Morality and Aesthetic Judgement

What is at stake in the relationship of morality and aesthetic judgement is the hospitality of nature to the aesthetic ends of humanity. The affiliation of morality (the rational self-determination of the will) and aesthetic judgement (the designation of nature or its artistic representation as beautiful or sublime) emerged as a pressing concern within Enlightenment philosophy. The core of the Enlightenment project as it developed in its English, French, and German forms was an absolute faith in the capacity of reason to overcome the prejudice and superstition of the Middle Ages, to establish moral, political, and normative systems that would liberate humanity from its dependence on unquestioned forms of authority, and to establish by science and experimentation the rational order that underlies the affairs of humans. The importance of aesthetic experience in this project is the possibility it offers of unifying the apparently disparate realms of history and nature: of showing that the unfolding of human affairs toward the ultimate ends of peace, security, and universal recognition is inscribed in the rational order of the world. Thus, insofar as the Enlightenment project attempted to expound a unity between the ultimate ends for which human beings were created, the aesthetic experience we have of nature was understood as configuring, or symbolizing, the moral integrity of the human will.

The exemplary text here is Immanuel Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (1790). In the first part of the book, “The Analytic of the Beautiful,” Kant attempted to set out the a priori conditions of the judgement of taste—the estimation of an object or its artistic representation as beautiful. For Kant, this judgement is independent of all interest, presents itself as a demand for the assent of all men, and follows not from the theoretical cognition of the object but from a certain harmony of the faculties of understanding and intuition. The feeling of delight that arises from my contemplation of a beautiful object, in other words, immediately refers my judgement to the intelligibility of nature, and so to a common sense of the aesthetic possessed by all rational beings. Insofar as I am moved to apply the concept of the beautiful to those objects that produce in me the feeling of delight, I can be said to be responding to a purposiveness in nature that exceeds the mere excitation of sensory interest. The tasteful contemplation of a nude, for example, would arise from its formal characteristics of line and symmetry and not from the immoral desires that the female body is wont to provoke. Both my disinterested pleasure in the beautiful and the pure desire I experience in the moral law, therefore, are related to what is literally unrepresentable: the supersensible conditions of unity and finality that cannot be schematized by the understanding. Thus, the acquisition of taste allows me to apprehend the real of sense as the embodiment of a divine purpose (the idea of nature), and to recognize its beauty as the symbol of the moral law.

The second part of The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement,“The Analytic of the Sublime,” is also concerned with the purposiveness of nature—although this time the feelings provoked are disturbing rather than pleasurable, and gesture beyond the regulative organization of taste. For Kant, the subject's encounter with the awesome magnitudes (a storm at sea, a snow-capped mountain range) through which nature signifies its totality produces a sense of terror at the loss of the serial time that is the imagination's a priori principle. The immediate (or reproductive) synthesis of the magnitudes that reason demands of the imagination in the presence of the sublime does violence to the successive (or compositional) time that is the condition of phenomenal experience. Yet for Kant, this feeling of terror is not unmixed; for it is simultaneous with a sense of exultation in reason's capacity to conceive of nature as an intelligible totality. Imagination, in other words, experiences metaphysical distress at its loss of reproductive intuition; for serial time, which conditions the synthesis of sense-data by the understanding, is threatened by the overwhelming simultaneity of compositional magnitudes. Reason, on the other hand, feels a certain exultation at its capacity to recognize the intelligibility of nature. Thus for Kant the sublime copresence of pleasure and pain that arises within the cognitive subject refers its freedom beyond mere sensory satisfaction and toward the higher moral ends for which humanity was created (peace, cooperation, universal respect).

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