the fluid is on the whole older than the solid, and plants no less than animal bodies are formed out of fluid nutritive matter insofar as it shapes itself at rest: in the latter, to be sure, primarily in accordance with a certain original predisposition oriented toward ends (which, as the second part will show, has to be appraised not aesthetically but teleologically, under the realist principle); yet, alongside this, perhaps also crystallizing in conformity with the universal law governing the affinity of materials, and giving itself form in freedom. Now, just as the aqueous fluids, dissolved within an atmosphere that constitutes a mixture of several kinds of air, generate—once the former part company with the latter through the departure of warmth—snow-figures whose form, varying with the momentary composition of the air, is frequently of an exceedingly beautiful and often quite artificial-looking shape: so it can well be thought, without withdrawing anything from the teleological principle of judging organization: that as regards the beauty of flowers, of bird-feathers, of shells—both in their shape and in their color—this could be ascribed to nature and to its capacity to form itself, in its freedom, without particular ends directed at this, according to chemical laws, through the deposition of the matter requisite for organization, also aesthetically-purposively.

But what directly proves the principle of the ideality of purposiveness in the beautiful of nature—as that which we always lay at the basis in the aesthetic judgment itself, and which permits us to make use of no realism of an end of nature for our power of representation as a ground of explanation—is this: that in judging beauty as such we look for the standard of it a priori within our own selves, and that the aesthetic power of judgment is, with respect to the judgment whether a thing be beautiful or not, itself the lawgiver—something that could not occur were the realism of nature's purposiveness assumed, since we should then have to learn from nature what we ought to find beautiful, and the judgment of taste would fall under empirical principles. For in such a judging it does not depend on what nature is, or even is for us as an end, but on how we receive it. It would always be an objective purposiveness of nature had it fashioned its forms for the sake of our satisfaction; and not a subjective purposiveness resting upon the free play of the imagination , a case in which the favor is one we extend to nature, not one that nature grants us. That characteristic of nature—namely, that it holds for us an opportunity to perceive the inner purposiveness in the relation of our mental powers when we appraise certain of its products, and to perceive it, moreover, as something that is to be pronounced necessary and universally valid on a supersensible ground—cannot be a natural end, or rather be judged by us to be one: for otherwise the judgment thereby determined would rest on heteronomy instead of being free and grounded in autonomy, as suits a judgment of taste.

In fine art the principle of the idealism of purposiveness stands out even more clearly. For the fact that no aesthetic realism of it by way of sensations may be assumed here (in which event it would amount, in place of fine art, to merely agreeable art): this is what it shares with beautiful nature. Yet the point that satisfaction through aesthetic ideas need not hinge upon the achievement of determinate ends (in the manner of mechanically deliberate art), so that within the rationalism of the principle itself it is the ideality of ends, not their reality, that lies at the basis: becomes plain already from this, that fine art as such has to be viewed not as a product of understanding and of science, but rather as one of genius, thereby acquiring its rule through aesthetic ideas, which differ essentially from ideas of reason concerned with determinate ends.

In just the way that the ideality of objects of sense, considered as appearances, alone makes it explicable that their forms should admit of being determined a priori: so, equally, the idealism of purposiveness in judging what is beautiful in nature and in art is the single presupposition under which alone the critique can render intelligible the possibility of a judgment of taste demanding a priori validity for everyone (without, however, resting on concepts the purposiveness that is represented in the object).

§ 59. On beauty as a symbol of morality

To establish the reality of our concepts, intuitions are always required. Should the concepts be empirical, these intuitions go by the name of examples. Where the concepts in question are pure concepts of the understanding, the intuitions in turn are termed schemata. Should someone even insist that the concepts of reason—the ideas, that is—have their objective reality set forth, and this for the sake of a theoretical cognition of them, then he demands an impossibility, since no intuition adequate to them can ever be furnished.

All hypotyposis (presentation, subiectio sub adspectum), as a rendering into the sensible, is of two kinds: it is either schematic, when a concept that the understanding grasps has its matching intuition furnished a priori; or symbolic, when beneath a concept—one that reason alone can think, and for which no sensible intuition could ever prove adequate—there is placed an intuition such that the procedure of the power of judgment is with respect to it merely analogous to what it does in schematizing, that is, agrees with it merely in the rule of that procedure and not in the intuition itself, hence merely as to the form of the reflection and not as to its content.

There is a use of the word symbolic—one that recent logicians have indeed adopted, yet that distorts its sense and is incorrect—according to which it is opposed to the intuitive mode of representation; for the symbolic is only one species of the intuitive. The latter (the intuitive), namely, can be divided into the schematic and the symbolic mode of representation. Both are hypotyposes, that is, presentations (exhibitiones): not mere characterizations, that is, designations of concepts by means of accompanying sensible signs that carry nothing pertaining to the object's own intuition but serve those concepts only, according to the law of the association of the imagination and hence with a subjective aim, as a means of reproduction; signs of this kind are either words or visible (algebraic, even mimetic) marks, as mere expressions for concepts²².

Accordingly, whatever intuitions we lay beneath concepts a priori are therefore either schemata or symbols: the first kind furnish direct presentations of the concept, the second kind indirect ones. A schema accomplishes this by demonstration, a symbol through an analogy (in the service of which empirical intuitions too are drawn upon), and in this analogy the power of judgment discharges a twofold task: first, to bring the concept to bear upon the object of some sensible intuition, and thereupon, secondly, to carry the mere rule of its reflection upon that intuition over to a wholly distinct object, of which the first serves only as the symbol. So it is that a monarchical state is represented through an ensouled body if it is governed according to internal laws of the people, but through a mere machine (such as a hand mill) if it is governed by a single absolute will—in either case, however, only symbolically. For although no likeness whatever holds between a despotic state and a hand mill, one assuredly does hold between the rules by which we reflect on the two and on their causality. This matter has so far been little worked out, however much it merits a more searching inquiry; but this is not the occasion to dwell upon it. Such indirect presentations following an analogy abound in our language, and through them the expression harbors, in place of the concept's genuine schema, nothing more than a symbol for reflection. Thus the words ground (support, base), to depend (to be held from above), whence to flow (instead of to follow), substance (in Locke's expression: the bearer of the accidents), and countless further ones are hypotyposes and expressions for concepts that are symbolic rather than schematic, resting not on any direct intuition but solely on an analogy with one—that is, on carrying the reflection upon an object of intuition over to a wholly other concept, one with which perhaps no intuition can ever stand in direct correspondence. If a mere mode of representation may already be styled cognition (which is doubtless allowable when it constitutes a principle not for theoretically determining what the object is in itself, but for practically determining what the idea of it is to come to for us and for the purposive employment of that idea): then whatever cognition of God we possess is nothing more than symbolic; and whoever takes it for schematic—along with those properties, understanding, will, and so forth, that attest their objective reality in worldly beings alone—falls into anthropomorphism, whereas, should he drop everything intuitive, he sinks into deism, by which nothing whatever is cognized, not even for a practical aim.

Now I make this claim: the morally good has its symbol in the beautiful—and only under this aspect (a relation natural to everyone, and one that each person likewise demands of others as a duty) does it please while asserting a title to the assent of everyone else; and in this the mind is at once conscious of a certain ennoblement and of an elevation above the mere receptivity to a pleasure through impressions of the senses, and it values another's worth as well by a similar maxim of their power of judgment. This is the intelligible toward which, as the previous section indicated, taste looks out—that with which our higher cognitive faculties themselves accord, and in whose absence sheer contradictions would spring up between their nature and the demands that taste raises. It is in this faculty that the power of judgment, unlike in its ordinary empirical appraisals, does not find itself subject to a heteronomy of the laws of experience: as concerns the objects of so pure a satisfaction it prescribes the law to its own self, in the very way reason does as concerns the faculty of desire; and, in view alike of this interior possibility residing in the subject and of the exterior possibility of a nature that harmonizes with it, it sees itself brought into relation with something present in the subject itself as well as outside it, something that is neither nature nor freedom, yet stands linked to the ground of freedom—the supersensible, namely—wherein the theoretical faculty is bound together with the practical into unity in a manner shared by both and unknown to us. Let me single out a few points of this analogy, taking care meanwhile not to pass over the respects in which it differs.

1) The beautiful gives pleasure immediately (yet solely within reflecting intuition, and not, as morality does, within the concept). 2) It gives pleasure without any interest (the morally good is indeed bound of necessity to an interest, yet not to one that precedes the judgment upon the satisfaction, but to one that this judgment first brings about). 3) The freedom of the imagination (that is, the sensible side of our faculty) is, in judging the beautiful, presented as consonant with the understanding's lawfulness (the moral judgment, by contrast, thinks the will's freedom as that will's agreement with itself according to universal laws of reason). 4) The subjective principle for judging the beautiful is represented as universal, that is, as valid for everyone, though not made recognizable by any universal concept whatever (morality's objective principle, for its part, is likewise declared universal, that is, valid for all subjects and at the same time for all actions of the same subject, and moreover as recognizable through a universal concept). Hence the moral judgment is not merely susceptible of determinate constitutive principles, but becomes possible only through founding the maxims upon these principles and upon their universality.

Regard for this analogy is likewise habitual to the common understanding; and beautiful objects of nature or of art we frequently label with names that appear to rest upon a moral appraisal. Buildings or trees we call majestic and magnificent, or meadows laughing and glad; colors themselves are termed innocent, modest, and tender, since they awaken feelings that hold within them something akin to the awareness of a state of mind brought about by moral judgings. Taste, as it were, renders the passage from sensory charm to a habitual moral interest possible without any too violent a leap, in that it exhibits the imagination, even in its freedom, as determinable so as to be purposive for the understanding, and it schools us to find a free satisfaction even in objects of sense that lack all sensory charm.

§ 60. Appendix. On the doctrine of method of taste

That separation of a critique into a doctrine of elements and a doctrine of method, a separation preceding the science itself, does not admit of application to the critique of taste : for no science of the beautiful is given or can be given, and the judgment of taste is incapable of determination through principles. For as concerns the scientific side of any art — the side directed toward truth in the presentation of its object — that side is admittedly the unavoidable condition (conditio sine qua non) of fine art, but is not itself that art. There is therefore for fine art only a manner (modus), not a mode of teaching (methodus). The master must demonstrate for the pupil what he is to produce and how; and those general rules beneath which he finally subsumes his own procedure are apt to serve less for prescribing that procedure to him than for occasionally calling its chief moments back to memory. Even so, regard must here be paid to a certain ideal that art must keep before its eyes, though it never fully reaches it in its practice. Only by rousing the pupil's imagination to adequacy with a given concept, by the noted insufficiency of the expression for the idea that the concept itself does not reach because that idea is aesthetic, and by keen critique, can one guard against the examples set before him being taken by him at once as archetypes and as patterns for imitation subject to no still higher norm and to no judging of his own, and thus against genius, and with it the very freedom of the imagination in its lawfulness, being stifled — that freedom without which no fine art, indeed not even a correct taste of one's own for judging it, is possible.

The propaedeutic to all fine art, so far as it aims at the utmost degree of its perfection, appears to consist not in prescriptions but in the culture of the mental powers by way of that preliminary knowledge which is called humaniora: presumably because humanity signifies, on the one hand, the universal feeling of fellow participation and, on the other, the capacity to communicate oneself most intimately and universally; which properties, joined together, constitute the sociability befitting humankind, whereby it sets itself apart from the confinement of the animal. Both the epoch and the peoples among whom the lively impulse toward lawful sociability — that by which a nation constitutes a lasting common being — struggled against the great difficulties that hem in the arduous task of joining freedom (and therefore equality as well) to a coercion (one grounded more in esteem and in submission out of duty than out of fear); such an epoch and such a people were the first who had to devise the art whereby the ideas of the most highly developed portion are reciprocally imparted to the ruder portion, the attunement of the widening and refinement of the former to the unaffected plainness and originality of the latter, and thereby that middle term between the loftier culture and an undemanding nature which yields the right measure — one specifiable by no general rules — for taste as well, taken as a universal human sense.

A later epoch will scarcely be able to do without those models: for it will draw ever further from nature, and in the end, possessing no abiding examples drawn from her, could hardly form for itself any concept of that happy marriage — within one selfsame people — between the lawful constraint belonging to the highest culture and the vigor and rectitude of a free nature that feels its own worth.

But since taste is at bottom a faculty for judging the making-sensible of moral ideas (by means of a certain analogy in the reflection upon both), from which faculty, and from the greater receptivity to be grounded thereon for the feeling arising out of those ideas (which is called the moral feeling), there is likewise derived that pleasure which taste pronounces valid for mankind at large, and not for the private feeling of each person alone : it becomes plain that the true propaedeutic for grounding taste is the development of moral ideas and the culture of moral feeling; for genuine taste can assume a determinate, unchanging form only where sensibility has been attuned to that feeling.

The Critique of the Power of Judgment

Second Part. Critique of the teleological power of judgment

§ 61. On the objective purposiveness of nature

Following transcendental principles, we have good reason to assume a subjective purposiveness of nature in its particular laws, one directed at its comprehensibility for the human power of judgment and at the possibility of combining its particular experiences into a system of these; and there, amongst nature's many products, some may likewise be looked for as possible which — as if they had been arranged quite expressly for our power of judgment — contain forms so specifically suited to it that, by their manifoldness and unity, they serve, so to speak, to fortify and sustain the mental powers (those set in play in the use of this faculty), and on which one accordingly bestows the name of beautiful forms.

But that things of nature mutually serve as means toward ends, and that their possibility itself should prove adequately intelligible solely through a causality of this kind — for that we have not the slightest ground in the general idea of nature, taken as the totality of the objects of the senses. For in the above case the representation of things, since it is something within us, could very well be thought even a priori as fit and suited to the inwardly purposive attunement of our cognitive faculties; but how ends that are not our own, and that also do not belong to nature (which we do not assume to be an intelligent being), could or should nevertheless constitute a special kind of causality, or at least a lawfulness altogether peculiar to it, cannot in the least be presumed a priori on any ground. What is more, even experience cannot prove to us the reality of such causality; there would have to have been some sophistical reasoning beforehand that merely reads the concept of an end into the nature of things, yet does not draw it from the objects and their empirical cognition, and thus uses that concept more to render nature intelligible by analogy with a subjective ground for connecting representations within us than to cognize nature from objective grounds.

Besides, objective purposiveness, taken as a principle by which the things of nature are made possible, stands so far from being necessarily tied to the concept of nature that it is instead precisely what one chiefly invokes in order to demonstrate, on that very basis, how contingent nature and its form are. For if one adduces, for instance, the structure of a bird, the hollowness in its bones, the way its wings are set for motion and its tail for steering, and so on, one is thereby asserting that all of this, taken merely according to the nexus effectivus in nature and without calling upon a special variety of causality — namely that of ends (nexus finalis) — is contingent to the highest degree; in other words, that nature, viewed as mere mechanism, could have shaped itself in a thousand different ways without hitting precisely upon unity in accordance with such a principle, so that one may not hope to encounter the slightest ground for it a priori anywhere except outside the concept of nature, and never within it.

Still, teleological judging is, at least problematically, justly drawn into natural research; yet only so as to bring it under principles of observation and investigation by analogy with causality in accordance with ends, without presuming to explain it thereby. It therefore pertains to the reflecting power of judgment, not the determining one. The concept of nature's connections and forms according to ends is, nonetheless, at the very least one more principle by which to subsume its appearances under rules in cases where the laws of causality, resting on its mere mechanism, prove insufficient. For we adduce a teleological ground whenever, to a concept of an object — as though that concept were located in nature (and not in us) — we assign a causality with respect to an object, or rather picture to ourselves the possibility of the thing on the analogy of such a causality (of the kind we come upon within ourselves), thereby thinking nature as technical through a capacity of its own; against which, should we not ascribe to it such a mode of operation, its causality would have to be envisaged as a blind mechanism. Should we instead place beneath nature causes that act intentionally, and so lay as the foundation of teleology not solely a regulative principle meant merely for the judging of appearances — which nature, in keeping with its particular laws, might be thought to be subject to — but also a constitutive principle for the derivation of its products out of their causes: then a natural end, taken as a concept, would cease to belong to the reflecting power of judgment and would fall instead to the determining one; yet in that case it would in truth not be peculiar to the power of judgment at all (like the concept of beauty, which is a formal subjective purposiveness), but would, as a concept of reason, introduce into natural science a new causality — one that we in fact merely borrow from ourselves and attribute to other beings, without, however, being willing to assume them to be of the same kind as us.

First Division. Analytic of the teleological power of judgment

§ 62. On objective purposiveness that is merely formal, as distinguished from the material kind

Every geometrical figure drawn according to a principle exhibits in itself a manifold and often admired objective purposiveness, namely a fitness for the solution of many problems by a single principle, and indeed of each individual problem in infinitely varied ways. The purposiveness here is manifestly objective and intellectual, not merely subjective and aesthetic. For it expresses the adequacy of the figure for producing many intended shapes, and is cognized by reason. Yet this purposiveness does not make possible the concept of the object itself, that is, the object is not regarded as possible merely with a view to this use.

In a figure as simple as the circle there lies the ground for the solution of a host of problems, each of which taken by itself would demand various apparatus, and which follows as if of its own accord as one among the infinitely many excellent properties of this figure. If the task is, for example, to construct a triangle from a given base line and the angle opposite to it, the problem is indeterminate, that is, it can be solved in infinitely manifold ways. Yet the circle comprises them all together, as the geometrical locus of all triangles that conform to this condition. Or let two lines cross one another so that the rectangle contained by the two segments of the first equals that contained by the two segments of the second: to all appearances, resolving such a task carries much difficulty. But all lines that intersect within the circle whose circumference bounds each of them divide themselves of their own accord in this proportion. The other curved lines in turn furnish still further purposive solutions that were not at all thought of in the rule constituting their construction. Every conic section, whether considered on its own or set beside the others, teems with principles by which a multitude of possible problems may be resolved, no matter how plain the definition that fixes its concept. — It is a genuine joy to watch the ardor with which the ancient geometers pursued these properties belonging to lines of this kind, refusing to be unsettled by the question, raised by narrow intellects, of what good such knowledge could possibly do; the parabola, for instance, they studied without knowing the law of gravity here on earth — the law that would have furnished them the means of applying that curve to the flight path of projected heavy bodies (whose gravitational direction throughout their motion may be taken as parallel); or the ellipse, never guessing that gravity resides in the celestial bodies as well, nor acquainted with its law at the various distances from the center of attraction, the very thing that makes those bodies trace this line in unconstrained motion. Even as they toiled here for later generations without themselves being aware of it, they took pleasure in a purposiveness residing within the essence of things, one they were nevertheless able to exhibit wholly a priori in its necessity. Plato, himself a master of this science, fell — on account of such an original constitution of things, whose discovery lets us do without all experience, and on account of the mind's power to draw the harmony of beings out of their supersensible principle (to which one may add those numerical properties that the mind toys with in music) — into an enthusiasm that lifted him past the concepts of experience up to ideas which, to his mind, seemed explicable only through an intellectual fellowship with the origin of all beings. It is no wonder that he turned away from his school anyone unversed in geometry, in that he supposed himself able to derive, from the pure intuition dwelling inwardly in the human spirit, what Anaxagoras had inferred from objects of experience and their purposive connection. For the very ground of that great admiration of nature — a ground residing not so much beyond us as in our own reason — is to be found in the necessity attaching to whatever is purposive and framed as though it had been set up on purpose for our use, and yet appears to pertain from the outset to the essence of things, taking no account whatever of that use; and here it is quite pardonable that such admiration, by way of misunderstanding, should little by little have mounted to the pitch of fanaticism.

This intellectual purposiveness, however, although it is objective (and not subjective like the aesthetic), can nonetheless, with respect to its possibility, be quite well comprehended, though only in general, as merely formal (not real), that is, as a purposiveness without there being any need to lay an end at its foundation, and hence without any need of teleology for it. The circle's figure is an intuition that the understanding has settled upon in conformity with a principle: this principle, whose unity I posit arbitrarily and lay down as a concept, once brought to bear on a form of intuition — namely space — which likewise is encountered in me solely as a representation, and that a priori, renders intelligible the unity of the many rules that flow from constructing the said concept, rules purposive in a variety of possible aims, and it does so without allowing us to place beneath this purposiveness any end or any other ground for it. Matters stand otherwise here than they would if, within some collection of things outside me shut in by certain limits — a garden, say — I were to encounter order and regularity among the trees, flower beds, walkways, and the like, which I could not hope to derive a priori from my bounding of a space carried out by some arbitrary rule of my choosing: for these are things that exist, things that have to be given empirically if they are to be cognized, rather than a bare representation within me fixed a priori in accordance with a principle. The latter (empirical) purposiveness therefore depends, as something real, upon the concept of an end.

But the ground of the admiration of a purposiveness, even though one perceived in the essence of things (insofar as their concepts can be constructed), can also be very well grasped, and grasped indeed as legitimate. These diverse rules, whose unity (issuing from a single principle) is what stirs up such admiration, are without exception synthetic, and rather than following from any concept of the object — of the circle, say — they demand that this object be presented in intuition. Through this, however, this unity takes on the appearance of having empirically an external ground of the rules distinct from our power of representation, and thus that the agreement of the object with the need for rules, a need proper to the understanding, is contingent in itself, and hence possible only through an end expressly directed to that agreement. Now, to be sure, this very harmony, because, notwithstanding all this purposiveness, it is nonetheless cognized not empirically but a priori, ought of itself to bring us to acknowledge that space—by whose determination (through the imagination conformably to a concept) the object was alone possible—is no property of the things outside me but only a mode of representing in me, and thus that, into the figure I trace suited to a concept, that is, into my own way of representing whatever is externally given to me, be it in itself what it may, it is I who introduce the purposiveness, and that I receive no empirical instruction concerning it from this object, and consequently that I require for that purposiveness no particular end in the object outside me. Yet since such a consideration already calls for a critical employment of reason, and therefore cannot straightaway be included in the appraisal of the object according to its properties: what the latter appraisal hands me directly is nothing but a uniting of heterogeneous rules (even as regards whatever is unlike in them) under one principle — a principle that, without demanding for itself any special ground lying beyond my concept, and beyond my representation a priori in general, is all the same cognized by me a priori as genuinely valid. Now astonishment is a shock the mind receives at the incompatibility of a representation, and of the rule given through it, with the principles already lying at its foundation, a shock that therefore produces a doubt as to whether one has really seen or judged correctly; admiration, however, is an ever-recurring astonishment despite the vanishing of this doubt. The latter, accordingly, is an entirely natural upshot of that observed purposiveness within the essence of things (taken as appearances) — an upshot that cannot on this account be faulted, given that the agreement between that form of sensible intuition (the one we name space) and the faculty of concepts (namely the understanding) is not merely inexplicable to us because it happens to be just this form and no other, but is over and above that enlarging for the mind, inviting it as it were to sense something reaching yet further beyond those sensible representations, wherein — unknown to us though it be — the final ground of that concord might be met with. Knowing this ground is admittedly not something we require so long as nothing more than the formal purposiveness of our representations a priori is at issue; yet the mere obligation to gaze out that far already inspires, at once, admiration for the object that drives us to do so.

It is customary to call the properties just noted — those of geometrical shapes, and indeed those of numbers as well — beauty, owing to a certain purposiveness they possess for all manner of a priori cognitive use, a purposiveness one would not have looked for from the simplicity of their construction; and one will speak, for instance, of this or that beautiful property of the circle, uncovered in one way or another. It is, however, by no aesthetic judging that we find them purposive; not a conceptless judging, one that would bring to notice a merely subjective purposiveness within the unconstrained interplay of our cognitive powers: but an intellectual judging that proceeds by concepts, one giving us to cognize distinctly an objective purposiveness, i.e., a fitness for ends of every kind (manifold to infinity). It would be more fitting to name it a relative perfection rather than a beauty belonging to the mathematical figure. Nor, indeed, can the term intellectual beauty be suitably allowed at all: since otherwise the word beauty would forfeit every determinate meaning, or else the intellectual satisfaction would forfeit any precedence it holds over the sensible. It would sooner be a demonstration of such properties that one could pronounce beautiful, since through it the understanding, as the power of concepts, together with the imagination, as the power of presenting them a priori, feel themselves fortified (which, taken with the precision that reason imports, goes jointly under the name of the elegance of such a demonstration): for here at least the satisfaction, even though its ground resides in concepts, is subjective, whereas perfection brings an objective satisfaction along with it.

§ 63. On the relative purposiveness of nature as distinguished from inner purposiveness

Only where a relation of cause to effect stands to be judged²³ does experience direct our power of judgment toward the concept of an objective and material purposiveness—that is, toward the concept of an end of nature; and such a relation we are able to recognize as law-governed solely by placing the idea of the effect beneath the causality of its cause, taken as the condition that, grounding that causality itself, makes the former possible. But this may occur in two different manners: we regard the effect either directly as a product of art, or else merely as material for the art of other possible natural beings—hence either as an end, or as a means to the purposive employment of other causes. This second purposiveness goes by the name of usefulness (for human beings), or likewise beneficialness (for any other creature), and it remains merely relative, while the first is an inner purposiveness belonging to the natural being.

Rivers, for example, carry along with them all sorts of soil serviceable to the growth of plants, which they deposit sometimes in the midst of the land, often also at their mouths. The tide bears this silt over the land along many a coast, or lays it down on its shore; and when human beings above all lend a hand so that the ebb does not carry it off again, the fertile land increases, and the vegetable kingdom gains ground where formerly fish and shellfish had their abode. Most enlargements of land of this kind have probably been accomplished by nature itself, and it still carries on with them, though slowly. — Now the question arises whether this is to be judged as an end of nature, because it contains a usefulness for human beings; for the usefulness for the vegetable kingdom itself cannot be brought into the reckoning, since just as much is withdrawn from the sea creatures on the other side as advantage accrues to the land.

Or, to offer an instance of how certain natural things prove beneficial as means to other creatures (supposing these are posited as ends): for spruces no ground thrives better than sandy ground. Before the primeval sea drew back from the land, it had deposited in our northern territories such broad tracts of sand that upon this ground, otherwise wholly unfit for any cultivation, sprawling spruce forests could establish themselves—forests for whose irrational eradication we often accuse our ancestors; and one may then ask whether that most ancient laying-down of the sand-strata served as an end of nature on behalf of the spruce forests made possible upon them. So much is evident: that whoever admits these as an end of nature must concede sand as well, though only as a relative end, whose means was in turn the old seacoast together with its receding; for within a chain whose links stand subordinated one to another in a nexus of ends, each connecting link has to count as an end (though not, of course, as a final end), the link for which its immediately preceding cause serves as the means. Likewise, were cattle, sheep, horses, and the like ever to be present in the world, grass had of necessity to spring up on the earth; but salt-herbs, too, had to grow in the sandy wastes if camels were to flourish, just as these and other grass-feeding species had to be met with in plenty if wolves, tigers, and lions were ever to exist. Hence the objective purposiveness founded upon beneficialness is no objective purposiveness inhering in the things as they are in themselves, as if the sand, on its own, could not be comprehended as an effect arising out of its cause, the sea, without ascribing an end to that sea and viewing the effect—namely the sand—as a work of art. Such purposiveness is merely relative, and merely accidental to the very thing to which it is ascribed; and although, among the examples cited, the kinds of grass are on their own to be judged as organized products of nature, and hence as full of art, still, in relation to the animals that feed on them, they are regarded as mere raw matter.

But when the human being goes still further and, by the freedom of his causality, turns natural things to his frequently foolish purposes (the bright bird-feathers to adorn his garments, tinted earths or plant-saps for cosmetic paint)—and at times, from a rational purpose, the horse to ride, the ox, and in Minorca even the ass and the swine to plow with—then not even a relative natural end (for such use) may be assumed here. For his reason knows how to endow things with a fitness to his capricious whims—a fitness for which nature itself had by no means predestined him. Only if it be granted that human beings were meant to dwell upon the earth can it follow that, at the very least, the means cannot be lacking whereby they were able to persist as animals—and indeed as rational animals (to however humble a degree); and in that event those natural things that are indispensable for this end would likewise have to be counted as natural ends.

It is easy to gather from all this that external purposiveness (one thing's beneficialness for others) admits of being taken as an external natural end solely provided that the existence of whatever it benefits, be it nearby or at some remove, is in its own right an end of nature. But since the latter can never be made out by mere observation of nature, the consequence is that relative purposiveness, though it points only hypothetically to natural ends, still authorizes no absolute teleological judgment.

Snow protects the seed-crops in cold countries against the frost; it eases the intercourse of human beings (by means of sledges); the Laplander finds there animals that bring about this intercourse (reindeer), which find ample nourishment in a dry moss that they must themselves scratch out from under the snow, and which nonetheless let themselves be tamed with ease and be willingly robbed of the freedom in which they could perfectly well have sustained themselves. For other peoples in the same frigid zone the sea holds a rich store of animals which, besides the food and clothing they supply, and the wood which the sea as it were floats down to them for their dwellings, furnish them further with fuel for warming their huts. Here, then, one meets with an admirable convergence of so many of nature's relations upon a single end; and that end is the Greenlander, the Lapp, the Samoyed, the Yakut, and so forth. Yet why human beings should have to live there in the first place is not something one perceives. To say, therefore: that for this reason vapors from the air in the form of snow fall down, that the sea has its currents which float thither the wood grown in warmer countries, and that great sea-animals filled with oil are present, because the idea of an advantage for certain wretched creatures lies at the basis of the cause that procures all these natural products, would be a very daring and arbitrary judgment. For even if all this natural usefulness were absent, we should miss nothing in the sufficiency of the natural causes for this constitution; rather, so much as to demand such a disposition, and to impute such an end to nature (since, apart from this, it was only the utmost incompatibility of human beings among themselves that could have scattered them into such inhospitable regions), would strike us as being itself presumptuous and thoughtless.

§ 64. On the distinctive character of things as natural ends

To grasp that a thing can be possible solely as an end—that is, to have to seek the causality behind its origin not within nature's mechanism but instead in a cause whose power to produce effects is settled by concepts—the following is demanded: that its form not admit of being possible under mere natural laws, namely those which we, applying the understanding by itself to objects of the senses, are able to cognize; but rather that even its empirical cognition, in respect of its cause and effect, should presuppose concepts of reason. This contingency of its form, in relation to reason and across all empirical natural laws—for reason, obliged to recognize in each form of a natural product likewise the necessity belonging to it, if it would grasp even merely the conditions tied to that product's generation, is nonetheless unable to accept this necessity in the given form—already furnishes a ground for taking the causality of that thing to be such that, on that very account, it could be possible only through reason; and reason is in that case the capacity for acting according to ends (a will); and the object, which one represents to oneself as possible only as something proceeding from this, would in that case be represented as possible only as an end.

Suppose that, in a country seeming to him uninhabited, a person noticed a geometrical figure—perhaps a regular hexagon—traced in the sand: his reflection, in working out a concept of it, would then apprehend, however dimly, through the mediation of reason, the unity in the principle of its production, and, guided by this, would decline to judge the sand, the sea nearby, the winds, or even animals whose footprints he is familiar with, or any other cause lacking reason, as a ground for the possibility of such a shape: for the sheer contingency involved in its coinciding with a concept of this sort, one that only reason can render possible, would strike him as so boundlessly great that it would come to the same thing as if no natural law governed it whatsoever, so that no cause within nature operating merely mechanically, but solely the concept of such an object—as a concept that reason alone can furnish and by which alone reason can measure the object—could equally contain the causality for such an effect, and hence this could be regarded outright as an end, though not as a natural end, that is, as a product of art (vestigium hominis video).

But to judge something that one recognizes as a natural product nonetheless also as an end—hence as a natural end—for this, provided there is not perhaps some contradiction lurking here, still more is required. I would say provisionally: a thing exists as a natural end when it is, of itself (though in a twofold sense) both cause and effect; for what lies in this is a causality that cannot be bound up with the bare concept of a nature so long as no end is laid beneath it, and which, though it may then at least be thought without contradiction, still cannot be comprehended. Before expounding this idea of a natural end in full, let us begin by clarifying its determination through an example.

A tree, in the first place, generates another tree according to a known law of nature. But the tree that it produces is of the same species; and thus it produces itself as regards its species, within which, being on the one hand effect and on the other hand cause, ceaselessly brought forth by itself and likewise often bringing itself forth, it perpetually preserves itself as a species.

Secondly, a tree also produces itself as an individual. This kind of effect we call, to be sure, merely growth; but growth is to be taken in such a sense that it is wholly distinct from any other increase in magnitude according to mechanical laws and is to be reckoned as equivalent to a generation, albeit under a different name. The matter that it adds to itself this growing thing first works up into a specifically distinctive quality that the mechanism of nature outside it cannot supply, and it develops itself further by means of a material that, in its composition, is its own product. For although, as regards the constituents that it receives from the nature outside it, it must be regarded merely as an educt: still, in the separation and fresh recombination of this raw material there is to be found such an originality in the separative and formative capacity of this kind of natural being that all art remains infinitely far removed from it when it attempts to reconstitute those products of the vegetable kingdom out of the elements it obtains by decomposing them, or out of the material that nature supplies for their nourishment.

Thirdly, one part of this creature likewise brings itself forth in such a fashion: that the maintenance of the one hangs reciprocally upon the maintenance of the other. The bud on the leaf of one tree, inoculated into the branch of another, brings forth on an alien stock a growth of its own kind, and likewise does the graft-scion upon another trunk. Hence one may also regard, on one and the same tree, every branch or leaf as merely grafted or budded onto it, and thus as a tree existing for itself, one that merely attaches itself to another and feeds parasitically upon it. At the same time the leaves are indeed products of the tree, yet they in turn also sustain it; for were it stripped of its foliage again and again this would kill it, and its growth rests on the effect they exert upon the trunk. The self-help of nature in these creatures upon their injury, where the lack of a part that belonged to the preservation of the neighboring ones is made good by the rest; the malformations or deformities in growth, where certain parts, on account of deficiencies or obstacles that arise, shape themselves in an entirely new way so as to preserve what is there and to bring forth an anomalous creature: these I will mention here only in passing, notwithstanding that they belong among the most marvelous properties of organized creatures.

§ 65. Things as natural ends are organized beings

By the character adduced in the foregoing §, a thing meant to be cognized as a natural product while nonetheless being possible solely as a natural end must relate itself to itself reciprocally as cause and effect — an expression somewhat improper and indeterminate, one that calls for derivation from a determinate concept.

So far as it is conceived merely by means of the understanding, the causal connection is a linkage constituting a series (of causes and effects) that proceeds ever downward; and the very things that, being effects, presuppose others as cause cannot at the same time serve reciprocally as cause of those. This causal connection is called that of efficient causes (nexus effectivus). Yet on the other hand a causal connection may likewise be conceived according to a concept of reason (that of ends), a connection which, taken as a series, would bring with it dependency in both directions, downward and upward alike, such that the thing once labeled an effect still, in the upward direction, merits being called the cause of the very thing whose effect it is. Within the practical domain (that is, in art) such a linkage is readily met with — the house, for example, being indeed the cause of the monies received as rent, while conversely the representation of this prospective income was itself the cause of the house's construction. Such a causal linkage is called that of final causes (nexus finalis). One might perhaps more fittingly call the former the linkage of real causes, and the second that of ideal causes, since this naming at once makes it understood that causality admits of no more than these two kinds.

For a thing considered as a natural end it is now demanded, first of all, that its parts—in respect of their existence as well as their form—be possible solely through the way they bear on the whole. For the thing is itself an end, and is therefore grasped under a concept or idea that has to determine a priori all that is meant to be contained within it. But so far as a thing is held to be possible in this manner alone, it amounts to no more than a work of art, that is, the product of a rational cause set apart from that thing's matter (its parts), a cause whose causality (in gathering and joining the parts) is determined by the idea it possesses of a whole thereby rendered possible (and thus not by the nature outside it).

Should a thing, however, as a natural product, nonetheless harbor in itself and in its inner possibility a bearing upon ends—that is, to be possible solely as a natural end and apart from any causality of the concepts belonging to rational beings outside it—then what is demanded in the second place is this: that its parts bind themselves into the unity of a whole precisely by being, each toward the other, reciprocally cause and effect of their form. For only in this manner does it become possible that, conversely (reciprocally), the idea of the whole should in its turn determine how all the parts are formed and combined: not in the capacity of a cause—since then the thing would be a product of art—but rather, for whoever appraises it, as the ground of cognition for the systematic unity belonging to the form and joining of all the manifold that the given matter contains.

For a body, then, that is meant to be appraised in itself and by its inner possibility as a natural end, it is requisite that its parts should, all together and in respect of their form as much as their combination, bring one another forth reciprocally and so generate a whole from a causality of their own, the concept of which would in turn, conversely (within a being that possessed a causality according to concepts suited to such a product), be the cause of that same whole according to a principle, so that the connection of efficient causes might at once be appraised as an effect through final causes.

Within such a product of nature every part, in the same way that it is there only through all the others, is likewise conceived as existing for the others' and for the whole's sake, that is, as a tool (organ): which is nevertheless not sufficient (for it might equally be a tool of art and so be represented as possible merely as an end in general); rather, it must be conceived as an organ producing the remaining parts (and thus each one the others reciprocally), of a kind that can be no tool of art but belongs only to the nature that supplies all the material for tools (even those of art): and only then, and for that reason, may a product of this kind—an organized being that organizes itself—receive the name of a natural end.

In a clock one part is the instrument for the movement of the others, but no one wheel is the efficient cause of the production of another; one part is indeed there for the sake of another, yet not through it. Hence the cause that produces the clock and its form is likewise not contained in nature (in this matter) but outside it, in a being that can act according to ideas of a whole made possible through its causality. For this reason, again, one wheel in the clock does not bring about another, and still less does a clock bring forth other clocks by putting other matter to that use (organizing it); nor, accordingly, does it of its own accord make up for the parts stripped away from it, or compensate for a shortcoming in its initial formation through the joining-in of the rest, or set itself to rights, as it were, once it has lapsed into disorder: all of which, on the contrary, we are entitled to look for from organized nature. — An organized being is therefore not merely a machine: for a machine has solely moving power; rather, it possesses within itself formative power, and indeed a power of such a kind that it imparts it to the materials that do not have it (organizing them): thus a self-propagating formative power that cannot be explained by the capacity for motion alone (mechanism).

Of nature and of its power in organized products one says all too little in terming this an analogue of art; for in doing so one pictures the artist (a rational being) as lying beyond it. Rather, nature organizes itself, and in each species of its organized products, according to a single pattern on the whole, yet also with suitable deviations that self-preservation requires as circumstances demand. One draws nearer, perhaps, to this unfathomable property by naming it an analogue of life: but here one must either bestow on matter, taken as mere matter, a property (hylozoism) that runs counter to its very essence; or link to it a principle of foreign kind standing in community with it (namely a soul): yet for this, should such a product be meant to be a product of nature, then one either takes organized matter for granted beforehand as the tool of that soul—so rendering that soul not a whit more intelligible—or else is obliged to turn the soul into the artisan of this edifice, thereby wresting the product away from nature (from the corporeal). Strictly speaking, then, the organization of nature has nothing analogous to any causality that we know²⁴. Nature's beauty, since it is attributed to objects only in relation to the reflection upon their outer intuition, and hence merely on account of the form of the surface, may with justice be termed an analogue of art. Inner natural perfection, however, of the sort that belongs to those things which are possible solely as natural ends and are for that reason termed organized beings, can, on the analogy of no physical—that is, natural—capacity known to us, and indeed, seeing that we ourselves belong within nature taken in the widest sense, be rendered thinkable and explicable not even through a precisely fitting analogy with human art.

Accordingly, the concept of a thing that is in itself a natural end is no constitutive concept, whether of the understanding or of reason, and yet it may nonetheless function, for the reflecting power of judgment, as a regulative concept, serving—through a distant analogy to our own causality in accordance with ends generally—to guide the inquiry into objects of this sort and to prompt reflection upon their highest ground; this latter aim being, to be sure, directed not toward a knowledge of nature, nor toward that primal ground of it, but rather toward that very practical faculty of reason within us, by analogy with which we had been regarding the cause of that purposiveness.

Organized beings, then, are the sole ones in nature that—even taken by themselves and apart from any relation to other things—must all the same be conceived as possible only as ends of nature, and that are consequently the first to secure objective reality for the concept of an end that is not practical but rather an end of nature, and in this way to furnish natural science with a foundation for a teleology, that is, for a manner of appraising its objects by a special principle—one that, apart from this, it would be flatly unwarranted to bring into it (since the possibility of such a species of causality can in no way be discerned a priori).

§ 66. On the principle for judging the inner purposiveness in organized beings

This principle, which is at once also the definition of such purposiveness, may be stated thus: An organized product of nature is one in which everything is an end and reciprocally also a means. Nothing in it is in vain, purposeless, or attributable to a blind natural mechanism.

True, this principle is, in respect of what prompts it, to be drawn from experience — specifically from the sort that proceeds methodically and goes by the name of observation; but because of the universal and necessary character it predicates of a purposiveness of this kind, it cannot rest on empirical grounds alone, and must instead have some a priori principle as its foundation, even were that principle merely regulative and even were those ends situated solely within the idea of the one judging and nowhere within any operative cause. Accordingly, one may call the aforesaid principle a maxim for appraising, in organized beings, their inner purposiveness.

It is a familiar fact that those who dissect plants and animals — seeking to explore how such beings are built and to comprehend the grounds why and to what end particular parts, why a particular placement and joining of the parts and precisely this inner form, were bestowed on them — hold the maxim that nothing in such a creature is in vain to be inescapably necessary, and press it into service just as much as the principle of general natural science, namely that nothing happens by chance. Indeed, they can renounce this teleological principle just as little as the general physical one, because, just as abandoning the latter would leave no experience whatsoever, so abandoning the former principle would leave behind no guiding thread for observing a species of natural thing that we have once thought teleologically under the concept of natural ends.

For this concept leads reason into an entirely different order of things than the order of a mere natural mechanism, which here will no longer satisfy us. An idea is supposed to lie at the basis of the possibility of the natural product. But since this idea constitutes an absolute unity of the representation, while matter, by contrast, is a manifold of things that on its own can supply no determinate unity of composition: then, should that unity belonging to the idea serve even as the a priori determining ground of a natural law that governs how such a composite form is causally brought about, nature's end has to be extended to everything contained in its product. For once we refer such an effect as a whole to a supersensible determining ground lying beyond nature's blind mechanism, we must also judge it entirely according to this principle; and there is no reason to assume the form of such a thing still to be in part dependent on the latter, since in that case, with the mixing of heterogeneous principles, no secure rule of judging would remain at all.

It may well be that, e.g., in an animal body some parts could be comprehended as concretions according to merely mechanical laws (such as skin, bones, hair). Yet the cause that supplies the matter fit for this, that so modifies and shapes it and sets it down in its proper places, must always be appraised teleologically, so that everything within it has to be viewed as organized, and everything, taken in a certain respect toward the thing itself, is once again an organ too.

§ 67. On the principle for the teleological judging of nature in general, considered as a system of ends

Concerning the external purposiveness of natural things we stated earlier that it affords no adequate warrant for pressing them into service, as ends of nature at once, to explain why they exist, nor for taking their accidentally purposive effects, as conceived in the idea, as reasons for their existence under the principle of final causes. Thus the rivers, because they promote intercourse among peoples in the interior of countries, the mountains, because they contain the sources for these rivers and, for the maintenance of the same, the store of snow for rainless seasons, and likewise the slope of the land, which carries off these waters and lets the ground become dry, are on that account not straightaway to be taken for natural ends: because, although this configuration of the earth's surface was highly necessary for the origination and maintenance of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, it nevertheless has nothing in itself for whose possibility one would find oneself compelled to assume a causality according to ends. The very same holds of plants, which the human being uses for his needs or his enjoyment: of animals, the camel, the ox, the horse, the dog, etc., which he can employ in such manifold ways partly for his nourishment, partly for his service, and for the most part cannot do without at all. In the case of things of which one has no cause to regard any as an end in itself, the external relation can be judged to be purposive only hypothetically.

To judge a thing as a natural end on account of its inner form is something wholly different from holding the existence of this thing to be an end of nature. For this latter claim we need not merely a concept of some possible end, but rather cognition of the final end (scopus) of nature, which demands a relation of the same to something supersensible that far outstrips all our teleological cognition of nature; for the end of nature's own existence must be sought beyond nature. The inner form of a mere blade of grass can sufficiently establish, for our human faculty of judging, that its origin is possible solely under the rule of ends. But if one departs from this and looks only at the use that other natural beings make of it, thus abandoning the consideration of the inner organization and attending only to external purposive relations—how the grass is needed by cattle, how these are needed by the human being as a means to his existence—and one does not see why it should be necessary that human beings exist (which, if one has in mind, say, the New Hollanders or the Fuegians, might not so easily be answered): then one arrives at no categorical end, but rather all this purposive relation rests on a condition that must always be set ever further back, a condition that, as unconditioned (the existence of a thing as final end), lies wholly outside the physico-teleological consideration of the world. But then such a thing fails to be a natural end as well; for it (or indeed its entire species) cannot count as a product of nature.

Therefore nothing but matter, so far as it is organized, of necessity brings the concept of itself as a natural end in its train, since this, its specific form, is at once nature's own product. This concept, however, now carries us necessarily onward to the idea of nature in its totality as a single system built on the rule of ends—an idea beneath which nature's entire mechanism must from now on be subordinated in accordance with principles of reason (at least so as to test the appearance of nature against it). Reason's principle pertains to it only as something subjective, i.e., as a maxim: everything in the world is good for something or other; nothing in it is in vain; and one is entitled, indeed called upon, by the example that nature gives in its organic products, to expect from it and its laws nothing but what is purposive on the whole.

It is self-evident that this serves as a principle belonging not to the determining but solely to the reflecting power of judgment, that its role is regulative rather than constitutive, and that it thereby furnishes us with nothing more than a guiding clue for viewing natural things—in their bearing on a ground of determination already at hand—under a new order of law, and for broadening natural science by a further principle, namely that of final causes, though this leaves wholly intact the principle of its causal mechanism. For the rest, this in no way settles whether anything that we judge according to this principle is intentionally an end of nature: whether the grasses exist for the sake of the ox or the sheep, and whether these and the remaining natural things exist for the sake of the human being. It is good to consider even those things that are disagreeable to us and contrary to purpose in particular relations from this side as well. One might say, for instance: the vermin that torment people in their clothing, their hair, or their bedsteads are, according to a wise provision of nature, a spur toward cleanliness, which on its own already counts as an important means whereby health is preserved. Or, again, the mosquitoes together with other stinging insects, which render the deserts of America so burdensome to the savages, count as so many prods to industry for these fledgling human beings, driving them to drain the swamps, to clear the dense forests that shut out the current of air, and thereby—along with the tilling of the soil—to render their dwelling-place healthier at once. Even what appears to run counter to nature in the human being's inner organization, when handled in this manner, affords an entertaining and at times also instructive glimpse into a teleological ordering of things—one to which mere physical observation, lacking such a principle, would not by itself lead us. Just as some judge the tapeworm to have been given to the human being or the animal in which it dwells as it were to compensate for a certain deficiency of its vital organs, so I would ask whether dreams (without which sleep never occurs, even though we but seldom remember them) might not be a purposive arrangement of nature, in that, namely, during the relaxation of all the bodily moving forces, they serve to move the vital organs most inwardly by means of the imagination and its great busyness (which in this state mostly rises to the level of affect); just as they also, when the stomach is overfilled, where this movement is all the more necessary, commonly play in the night's sleep with all the more liveliness; so that consequently, without this inwardly moving force and wearying unrest, of which we accuse dreams (which are yet in fact perhaps remedies), sleep even in a healthy condition would probably be a complete extinction of life.

Beauty in nature, too—i.e., its agreement, in the apprehension and appraisal of its appearance, with the free play of our powers of cognition—can in this fashion be viewed as an objective purposiveness belonging to nature as one whole, a system wherein the human being stands as a member: provided the teleological judging of nature, through those natural ends which organized beings put into our hands, has once warranted for us the idea of one great system embracing nature's ends. We can regard it as a favor²⁵ that nature has shown us that, over and above the useful, it dispensed beauty and charms so abundantly, and can love it on that account, just as we can regard it with respect on account of its immeasurability and, in this contemplation, feel ourselves ennobled: exactly as if nature had, quite properly with this intention, set up and adorned its magnificent stage.

In this § we intend to assert nothing beyond this: that, having once detected in nature a power to bring forth products conceivable by us solely under the concept of final causes, we then press on and are entitled to count as belonging to a system of ends even those products which—or whose relation, purposive though it be —do not strictly oblige us to look, over and above the mechanism of blindly acting causes, for some further principle of their possibility: for that first idea already, as regards its ground, carries us out past the sensible world; since the unity of the supersensible principle must count as valid in one and the same way not only for certain species of natural being, but equally for the entirety of nature as a system.