Part I — Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment

Second Section. The Dialectic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment.

55 A power of judgment that is to be dialectical must first be reasoning; that is, its judgments must lay claim to universality, and indeed a priori²², for dialectic consists in the opposition of such judgments. Hence the incompatibility of aesthetic judgments of sense (concerning the agreeable and disagreeable) is not dialectical. Nor does the conflict of judgments of taste, insofar as each person appeals merely to his own taste, constitute a dialectic of taste, because A 232 no one intends to make his judgment a universal rule. Thus no concept remains of a dialectic that could concern taste except a dialectic of the critique of taste (not of taste itself) with respect to its principles: namely, where conflicting concepts arise naturally and unavoidably concerning the ground of the possibility of judgments of taste in general. A transcendental critique of taste will therefore contain a part that can bear the name of a dialectic of the aesthetic power of judgment only if there is an antinomy of the principles of this faculty that casts doubt on its conformity to law, and hence also on its inner possibility.

56 338 Presentation of the Antinomy of Taste.

The first commonplace of taste is contained in the proposition with which everyone lacking taste thinks to defend himself against criticism: everyone has his own taste. This amounts to saying that the determining ground of this judgment is merely subjective (delight or pain), and the judgment has no right to the necessary assent of others.

Its second commonplace, used even by those who grant a judgment of taste the right to pronounce itself valid for everyone A 233, is: there is no disputing about taste. This amounts to saying that the determining ground of a judgment of taste may indeed also be objective, but cannot be brought under determinate concepts; consequently nothing concerning the judgment itself can be decided by proofs, although we can quite properly and legitimately argue about it. For arguing and disputing agree in seeking to produce unanimity of judgments through their mutual opposition; but they differ in that the latter hopes to accomplish this according to determinate concepts as grounds of proof, and thus assumes objective concepts as grounds of the judgment. Where this is considered impracticable, disputing is likewise judged impracticable.

It is easy to see that between these two commonplaces a proposition is missing which, though not in proverbial circulation, is nevertheless present in everyone's mind: we can argue about taste (although not dispute about it). But this proposition contains the opposite of the first proposition. For where arguing is to be permissible, there must be hope of reaching agreement with one another; consequently we must be able to count on grounds of judgment that have more than private validity, and thus are not merely subjective. Yet the principle that everyone has his own taste stands directly opposed to this.

Thus the following A 234 antinomy emerges concerning the principle of taste:

1) Thesis. The judgment of taste is not based on concepts; for otherwise we could dispute about it (decide it by proofs).

2) Antithesis. The judgment of taste is based on concepts; for otherwise, despite its diversity, we could not even 339 argue about it (claim the necessary agreement of others with this judgment).

57 Resolution of the Antinomy of Taste.

There is no way to remove the conflict between those principles underlying every judgment of taste (which are nothing other than the two peculiarities of the judgment of taste presented above in the Analytic) except by showing that the concept to which we refer the object in judgments of this kind is not taken in the same sense in both maxims of the aesthetic power of judgment; that this twofold sense, or standpoint of judging, is necessary to our transcendental power of judgment; but also that the semblance arising from confusing one with the other is unavoidable as a natural illusion.

The judgment of taste must refer to some concept; for otherwise it could make no claim whatever to necessary validity for A 235 everyone. Yet this does not mean that it must be demonstrable from a concept, since a concept can be either determinable or, in itself, indeterminate and also indeterminable. Of the first kind is the concept of the understanding, which can be determined through predicates of the sensible intuition that can correspond to it; of the second is the transcendental concept of reason concerning the supersensible that underlies all such intuition, and therefore cannot be further determined theoretically.

Now the judgment of taste concerns objects of the senses, but not in order to determine a concept of them for the understanding; for it is not a cognitive judgment. Hence, as an intuitive, singular representation related to the feeling of pleasure, it is only a private judgment; and to that extent its validity would be restricted to the judging individual alone: the object is an object of satisfaction for me; for others it may be otherwise—everyone has his own taste.

Nevertheless, the judgment of taste undoubtedly contains an extended reference of the representation of the object (and at the same time of the subject), on which we base an extension of judgments of this kind as necessary for everyone. This must therefore necessarily rest on some 340 concept; but a concept that cannot be determined at all through intuition A 236, through which nothing can be cognized, and hence from which no proof can be given for the judgment of taste. Such a concept, however, is the mere pure concept of reason concerning the supersensible that underlies the object (and also the judging subject) as an object of sense, and thus as appearance. For unless we assumed such a reference, the judgment of taste's claim to universal validity could not be saved. If the concept on which it rests were merely a confused concept of the understanding, of perfection, for example, to which we could attach a corresponding sensible intuition of the beautiful, then it would at least be possible in itself to base the judgment of taste on proofs, which contradicts the thesis.

But all contradiction disappears when I say: the judgment of taste is based on a concept (of a ground in general of nature's subjective purposiveness for the power of judgment), from which, however, nothing concerning the object can be cognized or proved, since it is in itself indeterminable and unfit for cognition. Yet through this very concept the judgment at the same time acquires validity for everyone (in each person, indeed, as a singular judgment immediately accompanying the intuition), because its determining ground perhaps lies in the concept of what can be regarded A 237 as the supersensible substrate of humanity.

In resolving an antinomy, all that matters is the possibility that two apparently conflicting propositions do not in fact contradict one another but can coexist, even though explaining the possibility of their concept exceeds our cognitive faculty. From this we can also make comprehensible that this semblance is natural and unavoidable for human reason; likewise, why it is and remains so, although it no longer deceives after the apparent contradiction has been resolved.

For in both conflicting judgments we take the concept on which the universal validity of a judgment must rest in the same sense, and yet attribute two opposed predicates to it. Thus the thesis should read: the judgment of taste is not based on determinate concepts; the antithesis, however: the judgment of taste is nevertheless based on a concept, though an indeterminate 341 one (namely, of the supersensible substrate of appearances); and then there would be no conflict between them.

We can do no more than remove this conflict in taste's claims and counterclaims. To give a determinate objective principle of taste by which its judgments could be guided, A 238 tested, and proved is utterly impossible; for then it would no longer be a judgment of taste. The subjective principle, namely the indeterminate idea of the supersensible within us, can only be indicated as the sole key to the riddle of this faculty, whose sources are hidden even from ourselves; it cannot be made comprehensible through anything further.

The antinomy set forth and reconciled here rests on the correct concept of taste, namely as a merely reflective aesthetic power of judgment. The two apparently conflicting principles were reconciled because both can be true, which is also enough. If, on the other hand, we assume agreeableness as taste's determining ground, as some do (because of the singularity of the representation underlying a judgment of taste), or the principle of perfection, as others wish (because of its universal validity), and frame the definition of taste accordingly, then an antinomy arises that can be reconciled only by showing that both propositions opposed to one another (though not merely as contradictories) are false. This then proves that the concept on which each rests contradicts itself. Thus we see that A 239 removing the antinomy of the aesthetic power of judgment follows a course similar to that followed by the Critique in resolving the antinomies of pure theoretical reason; and that here too, as in the Critique of Practical Reason, the antinomies compel us against our will to look beyond the sensible and seek in the supersensible the point of union of all our a priori faculties, because no other way remains to bring reason into agreement with itself.

Remark I.

Since in transcendental philosophy we so often have occasion to distinguish ideas from concepts of the understanding, it may be 342 useful to introduce technical expressions suited to their distinction. I believe there will be no objection if I propose a few.—Ideas, in the most general sense, are representations referred to an object according to a certain principle (subjective or objective), insofar as they can nevertheless never become cognition of it. They are either referred to an intuition according to a merely subjective principle of the agreement of the cognitive faculties with one another (imagination and understanding), and are then called aesthetic; or they are referred to a concept according to an objective principle, but can nevertheless never yield cognition of the object, and are called ideas of reason. In the latter case the concept is a transcendent concept, distinguished from a concept of the understanding, to which an A 240 adequately corresponding experience can always be supplied, and which is therefore called immanent.

An aesthetic idea cannot become cognition because it is an intuition (of the imagination) for which an adequate concept can never be found. An idea of reason can never become cognition because it contains a concept (of the supersensible) for which an adequate intuition can never be given.

Now I believe we may call an aesthetic idea an inexponible representation of the imagination, and an idea of reason an indemonstrable concept of reason. Of both it is assumed that they are not altogether groundless, but are produced (according to the explanation of an idea in general given above) in accordance with certain principles of the cognitive faculties to which they belong: the former with subjective principles, the latter with objective ones.

Concepts of the understanding, as such, must always be demonstrable (if by demonstrating we understand, as in anatomy, merely presenting); that is, the object corresponding to them must always be capable of being given in intuition, pure or empirical, for only through this can they become cognitions. The concept of magnitude can be given a priori in the intuition of space, for example in a straight line, and so on; the concept of cause, in the impenetrability and impact of bodies, and so on. Thus both can be supported by an empirical intuition, that is, the thought of them can be shown in an example (demonstrated, pointed out); and this must 343 be possible, otherwise we are not certain whether the thought is empty, that is, without any object at all.

In logic, the expressions demonstrable and A 241 indemonstrable are commonly used only with regard to propositions. The former could better be designated as only mediately certain propositions, the latter as immediately certain ones; for pure philosophy, too, has propositions of both kinds, if by these we understand true propositions capable and incapable of proof. But although, as philosophy, it can prove from a priori grounds, it cannot demonstrate—unless we abandon entirely the meaning of the word, according to which demonstrating (ostendere, exhibere: showing, exhibiting) means presenting one's concept in intuition at the same time, whether in proving or merely in defining. If this is an a priori intuition, it is called constructing the concept; but even if the intuition is empirical, it still remains an exhibiting of the object, through which the concept's objective reality is secured. Thus we say that an anatomist demonstrates the human eye when, by dissecting this organ, he makes intuitive the concept he has previously expounded discursively.

Accordingly, reason's concept of the supersensible substrate of all appearances in general, or of what must underlie our power of choice in relation to moral laws, namely transcendental freedom, is already by its kind an indemonstrable concept and an idea of reason; virtue, however, is so by its degree. For in the former case nothing corresponding to it in quality can in itself be given in experience, whereas in the latter no product in experience of that causality attains the degree prescribed as a rule by the idea of reason.

Just as, in an idea of reason, the imagination with its A 242 intuitions falls short of the given concept, so, in an aesthetic idea, the understanding through its concepts never attains the whole inner intuition of the imagination that it connects with a given representation. Now since bringing a representation of the imagination under concepts means expounding it, an aesthetic idea can be called an inexponible representation of the imagination (in its free play). Later I shall have occasion to develop something further about ideas of this kind; here I note only that both kinds 344 of ideas, ideas of reason as well as aesthetic ideas, must have their principles, and both in reason: the former in the objective, the latter in the subjective principles of its use.

Accordingly, genius can also be explained as the faculty of aesthetic ideas. This also indicates the reason why in products of genius nature (in the subject), rather than a deliberate end of art (the production of the beautiful), gives the rule. For since the beautiful must be judged not by concepts, but by the purposive attunement of imagination to agreement with the faculty of concepts in general, neither rule nor prescription can serve as the subjective standard for that aesthetic yet unconditional purposiveness in beautiful art which is to make a legitimate A 243 claim that it must please everyone. Only what is mere nature in the subject, but cannot be brought under rules or concepts—that is, the supersensible substrate of all its faculties (which no concept of the understanding can reach)—can serve as this standard; consequently, that in relation to which bringing all our cognitive faculties into accord is the ultimate end given through the intelligible element of our nature. Only in this way, too, is it possible for this purposiveness, to which no objective principle can be prescribed, to rest on a subjective and yet universally valid a priori principle.

Remark II.

The following important observation presents itself here: there are three kinds of antinomy of pure reason, but they all agree in forcing reason to abandon the otherwise very natural presupposition that objects of the senses are things in themselves, to regard them instead merely as appearances, and to place beneath them an intelligible substrate (something supersensible, the concept of which is only an idea and admits no cognition proper). Without such an antinomy, reason could never resolve to accept a principle that so greatly narrows the field of its speculation, or to make sacrifices in which so many otherwise glittering hopes must wholly vanish. For even now, when a correspondingly greater use in a practical respect opens up to compensate it for this loss, reason seems 345 unable to part from those hopes and free itself from its old attachment without pain.

That there are three kinds of antinomy is grounded in the existence of three cognitive faculties: understanding, power of judgment, and reason, each of which (as a higher cognitive faculty) must have its a priori principles. Now reason, insofar as it judges these principles themselves and their use, relentlessly demands, with respect to them all, the unconditioned for the given A 244 conditioned. Yet this can never be found if we regard the sensible as belonging to things in themselves, rather than placing beneath it, as mere appearance, something supersensible (the intelligible substrate of nature outside us and within us) as the thing in itself. Thus there are: 1) an antinomy of reason concerning the theoretical use of the understanding, ascending to the unconditioned, for the cognitive faculty; 2) an antinomy of reason concerning the aesthetic use of the power of judgment for the feeling of pleasure and displeasure; 3) an antinomy concerning the practical use of reason, which legislates in itself, for the faculty of desire: insofar as all these faculties have their higher a priori principles and, in accordance with an inescapable demand of reason, must also be able to judge and determine their object unconditionally according to these principles.

Concerning two antinomies of those higher cognitive faculties, that of their theoretical and that of their practical use, we have already shown elsewhere both their inevitability if such judgments do not look back to a supersensible substrate of the given objects as appearances, and their resolvability as soon as they do. As for the antinomy in the use of the power of judgment in accordance with reason's demand, and its resolution given here, there is no other means of avoiding it than either to deny that any a priori principle underlies the aesthetic judgment of taste, so that every claim to the necessity of universal assent is a groundless, empty delusion, and a judgment of taste deserves to be held correct A 245 only because it happens that many agree about it—and even this not properly because we suspect an a priori principle behind their agreement, but because (as in the taste of the palate) the subjects happen by chance to be similarly 346 organized; or we would have to assume that a judgment of taste is really a concealed judgment of reason concerning the perfection discovered in a thing and in the relation of the manifold within it to an end, and is thus called aesthetic only because of the confusion attaching to this reflection of ours, although fundamentally it is teleological. In that case we could declare the resolution of the antinomy through transcendental ideas unnecessary and void, and so reconcile those laws of taste with objects of the senses not merely as appearances, but also as things in themselves. Yet how little either escape achieves has been shown at several points in the exposition of judgments of taste.

But if we concede to our deduction at least that it proceeds along the right path, although it has not yet been made sufficiently clear in every respect, then three ideas emerge: first, of the supersensible in general, without further determination, as the substrate of nature; second, of this same supersensible as the principle of nature's subjective purposiveness for our cognitive faculty; third, of this same supersensible as the principle of the ends of freedom and of their agreement with nature in the moral sphere.

58 A 246 On the Idealism of the Purposiveness of Both Nature and Art, as the Sole Principle of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment.

To begin with, we can place the principle of taste either in its always judging according to empirical determining grounds, and thus grounds given only a posteriori through the senses, or we can concede that it judges from an a priori ground. The former would be the empiricism of the critique of taste, the latter its rationalism. According to the first, the object of our satisfaction would not be distinguished from the agreeable; according to the second, if the judgment rested on determinate concepts, it would not be distinguished from the good. Thus all beauty would be denied out of the world, leaving in its place only a special name, perhaps for a certain mixture of the two kinds of satisfaction just mentioned. But 347 we have shown that there are also a priori grounds of satisfaction, which can therefore coexist with the principle of rationalism, although they cannot be grasped in determinate concepts.

The rationalism of the principle of taste, in turn, is either that of the realism of purposiveness or of its idealism. Now since a judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment, and beauty A 247 is not a property of the object considered in itself, the rationalism of the principle of taste can never consist in thinking the purposiveness in this judgment as objective: that is, in the judgment's referring theoretically, and thus also logically (even if only in a confused judging), to the perfection of the object. It can refer only aesthetically to the agreement, in the subject, of the object's representation in imagination with the essential principles of the power of judgment in general. Consequently, even according to the principle of rationalism, the judgment of taste and the distinction between its realism and idealism can consist only in this: in the first case that subjective purposiveness is assumed as an actual (intentional) end of nature (or of art) to agree with our power of judgment; in the second, it is assumed only as a purposive agreement with the needs of the power of judgment concerning nature and its forms produced according to particular laws, an agreement arising of itself and by chance, without an end.

The A 248 beautiful formations in the realm of organized nature speak strongly in favor of the realism of nature's aesthetic purposiveness: namely, the assumption that the production of the beautiful rests on an idea of it in the producing cause, as an end favoring our imagination. Flowers, blossoms, even the shapes of entire plants; the elegance in the forms of animals of every kind, unnecessary for their own use but seemingly chosen for our taste; above all, the variety and harmonious combination of colors so pleasing and charming to our eyes (in the pheasant, in shellfish, insects, down to the commonest flowers)—these seem entirely directed toward outward contemplation, since they concern merely the surface, and even there not the shape of the creatures, which might still be required for their inner ends. They lend 348 great weight to an explanation that assumes actual ends of nature for our aesthetic power of judgment.

Against this assumption stands not only reason, with its maxims of avoiding everywhere, as far as possible, any unnecessary multiplication of principles; nature itself also shows everywhere, in its free formations, so much of a mechanical tendency to produce forms seemingly made for the aesthetic use of our power of judgment, without offering the slightest ground for supposing that anything beyond its mechanism, merely as nature, is needed. In accordance with this mechanism, they can be purposive for our judging even without any idea underlying them. By a free formation of nature A 249, however, I understand one in which, from a fluid at rest, through the evaporation or separation of a part of it (sometimes merely the matter of heat), the remainder assumes, as it solidifies, a determinate shape or fabric (figure or texture), differing with the specific differences of the materials but precisely the same in the same material. This presupposes what is always understood by a true fluid: that the matter in it is completely dissolved, that is, is not to be regarded as a mere mixture of solid parts merely suspended within it.

The formation then takes place through setting, that is, through a sudden solidification, not a gradual transition from the fluid to the solid state, but, as it were, a leap—a transition also called crystallization. The commonest example of this kind of formation is freezing water, in which straight rays of ice first develop and join at angles of 60 degrees, while others similarly attach themselves at every point, until everything has become ice. During this time the water between the rays of ice does not gradually grow more viscous, but is as completely fluid as it would be at a much greater warmth, and yet has the full coldness of ice. The separating matter, which suddenly escapes at the moment A 250 of solidification, is a considerable quantity of caloric; since it was required only for fluidity, its departure leaves this newly formed ice not the least colder than the water that was fluid within it just before.

Many salts, as well as stones with a crystalline figure, are similarly produced from an earthy substance dissolved in water by who knows what agency 349. Likewise, the clustered configurations of many minerals, of cubic galena, ruby silver ore, and the like, are in all probability also formed in water and through the setting of their parts, when some cause forces them to leave this vehicle and unite with one another in determinate outward shapes.

But even internally, all materials made fluid merely by heat and solidified by cooling reveal a determinate texture when fractured. From this we may judge that, had their own weight or contact with air not prevented it, they would also have displayed outwardly the shape peculiar to their kind. Something like this has been observed in certain metals that had hardened outwardly after melting but remained fluid within: the inner, still fluid part was drained off, and what remained inside was then allowed to set undisturbed. Many of those mineral A 251 crystallizations, such as clusters of spar, kidney ore, and iron flowers, often yield forms as exceedingly beautiful as art could ever devise; and the splendor in the cave of Antiparos is merely the product of water seeping through beds of gypsum.

To all appearances, the fluid is generally older than the solid, and both plants and animal bodies are formed from fluid nutritive matter as it takes shape at rest. In this nutritive matter, admittedly, the formation proceeds first according to a certain original predisposition directed toward ends (which, as will be shown in the second part, must be judged not aesthetically but teleologically, according to the principle of realism); yet perhaps it also happens incidentally through setting and free formation according to the universal law of the affinity of materials. Now just as aqueous fluids dissolved in an atmosphere that is a mixture of different kinds of air produce snow figures when, through the loss of heat, these fluids separate from the atmosphere—figures often seemingly very artful and exceedingly beautiful, according to the differences in the current mixture of air—so we can well conceive, without detracting at all from the teleological principle for judging organization, that the beauty of flowers, birds' feathers, and shells, in both shape and color, can A 252 be ascribed to nature and its capacity, in its freedom and without particular ends directed toward this, to form itself in an aesthetically purposive way as well, according to chemical laws, through the deposition of the matter required for 350 organization.

But what directly proves the principle of the ideality of purposiveness in natural beauty—as the principle we always lay at the basis of aesthetic judgment itself, and which permits us to use no realism of an end of nature for our faculty of representation as a ground of explanation—is this: in judging beauty in general, we seek its standard a priori within ourselves, and the aesthetic power of judgment itself legislates in judging whether something is beautiful or not. This cannot take place if we assume the realism of nature's purposiveness, since then we would have to learn from nature what we should find beautiful, and the judgment of taste would be subject to empirical principles. For in such judging, what matters is not what nature is, or even what it is for us as an end, but how we receive it. If nature had fashioned its forms for our satisfaction, this would always be an objective purposiveness of nature, not a subjective purposiveness resting on the play of imagination in its freedom A 253, where it is with favor that we receive nature, not favor that nature shows us. Nature's property of affording us an opportunity, in judging certain of its products, to perceive the inner purposiveness in the relation of our mental powers—and indeed a purposiveness that is to be declared necessary and universally valid from a supersensible ground—cannot be an end of nature, or rather cannot be judged by us as such. Otherwise the judgment determined by it would be heteronomous, and not, as befits a judgment of taste, free and grounded in autonomy.

In beautiful art the principle of the idealism of purposiveness can be recognized still more clearly. For that we cannot here assume an aesthetic realism of purposiveness through sensations (in which case it would be merely agreeable rather than beautiful art) is something it shares with beautiful nature. But that satisfaction through aesthetic ideas must not depend on the attainment of determinate ends (as mechanically intentional art), and consequently that even the rationalism of the principle rests on the ideality of ends, not their reality, is already evident from this: beautiful art as such must be regarded not as a 351 product of understanding and science, but of genius, and thus receives its rule through aesthetic ideas, which differ essentially from ideas of reason concerning determinate ends. A 254

Just as the ideality of objects of the senses as appearances is the only way to explain the possibility of determining their forms a priori, so too the idealism of purposiveness in judging the beauty of nature and art is the sole presupposition under which the critique can explain the possibility of a judgment of taste that demands a priori validity for everyone (without, however, grounding the purposiveness represented in the object on concepts).

59 On Beauty as the Symbol of Morality.

To establish the reality of our concepts, intuitions are always required. If the concepts are empirical, the intuitions are called examples. If they are pure concepts of the understanding, the intuitions are called schemata. If one goes so far as to demand that the objective reality of concepts of reason, that is, of ideas, be established for the sake of theoretical cognition of them, one asks the impossible, since absolutely no adequate intuition can be given for them.

All hypotyposis (presentation, subiectio sub adspectum, placing before the eyes), as a rendering sensible A 255, is twofold: either schematic, where the intuition corresponding to a concept grasped by the understanding is given a priori; or symbolic, where a concept that only reason can think, and for which no sensible intuition can be adequate, is supplied with an intuition such that the procedure of the power of judgment with it is merely analogous to the procedure it follows in schematizing. That is, the two agree merely in the rule of this procedure, not in the intuition itself, and thus merely in the form of reflection, not in its content.

It is an incorrect use of the word symbolic, though accepted by modern logicians, and one that distorts its meaning, to oppose it to the intuitive manner of representation; for the symbolic is only a kind of the intuitive. The latter (the intuitive) can, namely, be divided into the schematic and the symbolic manner of representation. 352 Both are hypotyposes, that is, presentations (exhibitiones), not mere characterizations: designations of concepts through accompanying sensible signs that contain nothing belonging to the intuition of the object, but serve only as a means of reproducing those concepts according to the imagination's law of association, and thus for a subjective purpose. Such signs are either words or visible signs (algebraic, A 256 even mimetic), as mere expressions for concepts²³.

All intuitions supplied to a priori concepts are thus either schemata or symbols, the former containing direct, the latter indirect presentations of the concept. The former do this demonstratively, the latter by means of an analogy (for which empirical intuitions are also used), in which the power of judgment performs a double task: first applying the concept to the object of a sensible intuition, and then applying the mere rule of reflection on that intuition to an entirely different object, of which the first is only the symbol. Thus a monarchical state is represented by an animate body if it is governed according to the people's internal laws, but by a mere machine (a hand mill, for example) if it is governed by a single absolute will; in both cases, however, it is represented only symbolically. For although there is no resemblance between a despotic state and a hand mill, there is one between the rules for reflecting on the two and on their causality. This activity has so far been little analyzed, much as A 257 it deserves deeper investigation; but this is not the place to dwell on it. Our language is full of such indirect presentations by analogy, in which the expression contains not the proper schema for the concept but merely a symbol for reflection. Thus the words ground (support, base), depend (be held from above), flow from (instead of follow), substance (as Locke puts it: the bearer of accidents), and countless others are not schematic but symbolic hypotyposes, and expressions for concepts not by means of a direct intuition but only by analogy with it: that is, by transferring reflection on 353 an object of intuition to an entirely different concept, to which perhaps no intuition can ever directly correspond. If we may call a mere manner of representation cognition at all (which is permissible if it is a principle not for theoretically determining the object as it is in itself, but for practically determining what the idea of it is to become for us and for its purposive use), then all our cognition of God is merely symbolic. Whoever takes it as schematic, with the properties of understanding, will, and so on, which prove their objective reality only in beings within the world, falls into anthropomorphism; just as, if he leaves out everything intuitive, he falls into A 258 deism, through which nothing whatever is cognized, not even in a practical respect.

Now I say: the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good; and only in this respect (a relation natural to everyone, and which everyone also requires of others as a duty) does it please with a claim to everyone else's assent. In this the mind is at the same time conscious of a certain ennoblement and elevation above mere receptivity to pleasure through impressions of sense, and estimates the worth of others according to a similar maxim of their power of judgment. This is the intelligible toward which, as the preceding section indicated, taste looks: that with which even our higher cognitive faculties agree, and without which nothing but contradictions would arise between their nature and the claims taste makes. In this faculty the power of judgment does not, as it otherwise does in empirical judging, see itself subjected to a heteronomy of laws of experience. With regard to the objects of so pure a satisfaction, it gives itself the law, just as reason does with regard to the faculty of desire; and both because of this inner possibility in the subject and because of the outward possibility of a nature agreeing with it, it sees itself referred to something within the subject itself and outside it A 259 that is neither nature nor freedom, yet is linked with the ground of the latter, namely the supersensible, in which the theoretical faculty is joined in unity with the practical in a shared and unknown way. We shall mention some points of this analogy, while also noting their differences.

1) The beautiful pleases immediately (but only in reflective 354 intuition, not, like morality, in a concept). 2) It pleases without any interest (the morally good is necessarily connected with an interest, but not one that precedes the judgment of satisfaction; rather, one first produced by it). 3) The freedom of imagination (and thus of the sensibility of our faculty) is represented, in judging the beautiful, as agreeing with the lawfulness of the understanding (in moral judgment the freedom of the will is thought as the will's agreement with itself according to universal laws of reason). 4) The subjective principle for judging the beautiful is represented as universal, that is, valid for everyone, yet not recognizable through any universal concept (the objective principle of morality is likewise declared universal, that is, valid for all subjects and also for all actions of the same subject, while recognizable through a universal concept). Hence A 260 moral judgment is not merely capable of determinate constitutive principles, but is possible only through grounding maxims on these principles and their universality.

Attention to this analogy is also customary for common understanding; and we often give beautiful objects of nature or art names that seem to rest on moral judging. We call buildings or trees majestic and magnificent, or fields smiling and cheerful; even colors are called innocent, modest, tender, because they arouse sensations containing something analogous to consciousness of a state of mind brought about by moral judgments. Taste makes possible, as it were, the transition from sensory charm to habitual moral interest without too violent a leap, by representing imagination even in its freedom as determinable purposively for the understanding, and by teaching us to find a free satisfaction even in objects of the senses without sensory charm.

60 A 261 Appendix. On the Doctrine of Method for Taste.

The division of a critique into a doctrine of elements and a doctrine of method, preceding the science, cannot be applied to the critique of taste 355, because there is and can be no science of the beautiful, and the judgment of taste cannot be determined by principles. For the scientific element in every art, which concerns truth in the presentation of its object, is indeed the indispensable condition (conditio sine qua non) of beautiful art, but not beautiful art itself. Thus for beautiful art there is only a manner (modus), not a method of instruction (methodus). The master must demonstrate what the pupil is to accomplish and how; and the general rules under which he ultimately brings his procedure can serve rather to recall its chief features on occasion than to prescribe them to him. Yet attention must be paid here to a certain ideal that art must keep before its eyes, though it never fully attains it in practice. Only by awakening the pupil's imagination to adequacy to a given concept, by pointing out the inadequacy of A 262 expression to the idea that the concept itself does not reach because it is aesthetic, and by exacting criticism, can we prevent him from immediately taking the examples set before him as archetypes and models for imitation, subject perhaps to no still higher norm or judgment of his own. Otherwise genius would be stifled, and with it the freedom of imagination itself in its lawfulness, without which no beautiful art is possible, nor even a correct taste of one's own for judging it.

The preparatory training for all beautiful art, insofar as its highest degree of perfection is intended, seems to lie not in precepts but in the cultivation of the mental powers through the preliminary studies called the humanities. This is presumably because humanity means, on the one hand, the universal feeling of sympathy, and on the other, the capacity to communicate intimately and universally. Together these qualities constitute the sociability appropriate to humanity, by which it differs from animal limitation. In ages and among peoples where the lively drive toward law-governed sociability, through which a people forms a lasting commonwealth, struggled with the great difficulties surrounding the hard task of uniting freedom (and thus equality) with A 263 constraint (more of respect and submission from duty than of fear), such an age and such a people had 356 first to discover the art of reciprocal communication of ideas between the most cultivated part and the less refined; of attuning the breadth and refinement of the former to the natural simplicity and originality of the latter; and in this way of finding the mean between higher culture and self-sufficient nature that also constitutes the correct standard for taste as a universal human sense—a standard that cannot be stated through general rules.

A later age will scarcely make those models dispensable, since it will stand ever farther from nature and may ultimately, without enduring examples of it, hardly be able to form a concept of the happy union, in one and the same people, of the lawful constraint of the highest culture with the strength and soundness of free nature conscious of its own worth.

But since taste is fundamentally a faculty for judging the rendering of moral ideas in sensible form (through a certain analogy of reflection on the two), and since from this, and from the greater receptivity to the feeling arising from those ideas (called moral feeling) that is to be grounded on it, there also derives the pleasure that taste declares valid for humanity in general, not merely for each person's private feeling A 264, it is evident that the true preparatory training for establishing taste is the development of moral ideas and the cultivation of moral feeling. For only when sensibility is brought into agreement with this feeling can genuine taste assume a determinate, unchanging form.

Of the A 265 357 Critique of the Power of Judgment

22 Any judgment that announces itself as universal can be called a reasoning judgment (iudicium ratiocinans), for to that extent it can serve as the major premise in an inference of reason. A judgment of reason (iudicium ratiocinatum), on the other hand, can only be one that is thought as the conclusion of an inference of reason, and hence as grounded a priori.

23 The intuitive in cognition must be opposed to the discursive (not to the symbolic). The former is either schematic through demonstration, or symbolic as representation according to a mere analogy.

Second Section. Dialectic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment.

55 For a power of judgment to be dialectical, it must first make claims through reasoning. That is, its judgments must claim universality, and must do so a priori²², since dialectic consists in the opposition of such judgments. So the incompatibility of aesthetic judgments of sense, about what is agreeable or disagreeable, is not dialectical. Nor does conflict between judgments of taste constitute a dialectic of taste when each person appeals only to his own taste, because A 232 no one intends to make his judgment a universal rule. The only remaining concept of a dialectic that could concern taste is therefore a dialectic of the critique of taste, not of taste itself, concerning its principles. This arises when conflicting concepts about the basis for the possibility of judgments of taste in general emerge naturally and unavoidably. A transcendental critique of taste will therefore contain a part that can be called a dialectic of the aesthetic power of judgment only if there is an antinomy in this faculty's principles that makes its conformity to law, and thus its inner possibility, doubtful.

56 338 Presentation of the Antinomy of Taste.

The first commonplace of taste is contained in the saying with which every tasteless person thinks he can protect himself against criticism: everyone has his own taste. This means that the determining ground of this judgment is merely subjective—enjoyment or pain—and that the judgment has no right to demand the necessary agreement of others.

Its second commonplace, used even by those who grant a judgment of taste the right to pronounce something valid for everyone, A 233 is this: there can be no conclusive dispute about taste. This means that the determining ground of a judgment of taste may indeed also be objective, but it cannot be put into definite concepts. So nothing about the judgment itself can be decided by proofs, although it is quite possible and legitimate to argue about it. Arguing and disputing conclusively are alike in seeking agreement through opposing judgments. They differ in that the latter hopes to achieve this through definite concepts as grounds of proof, and thus assumes objective concepts as grounds of judgment. Where this is considered impossible, conclusive disputation is likewise judged impossible.

We can easily see that a proposition is missing between these two commonplaces. It is not current as a proverb, but it is present in everyone's mind: we can argue about taste, though we cannot settle it by conclusive dispute. But this proposition contains the opposite of the first one. Wherever argument is to be allowed, there must be hope of reaching agreement. So we must be able to count on grounds of judgment that have more than private validity and are therefore not merely subjective. Yet the principle that everyone has his own taste directly opposes this.

The principle of taste therefore shows the following A 234 antinomy:

1) Thesis. A judgment of taste is not based on concepts, since otherwise it could be settled by conclusive dispute, that is, decided by proofs.

2) Antithesis. A judgment of taste is based on concepts, since otherwise, despite differences in such judgments, we could not 339 even argue about it, that is, claim that others must agree with this judgment.

57 Resolution of the Antinomy of Taste.

There is only one way to remove the conflict between the principles underlying every judgment of taste. These principles are simply the two distinctive features of judgments of taste presented above in the Analytic. We must show that the concept to which the object is referred in this kind of judgment is not taken in the same sense in the two maxims of the aesthetic power of judgment. This double meaning, or twofold standpoint for judging, is necessary for our transcendental power of judgment. But the deceptive appearance arising from mixing the two is also unavoidable as a natural illusion.

A judgment of taste must refer to some concept, since otherwise it could not possibly claim necessary validity for A 235 everyone. But it must not be provable from a concept. A concept can either be determinable or be both undetermined in itself and indeterminable. A concept of the understanding is of the first kind: it can be determined through predicates of the sensory intuition that can correspond to it. The second kind is the transcendental concept of reason concerning the supersensible that underlies all such intuition. It therefore cannot be determined further theoretically.

Now a judgment of taste concerns objects of the senses, but not in order to determine a concept of them for the understanding, since it is not a cognitive judgment. As an individual intuitive representation referred to the feeling of pleasure, it is therefore only a private judgment. To that extent, its validity would be limited to the judging individual alone: the object is an object of satisfaction for me; for others it may be different—everyone has his own taste.

Yet a judgment of taste undoubtedly contains a wider reference of the representation of the object, and also of the subject. On this we base a necessary extension of this kind of judgment to everyone. Some concept must therefore underlie it, 340 but a concept that cannot be determined by intuition, A 236 through which nothing can be cognized, and which therefore cannot supply any proof for the judgment of taste. Such a concept is the mere pure concept of reason concerning the supersensible that underlies the object, and also the judging subject, as an object of sense and thus as an appearance. Without assuming such a reference, we could not defend the judgment of taste's claim to universal validity. If the concept on which it rests were merely a confused concept of the understanding—for example, of perfection—to which the sensory intuition of beauty could be supplied as a counterpart, it would at least be possible in itself to base the judgment of taste on proofs. This contradicts the thesis.

But all contradiction disappears if I say this: a judgment of taste rests on a concept of a ground in general for nature's subjective purposiveness for the power of judgment. From this concept, however, nothing about the object can be cognized or proved, since it is indeterminable in itself and unsuitable for cognition. Yet through this very concept the judgment also gains validity for everyone, though for each person it remains an individual judgment immediately accompanying intuition. Its determining ground may lie in the concept of what can be regarded as humanity's supersensible substrate. A 237

To resolve an antinomy, all that matters is the possibility that two apparently conflicting propositions do not actually contradict each other but can stand together, even if explaining how their concept is possible exceeds our cognitive faculty. This can also make understandable why the appearance is natural and unavoidable for human reason, and why it remains so, although after the apparent contradiction is resolved it no longer deceives us.

In both conflicting judgments we take in the same sense the concept on which a judgment's universal validity must rest, yet assert two opposite predicates of it. The thesis should therefore say: a judgment of taste is not based on determinate concepts. The antithesis should say: a judgment of taste is nevertheless based on a concept, though an indeterminate 341 one, namely the concept of the supersensible substrate of appearances. Then there would be no conflict between them.

We can do no more than remove this conflict in taste's claims and counterclaims. It is absolutely impossible to give a definite objective principle of taste by which its judgments could be guided, A 238 tested, and proved. They would then no longer be judgments of taste. The subjective principle—the indeterminate idea of the supersensible in us—can only be identified as the sole key to solving the riddle of this faculty, whose sources remain hidden even from us. Nothing further can make it understandable.

The antinomy presented and reconciled here rests on the correct concept of taste: a merely reflective aesthetic power of judgment. The two apparently conflicting principles were brought together by showing that both can be true, which is enough. Suppose instead that, as some do, we took agreeableness as the determining ground of taste because of the individual character of the representation underlying its judgment. Or suppose, as others want, we took the principle of perfection, because of the judgment's universal validity, and defined taste accordingly. An antinomy would then arise that could be reconciled only by showing that both opposing propositions are false, though their opposition is not merely contradictory. This would prove that the concept underlying each contradicts itself. So we see that A 239 removing the antinomy of the aesthetic power of judgment follows a path similar to the one the Critique followed in resolving the antinomies of pure theoretical reason. Here too, as in the Critique of Practical Reason, the antinomies force us against our will to look beyond the sensible and seek in the supersensible the point where all our a priori faculties unite. No other way remains to make reason agree with itself.

Remark I.

In transcendental philosophy we so often have occasion to distinguish ideas from concepts of the understanding that it may be 342 useful to introduce technical terms suited to their difference. I believe there will be no objection if I suggest a few.—Ideas, in the most general sense, are representations referred to an object according to a certain subjective or objective principle, insofar as they can nevertheless never become cognition of that object. They are either referred to an intuition according to a merely subjective principle of agreement between the cognitive faculties, imagination and understanding, and are then called aesthetic; or they are referred to a concept according to an objective principle, yet can never yield cognition of the object, and are called ideas of reason. In the latter case the concept is transcendent. It differs from a concept of the understanding, for which an A 240 adequately corresponding experience can always be supplied and which is therefore called immanent.

An aesthetic idea cannot become cognition because it is an intuition of the imagination for which no adequate concept can ever be found. An idea of reason can never become cognition because it contains a concept of the supersensible for which no adequate intuition can ever be given.

I think we can therefore call an aesthetic idea an inexponible representation of the imagination—one that cannot be fully set out in concepts—and an idea of reason an indemonstrable concept of reason—one that cannot be exhibited in intuition. Both are assumed not to be groundless. Rather, according to the explanation of an idea in general given above, they are produced in keeping with certain principles of the cognitive faculties to which they belong: the former with subjective principles, the latter with objective ones.

Concepts of the understanding, as such, must always be demonstrable, if by demonstrating we mean merely presenting, as in anatomy. That is, their corresponding object must always be capable of being given in intuition, whether pure or empirical, since only in this way can they become cognitions. The concept of magnitude can be given a priori in the intuition of space, for example in a straight line, and so on; the concept of cause in impenetrability, the impact of bodies, and so on. Thus both can be supported by an empirical intuition: the thought of them can be shown, demonstrated, or exhibited in an example. This must be 343 possible; otherwise we cannot be sure that the thought is not empty, that is, without any object at all.

In logic, the terms demonstrable and A 241 indemonstrable are generally used only of propositions. The former would be better called propositions certain only indirectly, and the latter immediately certain propositions. Pure philosophy also has propositions of both kinds, if we mean true propositions that can and cannot be proved. But as philosophy it can prove from a priori grounds without being able to demonstrate. This holds unless we abandon entirely the meaning of the word: to demonstrate (ostendere, exhibere) means to present one's concept in intuition at the same time, whether in proving it or merely defining it. When the intuition is a priori, this is called constructing the concept. Even when the intuition is empirical, it remains an exhibition of the object that secures the concept's objective reality. Thus we say that an anatomist demonstrates the human eye when, by dissecting that organ, he makes intuitively visible the concept he previously presented in words.

Accordingly, reason's concept of the supersensible substrate of all appearances in general, or of what must underlie our power of choice in relation to moral laws—namely transcendental freedom—is an indemonstrable concept and an idea of reason by its very kind. Virtue is so by degree. For the former can in itself have nothing corresponding to its quality given in experience. In the latter case, however, no product in experience of that causality reaches the degree prescribed as a rule by the idea of reason.

Just as, with an idea of reason, the imagination and its A 242 intuitions fall short of the given concept, so, with an aesthetic idea, the understanding and its concepts never reach the whole inner intuition that the imagination connects with a given representation. Now to put a representation of the imagination into concepts means to expound it. So an aesthetic idea can be called an inexponible representation of the imagination in its free play. I will have an opportunity later to say more about ideas of this kind. For now I note only that both kinds 344 of ideas, ideas of reason and aesthetic ideas, must have their principles, and both must have them in reason: the former in the objective principles of its use, the latter in the subjective ones.

Accordingly, genius can also be defined as the faculty of aesthetic ideas. This also indicates why in products of genius it is the subject's nature, not a deliberate artistic end of producing beauty, that gives the rule. Beauty must be judged not by concepts but by the purposive attunement of the imagination to agreement with the faculty of concepts in general. So neither rule nor instruction can serve as the subjective standard for that aesthetic yet unconditional purposiveness in beautiful art which is to make a rightful A 243 claim that it must please everyone. Only what is mere nature in the subject, yet cannot be brought under rules or concepts, can do this: the supersensible substrate of all the subject's faculties, which no concept of the understanding reaches. The ultimate end given by the intelligible element of our nature is to bring all our cognitive faculties into harmony in relation to this substrate. Only in this way can that purposiveness, for which no objective principle can be prescribed, rest on a subjective yet universally valid a priori principle.

Remark II.

The following important observation naturally arises here: there are three kinds of antinomy of pure reason. They all agree in forcing reason to abandon the otherwise very natural assumption that objects of the senses are things in themselves. Instead, reason must regard them merely as appearances and place an intelligible substrate beneath them: something supersensible whose concept is only an idea and permits no actual cognition. Without such an antinomy, reason could never decide to accept a principle that so greatly narrows the field of its speculation, or to make sacrifices that require so many otherwise dazzling hopes to disappear entirely. Even now, when a correspondingly greater use in practical matters opens up to compensate for this loss, reason seems 345 unable to part with those hopes and free itself from its old attachment without pain.

There are three kinds of antinomy because there are three cognitive faculties: understanding, judgment, and reason. Each, as a higher cognitive faculty, must have its a priori principles. When reason judges these principles themselves and their use, it insistently demands the unconditioned for the given A 244 conditioned in all three. Yet this can never be found if we regard the sensible as belonging to things in themselves, instead of treating it as mere appearance and placing something supersensible beneath it as the thing in itself: the intelligible substrate of nature outside and within us. Thus there is 1) an antinomy of reason concerning the theoretical use of the understanding up to the unconditioned, for the cognitive faculty; 2) an antinomy of reason concerning the aesthetic use of judgment, for the feeling of pleasure and displeasure; 3) an antinomy concerning the practical use of reason, which gives itself its own law, for the faculty of desire. All these faculties have their higher a priori principles. According to reason's unavoidable demand, they must also be able to judge and determine their object unconditionally by these principles.

Elsewhere we have already shown two things about two of these antinomies, those concerning the theoretical and practical use of the higher cognitive faculties: their inevitability when such judgments do not refer back to a supersensible substrate of the given objects as appearances, and their resolvability as soon as they do. As for the antinomy in the use of judgment according to reason's demand, and its resolution given here, there are only two ways of avoiding it. Either we deny that an aesthetic judgment of taste rests on any a priori principle. Then every claim that universal agreement is necessary is groundless, empty delusion. A judgment of taste would deserve to be held correct A 245 only because many people happen to agree about it. Nor would this be because we suspect an a priori principle behind their agreement, but because, as with taste on the tongue, the subjects happen to be similarly 346 organized. Or we must assume that a judgment of taste is really a concealed judgment of reason about perfection discovered in a thing and in the relation of its manifold features to an end. It would be called aesthetic only because our reflection is confused, although fundamentally it is teleological. In that case we could declare the resolution of the antinomy through transcendental ideas unnecessary and invalid, and reconcile those laws of taste with objects of sense regarded not merely as appearances but also as things in themselves. But we have shown at several points in the exposition of judgments of taste how little either escape route accomplishes.

If we grant our deduction at least this much—that it proceeds along the right path, even if not yet made clear enough in every detail—three ideas emerge. First, the idea of the supersensible in general, without further determination, as nature's substrate. Second, the idea of that same supersensible as the principle of nature's subjective purposiveness for our cognitive faculty. Third, the idea of it as the principle of the ends of freedom and of their agreement with nature in morality.

58 A 246 On the Idealism of the Purposiveness of Both Nature and Art as the Sole Principle of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment.

To begin with, we can locate the principle of taste either in its always judging by empirical determining grounds, given by the senses only a posteriori, or admit that it judges from an a priori ground. The first would be the empiricism of the critique of taste; the second its rationalism. On the first account, the object of our liking would not differ from the agreeable. On the second, if the judgment rested on definite concepts, it would not differ from the good. All beauty would thus be denied any place in the world. Only a special name would remain in its place, perhaps for a certain mixture of those two kinds of liking. But 347 we have shown that there are also a priori grounds of liking which can coexist with the principle of rationalism, although they cannot be put into definite concepts.

Rationalism concerning the principle of taste is, in turn, either realism or idealism concerning purposiveness. Now a judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment, and beauty A 247 is not a property of the object considered on its own. So rationalism concerning taste's principle can never consist in thinking the purposiveness in this judgment as objective. The judgment cannot concern the object's perfection theoretically and thus logically, even if only through confused judging. It can concern only aesthetically the agreement, within the subject, of the object's representation in the imagination with the essential principles of judgment in general. Thus, even on the principle of rationalism, a judgment of taste, and the distinction between realism and idealism about it, can lie only in this: in the first case that subjective purposiveness is assumed to be an actual, intentional end of nature or art, aimed at agreeing with our power of judgment. In the second, it is assumed to be only a purposive agreement that appears on its own and by chance, without an end, with judgment's need regarding nature and the forms it produces under particular laws.

The beautiful formations in the realm of organized nature strongly support realism about nature's aesthetic purposiveness. This is the view that the production of beauty rested on an idea of beauty in the producing cause, namely an end favoring our imagination. A 248 Flowers, blossoms, even the shapes of whole plants; the elegance of animal forms of every kind, unnecessary for their own use but seemingly selected for our taste; above all, the variety and harmonious combination of colors so pleasing and attractive to our eyes—in pheasants, shellfish, insects, down to the commonest flowers—all seem aimed entirely at outward contemplation. For they concern only the creatures' surfaces, and not even the shape of those surfaces, which might still be required for their internal ends. These things give 348 great weight to an explanation that assumes actual ends of nature for our aesthetic power of judgment.

But reason opposes this assumption through its maxim of preventing unnecessary multiplication of principles wherever possible. Nature itself also shows everywhere, in its free formations, such a strong mechanical tendency to produce forms seemingly made for the aesthetic use of our judgment that it gives us not the slightest reason to suspect that anything beyond its mechanism as mere nature is needed. Under that mechanism, forms can be purposive for our judging without any idea underlying them. By a free formation A 249 of nature I mean one in which, from a fluid at rest, part evaporates or separates out—sometimes only the matter of heat—and the rest, as it solidifies, assumes a definite shape or structure, a figure or texture. This differs with the specific kind of matter but is exactly the same within a given kind. This presupposes what is always meant by a true fluid: its matter is completely dissolved, not a mere mixture of solid parts suspended in it.

Formation then occurs through crystallization: sudden solidification, not a gradual transition from the fluid to the solid state but, so to speak, a leap. This transition is also called crystallizing. The commonest example is freezing water. At first, straight little rays of ice form and join at angles of 60 degrees. Others attach in the same way at every point along them until everything has become ice. During this time the water between the rays of ice does not gradually become thicker. It remains as perfectly fluid as it would be at a much higher temperature, yet has the full coldness of ice. The matter that separates out and suddenly escapes at the moment A 250 of solidification is a considerable quantity of heat matter. Since it was required only for fluidity, its departure leaves the resulting ice not the least colder than the water that was fluid in it a moment before.

Many salts, and also stones with a crystalline shape, are similarly produced from an earthy material dissolved in water by who knows what means. 349 The clustered configurations of many minerals, cubic galena, ruby silver ore, and the like also presumably form in water through the crystallization of their parts. Some cause forces them to leave this vehicle and join one another in definite external shapes.

But even internally, all materials that were made fluid merely by heat and became solid through cooling show a definite texture when broken. This suggests that, had their own weight or contact with air not prevented it, they would also have displayed their specific characteristic shape externally. This has been observed in some metals that had hardened on the outside after melting but were still fluid within. The still-fluid inner part was drained away, and the remainder left inside was allowed to crystallize undisturbed. Many of these mineral A 251 crystallizations, such as clusters of spar, botryoidal hematite, and iron flower, often produce forms as beautiful as art could possibly imagine. The splendor in the cave of Antiparos is merely the product of water seeping through beds of gypsum.

Fluid matter appears in general to be older than solid matter. Both plants and animal bodies are formed from fluid nutritional matter as it takes shape at rest. Admittedly, formation in this matter occurs first according to a certain original predisposition directed toward ends. As the second part will show, this must be judged not aesthetically but teleologically, according to the principle of realism. But alongside this, the matter may perhaps also crystallize and form freely according to the universal law of the affinity of materials. Consider how watery fluids dissolved in an atmosphere, which is a mixture of different kinds of air, produce snow figures when loss of heat separates them from it. Depending on the mixture of air at the time, these figures often have shapes that look highly artistic and are extremely beautiful. Similarly, without taking anything away from the teleological principle for judging organization, we can well think that the beauty of flowers, birds' feathers, and shells, in both shape and color, A 252 can be attributed to nature and its capacity to form itself freely according to chemical laws, without particular ends directed toward this. By depositing the matter required for 350 organization, it can also form itself in an aesthetically purposive way.

But there is a direct proof of the principle of the ideality of purposiveness in natural beauty. This is the principle we always assume in aesthetic judgment itself, and it forbids us to explain nature by a realism of an end aimed at our power of representation. The proof is that, in judging beauty in general, we seek its standard a priori in ourselves, and the aesthetic power of judgment gives itself its own law in deciding whether something is beautiful. This could not happen if we assumed realism about nature's purposiveness. We would then have to learn from nature what we should find beautiful, and the judgment of taste would be subject to empirical principles. For such judging concerns not what nature is, or even what it is for us as an end, but how we receive it. If nature had formed its shapes for our satisfaction, this would always be an objective purposiveness of nature, not a subjective purposiveness resting on the play of the imagination in its freedom. A 253 In the latter case we receive nature with favor; nature is not showing favor to us. Nature gives us occasion, in judging certain of its products, to perceive the inner purposiveness in the relation of our mental powers. Moreover, this purposiveness is to be declared necessary and universally valid on a supersensible ground. This feature of nature cannot be an end of nature—or rather, we cannot judge it as such. Otherwise the judgment it determined would rest on heteronomy, rather than being free and based on autonomy as a judgment of taste should be.

The principle of the idealism of purposiveness is still clearer in beautiful art. Like beautiful nature, it cannot involve aesthetic realism of purposiveness through sensations; otherwise it would be merely agreeable art, not beautiful art. But satisfaction through aesthetic ideas must not depend on achieving definite ends, as mechanically intentional art does. So even within rationalism about the principle, the ideality of ends, not their reality, must be the basis. This is already clear because beautiful art as such must be regarded not as a 351 product of understanding and science but of genius. It therefore receives its rule through aesthetic ideas, which differ essentially from ideas of reason concerning definite ends. A 254

The ideality of objects of sense as appearances is the only way to explain how their forms can be determined a priori. In the same way, the idealism of purposiveness in judging the beauty of nature and art is the only assumption under which the critique can explain the possibility of a judgment of taste that demands a priori validity for everyone, without grounding the purposiveness represented in the object on concepts.

59 On Beauty as a Symbol of Morality.

Intuitions are always required to establish the reality of our concepts. If the concepts are empirical, the intuitions are called examples. If they are pure concepts of the understanding, the intuitions are called schemata. But to demand that the objective reality of concepts of reason, or ideas, be established for the purpose of theoretical cognition of them is to demand something impossible. No adequate intuition can ever be given for them.

All hypotyposis—presentation, subiectio sub adspectum—as a making sensible A 255 is of two kinds. It is either schematic, when the intuition corresponding to a concept grasped by the understanding is given a priori; or symbolic, when an intuition is supplied for a concept that only reason can think and to which no sensory intuition can be adequate. In the latter case the power of judgment's procedure is merely analogous to its procedure in schematizing. It agrees only in the rule of the procedure, not in the intuition itself, and thus only in the form of reflection, not its content.

Modern logicians have adopted a mistaken usage that distorts the meaning of symbolic: they oppose it to the intuitive way of representing. But symbolic representation is only one kind of intuitive representation. The intuitive can be divided into schematic and symbolic representation. 352 Both are hypotyposes, that is, presentations (exhibitiones), not mere characterizations. The latter designate concepts through accompanying sensory signs that contain nothing belonging to the intuition of the object. Under the imagination's law of association, these signs serve only as means of reproducing the concepts, and thus serve a subjective purpose. They are either words or visible signs—algebraic, A 256 or even gestural—as mere expressions for concepts²³.

All intuitions supplied for a priori concepts are therefore either schemata or symbols. The former contain direct presentations of the concept, the latter indirect ones. The former do this by demonstration, the latter through analogy, which can also use empirical intuitions. In analogy, the power of judgment performs a double task. First it applies the concept to the object of a sensory intuition. Then it applies the mere rule for reflecting on that intuition to an entirely different object, of which the first is only the symbol. Thus a monarchical state is represented by a living body if it is governed by internal laws of the people, but by a mere machine, such as a hand mill, if governed by a single absolute will. In both cases it is represented only symbolically. There is no resemblance between a despotic state and a hand mill, but there is one between the rules for reflecting on the two and their causality. This procedure has so far been little analyzed, although A 257 it deserves deeper investigation. This is not the place to pursue it. Our language is full of such indirect presentations through analogy. In them the expression contains not the actual schema for the concept, but only a symbol for reflection. Thus the words ground—support or base—depend—be held from above—flow from, instead of follow from, substance, which Locke calls the bearer of accidents, and countless others are not schematic but symbolic hypotyposes. They express concepts not through direct intuition, but only by analogy with it: by transferring reflection on 353 an object of intuition to an entirely different concept, to which perhaps no intuition can ever directly correspond. We may call a mere way of representing cognition if it is a principle not for theoretically determining what the object is in itself, but for practically determining what the idea of it should become for us and for its purposive use. If we do so, all our cognition of God is merely symbolic. Whoever takes it as schematic, with properties such as understanding and will that prove their objective reality only in beings within the world, falls into anthropomorphism. If he leaves out everything intuitive, he falls into A 258 deism, through which nothing at all is cognized, even for practical purposes.

Now I say that beauty is the symbol of moral goodness. Only in this respect does it please us with a claim to everyone else's agreement—a relation natural to everyone, which everyone also expects of others as a duty. At the same time the mind is conscious of a certain ennoblement and elevation above mere receptivity to pleasure through sensory impressions. It also judges others' worth by a similar maxim of their power of judgment. This is the intelligible toward which taste looks, as the previous section indicated. Even our higher cognitive faculties agree in relation to it. Without it, their nature, compared with the claims taste makes, would produce nothing but contradictions. In this faculty the power of judgment does not, as in ordinary empirical judging, find itself subject to the heteronomy of laws of experience. Regarding objects of such pure liking, it gives itself the law, just as reason does regarding the faculty of desire. Both because of this inner possibility within the subject and because of the outer possibility of a nature agreeing with it, judgment finds itself referred to something within and outside the subject A 259 that is neither nature nor freedom, yet is connected with the ground of freedom, the supersensible. In this, the theoretical and practical faculties are brought into unity in a shared but unknown way. We will give some points of this analogy while also noting their differences.

1) Beauty pleases immediately, though only in reflective 354 intuition, not in a concept as morality does. 2) It pleases without any interest. Moral goodness, by contrast, is necessarily connected with an interest, but not one that precedes the judgment of liking: the judgment first produces it. 3) In judging beauty, the imagination's freedom, and thus the freedom of our faculty's sensibility, is represented as agreeing with the lawfulness of the understanding. In a moral judgment the will's freedom is thought as its agreement with itself under universal laws of reason. 4) The subjective principle for judging beauty is represented as universal, valid for everyone, yet not identifiable through any universal concept. The objective principle of morality is also declared universal, valid for all subjects and for all actions of the same subject, but also identifiable through a universal concept. Thus A 260 moral judgment is not only capable of definite constitutive principles; it is possible only by grounding maxims on those principles and their universality.

Ordinary understanding also commonly considers this analogy. We often give beautiful objects of nature or art names that seem to presuppose moral judgment. We call buildings or trees majestic and magnificent, or fields smiling and cheerful. Even colors are called innocent, modest, or tender, because they arouse sensations containing something analogous to awareness of a state of mind produced by moral judgments. Taste makes possible, as it were, a transition from sensory charm to habitual moral interest without too violent a leap. It represents imagination even in its freedom as capable of being determined purposively for the understanding. It even teaches us to find free satisfaction in objects of sense without sensory charm.

60 A 261 Appendix. On the Methodology of Taste.

A critique preceding a science can be divided into a doctrine of elements and a doctrine of method. This division cannot be applied to the critique of taste, 355 because there is and can be no science of beauty, and a judgment of taste cannot be determined by principles. The scientific element in any art concerns truth in the presentation of its object. This is indeed an indispensable condition, a conditio sine qua non, of beautiful art, but it is not beautiful art itself. Beautiful art therefore has only a manner (modus), not a method of teaching (methodus). The master must show by doing what the pupil is to accomplish and how. The general rules under which he finally brings his procedure serve more to recall its main points when needed than to prescribe them. Yet a certain ideal must be considered, which art must keep in view although it never fully reaches it in practice. There are only certain ways to prevent the pupil from immediately treating the examples put before him as originals and models for imitation, subject to no higher standard or judgment of his own. These are to awaken his imagination into adequacy with a given concept, to point out the inadequacy of the A 262 expression for the idea, which the concept itself does not reach because it is aesthetic, and to use rigorous criticism. Otherwise genius would be stifled, and with it imagination's freedom even within its lawfulness. Without that freedom no beautiful art is possible, nor even a sound independent taste for judging it.

The preparation for all beautiful art, insofar as its highest perfection is intended, seems to lie not in prescriptions but in cultivating the mental powers through the preliminary studies called humaniora, or the humanities. Presumably this is because humanity means both a universal feeling of sympathy and the ability to communicate intimately and universally. Together these qualities constitute the sociability suited to humanity, distinguishing it from the limitations of animal life. Consider an age and a people in which an active drive toward lawful sociability, through which a people forms a lasting commonwealth, struggled with great difficulties. These surround the hard task of combining freedom, and therefore equality, with A 263 constraint—a constraint based more on respect and submission from duty than on fear. Such an age and people had to 356 discover the art of mutual communication of ideas between the most educated part and the less cultivated part. They had to adjust the breadth and refinement of the former to the natural simplicity and originality of the latter. In this way they first discovered the middle ground between higher culture and self-sufficient nature. This also supplies the correct standard for taste as a universal human sense, a standard that cannot be stated through general rules.

A later age will hardly be able to dispense with those models. It will be increasingly distant from nature. In the end, without lasting examples of nature, it might scarcely be able to conceive the happy union, in one and the same people, of the lawful constraint of the highest culture with the strength and soundness of free nature conscious of its own worth.

But taste is fundamentally a faculty for judging the sensory presentation of moral ideas, through a certain analogy in reflection on both. From this, and from the greater receptivity it should establish for the feeling arising from moral ideas—the feeling called moral—comes the pleasure taste declares valid for humanity in general, not merely for each person's private feeling. A 264 So it is clear that the true preparation for establishing taste is the development of moral ideas and the cultivation of moral feeling. Only when sensibility is brought into agreement with this can genuine taste assume a definite, unchanging form.

Of the A 265 357 Critique of the Power of Judgment

22 Any judgment announcing itself as universal can be called a reasoning judgment (iudicium ratiocinans), since to that extent it can serve as the major premise in an inference of reason. But only a judgment thought as the conclusion of such an inference, and therefore as grounded a priori, can be called a judgment of reason (iudicium ratiocinatum).

23 The intuitive element in cognition must be opposed to the discursive, not to the symbolic. The intuitive is either schematic, through demonstration, or symbolic, as representation through mere analogy.