KANT'S AESTHETIC REVOLUTION*

Albert Hofstadter
ABSTRACT
This paper interprets the Critique of Judgment as the culmination of
Kant's contribution to our understanding of freedomthe human
meaning of which is being-with-other-as-with-own. Central to that complex achievement and to the overarching role assigned by Kant to the
aesthetic dimension (beauty, feeling, judgment, and art) is his revolutionary new way of seeing beauty and art as the expression of aesthetic
ideasa definition of them which carries him beyond formalism to
illuminate also the modern and romantic search for freedom. This move
also brings Kant to the threshold of religious ethics as man's ultimate
freedom, his being-with-the-infinitely-transcendent-as-with-own, is, in
art and beauty, disclosed for imagination and made available for the life
of feeling in this world.

The central matter of thinking, as of life, is freedom.

Kant's aesthetic revolution, continuous with what he called his Copernican
revolution in thought, has to do with his effort to think freedom. Like every
great thinker he is concerned eventually with the Froblem of the freedom of the
individual in relation to his membership in the free social whole. Kant is confronted with this problem in the context in which the enlightenment presented
it. He is the heir of Enlightenment thinking, French, English, and German, and
This study was written under a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for
the Humanities. I am also gratefully indebted to the Research Committee of the University
of California at Santa Cruz for funds allocated to specific research in this and allied fields.
JRE 3/2(1975), 171-191

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he is the great source of our tradition who has handed over to us the major
problems.
During the Enlightenment period the idea of humanity as such, surpassing
all nationalities, races, and religions, began to become explicit, ironically but
intelligibly at the very time that national differences were firming up more
strongly than ever. During the same period the idea of the inalienable rights of
the individual as such also began to become explicit. Within the human community each individual self was seen as the bearer of rights attaching to his very
humanity and on that account inalienable. These thoughts pervade the important documents of the French and American Revolutions and pervade as well
the thoughts, aspirations, and actions by which those revolutions were brought
aboutrecognizing, of course, that their realization was and still remains far
from the ideal.
Above all other philosophers, Kant was the bearer of these thoughts. His
philosophizing was correlative to the revolution in socioeconomic, political and
legal practice that was taking place in and through the Enlightenment period,
especially toward its end in the late 18th century and the very early 19th. His
thinking was part of the total European revolution of the time. The focus of his
philosophical vision is the combination of the freedom of the human individual
with the social community of mankind, even with that of all rational beings. His
thinking penetrates to the sourcesupersensuous for himof the unalienable
freedom of the human individual, a source which is at the same time the ground
of the individual's freedom as a human being, that is, as a member of the human
community, even of the community of all rational beings.
Despite any limitations existing during his agethe slave trade, developing
class differences between capital and labor, developing national differences
which were ultimately to lead to our century's world wars, developing colonialism in Africa, South America, and Asiathe idea of freedom is the burgeoning idea of the time. Kant is the great bearer of it as it involves the difference between the inalienable freedom of the individual and the rightful claims
of the human community, together with the possible and necessary unity of the
two, and including in between the differences and the unity of the particular
rights of estates, classes, peoples, and nations.
Kant initiated the attempt to think this idea of freedom as the central
systematizing idea of philosophy itself. I am not speaking of his terminology,
even though the word "Freiheit" played an important part in it. Part of Kant's
limitation was in fact that he did not fully comprehend that this word could
have the more comprehensive employment about which I shall be talking. I am
speaking rather of the real content of Kant's thinking, which everywhere was
concerhed first of all with man and human freedom. In his lectures on logic he
says that there are four philosophical questions: What can I know? What should
I do? What may I hope? and What is man? And he adds that the last question,
the anthropological one, comprehends the other three. His own Anthropology
carries the qualification in its title: "from a pragmatic viewpoint"; and he ex-

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plains in the preface that it differs from anthropology considered from a physiological viewpoint in that it examines what man makes, or can and should make,
of himself as a freely acting being, as contrasted with examining what nature
makes of man.^ Thus the basic question of anthropology, the sum-total of
philosophy, is: How does man-and how can he and must herealize his own
freedom? When we look at Kant's doing of philosophy as well as his statements
about it, we see that its actual content is man's freedom of self-determination,
his self-articulation as a rational being.
Of course there are severe dangers in this Kantian way of dealing with
freedom as self-making and self-determination. The basic danger lies in a virtual
or actual deification of man in theory and, in practice, man's overreaching of
himself and his world, an overreaching which, as we see it before our very eyes
today, threatens to destroy man, his freedom, and his world in the process. This
experience of ours leads us back to the thought of freedom and to the need to
reconstitute it in a more adequate way than we find it in Kant or his successors.
But that is our problem. I am to speak here chiefly of Kant's.
Kant initiated the attempt to think freedom centrally and coherently. He
was not able to formulate the enterprise in its full integrity, though he made a
close approach. He saw the parts of the problem and saw their interconnection
as well. One gets a glimpse of this from the table which he placed at the end of
the present "Introduction" to the Critique of Judgment, similar to that at the
end of the first introduction published separately as the essay, "On Philosophy
in General."^ Here the domains of nature and freedom, of theoretical knowledge
and practical (moral) knowledge, are linked by way of the domain of art and the
aesthetic. Understanding and reason are linked by judgment. Conformity to law
and final purpose are linked by purposiveness, that is, by beauty. Knowledge and
desire (and therefore practice) are linked by feeling, the feeling of pleasure and
displeasure. Beauty, feeling, judgment, artthese are the middle and medium
linking man's theoretical and practical sides together so as to make it possible for
him to be humanly whole. The aesthetic dimension of man is given an overarching role by Kant, one which some of his immediate contemporaries and
successors like Goethe, Schiller, and Schelling clearly understood. Fichte, too,
saw the tremendous significance that had to be given to imagination in the
constitution of freedom and humanity. Hegel later tried to put'it together by
making art the first member of the triad of absolute spirit, which latter itself was
the ultimate form of the actualization of freedom.
Now in Kant, and generally in our modern tradition thereafter, freedom has
a' negative and a positive meaning: negatively it is absence of determination by
another, positively it is self-determination. Where I am not the author or cause
of what I am or do, I am not free; where I am the author or cause, I am free.
Most of the problems of freedom, metaphysical, ethical, political, and other,
have tended to be treated as problems regarding determination, whether by
other or by self. But if we investigate the word etymologicallythe English
"freedom" or Kant's German "Freiheit"we make the interesting discovery that

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a different sense is attached to it, namely, the sense of Being-with-other-as-withown. One can find the details in any available handbook for English (Partridge,
1958) or German (Grebe, 1963). We learn there that free and friend are identical
in origin. The verb to free derives from Old English frebgan, and the noun friend
derives from the Old English ffeond, itself shaped from the present participle of
the verb frWon, which is a contraction of the verb frFogan, the same as that from
which to free is derived. And what is of decisive significance is that freogan
means: to love.
Freogan is one of a close-knit family of words in the Anglo-Germanic languages meaning love, peace, protection, care, preservation. There is nothing
explicitly referring to determination, whether by other or by self, in these. They
emphasize protecting, caring for, preserving, loving, holding dear, cherishing. On
this basis, the writer of the article in the Duden Etymologie points out, the
Germans developed frei as a concept of the legal order, the order of right:
"belonging to den Lieben, the dear or beloved ones." Those who are of the same
kinship, consanguinity, clan, or tribethe friends-are protected, sheltered, kept
secure. When you are a member of the family, clan, or tribe, you are treated as
one of the friends. It is the foreigners, the aliens, such as those captured in war,
who are unfree, for they have no such right; they are right-less, out-lawed, and
hence essentially slaves. For the Germans, the Slavs in particular were the aliens
who were captured and used as befits Slavs-as Sklaven, slaves. The outsider
seems even not human but barbarian, fit to be used like other animals, as chattel,
for economic burdens, mining, tilling, domestic labor, sexual exploitation. He is
captured, held in bondage, kept unfree, just as he was to begin with.^
Originally then, and as I believe also basically in an ontological sense, freedom is what we have when we are with our own, when the others about us are
own to us and we are own to them. It is Being-with-other-as-with-own. The land
in which we live is our land, the place our own place. Freedom is what we have
when we are with kith and kin, the beloved ones, living our life together in
mutual care and preservation. It is what we have when we are at home where we
belong, or within the protective camp when we are abroad fighting, or when as
nomads we travel together with herds, horses, and families across the wild wastes
of the steppes, hanging together in common kinship and mutual support, or
when, together with our band of hunters in the forest or fishers at the lake, we
keep with them in the bond of care and protection.
Freedom becomes undetermination by another and self-determination when
the individual emerges more and more for himself over against the other, when
the kinship-protection bond weakens. It becomes all the more undetermination
by another and self-determination in the development of what Marxism called
bourgeois-capitalist culture, when the individual was emerging as the entrepreneur whose aim was to achieve as much control of his own activity and
destiny as possible while using others as means toward his ends; and meanwhile
the others were losing the freedom of feudal belonging by being loosened from
lord and land and given over to the freedom of the labor market. The shift of

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freedom from Being-with-other-as-with-own into Being-undetermined-by-other

and Being-self-determined accompanied the dissolution of culture into atomic
individuality.
In Kant, the development of the thought of freedom as pure selfdetermination has come a long way, especially in his ethics. But at the same
time, as philosopher and inheritor of the Enlightenment, he also sees the other
side of the picturethe Enlightenment's vision of mankind as a whole, the idea
of humanity as such. At the same time that modern civilization dissolves the
older bonds of clan, tribe, and (later) the feudal order, it fashions those of
nation and state. In essential relation and conflict at one and the same time, it
looks beyond the nations to the international whole of mankind. Kant already
proposes a league of nations. That is the universal moment at work, as contrasted with the individual: the collectivity as contrasted with the particular
subjectivity.
Thus while in the Kantian ethics the fundamental presupposition of duty is
the freedom of the individual, it is also of the very essence of freedom that the
individual should behave in a rational manner, that is to say, a manner that is
universally valid for all rational beings. In Kant the two sides of freedom come
together: the self-determination of the individual agent and his Being-with-other,
now all other men, all other rational beings, as-own. That is the basic meaning in
the Kantian notions of never treating others as mere means but always as ends
and of acting always as a member of a kingdom of ends which counts all human
and rational beings among its citizens. It is the basic meaning of the categorical
imperative. True freedom for Kant is this absolutely universally valid Beingwith-others-as-with-own which is attained by means of the autonomous rational
self-determination of each individual. He does not use our language, but the
thought is the heart and soul of his thinking.
Kant struggled toward the development of a comprehensive vision of freedom. His revolution in thought as a whole is this: for the first time freedom
begins to show itself in a systematic way, integrating knowledge, practice, and
art into a coherent picture of freedom facing in both its essential directions at
once: particular and universal, singular and collective. His thought reached only
an abstract result. His understanding of knowledge, morality, and art remained
one-sidedsubjectivistic and chiefly formalbut he succeeded in the enormous
task of bringing them together in an integrated way of thinking freedom. This is
our great debt to him.
In what remains of this paper I shall try to call to your attention the way in
which this happens in his thought regarding natural knowledge, morals, and
especially art and the aesthetic. Plainly, the time allotted permits only the barest
sketch.
The interest of the Critique of Pure Reason is metaphysics, man's comprehension of the nature of reality in itself. Its conclusion is that man is incapable of a genuinely cognitive grasp of reality in itself. The reason lies in the

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peculiarly finite character of man's freedom. This may sound odd, but that is
what the fact of the matter is when we understand freedom as Being-with-otheras-with-own. For man's Being-with reality remains for Kant a separation that can
never be fully bridged in a purely theoretical way. The thing-in-itself remains
in-itself, ever eluding the grasp of the human mind as theoretical, ever alienated
and estranged. Man can be with reality only in an indirect way, by mediation of
its representation as appearance. He is like a citizen abroad, in touch with his
native land only through its ambassador, or even like an exile who hears only
rumors of it.
Man's fundamental impulse is toward freedom, to be with the other as with
own, and in the dimension of knowledge it is to stand in that relationship by
cognitive means. Hence man is led to reach the best arrangement he can with the
recalcitrant reality: he produces an appearance of it, a phenomenal world, the
world of nature and experience. The real world comes to him only in the form
of appearance, phenomenon. This world of nature suits his powers of intuition
(spatial and temporal) and his powers of conception (categorial thinking) and
even his powers of reasoning (though only in the regulative use of Ideas). But
because of the finite nature of man's mind, signalized by the split in it between
the receptivity of sense and the spontaneity of understanding, this natural world,
by being human, is prevented from being what the real is in itself. The natural
world of experience is guaranteed to be conformable to human mentality, according to Kant's Copernican revolution, which declares that the world must fit
itself to human cognitive forms rather than the other way round. It becomes a
world intuitable in space and time and thinkable by the categories. But the price
paid for its becoming own to man is that it becomes foreign to the reality
in-itself. Man's cognitive homeland in his present life is that of a merely apparent
world of nature.
The source of man's freedom in the theoretical knowledge of nature which
is alone available to him lies in the spontaneity of the understanding as contrasted with the receptivity of sensation. It is because man is essentially a split
being in his cognitive capacity that the freedom of his relation to reality becomes finite. He is free in the spontaneity of conception or understanding, but
unfree in sensation. Reality, as it gives itself to him in sensation, is essentially
foreign and unnaturalizable as such: it comes as the brute otherness of sensory
matter. In order to make this foreign matter into something own, assimilable to
his cognitive capacity, man has to imagine it into intuitions in accordance with
his limited intellectual spontaneity. His freedom is therefore conditioned and
finite here. He remains imprisoned within the bars which he is forced to construct about his own self. It is as though he were a captive in war, compelled to
build his own prison cell, within which thereafter he is to live out his deprived
life. That cognitive cell cannot be regarded by man as his final dwelling-place. He
must look beyond it to his true home, even though that may be a home he will
never see with the unclouded eyes of intellect. Only an intuitive intellect, which
creates its own objects of intuition instead of being given the matter for them

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from an outside source, only a god, could do what man can never do. Kant does
not yet share the despair of the existentialist who would see man as a failed god;
but the limitation of freedom in cognition in Kant's philosophy becomes one of
the sources of this despair. Kant is still optimistic.
Man's cognitive freedom is conditioned by an other in the form of existent
reality, the thing-in-itself, the world-in-itself, as ultimately unovercomeable. His
practical or moral freedom- is conditioned by an other, too; but this other is his
own self, his self as other. For man is as split in his practical existence as he is in
his theoretical existence. In knowledge the split is between sense and intellect. In
moral practice the split is between sense and reason, or between man as animal
and man as rational. His divided nature shows itself here in the conflict between
inclination and duty, the lure of desire and the command of reason. As man is
not and cannot be an intuitive intellect, so he is not and cannot be a holy will,
which is a will whose maxims necessarily agree with the laws of autonomy.'*
A holy will would not need any commands or imperatives, because it would
not be attracted by the pleasure of satisfying inclination.^ It would not be
susceptible to any maxims contradicting the moral law, not because it lacks
power but because it lacks impotence, lacks defect and passivity. True, there is a
holy element in our feeling-life: we are able to feel respect for the moral law and
pleasure in the consciousness of having fulfilled our duty. Such a feeling Kant
calls "practical" because it rests on reason. But for the most part our feelings are
what he calls "pathological," or conditioned on something passive, therefore not
free. Thus the pleasures of the life of inclinationfood, sex, egoism, profit, the
satisfaction of various desiresare all pathological: they contain an unfree, passive moment (Kant, 1788: Book I, Section 3).
It is because man is such a divided creature, subject to the passivity of
feeling, that he needs a moral imperative, which is a command to his will to obey
the law just because it is law. If there were no lure of pleasure, man would not
need to be called to virtue; he would simply do of his own free volition what was
right and good. It is this otherness within himself, his sensuous passion, desire,
and inclination, which is really other as against his true nature, his rational will.
And this alien element in him, however much it belongs to him, nevertheless
draws him away from himself, enslaving him to externality.
Only resistance to this alien source of moral enslavement can keep man free
in the practical sense. For this, virtue is required. Virtue is "a human being's
moral strength of will in the pursuit of his duty: which is a morally obliging
pressure by his own legislative reason, insofar as this reason constitutes itself into
an authoritative power for implementation or effectuation of the law." In
other words, virtue is the agreement of man's will with every duty, an agreement
founded on a fixed and stable state of mind or disposition (Abbott, 1909:306;
Eisler, 1964:542). As Kant says:
The ethical level on which man (and indeed every rational creature, as we see
it) stands is respect for the moral law. The disposition which obliges him to

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follow this law is: to follow it out of duty, not out of voluntary inclination,
and also, in any case, out of a striving which he willingly undertakes himself
without being commanded to it; and his moral condition, in which he can
always be, is virtue, that is to say, moral disposition in combat, and not
holiness in a supposed possession of a complete purity of the dispositions of
his will. (Kant, 1788:Book I, Section 3)

Only by maintaining this embattled position of his moral frame of mind does
man attain to the practical freedom which is his vocation. It is virtue that makes
man free.
Man's practical freedom is not an object of natural theoretical knowledge.
Freedom is a rational Idea that transcends all possibility of empirical recognition;
it is problematical for theoretical reason. But in a practical sense we know its possibility a priori because we are conscious within ourselves of the obligation to
obey moral law as such. We may not have theoretical insight into the ground of
thisapriori possibility of our transcendental freedom, but our whole moral life is
based on it.
This moral life implies a moral world which, for Kant, cannot be a merely
natural world. It is a world of moral persons, each possessing the pure practical
reason or rational will which makes him a member, so to speak, of the moral
species. By his rational will man is own to man, rational being is own to rational
being; all are own to one another in moral kinship. This moral world is the
people of freedom. I realize that Kant does not use this latter phrase; but it is
surely the truest description of what he is talking about. It is a description that is
inevitable when we grasp the scope and content of his doctrine. His own phrase
for it is the kingdom of ends. It is only as a member of this people of freedom
that the human individual can realize his humanity and rationality. Such a
people is not governed by an authority that exercises force from the outside
upon the members in order to keep them within the bounds of its law (heteronomy). Rather, it governs itself anarchically, as it were, insofar as each member
rules himself by his own inner self-authority, which is the same for all: reason in
its practical employment. That is why it is the people of freedom: its government is self-government, autonomy, self-determination of own among own.
When the French revolutionists envisaged the revolution as one in which the
prime motive, force, spirit, and outcome was to be virtue, their vision was a real
historical, if more earthly, counterpart to the ideal vision of the philosopher who
most deeply of all expressed the truth of the revolution at that stage of mankind's development.
Kant's thinking is thinking in transition. He occupied the height of the
Enlightenment from which the newer ilomantic period was emerging. In him the
forces of the two are at work in living tension and movement. Despite the fact
that in theoretical knowledge he assigns the priority of freedom to the understanding and in practical knowledge he assigns the priority of freedom to reason,
there is in his thinking a groundswell which brings into dominance subjectivity,
life, movement, feeling, spirit. There is in him already the drive to surpass the

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dualisms of sense-intellect, passion-reason by a third force, leading to a truer

human freedom; and this third force is adumbrated in the aesthetic dimension.
Kant never got to the completion of this movement of thought. It is more fully
developed in Friedrich Schiller and Schelling. It is sublimated in Hegel. And in
more recent thought, and especially for us today, it becomes a significant problem because of the impact of Darwin, Marx, and Freud, and because of the more
extensive development of scientific insight into the interplay of body and mind.
Kant was fully aware of the gap between nature and morality which his
thinking exposed. Nature is the scene of necessary causal determination. The
moral world is the world of human freedom, in which man's action is imputable
to him as its spontaneous author. The problem of how the two could coexist
stood out in all obviousness. Kant had worked out his own solution In the
Critique of Pure Reason, but only by separating the moral world of freedom
from the natural world of necessity and so confirming the inner division and
splitness of man's being along with the separation of the worlds he inhabited.
But one unquenchable question still flamed up. Although the two worlds
are separate, the moral world ought to influence the natural world. Even if no
transition can be made from the one to the other by means of the theoretical use
of reason, nevertheless:
the concept of freedom ought to make the purpose assigned by its laws actual
in the sense-world, and nature must consequently also be so thought that the
lawfulness of its forms at least agrees with the possibility of the purposes to be
effected in nature according to the laws of freedom. (Kant, 1790a: Introduction II)

The very meaning of the laws of morals implies that they ought to be carried out
in the world of nature. What sense is there in telling us that lying is wrong or
that we should treat others as ends and never as mere means, if we are not
obliged to practice truth-telling in this natural existence of ours or if in that
natural existence any treatment of others were permitted? The intention of
moral law, as expressed in moral commandments, bears on what should be done
by us in the spatiotemporal causal world. If we were not members of the natural
world we would have no feeling-life, our feeling-nature would have nothing
pathological in it, and there would be no meaning in the idea of addressing a
moral imperative to us.
But how is the relation of the two worlds to be thought? There must, Kant
says, be some ground of the unity of the supersensible that lies at the basis of
nature with the supersensible that is contained practically by the concept of
freedom. The concept of this unity will not give us either a theoretical or a
practical knowledge of it, but it should make it possible to go from the principles of the one world to those of the other. It is not a third world, so to speak,
which binds the first two together (Kant's word is "Gebiet," peculiar realm);
rather, it is a bond that leads from freedom to nature and from nature to
freedom.

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Earlier, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had given a metaphysical

solution of this problem of the relation of freedom to nature by his doctrine of
the intelligible character of man, according to which man's choice of what he is
to do in the natural world is made in the supersensuous world of freedom by an
eternal act.' But he goes further than this. He is really concerned with the
possibility of a genuine interplay between freedom and nature, a real dimension,
even if not a world, of human existence in which there would be a union rather
than a gap between them. And he finds this in art.
Art mediates between nature and freedom, between the unhuman regularity
of natural law and the human spontaneity of rational liberty, just as feeling
mediates between knowledge and desire, and judgment between understanding
and reason. Art and aesthetic experience give us a new dimension governed by a
new kind of a priori structuring, whose fundamental mode is Zweci<m'assigkeit,
purposiveness, fitness, as compared with the conformity to law of nature and the
final purpose, Endzweck, of moral freedom. This purposivenessthe essential
characteristic of fine art and beautyis, on the one side, like purpose without
being a definite purpose, and on the other side, like law without being a definite
law. (More exactly, it is a conformity which is neither conformity to a definite
purpose nor conformity to a definite law.) It joins the qualities of law and
purpose into one, as it joins the qualities of necessity and freedom into one.
We experience this union as the judgment of taste in our perception of a
beautiful natural thing or artwork. In the former, nature appears as though it
were freedom, and in the latter, freedom as though it were nature. In both, we
experience an object which is felt and judged as freely necessary and necessarily
free. Not constitutively, as a matter of actual theoretical knowledge or of actual
moral commandment, but in its own peculiar way with its own kind of necessity
which Kant calls "exemplary."
Why is it that we enjoy this paradoxical union, this felt promise of the
possibility of freedom's actual realization in nature, when confronted by
beauty? It is because, according to Kant, we are actually feeling the harmony
within ourselves of the passive and the active, the natural and the free. Imagination is the faculty that shapes sensations into intuitive form. It usually has to
subserve the finite purposes of knowledge and therefore, while it has some
freedom, it is under the constraint of sensation in its relation to external nature.
Understanding is the faculty that shapes concepts according to the categories. It,
too, usually has to subserve the finite purposes of knowledge and therefore,
while it has some freedom, it remains under the constraint of fitting its concepts
to the sensuous intuitions of natural things. But these two faculties can be given
a holiday from the hard labor of finite knowing, and allowed to play freely with
one another. This is done when imagination is permitted to make intuitive forms
free from responsitrility to external reality and suited only for the enjoyment of
its harmony with the understanding. The two faculties of imagination and understanding are able to play together because, by their original constitution, they
have been proportioned to each other for the sake of knowledge (a proportion

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which is the same in every human mind); and this proportioning remains even
when they are not engaged in the unaesthetic daily task of knowing. Thus within
ourselves, in the free interplay of understanding and imagination, we experience
our mind existing and acting in unconstrained interaction with the sensible
matter derived from the mind's other, the external reality, when that sensible
matter is shaped in beauty and thereby itself freed from the need to serve as a
sign of the external reality.
Unlike the mind's Being-with-other-as-with-own in the case of definite
theoretical knowing, where there is a constraint on the mind by the real sensations given to it and by the limited purpose of obtaining knowledge of the
externar world, and unlike the mind's Being-with-other-as-with-own in the case
of moral judgment and action, where there is again a constraint on the mind, this
time by the real inclinations and passions it has to resist because of the purpose
of fulfilling the obligation of duty-unlike both those one-sided forms of freedom, here, in the experience of beauty, there is freedom without constraint.
Both the earlier constraints are removed. The sensuous-imaginative intuitive
form is freely made by the artist, or (as in nature) it is freely followed by the
mind just as if it had been the artist who created such a form; and no purpose of
obtaining knowledge or fulfilling duty compels the mind in its holiday play here.
The judgment of taste is, as Kant puts it, "disinterested."
That is why the experience is one of free play as against every unplaying
form of knowing and acting. This free play of the mind occurs within itself
between understanding and imagination. But by that very fact it obtains also
between the mind and the sensuous-imaginative aesthetic object. The aesthetic
contemplator deals playfully, or disinterestedly, with the aesthetic object. This
free play, both inside the mind and between the mind and its object, hence both
subjective and subjective-objective, is a foretaste of a truer freedom than can be
experienced in theory or in practice. Between the mind and the form of its
object there is a Zweckmassigkeit, a fitness, which is to say a Being-with-as-own,
which is itself free. It is not constrained by any definite purpose. It is a purposiveness which is experienced as unrelated to any definite purpose, a free purposiveness that lies at the core of a more intimate ownness than anywhere else
experienced-so far. In beauty we see and feel the ownness of mind (spirit) and
nature to one another, as though a deeper-lying mind had created them for each
other.
That is the mode of human freedom as Being-with-own which Kant first
arrives at in the Critique of Judgment. He advances it by means of the analysis of
the judgment of taste or beauty in terms of its four moments: in quality it is
disinterested, in quantity it is subjectively universal, in relation the form of the
object is experienced as purposive though without any representation of a purpose, and in modality it is necessary in an exemplary fashion. The only one of
these four moments I have not yet specifically pointed to is the second, the
quantity of subjective universality. And once we contemplate the judgment of
taste in the context of freedom as just described, it becomes evident that this

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monnent of quantity represents the aspect of community in freedom. The

judgment of taste is aesthetic. That means for Kant that it is based on the pure
feeling of pleasure or displeasure as such. Therefore, it can only be made by a
particular individual in a particular case on the basis of his own particular feeling
at that moment, and for himself as a feeling being in his pure subjectivity. It is
wholly singular. It is never a matter of objectivity based on a scientific observation or on a rule given to the individual from elsewhere, as from a critic. But the
paradox of taste involves a unique combination of opposites: when I judge
something beautiful I do it solely on the basis of my individual feeling and solely
with regard to this single object in the form of a singular judgment (logical
singularity), and yet at the same time I demand that all other human beings
ought, by an exemplary necessity, to agree with my judgment (aesthetic universality). In my judgment of taste I give expression to a universal voice reflecting a
communal sense within me (einer gemeinschafttiche Sinn, not einer gemeine
Sinn: communal, not common merely).^ It is the voice and sense of mankind as
such. And it is only insofar as I make my judgment disinterested and attend
solely to the form of fitness of the object-and this means, only insofar as I
make myself a model representative of the human race as suchxhdX I have the
aesthetic right to put forth my judgment's claim to universal validity for all
human beings.
Whether in fact all human beings will agree with me is beside the point. I
never make that claim, any more than I claim that all human beings will be
perfectly moral. What I do, according to Kant's analysis, is to put forth the
claim. More than anything else it is an appeal to others, grounded on my irrepressible presupposition of our common humanity, and here in particular the
common structure and operation of our cognitive faculties of imagination and
understanding. The free play which I enjoy in aesthetic judgment is utterly
individual to me; but at the same time it is utterly universal in its meaning and
intention to speak with the voice of all humanity to the whole human communitythe people of freedom. In this experience I join myself to humanity and
invite humanity to join with me in Being-together-as-own-with-own in the
mutual freedom which beauty grants us. What Kant envisages is obviously a
genuine human communion which, although it is restricted to atomically separated feeling-judging experiences because of its aesthetic nature, nevertheless
transcends the atomization ideally and has a transcendental-transcendent character. That is why beauty fits man for social life and social life fits him for the
development of his taste. It is why beauty is the symbol of the good. And, as the
theory gets developed by Friedrich Schiller, it is why the means toward making
human culture civilized is afforded by the aesthetic education of mankind.
What Kant came to in the analysis of the judgment of taste, then, was a
deeply-grounded adumbration in human experience of the possibility of genuine
communion in the full actuality of man's existence. Beauty is the promise of the
full human freedom that can be reached only through full human communion.
Beauty tells us that this fuller communion is not impossible.

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183

But Kant went further still, probing into the deeper possibilities of human
freedom as Being-with-other-as-with-own. There is still a certain finitsness affecting beauty, insofar as beauty (for Kant) is essentially formal. The beautiful
object is beautiful because the form of its intuitive-imaginative presentation has
a specific fitness to the form-capacities of the human mind: imagination and
understanding in their mutual proportionality for cognition. Looking at the
matter in terms of style-history, we can say that the beauty of form which Kant
analyzed in the four moments of the judgment of taste is the abstract expression
of beauty concretely present in classical, classicistic, neoclassical, and even
rococo art. It is beauty as object of taste, that is, as object of our capacity to
judge immediately the not-too-much and not-too-little but just-right, the je ne
sais quoi of the connoisseur. Such beauty is tied up with our estimates of
propriety, rightness, fitness, good proportion, balance, harmony, orto use the
most comprehensive and Insightful logical category in this context-measure and
the mean. The common voice that claims agreement in the judgment of taste is
the voice of universal communal propriety as it is represented in humanity's
form-capacities of imagination and understanding. In order that the human mind
and spirit should find its object own to itself and itself own to the object, in full
universality, it needs an object which is exquisitely balanced in every respect
(regular but not too regular, free but not too free), not too much and not too
little. The object should exactly suit it, be zweckmassig to it, without the representation of any particular Zweck, purpose. This is the mind's need for definite
forms which will be own to and with it, in relation to which it can experience a
true Being-at-home.
But the mind has further demands. Because it is essentially freedom-the
irrepressible need, demand, and impulse for freedom-no finite form will ever be
able to satisfy it completely. Kant does not yet say this in so many words. It
remained for his successors, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, to mai<e it out. But the
truth is at work in Kant's own mind and it leads him beyond formal beauty to
the sublime and the comic. In both cases, needs of the mind cause the form of
the object to be deformed and eventually torn apart. The sublime can be an
experience not only of form but even more of unform: "the beautiful in
nature," Kant says, "has to do with the form of the object, which consists in
being bounded; the sublime, in contrast, is also to be found in a formless object
so far as in it or occasioned by it unboundedness is represented and yet its
totality is thought along with it."^
Whether it be the sublime of magnitude, which insults our capacity to hold
on to size, or that of force, which insults our finitude of power, in either case
the sublime insults the imagination by which form is bounded and kept within
measure and the understanding by which it is apprehended. In the sublime we
detect the stirrings of something which is measureless and the source of antimeasure; and it is precisely because of this that we enjoy it.'' What gets called
upon to respond, according to Kant, is no longer the combination of imagination
and understanding, which is the power of finite comprehension, but the combf-

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HOFSTADTER

nation of imagination Insulted and reason, which is the power of infinite conceptual comprehension, the power of Ideas, in a unitary tension of opposition.
What we experience in the sublime is, again, our freedom, but now a freedom that rises above any mere Being-wlth-nature-as-with-own, any mere harmony with nature, and which lies rather in our being above nature, with one'
another in the rational and moral sphere of freedom. Peculiarly and paradoxically the violation of form and measure in the sublime is itself that which
fitsi.e., measures rightly withthe human mind as a combination of sense and
reason! It is an experience which, unlike beauty, starts with unpleasure; but it
transcends the unpleasure into pleasure again.
The case of the comic is analogous. In experiencing a joke our mind is
strained to attend to something that promises or threatens to be serious and then
is disappointed by being given a nothing, a triviality. Hence Kant speaks of
laughter as "an affect arising from the sudden transformation of a strained or
tensed expectation into nothing" (1790a, Section 54). There is a play here with
imaginative constructs which is absurd, in which the understanding finds no
satisfaction. What would fit the mind's powers of comprehension is changed into
its opposite, the unfit. And because the shock has to do with something trivial
and not really harmful, we laugh. Kant believes that the reason for the laughter
is traceable to the body and its reflex effect on the mindan argument which we
might wish to criticize. But what remains is the fact that here again the human
mind has triumphed over measure and fitness, this time in a "low" manner, the
counterpart to the "high" (erhabene) manner of the sublime. And here again
peculiarly and paradoxically, a joke, to be a good joke, has to be exactly proportioned and fit in its structure, meaning, and time to do the job! Here too, by
this suitable means, the human mind declares its freedom from any constraint of
mere measure, mere finite rightness, mere propriety.
In both the sublime and the comic a certain wrongness, entailing a certain
insult to the mind's capacities of finitude, the imagination and the understanding, becomes, by a reaction, a source of satisfaction. This can only imply
the mind has in its essential constitution an impulse that pushes beyond finitude.
Kant already sees and says this with regard to the sublime, although his vision is
still restricted there to human self-satisfaction in its capacity to stand above
nature in reason and morality. But the truth is at work in his mind and it leads
him even further, beyond both the sublime and the comic, to a new way of
seeing beauty.'^'^ And if anything in Kant's thought deserves the special title of
an "aesthetic revolution" it is the move he now takes. The new definition of
beauty is related proximately to genius rather thantaste and to expression rather
than abstract form. Beauty is the expression of aesthetic ideas, and aesthetic
ideas are the counterpart to rational Ideas. Whereas a rational Idea is a concept
for which no intuition is adequate as presentation (not even a sublime intuition),
an aesthetic Idea is an intuition (an imaginative configuration) for which no set
of (definite) concepts suffices.
Genius is the capacity to imagine such aesthetic Ideas and perhaps also to

KANT'S AESTHETIC REVOLUTION

185

express them in the chosen medium.^ ^

Kant's aesthetic here moves beyond the aesthetic of taste. It transcends the
aesthetic standpoint of classicism, neoclassicism, rococo, and moves toward the
standpoint of romanticism. It finds the supreme artistic-aesthetic category to lie,
not in measure as such or merely, but in spirit, Geist, that which is the source of
the vitality by which the intuitive image is capable of exceeding all power of
definite concepts to encompass it.^"' The means by which the image has this
transcending power is found in its infinite suggestiveness, the inciting power of
the image to arouse thoughts and feelings beyond any finite limit, so that it is
able to serve as a concrete representative for the infinite power of rational Ideas.
Blake's Songs of Experience was published in 1794; Kant's Critique of Judgment
appeared in its first edition in 1790 and in its second and carefully revised
edition in 1793, the third, in 1794, being a re-issue of the second. Both belong
to a spiritual atmosphere that was spreading over Europe. Blake illustrates Kant.
Such a poem as, for instance, "The Sick Rose" is an irrefragable example of
what Kant means by the expression of an aesthetic Idea:
0 Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night.
In the howling stornn.
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy.
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

No set of finite concepts, however much one is piled on the other, will suffice to
exhaust the content of this poem. It has a content which is untranslatable into
conceptual terms. Even the verbal statement of infinitistic rational Ideas is insufficient to encompass it. In its own magical way it overcomes the limitations of
the sense-world, which cannot afford a direct literal presentation of infinitistic
Ideas-of God, of freedom, of the true self, of infinity or immortality-and
somehow makes that infinity present. In its own idiosyncratic way the aesthetic
Idea or infinitely suggestive image, as expressed in a medium, gives us all the
richness of the rational Idea in a sensuous presence that is alive with spirit itself.
Attainment of the aesthetic Idea and its expression by genius does not leave
behind the communion that is reached-out for in the judgment of taste. On the
contrary, Kant retains the operation of taste even in connection with the art of
genius; he allows the wings of erratic and high-flying genius to be clipped by the
judgment of taste, so as to keep the product beautifuM^"* Kant is transitional;
moving from Rococo to Romanticism, both directions of the aesthetic impulse
are still equally alive in his mind as they were in his culture. Indeed the claim for
community is even stronger in regard to aesthetic Ideas than it is in regard to
taste. For now the appeal is not merely to man's finitistic form-capacity for the

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HOFSTADTER

measure of the intelligible, but to his infinitistic expression-capacity for the

ultimate that transcends his finite powers of comprehension, a capacity which all
human beings share and which is the highest, or deepest, source of human
quality.
Man is human, not alone and not even primarily because he is an understanding being, but because he is a truly rational being, called upon to behave in
accordance with the moral Ideasthe rational Ideasof duty. Law, and freedom.
His truly human freedom occurs in his life within the ethical world, for only
there is the law a true law of freedom. The ethical world is the world in which
IdeasGod, freedom, immortalityare constitutive, as compared with the world
of nature in which only categories, that is, concepts determinative of finite
contents, are constitutive.
The art of genius, surpassing the negativities of the sublime and the comic,
which only promise an advance beyond the finite and natural by destroying
measure, now brings forth the positive form of the aesthetic Idea, which makes
present the meaning of the infinite and supernatural-supersensuous precisely in a
sensuous-imaginative figure, even if not in a literal presentation.
This art of genius leads man into the realm of his most genuinely human
freedom. It opens up for him an intuitive grasp of the infinite that is ownmost to
him. In it, he is with the infinite as with his own, and he is with it now with his
taste raised to the power of infinity. The aesthetic judgment, as practiced on the
art of beauty as the expression of aesthetic Ideas, is one in which the rightness of
purposiveness that is experienced, the measure that is judged, as in Blake's poem,
is a supermeasure, judged by the vitality and liveliness of the spiritual movement
and life evoked by the image. The image has become a symbol, not in the
Kantian sense defined in relation to beauty as symbol of the good, but in the
sense which Romanticism was ultimately to discover for itself in the creation of
the great symbolist works of the 19th century, from Mallarme and Baudelaire to
Wagner, the impressionists, the expressionists, and beyond. The aesthetic Idea as
symbolic image of the intellectually inexpressible source, ground, and possibility
of the real, with which man can be united as own with own, remains a lasting
result of Kant's works, a concept of art that is the first step toward an aesthetics
capable of handling the deepest questions of modern art and of bringing art into
its true place in the context of human freedom.
By means of art as expression of an aesthetic idea, man is able to mediate
the difference between himself and the content of the rational IdeasGod,
freedom, immortality, the whole sphere of metaphysical ultimacyso as to
appropriate them for himself, and himself to them, in immediate contact, in
direct touch with sense. The greatest gap that exists in his life, that between the
sensible present of the here and now and the ultimate eternal Beyond, between
the immediately given and the ultimate In-itself, is bridged by the aesthetic Idea,
whose expression in an image brings into the human soul the vibrating vitality of
the rational Idea without cutting it down or destroying it by shaping it according
to any set of definite concepts. Through the image of beautiful art man is given

KANT'S AESTHETIC REVOLUTION

187

in this life a taste of what life could be in his true homeland, where he would be
finally and irrevocably own among his own.
So the Kantian philosophical revolution attains a peak in the culmination of
the aesthetic revolution. Art, as expression of aesthetic Ideas, becomes the
medium by which man's ultimate freedom, his Being-with-the-infinitelytranscendent-as-own is disclosed for Imagination and made available for the life
of feeling in this finite temporal world. Out of this new vision of art there rises
the surge of the romantic and modern spirit, which liberated art from the confines of the cultivated good taste of a neoclassical and rococo culture and
opened it to the unceasing search of modernism for the fullness of human
freedom.

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NOTES
The statement of the four philosophical questions is given in Section III
of Kant's Logik, Ein Handbuch zu Vorlesungen. The English translation, by
T. K. Abbott, is reprinted by the Philosophical Library (New York, 1963), cf.
p. 15. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant had listed only the first three as
questions of philosophy, but not the question. What is man? See in that work
the section entitled, "The Ideal of the Highest Good, as a Determining Ground
of the Ultimate End of Pure Reason," in the translation by Norman Kemp Smith
(London: Macmillan, 1933), p. 635 (A804f, B833f). But surely the fourth
question had to be at work in Kant's mind all the way through!
The table in the Critique of Judgment-henceforth

abbreviated CJ\s:

All the Faculties of the Mind

Cognitive Faculties

Principles

Application

Faculty of Knowledge

Understanding

Lawfulness Nature

Faculty of Pleasure and

Unpleasure

Judgment

Purposiveness

Art

Faculty of Desire

Reason

Final
Purpose

Freedom

a priori

to

The table in the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment (Uber Philosophie Uberhaupt), in the translation by James Haden (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1965), is virtually identical.
'Compare the suggestive essay by Henri Levy-Bruhl, "Theorie de I'esclavage," in M. I. Finley, ed.. Slavery in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Heffer,
1960), where the thesis is maintained that in Roman law and custom "the slave
is nothing but a foreigner without rights," that formally "every slave is a foreigner" and "every foreigner is a slave," so that the notion of slave, servus, is
identified with that of foreigner. Levy-Bruhl goes so far as to affirm that this
holds not alone for the ancient Romans but also for the Homeric Greeks, the
ancient Jews, and the ancient Germans. See pp. 159-160 in Finley.
Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, p. 70 in the Rosenkranz and
Schubert edition of Kant's works. Volume VIII; in the translation by T. K.
Abbott, Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of
Ethics (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), p. 58; as reprinted in the Library of
Liberal Arts edition (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1949), p. 56.
^Rosenkranz-Schubert, VIII, pp. 37-38; Abbott, p. 31; Bobbs-Merrill,
p. 31.

KANT'S AESTHETIC REVOLUTION

18g

Metaphysik der Sitten. Tugendiehre. For the reference to the edition in

the Philosophischen Bibiiothek see R. Eisler, Kant-Lexikon (Hildesheim: Georg
Olms, 1964), p. VII and p. 542. Eisler is very useful for our subject Abbott
(1909), p. 316.
Critique of Pure Reason, "The Antinomy of Pure Reason, Section 9, III,
Possibility of Causality through Freedom, in Harmony with the Universal Law of
Natural Necessity," in N. K. Smith's translation, pp. 467-469 (A538, B566).
Sartre's underlying act by which freedom is supposed to choose its world in a
basically a pr/or/ way is an echo of this Kantian doctrine.
Kant frequently uses the expression "Gemeinsinn," literally common
sense, with the meaning of a sense that is common to all mankind, as for
instance in sections 20-22 of Kant 1790a. There is no doubt that he thinks of
judgment in its functioning in the uniquely proportioned combination of imagination and understanding, as represented in the judgment of taste, as such a
common sense: we are able to have a common world of nature known in a
common manner because we have a common proportionality of imagination and
understanding as basic cognitive equipment. But it is of interest in our present
context to observe that in Section 40 he explicitly turns to the other adjective,
speaking of this common sense as a "gemeinschaftlicher" one, that is to say, one
that is communal, and he explains it as "a faculty of judgment which in its
reflection has regard to the mode of representation of everyone else in thoughts
(a priori), in order, as it were, to keep its judgment to the whole of human
reason and thereby to avoid the illusion which would have an injurious influence
on the judgment stemming from subjective private conditions which could easily
be taken to be objective." From this we see that for Kant the common sense is
more than merely a sense that happens to exist as the same in each human being.
It is communal in that it itself intends to keep to communion with the whole of
humanity in its activity as judgment. This keeping to communion is done by
comparing our judgments with the possible, not merely actual, judgments of
others and by putting ourselves in the place of every other person by abstracting
from the limitations which contingently attach to our own personal judgment.
Thus we abstract from charm or emotion in seeking a judgment that has
humanly universal validity. See Section 40, "On Taste as a kind oisensuscommunis."
For the notion of a universal voice that expresses this communal sense or
judgment, see Section 8 of Kant, 1790a. "The universality of the satisfaction is
represented in a judgment of taste only as subjective." "We wish to submit the
object to our eyes, as if the satisfaction in it depended on sensation; and yet if
we then call the object beautiful, we believe we possess a universal voice, and we
make a claim to everyone's agreement, although on the contrary all private
sensation would be decisive only for the contemplator alone and his satisfaction."

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HOFSTADTER

^Section 23 in the "Analytic of the Sublime" (Kant, 1790a). See also the
end of Section VII of the "Introduction," where Kant speaks of our pleasure in
the sublime as "a purposiveness of the object, in accordance with the concept of
freedom, in regard to the form or even the unform of objects."
^See Section 23, "Analytic of the Sublime," where Kant says that "the
most important and inner difference between the sublime and the beautiful is
surely this: that if, as is reasonable, we here consider at first only the sublime in
natural objects (for the sublime in art is always limited to the conditions of
agreement with nature), the beauty of nature (independent beauty) carries with
it a purposiveness in its form by which the object seems to be predetermined, as
it were, for our power of judgment, and thus constitutes itself an object of
satisfaction, whereas on the contrary that which arouses the feeling of the sublime in us, without our reasoning and merely in the apprehension of it, may
indeed appear in its form to be contrary to the ends of our power of judgment,
unsuited to our power of presentation and, as it were, violent in its action on our
imagination, and yet it is judged to be all the more sublime on that account."
^Z* I am not referring to a chronological sequence in the composition of
Kant, 1790a. It may be that Kant's first-reached definition of beauty was
actually the one in terms of aesthetic ideas. The point, rather, is the ontological
sequence of the thought, which then has more than a biographical relation to
artistic-aesthetic history. In a time of transition thoughts intermingle in the
individual's head in a varied manner until, socially, they settle down into prevailing patterns.
^^See Kant, 1790a, Section 49, and the Remark I to Section 57. Kant
sometimes seems to restrict genius to being merely the faculty of having
aesthetic Ideas, anterior, so to speak, to any artistic expression of them in an
individual medium. In that case, in order for a genius to be an artist he would
then have to add to this faculty of genius the talent of spirit, which Kant treats
as the faculty for expressing in the medium, "whether the expression be in
speech or painting or statuary," the ineffable state of mind implied by the
aesthetic Idea. See immediately below. Note 13.
^^"Geist, spirit, in its aesthetic meaning, denotes the animating principle in
the mind. . ,. Now I maintain that this principle is no other than the faculty of
presentation of aesthetic Ideas; and by an aesthetic Idea I mean that representation of the imagination which gives us much to think about although no
definite thought, that is to say, concept, can be adequate to it, and which
consequently no language can make intelligible or fully achieve. It is easily
seen that it is the counterpart (pendant) to a rational Idea, which conversely is a
concept to which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate" (Kant, 1790a, Section 49). See also Remark I of Section 57 for further

KANT'S AESTHETIC REVOLUTION

191

definitory observations on the aesthetic Idea in its contrast with the rational
Idea.
e, like judgment in general, is the discipline (or training) of genius; it
clips its wings closely and makes it civilized and well-bred or polished" (Kant,
1790a, Section 50). After a few further remarks on the services of taste in
advancing the condition of genius, Kant decides that if something in an artwork
should be sacrificed in the conflict between the two, it should rather fall on the
side of genius. Judgment, which in matters of fine art makes the decision on its
own principles, will rather let the damage be done to the freedom and riches of
the imagination than to understanding!

REFERENCES
Abbott, T. K.
1909

T. K. Abbott (trans.). Critique of Practical Reason and other

Works on the Theory of Ethics. London: Longmans, Green.

Eisler, R.
1964
Grebe, Paul

1963
Kant, Immanuel
1781
1785
1788
1790a
1790b
1797
1800
Partridge, Eric
1958

Kant-Lexikon.

Hildesheim: Georg Olms.

(ed.) Duden Etymologie. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, Dudenverlag.

Critique of Pure Reason.
Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.
Critique of Practical Reason.
Critique of Judgment.
Uber Philosophie Uberhaupt.
The Metaphysics of Morals, II.
Logik, Ein Handbuch zu Vorlesungen.
Origins. New York: Macmillan.

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