Part I — Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments

Deduction of pure aesthetic judgments. 279

30 The deduction of aesthetic judgments concerning the objects of nature must be directed not to what we call sublime in nature, but only to the beautiful.

An aesthetic judgment’s claim to universal validity for every subject requires, as a judgment that must rest upon some a priori principle, a deduction (that is, a legitimation of its pretension) in addition to its exposition, when it concerns a satisfaction or dissatisfaction in the form of the object. Judgments of taste on the beautiful in nature are of this kind. For then purposiveness does have its ground in the object and its shape, even though it does not indicate the object’s relation to other objects according to concepts (for a cognitive judgment), but concerns merely the apprehension of this form insofar as it shows itself suited in the mind to the faculty both A 132 of concepts and of their presentation (which is one and the same as the faculty of apprehension) in general. Hence concerning the beautiful in nature we can also raise various questions about the cause of this purposiveness of its forms: for example, how one would explain why nature has so lavishly spread beauty everywhere, even on the ocean floor, where the human eye (for which alone it is nevertheless purposive) only rarely reaches, and so forth.

But the sublime in nature—when we pass a pure aesthetic judgment upon it, unmixed with concepts of perfection as objective purposiveness, in which case it would be a teleological judgment—can be regarded as entirely formless or shapeless and yet as an object of pure satisfaction, and can display subjective purposiveness in the given representation. The question now arises whether an aesthetic judgment of this kind can also require, beyond the exposition of what is thought in it, a deduction of its claim to some (subjective) a priori principle.

280 The answer is that the sublime in nature is so called only improperly, and must properly be ascribed solely to our way of thinking, or rather to its foundation in human nature. The apprehension of an A 133 otherwise formless and contrapurposive object merely provides the occasion for becoming conscious of this foundation; the object is thus used in a subjectively purposive way, but is not judged as such in itself and for the sake of its form (a species finalis accepta, non data, as it were—a purposive form assumed, not given). Hence our exposition of judgments on the sublime in nature was at the same time their deduction. For when we analyzed the reflection of the power of judgment within them, we found a purposive relation of the cognitive faculties that must be laid a priori at the foundation of the faculty of ends (the will), and is therefore itself purposive a priori. This at once contains the deduction, that is, the justification of such a judgment’s claim to universally necessary validity.

We shall therefore have to seek only the deduction of judgments of taste, that is, judgments on the beauty of natural things, and so satisfy the task for the entire aesthetic power of judgment as a whole.

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

The obligation to provide a deduction, that is, a guarantee of legitimacy, for a kind of judgment arises only when the judgment lays claim to A 134 necessity. This is also the case when it demands subjective universality, that is, everyone’s assent, although it is not a cognitive judgment but only a judgment of pleasure or displeasure in a given object, that is, a claim to a subjective purposiveness valid throughout for everyone, which is to rest on no concepts of the thing, because it is a judgment of taste.

Since in the latter case we have before us no cognitive judgment—neither a theoretical one grounding itself on the concept of nature in general through the understanding, nor a (pure) practical one grounding itself on the idea of freedom as given a priori through reason—and thus have to justify in its a priori validity neither a judgment representing what a thing is nor one stating that I ought to do something to produce it, we need establish only the universal validity of a 281 singular judgment expressing the subjective purposiveness of an empirical representation of an object’s form for the power of judgment in general. This will explain how something can please merely in being judged (without sensory sensation or concept), and how, just as judging an object for the sake of cognition in general has universal rules, so also the A 135 satisfaction of each person may be announced as a rule for every other.

Now if this universal validity is not to rest upon collecting votes and questioning others about their manner of feeling, but, as it were, on an autonomy of the subject judging the feeling of pleasure (in the given representation), that is, on his own taste, yet is also not to be derived from concepts, then such a judgment—as a judgment of taste actually is—has a twofold and indeed logical peculiarity: first, universal validity a priori, yet not a logical universality according to concepts, but the universality of a singular judgment; second, a necessity (which must always rest on a priori grounds) that nevertheless depends on no a priori grounds of proof whose representation could compel the assent that the judgment of taste demands of everyone.

Resolving these logical peculiarities, by which a judgment of taste differs from all cognitive judgments—if we initially abstract here from its entire content, namely the feeling of pleasure, and compare only its aesthetic form with the form of objective judgments as prescribed by logic—will alone suffice for the deduction of this remarkable faculty. We shall therefore first present these characteristic properties of taste, illustrated by A 136 examples.

32 First peculiarity of the judgment of taste.

The judgment of taste determines its object with regard to satisfaction (as beauty), claiming everyone’s assent as though it were objective.

To say “This flower is beautiful” is tantamount merely to repeating the flower’s own 282 claim to everyone’s satisfaction. Through the agreeableness of its fragrance it has no claims at all. This fragrance delights one person and gives another a headache. What else should one infer from this but that beauty must be held to be a property of the flower itself, which does not adapt itself to the diversity of heads and so many senses, but to which these must adapt themselves if they wish to judge it? And yet this is not how matters stand. For precisely this constitutes the judgment of taste: it calls a thing beautiful only according to that quality in which it adapts itself to our manner of receiving it.

Moreover, every judgment that is to prove the subject’s taste requires the subject to judge for himself, without needing A 137 to grope about through experience among others’ judgments and first learn from their satisfaction or dissatisfaction in the same object. Thus he is to pronounce his judgment not as an imitation, because a thing happens actually to please universally, but a priori. Yet one would think that an a priori judgment must contain a concept of the object for whose cognition it contains the principle; but a judgment of taste is not grounded on concepts at all, and is by no means cognition, but only an aesthetic judgment.

Hence a young poet cannot be dissuaded from his conviction that his poem is beautiful by the judgment of the public or even of his friends. If he listens to them, it is not because he now judges it differently, but because his desire for approval gives him reason to accommodate himself (even against his own judgment) to the common delusion, even if the whole public had false taste (at least in his view). Only later, when his power of judgment has been sharpened through practice, does he voluntarily abandon his earlier judgment, just as he does with judgments resting wholly on reason. Taste lays claim merely to autonomy. To make others’ judgments the determining ground of one’s own would be heteronomy.

That the works of the ancients are rightly commended as models, and A 138 their authors called classical, like a certain nobility among writers who give the people laws through their example, seems to indicate a posteriori sources of taste and to refute its autonomy in every subject. Yet one could just as well 283 say that the ancient mathematicians, still regarded as indispensable models of the utmost thoroughness and elegance of the synthetic method, also prove that reason on our side is imitative, and incapable of producing strict proofs from itself with the greatest intuitive clarity through constructing concepts. There is no use of our powers, however free it may be—even of reason (which must draw all its judgments from the common a priori source)—that would not fall into faulty attempts if every subject always had to begin entirely from the raw predisposition of his nature, unless others had preceded him with their own attempts. They do so not to make their successors mere imitators, but through their procedure to set others on the path of seeking the principles within themselves and thus taking their own, often better, course. Even in religion, where everyone must certainly draw the rule of his conduct from himself, because he also remains responsible for it and cannot shift the blame for his transgressions A 139 onto others as teachers or predecessors, universal precepts—whether received from priests or philosophers or drawn from oneself—will never accomplish as much as an example of virtue or holiness. Presented in history, such an example does not make dispensable the autonomy of virtue arising from one’s own original idea of morality (a priori), or turn it into a mechanism of imitation. Following, which refers to a precedent, not imitation, is the proper expression for all the influence the products of an exemplary author can have upon others. It means only this: drawing from the same sources from which he himself drew, and learning from one’s predecessor only how to proceed in doing so. But of all faculties and talents, taste is precisely the one that, because its judgment cannot be determined through concepts and precepts, most needs examples of what has longest retained approval as cultivation advances, lest it soon grow uncouth again and relapse into the crudity of its first attempts.

33 A 140 284 Second peculiarity of the judgment of taste.

The judgment of taste cannot be determined by grounds of proof at all, just as though it were merely subjective.

If someone does not find a building, a view, or a poem beautiful, then, first, a hundred voices all praising it highly cannot force their approval upon him inwardly. He may indeed pretend that it pleases him too, so as not to be considered tasteless; he may even begin to doubt whether he has sufficiently cultivated his taste by acquaintance with enough objects of a certain kind (as someone who believes he sees a forest in the distance where everyone else sees a town doubts the judgment of his own sight). Yet he clearly sees that others’ approval supplies no valid proof for judging beauty; that others may indeed see and observe on his behalf, and that what many have seen in the same way can serve him, who believes he saw it differently, as sufficient proof for a theoretical and thus logical judgment, but that what has pleased others can never serve as the ground of an aesthetic judgment. The unfavorable judgment of others may indeed rightly make us doubtful about A 141 our own, but can never convince us of its incorrectness. Thus there is no empirical ground of proof by which to compel a judgment of taste from anyone.

Second, still less can an a priori proof according to determinate rules determine a judgment on beauty. If someone reads me his poem, or takes me to a play that ultimately fails to suit my taste, he may cite Batteux or Lessing, or still older and more celebrated critics of taste, and all the rules they have established, to prove that his poem is beautiful; certain passages that displease me may even accord perfectly well with rules of beauty (as given there and universally acknowledged): I stop my ears, wish to hear no reasons or reasonings, and would sooner assume those critics’ rules to be false, or at least that this is not a case for applying them, than allow my judgment to be determined through a priori grounds of proof, 285 since it is to be a judgment of taste and not of understanding or reason.

This seems to be one of the principal reasons why this aesthetic faculty of judging has been given precisely the name of taste. For someone may enumerate all the ingredients A 142 of a dish and remark of each that I otherwise find it agreeable, and may rightly praise the wholesomeness of the food besides; yet I am deaf to all these reasons, try the dish on my own tongue and palate, and judge accordingly (not according to universal principles).

In fact, a judgment of taste is always made as a singular judgment of the object. By comparing the object in respect of what is pleasing with the judgment of others, the understanding can make a universal judgment—for example, all tulips are beautiful; but this is then not a judgment of taste but a logical judgment, which makes an object’s relation to taste a predicate of things of a certain kind in general. Only the judgment through which I find a single given tulip beautiful, that is, my satisfaction in it universally valid, is a judgment of taste. Its peculiarity, however, consists in this: although it has merely subjective validity, it nevertheless lays claim to all subjects as fully as could ever occur if it were an objective judgment resting on grounds of cognition and capable of being compelled through a proof.

34 A 143 No objective principle of taste is possible.

By a principle of taste one would understand a fundamental proposition under whose condition one could subsume the concept of an object and then conclude by inference that it is beautiful. But this is absolutely impossible. For I must feel pleasure immediately in its representation, and no grounds of proof can talk me into it. Thus although critics, as Hume says, can reason more plausibly than cooks, they nevertheless share the same fate. They can expect the determining ground of their judgment not from the force of proofs, but only from the 286 subject’s reflection upon his own state (of pleasure or displeasure), rejecting all precepts and rules.

What critics nevertheless can and should reason about, so as to correct and enlarge our judgments of taste, is not the setting forth of the determining ground of this kind of aesthetic judgment in a universally usable formula, which is impossible, but the investigation of the cognitive faculties and their activities in these judgments, and the elucidation through examples of their reciprocal subjective purposiveness, A 144 whose form in a given representation has been shown above to be the beauty of its object. Thus the critique of taste is itself only subjective with regard to the representation through which an object is given to us: namely, it is the art or science of bringing under rules the reciprocal relation of understanding and imagination in the given representation (without reference to a preceding sensation or concept), and thus their accord or discord, and of determining this relation with regard to its conditions. It is an art when it shows this only through examples; a science when it derives the possibility of such judging from the nature of these faculties as cognitive faculties in general. Here we are concerned throughout solely with the latter, as transcendental critique. It is to develop and justify the subjective principle of taste as an a priori principle of the power of judgment. Critique as art seeks merely to apply the physiological (here psychological), and thus empirical, rules according to which taste actually proceeds (without reflecting on their possibility) to the judging of its objects, and criticizes the products of fine art, just as the former criticizes the very faculty of judging them.

35 A 145 The principle of taste is the subjective principle of the power of judgment in general.

The judgment of taste differs from the logical judgment in that the latter subsumes a representation under concepts of the object, whereas the former does not subsume it under a concept at all, since otherwise the necessary universal assent could be compelled through proofs. Nevertheless it resembles the latter in claiming a universality and 287 necessity, though not according to concepts of the object, and consequently a merely subjective one. Now since concepts in a judgment constitute its content (what belongs to cognition of the object), while a judgment of taste cannot be determined through concepts, it rests only upon the subjective formal condition of a judgment in general. The subjective condition of all judgments is the faculty of judging itself, or the power of judgment. Employed with regard to a representation through which an object is given, this requires the accord of two powers of representation: imagination (for the intuition and the composition of its manifold) and understanding (for the concept of the representation of the unity of this composition). Since no concept of the object underlies the judgment here, it can consist only in subsuming the imagination A 146 itself (in a representation through which an object is given) under the condition that the understanding in general proceeds from intuition to concepts. That is, since the imagination’s freedom consists precisely in schematizing without a concept, the judgment of taste must rest on a mere sensation of imagination in its freedom and understanding with its lawfulness, mutually animating one another; thus upon a feeling that allows the object to be judged according to the purposiveness of the representation (through which an object is given) for furthering the cognitive faculties in their free play. And taste, as subjective power of judgment, contains a principle of subsumption, but not of intuitions under concepts: rather, of the faculty of intuitions or presentations (that is, imagination) under the faculty of concepts (that is, understanding), insofar as the former in its freedom accords with the latter in its lawfulness.

To discover this ground of legitimacy through a deduction of judgments of taste, only the formal peculiarities of this kind of judgment, and thus only insofar as their logical form is considered, can serve as our guide.

36 A 147 On the task of a deduction of judgments of taste.

With the perception of an object, the concept of an object in general, of which that perception contains the empirical 288 predicates, can be immediately connected in a cognitive judgment, thereby producing a judgment of experience. Now underlying this are a priori concepts of the synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition, so as to think it as the determination of an object; and these concepts (the categories) require a deduction, which was also given in the Critique of Pure Reason. Through this the solution to the problem could also be achieved: How are synthetic cognitive judgments a priori possible? This problem therefore concerned the a priori principles of pure understanding and its theoretical judgments.

But a feeling of pleasure (or displeasure) and a satisfaction can also be connected immediately with a perception, accompanying the representation of the object and serving it in place of a predicate; thus an aesthetic judgment arises that is not a cognitive judgment. Such a judgment, if it is not a mere judgment of sensation but a formal judgment of reflection demanding this satisfaction of everyone as necessary, must have something underlying it as an a priori principle, A 148 which may indeed be merely subjective (if an objective one should be impossible for this kind of judgment), but even as such requires a deduction, so that we may comprehend how an aesthetic judgment can lay claim to necessity. On this now rests the problem with which we are presently concerned: How are judgments of taste possible? This problem therefore concerns the a priori principles of the pure power of judgment in aesthetic judgments, that is, in judgments where it does not (as in theoretical ones) merely have to subsume under objective concepts of understanding and stand under a law, but where it is subjectively both object and law to itself.

This problem can also be presented as follows: How is a judgment possible that, merely from one’s own feeling of pleasure in an object, independently of its concept, judges this pleasure a priori—that is, without having to await others’ assent—as attached to the representation of the same object in every other subject?

That judgments of taste are synthetic is easy to see, because they go beyond the concept and even the intuition of the object, adding as a predicate something that is not even cognition, namely the feeling of pleasure (or displeasure). But that, although the predicate (of one’s own pleasure connected with the representation) is empirical, A 149 they are nevertheless a priori judgments, or wish to be taken as such, with regard to the assent demanded of everyone, 289 is likewise already contained in the expressions of their claim. Thus this problem of the critique of the power of judgment belongs under the general problem of transcendental philosophy: How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?

37 What, precisely, is asserted a priori about an object in a judgment of taste?

That the representation of an object is immediately connected with a pleasure can be perceived only inwardly, and if one wished to indicate nothing more than this, it would yield a merely empirical judgment. For I cannot connect a determinate feeling (of pleasure or displeasure) a priori with any representation, except where an a priori principle determining the will underlies it in reason. There pleasure (in moral feeling) is its consequence, but for precisely that reason cannot be compared at all with pleasure in taste, because it requires a determinate concept of a law, whereas the latter is to be connected immediately with mere judging, prior to any concept. Hence all judgments of taste are also singular judgments, A 150 because they connect their predicate of satisfaction not with a concept but with a given singular empirical representation.

Thus it is not pleasure, but the universal validity of this pleasure, perceived as connected in the mind with the mere judging of an object, that is represented a priori in a judgment of taste as a universal rule for the power of judgment, valid for everyone. It is an empirical judgment that I perceive and judge an object with pleasure. But it is an a priori judgment that I find it beautiful, that is, that I may demand that satisfaction of everyone as necessary.

38 Deduction of judgments of taste.

If it is granted that in a pure judgment of taste satisfaction in the object is connected with the mere judging of its form, then it is nothing other than the subjective purposiveness 290 of this form for the power of judgment that we feel connected in the mind with the object’s representation. Now the power of judgment, with regard to the formal rules of judging and without any matter (neither sensory sensation nor concept), can be directed only to the subjective A 151 conditions of employing the power of judgment in general (which is restricted neither to a particular manner of sense nor to a particular concept of understanding), and consequently to that subjective element we can presuppose in all human beings (as requisite for possible cognition in general). Thus the agreement of a representation with these conditions of the power of judgment must be capable of being assumed a priori as valid for everyone. That is, the pleasure, or subjective purposiveness of the representation for the relation of the cognitive faculties in judging a sensible object in general, may rightly be demanded of everyone¹².

Remark. A 152

This deduction is so easy because it has no need to justify the objective reality of a concept; for beauty is not a concept of the object, and a judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment. It asserts only that we are entitled to presuppose universally in every human being the same subjective conditions of the power of judgment that we find in ourselves; and further, only that we have correctly subsumed the given object under these conditions. Although the latter involves unavoidable difficulties not attaching to the logical power of judgment (because there one subsumes under concepts, but in aesthetic judgment under a 291 merely felt relation of imagination and understanding, mutually attuned to one another in the represented form of the object, where subsumption can easily deceive), this nevertheless detracts nothing from the legitimacy of the power of judgment’s claim to count on universal assent. This claim amounts only to judging the correctness of the principle of judging from subjective grounds as valid for everyone. For the difficulty and doubt concerning the correctness of subsumption under that principle casts as little doubt upon the legitimacy of the claim to this validity of an aesthetic judgment in general, and thus upon the principle itself, as the likewise fallible subsumption of the logical power of judgment under its principle (though it errs less often and less readily) can cast doubt upon that principle, which is objective. But if the question were: How is it possible to assume nature a priori as a totality of objects of taste? then this problem would have a bearing on teleology, because the production of forms purposive for our power of judgment would have to be regarded as an end of nature A 153 essentially belonging to its concept. Yet the correctness of this assumption remains very doubtful, while the actuality of natural beauties lies open to experience.

39 On the communicability of a sensation.

If sensation, as what is real in perception, is referred to cognition, it is called sensory sensation; and the specific character of its quality can be represented as communicable throughout in the same way only if we assume that everyone has a sense like ours. But this cannot by any means be presupposed of a sensory sensation. Thus this kind of sensation cannot be communicated to someone who lacks the sense of smell; and even if he does not lack it, we still cannot be certain whether he has precisely the same sensation from a flower as we have. But we must represent people as differing still more with regard to the agreeableness or disagreeableness in the sensation of the very same sensible object; and it is absolutely impossible to demand that pleasure in such objects be acknowledged by everyone. We may call pleasure of this 292 kind the pleasure of enjoyment, because it enters the mind through sense, and we are therefore passive in it.

Satisfaction in an action on account of its moral character, A 154 by contrast, is not a pleasure of enjoyment but of self-activity and its conformity with the idea of one’s vocation. This feeling, called moral feeling, nevertheless requires concepts and presents not a free but a lawful purposiveness; thus it can be universally communicated only through reason and, if the pleasure is to be of the same kind in everyone, through very determinate practical concepts of reason.

Pleasure in the sublime in nature, as a pleasure of reasoning contemplation, does indeed also claim universal participation, but already presupposes another feeling, namely that of one’s supersensible vocation, which, however obscure it may be, has a moral foundation. Yet I am not entitled simply to presuppose that other people will attend to this and find satisfaction in contemplating nature’s rugged magnitude (a satisfaction that certainly cannot be ascribed to its appearance, which is rather repellent). Nevertheless, considering that those moral predispositions ought to be attended to on every suitable occasion, I can also demand that satisfaction of everyone, but only through the moral law, which in turn rests on concepts of reason.

Pleasure in the beautiful, by contrast, is a pleasure neither of enjoyment nor A 155 of lawful activity, nor yet of reasoning contemplation according to ideas, but of mere reflection. Without having any end or fundamental principle as its guide, this pleasure accompanies the ordinary apprehension of an object by imagination, as the faculty of intuition, in relation to understanding, as the faculty of concepts, through a procedure of the power of judgment which it must also exercise for the sake of the most ordinary experience. Only in the latter case it is compelled to proceed in this way to obtain an empirical objective concept, while in the former (in aesthetic judging) it does so merely to perceive the representation’s adequacy to the harmonious (subjectively purposive) activity of both cognitive faculties in their freedom, that is, to feel the representational state with pleasure. This pleasure must necessarily rest on the same conditions in everyone, because they are subjective conditions of the possibility of cognition in general, and the proportion of these 293 cognitive faculties required for taste is also required for ordinary sound understanding, which we may presuppose in everyone. Precisely for this reason someone judging with taste (provided only that he does not err in this consciousness and does not take matter for form, charm for beauty) may also demand subjective purposiveness, that is, A 156 his satisfaction in the object, of everyone else, and assume his feeling to be universally communicable, indeed without the mediation of concepts.

40 On taste as a kind of sensus communis.

The power of judgment is often given the name of a sense when its reflection is less noticeable than merely its result; people speak of a sense of truth, a sense of propriety, justice, and so forth. Yet one knows, or at least ought to know, that these concepts cannot have their seat in a sense, still less that a sense has the slightest capacity to pronounce universal rules; rather, no representation of this kind concerning truth, propriety, beauty, or justice could ever enter our thoughts unless we could rise above the senses to higher cognitive faculties. Common human understanding, which as merely sound (not yet cultivated) understanding is considered the very least one can expect of anyone laying claim to the name of human being, therefore also has the mortifying honor of being designated common sense (sensus communis). And this is done in such a way that by the word common (not only in our language, which really contains an ambiguity here, A 157 but in several others as well) one understands the vulgar, what is found everywhere, the possession of which is absolutely no merit or distinction.

By sensus communis, however, we must understand the idea of a communal sense, that is, a faculty of judging that in its reflection takes account in thought (a priori) of everyone else’s way of representing, in order as it were to hold its judgment up to human reason as a whole, and thereby escape the illusion that would injure judgment through subjective private conditions easily mistaken for objective ones. 294 This is accomplished by holding one’s judgment up not so much to the actual as to the merely possible judgments of others, and putting oneself in everyone else’s place, merely abstracting from the limitations that happen to attach to our own judging. This in turn is effected by omitting as far as possible what is matter, that is, sensation, in the representational state, and attending solely to the formal peculiarities of one’s representation or representational state. Now this operation of reflection may perhaps seem too artificial to ascribe to the faculty we call common sense; but it only looks that A 158 way when expressed in abstract formulas. In itself nothing is more natural than to abstract from charm and emotion when seeking a judgment that is to serve as a universal rule.

The following maxims of common human understanding do not belong here as parts of the critique of taste, but can nevertheless serve to elucidate its principles. They are: 1. To think for oneself; 2. To think in the place of everyone else; 3. Always to think consistently with oneself. The first is the maxim of an unprejudiced, the second of an enlarged, the third of a consistent way of thinking. The first is the maxim of a reason that is never passive. The propensity toward passivity, and thus toward heteronomy of reason, is called prejudice; and the greatest of all prejudices is to represent nature as not subject to the rules that the understanding lays at its foundation through its own essential law: that is, superstition. Liberation from superstition is called enlightenment¹³. For although this name also belongs to liberation from prejudices in general, superstition preeminently (in sensu A 159 eminenti) deserves to be called a prejudice, because the blindness into which superstition plunges us, indeed even demands as an obligation, 295 makes particularly evident the need to be guided by others, and thus the condition of a passive reason. As for the second maxim of thinking, we are otherwise accustomed to call someone limited (narrow-minded, the opposite of enlarged) whose talents do not suffice for any great use (especially an intensive one). But here the issue is not the faculty of cognition, but the way of thinking that makes a purposive use of it. However small the scope and degree to which a person’s natural gift extends, this still marks someone of an enlarged way of thinking if he rises above the subjective private conditions of judgment within which so many others are, as it were, enclosed, and reflects upon his own judgment from a universal standpoint (which he can determine only by placing himself at the standpoint of others). The third maxim, that of consistent A 160 thinking, is the hardest to attain, and can be attained only through the union of the first two and after following them often enough for this to become a skill. We may say: the first of these is the maxim of understanding, the second of the power of judgment, the third of reason.—

I resume the thread abandoned in this digression, and say that taste may with greater right be called sensus communis than sound understanding, and that the aesthetic rather than the intellectual power of judgment may bear the name of a communal sense¹⁴, if we are to use the word sense at all for an effect of mere reflection upon the mind; for then by sense we understand the feeling of pleasure. We might even define taste as the faculty of judging what makes our feeling in a given representation universally communicable without the mediation of a concept.

People’s skill in communicating their thoughts also requires a relation of imagination and understanding, in order to associate intuitions with concepts and concepts in turn with intuitions, A 161 which flow together into a cognition; but then the accord of both mental powers is lawful, under the constraint of determinate 296 concepts. Only where imagination in its freedom awakens understanding, and understanding without concepts sets imagination into a regular play, is the representation communicated not as a thought but as an inner feeling of a purposive state of mind.

Taste is therefore the faculty for judging a priori the communicability of feelings connected with a given representation (without the mediation of a concept).

If we could assume that the mere universal communicability of one’s feeling must of itself already carry an interest for us (which, however, we are not entitled to infer from the character of a merely reflective power of judgment), we could explain why the feeling in a judgment of taste is demanded of everyone as though it were a duty.

41 On the empirical interest in the beautiful.

It has been sufficiently shown above that the judgment of taste by which something is declared beautiful must have no interest as its determining ground. But it does not follow that, once it has been given as a A 162 pure aesthetic judgment, no interest can be connected with it. This connection, however, can always be only indirect: taste must first be represented as connected with something else, in order to join to satisfaction in mere reflection on an object a pleasure in its existence as well (in which all interest consists). For what is said of a cognitive judgment (concerning things in general) holds here of an aesthetic judgment: a posse ad esse non valet consequentia—the inference from possibility to actuality is invalid. This other thing may be something empirical, namely an inclination proper to human nature; or something intellectual, as a property of the will by which it can be determined a priori through reason. Both contain a satisfaction in the existence of an object, and can thus ground an interest in what has already pleased of itself and without regard to any interest.

Empirically, the beautiful interests us only in society; and if we grant that the drive toward society is natural to human beings, and that the aptitude and propensity for it, that is, sociability, is requisite 297 for the human being as a creature destined for society, and thus a property belonging to humanity, then we cannot fail also to regard taste as a faculty of judging A 163 everything through which we can communicate even our feeling to everyone else, and consequently as a means of furthering what everyone’s natural inclination demands.

Alone, a person abandoned on a deserted island would adorn neither his hut nor himself, nor seek out flowers, still less plant them, to decorate himself. Only in society does it occur to him to be not merely a human being but a refined one in his own way (the beginning of civilization); for we judge as such someone inclined and skilled in communicating his pleasure to others, whom an object does not satisfy unless he can feel his satisfaction in it in community with others. Everyone also expects and demands from everyone else a regard for universal communication, as though arising from an original contract dictated by humanity itself. Thus, at first, mere charms—colors, for example, for painting oneself (roucou among the Caribs and cinnabar among the Iroquois), or flowers, seashells, brightly colored feathers—but in time also beautiful forms (on canoes, clothes, and so forth), which carry no gratification, that is, satisfaction of enjoyment, become important in society and connected with great interest. Finally civilization, A 164 having reached its highest point, makes this almost the principal occupation of refined inclination, and sensations are esteemed only insofar as they can be universally communicated. Then, although the pleasure each person has in such an object is only slight and of itself without appreciable interest, the idea of its universal communicability nevertheless increases its value almost infinitely.

But this empirical interest, indirectly attached to the beautiful through the inclination toward society, is of no importance to us here, since we have to consider only what may bear upon the judgment of taste a priori, even if only indirectly. For if an interest connected with it should also be discovered in this form, taste would disclose a transition of our faculty of judging from sensory enjoyment to moral feeling; and not only would this better guide us in employing taste purposively, 298 but a middle link in the chain of human a priori faculties, on which all legislation must depend, would also be presented as such. Of the empirical interest in objects of taste and in taste itself, we may certainly say this much: since taste indulges inclination, however refined that inclination may be, it readily A 165 blends with all the inclinations and passions that attain their greatest diversity and highest degree in society; and an interest in the beautiful, if founded on this, can supply only a very equivocal transition from the agreeable to the good. Yet we have reason to investigate whether this transition might nevertheless be furthered through taste when taken in its purity.

42 On the intellectual interest in the beautiful.

It was with kindly intentions that those who wished to direct all human occupations prompted by our inner natural predisposition toward humanity’s final end, namely the morally good, considered an interest in the beautiful in general a sign of good moral character. But others, not without reason, contradicted them, appealing to experience: virtuosos of taste, not merely often but perhaps usually vain, obstinate, and devoted to ruinous passions, might have even less claim than others to the distinction of adherence to moral principles. Thus it seems that the feeling for the beautiful is not only specifically distinct from moral feeling (as indeed it is), but also that the interest one can connect with it is difficult to reconcile with the moral interest, A 166 and by no means reconcilable through an inner affinity.

Now I readily concede that interest in the beautiful in art (under which I also count the artificial use of natural beauties for adornment, and thus for vanity) supplies no proof of a way of thinking attached to the morally good, or even inclined toward it. But I maintain, by contrast, that taking an immediate interest in the beauty of nature (not merely having the taste to judge it) is always a mark of a good soul; and that, 299 if this interest is habitual, it indicates at least a disposition of mind favorable to moral feeling, when it gladly joins itself with the contemplation of nature. But one must remember that I mean here specifically the beautiful forms of nature, while still setting aside the charms that nature so abundantly connects with them, because interest in these, although also immediate, is nevertheless empirical.

Someone who, alone (and without intending to communicate his observations to others), contemplates the beautiful shape of a wildflower, a bird, an insect, and so on, in order to admire and love it, and would be unwilling for it to be absent from nature altogether, even though it should cause him some harm, much less promise him any advantage, takes an immediate and indeed intellectual interest A 167 in the beauty of nature. That is, not only does nature’s product please him in its form, but its existence also pleases him, without sensory charm having any share in this or his connecting any end with it.

But here it is noteworthy that, if this lover of beauty had been secretly deceived, and artificial flowers (which can be made entirely like natural ones) had been planted in the ground, or artificially carved birds placed on the branches of trees, and he then discovered the deception, the immediate interest he previously took in them would vanish at once. Perhaps another interest would take its place, namely the interest of vanity in adorning his room with them for the eyes of visitors. That nature has produced this beauty: this thought must accompany intuition and reflection, and on it alone rests the immediate interest we take in it. Otherwise there remains either a mere judgment of taste without any interest, or only one connected with an indirect interest, namely an interest relating to society; the latter gives no sure indication of a morally good way of thinking.

This privilege of natural over artistic beauty—that even if the latter surpassed the former in form, natural beauty alone A 168 awakens an immediate interest—accords with the purified and thorough way of thinking of all people who have cultivated their moral feeling. If a man with taste enough to judge the products of fine art with the greatest correctness and delicacy 300 gladly leaves the room where those beauties that entertain vanity and perhaps social pleasures are to be found, and turns to the beautiful in nature, to find here, as it were, delight for his spirit in a train of thought he can never fully unfold to himself, we shall regard his very choice with esteem and presuppose in him a beautiful soul, to which no connoisseur or lover of art can lay claim merely on account of his interest in his objects.—What, then, accounts for this so different estimation of two kinds of object that, in the judgment of mere taste, would hardly contest precedence with one another?

We have a faculty of merely aesthetic judgment for judging forms without concepts and finding satisfaction in merely judging them, a satisfaction we at the same time make a rule for everyone, without this judgment resting upon an interest or producing one.—On the other hand, we also have a faculty of intellectual judgment for determining a priori a satisfaction in mere forms of practical maxims (insofar as they qualify of themselves for universal legislation), A 169 which we make a law for everyone, without our judgment resting upon any interest, but nevertheless producing one. The pleasure or displeasure in the first judgment is called that of taste, in the second that of moral feeling.

But reason also has an interest in ideas (for which it produces an immediate interest in moral feeling) having objective reality: that is, in nature at least showing a trace, or giving a hint, that it contains some ground for assuming a lawful agreement of its products with our satisfaction independent of all interest (which we recognize a priori as a law for everyone, without being able to ground it on proofs). Thus reason must take an interest in every manifestation by nature of an agreement resembling this. Consequently the mind cannot reflect upon the beauty of nature without finding itself interested at the same time. But this interest is moral by affinity; and someone who takes it in the beautiful in nature can do so only insofar as he has already firmly grounded his interest in the morally good. Thus in anyone whom the beauty of nature 301 immediately interests, we have reason to suspect at least a predisposition A 170 toward a good moral disposition.

It will be said that interpreting aesthetic judgments as akin to moral feeling looks far too studied to be the true interpretation of the cipher in which nature speaks to us figuratively through its beautiful forms. But first, this immediate interest in the beautiful in nature is in fact not common, but belongs only to those whose way of thinking is either already developed toward the good or especially receptive to such development. And then the analogy between the pure judgment of taste—which, without depending on any interest, lets us feel a satisfaction and at the same time represents it a priori as befitting humanity in general—and the moral judgment, which does precisely the same through concepts, leads even without clear, subtle, and deliberate reflection to a similar immediate interest in the object of the former as in that of the latter. Only the former interest is free, while the latter is founded on objective laws. Added to this is admiration for nature, which in its beautiful products shows itself as art, not merely by chance but as though intentionally, according to lawful arrangement and as purposiveness without an end. Since we nowhere find this latter end externally, we naturally seek it within ourselves, and indeed in what A 171 constitutes the final end of our existence, namely our moral vocation (but this inquiry into the ground of the possibility of such natural purposiveness will be discussed only in the teleology).

It is also easy to explain why satisfaction in fine art in a pure judgment of taste is not connected with an immediate interest in the same way as satisfaction in beautiful nature. For art is either an imitation of nature carried to the point of deception, in which case it acts as natural beauty (being taken for such); or it is art visibly and intentionally directed toward our satisfaction. In the latter case satisfaction in this product would indeed occur immediately through taste, but would awaken only an indirect interest in the underlying cause, namely an art that can interest us only through its end, never in itself. Perhaps it will be said that the same holds when an object of nature interests us through its beauty only insofar 302 as a moral idea is associated with it; but it is not this association, but nature’s own character in itself, its qualification for such an association, which thus belongs to it inwardly, that interests us immediately.

The charms in beautiful nature, which we so frequently find as though fused with beautiful form, belong either A 172 to modifications of light (in coloring) or of sound (in tones). For these are the only sensations that permit not merely sensory feeling but also reflection upon the form of these modifications of the senses, and thus contain, as it were, a language nature addresses to us, which seems to have a higher meaning. Thus the white color of the lily seems to dispose the mind toward ideas of innocence, and the sequence of the seven colors from red to violet toward 1) the idea of sublimity, 2) of boldness, 3) of candor, 4) of friendliness, 5) of modesty, 6) of constancy, and 7) of tenderness. The singing of birds proclaims joy and contentment with their existence. At least this is how we interpret nature, whether such is its intention or not. But this interest we here take in beauty absolutely requires that it be the beauty of nature; it disappears entirely as soon as we notice that we have been deceived and that it is only art, so completely that taste can then no longer find anything beautiful in it, nor sight anything charming. What do poets praise more highly than the enchantingly beautiful song of the nightingale in solitary bushes on a quiet summer evening by the gentle light of the moon? Yet there are examples where, in the absence of such a singer, A 173 some merry host has deceived the guests who came to enjoy the country air, to their greatest satisfaction, by hiding in a bush a mischievous boy who knew how to imitate this song (with a reed or tube in his mouth) exactly like nature. But as soon as one realizes it is a deception, no one will long endure listening to this song previously considered so charming; and the same holds for every other songbird. It must be nature, or be taken by us for nature, if we are to take an immediate interest in the beautiful as such; still more if we are entitled to require others to take such an interest, as we in fact do 303 when we consider the way of thinking of those who have no feeling for beautiful nature (for so we call receptivity to an interest in contemplating it) coarse and ignoble, and find them clinging over their meal or bottle to the enjoyment of mere sensory sensations.

43 On art in general.

1) Art is distinguished from nature as making (facere) is from acting or operating in general (agere); and the product or consequence of the former, as a work (opus), from that of the latter, as an effect (effectus). A 174

Strictly speaking, only production through freedom, that is, through a power of choice that grounds its actions on reason, should be called art. For although people like to call the product of bees (their regularly constructed honeycombs) a work of art, this is done only by analogy with art; as soon as we recall that they ground their labor on no rational deliberation of their own, we immediately say that it is a product of their nature (of instinct), and as art it is ascribed only to their creator.

If, in searching a bog, one finds a piece of hewn wood, as has sometimes happened, one does not say it is a product of nature, but of art; its producing cause conceived an end to which the wood owes its form. Otherwise one may also discern art in everything so constituted that a representation of it must have preceded its actuality in its cause (as even with bees), without the effect necessarily having been thought by that cause. But when something is called a work of art outright, to distinguish it from a natural effect, one always understands a work of human beings.

2) Art, as human skill, is also distinguished from A 175 science (being able from knowing), as a practical from a theoretical faculty, as technique from theory (as surveying from geometry). Here, too, what one can do as soon as one merely knows what is to be done, and thus sufficiently knows the desired effect, is not properly called art. Only what one does not immediately have the skill to make, 304 even when one knows it most completely, belongs to art to that extent. Camper describes very precisely what the best shoe would have to be like, but he certainly could not make one¹⁵.

3) Art is also distinguished from craft: the former is called liberal, while the latter may also be called mercenary art. The former is regarded as though it could turn out purposively (succeed) only as play, that is, an occupation agreeable in itself; the latter as labor, that is, an occupation disagreeable (burdensome) in itself and attractive only through its effect (for example, its wages), and thus capable of being imposed A 176 by constraint. Whether watchmakers should rank as artists, but blacksmiths as craftsmen, in the hierarchy of guilds requires a standpoint of judgment different from the one we take here: namely, the proportion of talents that must underlie one occupation or the other. Whether among the so-called seven liberal arts some might have been listed that should be counted among the sciences, and others compared with crafts, I shall not discuss here. But it is advisable to recall that in all liberal arts something constraining, or, as it is called, a mechanism, is nevertheless required, without which the spirit, which must be free in art and alone animates the work, would have no body and evaporate entirely (in poetry, for example, correctness and richness of language, as well as prosody and meter). For some recent educators believe they best further a liberal art by removing all constraint from it and turning it from labor into mere play.

44 On fine art.

There is neither a science of the beautiful, but only a critique, nor a beautiful science, but only fine art. For as regards the former, A 177 it would have to determine scientifically, that is, through grounds of proof, 305 whether something is to be considered beautiful or not; thus if judgment on beauty belonged to science, it would not be a judgment of taste. As for the second, a science that is to be beautiful as such is an absurdity. For if one asked for reasons and proofs in it as a science, one would be put off with tasteful sayings (bon mots).—What has occasioned the customary expression beautiful sciences is undoubtedly nothing other than the quite correct observation that fine art in its full perfection requires much science: for example, knowledge of ancient languages, wide reading in authors considered classical, history, knowledge of antiquities, and so forth. Thus these historical sciences, because they constitute the necessary preparation and foundation for fine art, and partly also because knowledge of the products of fine art themselves (eloquence and poetry) was included among them, have through a confusion of words themselves been called beautiful sciences.

If art, in conformity with the cognition of a possible object, performs the actions required merely to make it actual, it is mechanical; but if its immediate aim is the feeling of pleasure, it is called aesthetic art. This is either A 178 agreeable or fine art. It is the former when its end is that pleasure accompany representations as mere sensations; the latter when pleasure is to accompany them as kinds of cognition.

Agreeable arts are those directed merely toward enjoyment. Such are all the charms that can entertain company at table: telling amusing stories, drawing the company into frank and lively conversation, disposing it through jokes and laughter to a certain tone of merriment in which, as people say, much may be chattered into the gathering, and no one wishes to be held responsible for what he says, because the aim is only momentary entertainment, not lasting matter for reflection or repetition. (This also includes the manner in which the table is furnished for enjoyment, or even, at large banquets, table music: a curious thing, intended merely as an agreeable noise to maintain the minds’ disposition toward gaiety and, without anyone paying the slightest attention to its composition, to favor the free conversation of one neighbor with another 306.) These arts also include all games that carry no interest beyond making time pass unnoticed.

Fine art, by contrast, is a manner of representation that is purposive in itself A 179 and, although without an end, nevertheless furthers the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication.

The universal communicability of a pleasure already entails in its concept that this must be a pleasure not of enjoyment from mere sensation, but of reflection; and thus aesthetic art, as fine art, takes the reflective power of judgment, not sensory sensation, as its standard.

45 Fine art is an art insofar as it also seems to be nature.

In a product of fine art we must become conscious that it is art and not nature; yet the purposiveness in its form must seem as free from every constraint of arbitrary rules as if it were a product of nature alone. Upon this feeling of freedom in the play of our cognitive faculties, which must nevertheless also be purposive, rests that pleasure which alone is universally communicable without being grounded on concepts. Nature was beautiful when it also looked like art; and art can be called beautiful only when we are conscious that it is art and yet it looks to us like nature.

For we can say universally, whether concerning natural or artistic beauty: A 180 beautiful is what pleases in mere judging (not in sensory sensation or through a concept). Now art always has a determinate intention to produce something. But if this were mere sensation (something merely subjective) that was to be accompanied by pleasure, then the product would please in being judged only through sensory feeling. If the intention were directed toward producing a determinate object, then, when art achieved it, the object would please only through concepts. In either case, however, the art would please not in mere judging, that is, not as fine but as mechanical art.

Thus purposiveness in the product of fine art, although 307 intentional, must nevertheless not seem intentional; that is, fine art must be regarded as nature, although we are conscious of it as art. But a product of art appears as nature when we find in it all exactness in agreement with the rules by which alone the product can become what it ought to be, yet without painstakingness, without the academic form showing through—that is, without betraying a trace that the rule hovered before the artist’s eyes and fettered his mental powers.

46 A 181 Fine art is the art of genius.

Genius is the talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art. Since talent, as the artist’s innate productive faculty, itself belongs to nature, we could also express this as follows: genius is the innate disposition of mind (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art.

Whatever may be the status of this definition, whether it is merely arbitrary or accords with the concept customarily associated with the word genius, or not (which will be discussed in the following §), we can nevertheless already prove that, according to the meaning of the word adopted here, the fine arts must necessarily be regarded as arts of genius.

For every art presupposes rules through whose grounding alone a product, if it is to be called artistic, is represented as possible. But the concept of fine art does not permit the judgment on the beauty of its product to be derived from any rule having a concept as its determining ground, and thus grounding itself on a concept of how the product is possible. Hence fine art cannot itself devise the rule according to which it is to bring its product A 182 into being. Yet since without a preceding rule a product can never be called art, nature in the subject (and through the attunement of his faculties) must give the rule to art; that is, fine art is possible only as a product of genius.

From this we see that genius 1) is a talent for producing that for which no determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition of skill for what can be learned according to some rule; 308 consequently originality must be its first property. 2) Since there can also be original nonsense, its products must at the same time be models, that is, exemplary; hence, although not themselves arising through imitation, they must nevertheless serve others for imitation, that is, as a standard or rule of judging. 3) It cannot itself describe or scientifically indicate how it brings its product into being, but gives the rule as nature. Hence the author of a product he owes to his genius does not himself know how the ideas for it come to him, nor does he have it in his power to devise such ideas at will or according to plan and communicate them to others in precepts enabling them to produce similar products. (Presumably, therefore, the word genius is derived from genius, the peculiar protective and guiding spirit given to a person at birth, A 183 from whose inspiration those original ideas arose.) 4) Through genius nature prescribes the rule not to science but to art, and even this only insofar as the latter is to be fine art.

47 Elucidation and confirmation of the above explanation of genius.

Everyone agrees that genius must be set wholly against the spirit of imitation. Now since learning is nothing but imitation, the greatest aptitude, receptivity to learning (capacity) as such, cannot count as genius. But even if someone thinks or composes for himself and does not merely apprehend what others have thought, indeed even if he invents much for art and science, this still does not provide the proper ground for calling such a (often great) mind a genius (as opposed to someone called a blockhead because he can never do more than merely learn and imitate). For precisely this could also have been learned, and thus still lies on the natural path of inquiry and reflection according to rules, and is not specifically different from what diligence can acquire through imitation. Thus one can certainly learn everything that Newton set forth in his immortal work, the Principles of Natural Philosophy, however great a mind A 184 was required to discover such things; but one cannot learn to compose inspired poetry, however exhaustively 309 all the precepts for poetry are given and however excellent its models. The reason is that Newton could make all the steps he had to take, from the first elements of geometry to his great and profound discoveries, fully intuitive and determinate for following, not only to himself but to everyone else. Yet no Homer or Wieland can indicate how his ideas, rich in imagination yet also in thought, arise and come together in his head, because he does not himself know and thus cannot teach anyone else. In science, therefore, the greatest discoverer differs from the most laborious imitator and apprentice only in degree, but differs specifically from someone nature has endowed for fine art. Yet this involves no belittling of those great men to whom the human race owes so much, in comparison with nature’s favorites in respect of their talent for fine art. Precisely in the fact that their talent is made for the ever-advancing greater perfection of knowledge and all the benefit dependent upon it, as well as for instructing others in the same knowledge, lies their great advantage over those who deserve the honor of being called geniuses. For with these art comes A 185 to a standstill somewhere, since a limit is set for it beyond which it cannot go, a limit presumably reached long ago and incapable of further extension; moreover, such skill cannot be communicated, but must be bestowed on each person directly by nature’s hand, and thus dies with him, until nature once again endows another in the same way, who needs nothing more than an example to let the talent of which he is conscious operate in a similar manner.

Since the natural gift must give art (as fine art) its rule, of what kind is this rule? It cannot be formulated to serve as a precept, for otherwise judgment on the beautiful could be determined through concepts. Rather, the rule must be abstracted from the deed, that is, from the product, upon which others may test their own talent, allowing it to serve them as a model not for copying but for imitation. How this is possible is difficult to explain. The artist’s ideas awaken similar ideas in his pupil, if nature has furnished him with a similar proportion of mental powers. The models of fine art are therefore 310 the only means of conveying it to posterity; this could not be accomplished through mere descriptions (especially in the verbal arts), and even in these only those models A 186 in ancient, dead languages, now preserved only as learned languages, can become classical.

Although mechanical and fine art are very different from one another, the first as the mere art of diligence and learning, the second as the art of genius, there is nevertheless no fine art in which something mechanical, comprehensible and followable according to rules, and thus something academic, does not constitute an essential condition of the art. For something must be thought as an end in it, otherwise its product could not be ascribed to any art at all: it would be a mere product of chance. But carrying out an end requires determinate rules from which one may not exempt oneself. Now since originality of talent constitutes one essential element (but not the only one) in the character of genius, shallow minds believe they can best show themselves to be budding geniuses by renouncing the academic constraint of all rules; they believe one cuts a better figure on a horse running wild than on a trained one. Genius can supply only rich material for products of fine art; working it up and giving it form require a talent trained through schooling, to make a use of it that can withstand the power of judgment. But if someone speaks A 187 and decides like a genius even in matters requiring the most careful rational investigation, it becomes altogether ridiculous. One hardly knows whether to laugh more at the conjurer spreading so much mist around himself that nothing can be judged clearly but all the more can be imagined, or at the public, which naively imagines that its inability to recognize and grasp clearly this masterpiece of insight arises because new truths are being thrown at it in whole masses, while detail (through measured explanations and academically rigorous examination of principles) seems to it mere bungling.

48 311 On the relation of genius to taste.

Judging beautiful objects as such requires taste; fine art itself, however, that is, producing such objects, requires genius.

If we regard genius as a talent for fine art (as the proper meaning of the word entails), and wish in this respect to analyze it into the faculties that must combine to constitute such a talent, we must first precisely determine the distinction between natural beauty, whose judging requires only taste, and artistic beauty, whose possibility (which must also be considered in judging A 188 such an object) requires genius.

A natural beauty is a beautiful thing; artistic beauty is a beautiful representation of a thing.

To judge a natural beauty as such, I need not first have a concept of what sort of thing the object is supposed to be; that is, I need not know its material purposiveness (its end), but the mere form, without knowledge of the end, pleases of itself in being judged. But if the object is given as a product of art and is to be declared beautiful as such, then, because art always presupposes an end in the cause (and its causality), a concept of what the thing is supposed to be must first be laid at the foundation. And since the agreement of the manifold in a thing with an inner determination of it as an end is the thing’s perfection, the perfection of the thing must also be taken into account in judging artistic beauty, whereas in judging a natural beauty (as such) there is no question of this at all.—Indeed, in judging particularly animate objects of nature, such as a human being or a horse, objective purposiveness is also commonly taken into consideration in judging their beauty; A 189 but then the judgment is no longer purely aesthetic, that is, a mere judgment of taste. Nature is no longer judged as it appears as art, but insofar as it really is art (although superhuman); and the teleological judgment serves the aesthetic judgment as a 312 foundation and condition to which it must attend. In such a case, too, when one says, for example, “That is a beautiful woman,” one actually thinks nothing other than: nature beautifully presents in her figure the ends of the female constitution. For one must look beyond mere form to a concept if the object is to be thought in this way through a logically conditioned aesthetic judgment.

Fine art shows its excellence precisely in describing beautifully things that in nature would be ugly or displeasing. The Furies, diseases, the devastations of war, and the like can, as harmful things, be very beautifully described and even represented in painting. Only one kind of ugliness cannot be represented in conformity with nature without destroying all aesthetic satisfaction, and thus artistic beauty: namely, that which arouses disgust. For in this peculiar sensation, resting on imagination alone, the object is represented as though pressing itself upon us for enjoyment, against which A 190 we nevertheless struggle violently; thus in our sensation the artistic representation of the object is no longer distinguished from the nature of that object itself, and the former cannot possibly then be considered beautiful. Sculpture, too, because in its products art is almost confused with nature, has excluded the immediate representation of ugly objects from its creations and permitted instead, for example, death (in a beautiful spirit) and martial courage (in Mars) to be represented through an allegory or attributes pleasing to the eye, thus only indirectly through an interpretation by reason, and not for merely aesthetic judgment.

So much for the beautiful representation of an object, which is properly only the form of the presentation of a concept, through which the concept is universally communicated.—But to give this form to the product of fine art requires only taste. After exercising and correcting it through manifold examples of art or nature, the artist holds his work up to it, and after many often laborious attempts to satisfy it finds the form that meets its demands. Hence this is not, as it were, a matter of inspiration or of a free impetus of the mental powers, but of slow and even painstaking correction, to make it adequate to the thought A 191 313 yet not detrimental to freedom in the play of those powers.

Taste, however, is merely a judging, not a productive faculty; and what accords with it is not thereby a work of fine art. It may be a product belonging to useful and mechanical art, or even to science, according to determinate rules that can be learned and must be followed exactly. The pleasing form one gives it is only the vehicle of communication and, as it were, a manner of exposition, in respect of which one still remains to a certain degree free, although otherwise bound to a determinate end. Thus we demand that tableware, or even a moral treatise, even a sermon, possess this form of fine art without seeming studied; but we shall not for that reason call them works of fine art. A poem, a piece of music, a picture gallery, and the like, however, are counted as fine art; and in something intended as a work of fine art we can often perceive genius without taste, and in another taste without genius.

49 A 192 On the faculties of the mind that constitute genius.

Of certain products expected to show themselves at least in part as fine art, we say that they are without spirit, although we find nothing in them to criticize as regards taste. A poem may be quite neat and elegant, yet without spirit. A history is accurate and orderly, yet without spirit. A ceremonial oration is thorough and at the same time graceful, yet without spirit. Much conversation is not without entertainment, yet is without spirit; even of a woman one may say: she is pretty, talkative, and agreeable, but without spirit. What, then, do we understand here by spirit?

Spirit, in an aesthetic sense, means the animating principle in the mind. But that through which this principle animates the soul, the material it employs for this purpose, is what sets the mental powers purposively in motion, that is, into a play that maintains itself and even strengthens those powers for it.

Now I maintain that this principle is nothing other than the faculty 314 of presenting aesthetic ideas; and by an aesthetic idea I understand a representation of the imagination that occasions much thought without any determinate thought, A 193 that is, concept, being adequate to it, and which consequently no language can fully attain and render intelligible.—We readily see that it is the counterpart (pendant) of an idea of reason, which conversely is a concept to which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate.

For the imagination (as a productive cognitive faculty) is very powerful in creating, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it. We entertain ourselves with it where experience seems too commonplace; we may even reshape experience, still indeed according to analogical laws, but also according to principles lying higher in reason (which are just as natural to us as those by which the understanding apprehends empirical nature). In this we feel our freedom from the law of association (which attaches to the empirical use of that faculty), according to which nature indeed lends us material, but we can work this up into something entirely different, namely something surpassing nature.

Such representations of the imagination may be called ideas: partly because they at least strive toward something lying beyond the bounds of experience, and thus seek to approach a presentation of rational concepts (intellectual ideas), which A 194 gives them the appearance of an objective reality; but also, and chiefly, because no concept can be fully adequate to them as inner intuitions. The poet ventures to make sensible rational ideas of invisible beings, the realm of the blessed, the realm of hell, eternity, creation, and the like; or even to make sensible what does indeed find examples in experience—death, for example, envy and all vices, as well as love, fame, and the like—beyond the limits of experience, through an imagination emulating reason’s precedent in attaining a maximum, with a completeness for which no example is found in nature. It is properly in poetry that the faculty of aesthetic ideas can show itself to its full extent. But this faculty, considered by itself, is properly only a talent (of the imagination).

Now if a representation of the imagination 315 is placed beneath a concept, belonging to its presentation but occasioning of itself so much thought as can never be comprehended in a determinate concept, and thus aesthetically enlarging the concept itself without bounds, then the imagination is creative here and sets the faculty of intellectual ideas (reason) in motion: namely, to think more on the occasion of a representation (though this belongs to the concept of the object) than can be apprehended and made clear A 195 in it.

Those forms which do not constitute the presentation of a given concept itself, but merely express, as subsidiary representations of the imagination, the consequences connected with it and its affinity with other concepts, are called the (aesthetic) attributes of an object whose concept, as an idea of reason, cannot be adequately presented. Thus Jupiter’s eagle with lightning in its claws is an attribute of the mighty king of heaven, and the peacock of heaven’s magnificent queen. Unlike logical attributes, they represent not what lies in our concepts of the sublimity and majesty of creation, but something else that gives the imagination occasion to spread over a multitude of related representations, which provoke more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words. They supply an aesthetic idea that serves the rational idea in place of a logical presentation, but properly serves to animate the mind by opening before it the prospect of an immeasurable field of related representations. Fine art does this not only in painting or sculpture (where the name attributes is customary); poetry and eloquence, too, draw the spirit animating their works solely from the aesthetic attributes of objects, which accompany their logical attributes and give the imagination A 196 an impetus to think more in connection with them, though in an undeveloped way, than can be comprehended in a concept, and thus in a determinate expression of language.—For brevity I must restrict myself to only a few examples.

When the great king expresses himself in one of his poems as follows: “Let us depart from life without murmuring and without regretting anything, while even then leaving the world heaped with benefits. Thus the sun, after completing its daily course, still spreads a gentle light across the sky; and the last rays 316 it sends into the air are its last sighs for the welfare of the world,” he animates his rational idea of a cosmopolitan disposition even at life’s end through an attribute that the imagination associates with that representation (in recalling all the pleasures of a completed beautiful summer day that a serene evening calls to mind), and that awakens a multitude of sensations and subsidiary representations for which no expression can be found. Conversely, even an intellectual concept can serve as the attribute of a representation of the senses, and thus animate the latter through the idea of the supersensible; but only by employing for this purpose the aesthetic element subjectively attached to the consciousness of the latter. Thus, A 197 for example, a certain poet says in describing a beautiful morning: “The sun welled forth, as peace wells forth from virtue.” Consciousness of virtue, even if we place ourselves only in thought in the position of a virtuous person, spreads through the mind a multitude of sublime and soothing feelings, and a boundless prospect into a joyful future, which no expression adequate to a determinate concept fully attains.¹⁶

In a word, an aesthetic idea is a representation of the imagination associated with a given concept, connected in the free use of the imagination with such a multiplicity of partial representations that no expression designating a determinate concept can be found for it. It thus lets us think much that is unnameable in addition to a concept, the feeling of which animates the cognitive faculties and joins spirit to language as mere letter.

Thus the mental powers whose union (in a certain relation) A 198 constitutes genius are imagination and understanding. Only, in employing imagination for cognition, imagination is under the constraint of understanding and subject to the restriction of being adequate to its concept; in an aesthetic respect, 317 however, imagination is free to supply, beyond that agreement with the concept, a wealth of undeveloped material for understanding, without seeking it, to which understanding paid no regard in its concept, but which it employs not so much objectively for cognition as subjectively to animate the cognitive powers, and thus indirectly for cognitions as well. Genius therefore consists properly in the happy relation, which no science can teach and no diligence learn, of discovering ideas for a given concept, and on the other hand of finding for them the expression through which the subjective disposition of mind thereby produced can be communicated to others as accompanying a concept. The latter talent is properly what is called spirit; for to express what is unnameable in the state of mind in a certain representation and make it universally communicable, whether the expression consists in language, painting, or sculpture, requires a faculty for apprehending the rapidly passing play of imagination and uniting it in a concept (which for that very reason is original and A 199 at the same time opens a new rule that could not have been inferred from any preceding principles or examples) communicable without the constraint of rules.

If, after these analyses, we look back at the explanation given above of what is called genius, we find: first, that it is a talent for art, not for science, in which clearly known rules must precede and determine its procedure; second, that as a talent for art it presupposes a determinate concept of the product as an end, and thus understanding, but also a representation (even if indeterminate) of the material, that is, the intuition, for presenting this concept, and thus a relation of imagination to understanding; third, that it shows itself not so much in carrying out the proposed end in presenting a determinate concept, as rather in the exposition or expression of aesthetic ideas containing rich material for that aim, and thus represents imagination in its freedom from all guidance by rules as nevertheless purposive for presenting the given concept; and finally, fourth, that the unstudied, unintentional subjective purposiveness 318 in the free agreement of imagination with the lawfulness A 200 of understanding presupposes such a proportion and attunement of these faculties as no following of rules, whether of science or mechanical imitation, can effect, but only the nature of the subject can produce.

According to these presuppositions, genius is the exemplary originality of a subject’s natural gift in the free use of his cognitive faculties. In this way the product of a genius (in respect of what in it is to be ascribed to genius, not to possible learning or schooling) is an example not for imitation (for then what is genius in it, constituting the spirit of the work, would be lost), but for another genius to follow. Through it he is awakened to the feeling of his own originality, to exercise freedom from the constraint of rules in art in such a way that art thereby acquires a new rule, through which the talent shows itself exemplary. But because genius is a favorite of nature, to be regarded as a rare phenomenon, his example produces a school for other good minds, that is, a methodical instruction according to rules insofar as these could be drawn from those products of spirit and their peculiar character; and for these minds fine art is to that extent imitation, to which nature gave the rule through a genius.

But this imitation becomes aping when the pupil copies everything, A 201 down to the deformities genius had to permit only because they could not readily be removed without weakening the idea. Such daring is meritorious in genius alone; a certain boldness of expression, and in general many a departure from the common rule, suit it well, but are by no means worthy of imitation. They always remain faults in themselves, which one must seek to remove, yet for which genius is, as it were, privileged, since anxious caution would impair the inimitable impetus of its spirit. Mannerism is another kind of aping, namely of mere peculiarity (originality) in general, in order to distance oneself as far as possible from imitators, yet without possessing the talent also to be exemplary.—There are indeed two ways (modi) in general of arranging one’s thoughts for exposition, one called manner (modus aestheticus), the other method (modus logicus), which differ 319 in that the first has no standard other than the feeling of unity in presentation, while the other follows determinate principles in this; thus only the former holds for fine art. But a product of art is called mannered only when the exposition of its idea is designed for singularity, rather than made adequate A 202 to the idea. The showy (precious), the contorted, and the affected, intended merely to distinguish themselves from the ordinary (but without spirit), resemble the conduct of someone said to love hearing himself speak, or who stands and walks as though on a stage to be gaped at: this always betrays a bungler.

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

If the question is which matters more in things of fine art, whether genius or taste should show itself in them, this amounts to asking whether imagination or the power of judgment matters more. Now since an art deserves to be called inspired in respect of the former, but fine only in respect of the latter, the latter, at least as an indispensable condition (conditio sine qua non), is the foremost thing to consider in judging art as fine art. Richness and originality of ideas are not so necessary for beauty as is the adequacy of imagination in its freedom to the lawfulness of understanding. For all the former’s richness, in its lawless freedom, A 203 produces nothing but nonsense; the power of judgment, by contrast, is the faculty for adapting it to understanding.

Taste, like the power of judgment in general, is the discipline (or training) of genius, severely clipping its wings and making it civilized or polished; at the same time it guides it as to where and how far it should extend if it is to remain purposive. And by bringing clarity and order into the wealth of thoughts, it makes the ideas lasting, capable of enduring and also universal approval, of being followed by others, and of an ever-advancing cultivation. Thus if, in the conflict between the two properties in a product, 320 something must be sacrificed, this should rather be on the side of genius; and the power of judgment, which pronounces from its own principles in matters of fine art, will sooner permit impairment of the freedom and richness of imagination than of understanding.

Fine art would thus require imagination, understanding, spirit, and taste¹⁷.

51 A 204 On the division of the fine arts.

We may call beauty in general (whether natural or artistic beauty) the expression of aesthetic ideas; only, in fine art this idea must be occasioned by a concept of the object, while in beautiful nature mere reflection upon a given intuition, without a concept of what the object ought to be, suffices to awaken and communicate the idea of which that object is regarded as the expression.

Thus if we wish to divide the fine arts, we can choose, at least provisionally, no more convenient principle than the analogy of art with the kind of expression people employ in speaking to communicate themselves to one another as fully as possible, that is, not merely according to their concepts but also their sensations¹⁸.—This consists in word, gesture, and tone (articulation, gesticulation, and modulation). Only the union of these A 205 three kinds of expression constitutes the speaker’s complete communication. For through them thought, intuition, and sensation are conveyed to the other person simultaneously and in union.

There are therefore only three kinds of fine arts: the verbal, the 321 formative, and the art of the play of sensations (as external sensory impressions). We could also arrange this division dichotomously, dividing fine art into the expression of thoughts or of intuitions, and the latter in turn merely according to their form or their matter (sensation). But then it would look too abstract and less suited to ordinary concepts.

1) The verbal arts are eloquence and poetry. Eloquence is the art of conducting a business of the understanding as a free play of imagination; poetry, of carrying out a free play of imagination as a business of the understanding.

Thus the orator announces a business and conducts it as though it were merely a play with ideas, to entertain his listeners. The poet announces merely an entertaining play with ideas, and yet as much results for the understanding as though he had intended only to conduct its business. The union and harmony of both A 206 cognitive faculties, sensibility and understanding—which cannot do without one another, yet cannot readily be united without constraint and mutual impairment—must seem unintentional and as though it comes about of itself; otherwise it is not fine art. Hence everything studied and painstaking must be avoided in it; for fine art must be free art in a double sense: both in not being, as a paid occupation, a labor whose magnitude can be judged, compelled, or paid for according to a determinate standard, and in the mind’s feeling itself occupied yet satisfied and enlivened, without looking toward another end (independently of payment).

The orator thus does give something he does not promise, namely an entertaining play of imagination; but he also falls short of what he promises, and what is nevertheless his announced business, namely to occupy the understanding purposively. The poet, by contrast, promises little and announces a mere play with ideas, but accomplishes something worthy of a business, namely to provide nourishment for the understanding through play and give life to its concepts through imagination: thus the former gives at bottom less, the latter more, than he promises.

2) The formative arts, or those that express ideas in A 207 sensory intuition (not through representations of mere imagination 322 aroused by words), are either those of sensory truth or of sensory semblance. The first is called plastic art, the second painting. Both make shapes in space expressions of ideas: the former makes shapes recognizable to two senses, sight and touch (though not to the latter with regard to beauty), the latter only to the first. In both the aesthetic idea (archetype, original image) lies in the imagination as their foundation; but the shape constituting its expression (ectype, copy) is given either in its bodily extension (as the object itself exists) or according to the manner in which this depicts itself to the eye (according to its appearance on a surface). Or, amounting to the same thing, either relation to an actual end or merely its semblance is made a condition of reflection.

Plastic art, as the first kind of fine formative art, includes sculpture and architecture. The first presents concepts of things corporeally as they could exist in nature (yet as fine art with regard to aesthetic purposiveness); the second is the art of presenting concepts of things possible only through art, whose form has not nature but A 208 an arbitrary end as its determining ground, for this purpose, yet at the same time in an aesthetically purposive way. In the latter a certain use of the artificial object is the principal thing, to which, as a condition, aesthetic ideas are restricted. In the former the mere expression of aesthetic ideas is the principal aim. Thus statues of human beings, gods, animals, and the like are of the former kind; but temples, magnificent buildings for public assemblies, or even dwellings, triumphal arches, columns, cenotaphs, and the like, erected in honorable remembrance, belong to architecture. Indeed, all household furnishings (the work of the cabinetmaker and similar useful things) can be counted here, because the adequacy of the product to a certain use constitutes the essence of an architectural work. A mere sculptural work, by contrast, made solely for viewing and meant to please in itself, is, as a bodily presentation, mere imitation of nature, yet with regard to aesthetic ideas; here sensory truth must not go so far that it ceases to appear as art and a product of choice.

Painting, as the second kind of formative art, which artistically presents 323 sensory semblance connected with ideas, I would divide into the beautiful depiction of nature and the beautiful arrangement of its products. The first would be painting A 209 proper, the second landscape gardening. For the first gives only the semblance of bodily extension; the second indeed gives this in truth, but only the semblance of employment and use for ends other than merely the play of imagination in contemplating its forms¹⁹. The latter is nothing other than adorning the ground with the same variety (grasses, flowers, shrubs, trees, even waters, hills, and valleys) with which nature presents it to intuition, only arranged differently and in conformity with certain ideas. But the beautiful arrangement of bodily things is A 210 also given only for the eye, like painting; the sense of touch can supply no intuitive representation of such a form. Under painting in the broad sense I would also count the decoration of rooms through wallpaper, ornaments, and all beautiful furnishings serving merely for viewing; likewise the art of tasteful attire (rings, snuffboxes, and so on). For a bed of various flowers, a room with various ornaments (including even the ladies’ finery) at a magnificent festival, constitute a kind of painting which, like paintings properly so called (which do not aim, for instance, to teach history or natural knowledge), exists merely to be viewed, in order to entertain the imagination in free play with ideas and occupy the aesthetic power of judgment without a determinate end. The workmanship in all this adornment may be very different mechanically 324 and require entirely different artists; yet judgment of taste concerning what is beautiful in this art is to that extent determined in the same way: namely, to judge only the forms (without regard to an end), as they present themselves to the eye, singly or in combination, according to their effect on the imagination.—But the justification for counting formative art as gesture in a language (by analogy) A 211 is that through these shapes the artist’s spirit gives a bodily expression of what and how he has thought, and makes the thing itself speak, as it were, through mime: a very familiar play of our fantasy, which lays beneath lifeless things a spirit corresponding to their form that speaks out of them.

3) The art of the beautiful play of sensations (produced from outside, yet a play that must nevertheless be universally communicable) can concern nothing other than the proportion of the different degrees of attunement (tension) of the sense to which the sensation belongs, that is, its tone. In this broad meaning of the word, it can be divided into the artistic play of sensations of hearing and of sight, and thus into music and the art of color.—It is remarkable that these two senses, besides their receptivity to impressions insofar as required to obtain concepts of external objects through them, are also capable of a special sensation connected with these, concerning which we cannot quite determine whether sense or reflection lies at its foundation; and that this susceptibility can sometimes be absent, although the sense is otherwise not at all deficient in its use for cognizing objects, but perhaps even exceptionally fine. A 212 That is, we cannot say with certainty whether a color or a tone (sound) is merely an agreeable sensation, or already in itself a beautiful play of sensations and as such carries with it a satisfaction in form in aesthetic judging. If we consider the rapidity of the vibrations of light, or, in the second case, of air, which probably far exceeds our entire capacity to judge directly in perception the proportion of time’s division by them, we should believe that only the effect of these vibrations upon the elastic parts of our body is felt, while the division of time by them is not noticed or 325 taken into judgment, and thus only agreeableness, not beauty of their composition, is connected with colors and tones. But if, on the other hand, we consider first the mathematics that can be stated concerning the proportion of these vibrations in music and their judging, and judge the contrast of colors, as we should, by analogy with music; if second we consult the examples, though rare, of people who with the best eyesight in the world could not distinguish colors, or with the sharpest hearing could not distinguish tones, as well as, for those who can, the perception of an altered quality (not merely degree of sensation) at the different intensities on the scale of colors or tones, and likewise the fact that their number A 213 is determinate for comprehensible differences: we might find ourselves compelled to regard the sensations of both not as mere sensory impressions, but as the effect of a judging of form in the play of many sensations. The difference between the two opinions in judging the basis of music, however, would alter its definition only so far as to explain it either, as we have done, as the beautiful play of sensations (through hearing), or as the play of agreeable sensations. Only according to the first explanation will music be represented wholly as a fine art; according to the second, as an agreeable art (at least in part).

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

Eloquence can be united with a pictorial presentation both of its subjects and its objects in a play; poetry with music in song, and song in turn with pictorial (theatrical) presentation in an opera; the play of sensations in music with the play of shapes in dance, and so on. The presentation of the sublime, insofar as it belongs to fine art, can also unite with beauty in a rhymed tragedy, a didactic poem, or an oratorio; A 214 and in these combinations fine art is still more artful. Whether it is also more beautiful (since so many different kinds of satisfaction intersect) may be doubted in some of these cases. Yet in all fine 326 art the essential thing consists in the form that is purposive for observation and judging, where pleasure is at the same time cultivation and disposes the spirit toward ideas, thus making it receptive to more such pleasure and entertainment; not in the matter of sensation (charm or emotion), where the aim is mere enjoyment, which leaves nothing behind in the idea, dulls the spirit, gradually makes the object repulsive, and, through consciousness of a disposition that reason judges contrapurposive, makes the mind dissatisfied with itself and ill-tempered.

Unless the fine arts are brought into a closer or more distant connection with moral ideas, which alone carry an independent satisfaction, the latter is their ultimate fate. They then serve merely as a diversion, of which one becomes increasingly needy the more one employs it to drive away the mind’s dissatisfaction with itself, thereby making oneself still more useless and dissatisfied with oneself. In general, the beauties of nature are most conducive to the former aim, if one is accustomed early A 215 to observing, judging, and admiring them.

53 Comparison of the aesthetic worth of the fine arts with one another.

Among them all, poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and is least willing to be guided by precept or example) holds the highest rank. It enlarges the mind by setting the imagination free and, within the bounds of a given concept, offering among the boundless variety of possible forms agreeing with it the one that joins its presentation to a wealth of thought to which no linguistic expression is fully adequate, and thus rises aesthetically to ideas. It strengthens the mind by letting it feel its free, self-active faculty, independent of determination by nature, for contemplating and judging nature as appearance according to views it does not of itself offer either to sense or to understanding in experience, and thus for using it on behalf of, and as it were as a schema for, the supersensible. It plays with 327 the semblance it produces at will, yet without thereby deceiving; for it declares its own occupation to be mere play, which nevertheless A 216 can be purposively employed by understanding for its business.—Eloquence, insofar as this means the art of persuasion, that is, of deceiving through beautiful semblance (as ars oratoria), and not mere excellence of speech (eloquence and style), is a dialectic that borrows from poetry only so much as is needed to win minds over to the orator’s advantage before they judge, and deprive judgment of its freedom. Thus it can be recommended neither for the courtroom nor for the pulpit. For when civil laws, the rights of individuals, or lasting instruction and determination of minds toward correct knowledge and conscientious observance of their duty are at issue, it is beneath the dignity of so important a business to display even a trace of luxuriance of wit and imagination, still more of the art of persuading and predisposing people to anyone’s advantage. For although this can sometimes be employed for intrinsically rightful and praiseworthy aims, it nevertheless becomes reprehensible because in this way maxims and dispositions are subjectively corrupted, even if the deed is objectively lawful: it is not enough to do what is right, but one must also do it solely because it is right. Moreover, the mere clear concept of these kinds of human affairs, joined with a A 217 lively presentation through examples and without violating the rules of euphony in language or propriety in expressing rational ideas (which together constitute excellence of speech), already has sufficient influence of itself on human minds, without any need also to deploy the machinery of persuasion. Since this machinery can equally be used to embellish or conceal vice and error, it cannot wholly eradicate a secret suspicion of artful deception. In poetry everything proceeds honestly and sincerely. It declares that it wishes to conduct a merely entertaining play with imagination, and indeed one agreeing in form with the laws of understanding; it does not seek to steal upon and ensnare understanding through sensible presentation.²⁰

328 After poetry I would place, if charm and the movement A 218 of the mind are at issue, that art which comes nearest to it among the verbal arts and can also be very naturally united with it, namely music. For although it speaks through nothing but sensations without concepts, and thus unlike poetry leaves nothing behind for reflection, it nevertheless moves the mind more diversely and, though only fleetingly, more intimately; but it is certainly more enjoyment than cultivation (the play of thought incidentally aroused by it is merely the effect of an almost mechanical association), and, judged by reason, has less worth than any other fine art. Hence, like every enjoyment, it demands frequent change and cannot endure repeated hearings without producing weariness. Its charm, which can be so universally communicated, seems A 219 to rest on this: every expression in connected speech has a tone appropriate to its meaning; this tone more or less designates an affect in the speaker and reciprocally produces it in the listener, in whom it in turn also awakens the idea expressed in language with such a tone. And just as modulation is, as it were, a universal language of sensations intelligible to every human being, music practices this language by itself in its full force, namely as a language of affects, and thus universally communicates, according to the law of association, the aesthetic ideas naturally connected with it. But because those 329 aesthetic ideas are not concepts and determinate thoughts, the form of the composition of these sensations (harmony and melody) serves only in place of the form of a language, in order, through their proportionate attunement (which, because in tones it rests upon the ratio of the number of vibrations of air in the same time, insofar as tones are connected simultaneously or successively, can be brought mathematically under certain rules), to express the aesthetic idea of a coherent whole of an unnameable wealth of thought, in conformity with a certain theme constituting the affect prevailing in the piece. Upon this mathematical form alone, although not represented through determinate A 220 concepts, depends the satisfaction that mere reflection upon such a multitude of sensations accompanying or succeeding one another connects with their play as a universally valid condition of its beauty; and it is by this form alone that taste may claim a right to pronounce in advance upon everyone’s judgment.

But mathematics certainly has not the slightest share in the charm and movement of mind that music produces; rather, it is only the indispensable condition (conditio sine qua non) of that proportion of impressions in their combination as well as their alternation which makes it possible to comprehend them and prevent them from destroying one another, allowing them instead to accord in a continuous movement and animation of the mind through affects consonant with them, and thus in a comfortable enjoyment of oneself.

If, by contrast, we estimate the worth of the fine arts according to the cultivation they afford the mind, and take as our standard the enlargement of the faculties that must come together in the power of judgment for cognition, music holds the lowest place among the fine arts to this extent (just as among those also estimated by their agreeableness it perhaps holds the highest), because it plays merely with sensations. The formative arts therefore far surpass it in this A 221 respect; for by setting the imagination into a free play that is nevertheless also adequate to understanding, they at the same time conduct a business, producing a product that serves the concepts of understanding as a lasting vehicle commending itself on its own account, to further their union with sensibility and thus, as it were, the urbanity of the higher cognitive powers. 330 The two kinds of art take entirely different courses: the former from sensations to indeterminate ideas, the latter from determinate ideas to sensations. The latter leave a lasting, the former only a transitory impression. Imagination can recall the lasting impressions and entertain itself agreeably with them; but the transitory ones either fade entirely or, if involuntarily repeated by imagination, are more troublesome than agreeable. Moreover, music is attended by a certain lack of urbanity: chiefly according to the character of its instruments, it spreads its influence further than desired (into the neighborhood) and thus, as it were, imposes itself, impairing the freedom of others outside the musical company. Arts addressing the eyes do not do this, since one need only turn one’s eyes away if one does not wish to admit their impression. It is almost as with A 222 enjoyment from a widely spreading fragrance. Someone who draws his perfumed handkerchief from his pocket treats everyone around and beside him against their will, and compels them, if they wish to breathe, to enjoy it too; hence this has also gone out of fashion.²¹—Among the formative arts I would give preference to painting: partly because, as the art of drawing, it lies at the foundation of all the other formative arts; partly because it can penetrate far further into the region of ideas, and also expand the field of intuition in conformity with them more than the others are permitted to do.

54 Remark.

Between what pleases merely in judging and what delights (pleases in sensation), there is, as we have often shown, an essential difference. The latter is not something we can require of everyone as we can the former. Delight (even if its cause lies in ideas) seems always to consist in 331 a feeling that the whole of a person's life is being furthered, and thus bodily well-being as well, that is, health; A 223 so that Epicurus, who declared all delight to be fundamentally bodily sensation, may perhaps not have been wrong to that extent, and only misunderstood himself when he counted intellectual and even practical satisfaction among delights. With this last distinction in view, we can explain how a delight can itself displease the person who feels it (as when a needy but right-minded man rejoices in the inheritance left by his loving but miserly father); or how a deep pain can nevertheless please the person who suffers it (a widow's sorrow at the death of her worthy husband); or how a delight can also please us (as does our delight in the sciences we pursue); or a pain (for example, hatred, envy, and the thirst for revenge) can also displease us. Here satisfaction or dissatisfaction rests on reason and is identical with approval or disapproval; delight and pain, however, can rest only on the feeling or prospect of possible well-being or ill-being, whatever its ground may be.

Every changing, free play of sensations (those with no intention underlying them) delights us because it furthers the feeling of health, whether or not, in judging by reason, we take satisfaction in its object or even in this delight itself. And this delight can rise to the level of an affect, although we take no interest in the object itself, or at least none proportionate to the degree of the affect. We can divide these kinds of play into games of chance, the play of tones, and the play of thought. The first requires an interest, whether of vanity or self-interest, though this is far less than our interest in the way we seek to obtain it; A 224 the second requires only the alternation of sensations, each of which bears a relation to affect, without reaching its degree, and awakens aesthetic ideas; the third springs merely from the alternation of representations in the power of judgment, which produces no thought carrying any interest, but nevertheless enlivens the mind.

How delightful games must be, without our having to suppose an interested intention beneath them, is shown by all our evening gatherings; for scarcely any can sustain themselves without a game. Yet the affects of hope, fear, joy, anger, and mockery 332 play their parts in them, changing roles at every moment, and are so lively that, as an inward exercise, they seem to further the entire business of life in the body. The cheerfulness of mind they produce bears witness to this, although nothing has been won or learned. But since a game of chance is not a beautiful play, we shall set it aside here. Music and material for laughter, on the other hand, are two kinds of play with aesthetic ideas, or even with representations of the understanding, through which in the end nothing is thought, and which can delight us vividly merely through their alternation. They thereby make it fairly clear that in both cases the enlivening is merely bodily, although it is aroused by ideas of the mind, and that the feeling of health, through a movement of the viscera corresponding to that play, makes up the whole delight of a lively gathering, so highly praised for its refinement and wit. It is not the judging of harmony in tones or witty conceits, whose beauty serves only as a necessary vehicle, but the furthered business of life in the body, the affect that moves the A 225 viscera and the diaphragm—in a word, the feeling of health (which otherwise cannot be felt without such an occasion)—that makes up the delight we find in being able to reach the body through the soul as well, and to use the latter as the former's physician.

In music this play proceeds from bodily sensation to aesthetic ideas (the objects of affects), and then from these back again to the body, but with combined force. In joking (which, like music, deserves to be counted among the agreeable rather than the beautiful arts), the play begins with thoughts, all of which, insofar as they seek expression in the senses, also engage the body. And when the understanding suddenly relaxes in this presentation, in which it fails to find what it expected, we feel the effect of this relaxation in the body through the vibration of the organs, which furthers the restoration of their equilibrium and has a beneficial influence on health.

In everything meant to provoke lively, convulsive laughter, there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, in itself, can therefore find no satisfaction). Laughter is an affect arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. This very transformation, which certainly gives the understanding no joy, nevertheless affords very lively joy indirectly for a moment. Its 333 cause must therefore lie in the influence of the representation on the body and the body's reciprocal influence on the mind; not, indeed, insofar as the representation is objectively an object of delight (for how can a disappointed expectation delight us?), but solely because, as A 226 a mere play of representations, it brings about an equilibrium of the vital forces in the body.

If someone tells how an Indian, at an Englishman's table in Surat, saw a bottle of ale opened and all the beer, turned to foam, rush out, and expressed his great astonishment with many exclamations; and how, when the Englishman asked, “What is there here to be so astonished at?” he answered, “I am not astonished that it comes out, but at how you managed to get it in”—then we laugh, and it gives us hearty pleasure. This is not because we find ourselves cleverer than this ignorant man, or because of anything else in which the understanding might discover something pleasing; rather, our expectation was strained and suddenly vanishes into nothing. Or suppose the heir of a rich relative wishes to arrange a suitably solemn funeral for him, but complains that he cannot quite manage it; “for,” he says, “the more money I give my mourners to look sorrowful, the more cheerful they look.” Then we laugh aloud, and the reason is that an expectation suddenly turns into nothing. We must note carefully that it must turn not into the positive opposite of an expected object—for that is always something and can often distress us—but into nothing. For if someone arouses great expectations in us by telling a story, and at its close we immediately recognize its untruth, this displeases us: for example, stories of people said to have grown gray-haired in a single night from great grief. But if, in reply to such a story, another wag relates at great length the grief of a merchant who, returning from India to Europe with his entire fortune A 227 in goods, was forced in a violent storm to throw everything overboard, and grieved so deeply that his wig turned gray that very night, then we laugh, and it delights us. For we knock our own mistaken reach for an otherwise indifferent object—or rather, the idea we have been pursuing—back and forth for a while like a ball, when our only intention was to catch it and hold it fast. It is 334 not the rebuff to a liar or a fool that awakens the delight here; for even on its own, the latter story, told with an air of seriousness, would set a company laughing heartily, while such a rebuff would ordinarily not even be worth attention.

It is remarkable that in all such cases the joke must always contain something capable of deceiving us for a moment. Hence, when the illusion vanishes into nothing, the mind looks back to try it once again, and so is tossed back and forth and set oscillating by tension and relaxation following rapidly upon one another. Since the release from what had, as it were, drawn the string taut occurred suddenly, rather than through a gradual slackening, this oscillation must cause a movement of the mind and an inward bodily movement in harmony with it, which continues involuntarily and produces fatigue, but also exhilaration—the effects of exercise conducive to health.

For if we assume that some movement in the bodily organs is harmoniously connected with all our thoughts, we can fairly well understand how this sudden shifting of the mind, now to one standpoint, now to another, to consider its object A 228, might be answered by an alternating tension and release of the elastic parts of our viscera, communicated to the diaphragm (like what ticklish people feel). In this process the lungs expel air in rapidly succeeding bursts, producing a movement beneficial to health, which alone—and not what takes place in the mind—is the true cause of delight in a thought that fundamentally represents nothing.—Voltaire said that heaven had given us two things to counterbalance life's many hardships: hope and sleep. He might have added laughter, if only the means of arousing it in reasonable people were so readily at hand, and the wit or originality of humor required for it were not as rare as the talent is common for composing things that rack the brain, like mystical brooders, risk the neck, like geniuses, or break the heart, like sentimental novelists (and moralists of that sort as well).

Thus, it seems to me, we may well concede to Epicurus that all delight, even when occasioned by concepts that 335 awaken aesthetic ideas, is animal, that is, bodily sensation, without thereby doing the least injury to the spiritual feeling of respect for moral ideas. This is not delight, but an esteem for oneself (for the humanity within us), which raises us above the need for delight; nor need we injure even the less noble feeling of taste.

Something compounded of both is found in naivety: the outbreak of the sincerity originally natural to humanity against the art of dissimulation that has become second nature. We A 229 laugh at the simplicity that does not yet know how to dissemble; yet we also rejoice in the simplicity of nature, which here thwarts that art. We expected the customary manner of expression, artificial and carefully contrived for the sake of a fine appearance; and look! It is unspoiled, innocent nature, which we had not expected to encounter at all, and which the person who let it show had not intended to expose. The fine but false appearance that ordinarily counts for so much in our judgment is suddenly turned into nothing; the rogue within ourselves is, as it were, unmasked. This produces a movement of the mind in two opposite directions in succession, which at the same time gives the body a wholesome shaking. But that something infinitely better than all adopted manners—purity of thought (at least the predisposition to it)—has not quite died out in human nature mingles seriousness and high esteem with this play of the power of judgment. Since, however, it is only an appearance emerging for a short time, and the veil of dissimulation is soon drawn over it again, regret also mingles with it. This is a tender emotion that, as play, can readily be joined with such good-hearted laughter, and ordinarily is; it also tends to compensate the person who occasions it for the embarrassment of not yet having acquired worldly wisdom.—An art of being naive is therefore a contradiction; but to present naivety in a fictional character is certainly possible, and is a beautiful, though also rare, art. Naivety must not be confused with openhearted simplicity, which leaves nature unadorned only because it has no understanding A 230 of the art of social intercourse.

Among things that cheer us, are closely related to the delight of laughter, and belong to originality of spirit, though not specifically to the talent for beautiful art, we may also count the humorous manner 336. Humor, in the good sense, means the talent for voluntarily placing oneself in a certain disposition of mind in which all things are judged quite differently from usual (even in reverse), and yet in accordance with certain principles of reason appropriate to such a mood. Someone subject to such changes involuntarily is moody; someone able to assume them voluntarily and purposively (for a lively presentation by means of a contrast that provokes laughter) is called humorous, as is his manner of presentation. This manner, however, belongs more to agreeable than to beautiful art, since the object of the latter must always display a certain dignity, and therefore requires a certain seriousness in its presentation, as taste does in judging it.

Of the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment A 231 337

12 To be entitled to claim universal assent to a judgment of the aesthetic power of judgment resting merely on subjective grounds, it is enough to concede: 1) In all people the subjective conditions of this faculty are identical with respect to the relation of the cognitive powers set into activity within it to cognition in general. This must be true, since otherwise people could not communicate their representations, or even cognition itself, to one another. 2) The judgment has taken account only of this relation (and thus of the formal condition of the power of judgment) and is pure, that is, mingled neither with concepts of the object nor with sensations as determining grounds. Even if an error has been made in this latter respect, it concerns only the incorrect application to a particular case of an entitlement a law gives us; this does not annul the entitlement in general.

13 We soon see that enlightenment, though easy in principle, is in practice a difficult thing, slow to accomplish. For not to be passive in the use of one's reason, but always to legislate for oneself, is indeed quite easy for a person who wishes only to be adequate to his essential end and does not demand knowledge of what surpasses his understanding. But since the striving for such knowledge can scarcely be prevented, and there will never be any lack of others who promise with great confidence to satisfy this curiosity, it must be very difficult to preserve or establish in a way of thinking (especially the public one) that merely negative element which constitutes enlightenment proper.

14 Taste might be designated by sensus communis aestheticus, common human understanding by sensus communis logicus.

15 In the region where I live, when an ordinary man is set a task like that of Columbus and his egg, he says: that is no art; it is only knowledge. That is, if one knows it, one can do it; and he says precisely the same of all the conjurer's supposed arts. But he will not hesitate at all to call the tightrope walker's skill an art.

16 Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, or a thought expressed more sublimely, than in that inscription above the temple of Isis (mother Nature): “I am all that is, all that was, and all that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil.” Segner used this idea in an ingenious vignette prefixed to his natural philosophy, so as to fill his pupil, whom he was preparing to lead into this temple, with the sacred awe that should attune the mind to solemn attention.

17 The first three faculties receive their union only through the fourth. In his History, Hume gives the English to understand that although in their works they yield to no people in the world in evidence of the first three qualities, considered separately, in the quality that unites them they must nevertheless fall behind their neighbors, the French.

18 The reader will not judge this sketch of a possible division of the beautiful arts as an intended theory. It is only one of the many attempts that can and should still be made.

19 That ornamental gardening can be regarded as a kind of painting, although it presents its forms in bodily shape, may seem strange. But it actually takes its forms from nature (its trees, shrubs, grasses, and flowers from forest and field, at least originally), and to that extent is not an art like sculpture; nor does it make a concept of the object and its end (as architecture does, for example) the condition of their arrangement, but merely the free play of imagination in contemplation. To that extent, therefore, it agrees with merely aesthetic painting, which has no determinate theme (and pleasingly combines sky, land, and water through light and shadow).—In general, the reader will judge this only as an attempt to unite the beautiful arts under one principle, which on this occasion is to be the expression of aesthetic ideas (by analogy with a language), and will not regard it as a derivation of them held to be conclusive.

20 I must confess that a beautiful poem has always given me pure delight, whereas reading the best speech of a Roman popular orator, or a present-day parliamentary or pulpit speaker, has always been mingled with the unpleasant feeling of disapproval of an insidious art. It knows how to move people like machines, in important matters, toward a judgment that must lose all its weight with them in calm reflection. Eloquence and excellence of expression (together, rhetoric) belong to beautiful art; but oratory (ars oratoria), as the art of exploiting people's weaknesses for one's purposes (however well intended or even genuinely good these may be), is worthy of no respect at all. Indeed, both in Athens and in Rome it reached its highest point only at a time when the state was hastening to ruin and a truly patriotic way of thinking had died out. Someone who, with clear insight into affairs, commands language in its richness and purity, and who, with an imagination fruitful and capable of presenting his ideas, takes a lively, heartfelt interest in the true good, is the vir bonus dicendi peritus—the good man skilled in speaking—the orator without artifice but full of force, as Cicero would have him, though Cicero himself did not always remain faithful to this ideal.

21 Those who have recommended the singing of hymns as part of private devotions did not consider that through such noisy devotion (usually Pharisaical for that very reason) they impose a great burden on the public, by forcing their neighbors either to sing along or to lay aside their own train of thought.

Deduction of pure aesthetic judgments. 279

30 The deduction of aesthetic judgments about natural objects must address not what we call sublime in nature, but only the beautiful.

An aesthetic judgment's claim to universal validity for every subject requires a deduction, that is, a justification of its claim, because it must rest on some a priori principle. This deduction must be added to its exposition when the judgment concerns satisfaction or dissatisfaction in the form of the object. Judgments of taste about beauty in nature are of this kind. For purposiveness then has its ground in the object and its shape, even though it does not indicate the object's relation to other objects according to concepts, for a cognitive judgment. Instead, it concerns only the apprehension of this form in general, insofar as it proves suited to the mind's power both A 132 of concepts and of presenting them, which is one and the same power as apprehension. We can therefore raise various questions about beauty in nature that concern the cause of this purposiveness of its forms. For example, how are we to explain why nature has spread beauty so lavishly everywhere, even at the bottom of the ocean, where the human eye, for which alone that beauty is purposive, rarely reaches? And so on.

But the sublime in nature can be considered entirely formless or shapeless and still be an object of pure satisfaction, displaying subjective purposiveness of the given representation. This applies when we make a pure aesthetic judgment about it, not mixed with concepts of perfection as objective purposiveness, which would make it a teleological judgment. The question now is whether, beyond an exposition of what is thought in an aesthetic judgment of this kind, we can also demand a deduction of its claim to some subjective a priori principle.

280 The answer is that the sublime in nature is only improperly so called. Strictly it must be attributed only to our way of thinking, or rather to its basis in human nature. Apprehending an A 133 otherwise formless and unpurposive object merely gives us the occasion to become aware of this basis. The object is thus used in a subjectively purposive way, but is not judged purposive in itself and because of its form—as it were, species finalis accepta, non data, a purposive form accepted, not given. So our exposition of judgments about the sublime in nature was also their deduction. For when we analyzed the reflection of judgment in them, we found a purposive relation of the cognitive powers. This relation must be assumed a priori as underlying the faculty of ends, the will, and is therefore itself purposive a priori. This immediately contains the deduction: the justification of such a judgment's claim to universally necessary validity.

We therefore need seek only the deduction of judgments of taste, judgments about the beauty of natural things. In this way we will satisfy the task for the entire power of aesthetic judgment as a whole.

31 The method of deducing judgments of taste.

The duty to provide a deduction, that is, a guarantee of legitimacy, for a kind of judgment arises only when the judgment claims A 134 necessity. This is also the case when it demands subjective universality, everyone's agreement, although it is not a cognitive judgment but only a judgment of pleasure or displeasure in a given object. It thus claims a subjective purposiveness valid without exception for everyone, which, because it is a judgment of taste, is not supposed to be based on any concepts of the thing.

In this last case we are not dealing with a cognitive judgment: neither a theoretical one based on understanding's concept of nature in general, nor a pure practical one based on the idea of freedom as given a priori by reason. So we do not have to justify the a priori validity of a judgment representing what a thing is, or that I ought to do something to produce it. We need show only the universal validity, for judgment in general, of a 281 singular judgment expressing the subjective purposiveness of an empirical representation of an object's form. This will explain how something can please merely in being judged, without sensory sensation or a concept, and how, just as judging an object for the sake of cognition in general has universal rules, A 135 each person's satisfaction may also be announced as a rule for everyone else.

Now this universal validity is not to be based on collecting votes and asking others about their way of feeling. Rather, it is to rest, as it were, on the autonomy of the subject judging the feeling of pleasure in the given representation—that is, on their own taste. Yet it is not to be derived from concepts either. Such a judgment, which is what a judgment of taste actually is, has two distinctive logical features. First, it has a priori universal validity, but not logical universality according to concepts: it is the universality of a singular judgment. Second, it has a necessity, which must always rest on a priori grounds, yet does not depend on any a priori proofs whose representation could compel the approval a judgment of taste demands from everyone.

Resolving these logical peculiarities, which distinguish a judgment of taste from all cognitive judgments, will alone be sufficient for the deduction of this unusual power. Initially we will abstract from all its content, the feeling of pleasure, and compare only its aesthetic form with the form of objective judgments prescribed by logic. So we will first present these characteristic properties of taste, illustrated by examples A 136.

32 The first peculiarity of a judgment of taste.

A judgment of taste determines its object with regard to satisfaction, as beauty, while claiming everyone's agreement, as if it were objective.

To say "This flower is beautiful" amounts merely to repeating its own 282 claim to everyone's satisfaction. Through the agreeableness of its smell it has no claim at all. One person enjoys the smell; it gives another a headache. What else should we infer but that beauty must be regarded as a property of the flower itself, one that does not conform to the differences between people's minds and their many senses, but to which these must conform if they wish to judge it? Yet this is not how things stand. For the very nature of a judgment of taste is that it calls a thing beautiful only in respect of the character in which it conforms to our way of receiving it.

Moreover, every judgment meant to demonstrate the subject's taste must meet a requirement: the subject must judge for themselves, without having to A 137 grope through other people's judgments by experience and first learn from their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the same object. They must therefore pronounce their judgment not as an imitation, because a thing perhaps actually pleases everyone, but a priori. Yet one would think that an a priori judgment must contain a concept of the object, for knowledge of which it contains the principle. But a judgment of taste is not based on concepts at all. It is not cognition of any kind, but only an aesthetic judgment.

So a young poet cannot be dissuaded from the conviction that their poem is beautiful by the judgment of either the public or their friends. If the poet listens to them, it is not because they now judge it differently. Rather, even if the entire public has false taste, at least in the poet's eyes, their desire for approval gives them a reason to accommodate themselves to the common delusion, even against their own judgment. Only later, when their power of judgment has been sharpened by practice, do they voluntarily abandon their earlier judgment. They do the same with judgments based entirely on reason. Taste claims only autonomy. Making other people's judgments the determining ground of one's own would be heteronomy.

We rightly recommend the works of the ancients as models and A 138 call their authors classical, like a certain nobility among writers whose example gives laws to the people. This seems to point to a posteriori sources of taste and to refute its autonomy in every subject. But we could just as well 283 say that the ancient mathematicians, still regarded as virtually indispensable models of the greatest rigor and elegance in the synthetic method, proved that our reason is imitative and unable on its own to produce strict proofs with the greatest intuitive clarity by constructing concepts. No use of our powers, however free, could avoid falling into faulty attempts if each subject always had to begin entirely from their raw natural predisposition and others had not gone before them with their own attempts. This holds even for reason, which must draw all its judgments from the common a priori source. The predecessors are not there to make later people mere imitators. Their procedure puts others on the track of seeking the principles within themselves and thus taking their own, often better, path. Even in religion, everyone must certainly draw the rule of their conduct from themselves, since they remain personally responsible for it and cannot shift the blame for their offenses A 139 to others as teachers or predecessors. Yet general precepts, received from priests or philosophers or drawn from ourselves, will never accomplish as much as an example of virtue or holiness set out in history. Such an example does not make the autonomy of virtue, arising from our own original a priori idea of morality, dispensable or turn it into a mechanism of imitation. Following, referring to a precedent, rather than imitation, is the correct expression for any influence the works of an exemplary creator can have on others. This means only drawing from the same sources from which that person drew, and learning from a predecessor only how to go about it. But among all powers and talents, taste is precisely the one most in need of examples of what has won the longest-lasting approval as culture advances. For its judgment cannot be determined by concepts and precepts, and without such examples it would soon become uncouth again and fall back into the crudeness of its first attempts.

33 A 140 284 The second peculiarity of a judgment of taste.

A judgment of taste cannot be determined by proofs at all, as though it were merely subjective.

First, if someone does not find a building, a view, or a poem beautiful, a hundred voices praising it highly cannot force inward approval on them. They may pretend to like it too, to avoid being thought tasteless. They may even begin to doubt whether they have sufficiently developed their taste through acquaintance with enough objects of a certain kind. This is like someone who thinks they see a forest in the distance, while everyone else sees a town, and so doubts their own eyesight. Yet they clearly recognize that other people's approval provides no valid proof for judging beauty. Others may perhaps see and observe for them, and what many have seen in the same way may serve as sufficient proof for a theoretical, hence logical, judgment by someone who thinks they saw it differently. But what pleased others can never serve as the ground of an aesthetic judgment. Other people's judgment against ours can rightly make us hesitate about A 141 our own, but can never convince us that it is incorrect. So there is no empirical proof by which to force a judgment of taste on anyone.

Second, still less can an a priori proof according to definite rules determine a judgment about beauty. If someone reads me their poem or takes me to a play that ultimately does not suit my taste, they may cite Batteux or Lessing, or still older and more famous critics of taste, and all the rules they have established, to prove that the poem is beautiful. Certain passages that displease me may even agree perfectly with rules of beauty as given there and generally acknowledged. I stop my ears, refuse to hear arguments or reasoning, and would sooner assume those critics' rules are false, or at least inapplicable here, than allow my judgment to be determined by a priori proofs 285. For it is supposed to be a judgment of taste, not of understanding or reason.

This seems to be one of the main reasons this aesthetic power of judgment has been given precisely the name taste. Someone may list all the ingredients A 142 of a dish and point out that I otherwise find each of them agreeable. They may also rightly praise how healthy the food is. But I am deaf to all these arguments, try the dish on my own tongue and palate, and judge accordingly, not by universal principles.

In fact, a judgment of taste is always made as a singular judgment about an object. By comparing the object in respect of what pleases with other people's judgments, understanding can make a universal judgment, such as "All tulips are beautiful." But this is then not a judgment of taste but a logical judgment, which makes an object's relation to taste a predicate of things of a certain kind in general. Only the judgment through which I find a particular given tulip beautiful—that is, find my satisfaction in it universally valid—is a judgment of taste. Its peculiarity consists in this: although it has only subjective validity, it nevertheless lays claim to all subjects as fully as it possibly could if it were an objective judgment resting on grounds of cognition and enforceable through proof.

34 A 143 No objective principle of taste is possible.

A principle of taste would mean a basic rule under whose condition we could subsume the concept of an object, then infer that it was beautiful. But this is absolutely impossible. For I must feel pleasure immediately in the representation of it, and no proofs can talk me into that pleasure. So although critics, as Hume says, can reason more plausibly than cooks, they share the same fate. They cannot expect the determining ground of their judgment from the force of proofs, but only from the 286 subject's reflection on their own state of pleasure or displeasure, rejecting all precepts and rules.

Yet critics can and should reason in a way that corrects and broadens our judgments of taste. This does not mean stating the determining ground of this kind of aesthetic judgment in a universally usable formula, which is impossible. Rather, it means investigating the cognitive powers and their activities in these judgments, and explaining through examples their reciprocal subjective purposiveness A 144. We showed above that the form of this purposiveness in a given representation is the beauty of its object. So the critique of taste is itself only subjective regarding the representation through which an object is given to us. It is the art or science of bringing under rules the mutual relation of understanding and imagination in the given representation, without reference to a preceding sensation or concept, and thus their agreement or disagreement, and determining their conditions. It is art when it shows this only through examples. It is science when it derives the possibility of such judgment from the nature of these powers as cognitive powers in general. Here we are concerned throughout only with the latter, as transcendental critique. It is to develop and justify the subjective principle of taste as an a priori principle of judgment. Critique as art merely seeks to apply to the judgment of objects the physiological—here psychological—and thus empirical rules by which taste actually proceeds, without reflecting on their possibility. It criticizes the products of fine art, whereas transcendental critique criticizes the very power of judging them.

35 A 145 The principle of taste is the subjective principle of judgment in general.

A judgment of taste differs from a logical judgment in that the latter subsumes a representation under concepts of the object, while the former does not subsume it under a concept at all. Otherwise the necessary universal approval could be compelled by proofs. Yet it resembles the logical judgment in claiming universality and 287 necessity, though not according to concepts of the object, and therefore only subjectively. Now concepts in a judgment constitute its content, what belongs to cognition of the object. But a judgment of taste cannot be determined through concepts, so it rests only on the subjective formal condition of a judgment in general. The subjective condition of all judgments is the ability to judge itself, or the power of judgment. Used in relation to a representation through which an object is given, this requires agreement between two powers of representation: imagination, for intuition and the composition of its manifold, and understanding, for the concept representing the unity of this composition. Since no concept of the object underlies the judgment here, it can consist only in subsuming imagination A 146 itself, in a representation through which an object is given, under the condition that understanding in general proceeds from intuition to concepts. That is, imagination's freedom consists precisely in its schematizing without a concept. So a judgment of taste must rest on a mere sensation of imagination in its freedom and understanding in its lawfulness, each enlivening the other. It thus rests on a feeling that allows us to judge the object by the purposiveness of the representation through which it is given for promoting the cognitive powers in their free play. Taste, as subjective judgment, contains a principle of subsumption, but not of intuitions under concepts. It subsumes the power of intuitions or presentations, imagination, under the power of concepts, understanding, insofar as the former in its freedom agrees with the latter in its lawfulness.

To discover this rightful basis through a deduction of judgments of taste, we can be guided only by the formal peculiarities of this kind of judgment, and thus by considering merely their logical form.

36 A 147 The task of a deduction of judgments of taste.

The perception of an object can be connected immediately, in a cognitive judgment, with the concept of an object in general whose empirical 288 predicates the perception contains. This produces a judgment of experience. It rests on a priori concepts of the synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition, so that we can think it as the determination of an object. These concepts, the categories, require a deduction, which was also provided in the Critique of Pure Reason. This made it possible to solve the problem: How are synthetic cognitive judgments a priori possible? That problem thus concerned the a priori principles of pure understanding and its theoretical judgments.

But a perception can also be connected immediately with a feeling of pleasure or displeasure and a satisfaction that accompanies the representation of the object and serves as its predicate. This gives rise to an aesthetic judgment, which is not a cognitive judgment. If such a judgment is not merely one of sensation but a formal judgment of reflection demanding this satisfaction from everyone as necessary, it must have something as an a priori principle A 148 underlying it. This may perhaps be merely subjective, if an objective principle is impossible for this kind of judgment. But even as subjective it requires a deduction, to make it comprehensible how an aesthetic judgment can claim necessity. This is the basis of the problem now occupying us: How are judgments of taste possible? This problem thus concerns the a priori principles of pure judgment in aesthetic judgments. Here judgment does not merely subsume under objective concepts of understanding and stand under a law, as in theoretical judgments. Rather, it is subjectively both object and law to itself.

The problem can also be put this way: How is a judgment possible that, merely from one's own feeling of pleasure in an object and independently of its concept, judges a priori that this pleasure attaches to the representation of that same object in every other subject—without having to wait for others' agreement?

It is easy to see that judgments of taste are synthetic. They go beyond the concept and even the intuition of the object and add as a predicate something that is not even cognition: the feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Their claim also already implies that, although the predicate, one's own pleasure connected with the representation, is empirical A 149, they are nevertheless a priori judgments, or wish to be regarded as such, concerning the agreement demanded from everyone 289. So this task of the critique of judgment belongs under the general problem of transcendental philosophy: How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?

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

That the representation of an object is immediately connected with pleasure can be perceived only inwardly. If we meant to state nothing more than this, it would yield a merely empirical judgment. For I cannot connect a definite feeling of pleasure or displeasure with any representation a priori, except where an a priori principle determining the will lies in reason. In that case pleasure, in moral feeling, is its consequence. But for that very reason it cannot be compared at all with pleasure in taste, because it requires a definite concept of a law. Pleasure in taste, by contrast, is supposed to be connected immediately with mere judging, before any concept. So all judgments of taste are singular judgments A 150, because they connect their predicate of satisfaction not with a concept but with a given singular empirical representation.

So what a judgment of taste represents a priori as a universal rule of judgment valid for everyone is not the pleasure itself, but the universal validity of this pleasure, which we perceive in the mind as connected with merely judging an object. That I perceive and judge an object with pleasure is an empirical judgment. But that I find it beautiful—that I may demand this satisfaction from everyone as necessary—is an a priori judgment.

38 Deduction of judgments of taste.

Suppose we grant that in a pure judgment of taste satisfaction in the object is connected with merely judging its form. Then what we feel connected with the representation of the object in our mind is nothing other than the subjective purposiveness 290 of that form for judgment. Now with regard to the formal rules of judging, without any matter, whether sensory sensation or concept, judgment can be directed only toward the subjective A 151 conditions of the use of judgment in general, which is limited neither to a particular mode of sense nor to a particular concept of understanding. It is therefore directed toward that subjective element which we may presuppose in all people as required for possible cognition in general. So we must be able to assume a priori that the agreement of a representation with these conditions of judgment is valid for everyone. That is, we may rightly demand from everyone the pleasure, or subjective purposiveness of the representation, for the relation of the cognitive powers in judging a sensible object in general¹².

Remark. A 152

This deduction is so easy because it need not justify the objective reality of a concept. Beauty is not a concept of an object, and a judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment. It asserts only that we are entitled to presuppose universally in every person the same subjective conditions of judgment that we find in ourselves, and further only that we have correctly subsumed the given object under these conditions. This last step does have unavoidable difficulties not attached to logical judgment. In logical judgment we subsume under concepts, whereas in aesthetic judgment we subsume under a 291 merely felt relation of imagination and understanding agreeing with one another in the represented form of the object. Here subsumption can easily deceive us. Yet this takes nothing away from the legitimacy of judgment's claim to count on universal agreement. That claim amounts only to judging the correctness of the principle from subjective grounds as valid for everyone. The difficulty and doubt about whether subsumption under that principle is correct no more call into question the legitimacy of an aesthetic judgment's claim to this validity in general, and therefore the principle itself, than the likewise fallible subsumption of logical judgment under its principle can make that objective principle doubtful, though mistakes there occur less often and less easily. But if the question were "How is it possible to assume a priori that nature is a totality of objects of taste?", this problem would concern teleology. For we would have to regard producing forms purposive for our judgment as an end of nature A 153 essentially attached to its concept. But the correctness of this assumption remains very doubtful, while the actuality of natural beauties lies open to experience.

39 The communicability of a sensation.

When sensation, as what is real in perception, is related to cognition, it is called sensory sensation. The specific character of its quality can be represented as communicable in exactly the same way to everyone only if we assume that everyone has a sense like ours. But we cannot simply presuppose this of a sensory sensation. Thus this kind of sensation cannot be communicated to someone who lacks the sense of smell. Even if they do not lack it, we cannot be sure they have exactly the same sensation from a flower that we have. Still greater differences must be assumed between people concerning the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the sensation of the very same object of the senses. We simply cannot demand that everyone acknowledge pleasure in such objects. Since pleasure of this 292 kind enters the mind through sense, so that we are passive in it, we may call it the pleasure of enjoyment.

Satisfaction in an action because of its moral character A 154, by contrast, is not a pleasure of enjoyment, but of self-activity and its conformity with the idea of one's vocation. But this feeling, called moral feeling, requires concepts and presents not free but lawful purposiveness. So it can be communicated universally only through reason and, if the pleasure is to be of the same kind in everyone, through very definite practical concepts of reason.

Pleasure in the sublime in nature, as a pleasure of reasoning contemplation, also claims universal participation. Yet it already presupposes another feeling: the feeling of one's supersensible vocation. However obscure this may be, it has a moral basis. But I am not entitled simply to presuppose that other people will attend to this and find satisfaction in contemplating nature's rugged magnitude. This satisfaction certainly cannot be attributed to its appearance, which is more likely to repel. Nevertheless, since those moral predispositions ought to be attended to on every suitable occasion, I can demand this satisfaction from everyone too. But I can do so only through the moral law, which in turn is based on concepts of reason.

By contrast, pleasure in the beautiful is a pleasure neither of enjoyment nor A 155 of lawful activity, nor of reasoning contemplation according to ideas, but of mere reflection. Without any end or principle as a guide, this pleasure accompanies the ordinary apprehension of an object by imagination, the power of intuition, in relation to understanding, the power of concepts. This occurs through a procedure of judgment that it must also exercise for the sake of the most ordinary experience. The difference is that in experience it must do this to obtain an empirical objective concept, whereas in aesthetic judgment it must do so merely to perceive the representation's adequacy for the harmonious, subjectively purposive activity of both cognitive powers in their freedom—that is, to feel the representational state with pleasure. This pleasure must necessarily rest on the same conditions in everyone, because they are subjective conditions of the possibility of cognition in general. And the proportion of these 293 cognitive powers required for taste is also required for ordinary, sound understanding, which we may presuppose in everyone. For this very reason, someone judging with taste may demand this subjective purposiveness, that is, A 156 their satisfaction in the object, from everyone else, and assume their feeling is universally communicable without the mediation of concepts—provided only that they are not mistaken in this awareness, and do not take matter for form or charm for beauty.

40 Taste as a kind of sensus communis, or common sense.

We often call judgment a sense when what stands out is not so much its reflection as merely its result. We speak of a sense of truth, of propriety, of justice, and so on. Yet we know, or at least ought to know, that these concepts cannot have their seat in a sense, still less that a sense has the slightest ability to pronounce universal rules. No representation of this kind—truth, propriety, beauty, or justice—could ever enter our thoughts if we could not rise above the senses to higher cognitive powers. Common human understanding, regarded as merely sound and not yet cultivated understanding, is considered the least we can possibly expect from someone claiming the name of human being. It therefore also has the insulting honor of being called common sense, sensus communis. Here the word common—not only in our language, which really contains an ambiguity A 157 here, but in many others—is understood as meaning the vulgar, what is found everywhere and whose possession is no merit or distinction at all.

But by sensus communis, common sense, we must understand the idea of a shared sense: a power of judgment that in its reflection takes account in thought, a priori, of everyone else's way of representing. It thus holds its judgment, as it were, up to human reason as a whole, avoiding the illusion that would harmfully influence judgment through subjective private conditions easily mistaken for objective ones. 294 We do this by comparing our judgment not so much with others' actual judgments as with their merely possible ones, and putting ourselves in everyone else's position. We abstract only from the limitations that happen to attach to our own judgment. We do this in turn by leaving out, as far as possible, what is matter in our representational state—that is, sensation—and attending only to the formal peculiarities of our representation or representational state. This reflective operation may seem too artificial to attribute to the power we call common sense. But it seems so A 158 only when expressed in abstract formulas. In itself nothing is more natural than abstracting from charm and emotion when seeking a judgment that is to serve as a universal rule.

The following maxims of common human understanding do not belong here as parts of the critique of taste, but can serve to explain its principles. They are: 1. Think for oneself; 2. Think in the position of everyone else; 3. Always think consistently with oneself. The first is the maxim of an unprejudiced, the second of an enlarged, and the third of a consistent way of thinking. The first is the maxim of a reason that is never passive. The tendency toward passivity, and thus toward heteronomy of reason, is called prejudice. The greatest prejudice of all is to represent nature as not subject to rules that understanding lays down for it through its own essential law: that is, superstition. Liberation from superstition is called enlightenment¹³. Although this name also applies to liberation from prejudices in general, superstition especially deserves to be called a prejudice (in sensu A 159 eminenti, in the highest sense). For the blindness into which superstition puts us, and even demands as a duty, 295 makes especially clear our need to be guided by others, and thus the state of passive reason. As for the second maxim, we ordinarily call someone limited—narrow-minded, the opposite of enlarged—whose talents do not suffice for any great use, especially an intensive use. But here we are speaking not of the power of cognition, but of the way of thinking that makes purposive use of it. However small the range and degree of a person's natural gifts, they still display an enlarged way of thinking if they rise above the subjective private conditions of judgment within which so many others remain confined, and reflect on their own judgment from a universal standpoint. They can determine this standpoint only by putting themselves in others' positions. The third maxim, that of a consistent A 160 way of thinking, is the hardest to attain. It can be reached only by combining the first two and following them often enough to turn this into an acquired skill. We can say that the first is the maxim of understanding, the second of judgment, and the third of reason.—

I return to the thread interrupted by this digression and say that taste can more rightly be called sensus communis than sound understanding can. Aesthetic judgment, rather than intellectual judgment, can bear the name of a shared sense¹⁴, if we are willing to use the word sense for an effect of mere reflection on the mind. For then sense means the feeling of pleasure. We could even define taste as the power of judging what makes our feeling in a given representation universally communicable without the mediation of a concept.

People's ability to communicate their thoughts also requires a relation between imagination and understanding, to associate intuitions with concepts and concepts in turn with intuitions, A 161 so that they come together in cognition. But then the agreement of the two mental powers is lawful, under the constraint of definite 296 concepts. Only where imagination in its freedom awakens understanding, and understanding without concepts puts imagination into a regular play, is the representation communicated not as a thought but as an inner feeling of a purposive state of mind.

Taste is therefore the power to judge a priori the communicability of feelings connected with a given representation without the mediation of a concept.

If we could assume that the mere universal communicability of our feeling must itself already involve an interest for us, we could explain why the feeling in a judgment of taste is demanded from everyone almost as a duty. But we are not entitled to infer this from the nature of a merely reflective power of judgment.

41 The empirical interest in the beautiful.

We have sufficiently shown above that the judgment of taste declaring something beautiful must have no interest as its determining ground. But it does not follow that once it has been made as a A 162 pure aesthetic judgment, no interest can be connected with it. This connection can always be only indirect. Taste must first be represented as connected with something else, so that satisfaction in merely reflecting on an object can be joined to a pleasure in its existence, which is what all interest consists in. For here the same holds for an aesthetic judgment as is said of a cognitive judgment about things in general: a posse ad esse non valet consequentia, we cannot validly infer actuality from possibility. This other thing can be empirical, an inclination belonging to human nature, or intellectual, a property of the will by which it can be determined a priori through reason. Both contain a satisfaction in an object's existence, and so can ground an interest in what has already pleased on its own, without reference to any interest.

Empirically, the beautiful interests us only in society. If we admit that the drive toward society is natural to human beings, and that fitness and inclination for it—sociability—are required 297 of human beings as creatures destined for society, and thus belong to humanity, then we cannot fail to regard taste as a power of judging A 163 everything through which we can communicate even our feeling to everyone else. We will thus regard it as a means of promoting what everyone's natural inclination demands.

Alone, someone abandoned on a deserted island would adorn neither their hut nor themselves, nor seek flowers, still less plant them, to decorate themselves. Only in society do they think of being not merely human but also refined in their own way: the beginning of civilization. For we judge someone refined when they are inclined and able to communicate their pleasure to others, and are not satisfied with an object unless they can feel satisfaction in it in company with others. Everyone also expects and demands that everyone else consider universal communication, as if under an original contract dictated by humanity itself. So at first only charms become important in society: colors for painting oneself, such as annatto among the Caribs and cinnabar among the Iroquois; or flowers, shells, and beautifully colored bird feathers. In time beautiful forms too, as on canoes, clothes, and so on, become important and connected with great interest, even though they bring no gratification, that is, no satisfaction of mere enjoyment. Finally civilization at its highest point A 164 makes this almost the main occupation of refined inclination, and sensations are valued only insofar as they can be universally communicated. Then, although the pleasure each person takes in such an object is slight and in itself without noticeable interest, the idea of its universal communicability increases its value almost infinitely.

But this empirical interest, attached indirectly to the beautiful through our inclination toward society, has no importance for us here. We need attend only to what may have an a priori relation to a judgment of taste, even if only indirectly. For if an interest connected with it were discovered in this form too, taste would reveal a transition in our power of judgment from sensory enjoyment to moral feeling. This would not only better guide us 298 in giving taste a purposive occupation. It would also display a link in the chain of human a priori powers, on which all legislation must depend. We can certainly say this much about the empirical interest in objects of taste and in taste itself: since taste serves inclination, however refined, it readily merges A 165 with all the inclinations and passions that reach their greatest variety and highest degree in society. An interest in the beautiful based on this can provide only a very ambiguous transition from the agreeable to the good. But we have reason to investigate whether taste, taken in its purity, might nevertheless promote this transition.

42 The intellectual interest in the beautiful.

Those who wanted to direct all the activities prompted by human beings' inner natural predisposition toward humanity's final end, the morally good, had good intentions in regarding interest in the beautiful in general as a sign of good moral character. But others have objected, not without reason. They appeal to experience: virtuosos of taste are not only often but perhaps even usually vain, willful, and devoted to corrupting passions, and may be still less entitled than others to claim the distinction of attachment to moral principles. It thus seems that the feeling for beauty is not only specifically different from moral feeling, as it really is, but that the interest we can connect with it is also difficult to reconcile with moral interest A 166, and certainly not reconcilable through any inner affinity.

I readily admit that interest in the beauty of art, including the artificial use of natural beauties for adornment and thus vanity, gives no evidence of a way of thinking attached to the morally good or even inclined toward it. But I maintain that taking an immediate interest in the beauty of nature, not merely having the taste to judge it, is always a sign of a good soul. And 299 if this interest is habitual, it at least indicates a state of mind favorable to moral feeling when it readily joins with the contemplation of nature. But remember that here I really mean nature's beautiful forms. I am still setting aside the charms that nature usually combines with them so richly, because interest in these, though also immediate, is empirical.

Someone who alone, and with no intention of communicating their observations to others, contemplates the beautiful shape of a wildflower, bird, insect, and so on, to admire and love it, and would not willingly have it absent from nature altogether, takes an immediate and indeed intellectual interest A 167 in nature's beauty—even if it caused them some harm, with no apparent benefit from it. That is, not only the form of nature's product but also its existence pleases them, without any part being played by sensory charm or any end being connected with it.

But it is noteworthy that if someone had secretly deceived this lover of beauty by planting artificial flowers, which can be made entirely like natural ones, or placing artificially carved birds on tree branches, and the person then discovered the deception, their previous immediate interest would disappear at once. Perhaps another interest would take its place: the vanity of decorating their room with these objects for other people's eyes. The thought that nature has produced this beauty must accompany intuition and reflection. On this thought alone rests our immediate interest in it. Otherwise what remains is either a mere judgment of taste without any interest, or one connected only with an indirect interest relating to society. The latter gives no reliable indication of a morally good way of thinking.

Natural beauty has this advantage over artistic beauty: even if artistic beauty surpasses it in form, natural beauty alone A 168 can awaken an immediate interest. This agrees with the purified and thorough way of thinking of all who have cultivated their moral feeling. Suppose someone has enough taste to judge products of fine art with the greatest correctness and subtlety 300, yet readily leaves the room containing beauties that sustain vanity and perhaps social pleasures, and turns to nature's beauty. Here they find, as it were, delight for their spirit in a train of thought they can never fully unfold. We will regard this choice itself with respect and assume a beautiful soul in them. No art connoisseur or lover can claim this merely because of the interest taken in their objects.—What, then, accounts for such different estimates of two kinds of objects that could scarcely dispute each other's standing in the judgment of mere taste?

We have a merely aesthetic power of judgment that judges forms without concepts and finds satisfaction in merely judging them. We also make this satisfaction a rule for everyone, although the judgment neither rests on nor produces an interest.—On the other hand, we also have an intellectual power of judgment that determines a priori a satisfaction in the mere forms of practical maxims, insofar as they qualify by themselves for universal legislation A 169. We make this a law for everyone, although our judgment rests on no interest, yet produces one. The pleasure or displeasure in the first judgment is called that of taste; in the second, that of moral feeling.

But reason is also interested in the objective reality of the ideas in which it produces an immediate interest through moral feeling. That is, reason wants nature at least to show a trace or give a hint that it contains some ground for assuming a lawful agreement of its products with our satisfaction independent of all interest. We recognize this satisfaction a priori as a law for everyone, without being able to base it on proofs. So reason must take an interest in every sign from nature of an agreement resembling this. Consequently, the mind cannot reflect on the beauty of nature without also finding itself interested in it. By its affinity, however, this interest is moral. Someone who takes it in nature's beauty can do so only insofar as they have already firmly grounded their interest in the morally good. So where nature's beauty 301 interests someone immediately, we have reason to suspect at least a predisposition A 170 toward a good moral disposition.

People will say this interpretation of aesthetic judgments through their relation to moral feeling looks too contrived to be the true reading of the cipher in which nature speaks figuratively to us through its beautiful forms. But first, this immediate interest in natural beauty is in fact not common. It belongs only to those whose way of thinking is either already developed toward the good or especially receptive to such development. Second, there is an analogy between a pure judgment of taste, which lets us feel a satisfaction independent of any interest and at the same time represents it a priori as fitting for humanity in general, and a moral judgment, which does exactly the same through concepts. Even without clear, subtle, deliberate reflection, this analogy leads to a similar immediate interest in the object of the first as in that of the second. The only difference is that the first is a free interest and the second is based on objective laws. Added to this is admiration for nature, which in its beautiful products shows itself as art, not merely by chance but as if intentionally, according to a lawful arrangement and as purposiveness without an end. Since we find this end nowhere outside us, we naturally seek it within ourselves, and specifically in A 171 what constitutes the final end of our existence: our moral vocation. This inquiry into the ground of the possibility of such natural purposiveness will first be discussed in teleology.

It is also easy to explain why satisfaction in fine art in a pure judgment of taste is not connected with an immediate interest in the same way as satisfaction in beautiful nature. Fine art is either an imitation of nature carried to the point of deception, in which case it has the effect of natural beauty because it is taken for such, or it is art visibly and intentionally directed toward our satisfaction. In the latter case satisfaction in the product would indeed arise immediately through taste, but would awaken only an indirect interest in its underlying cause: an art that can interest us only through its end, never in itself. Someone may say this is also the case when a natural object interests us through its beauty only insofar 302 as a moral idea is associated with it. But what interests us immediately is not this association. It is nature's own character, which qualifies it for such an association, a capacity that therefore belongs to it inwardly.

The charms in beautiful nature, so often found seemingly blended with beautiful form, belong either A 172 to modifications of light, in coloring, or of sound, in tones. For these are the only sensations that allow not just sensory feeling but also reflection on the form of these modifications of the senses. Thus they contain, as it were, a language nature addresses to us that seems to have a higher meaning. The lily's white color seems to dispose the mind toward ideas of innocence. In the order of the seven colors from red to violet, the colors seem to dispose it toward the ideas of 1) sublimity, 2) boldness, 3) candor, 4) friendliness, 5) modesty, 6) constancy, and 7) tenderness. Birds' song proclaims joy and contentment with their existence. At least this is how we interpret nature, whether or not it intends anything of the kind. But this interest we take in beauty absolutely requires it to be natural beauty. It disappears entirely once we notice we have been deceived and it is only art—so much so that taste can then find nothing beautiful in it, nor sight anything charming. What do poets praise more highly than the enchantingly beautiful song of the nightingale in a lonely thicket on a quiet summer evening in soft moonlight? Yet there are examples of a cheerful innkeeper, where no such singer was to be found A 173, deceiving guests who had come to enjoy the country air, to their great satisfaction. He hid a mischievous lad in a thicket who could imitate the song exactly like nature with a reed or tube in his mouth. But as soon as people realize it is a trick, nobody will long endure listening to the song previously thought so charming. The same holds for every other songbird. It must be nature, or taken by us to be nature, for us to take an immediate interest in the beautiful as such. This is even more necessary if we are entitled to expect others to take such an interest, as we actually do 303 when we regard the way of thinking of people without any feeling for beautiful nature as crude and ignoble. By feeling we mean receptivity to an interest in contemplating nature. Such people stick to enjoying mere sensory sensations over a meal or a bottle.

43 Art in general.

1) Art is distinguished from nature as making (facere) is distinguished from acting or working in general (agere). The product or consequence of the first is a work (opus), distinguished from the consequence of the second as an effect (effectus). A 174

Strictly, only production through freedom should be called art: through a power of choice that bases its actions on reason. People may like to call what bees produce—their regularly built wax combs—a work of art, but only by analogy with art. As soon as we recall that bees do not base their work on rational deliberation of their own, we immediately say it is a product of their nature, their instinct. It is attributed as art only to their creator.

If, while searching a peat bog, we find a piece of carved wood, as has sometimes happened, we do not call it a product of nature but of art. Its producing cause conceived an end to which the wood owes its form. We also see art in anything made in such a way that a representation of it must have preceded its actuality in its cause, as even with bees, without the cause having had to think the effect. But when we simply call something a work of art to distinguish it from an effect of nature, we always mean a work of human beings.

2) Art, as human skill, is also distinguished from A 175 science—being able from knowing—as practical from theoretical ability, technique from theory, as surveying is distinguished from geometry. What we can do as soon as we know what should be done, and thus merely know the desired effect sufficiently, is not on that account called art. Only what we do not immediately have the skill to make 304 simply by knowing it, even knowing it most completely, belongs to art to that extent. Camper describes very precisely what the best shoe should be like, but he certainly could not make one¹⁵.

3) Art is also distinguished from craft. The first is called free art, while the second can also be called paid art. We regard the first as capable of being purposive, or succeeding, only as play: an occupation agreeable in itself. We regard the second as labor: an occupation disagreeable or burdensome in itself, attractive only through its result, such as pay, and therefore capable of being compulsorily A 176 imposed. Whether watchmakers should count as artists and blacksmiths as craftsmen in the ranking of guilds requires a different standpoint of judgment from ours here: the proportion of talents that must underlie either occupation. I will not discuss whether among the so-called seven liberal arts some should be counted as sciences and others compared to crafts. But it is worth remembering that all free arts nevertheless require something compulsory, or, as it is called, a mechanism. Without it the spirit, which must be free in art and alone brings the work to life, would have no body and would evaporate completely. Examples in poetry are correctness and richness of language, as well as prosody and meter. This reminder matters because some modern educators believe they best promote a free art by removing all constraint and changing it from labor into mere play.

44 Fine art.

There is no science of the beautiful, only a critique; and no beautiful science, only fine art. As for the first A 177, such a science would have to decide scientifically, through proofs, 305 whether something should be regarded as beautiful. A judgment about beauty, if it belonged to science, would therefore not be a judgment of taste. As for the second, a science that is supposed to be beautiful as such is an absurdity. For if we asked it for reasons and proofs as a science, it would put us off with tasteful sayings and witty remarks.—The familiar expression fine sciences was undoubtedly prompted by a perfectly correct observation: fine art in its full perfection requires much scientific knowledge, such as knowledge of ancient languages, wide reading of authors regarded as classics, history, knowledge of antiquities, and so on. Because these historical sciences form the necessary preparation and basis for fine art, and partly because they include knowledge of the products of fine art themselves—eloquence and poetry—people confused the words and called them fine sciences.

If art, in accordance with the cognition of a possible object, merely performs the actions required to make it actual, it is mechanical. But if its immediate aim is the feeling of pleasure, it is called aesthetic art. This is either A 178 agreeable or fine art. It is agreeable when its end is that pleasure accompany representations as mere sensations, and fine when pleasure is to accompany them as modes of cognition.

Agreeable arts are those aimed merely at enjoyment. They include all the attractions that can entertain company at table: telling entertaining stories, putting the company into a frank and lively conversational mood, and using joking and laughter to put it into a certain cheerful tone. In this mood, as people say, much can be casually talked about over drinks, and nobody wants to be held responsible for what they say. The aim is only momentary entertainment, not lasting material for reflection or repetition. This also includes how the table is furnished for enjoyment, or even, at large banquets, the dinner music: a curious thing intended only as agreeable noise to sustain a cheerful state of mind. Without anyone paying the slightest attention to its composition, it encourages free conversation between neighbors. 306 Also included are all games that involve no further interest than making time pass unnoticed.

Fine art, by contrast, is a way of representing that is purposive in itself A 179 and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of mental powers for social communication.

The very concept of the universal communicability of a pleasure implies that this must be a pleasure not of enjoyment from mere sensation, but of reflection. So aesthetic art as fine art takes reflective judgment, not sensory sensation, as its standard.

45 Fine art is art insofar as it also seems to be nature.

In a product of fine art we must be aware that it is art, not nature. Yet the purposiveness in its form must seem as free from all constraint by arbitrary rules as if it were a product of mere nature. This feeling of freedom in the play of our cognitive powers, which must nevertheless also be purposive, grounds the only pleasure that is universally communicable without being based on concepts. Nature was beautiful when it also looked like art; art can be called beautiful only when we are aware that it is art and yet it looks like nature to us.

For we can say universally, whether of natural or artistic beauty A 180: beautiful is what pleases in merely being judged, not in sensory sensation or through a concept. Now art always has a definite intention to produce something. If this were mere sensation, something merely subjective, which was to be accompanied by pleasure, the product would please in judgment only through sensory feeling. If the intention aimed at producing a definite object, then when art achieved it the object would please only through concepts. In both cases, however, art would please not in merely being judged, and thus not as fine art but as mechanical art.

So purposiveness in a product of fine art, though 307 intentional, must not seem intentional. That is, fine art must look like nature, although we are aware of it as art. An artistic product appears as nature when it shows all the precision in agreeing with rules by which alone it can become what it is supposed to be, but without laboriousness, without letting the academic form show through. It must show no trace that the rule hovered before the artist's eyes and put fetters on their mental powers.

46 A 181 Fine art is the art of genius.

Genius is the talent, or natural gift, that gives the rule to art. Since talent, as the artist's inborn productive power, itself belongs to nature, we could also put it this way: Genius is the inborn mental predisposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art.

Whatever the status of this definition, whether it is merely arbitrary or agrees with the concept usually connected with the word genius—a question to be discussed in the next section—we can already prove that, in the meaning of the word adopted here, fine arts must necessarily be regarded as arts of genius.

For every art presupposes rules. Only by laying these down as a basis can a product, if it is to be called artistic, be represented as possible. But the concept of fine art does not allow the judgment about the beauty of its product to be derived from any rule that has a concept as its determining ground, and thus is based on a concept of how the product is possible. So fine art cannot itself devise the rule by which it is to bring its product A 182 about. Yet without a preceding rule a product can never be called art. Therefore nature in the subject, through the attunement of the subject's powers, must give the rule to art. That is, fine art is possible only as a product of genius.

From this we see: 1) Genius is a talent for producing what no definite rule can be given for, not an aptitude for learning something by some rule. 308 So originality must be its first property. 2) Since there can also be original nonsense, its products must also be models, that is, exemplary. Though not themselves arising through imitation, they must serve others as a standard or rule of judgment. 3) Genius cannot itself describe or scientifically explain how it produces its work; rather, it gives the rule as nature. So the creator of a product owed to genius does not themselves know how the ideas for it arise in them. Nor is it in their power to devise such ideas at will or according to a plan, and communicate them to others in precepts enabling them to produce similar works. Presumably this is why the word genius derives from genius, the particular protecting and guiding spirit given to a person at birth A 183, whose inspiration was the source of those original ideas. 4) Through genius, nature prescribes the rule not to science but to art, and even there only insofar as the art is to be fine art.

47 Explanation and confirmation of the above account of genius.

Everyone agrees that genius must be set entirely against the spirit of imitation. Since learning is nothing but imitation, the greatest ability to learn, or capacity, cannot as such count as genius. But even if someone thinks or creates for themselves, rather than merely grasping what others have thought, and even makes many discoveries for art and science, this is still not the proper ground for calling such an often great mind a genius. Such a mind contrasts with someone called a blockhead because they can never do more than learn and imitate. For those discoveries too could have been learned, and thus lie on the natural path of inquiry and reflection according to rules. They are not specifically different from what diligence can acquire through imitation. Thus we can certainly learn everything Newton presented in his immortal Principles of Natural Philosophy, however great a mind A 184 was required to discover such things. But we cannot learn to write inspired poetry, however detailed 309 all the precepts for poetry and however excellent its models may be. The reason is that Newton could make all the steps he had to take, from the first elements of geometry to his great and profound discoveries, fully clear to intuition, not only to himself but to everyone else, showing them precisely how to follow his steps. Yet no Homer or Wieland can explain how their ideas, rich in imagination yet also full of thought, arise and come together in their mind. They do not know this themselves and so cannot teach it to anyone else. In science, then, the greatest discoverer differs only in degree from the most laborious imitator and apprentice, but differs specifically from someone nature has gifted for fine art. This does not lower those great men, to whom humanity owes so much, beneath nature's favorites in talent for fine art. Their talent has a great advantage precisely because it is suited to an ever-advancing perfection of knowledge, to all the benefit dependent on it, and to teaching others the same knowledge. For those who deserve the honor of being called geniuses, art comes to a standstill somewhere A 185, since a limit is set to it beyond which it cannot go, a limit presumably reached long ago that cannot be extended further. Moreover, such skill cannot be communicated. It must be bestowed on each person directly by nature's hand, and so dies with them, until nature again gifts someone else in the same way. This person needs only an example to let the talent of which they are aware work in a similar way.

Since the natural gift must give the rule to art as fine art, what kind of rule is it? It cannot be stated in a formula to serve as a precept, since then judgment about the beautiful could be determined by concepts. Rather, the rule must be abstracted from the deed, the product, by which others may test their own talent, using it as a model not for copying but for imitation. How this is possible is hard to explain. The artist's ideas arouse similar ideas in their pupil if nature has provided the pupil with a similar proportion of mental powers. So models of fine art are 310 the only means of passing it on to later generations. Mere descriptions could not do this, especially in the arts of speech. And even in these arts, only works A 186 in ancient, dead languages, now preserved only as learned languages, can become classical.

Mechanical and fine art are very different: the first is merely the art of diligence and learning, the second the art of genius. Yet no fine art lacks something mechanical that can be grasped and followed according to rules, and thus something academically correct, as an essential condition. For something in it must be thought of as an end. Otherwise its product could not be attributed to art at all; it would be a mere product of chance. But carrying out an end requires definite rules from which we may not exempt ourselves. Since originality of talent is one essential feature of genius, though not the only one, shallow minds believe they can best show themselves to be budding geniuses by renouncing the academic constraint of all rules. They think they cut a better figure on an unruly horse than on a trained one. Genius can supply only rich material for products of fine art. Working this material up and giving it form requires a talent trained through schooling, to put it to a use that can stand before judgment. But when someone speaks and decides like a genius even in matters requiring the most careful rational investigation A 187, it is utterly ridiculous. We hardly know whether to laugh more at the charlatan spreading so much fog around them, in which nothing can be clearly judged but all the more can be imagined, or at the public. The public naively imagines its inability to recognize and grasp this masterpiece of insight clearly comes from having new truths thrown at it in great masses, while detailed work through measured explanations and academically correct testing of principles seems mere bungling.

48 311 The relation of genius to taste.

Taste is required to judge beautiful objects as such. But genius is required for fine art itself, that is, for producing such objects.

If we regard genius as talent for fine art, as the word's proper meaning implies, and want to analyze it into the powers that must combine to make up such a talent, we must first determine precisely the difference between natural beauty, whose judgment requires only taste, and artistic beauty, whose possibility requires genius. This possibility must also be considered in judging A 188 such an object.

A beauty of nature is a beautiful thing. Artistic beauty is a beautiful representation of a thing.

To judge a natural beauty as such, I do not first need a concept of what sort of thing the object is supposed to be. I do not need to know its material purposiveness, its end. Its mere form, without knowledge of its end, pleases on its own in judgment. But if the object is given as a product of art and is to be declared beautiful as such, then art always presupposes an end in its cause and that cause's causality. So we must first base our judgment on a concept of what the thing is supposed to be. The agreement of the manifold in a thing with an inner determination of it as an end is the thing's perfection. Thus in judging artistic beauty we must also take the thing's perfection into account, whereas in judging a natural beauty as such this is not in question at all.—Admittedly, when judging especially living objects of nature, such as a human being or a horse, we generally also consider objective purposiveness in judging their beauty A 189. But then the judgment is no longer purely aesthetic, a mere judgment of taste. We no longer judge nature as it appears as art, but insofar as it really is art, though superhuman art. The teleological judgment serves the aesthetic one as its 312 basis and condition, which it must take into account. In such a case, when we say, for example, "That is a beautiful woman," we really mean nothing other than "In her shape, nature beautifully presents the ends of the female structure." For we must look beyond mere form to a concept, if the object is to be thought in this way through a logically conditioned aesthetic judgment.

Fine art shows its excellence precisely in beautifully describing things that would be ugly or displeasing in nature. The Furies, diseases, the devastations of war, and the like can be very beautifully described as evils, and even represented in painting. Only one kind of ugliness cannot be represented true to nature without destroying all aesthetic satisfaction, and thus artistic beauty: that which arouses disgust. In this peculiar sensation, based entirely on imagination, the object is represented as if it were forcing itself on us for enjoyment, while we resist it A 190 violently. So in our sensation the artistic representation of the object is no longer distinguished from the nature of the object itself, and the representation then cannot possibly be considered beautiful. Sculpture too, because art in its products is almost confused with nature, has excluded the immediate representation of ugly objects from its creations. Instead it has allowed death, for example, to be represented by a beautiful spirit, and martial courage by Mars, through an allegory or attributes that look pleasing. It thus represents them only indirectly through an interpretation by reason, not for merely aesthetic judgment.

So much for the beautiful representation of an object, which is really only the form of presenting a concept through which it is universally communicated.—Giving a product of fine art this form requires only taste. After exercising and correcting taste through many examples of art or nature, the artist measures their work against it, and after many often laborious attempts to satisfy it finds the form that meets its demands. So form is not, as it were, a matter of inspiration or of a free sweep of the mental powers, but of slow and painstaking revision, to make it adequate to the thought A 191 313 without harming those powers' freedom in play.

But taste is merely a judging, not a productive, power. What conforms to it is not therefore a work of fine art. It may be a product belonging to useful and mechanical art, or even to science, according to definite rules that can be learned and must be followed exactly. The pleasing form given to it is only the vehicle of communication and, as it were, a manner of presentation. In this respect we remain free to some degree, although otherwise bound to a definite end. Thus we demand that tableware, or a moral treatise, even a sermon, have this form of fine art without seeming contrived. But we will not therefore call them works of fine art. A poem, a piece of music, a picture gallery, and the like are counted as fine art. In a supposed work of fine art we can often find genius without taste, and in another taste without genius.

49 A 192 The mental powers that constitute genius.

Of certain products expected to show themselves, at least partly, as fine art, we say they are without spirit, although we find nothing to criticize in them as regards taste. A poem can be quite neat and elegant, yet lack spirit. A history is accurate and orderly, but without spirit. A ceremonial speech is thorough and also graceful, but without spirit. Many conversations are entertaining enough, but without spirit. Even of a woman people may say she is pretty, talkative, and pleasant, but without spirit. What, then, does spirit mean here?

In an aesthetic sense, spirit means the enlivening principle in the mind. What this principle uses to enliven the soul, the material it employs, is what purposively sets the mental powers in motion, in a play that maintains itself and even strengthens the powers for it.

Now I maintain that this principle is nothing other than the power 314 to present aesthetic ideas. By an aesthetic idea I mean a representation of imagination that prompts much thought, yet to which no definite thought, A 193 that is, concept, can be adequate. Consequently no language can fully reach it and make it intelligible.—We easily see that it is the counterpart of an idea of reason, which, conversely, is a concept to which no intuition, no representation of imagination, can be adequate.

For imagination, as a productive cognitive power, is very powerful in creating, as it were, another nature out of the material actual nature gives it. We entertain ourselves with it when experience seems too ordinary. We also reshape experience, still according to laws of analogy, but also according to principles lying higher up in reason. These are as natural to us as the principles by which understanding grasps empirical nature. In doing so we feel our freedom from the law of association attached to imagination's empirical use. Under that law, nature lends us the material, but we can work it up into something entirely different: something surpassing nature.

We can call such representations of imagination ideas. One reason is that they at least strive toward something beyond the limits of experience, and so try to approach a presentation of reason's concepts, intellectual ideas. This A 194 gives them the appearance of an objective reality. The other and main reason is that, as inner intuitions, no concept can be fully adequate to them. The poet ventures to make sensible reason's ideas of invisible beings, the realm of the blessed, hell, eternity, creation, and the like. Or the poet takes things for which experience does offer examples—death, envy, and all vices, as well as love, fame, and the like—and makes them sensible beyond the limits of experience, in a completeness for which no example exists in nature. This is done through an imagination that emulates reason's example in reaching toward a maximum. It is really in poetry that the power of aesthetic ideas can display itself to its full extent. But considered on its own, this power is really only a talent of imagination.

Now suppose a concept is supplied with a representation of imagination 315 that belongs to its presentation, yet by itself prompts more thought than can ever be comprehended in a definite concept, and thus aesthetically expands the concept itself without limit. Then imagination is creative and sets the power of intellectual ideas, reason, in motion. On the occasion of a representation, it prompts more thought—though belonging to the object's concept—than can be grasped and made clear A 195 in that representation.

Forms that do not constitute the presentation of a given concept itself, but only express, as associated representations of imagination, its connected consequences and relations with other concepts, are called the aesthetic attributes of an object whose concept, as an idea of reason, cannot be adequately presented. Thus Jupiter's eagle with lightning in its claws is an attribute of the mighty king of heaven, and the peacock of the magnificent queen of heaven. Unlike logical attributes, these do not represent what lies in our concepts of the sublimity and majesty of creation. They represent something else that gives imagination occasion to spread over a multitude of related representations, prompting more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words. They supply an aesthetic idea that serves the idea of reason in place of a logical presentation, but really serves to enliven the mind by opening up a view into an immeasurable field of related representations. Fine art does this not only in painting or sculpture, where the term attributes is usually used. Poetry and eloquence also draw the spirit that enlivens their works solely from the aesthetic attributes of objects. These accompany logical attributes and give imagination A 196 an impetus to think more, though in an undeveloped way, than can be comprehended in a concept and thus in a definite linguistic expression.—For brevity I must limit myself to a few examples.

In one of his poems the great king expresses himself this way: "Let us leave life without murmuring and without regret, while still leaving the world heaped with benefits. So the sun, after completing its daily course, still spreads a gentle light across the sky; and the last rays 316 it sends into the air are its last sighs for the world's well-being." He thus enlivens his rational idea of a cosmopolitan disposition even at life's end through an attribute imagination associates with that representation: the memory of all the pleasures of a completed beautiful summer day that a serene evening calls to mind. This awakens a multitude of sensations and associated representations for which no expression can be found. Conversely, even an intellectual concept can serve as an attribute of a sensory representation and so enliven it through the idea of the supersensible. But it does so only by using the aesthetic element subjectively attached to awareness of that idea. Thus A 197 a certain poet describing a beautiful morning says: "The sun welled forth, as peace wells forth from virtue." Awareness of virtue, even when we merely put ourselves in thought into the position of a virtuous person, spreads through the mind a multitude of sublime and calming feelings and a boundless prospect of a joyful future. No expression adequate to a definite concept can fully reach these.¹⁶

In a word, an aesthetic idea is a representation of imagination associated with a given concept. In imagination's free use, it is connected with such a variety of partial representations that no expression signifying a definite concept can be found for it. It thus lets us think, in addition to a concept, much that cannot be named. The feeling of this enlivens the cognitive powers and joins spirit to language as mere letter.

So the mental powers whose union in a certain proportion A 198 constitutes genius are imagination and understanding. But in the use of imagination for cognition, imagination is under understanding's constraint and limited to being adequate to its concept. For an aesthetic purpose 317, however, imagination is free to supply understanding, beyond this agreement with the concept, with abundant undeveloped material, without contrivance, that understanding did not consider in its concept. Understanding applies this material not so much objectively to cognition as subjectively to enlivening the cognitive powers, and thus indirectly also to knowledge. Genius therefore consists in the happy relation that no science can teach and no diligence can learn: finding ideas for a given concept, and on the other side finding for them the expression through which the resulting subjective state of mind, as accompaniment to a concept, can be communicated to others. The latter talent is really what we call spirit. For to express what is unnameable in the state of mind during a certain representation, and make it universally communicable, whether in language, painting, or sculpture, requires a power to grasp imagination's rapidly passing play and unite it in a concept communicable without the constraint of rules. For this very reason the concept is original A 199 and also opens up a new rule that could not have been inferred from any preceding principles or examples.

If, after these analyses, we look back at the account given above of what is called genius, we find: first, it is a talent for art, not for science, in which clearly known rules must come first and determine the procedure. Second, as artistic talent it presupposes a definite concept of the product as an end, and thus understanding, but also a representation, even if indefinite, of the material, the intuition, for presenting this concept, and thus a relation of imagination to understanding. Third, it shows itself not so much in carrying out the proposed end by presenting a definite concept, as in the presentation or expression of aesthetic ideas containing rich material for that purpose. It thus represents imagination as free from all guidance by rules, yet purposive for presenting the given concept. Finally, fourth, the uncontrived, unintentional subjective purposiveness 318 in imagination's free agreement with understanding's lawfulness A 200 presupposes a proportion and attunement of these powers that no following of rules, whether scientific or mechanically imitative, can bring about. Only the subject's nature can produce it.

On these assumptions, genius is the exemplary originality of a subject's natural gift in the free use of their cognitive powers. In this way a genius's product, in respect of what is attributable to genius rather than to possible learning or schooling, is an example not for imitation—for then what is genius in it and constitutes the work's spirit would be lost—but for another genius to follow. It awakens this other genius to a feeling of their own originality, to exercise freedom from the constraint of rules in art in such a way that art itself gains a new rule. Through this the talent shows itself to be exemplary. But genius is a favorite of nature and must be regarded as a rare occurrence. So its example produces a school for other capable minds: a methodical instruction according to rules, as far as these can be drawn from such inspired products and their distinctive character. For these minds fine art is to that extent imitation, to which nature gave the rule through a genius.

But this imitation becomes aping when the pupil copies everything A 201, including the defects the genius had to allow because they could not easily be removed without weakening the idea. This courage is a merit in a genius alone. A certain boldness of expression, and in general many departures from the ordinary rule, suit genius well, but are by no means worth imitating. They always remain faults in themselves, which we must try to remove. Yet genius is, as it were, privileged to have them, since anxious caution would harm the inimitable sweep of its spirit. Mannerism is another kind of aping: aping mere peculiarity, or originality in general, to get as far as possible from imitators, without possessing the talent to be exemplary at the same time.—In general there are two ways, or modes (modus), of arranging one's thoughts for presentation. One is called manner (modus aestheticus, aesthetic mode), the other method (modus logicus, logical mode). They differ 319 in that the first has no standard other than the feeling of unity in presentation, while the second follows definite principles. So only the first applies to fine art. But an artistic product is called mannered only when the presentation of its idea aims at oddity instead of being made adequate to the idea A 202. Showiness or preciousness, strained expression, and affectation merely to differ from the ordinary, but without spirit, resemble the behavior of someone said to like hearing themselves talk, or someone who stands and walks as if on a stage to be stared at. This always reveals a bungler.

50 The combination of taste with genius in products of fine art.

Asking which matters more in fine art, that it show genius or that it show taste, is the same as asking whether imagination matters more than judgment. An art deserves to be called inspired with regard to the first, but fine art only with regard to the second. So the latter, at least as an indispensable condition (conditio sine qua non), is the chief thing to consider in judging art as fine art. Richness and originality of ideas are not as necessary for beauty as the adequacy of imagination in its freedom to understanding's lawfulness. For all imagination's richness, in its lawless freedom A 203, produces nothing but nonsense. Judgment, by contrast, is the power of adapting it to understanding.

Taste, like judgment in general, is the discipline, or training, of genius. It severely clips its wings and makes it civilized or polished. But at the same time it gives genius guidance about where, and how far, it should extend to remain purposive. By bringing clarity and order into the abundance of thoughts, taste makes ideas stable and capable of lasting and universal approval, of being followed by others, and of an ever-advancing cultivation. So if, when these two qualities conflict in a product 320, something must be sacrificed, it should be on the side of genius. Judgment, which pronounces on fine art from its own principles, will sooner allow an impairment of imagination's freedom and richness than of understanding.

Fine art would therefore require imagination, understanding, spirit, and taste¹⁷.

51 A 204 The division of the fine arts.

In general, beauty, whether natural or artistic, can be called the expression of aesthetic ideas. The difference is that in fine art this idea must be prompted by a concept of the object. In beautiful nature, mere reflection on a given intuition, without a concept of what the object is supposed to be, is enough to awaken and communicate the idea of which that object is regarded as the expression.

So if we want to divide the fine arts, we can choose no more convenient principle, at least as an experiment, than the analogy of art with the kind of expression people use in speaking to communicate with one another as fully as possible—not only their concepts but also their sensations¹⁸.—This consists in word, gesture, and tone: articulation, gesticulation, and modulation. Only the combination of these A 205 three forms of expression constitutes the speaker's complete communication. For through them thought, intuition, and sensation are conveyed to another person simultaneously and in union.

There are therefore only three kinds of fine arts: the arts of speech, the 321 visual arts, and the art of the play of sensations, as external sensory impressions. We could also arrange this division in two branches, dividing fine art into the expression of thoughts or of intuitions, and then dividing the latter according to their form or their matter, sensation. But it would then look too abstract and less suited to ordinary concepts.

1) The arts of speech are eloquence and poetry. Eloquence is the art of carrying on a task of understanding as a free play of imagination; poetry, of carrying out a free play of imagination as a task of understanding.

So the orator announces a task and carries it out as if it were merely a play with ideas to entertain the listeners. The poet announces merely an entertaining play with ideas, yet as much results for understanding as if the intention had been simply to carry out its task. The connection and harmony of these two A 206 cognitive powers, sensibility and understanding, must seem unintentional and to occur of itself. For although they cannot do without one another, they cannot easily be united without constraint and mutual impairment. Otherwise it is not fine art. Thus everything contrived and labored must be avoided. Fine art must be free art in two senses: it must not, as paid employment, be labor whose amount can be judged by a definite standard, compelled, or paid for; and the mind, although occupied, must still feel satisfied and awakened without looking toward another end, independently of payment.

So the orator gives something not promised: an entertaining play of imagination. But the orator also falls somewhat short in what was promised and announced as the task: purposively occupying understanding. The poet, by contrast, promises little, announcing a mere play with ideas, but achieves something worthy of a task: playfully providing nourishment for understanding and giving life to its concepts through imagination. Thus the former fundamentally delivers less, and the latter more, than promised.

2) The visual arts, those expressing ideas in A 207 sensory intuition, not through representations of mere imagination 322 aroused by words, are either arts of sensory truth or of sensory appearance. The first is called plastic art, the second painting. Both make shapes in space the expression of ideas. Plastic art makes shapes perceptible to two senses, sight and touch, though not to touch with regard to beauty; painting only to sight. Both are based on the aesthetic idea in imagination, the archetype or original image. But the shape constituting its expression, the ectype or copy, is given either in its bodily extension, as the object itself exists, or in the way this extension depicts itself to the eye, as its appearance on a surface. Or, amounting to the same thing, either a relation to an actual end or only the appearance of one is made a condition for reflection.

Plastic art, as the first kind of fine visual art, includes sculpture and architecture. The first presents in bodily form concepts of things as they could exist in nature, though as fine art with regard to aesthetic purposiveness. The second is the art of presenting concepts of things possible only through art, whose form has as its determining ground not nature but A 208 an arbitrary end, in keeping with that aim yet also in an aesthetically purposive way. In architecture a certain use of the artificial object is the main thing, limiting aesthetic ideas as a condition. In sculpture the mere expression of aesthetic ideas is the main aim. Thus statues of human beings, gods, animals, and so on belong to the first kind. Temples, magnificent buildings for public assemblies, dwellings, triumphal arches, columns, cenotaphs, and the like, erected as memorials of honor, belong to architecture. Indeed all household furnishings—cabinetmakers' work and similar useful things—can be counted here, because a product's adequacy to a certain use constitutes the essence of a built work. By contrast, a mere sculpted work, made solely for viewing and intended to please in itself, is as a bodily presentation merely an imitation of nature, though with regard to aesthetic ideas. Here sensory truth must not go so far that the work ceases to appear as art and a product of choice.

As the second kind of visual art, painting artificially presents 323 sensory appearance in connection with ideas. I would divide it into the art of beautifully depicting nature and that of beautifully arranging its products. The first would be painting proper A 209, the second landscape gardening. Painting gives only the appearance of bodily extension. Gardening gives bodily extension in reality, but only the appearance of utilization and use for ends other than merely the play of imagination in contemplating its forms¹⁹. Gardening is nothing but decorating the ground with the same variety—grasses, flowers, shrubs, trees, even waters, hills, and valleys—with which nature presents it to our view, but arranged differently and in accordance with certain ideas. Yet a beautiful arrangement of bodily things is A 210 given only for the eye, like painting. Touch can provide no intuitive representation of such a form. Under painting in the broad sense I would also count decorating rooms with wallpaper, ornaments, and all beautiful furnishings serving merely for viewing, as well as the art of dressing with taste, including rings, snuffboxes, and so on. For a bed of varied flowers or a room with varied decorations, including the ladies' adornment, forms a kind of painting at a splendid celebration. Like paintings properly so called, which are not intended to teach history or natural knowledge, this exists merely to be looked at, to entertain imagination in free play with ideas and occupy aesthetic judgment without a definite end. The making of all this decoration may be mechanically very different 324 and require quite different artists. Still, judgment of taste about what is beautiful in this art is determined in the same way: we judge only the forms as they appear to the eye, without regard to an end, singly or in combination, by their effect on imagination.—That visual art can be counted, by analogy, as gesture in a language is justified A 211 by the fact that through these shapes the artist's spirit gives bodily expression to what and how it has thought, making the thing itself speak, as it were, through mime. This is a very common play of our imagination, which attributes to lifeless things, according to their form, a spirit speaking from them.

3) The art of the beautiful play of sensations, produced from outside yet nevertheless having to be universally communicable, can concern nothing but the proportion between different degrees of attunement or tension of the sense to which the sensation belongs, that is, its tone. In this broad meaning of the word, it can be divided into the artistic play of sensations of hearing and of sight, and thus into music and the art of colors.—It is noteworthy that besides their receptivity to impressions sufficient for obtaining concepts of external objects through them, these two senses are capable of a special connected sensation. We cannot quite determine whether this is based on sense or reflection. This capacity to be affected can sometimes be absent even though the sense is otherwise not deficient at all for cognizing objects, but may even be exceptionally acute A 212. That is, we cannot say with certainty whether a color or tone, a sound, is merely an agreeable sensation, or already in itself a beautiful play of sensations that as such brings satisfaction in form in aesthetic judgment. Consider the speed of the vibrations of light, or in the second case of air. This probably far exceeds our ability to judge directly in perception the proportion in which they divide time. So one would think that only the effect of these vibrations on our body's elastic parts is sensed, while the division of time through them is not noticed or 325 taken into account in judgment. Colors and tones would thus be connected only with agreeableness, not with beauty in their composition. But consider, on the other hand, first, what mathematics can say about the proportions of these vibrations in music and their judgment, and judge color contrasts, as we should, by analogy with music. Second, consult the rare examples of people with the best eyesight who could not distinguish colors, or the sharpest hearing who could not distinguish tones. Also consider that those who can distinguish them perceive a changed quality, not merely a degree of sensation, at the different intensities on the color or tonal scale, and that their number A 213 is fixed for intelligible differences. We might then feel compelled to regard both sensations not as mere sensory impressions, but as the effect of judging form in the play of many sensations. The difference either opinion makes in judging music's basis would alter only its definition: we would define it either, as we have done, as the beautiful play of sensations through hearing, or as the play of agreeable sensations. Only according to the first explanation would music be represented entirely as fine art; according to the second it would be, at least partly, agreeable art.

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

Eloquence can be combined with a pictorial presentation of its subjects as well as its objects in a play; poetry with music in song; song also with pictorial, theatrical presentation in an opera; the play of sensations in music with the play of shapes in dance; and so on. The presentation of the sublime, insofar as it belongs to fine art, can also unite with beauty in a rhymed tragedy, a didactic poem, or an oratorio A 214. In these combinations fine art is still more artful. Whether it is also more beautiful, since such diverse kinds of satisfaction cross one another, can be doubted in some of these cases. But in all fine 326 art the essential thing is form, which is purposive for observation and judgment. Here pleasure is also cultivation and disposes the spirit toward ideas, making it receptive to more such pleasure and entertainment. The essential thing is not the matter of sensation, charm or emotion, where the aim is merely enjoyment. Such enjoyment leaves nothing behind in the idea, dulls the spirit, gradually makes the object disgusting, and makes the mind dissatisfied with itself and moody through awareness that, in reason's judgment, its state is contrary to purpose.

If the fine arts are not connected, closely or remotely, with moral ideas, which alone bring an independent satisfaction, this latter outcome is their ultimate fate. They then serve only as distractions. We need ever more of them the more we use them to drive away the mind's dissatisfaction with itself, by making ourselves still more useless and dissatisfied. In general, natural beauties are most helpful for the first purpose if we are accustomed early A 215 to observing, judging, and admiring them.

53 Comparing the aesthetic worth of the fine arts with one another.

Among all the arts, poetry holds the highest rank. It owes its origin almost entirely to genius and is least willing to be guided by precepts or examples. It expands the mind by setting imagination free. Within the limits of a given concept, from the unlimited variety of possible forms agreeing with it, poetry offers the one that connects its presentation with an abundance of thought to which no linguistic expression is fully adequate. It thus rises aesthetically to ideas. Poetry strengthens the mind by letting it feel its free, self-active power, independent of determination by nature, to consider and judge nature as appearance from viewpoints that nature does not itself offer to either sense or understanding in experience. It thus lets the mind use nature for the purpose, and as it were as the schema, of the supersensible. It plays with 327 the illusion it produces at will, yet without deceiving. For it declares its own activity to be mere play, which nevertheless A 216 can be used purposively by understanding for its task.—Eloquence, insofar as it means the art of persuading, of deceiving through beautiful illusion, as ars oratoria, the art of oratory, rather than merely speaking well in eloquence and style, is a dialectic. It borrows from poetry only as much as is needed to win minds over in the speaker's favor before they judge, and to deprive judgment of its freedom. So it cannot be recommended for either the courtroom or the pulpit. Where civil laws, individuals' rights, or lasting instruction and determination of minds toward correct knowledge and conscientious observance of duty are concerned, even a trace of luxuriant wit and imagination is beneath the dignity of so important a task. Still more so is the art of persuading and winning people over to someone's advantage. Even if it can sometimes be used for intentions that are in themselves legitimate and praiseworthy, it is still objectionable because maxims and dispositions are thereby subjectively corrupted, even when the deed is objectively lawful. For it is not enough to do what is right; we must also do it solely because it is right. Moreover, the mere clear concept of these kinds of human concern, connected with a A 217 lively presentation through examples and without violating the rules of harmonious language or propriety of expression for reason's ideas—which together constitute speaking well—already has sufficient influence on human minds by itself. There is no need to add the machinery of persuasion. Since this can just as well be used to gloss over or conceal vice and error, it can never entirely remove the secret suspicion of an artful trick. In poetry everything proceeds honestly and openly. It declares that it wishes merely to engage in an entertaining play with imagination, one agreeing in form with understanding's laws. It does not seek to steal upon and entangle understanding through sensible presentation.²⁰

328 After poetry I would place, when charm and movement A 218 of the mind are at issue, the art nearest to it among the arts of expression, which also combines very naturally with it: music. Although music speaks through mere sensations without concepts, and so, unlike poetry, leaves nothing for reflection, it nevertheless moves the mind more variously and, though only temporarily, more deeply. Admittedly, it is more enjoyment than cultivation. The play of thoughts it incidentally arouses is only the effect of a seemingly mechanical association. Judged by reason, it has less worth than any other fine art. So, like every enjoyment, it demands frequent change and cannot endure repeated hearing without producing weariness. Its universally communicable charm seems A 219 to rest on the following. Every linguistic expression in context has a tone suited to its meaning. This tone more or less indicates an affect in the speaker and also produces it in the listener, in whom it in turn awakens the idea expressed in language with that tone. Since modulation is, as it were, a universal language of sensations intelligible to everyone, music exercises this language on its own in its full force as the language of affects. It thus universally communicates the aesthetic ideas naturally associated with it according to the law of association. But because these 329 aesthetic ideas are not concepts and definite thoughts, the form in which these sensations are combined—harmony and melody—serves only in place of the form of a language. Through a proportioned attunement of the sensations, it expresses the aesthetic idea of a coherent whole containing an unnameable abundance of thought, according to a certain theme that constitutes the dominant affect in the piece. This attunement can be brought mathematically under certain rules, because in tones it rests on the ratio of the numbers of air vibrations in the same time, insofar as tones are combined simultaneously or successively. On this mathematical form alone, although not represented through definite A 220 concepts, depends the satisfaction that mere reflection on such a multitude of simultaneous or successive sensations connects with their play as the universally valid condition of its beauty. Only according to this form may taste claim a right to pronounce in advance on everyone's judgment.

But mathematics certainly has not the slightest share in the charm and mental movement music produces. It is only the indispensable condition, the conditio sine qua non, of that proportion of impressions in their combination and alternation which makes it possible to grasp them together. It prevents them from destroying one another, so that instead they agree in continuously moving and enlivening the mind through affects in harmony with them, and thereby in a comfortable enjoyment of oneself.

If, by contrast, we estimate the worth of the fine arts by the cultivation they give the mind, taking as our standard the expansion of the powers that must come together in judgment for cognition, music has the lowest place among the fine arts in this respect. Among arts also assessed by their agreeableness, it may have the highest. For it merely plays with sensations. In this A 221 respect the visual arts therefore stand far above it. By setting imagination into a free play that is nevertheless adequate to understanding, they also carry out a task. They produce something that serves understanding's concepts as a lasting vehicle recommending itself on its own, to promote their union with sensibility and thus, as it were, the refinement of the higher cognitive powers. 330 The two kinds of art take entirely different paths: music goes from sensations to indeterminate ideas; visual art from determinate ideas to sensations. The latter leave a lasting impression, the former only a passing one. Imagination can recall visual impressions and entertain itself agreeably with them. Musical impressions either disappear entirely or, if involuntarily repeated by imagination, are more burdensome than agreeable. Music also has a certain lack of consideration: chiefly because of the nature of its instruments, it spreads its influence farther than desired, into the neighborhood, and thus, as it were, imposes itself. It therefore impairs the freedom of others outside the musical gathering. Arts speaking to the eyes do not do this, since we need only turn our eyes away if we do not want to admit their impression. It is almost like A 222 enjoyment through a widely spreading smell. Someone taking a perfumed handkerchief from their pocket treats everyone nearby against their will, forcing them, if they wish to breathe, to enjoy it too. This is also why it has gone out of fashion.²¹—Among the visual arts I would give painting preference, partly because, as the art of drawing, it underlies all the others, and partly because it can penetrate much farther into the region of ideas and expand the field of intuition in accordance with them more than the others are permitted to do.

54 Remark.

As we have often shown, there is an essential difference between what pleases us merely when we judge it and what gives enjoyment (pleases us in sensation). We cannot expect everyone to share the latter in the way we can the former. Enjoyment, even when its cause lies in ideas, always seems to consist in 331 a feeling that a person's whole life is being strengthened, including bodily well-being, or health. A 223 In this respect Epicurus, who regarded all enjoyment as basically bodily sensation, may perhaps have been right. He only misunderstood himself when he counted intellectual and even practical satisfaction among enjoyments. Keeping this last distinction in view explains how someone can disapprove of an enjoyment he feels—for example, a poor but decent person's joy at inheriting from his loving but miserly father. It also explains how someone can approve of a deep pain he suffers—a widow's sadness over the death of her worthy husband; how an enjoyment can also win our approval—for example, our enjoyment of the sciences we pursue; or how a pain, such as hatred, envy, or the desire for revenge, can also meet with our disapproval. Here liking or disliking rests on reason and is the same as approval or disapproval. Enjoyment and pain, however, can rest only on the feeling of, or prospect of, possible well-being or distress, whatever their cause.

Every changing free play of sensations, when it has no intention behind it, gives enjoyment because it strengthens the feeling of health. It does so whether or not, in judging by reason, we like its object or even the enjoyment itself. This enjoyment can rise to the level of an affect, although we take no interest in the object itself, or at least no interest proportionate to the strength of that affect. We can divide these activities into games of chance, the play of tones, and the play of thoughts. The first requires an interest, whether vanity or self-interest. But this interest is nowhere near as great as our interest in the way we try to obtain its object. A 224 The second requires only a change of sensations, each of which has some relation to an affect without reaching its intensity, and stirs aesthetic ideas. The third arises simply from the change of representations in the power of judgment. This produces no thought carrying any interest, but still enlivens the mind.

Our evening gatherings show how much enjoyment games must give, without our needing to assume any interested purpose behind them. Almost no gathering can keep itself entertained without a game. The affects of hope, fear, joy, anger, and mockery 332 play their parts, changing roles every moment. They are so lively that, as an internal exercise, they seem to stimulate all the body's vital activity. The cheerful state of mind they produce proves this, although nothing has been gained or learned. But games of chance are not a beautiful play, so we will leave them aside here. Music and material for laughter, on the other hand, are two kinds of play with aesthetic ideas, or even with representations of the understanding, through which ultimately nothing is thought. They can give lively enjoyment merely through their changes. In this way they show fairly clearly that in both cases the enlivening is merely bodily, although ideas of the mind arouse it. The feeling of health, produced by a movement of the internal organs corresponding to that play, makes up the whole enjoyment of a lively gathering, so often praised as refined and witty. This enjoyment does not consist in judging the harmony of tones or witty remarks. Their beauty serves only as its necessary vehicle. It consists instead in the stimulation of the body's vital activity, in the affect that moves the A 225 internal organs and diaphragm—in a word, in the feeling of health, which we otherwise cannot feel without some such occasion. We enjoy being able to reach the body through the soul as well, and to use the soul as its physician.

In music this play goes from bodily sensation to aesthetic ideas, the objects of affects, and then returns from them to the body with increased force. In joking—which, like music, deserves to be counted as agreeable rather than beautiful art—the play starts with thoughts. Insofar as these seek sensory expression, they all engage the body too. In this presentation the understanding does not find what it expected, and suddenly relaxes. We feel the effect of this relaxation in the body through the vibration of its organs. This helps restore their balance and has a beneficial effect on health.

Anything meant to produce lively, shaking laughter must contain something absurd, something the understanding therefore cannot like in itself. Laughter is an affect arising from the sudden transformation of a tense expectation into nothing. This very transformation, certainly not pleasing to the understanding, nevertheless gives very lively indirect pleasure for a moment. So its 333 cause must lie in the representation's influence on the body and the body's reciprocal influence on the mind. This does not happen because the representation is objectively an object of enjoyment—for how could a disappointed expectation give enjoyment? It happens solely because, as A 226 a mere play of representations, it produces a balance of vital forces in the body.

Suppose someone tells this story. An Indian at an Englishman's table in Surat saw a bottle of ale opened and all the beer rush out as foam. With many exclamations he expressed great astonishment. The Englishman asked, "What is so astonishing about that?" He answered, "I'm not astonished that it comes out, but at how you managed to get it in." We laugh and feel hearty delight. This is not because we think ourselves cleverer than this ignorant man, or because our understanding notices anything else pleasing in it. Rather, our expectation was tense and suddenly disappears into nothing. Or suppose the heir of a wealthy relative wants to arrange a very solemn funeral for him, but complains that he cannot quite manage it. "The more money I give my mourners to look sad," he says, "the happier they look." We laugh out loud, and the reason is that an expectation suddenly turns into nothing. We must take care to note that it must turn not into the positive opposite of an expected object—which is always something, and can often make us sad—but into nothing. For if someone raises great expectations by telling us a story, and we immediately see at its conclusion that it is untrue, we are displeased. Stories of people whose hair supposedly turned gray overnight from great grief are an example. But suppose another joker answers such a story by telling, in great detail, of a merchant's grief. Returning from India to Europe with his entire fortune A 227 in goods, the merchant was forced by a violent storm to throw everything overboard. He grieved so much that his wig turned gray that very night. Then we laugh and enjoy it. For a while we keep batting back and forth, like a ball, our own failed attempt to grasp an otherwise indifferent object—or rather, the idea we have been pursuing—when all we mean to do is catch it and hold it still. 334 The enjoyment here does not come from putting a liar or a fool in his place. Even on its own, the latter story, told with pretended seriousness, would make a company burst out laughing; and the former purpose would ordinarily not even be worth our attention.

What is remarkable is that in all such cases the joke must always contain something that can deceive us for a moment. So when the illusion disappears into nothing, the mind looks back to try it once again. Rapidly alternating tension and relaxation throw it back and forth and set it oscillating. The release from what had, so to speak, tightened the string happened suddenly, not through gradual slackening. This oscillation must therefore cause an emotional movement, along with a corresponding internal bodily movement. The movement continues involuntarily and produces fatigue but also cheerfulness—the effects of exercise beneficial to health.

Suppose we assume that all our thoughts are accompanied by some corresponding movement in the body's organs. Then we can fairly well understand how the mind's sudden shift from one standpoint to another, as it considers its object, A 228 could correspond to an alternating tension and release of the elastic parts of our internal organs. This is communicated to the diaphragm, much like what ticklish people feel. The lungs expel air in rapid bursts and so produce a movement beneficial to health. This alone, and not what goes on in the mind, is the actual cause of enjoyment in a thought that basically represents nothing.—Voltaire said that heaven had given us two things to offset life's many hardships: hope and sleep. He could have added laughter, if only the means of producing it in reasonable people were so readily available. The wit or originality of humor needed for this is as rare as the talent for writing things that rack the brain, like mystical brooding, risk the neck, like the productions of geniuses, or break the heart, like sentimental novels—and sometimes the writings of similar moralists.

So I think we can grant Epicurus that all enjoyment, even when prompted by concepts that 335 arouse aesthetic ideas, is animal, that is, bodily sensation. This does not in the least detract from the spiritual feeling of respect for moral ideas. That feeling is not enjoyment but an esteem for ourselves—for the humanity in us—which raises us above the need for enjoyment. Nor does it detract even from the less noble feeling of taste.

Something combining both is found in naivety. This is an outburst of the sincerity originally natural to humanity, breaking through the art of dissimulation that has become second nature. We A 229 laugh at a simplicity that has not yet learned to pretend. Yet we also take pleasure in nature's simplicity, which here frustrates that art. We expected the everyday habit of artificial expression, carefully arranged to make a good impression. Instead, here is unspoiled, innocent nature, which we did not expect to find, and which the person revealing it did not mean to expose. The attractive but false appearance that usually counts for so much in our judgment suddenly turns into nothing. It is as though the trickster within us had been exposed. This moves the mind successively in two opposite directions and at the same time gives the body a healthy shaking. But something infinitely better than all adopted manners has not entirely died out in human nature: purity of thought, or at least the capacity for it. This adds seriousness and high regard to the power of judgment's play. Yet the appearance shows itself only briefly, and the curtain of dissimulation is soon drawn again. So regret also enters into it, a tender emotion that can readily join, as play, with such good-natured laughter, and indeed usually does. It also generally makes up to the person who gives rise to it for his embarrassment at not yet having learned the ways of the world.—An art of being naive is therefore a contradiction. But presenting naivety in an invented character is quite possible, and is a beautiful though rare art. Naivety must not be confused with openhearted simplicity, which leaves nature unadorned only because it does not understand A 230 the art of social interaction.

The humorous manner 336 can also be counted among things that cheer us up and are closely related to the enjoyment of laughter. It belongs to originality of mind, but not specifically to the talent for beautiful art. In its good sense, humor means the talent for putting oneself at will into a certain frame of mind. In that frame, everything is judged quite differently from usual, even in reverse, yet still in keeping with certain principles of reason appropriate to that state of mind. Someone involuntarily subject to such changes is moody. Someone who can adopt them at will and purposefully, to produce a lively presentation through a contrast that arouses laughter, is called humorous, as is his presentation. Still, this manner belongs more to agreeable than to beautiful art. The object of beautiful art must always show some dignity of its own. It therefore requires a certain seriousness in its presentation, just as it requires taste in judging it.

Of the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment A 231 337

12 To justify a claim to universal agreement with a judgment of the aesthetic power of judgment resting on merely subjective grounds, it is enough to grant two points. 1) In all people the subjective conditions of this faculty are the same as regards the relation of the cognitive powers active in it to cognition in general. This must be true, since otherwise people could not communicate their representations or even their cognition to one another. 2) The judgment has taken only this relation, and thus the formal condition of the power of judgment, into account, and is pure. That is, it is mixed neither with concepts of the object nor with sensations as determining grounds. Even if a mistake has been made on this second point, it concerns only the incorrect application to a particular case of an entitlement given us by a law. It does not cancel the entitlement in general.

13 We soon see that enlightenment is easy in principle but difficult and slow to carry out in practice. Not being passive in the use of one's reason, but always giving oneself its law, is quite easy for someone who wants only to live in keeping with his essential end and does not seek knowledge of what exceeds his understanding. But the effort to know the latter is almost impossible to prevent. Nor will there ever be a shortage of others confidently promising to satisfy this curiosity. So it must be very difficult to preserve or establish in people's way of thinking, especially in public thinking, the merely negative attitude that makes up enlightenment proper.

14 Taste could be called sensus communis aestheticus, and ordinary human understanding sensus communis logicus.

15 In my region, when an ordinary person is given a problem like Columbus's egg, he says, that is no art, it is only knowledge. That is, if you know how it is done, you can do it. He says the same about all the conjurer's supposed arts. But he will not hesitate to call the tightrope walker's skill an art.

16 Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, nor any thought expressed more sublimely, than in that inscription above the temple of Isis, mother Nature: “I am all that is, all that was, and all that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil.” Segner used this idea in an ingenious illustration placed before his natural philosophy. He wanted to fill the pupil he was preparing to lead into this temple with the sacred awe that should put the mind into a state of solemn attention.

17 The first three faculties gain their unity only through the fourth. In his history, Hume suggests to the English that, although their works yield to no people in the world as evidence of the first three qualities considered separately, in the quality that unites them they must rank below their neighbors, the French.

18 The reader should not judge this outline of a possible division of the beautiful arts as a proposed theory. It is only one of the many attempts that can and should still be made.

19 It may seem strange that ornamental gardening can be regarded as a kind of painting, although it presents its forms in solid bodies. But it actually takes its forms from nature: trees, shrubs, grasses, and flowers from forest and field, at least originally. In this respect it is not an art like sculpture. Nor, like architecture, does it make a concept of the object and its end a condition of their arrangement. Its condition is only the free play of the imagination in contemplation. In this respect it agrees with merely aesthetic painting that has no definite subject, but makes an entertaining arrangement of sky, land, and water through light and shadow.—In general, the reader should judge this only as an attempt to bring the beautiful arts together under one principle, here that of expressing aesthetic ideas by analogy with a language. It should not be regarded as a derivation of them claimed to be conclusive.

20 I must admit that a beautiful poem has always given me pure enjoyment. By contrast, reading the best speech by a Roman popular orator, or a modern parliamentary speaker or preacher, has always brought an unpleasant feeling mixed with it: disapproval of a deceitful art. This art knows how to move people like machines, in important matters, toward a judgment that must lose all weight for them on calm reflection. Eloquence and fine speaking, together called rhetoric, belong to beautiful art. But oratory (ars oratoria), as the art of using people's weaknesses for one's purposes, deserves no respect at all, however well intended or genuinely good those purposes may be. In both Athens and Rome it reached its highest level only when the state was hastening toward its ruin and a genuinely patriotic way of thinking had died out. A person who clearly understands the subject, commands the language in its richness and purity, has a fertile imagination able to present his ideas, and takes a lively, heartfelt interest in what is truly good, is the vir bonus dicendi peritus: the good man skilled in speaking. He is the speaker without artifice but full of force whom Cicero wanted, though Cicero himself did not always remain true to this ideal.

21 Those who recommended singing religious songs as part of household worship did not consider the great burden such noisy devotion imposes on the public. For that very reason it is generally pharisaical. It forces the neighbors either to sing along or to stop their own thinking.