OXFORD-WARBURG STUDIES

THE MANIFOLD
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN PAGANISM AND
IN PERCEPTION r

CHRISTIANITY IN THE F O U R T H CENTURY

Essays edited by ARNA'LDO MOMIGLIANO. I!96J
Theories of oArt
JACOPO DELLA QUERCIA'S FONTE GAIAJ from %ant to Hildebrand
By ANNE COFFIN HANSON. I 965

BY
IE SISTINE CHAPEL B E F O R E MICHELANGELO
By L. D. E T T L I N G E R . 1965 MICHAEL PODRO

THE GOVERNMENT OF F L O R E N C E UNDER

THE MEDICI (1434-1494)
By NICOLAI RUBINSTEIN. I966

SPECTACLE, PAGEANTRY, AND

EARLY TUDOR POLICY
By SYDNEY ANGLO. I969

GIOTTO AND THE ORATORS

By MICHAEL BAXANDALL. I 9 7 I

RAMON LULL AND LULLISM IN

FOURTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE
By }. K. HILLGARTH. I J 2

OXFORD
AT T H E C L A R E N D O N PRESS
1972
 I
INTRODUCTION: T H R E E T Y P E S OF
DEMARCATION

" 'RITERS on art have aimed to draw distinctions between the

rerest of objects as they confront us in ordinary experience and
as they appear depicted within works of art. No serious theorist
has doubted that there is a difference between our interest in a real
martyrdom or a real woman on a bed, and our interest in the
depiction of such subjects in paintings by Titian; or between our
interest in a real bowl of fruit and some bottles, and our interest
in their depiction by Czanne. On the other hand, the view that
' e interest in a picture and in what it depicts are quite uncon-
cted has never been sustained with any plausibility.
Three kinds of criterion have been used for marking the transi-
gi from reality to art, and virtually each major writer on art
.s used several in combination. Theories using the first kind of
;
terion are those which hold that the artist reveals some aspect
the subject-matter which escapes us in ordinary experience :
tor instance the classical view that the painter, sculptor, or
dramatist is concerned with the underlying lawlikeness or ideal
purged of the accidents of everyday life, or that the painter should
give a completely lucid exposition of a dramatic subject, and that
everything within the picture must be subordinated to making
the dramatic subject intelligible.1 But this kind of criterion, that
art is revelatory of something in the subject, does not depend on

1
On the concept of the ideal, its variations and history, see E . Panofsky, Idea: Ein
Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der ltere Kunsttheorie (Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, vol. v ,
.eipzig 1924). A second edition, Berlin i960. English translation, Idea; Concept in Art
"heory (Columbia 1968).
The model f o r accounts of decorum in narrative painting is in L . B. Alberti 's Della
ittura{ 1455), ed. L . Mall (Florence 1950), pp. 87 if. O n the origins of this see M . Baxandall,
Hatto and the Orators (Oxford 1971). Later forms are in, e.g. Flibien, Entretiens sur les Vies
' sur les Ouvrages des plus excellent Peintres, Sixime Confrence (1677) (Trvoux 1725), v ,
00 ff.; Diderot, Essai sur la Peinture (1765), Ch. I V , uvres, ed. A . Billy (Bibliothque de
. Pliade, Paris 1951), and his critical exposition in his Salons, e.g. 'Salon de 1 7 6 1 ' iti Salons,
ed. J . Seznec et J . Adhmar (Oxford 1957), i, 1 4 1 . A l s o see below, p. 7, . . For references
. > such literature see Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis (New Y o r k 1967), reprinted from
Irt Bulletin, vol. xxii (:94).
9200343
2 I N T R O D U C T I O N : T H R E E T Y P E S OF DEMARCATION
a classical notion of the ideal or a norm which ordinary experience
fails to provide. For it was also held by such writers as Diderot,
who thought that each individual may be seen to have his own
unique character and reveal that essential character in the recipro-
cal adaption of each part of his body to the others.2 Similarly
when Thophile Thor invokes the beauty of the accidental and
momentary as opposed to the beauty of the ideal,3 he is still
talking about the subject represented, as is Castagnary when he
tells the artist : 'Nature and life . . . stretch out around you. Go !
And come back to show other men what you have found there.'4
Put generally, this kind of criterion for distinguishing the
interest of works of art from the interest of the obj ects represented
in them always involves an appeal to an object or aspect of an
object which the work of art reveals. Its scope would include,
for example, both the view of the tribunal of the Inquisition
which tried Veronese and the artist's defence. He was criticized
by the officers of the Inquisition for showing, in a Last Supper,
such vulgar details as a disciple picking Iiis teeth as well as for
including what they regarded as superfluous figures like German
soldiers, buffoons, and even dogs, while he claimed that he was
enriching the composition as he saw fit. In the sense I am trying
to clarify here he was invoking a criterion for what was proper
to art of the same class as his accusers. They were claiming that
the presentation of the Last Supper w7as marred by the inclusion
of inappropriate material; Veronese was answering that this,
given a large canvas, was a way of amplifying and increasing the
richness of the subject. He was differing from his accusers in
what was appropriate : he invoked the idea of poetic licence, but
only licence with regard to what was included in his subject-
matter.5
The second kind of criterion, for marking the transition be-
tween the interest of objects and of the artist's depiction of them,
2
Diderot, Essai sur la Peinture, Ch. I .
3 T . Thor, Salon de 184; (Paris 1845), p. 61.
4 an opportunity for the mind to make a comparison, to hear the
Castagnary, 'Salon de 1868', cited by Linda Nochlin, Realism anil Tradition in Art
(Sources and Documents in the History of Art Series, Englewood Cliffs, N . J . 1966), p. 68.
5
In classifying the positions of Veronese and his accusers in this way I am, in a sense,
deliberately missing the point of the dispute. Their dispute was really about the grounds
which legitimized one selection of subject-matter rather than another. M y reason f o r select-
ing it is to point to the way their discussion is couched in terms of subject-matter. The
account of the trial, which took place in 1 5 7 3 , is translated in E . G . Holt, Documentary History
of Art (New Y o r k 1958), ii, 66 if.
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T H R E E T Y P E S OF D E M A R C A T I O N 3
is that which involves making a reference to the perceptual pro-
cedures of the spectator or reader and then relates those pro-
cedures to the painting or poem, as for instance when we refer
to the perception of ambiguity or analogy, or to appreciating
similarity through difference or unity in multiplicity.
It might be argued that unity in multiplicity could as well
be seen as a question of subject-matter as of a special use of
perception. The coherent and decorous exposition of the subject-
matter, in which all figures are depicted appropriately and sub-
ordinated to their role in the drama, or the parts of the human
form depicted properly knit together, is simply a question of
subject-matter having unity or coherence as one of its characteris-
tics. This does not involve us in talking about perception or
the processes of our mind. But there is a sense in which to talk
about multiplicity in unity is to imply seeing an underlying
similarity between different features, or continuity between dis-
crete components, and this adds something not contained in the
description of the subject: it includes an irreducible reference to
the perceiver within the description of the painting or poem.
It is one thing to say the scene is coherent or complete, it is
another thing to say that the spectator can, by recognizing an
analogy or by adjusting his attention in a certain way, come to see
something in the painting that could not otherwise be seen. And
it is to introduce a different kind of criterion for including some-
thing in the category of art to demand that just such demands on
our perception are characteristic of something in so jar as it is a
work of art.
In practice there are many comments on tragedies or on paint-
ings in which it is obscure whether or not a reference to the
perceptual procedures of the spectator is being made. If we say
that there is an analogy between the fate of Macbeth at the end of
the play and of Macdonwald and the old Thane of Cawdor at the
beginning, we may simply intend to describe a fact about the
subject-matter: but we may remark on this because it suggests
suggestion of Macbeth's ultimate fate in the early lines of the
play. What is crucial for the distinction I want to make is noi
whether any single comment may or may not be thought to
make a reference to mental procedures like analogizing, but thai
reference to such procedures has been used as a criterion foi
4 I N T R O D U C T I O N : T H R E E T Y P E S OF D E M A R C A T I O N
distinguishing the characteristic interest of works of art from
the interest of what they present.
Two historical points may help to clarify the distinction a little
further. When Aristotle said that poetry was more philosophical
than history (Poetics, ix, 3-5), his grounds were that there was
about a properly formed tragedy an underlying lawlikeness or
regularity in the exhibition of human character in action. For
Aristotle, as later for most rationalist and neo-classic aesthetic
theory, the 'just representation of general nature' implied that
there was an order in the nature of things which was naturally
followed and recognized by our rational minds. The 'universal'
was both something in the world, and had its correlate within
our own m i n d s . . what actual sensation apprehends is
individuals, while what knowledge apprehends is universals, and
these are in a sense within the soul' (Aristode, de Anima, ir, 5).
While you believed this, and applied this belief to the interest of
art, you were not pressed to make the distinction between the
operation of the mind and the nature of things presented to it.
A second point can also be most easily made by reference to
Aristotle (Poetics, and xi). When he recommended the reversal
of fortune and discovery as dramatic devices, we can hardly say
whether he was talking simply about how to select material
which would bring out the essential character of his subject, or
whether he was not including some suggestion that these devices
carried with them the use of dramatic irony, that as spectator and
chorus know what is going to happen, the discovery and reversal
of fortune is a resolution of the audience's own tension, a factor
which cannot be attributed to the characterization of the pro-
tagonist and his fictive world. In general, talk about how the
artist selects or disposes his material is likely to contain implicit
reference to the way the spectator is perceptually as well as
emotionally engaged, which is different from the way in which
he would be engaged in so far as he was the observer of ordinary
events.
So far I have talked about two kinds of criterion for dis-
tinguishing the ordinary interest of things from their interest in
works of art, and I have assumed that what has been under dis-
cussion is representational art. But the second kind of criterion,
that which invokes a particular kind of perceptual activity or
reference to the beholder, can be extended without difficulty to
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T H R E E T Y P E S OF D E M A R C A T I O N
'abstract' elements. Shapes and notes may take on an intere
by the way in which their combination leads us to exercise 01
perception. I do not mean that things look different or may ha^
a different interest if they are put in a different context, but th
the context may set up perceptual expectations which are fu
filled or counterpointed, the abstract elements may yield oppo
tunities for analogizing and ordering, and the components mi
be so arranged as to lead us to discover aspects of them previous
undiscriminated.
The third way in which writers on art have characterized tl
distinguishing interest that things take on when included with]
works of art is by reference to states of mind, feelings, or att
tudes, most frequently by insisting that through our ment
absorption with a work of art, we achieve an emotional equil
brium, a purging or poise or inward harmony, which we do n<
normally possess. These states are not discussed as an exclush
'aesthetic state' unrelated to the over-all scheme of our sensibilit;
Typically a special emotional attitude is invoked to bring out tl
distinction between our satisfaction in tragedy as opposed to tt
feeling we might expect to have in front of real human disaste
And in the most distinguished theoretical writing on art, em<
tional and moral states and attitudes are linked to the way speci:
exercises of perception transform our relation to the object c
feature depicted.
In separating these three ways in which writers on art ha\
set out to distinguish the interest of ordinary objects in the worl
from the interest they take on when included within a work c
art, I am not suggesting that any one way has been held to h
sufficient. Nor do I believe that any disconnected additive con
bination of such criteria would be sufficient. For we seem alwa)
to be confronted by three kinds of factorattitudes or inwar
states, exercises of perception, and the objects of attentionan
these three seem always to interact.
If we take the most obvious terms in the discussion of the art:
we tend to find each of our three factors implicated. Notions c
harmony and counterpoint would hardly be explicated adequatel
in terms simply of the auditory relation of notes, nor of thes
plus the rousing and resolving of auditory expectations, if a
emotive factors were eliminated from the terms of the analysis
Similarly, when we talk about the unity of a work of art w
& I N T R O D U C T I O N ; T H R E E T Y P E S OF D E M A R C A T I O N
may be talking about any one or any combination of our three
factors : the unity or coherence of the subject-matter, the unity
which depends upon making analogies and perceiving connec-
tions, and that unity which is discussed as freedom from inward
tension or mental equilibrium.
This is not to suggest that the critic is under an obligation to
isolate these factors and see how they interact in any particular
casealthough it is sometimes useful.6 Criticism and history are
more likely to function with terms in which each of the factors
is at work, and their particular relation implicit in the discussion.
In the chapters which follow I shall trace the ways in which
the combinations and interactions of these three factors
attitudes, operations of perception, and objectshave been
analysed and conflated, starting with Kant.
6
In two papers I have tried to connect theories which concern these demarcations with
artistic practice : 'Formal Elements and Theories of Modern Art', British Journal of
Aesthetics, vi, N o . 4, Oct. 1966, pp. 329 if. and 'Painters' Analogies and their Theories',
i'rmh 'Nineteenth Century Painting and Literature, ed. U. Finke (Manchester 1972). Both
napers use material also discussed here, but are concerned with its implication for working
artists.
II
KANT
i. The Critique of Judgement
KANT brought his elaborate image of the mind to bear on a
group of deeply entrenched traditional conceptions of art, in
particular upon those conceptions which linked the pleasure in
the work of art with knowledge and with morality.1 Traditional
art theory rested on three overlapping concepts, the 'ideal',
'harmony', and 'decorum'. The notion of the ideal was of a
perfect exemplar or instantiation of an idea, and it was applied
primarily to the idea of the human being. It was an Aristotelian
and neo-Platonic notion which was given added authority by
being identified with antique works and with certain Renaissance
masters like Raphael. As an exemplification of an idea it was an
object of knowledge, as a perfect exemplification of a human
being it was invested with moral dignity. Further, the discussion
of the ideal merges with that of the appropriate and lucid exposi-
tion of the heroic subject on the one hand2 and with notions of
proportion and the divine order of the world on the other.3
These notions not only linked beauty and the disciplines of
1
The traditions which Kant himself drew upon are discussed most valuably in Alfred
Bumler's Kants 'Kritik der Urteilskraft' (Halle 1923), vol. 1 . (Only the one volume was
published.) Reprinted as Das Irrationalittsproblem in der Aesthetik und Logik des iS. Jahr-
hunderts bis zur 'Kritik der Urteilskraft' (Tbigen 1967). See also A . Nivelle, Les Thories
esthtiques en Allemagne de 'Baumgarten Kant (Paris 1955). T h i s contains a very extensive
bibliography on Kant. Other valuable studies o f eighteenth-century theories o f the mind
relevant to Kant are : Robert Somer, Grundzge einer Geschichte der deutschen Psychologie und
Aesthetik (Wrzburg 1892), and Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy. Kant and His
Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass. 1969).
2
A s for instance in Poussin's 'Observations on Painting' in Correspondance de Nicolas Pous-
sin (Archives de l'Art Franais, N.S., vol. v , Paris 1 9 1 1 ) , pp. 492 ff., translated in E . G . Holt,
Documentary History of Art (New Y o r k 1958), ii, 144 f.; Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art,
ed. R . R . Wark (San Marino, Calif. 1959): Discourse V I , pp. 1 0 1 f. and Discourse X I I I ,
pp. 235 f. T h e link between order, decorum, and the ideal as it occurs at the beginning of
Vasari's Preface to Part Three of the Lives of the most excellent Painters, Sculptors and
Architects has particular interest, for here each of the five qualities which contribute to
beauty is made to overlap in content with the one before (Vasari, Vile, ed. Milanesi
(Florence 1879), iv, 7 f.).
3
A s in Lomazzo, cited in E . Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (Columbia 1968),
p. 145.
 g KANT
art with morality and knowledge but each of them carried strong
overtones of the others : they constituted a set of reciprocally
reinforcing metaphors in terms of which the arts, particularly
painting, could be discussed.
The traditional consensus was already being eroded in the
eighteenth century from within the traditions of art itself. The
notion of the ideal was being challenged, for instance by Diderot
in Chapter I of the Essai sur la Peinture, on the grounds that the
canon imposed by the art of the past would lack the vividness
and variety of real life. This was to be enforced by an attempt
to account for the distinctive interest of art in terms of the opera-
tion of perception. Hogarth, for instance, brings into play both
lines of argument but still from within the over-all traditional
framework.4
The problems produced by discrediting the old consensus, not
simply for Kant but for Hume5 and for Burke,6 were : first, how
4
W. Hogarth, Analysis of beauty, ed. J . Burke (Oxford 1955). The whole orientation of
the book is toward a psychological account of the satisfaction in beauty conducted in
formalist terms. 'Intricacy in form, therefore, I shall define to be that peculiarity in the
lines, which compose it, that leads the eye a wanton kind of chacc, and from the pleasure
that gives the mind, entitles it to the name of beautiful. . (p. 42). His attitude to the ideal
appears in the Autobiographical Notes at the end of the edition : " . . . I grew so profane as to
admire Nature beyond Pictures and I confess objected sometimes to the divinity of even
Raphael Urbin, Correggio and Michelangelo for which I have been severely treated . . . I
do confess I fancied I saw delicacy fin] the life so far surpassing the utmost effort of imita-
tion." Hogarth remarks that 'such as have been brought up to the old religion of pictures
love to deceive and delight in antiquity and the marvelous and what they do not understand,
but I own I have hope of succeeding a little with such as dare think for themselves and can
believe their own eyes' (pp. 209 it.).
5
'. . . a thousand different sentiments, excited by the same object are all right; because
n o sentiment represents what is really in the object. It only marks a certain conformity or
relation between the object and the organs or faculties of the mind; and if that conformity
did not exist, the sentiment could never possibly have being. Beauty is no quality in things
themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each perceives a
different beauty.' D . Hume, O f the Standard of Taste' (757) in Of the Standards of Taste
and other Essays, ed. J . W. Lenz (Library of Liberal Arts, Indianapolis and N e w Y o r k
1965), p. 6. But Hume quickly presents the other side of the paradox: 'Whoever would
assert an equality of genius and elegance between Ogilby and Milton, or Bunyan and
Addison, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained
a mole-hill to be as high as Teneriffe, or a pond as extensive as the ocean. . . . T h e principle
of the natural equality of tastes is then totally forgot' (ibid., p. 7). However, there is careful
separation of the grounds of common judgement of taste from knowledge: 'Euclid has fully
explained every quality of the circle, but has not in any proposition, said a w o r d of its
beauty. The reason is evident. Beauty is not a quality o f the circle. . . . It is only the effect,
which that figure produces upon the mind, whose particular fabric or structure renders it
susceptible to such sentiments' ('The Sceptic', ibid., p. 125).
6
Burke offers several kinds of solution to the problem of intcrsubjectivity : one by main-
taining that there are natural preferences in what is, literally, the sense of taste in the human
species, however it may become corrupted in particular people. A second, and more
KANT
was it that taste or judgement in art could be right o: wron
how could there be an intersubjectivity of judgement i art w
not a matter either of knowledge, which had the cri ;rion
truth, or of moral tightness ? Secondly, what kind of irr >ortan
could be attached to it ?
In the first part of the Critique of Judgement Kant i slated
specific satisfaction in the exercise of our perception, nd th
later in the Critique he set out to relate this satisfaction 1 > a mc
extensive picture of human attitudes and, among othe thin;
to the subject-matter of art.
But Kant's focus in the first part of the Critique of Jktdgeme
the part concerned with pure aesthetic judgements jud|
ments of taste, is not on works of art, but, as his title lugges
on kinds of judgement. And like Burke, Kant is conirned
show that the foundations of those judgements which we m
in the exercise of taste lie in a capacity shared by alf men
virtue of the nature of their minds, whether or not thef hapf
to exercise or develop that capacity. *
But the notion of a judgement of taste, as Kant interprets
is beset with two kinds of ambiguity. The first is that sometir
he appears to mean a judgement which is about an object,
which implies something about the way our minds are led
operate in appreciating the object. That is, it appears to b
judgement about an object which yet contains an irreduci
reference to the perceiving mind. Then, at the same time,
judgement of taste or aesthetic judgement is treated as if it w
simply about the experience of our mental functioning, mak
no reference to an object outside the mind.
The major problems of the Critique of Judgement are closely c
nected with this ambiguity, which derives from the very con
Kant's thought. Kant in effect makes his philosophical starti
point a notion of Vorstellung or an 'idea'. This 'idea' or exp
enee can be thought of as the interface between the experienc
mind, the subject, and something in the world, an object,
when we think of an experience in this way we assume, norm;
ingenious, concerns the interest in analogy: a mistake in the painting of a sandal
anatomy does not show a weakness in the artist's taste, but his lack of knowledge : k
ledge of sandals or anatomy is material f o r making analogies. This secondary pleasi
taste is in making the analogy, not in having more or less exact knowledge of the c
which forms one term of the analogy. (Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J . T. Boulton (London 1958), pp. 13 ff. and 18 ff.
io KANT
that the experience has an object which really is present to the
subject. Kant does not make this assumption. In fact he assumes
that the 'idea' or 'experience' is of something which is in itself
unknowable: the mere momentary 'idea' or 'experience' only
yields knowledge, indeed only takes on the character of being the
experience of an independent object, by virtue of the way our
own mind places that idea or experience in a framework of time
and space, and connecting it with other ideas, gives them the
structure of being an object with properties, causally interacting
with other objects.
Now this basic position, which is discussed in more detail
below, makes it difficult for Kant to talk unambiguously about
an object independent of our mind and to which our mind can
attend in a particular way : a way of attending to the object is
for Kant very hard to distinguish from a way of constructing the
object out of the material of experience and the activity of the
mind.
But a great deal of what Kant says does presuppose that we can
talk about an object which is independent of our mind, and about
how we attend to it. Where he is most obscure, the obscurity is
frequently to be traced to the ambiguity between attending to an
object as independent of the mind, and producing a phenomenal
object within the mind.
The second ambiguity regarding the 'judgement of taste' is
between judgement being about something, whether it is an
object or a mental procedure, and itself being constitutive of the
mental procedure. This ambiguity provides less trouble, for in
the arguments of the Critique it is rare for it to be both obscure
and important whether Kant is talking about the perception of
an object, or about the report on the perception of an object.
Kant divides aesthetic judgement into two kinds, those judge-
ments we make in saying that something is beautiful, and those
we make in saying that it is sublime. The meanings of both
beautiful and sublime take on a new force when reinterpreted
within Kant's vision of the mind. The judgement of the beautiful,
m what Kant calls a 'pure judgement of taste', is about a par-
ticular use of our minds in perception, and in the kind of satis-
faction that we take in such use (K.U., i, 203 f.). The notion of
die beautiful is stripped of most of its usual connotationslike
those of sensuous attractiveness or perfection. The sublime, in
the most general sense Kant gives the term (as at the end of the
First Introduction to the Critique of Judgement ( 12, 249 )) is
also a matter of the exercise of our minds in perception, but here
the interest and satisfaction are in the effects, or use to which we
put our perception, in particular the metaphoric use, rather than
in the exercise of perception itself. An example which gives a
distinctly Kantian twist to an earlier idea is that of the mathe-
matically sublime : if we look at a massive object which we cannot
take in all at once, our sense of our own minds being inadequate
to the situation may serve as an analogue of our basic human
situation, in which our minds can never grasp the totality of
things and are limited to the world of phenomena. And, on
Kant's view, we may take satisfaction from this mere image of
things that lie beyond the bounds of sense, because it at least
suggests a transcendent reality which we should like to believe
was really there (K.U., 23, 245 ; 26, 252).
Kant starts the 'Critique of Aesthetic Judgement' with an
analysis of the pure judgement of taste. He does not regard it
as the kind of judgement we normally make in confronting works
of art or the beautiful in nature, but as a simplified description
of a distinct species of judgement in its purity. But the pure
judgement of taste is not for Kant merely a convenient sim-
plification or ideal construct, for he regards it as corresponding
to one of a limited number of basic capacities of our minds. And
in the exercise of that faculty we gain a satisfaction which is quite
distinct from those connected with our purposes or interests.
The pure judgement of taste which issues in our saying that
something is beautiful is, in Kant's terms, a judgement of satis-
faction felt in the harmonious play of our faculties as we contem-
plate something present to our senses (K.U., Introd., vrr, p. 190,
9, 218; First Introd., 8, 223). In saying that something is
beautiful we do not commit ourselves to saying anything else about
it besides relating it to ourselves, our own mental functioning.
The judgement, in Kant's phrase, does not include the object,
that is, does not describe the object (.K.U., 8, 215).
But although this judgement does not describe the object,
it does not merely register a private reaction to it, for it makes the
claim that anyone should find it satisfying. The link between the
object and human satisfaction is not contingent on who does
the judging (.K.U., 6 and 7).

KANT
Someone may fail to find the presentation of the object satis-
fyingso the implication of our judgement will runbut this
must be because some impurity, some prejudice, some mistake
has vitiated the dissenter's judgement, provided that our original
judgement was true. Just as someone may get an addition sum
wrong, but we would still say the right answer was valid for all
men (K.U. 8, 216).
Kant is not only concerned to define the claim of the pure
judgement of taste, he also holds that we have the right to make
such judgementseven though we can never prove any particular
one.
This claim to intersubjective validity is based by Kant on the
assumption that we may distinguish the cognitive procedures of
the mind valid for all men, from mere variable personal reactions
which we have as mere creatures of sensuality and appetite. The
intersubjectivity of the pure judgement of taste is to be based on
an assumed invariant characteristic of the mind, the relation of
our faculties of understanding and imagination. This appears
guaranteed because, for Kant, the relation is a necessary mental
condition of communicable knowledge itself, and that there is
such inter subjectively communicable knowledge is a presupposi-
tion from which Kant's philosophy starts (K.U., Note to 38;
21, 238).
ii. The Harmony of the Facuities
When Kant considers the interplay of the faculties as the founda-
tion of the pure judgement of taste, he is pointing to the mind's
capacity to unify or order its experience and to its satisfaction in
doing so. The notions he is employing had been developed in the
Critique of Pure Reason, where they had been treated in two
different ways, and we need to go back to both in order to follow
Kant's lines of argument in the Critique ofJudgement, particularly to
see where those lines get crossed.
In the 'Transcendental Deduction' in the first Critique Kant's
general aim was to show how our experience of the world comes
to exhibit unity and interrelatednessboth our experience at
any one moment and our life as a whole. The subject of the
'Transcendental Deduction' is the unity of our experience.
For Kant there was a problem about how our experience
comes to be unified, because he assumed that the starting point
for the discussion of our experience is the positing of discrete
fragmentary experiences or sensations. What he sets out to do
is to show what must be presupposed before a multiplicity of
discrete sensations or experiences can be regarded as linked
together in some one personal biography, or how such a multi-
plicity could appear to manifest a stable object or world of
objects interrelated by laws of cause and effect.
There are two main ways in which Kant considers the unifica-
tion of experience : the first, which examines what we presuppose
when we say our experience is unified, and the second, which
considers what powers of the mind must be posited in order to
produce such unity.
When discussing presuppositions of a unified experience he
points out that to appreciate a multiplicity we must already have
some conception of unity or aim to achieve unity (K.R.V.,
130 f.) ; furthermore, we must be in a position to survey the parts
or consider them within one framework, for otherwise we would
not be aware of the multiplicity as a multiplicity, there would
merely be discrete fragments of experience, neither unified objects
of experience nor the unity of the biography of a subject. But
Kant talks about what is presupposed when we consider experience
containing stable objects and biographical coherence at the same
time as talking about the formative powers of the mind operating
in experience to produce coherence. In talking about presupposi-
tions, Kant would be making no commitment as to the source of
unity, only maintaining that experience properly so called must
have certain kinds of unity. But when he talks about the forma-
tive powers of the mind he makes unity proceed from the mind
and from the mind alone.
Unity conceived in this second way is the result of combina-
tion, and combination is what the mind does with the raw
material of sensibility or sensation. Unity or order are not some-
thing that in Kant's view could be provided by the material
presented to the mind, but only something the mind itself imparts.
The mind in its character of the power of combination is the
'transcendental apperception' : and it operates both through the
faculties of imagination and understanding.
One difficulty here is that he seems to make it impossible
for us to have any experience at all that it is not unified, and
therefore there does not seem to be any special area within our
 iti KANT
experience which should give us particular satisfaction by virtue
of being unified, which is what is implied in the judgement of
tarte. For, on this view, the mind simply imposes unity. Nor does
Kant m any serious way mitigate the difficulty by talking about
the harmony of understanding and imagination instead of about
unity, The same difficulty recurs when he talks about the relation
of the faculties of understanding and imagination, as can be seen
in the following passage of the 'Transcendental Deduction' :
B u t appearances are only the representations of things which are un-
known as regards what they may be in themselves. A s mere repre-
sentations, they are subject to no law of connection save that which the
connecting faculty prescribes. N o w it is imagination that connects
the manifold of sensible intuition; and imagination is dependent f o r
the unity of its synthesis upon the understanding, and f o r the manifold-
ness of its apprehension upon sensibility ( K . R . l^., B164).
If imagination is dependent for its synthesis upon the under-
standing, and the imagination by its very nature has to produce
this synthesis, how can the product of the imagination fail to be
'in conformity with the demands of the understanding', with the
demand for unity? Has Kant left any sense to distinguishing
between those experiences in which imagination and under-
standing are in harmony and those in which they are not
between experiences which exhibit unity and those which do not ?
(In the Critique of Judgement itself he refers to harmony of the
faculties of imagination and understanding as 'requisite for
every empirica] cognition' (K.U., Introd., vir, 191).)
But there is an alternative and competing view regarding the
unity of experience in Kant's vision of the mind.7 According to
this, the mind does not impose unity on its contents, but seeks
unity between objects presented to it, and it is this perspective
which is central to the Critique of judgement, although the view
that unity proceeds exclusively from the action of the mind
plays an important role in the Critique, accounting for most of its
difficulties.
The conflict of these two views of order or unity is not
7
The tension between these two aspects of Kant's view o f the mind is discussed most
pertinently for the purposes of the Critique of Judgement by Gerd Buchdahl in 'The Relation
between "Understanding" and " R e a s o n " in the Architectonic of K a n t ' s Philosophy' in
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Ixvii (i 967), 209 ff., and in far greater detail and a broader
context in his chapter on Kant in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (Oxford 1969),
pp. 490- 5 1 2 and 641 ff. See also P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London 1966), par-
ticularly pp. 33-6, 85 ff.
KANT 15
exclusive to Kant's aesthetics but runs through his theory of the
mind. For instance, on causal laws he appears to say that the
sensibility, or the world of appearance, supplies the raw material.
And to combinations of this material the a priori 'rule in general'
imparts some kind of necessity.8 On the other hand, Kant does
not allow that it prescribes particular laws or concepts. But how
could the mind impart necessity to the combinations in the world
of experience except through imposing particular laws? How
could the rule in general give necessity to combinations if the com-
binations were not themselves necessary? If we are not prepared
to concede so much to the a priori power of the mind, we must
assume that lawlikeness in experience depends not only on the
mind but upon the material upon which it works, not only on
what the mind projects but what it searches for and finds.
And it is the search for system, for relations between
representations that we must assume to be implied by Kant in his
conception of the harmony of the faculties in aesthetic judgement.
The view of the mind searching for unity or system among the
features of experience is developed in the later part of the Critique
of Pure Reason, particularly in the section called the 'Regulative
Employment of the Ideas of Pure Reason' (K.R. V., A643 if.;
A677; A680-3 : see also A306). The idea of system is not for
Kant constitutive of experience (necessarily injected into ex-
perience) at least from the point of view developed here. It is
an idea or ideal with which we compare experience, and which
leads us to organize its components and make fresh discoveries.
It prompts the search for unity and completeness, for continuities
through discrete laws or classifications for the purpose of pro-
ducing more general principles of ordering, and from any giver
starting-point leads us to seek more extended chains of explana-
tion or chains of consequences.
This search for order and comprehensiveness among the
products of the understanding is made analogous to the relatior
of understanding and sensibility :
J u s t as the understanding unifies the manifold in the object by mean;
of concepts, so reason unifies the manifold concepts by means of ideas
8
' E v e n natural laws, viewed as principles o f the empirical employment of the under
standing, carry with them the expression of necessity, and so contain at least the suggestioi
of a determination from grounds which are valid a priori and antecedently to all experience
. . . These principles supply the concept which contains the condition, and as it wer
exponent, of a rule in general' (K.R. V., B198).
 KANT
positing a certain collective unity as the goal of the activities of the
understanding . . . (K.R.V., B 6 7 1 f.).
and later :
The understanding is an object f o r reason, just as sensibility is f o r
the understanding. It is the business of reason to render the unity of
all possible empirical facts of the understanding systematic; just as it
is of the understanding to connect the manifold o f the appearances
bv means of concepts, and bring it under empirical laws (K.R.V.,
B692).
The connection recurs implicitly in the First Introduction to the
Critique of Judgement, where Kant runs a parallel between reflec-
tive aesthetic judgement and reflective teleological judgements
of nature in the last two paragraphs of 7. But the judgement
of taste, as we shall see, does not go quite so far as to connect
the manifold of appearances by means of a concept; its con-
nections are made by forming analogies between the components
of the manifold.
What is gained by talking of the grounds of satisfaction in the
pure judgement of taste as the harmony of the faculties rather
than multiplicity in unity? Kant appears to justify this way of
talking by his insistence that between multiplicity in unity on the
one hand, and satisfaction on the other, there is no necessary
connectionto refer to one is not logically to imply the other.
To give a description of something is never a sufficient condition
of something being satisfying for perception. The test of satis-
faction is always an appeal to a perceptual encounter, to our
sense of our minds at work (First Introd.., 8, 226; K.U., 6,
211, 8, 216). But even so, it would be more readily intelligible
to talk of the harmony between the mind and the object of
perception. Kant's elaborate model of the harmony of the facul-
ties seems a way of talking about the mind's recognition of
the unity exhibited in an object, but talking about it in a way
which does not admit that the 'unity' may lie in the object, or in
the sensory material as caused in the mind from without.9
9
The refusal to admit this lies at the root of several different kinds of discussion of Kant.
First there are those, like the nineteenth-century philosopher Robert Zimmermann, w h o
bluntly ask what it is that is beautiful if not that upon which our mental powers are
exercised. (Zimroermarm's own position is that of Herbart discussed in Ch. V , see par-
ticularly pp. 61 tf. Robert Zimmermann, Aesthetik, Enter Theil: Geschichte der Aesthetik als
philosophischer Wissenschaft (Vienna 1858), pp. 4 1 1 ff.).
There are those who have exploited the subjectivism illegitimately: a contemporary,
Kant has a fundamental difficulty about the presence of stable
objects outside the mind, and about such objects possessing
order or unity, but he discusses the crucial questions of the third
Critique as if he can talk about them. To follow what is interesting
in what he says we have to hold in mind that he believed he had
given an account of experience of external objects and at the
same time that his exposition in the 'Critique of Aesthetic Judge-
ment' is constrained by his assumptions about what is involved
in that externality.
iii. lntersubjectivitj
Kant assumes that in the judgement of taste we search for order
among the components of perception, and gain satisfaction in
its discovery. But whether we regard satisfaction in the unifi-
ability of the manifold in terms of the relation of faculties or of
the relation of the mind to an object, the claim that such judge-
ments of taste could in principle be intersubjectively valid might
be thought problematic.
It has, for instance, been argued that some people prefer a
more unifiable configuration and some a less unifiable one.10
This argument assumes that Kant's pure judgement of taste is
a matter of grading. But for Kant's position it is enough to assume
that there is a kind of satisfaction which is obtained by being
able to unify features which present themselves as discrete or
unconnected:11 that we are able to experience a process of syn-
thesizing or relating or analogizing and that the successful
achievement of this provides satisfaction.
Robert L . Zimmerman, holds that Kant makes the aesthetic judgement a judgement of the
undistorted 'real "in-itself" world', because it avoids tampering with pure experience in
a way which turns it into objects of external reality. Robert L . Zimmerman, ' K a n t : the
Aesthetic Judgement', in Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R . P. Wolff (London
1968), pp. 386-9. This criticismis misleading, apart from anything else, for eliding the pure
judgement of taste with the intimations of the supersensible or noumenal world which
for Kant belongs to the sublime. It thus projects on to K a n t a rather Schopenhauerian
position.
10
This was argued by R . K . Elliott, 'Kant's "Critique of Judgement" British Journal
of Aesthetics, viii (1968), 244 if.
11
See First Introd,, 227; in a note to 8 on types of judgement: 'In general it can be said
that w e must never think that we can specifically differentiate by means of a quality which is
transformed into another merely by increase or decrease of degree.'
9200343 C
 iti K A N T
A more serious argument against Kant's position, but also
a defence, may be developed along lines which were already
formulated in the eighteenth century : what one mind may find
satisfying another may find too easy and so gain no satisfaction
at all. And what the more developed mind may find satisfying
the less may find ungraspable and phantasmagoric.12 In any par-
ticular case, then, we may be more or less capable or more or less
familiar with the components of the configuration or the mode
of their relation, and so may find the configuration more or less
graspable, depending on the condition and endowment of our
mind.
What is needed to underwrite the pure judgement of taste, it
may be argued, is some guarantee of a uniformity between our
minds in some relevant respect. Kant makes at least two remarks
which suggest his view on the subject. In the published (second)
introduction he considers the discovery of unifiability of laws or
species into a more comprehensive system in science, and admits
that because the exercise of systems of genera and species may
become so habitual and familiar, we may lose the sense of pleasure
in the unifiability. He insists, nevertheless, that it must have
been there. 'Still it is certain that the pleasure appeared in due
course, and only by reason of the most ordinary experience
12
A r g u i n g against the view that beauty is a matter of obscurity and by implication
irrational feeling, Moses Mendelssohn writes : '. . . only our [mental] frailty makes obscure
perception a necessary vehicle of the joy [of beauty] because within the capacity of the
human mind [Seele] clarity and profusion of concepts cannot coexist. A feeling of obscurity
in itself holds no charm. A n d beings that can grasp a greater multiplicity with clarity are
that much more fortunate, because the objects can have a more vivid effect.' 'ber die
Empfindung', Vierter Brief, in Gesammelte Schriften (Jubilumsausgabe, Berlin 1929), i. 247.
While Mendelssohn is not here specifically concerned with intersubjcctivity, this and the
next le!ter presuppose different levels of perception. Regarding merely sensory beauty
he writes : 'We grow weary when our senses have to follow too elaborate an order. Beings
that are gifted with sharper senses, must find in our beauty disagreeable unity, and what
tires us would afford them pleasure' (ibid., p. 251).
Burke wrote : ' N o w as the pleasure o f resemblance is that which principally flatters the
imagination, all men are nearly equal in this point, as far as their knowledge of the things
represented or compared extends. The principle of this knowledge is very much accidental,
as it depends upon experience and observation, and not on the strength or weakness of the
natural faculty, and it is f r o m this difference in knowledge that what we commonly, though
ir ih no great exactness, call a difference in Taste proceeds.' The Sublime and the Beautiful,
eu. J . T . Boulton (London 1958), p. 18 (my italics).
Burke goes on, with elaborate examples, to distinguish between those judgements o f the
excellences of a w o r k of art based on knowledge of the subject represented, and those judge-
ments based on the power of making analogy. H e also distinguishes, as a ground for
disagreement in judging works of art, the difference between those with more experience
or imitations of a certain kind and those with less, those with less experience being delighted
by relatively crude analogies.
KANT 19
being impossible without it . . . no longer arrests particular
attention' (K.U., Introd., vi, 187). And Kant amplifies the
point by referring to the sense of displeasure we would have if
we felt that nature as a whole was not amenable to unification
(ibid. 188).
If we extend this across to aesthetic judgement we may suppose
at least that Kant is indicating a type of judgement in which
we take pleasure, although whether any particular person is in
the right position to take satisfaction in a particular case may
always be open to doubt. A point in the 'Analytic of the Beauti-
ful' at which Kant shows himself aware of the contingencies of
the relation between the situation of the person judging and the
object judged is where he recommends that models of literary
taste should be in classical languages. The argument for this is
that in living languages noble expressions become flat, common
ones antiquated, and grammar lacks stability : that is, a reader's
relation to a formulation is subject to alteration by virtue of his
historical situation in so far as the formulation is in his own living
language (K.U., 17, Note 1). Clearly here Kant has more in
mind than ease of unifying the manifold, but the passage indi-
cates Kant's awareness of the situation of the person judging in
aesthetic judgements as well as of scientific 'reflective' judge-
ments.
In claiming that the pure judgement of taste is valid for all
men, we would not be saying that all men would in fact take
pleasure in this particular configuration, but that all men would
take pleasure in this configuration if they started from a similar
level of familiarity with the components and the mode of their
combination.
This might be thought to have radically weakened the claim
to intersubjective communicability of the pure judgement of
taste. For in what sense is it not contingent upon who does the
judging ? On behalf of Kant one can reply that it is not contingent
in this sense : it is not contingent upon the tastes or inclinations
which vary from one man to the next. The mode or type of
pleasure of unifying a manifold is common to all men, but in
any particular instance whether there appears to be a multiplicity
to unify or whether we can achieve this unity will depend upon
the chances of our mental development or experience. The
unification may pass unnoticed because we have already in the
iti KANT
past achieved this feat of connecting (or similar feats) which we
now perform at a glance. Or we may fail to gain the satisfaction
because we have not gained sufficient familiarity with the com-
ponents or sufficient exercise in the procedures of combination.
What remains as inter subjective and necessary is the possibility
of satisfaction in the perception of order in a multiplicity of
features. It will always be contingent whether any one person
is in a position to perceive that order with respect to any given
configuration.
This argument has been sustained on the basis of two assump-
tions: that all men are susceptible to this satisfaction; and
that what would be intersubjectively communicable would
be a satisfaction in ordering that can be separated from the
satisfaction or interest in the terms ordered.
Kant sought an a priori principle for judgements of beauty
as he did for the teleologica! assumptions of science and the
assumption of the systematicity of nature. The order of art and
the order of nature were two things which traditional theory had
linked. By basing the judgement of beauty on the experience of
the operation of our minds in perception, Kant is able to retain
the link between beauty and the order of the universe, and yet
make the distinction which earlier theory had failed to produce
between the pursuit of knowledge through analogy and the search
for system, and pleasure in analogizing or finding system (K.U.,
6, 2i and 15, 227-8). And he is able to do this without
making our response to beauty merely pathological.13
13
Lotze challenged the view that there are not intersubjective norms for ordinary
perception and (he infers) f o r the charming as well, since we have criteria f o r the proper
functioning of the senses as w e do for judgement. Therefore, he argues, intersubjectivity
cannot be the criterion for distinguishing the charming from the beautiful. The real force
of the distinction if we read between the lines, he says, lies in the fact that we evaluate by
different criteria, on the one hand the sensory o r sensuous (Sinnlichkeit), with regard to
which we are the passive recipients of impressions. On the other hand, in judgement we are
active in relating the manifold. {Geschichte der Aesthetik in Deutschland (Munich 1868),
pp. 5 3 f.) Necessary intersubjective communicability for Kant must stem from something
essential to our rational humanity. F o r Kant any other kind o f intersubjectivity would be
psychologically contingent.
Robert Zimmermann earlier had objected that the satisfaction of the harmony of the
faculties had no special claim to being universal and part of reason rather than one of our
personally variable utges. (Aesthetik, Erster Theil: Geschichte der Aesthetik als philosophischer
Wissenschaft (Vienna 1858), pp. 408 f.) But there is a sense in which our pursuit of order or
unity of experience has a special role in our mental life, whether or not w e subscribe to the
dichotomy of rational and appetitive parts of human nature, and it was particularly so with
Zimmermann. Zimmermann is here really objecting to the dichotomy, wanting to replace it
with the Herbartian conception of the mind discussed below in Ch. V .
KANT 21
iv. The Exclusion of Recognition from the Pure Judgement of
Taste
Kant separates the interest of ordering (or, in his terms, the
satisfaction of the harmonious interplay of our faculties) from
the interest in the terms ordered or the interest of the configura-
tion into which they are ordered. These separations appear to
depend upon the traditional dichotomy between rationality,
presumed the same in all men, and appetites which vary from
one man to the next, and upon Kant's own model of mental
operations. But the main conclusion does not depend upon
elaborate premisses, but upon economical and common-
sensical distinctions. I shall discuss the more problematic
arguments because they contain some of the most influential and
suggestive passages in the Critique, and they contribute to the
understanding of positions to be discussed later. But it is con-
venient to start with the relatively simple account.
Kant accepts a traditional distinction between satisfactions of
sensation and appetite, which are personally variable, and rational
satisfactions which are universal to all men as men. And it is
assumed that the judgement of taste is of the universal type.
Kant thinks that satisfaction in the material of sensation is
distinguishable from the satisfaction we take in ordering such
sensory material (K.U., 14, 224).
The force of the thesis does not, however, rest simply on the
assumption that the material of the senses provides us with mere
gratifications, while the sense of order provides us with some-
thing better. For it might be argued in a perfectly serious way
that perceiving analogiesor any process of relating that we do
simply by virtue of this capacity of our mindshas an interest
which can be distinguished from the interest in the terms related.
It does not matter whether the terms related are sounds or
colours, figures of human beings or trees; the satisfaction in
making analogies or in unifying in some other way may be
thought to be something distinguishable from the interest of the
elements related.
A similarly economical argument can be formulated which
would distinguish the interest of ordering from the interest of
the form or concept into which a multiplicity is ordered. For our
interest in the pure judgement of taste may be regarded as an
22 KANT
interest in the exercise of our minds in unifying the manifold,
and the interest of whatever concept Ave may happen to use in
gathering the manifold as outside that interest. From the point
of view of the interest in ordering, or in the harmony of the
faculties, it would not matter whether we resolved the multi-
plicity into the configuration of a house or a horse. Where we
simply reflect upon an object, enjoying the way the imagination
and the understanding harmonize, and we are not concerned to
produce a concept of the object, the judgement is an aesthetic
reflective judgement (First Introd., 7, 221). This argument
would be enough to separate the interest attached to the concepts
employed in the process of ordering from the interest of the
ordering, and so from the interest of the pure judgement of taste.
But Kant is to suggest a more extreme position, and to elimi-
nate not only the interest of concepts from the interest of the
pure judgement of taste, but to eliminate the use of concepts
in the pure judgement of taste. On this view judgements of
taste would not employ concepts like those of man, or tree, or
horse, but simply consider the formal 'play of the mind' while
it contemplates an object. Clearly, in present-day terms, the
mind must employ some concepts, even if it does not use con-
cepts like man or tree or horse : it must individuate shapes or
tones and so on, and this might be said to be using shape con-
cepts or tone concepts. But what Kant means by not employing
concepts is not employing concepts which in some sense 'go
beyond' the pure sensory determination of things and lead us to
classify the things of the world as objects of a certain kind. By
objects of a certain kind Kant seems to mean, paradigmatically,
botanical or biological kinds on the one hand and artefacts for
which there was a design or purpose on the other. At the very
least they characterize objects in space and time which involve
the mind (the understanding) in unifying a number of parts or
qualities in accordance with some rule.
His view that we do not use such concepts in the pure
judgement of taste follows from, or is supported by, arguments
employing the notion of purposiveness or finality. Kant has
a number of notions of purposiveness. Among them is that of
an objective purposiveness which we feel the need to posit in
order to explain how something with as many reciprocally inter-
related parts as an animal could come into being, for unless we
KAJNT
assume that the various parts grew in accordance with some
prearranged end we would find it incomprehensible how this
reciprocal adaption could have come about (K.U., 66, 376-7).
(It might have come about by the chance interaction of many
factors but it is subjectively more natural to assume that it did
not.) And objective purposiveness enters into our judgement in
a further way : when we posit some concept of what a thing
should be and judge whether it has fulfilled the criterion. In one
case we posit a concept of an end in order to explain how some-
thing came about, in the other we posit it in order to judge
whether a thing is good or good of its kind (K.U., 15, 226).
But Kant has another concept of purposiveness, that of sub-
jective purposiveness, and we attribute that to some object when
it seems suited to our processes of perception, as in our pure
judgement of taste. This he sees as incompatible with objective
purposiveness. But how does he see them as coming into
collision? And why does this lead him to eliminate the use of
concepts from the pure judgement of taste? The crux of the
matter is the way in which Kant sees objective purposiveness
bound up with our ordinary use of concepts.
The most convenient way of following the arguments is tc
watch Kant examining the distinction between a pure judgemem
of taste and judgement of decorum or appropriateness (K.U.
16). He starts by distinguishing what he calls free beauty fron
what he calls dependent beauty. As paradigms of free beauty hi
cites
. . . delineations la grecque, foliage or borders of wall paper [which
mean nothing in themselves; they represent nothing, no object unde
a definite conceptthey are free beauties. W e can refer to the sam
class what are called in music fantasies (without a theme), indeed a
music without a verbal text (K.U., 1 6 , 229).
What he is distinguishing free beauty from is the beauty whic
involves the idea of decorum or suitability to purpose :
T h e beauty o f a man . . . a building or a horse presuppose a conce}
of the end that defines that thing. . . . M u c h might be added to
building that w o u l d immediately please the eye, were it not intendi
f o r a church. A figure might be beautiful with all manner of elaboratioi
and light but regular lines, as is done by N e w Zealanders with the
iti KANT
tattooing, were we dealing with anything but human figures . . . ( K . U . ,
16, 230).
Here Kant's argument is that certain concepts, certain kinds of
thing, have attached to them a demand for decorum, that is
appropriateness to their function or ideal. And this demand is
seen as limiting the freedom of formal elaboration. But this
would seem only to show that in certain cases it would be diffi-
cult to consider something simply as an object of a pure judge-
ment of taste, because questions of ideals or purposes would
intrude.
In fact, Kant holds that 'strictly speaking, perfection neither
gains by beauty, nor beauty by perfection' (K.U., 16, 231).
But in that case, surely, the judgement of beauty would not be
able to lose from being unsupported by a judgement of perfec-
tion, or even weakened by a judgement of imperfection.
The two kinds of judgement have different criteria. But Kant
clearly had more in mind when distinguishing free from depen-
dent beauty. Between the two passages I have so far quoted there
is the following:
In the estimate of a free beauty (according to mere form) we have
the pure judgement of taste. N o concept is here pre-supposed of any
end for which the manifold should serve the given object, and which
the latter therefore should representan incumbrance which would
only restrict the freedom of the imagination that, as it were, is at play
in contemplation of the outward form.
But why should Kant (a) regard a perceptual judgement in
which, for instance, we saw a number of forms as making up
a figure of a man, as incompatible with a sense of satisfaction in
the employment of our minds, and (b) regard it as becoming a
judgement of perfectionof approval ?
A judgement of perfection involves relating a whole object
to a concept of what it should be, but the appreciation of the way
a number of patches resolve into the figure of a man or the way
we see a number of forms interplay within the figure of a man
as in the articulation of his musculatureis to see the relation
between the parts and the whole.
There are thus two confusions of which Kant seems guilty:
first, he conflates the relation of part to part in the manifold in
intuition with the relation of the whole collection of parts to a
KANT 25
concept. Secondly, he conflates coordinating successfully the
manifold in intuition with a concept, i.e. recognition, with
taking satisfaction in the thing being perfect of its kind.
One aspect of Kant's thought certainly suggests both such
conflations. Kant talks as if the application of a concept to a
manifold was itself like the application of a criterion of what
that manifold should be :
So to represent the objective finality of a thing, we must first have
a concept of what sort of thing it is to be. The agreement of the mani-
fold (which supplies the rules of its synthesis) is the qualitative per-
fection of the thing (K.U., 15, 227).
For Kant the employment of a concept like man or horse or tree
in a judgement of what the thing should be is not clearly dis-
tinguishable from its employment in simply recognizing it as
a man or tree. The concept is both a criterion of what the thing
should be and the rule of its synthesis, i.e. constitutive of what
it is. The concept is treated as a rule of combination of 'repre-
sentations' : it is a manifestation of the active mind ordering its
objects. The mind is seen as making demands on the representa-
tions, and this makes the constitutive concepts of experience into
rules to which these independent objects (the representations)
are made to conform.
However, it is possible to read these sections (K.U., 15 and
16) in a way which avoids these difficulties.
What makes the unity of the manifold possible is the fact that
the parts share a common characteristic; we may be aware of
this but not move on to the stage at which we abstract or isolate
the concept of what is shared. The similarity (albeit incomplete)
may also be between the manifold in intuition and the usual or
clear instance of a concept, and here too we may rest at the stage
of comparing the two, without abstracting the common property
and disregarding the rest.
Read in this way, Kant would not have conflated the relation
between the whole object and the concept with which it is to be
compared, and the relation between parts of the object; for, if
the section is understood in this way, both the relation of parts
to each other, and the relation of the collection of parts to the
concept to be applied to it, would be seen as entertained in
reflection without abstracting the similarity in either case. Read in

KANT
this way the introduction of 'foliage la grecque' may be taken as
a paradigm case for alerting us to the experience of suspending
our procedures of coming to a conclusion, categorically classify-
ing something with a concept, 'an incumbrance on the free play
of the imagination'.
That Kant thought in terms of such stages in the development
of a concept is made clear by the way such unification is discussed
in his Logic.
The source of concepts with respect to their mere f o r m rests on
reflection and on the abstraction of the distinction of things which are
indicated b y a certain idea. T h u s the question arises here : what acts of
the understanding constitute a concept, or what is the same thing,
what belongs to the production of a concept f r o m [a number o f ] given
ideas? {Logik, 5, 93).
Thus Kant seems to allow some intermediate stage between
reflection on things already distinguished which are seen to have
something in common, and abstracting the concept of what they
have in common. 14
This is enforced by his account of the distinction between
perceptual or aesthetic distinctness and logical distinctness in
the introduction to the Logic.
We must first of all distinguish logical distinctness from aesthetic.
T h e logical rests on the objective, the aesthetic on the subjective clarity
of characteristics. T h e former is clarity through concepts, the latter
a clarity through intuition. T h e latter kind of distinctness, therefore,
resides simply in vividness and intelligibility [Verstndlichkeit], that is,
m a mere clarity through examples in concreto, (for much can be intel-
ligible which is not certain, and the other w a y round, much can be
certain which is hard to understand because it depends upon remote
characteristics, which can be connected to perception [Anschauung] only
by a long series of links).
Objective distinctness is often subjective obscurity and vice versa.
Thus it can happen that logical certainty is not seldom to the dis-
advantage of the aesthetic. Conversely, the aesthetic certainty is
often obtained through examples and similes which do not correspond
closely enough, but are simply taken f r o m analogy, which is dis-
advantageous to logical distinctness. Further, examples in general are
14
The connection between these sections of the Logic and the Critique of judgement was
discussed by Walter Biemel, Dis Bedeutung von Kants Begrndung der Aesthetik fr die Vhilo-
s'/phie der Kunst (Kantstudien, Ergnzungshefte, lxxvii, Cologne 1959), pp. 13 ff.
KANT 27
not characteristics, but merely perceptions [Anschauungen] for the use
of concepts (Logik, Introd., VIII, 62).
Here Kant acknowledges that sustaining analogies in percep-
tion is different from the conceptual distinctness at which logical
judgement aims, although such sustaining of analogies may be
one stage in the production of a logical judgement.
On this view Kant would be allowing that among the over-all
configurations made up were those which formed themselves by
analogy with clear instances of our ordinary concepts, and
cases where we employed ordinary concepts constitutively in
perceiving the components of a configuration. This view is
developed in the discussion of 'aesthetic ideas' in the 'Deduction
of Aesthetic Judgement'.
v. Relation between the Pure Judgement of Taste
and 'Aesthetic Ideas'
The 'Critique of Aesthetic Judgement'is divided up in two ways :
first there is the division between the analysis of judgements of
beauty and the analysis of judgements of sublimity; the first
being the judgements which we found satisfying by virtue of the
way we exercised our perception, or, in Kant's terms, the way
we experienced the harmonious play of imagination and under-
standing; the second being the judgements we found satisfying
not by virtue of the experience of our perceptual activity, but
by virtue of the effects of that perceptual activity. But there is
another division within the 'Critique' : that between the 'Analysis
of the Pure Judgement of Taste' on the one hand, and the
'Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgements' on the other.
What Kant includes in his Deduction is puzzling. He admits
that the 'Exposition we gave of the judgements on the sublime
in nature was at the same time their Deduction' ('K.U., 30,
280), that is, the demonstration of how they were derived from
a higher principle. In fact the 'Deduction of Pure Aesthetic
Judgements' (K.U., 30-42) does not seem to add in any
essential way to the 'Analytic of the Beautiful'. We seem to come
then to a new section, an application of the previously considered
ideas to the discussion of art. The crucial sections within this
part of the 'Critique' are those on 'aesthetic ideas'. It is here
that Kant comes to answer the second basic question opened up
iti
KANT
by the breakdown of traditional art theory: What was the
importance of art ? And this is answered by reference to its role
in giving us an intimation of our moral situation :
Where fine arts are not, either immediately or remotely, brought into
combination with moral ideas, which alone are attended with self-
sufficient delight, the fate that ultimately awaits them . . .
is that they 'leave nothing behind them with respect to ideas,
and render the soul dull, the object in the course of time distaste-
ful, and the mind dissatisfied with itself' (K.U., 52, 326).
Here Kant fills in his account of the perceptual operations
involved in the pure judgement of taste and brings out the
relation between such exercises of perception and both the
subject-matter on which they are exercised, and our moral and
emotional purposes. (Hence, presumably, its inclusion in the
'Analytic of the Sublime'.)
T h e c r u c i a l p a s s a g e o n aesthetic ideas starts :
. . . by an aesthetic idea I mean that representation of the imagination
which induces much thought, yet without the possibility of any definite
thought whatever, i.e. concept, being adequate to it, and which language,
consequently, can never get quite on level terms with or render com-
pletely intelligible. It is easily seen that an aesthetic idea is the counter-
part (pendant) of a rational idea, which, conversely, is a concept, to
which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate
(K.U., 49, 314).
What Kant is saying in this paragraph does perhaps become
clearer when put in the context of earlier writing which seems
to have influenced the way that he has formulated his points.
There is first of all the parallel with Burke's comments on
clearness and obscurity, for instance his remark on Milton's
description of Satan :
Here is a very noble picture : in what does the poetical picture con-
sist? in images of a tower, an archangel, the sun rising through the
mists, or in an eclipse, the ruin of monarchs, and the revolutions of
kingdoms. T h e mind is hurried out of itself, by a c r o w d of great and
confused images; with effect because they are crowded and confused. 1 5
But Kant talks about the adequacy of concepts to representa-
tions of the imagination and the converse of this, the adequacy
of representations of the imagination to concepts. This for-
15
The Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. J . T . Boulton (London 1958), p. 62.
KANT 29
mulation suggests he had in mind Leibniz's essay 'Reflections
on Truth, Knowledge and Ideas'. Here Leibniz points to the
way we can use a word without simultaneously holding before
our minds all the implications of the meaning of the word. In
this way intuition or mental representation falls short of the
concept we are entertaining. There is then the case in which we
recognize what is present to our perception but do not have
in our minds a defined concept or definition which would specify
by what marks we distinguish this thing from otherswe
recognize but have no discursive account of what enables us to
do so 16 .
But for Kant, in the discussion of 'aesthetic ideas', the rational
ideas are those for which no intuition could possibly be adequate
they are concepts of what lies beyond the bounds of possible
experience. The intuitions or presentations of the imagination,
in their turn, are specially selected or arranged so as to avoid or
prevent distinct conceptual definition, and by so doing could
serve to intimate the transcendence of those ideas they were
illustrating.
Such representations of the imagination may be termed ideas. This
is partly because they at least strain after something lying out beyond
the confines of experience, and so seek to approximate to a presentation
of rational concepts (i.e., intellectual ideas), thus giving to these con-
cepts the semblance of an objective reality. But, on the other hand,
there is this most important reason, that no concept can be wholly
adequate to them as internal intuitions. The poet essays the task of
interpreting to sense the rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom,
of the blessed, hell, eternity, creation, & c . Or, again, as to things of
which examples occur in experience, e.g. death, envy, and all vices,
as also love, fame and the like, transgressing the limits of experience
he attempts with the aid of an imagination which emulates the display
of reason in its attainment of a maximum, to body them forth to sense
with a completeness of which nature affords no parallel; and it is in
fact precisely in the poetic art that the faculty of aesthetic ideas can
show itself to full advantage ( K . U . , 49, 314).
What relation have these 'aesthetic ideas' to the pure judgement
of taste ? Kant sees these aesthetic ideas as brought about by the
spontaneous play of the imagination and explicitly excludes mere
association of ideas. This clearly conforms to the notion of the
16
Monadologe and other Philosophical Essays, translated by P. and A. M . Schrecker (Library
of Liberal Arts, Indianapolis and New Y o r k 1965), pp. 4 f.
iti KANT
freedom of the imagination in the pure judgement of taste (cf.
K.U., 'General Remark on the First Section of the Analytic',
240-1). But he talks of this play of the mind as following
principles 'which have a higher seat in reason' and this is not
something which is contained in the analysis of the pure judge-
ment of taste. Reason might at first sight be understood in any
of three senses : first in the sense of a moral idea, secondly as
reason in its regulative employmentin the search for order or
analogy, thirdly as the idea of a maximum. The range of possible
senses does not really present us with a dilemma, for the context
makes it plain that the searcii for system is involved, but that
the search itself is conceived also as a search for an ungraspable
totality; and this in turn takes on intimations of the moral and
supersensible.
But the search for system is here characterized in a manner
which is unlike the pure judgement of taste in a number of ways.
The first difference is the transition from the harmony of the
faculties of imagination and understandingfrom the suitability
of the manifold for our mind to grasp it, to a disequilibriuma
search for unification which is never allowed to become com-
plete. This change, it might be thought, showed that we have
left the pure judgement of taste behind, that we are no longer
seeing a special adaptation or application of it. Its central defining
characteristicthe harmony of the facultiesseems excluded
from aesthetic ideas. But if we examine the pure judgement of
taste and the exercise of our minds in aesthetic ideas, it becomes
clear that this is not so.
To see the continuity between the pure judgement of taste
and the aesthetic ideas we need to point to the two-sided nature
of the process of ordering. If we talk of ordering a manifold or
multiplicity of features, then we must entertain the multiplicity
as a multiplicity : it would not count as an experience of multi-
plicity in unity if the parts were simply 'lost' in the whole.
However complex the whole might be, it would not yield a sense
of multiplicity in the sense Kant requires unless we had the ex-
perience of the multiplicity and of transcending the multiplicity
into a unifying order.17
17
There is a section of the Critique of Pure Reason which shows Kant's sense that in the
case of multiplicity in unity our preoccupation may lead us to insist on either one or the
other (K.R. V., B 6 9 4 f . ) and so the interdependence of profusion and order in art. K a n t
KANT 51
Now, in so far as unifying a multiplicity by perceiving ana-
logies between its members, or by perceiving the resemblance
between its total configuration and some other form, involves
entertaining two views of the same set of features, there is a
sense in which it is eluding our clear grasp, a sense in which
'language can never quite get on level terms' with it. That sense
of eluding our clear graspof language never getting on level
terms with somethingmay perhaps be made clear in the
following way.
To describe something, in an ordinary 'first order' sense, is
to attribute to it one or a group of characteristics which we
assume to belong to a single, consistent, and coherent account
of that thing. But to characterize the same thing in two ways,
attributing to it characteristics which we do not see it as having
from the same mental perspective, is to give up a unified account
ofthat object; it is to give up the presupposition of our descrip-
tions being coherent and perhaps (although not necessarily)
mutually consistent. Of course, we could always say that a feature
presented us with an ambiguous appearance, but this is to with-
draw from the position in which we utterfirstorder or categoric descri
tions. To say that something presents us with an ambiguous
appearance is to involve ourselves in talking, implicitly, about
the relation between our predicates and the object to which they
apply or the relation between perceiver and perceived : it is not
simply applying predicates to an object, or simply reporting on
the characteristics of the object perceived.
The harmony of the faculties in the pure judgement of taste
concentrated on the unifiability of the manifold, but even in the
pure judgement of taste Kant is emphatic that unification must
not be at the expense of unequivocal subsumption under a
concept. The discussion of 'aesthetic ideas' simply concentrates
on the exercise of that process of unification, taxed to an extreme
under the demands of a certain kind of art.
A second apparent discontinuity between the pure judgement
would almost certainly have read the following by A . G e r a r d : 'Neither fertility nor regu-
larity of imagination will form a good genius, if the one be disjoined from the other.
I f fertility be wanting, the correctest imagination will be confined with narrow bounds, and
will be very slow in its operations; there can be no penetration or copious invention.
I f regularity be absent, an exuberant invention will lose itself in a wilderness of its own
creation' (An Essay on Genius (London 1774), p. 49. Reprint edition, ed. . Fabian, Munich
1966). The passage continues in a way which suggests further analogies with Kant on
aesthetic ideas. There was a German edition in 1776.
iti KANT
of taste and aesthetic ideas is the exclusion of concepts from the
former, and inclusion in the latter. Where in the discussion of
the pure judgement of taste Kant maintained that the 'freedom
of the imagination which plays in the observation of form would
be limited' if the multiplicity were drawn under a concept, in the
case of aesthetic ideas Kant's restriction is less complete : he holds
that we retain our freedom of mind in so far as the multiplicity is
not seen as !?ierely instantiating a concept :
We attach to a concept a representation of the imagination which
belongs to (the concept's) presentation, but inducing solely o n its o w n
account such a wealth of thought as w o u l d never admit of comprehen-
sion in a definite concept . . . ( K . U . , 49, 3 1 5 ; see also K.U., 53,
526).
The pure judgement of taste involved disengaging from any
interest in the material or subject-matter and from concern
about any use to which we put our perception beyond its pure
exercise. It was in this pure exercise that we felt our spontaneity
or freedom. Now our sense of freedom can admit of the applica-
tion of a concept to the manifold of perception under the special
conditions that the manifold will not be totally absorbed by
such subsumption and seen simply as instantiating the concept.
The inconsistency here between the pure judgement of taste
and judgements involving aesthetic ideas is clearly an inconsis-
tency with the more problematic account of the pure judgement
of taste. If we take the pure judgement of taste to be exclusive of
the use of anv concept whatever, this produces an incompatibility
with Kant's account of the mind entertaining aesthetic ideas. But
even if we take the pure judgement of taste to exclude interest in
the material or concepts ordered, and not to exclude the use of
concepts, there remains an incompatibility. The exercise of per-
ception, as it occurs in the pure judgement of taste, is absorbed
wiihin the more complex phenomenon, which includes interest
in concepts.
vi. On Perception, Attitudes, and Subject-matter
But what relation does the exercise of perception have to other
elements in the aesthetic idea? First Kant talks about the exercise
of perception in aesthetic ideas as providing intimations of the
supersensible; secondly this is held appropriate to a certain kind
of subject-matterthat to which no sensible intuition is adequate.
KANT 33
There is a correspondence between the attitude elicited by the
use of perception, and the attitude appropriate to the subject-
matter represented. The subject-matter to which this attitude is
appropriate is limited to those objects which lie beyond the
bounds of sense : in this way we enact a recognition of our basic
human situation of being citizens simultaneously of the world of
necessity and of reason. It is the relation of our mind to the basic
framework of its existence that for Kant forms the content of
art.
The position suffers from a weakness, not of illogicality, but
of absurd rigidity. The only attitude we can entertain in relation
to the subject-matter is one of wonder or respect or moral
aspiration; the only use to which our perception of richness can
be put is to enforce an attitude appropriate to a single kind of
subject-matteran attitude, furthermore, which we are assumed
to hold in a completely unequivocal way. There is a similar
limitation where Kant considers the mind exercised in the pure
judgement of taste itself which serves the reason as a symbol of
reason itself in harmony with the will. Here all exercises of the
mind in the pure judgement of taste take on the same sublime
overtone or meaning (K.U., 59).
Kant was aware of some counter-evidence to the limitation of
his account of the meaning or effect of the free play of the
mind (although not necessarily as counter-evidence). When he
comes to discuss wit together with music the explanation of our
pleasure is sought in physiological effects. 'The harmony in tones
or sallies of wit, serve simply as a necessary vehicle for the
furtherance of vital bodily processes . . (K.U., 54, 332).
The account Kant gives of laughter as 'an affection arising
from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into
nothing' is developed into the most explicit of all his descriptions
of the play of perceptions.
. . . if a w a g . . . describes very circumstantially the grief of a merchant
returning f r o m India to E u r o p e with all his wealth in merchandise,
w h o was forced to throw it overboard in a heavy storm, and w h o
grieved so much that his wig turned grey that v e r y night, we laugh
and it gives us gratification. F o r we treat our own mistake, in the case
of an object otherwise indifferent to u s o r rather we treat the idea
which w e are following through-as w e treat a ball that we knock
to and f r o f o r a time which eludes our grasp. . . . It is remarkable in all
8200343 D
iti 34
KANT KANT

such cases that the jest must contain something that is capable of deceiv-
ing us f o r a moment. Hence when the illusion is dissipated, the mind
turns back to try it once again, and thus through a rapidly alternating
tension and relaxation it is jerked back and put into a state o f oscillation
(K.U., 54, 333-4)
intersubjective exercise of the mind, particularly one which will
establish the relation between the poet or artist and his reader or
spectator. Then, by stages, the Kantian framework becomes
radically transformed.

This 'transformation,' Kant has said, 'is certainly not enjoyable

to the understanding, yet indirectly gives it very active enjoyment
for the moment'. Therefore its cause must consist in the 'influence
of the representation upon the body and the reflex of this upon
the mind . . .'. But on Kant's own admission, sallies of wit, like
harmonies of tone, are beautiful as well as having effects upon
the bodily processes. Why should he relate wit to physiological
effects and the use of mind in the sublime aesthetic ideas to our
rational nature ? Is it a perceptual reason : that in sublime aesthe-
tic ideas the multiplicity of senses tends to fuse, while jokes tend
to produce tension and paradox?
Kant does not appear to consider the possibility that our
attitude in the case of a joke can be something other than an
effect of a conceptual or perceptual paradox. (That we have an
attitude of aggression toward the rich man is not considered.
This is not to complain that Kant is pre-Freudian, but simply to
point to how the nature of our involvement is cut down by
Kant.) For him there is an attitude toward the supersensible, be
it of grandeur or harmony, but other than the sublime there is
only the ridiculous. Clearly he sees that attitude, subject-matter,
and the uses of perception are all involved, but they stand in a
relation in which we cannot ask about their interaction: their
relation is simply that of reciprocal appropriateness.
Where the pure judgement of taste had made an operation of
our mind its own object, satisfying in relation to its own inbuilt
purpose, the aesthetic judgement engaged with aesthetic ideas
distinguishes object or subject-matter, use of perception, and
attitude, but locked in a rigid relation. The pure judgement of
taste had been concerned with the stable and inter subjective
condition of aesthetic judgement, the aesthetic ideas with the
dramatization of man's eternal situation seen as the only serious
subject of art.
Schiller, under the impact of Kant, from 1791, will take as
his starting-point the assumption that it is our eternal situation
which is the subject of art, and he will follow Kant in seeking an

III
S C H I L L E R ' S C O N C E P T I O N OF M O R A L I T Y
A N D ITS VISUAL I M A G E
J. The Tragedy Tapers
BETWEEN 1 7 9 1 and 1794 Schiller wrote a series of papers
developing ideas from Kant. The first of these were on tragedy.1
He abandoned the simple neo-Platonic vision according to which
'beauty and harmony ennoble morals and taste, and art directs
the way toward knowledge and virtue' (S.A., xi, 5 7), a role which
he saw the theatre as fulfilling in 1784 (S.A., xi, 89). Fie started
from Kant's distinction between the realm of necessity and nature
on the one hand, and freedom and reason on the other. Schiller
saw in tragedy the exemplification of the basic pattern of the
human situation: the fight of our rational and free humanity
against the forces of nature, against passion, inclination, and
suffering. Sensuous nature is opposed to our reason, and the
dramatic manifestation of our freedom is to act according to
reason against the opposition of sensuous nature (S.A., xi, 157 ff).
But he was concerned to sustain the distinction between aesthetic
and moral judgement.
Schiller develops the distinction by maintaining that although
in life our highest objective is to act morally, and not to obtain
satisfaction, the aim of art, including tragedy, is gaining satisfac-
tion (S.A., xi, 140 f.). The moral struggle within the action of
tragedy is material used for the creation of the drama, but the
purpose of the drama is not to present a moral.
But since he starts by making the interest of tragedy so speci-
fically moral, Schiller encounters some difficulty in distinguishing
moral from aesthetic satisfaction. To do so he asks us to imagine
the difference between looking at a heroic action with the purpose
of making a moral judgement, and with the purpose of making
an aesthetic judgement. When making a moral judgement on the
action, he says, we are simply concerned with whether the action
1
For a discussion of Schiller's earlier theoretical writing see Benno von Wiese, Schiller
(Stuttgart 1963), pp. 7 6 - 1 1 4 .
MORALITY AND ITS VISUAL I M A G E 37
conforms to the specification of duty in this particular case : and
in so doing we presuppose the possibility of the agent acting freely.
If we look at the same heroic action aesthetically we do not
approach it with a demand. Rather we involve ourselves in the
particular instance, identify with the protagonist in the particular
struggle. In so far as the protagonist reveals a resistance to the
pressures of instinct and inclination and pursues his rational
aims, we take satisfaction in this human achievement.
Furthermore, where moral judgement had presupposed human
freedom, and then made moral demands, specifying how the
agent should behave, aesthetic judgement takes satisfaction in dis-
covering that human beings can in general, since sometimes they
do, act freely. That there is such a thing as free will, which
morality demands, is a gift of nature, it need not have existed.
Following a courageous action is, in aesthetic judgement, an
experience of harmony between what the imagination seeks
and reality (Ueber das Pathetische, S.A., xi, 266 f.). 2
A further distinction between the moral judgement and aesthe-
tic judgement is that an act may be one of which we morally
disapprove and which we yet find aesthetically satisfying. 'The
vicious man begins to interest us as soon as he must risk his
happiness and life to carry out his perverse designs . . .' (S.A.,
xi, 273). This is a theme which had already been stated in Ueber
den Grund des Vergngens an tragischen Gegenstnden (S.A., xi, 15 2 f
we will follow and be heartened by the immoral action in so far
as we withdraw attention from its moral implications. What
engages us in tragedy is this power of overcoming affection and
inclination by force of will, even if this will is not directed
morally. This is heartening, for it is breaking loose from human
subjection to nature.
There is a logical shift from Schiller's explicit Kantian starting-
point here, and it is important for the whole development of
his later thought. Schiller started by assuming the distinction
between two aspects of the human mind or human situation :
man as part of nature, subject to the pressures and compulsions
of laws of cause and effect, and man as free, where his freedom is
to act rationally and morally, uninfluenced by feelings, inclinations
2
Here there is an interesting shift from Ueber die tragische Kunst, S.A., xi, 1 6 5 , where
Schiller talks of tragedy as resolving painful events in the light of the over-all teleology o f
the world.
38 S C H I L L E R ' S C O N C E P T I O N OF M O R A L I T Y
or passions. This dichotomy is Schiller's starting-point. But
he sees, in the case of a man who overcomes one feeling or
passion (like the desire for happiness or the instinct of self-
preservation) in the pursuit of another end, which may be
immoral (like that of Richard III), an exhibition of freedom, pro-
vided he is guided by a conception of what he is trying to do and
controls instinct in doing it (S.A., xi, 268). Any pursuit of a con-
sidered end which involves, not simply gratifying a passion or
inclination, but controlling passion or inclination in the pursuit
of an end, constitutes a form of freedom, in the sense in which the
imagination demands it. (The point recalls Schiller's dissertation,
on the unity of human and animal nature in man, where he holds,
following Garve, that the distinctively human characteristic is
the ability to pursue not only immediate satisfactions, but to go
through many controlled operations between the stimulus of
desire and the gaining of fulfilment (S.A., xi, 54 f.).)
It is useful at this point to invoke a phrase which Schiller
was to use several years later when distinguishing 'nave' and
'sendmental' poetry: the subject-matter may be the same, but
it is presented before a different tribunal. The kind of connection
made by Schiller in the tragedy papers between moral and aesthe-
tic judgement raises two closely linked questions. In so far as the
difference is that in aesthetic judgement we are interested in a
'consonance' between expectation or aspiration and what hap-
pens, why should the aesthetic judgement be more than trivial,
except by virtue of the subject-matter and moral attitude
involved? And how is importance to be attributed to art except
in the case of tragedy which has these moral components?
These are questions to which Schiller turns throughout the rest
of his critical work.
ii. liai H as-Briefe
In the tragedy papers Schiller had characterized an aesthetic
attitude or aesthetic involvement which was marked off from a
moral attitude, but was grounded on the same basic features of
the human situation as characterized our moral life : the opposi-
tion of freedom and reason on the one hand, and natural inclina-
tion on the other. It had the moral life as its appropriate object.
For it was not any 'consonance' which was the appropriate object
of aesthetic involvement in the field of tragedy, but consonances
between human action and what we hoped for from human
action, and what we hoped for was overcoming the constraints
we suffer from being part of the world of nature.
In the tragedy papers this view of the object of aesthetic
involvement was given a certain extension : immoral action, where
it involved overcoming feelings, where the will was pitted against
difficulties in carrying out its designs, was also an appropriate
object of aesthetic satisfaction in so far as we were directing
attention to the struggle against difficulties.
In making the transition from the special field of tragedy to
a more general study of the beautiful in a series of letters to
Krner (never published by Schiller and known as the Kallias-
Briefe), Schiller takes his objects from visual experience, although
not from works of visual art. Here the metaphorical suggestion
of the struggle of reason against nature and inclination is sought
in visible forms : 'The rays of the great idea of self-determination
stream back at us from certain appearances of nature, and this
we term beauty' (Jonas, iii, 256).
What Schiller treats as the power in the visible form of things
to suggest self-determination is first of all a negative charac-
teristic: that on the one hand the form does not immediately
suggest that it has been produced as a result of a pre-existent
pattern or concept, and on the other that we do not see it as the
exemplification of such a pattern or concept. Presented with a
triangle, the form immediately fits a concept and we can see it
only as an exemplification of that concept and designed to be so.
A wavy line lacks the same clear identifiability as to what it is
meant to be.3
* ' A n object presents itself as free to the intuition if its form does not prompt the
reflective understanding to seek a ground [for it being as it is]. A beautiful form therefore
is one which is self-clarifying, and by //-clarifying here, I mean without the help of con-
cepts. A triangle is self-clarifying but only by means of concepts. A -wavy line clarifies
itself without the medium of a concept.' Later Schiller says that even where w e see a form
as self-determined, as opposed to determined from without, it must have some determinate
character, and f o r something to have a determinate character, there must be some under-
lying rule in its appearance. 'But', says Schiller, "it is not necessary that the understanding
knows the rule (the knowledge of the rule would destroy all appearance of freedom which
is the case when confronted with examples of strict regularity) ; it is enough that the under-
standing be led to a (sense of a) ruleno matter what particular rule. One has only to look
at a simple leaf f r o m a tree, and one is convinced of the impossibility that its manifold can
have been so ordered by chance. Our immediate reflection on the appearance of the leaf
teaches us this without our being forced to look into the rule and make a concept of the
leaf's structure for ourselves' (Jonas, iii, 268). The sources of these passages are the Critique
f Judgement. General Remark on the Analytic of the Beautiful, and 16, 230.
4c S C H I L L E R ' S C O N C E P T I O N OF M O R A L I T Y
An inhibition of the sense of freedom would also result from
our feeling that the weight of the material in which an object
was made accounted for its shape, or that the shape had been
disturbed by some functional adjunct, like putting a handle on
a pot.
Remaining free from ready classification, by concept, function,
or material condition, was for Schiller an analogue of the inde-
pendence of our minds from constraint, and not only the inde-
pendence of the object itself from constraint. Or rather, the two
are blurred in the passages referred to. For Schiller's background
psychological model, like Kant's, is of concepts constraining
and subordinating contents. And Schiller is here opposing the
view of his correspondent Krner that beauty consists in such
subordination.4 In this way Schiller is discussing simultaneously
a special use of perception and a special kind of object. (This does
not, in any serious sense, involve confusion; Schiller is simply
saying that when objects are of a kind, which elicit a certain
exercise of our minds, they take on a certain metaphoric value.)
The eluding of a ready classification, sense of function, or
manifestation of conditions of manufacture are negative con-
ditions of the visual metaphor of freedom, and Schiller then
adds more positive connotations. For the wavy line comes into
the discussion again, now in contrast to a zigzag line, to suggest
smooth and autonomous transitions, where the abrupt changes
of the zigzag suggest constraint from without. (The fluent
serpentine line has a long history of analogy with graceful
human action.)5 And the sense of constraint imposed by the
weight of material on an object leads Schiller to suggest the
contrast between the heavy cart-horse and the Spanish palfrey,
the one with its form and movement weighed down, the other
whose form and movement seem to spring from within itself,
in so far as we look at them aesthetically (Jonas, iii, 270 ff.).
iii. The Artisfs Achievement
However, another line of argument is to transform his concep-
tion of freedom within the realm of appearance. The eluding of
4
Letter of 4 February 1793, Schiller's Briefwechsel mit Korner (Berlin 1847), Part I I I , p. 10.
5
See J . Dobai, 'William Hogarth and Antoine Parent', journal of the Warburg and Cour-
taulinstitutes, xxxi (1968), 336 ff.
a ready concept and the sense of inward vitality converge and
gain another sense applicable strictly in the field of art.
. . . Kant insists... that each beauty which stands under the concept
of a purpose, is not a pure beauty : that therefore an arabesque, and
things like that, considered from the point of view of beauty, are purer
than the highest beauty of the human form. I find his distinction of
logical and aesthetic can be of great use, but it seems to me to be quite
inadequate to the idea of beauty. For beauty shows with its greatest
brilliance, just when it overcomes the logical character of its object,
and how can it overcome where there is no resistance? H o w can it
(beauty) impart its form to wholly formless material? I am at least
convinced that beauty is only the form of a form, and what one calls
its material must be material with a form. Perfection is the form of
material; beauty, in contrast, is form of this perfection (Jonas, iii, 238).
The 'logical character' of the object here is the conformity of
the object to its concept or aim. Where the sense of freedom
overcomes what Schiller calls our sense of perfection, beauty is
at its most brilliant. 'Beauty grows as the perfection becomes
more closely integrated and nature [the sense of naturalness]
does not suffer by it : then the task of freedom becomes harder
with the increasing range of components and its successful
resolution to that extent more entrancing' (ibid. 278).
And Schiller goes on to talk of beauty as the free formula-
tion of such characteristics as perfection and order (ibid. 279) :
multiplicity in unity is not enough, we must feel the ease, the
fluency within the order (ibid. 283).
Here we have a transition from a sense of fluency and control
attributed metaphorically to the object to a sense of fluency and
control of the artist formulating or articulating his form.
The distinction between an object which suggests that it has
been produced in accordance with a concept that we see it as
exemplifying, and one which is not seen in this way, is eclipsed
by the later distinction : between a form which appears complete,
quite independently of eliciting the constructive activity of our
minds, and one which does elicit this involvement.
The notion of mental constraint has taken on a new sense.
Constraint is no longer the effect of a form exemplifying a con-
cept, but of its exemplifying a concept without giving our minds
the opportunity of constructive activity. In the following two
years Schiller is to give a highly articulated account of this
42- S C H I L L E R ' S C O N C E P T I O N OF M O R A L I T Y
-constructive activity of the mind and its relation to our interest
in the ideal and the subject-matter of art.
Before turning to this we must notice another theoretical
shift within the Kallias-Briefe. Another sense of 'freedom in
appearance' given here by Schiller which is central to his con-
ception of freedom. He talks about the technique by which an
object is made seeming to spring inwardly from the nature of the
objectthe object seeming to consent in its own technique.
Rather than try to unravel what experience of form Schiller is
talking about we need to see what metaphorical value this verbal
characterization is meant to indicate. Because here there is a shift
in Schiller's ethical assumption, a shift from the vision underlying
t he tragedy papers and those aspects of the Kallias letters dis-
cussed so far. He now comes to conceive of human freedom as
something which could suffer curtailment not only from the side
of nature but also from the side of reason. The ideal of the human
condition is now seen as a harmonic coincidence of these two
aspects of our situation or personality.6
In Schiller's subsequent thought the ethical ideal of the
coincidence of duty and inclination becomes closely related to the
aesthetic ideal according to which our mind constructively par-
ticipates in perception, turning the perception of an object into
something like a free formulation of our own mind.
iv. The Matthisson Article
The crucial paper in the development of Schiller's aesthetic
theory is the review article of Matthisson's nature or landscape
poetry. Before Schiller settles down to practical criticism, there
is a self-contained theoretical section which asks and answers the
question: how is it that anything other than humanity can
become the subject-matter of art at its highestin particular
how can landscape painting and poetry enter the realm of high
an?
The paper starts by pointing out that human and animal form
and human action have from antiquity had a privileged place
in painting and poetry. And Schiller sets out to isolate what it
is that gives them such pre-eminent suitability as the subject-
- Simultaneously Schiller discusses the ethical viewpoint in Anmut und Wrde, but the
intricacies o f metaphor in that paper hardly contribute to the centra! theme discussed here.
A N D ITS V I S U A L IMAGE 43
matter of art. What he isolates is their lawlikeness. In the human
or animal form and in human action we can discern certain
underlying rules of connection; we can discern in them what is
essential and consequential and so we can distinguish between
an arbitrary link or transition and one which conforms to the
logic or organization of the species. That is, Schiller is assuming
an intuitive power of the artist and spectator, once their minds
have been properly developed or educated, to distinguish the
essential from the accidental. And this gives artist and spectator
a common ground, so that the spectator can 'follow' and even
anticipate the transitions and articulations of the subject presented
as he might follow a sentence or an argument.
Furthermore, animal and human lawlikeness satisfies a second
criterion (not always clearly distinguished by Schiller)that of
linking an external form to an internal state or movement of
sensibility. (One can see why these should be felt to lie together
by looking, say, at Canova's Hercules or the Laocoon.)
Schiller then points out how these criteria, of order or con-
sequentiality and of a feeling dimension, can be extended beyond
the representation of human form and action: we may, for
instance, have combinations as in music, in which we are drawn
to participate in a sense of order, and the order is inseparable
from the emotional pattern. Furthermore, in the very process of
perceptual ordering of similar forms, we have an analogue of the
moral harmony of two aspects of our mindour active and
receptive, rational and sensory powers.
The over-all pattern of Schiller's argument here started by
pointing to a certain kind of subject-matter as the characteristic
matter of artof beautiful art, properly so calledand then
justified its value for art by pointing to its amenability to a
certain use of perception. In passing, we may note that the
argument has justified much more than landscape as subject-
matter : it justifies formal order as such.
Seen in broad outline, but only in broad outline, Schiller's
account seems to reiterate the main patterns of Kant's pure
judgement of taste and aesthetic ideassubject has been swal-
lowed by order and given a symbolic moral and emotional
meaning. But when we come to look at the paper in more
detail we find important shifts from the Kantian position.
In asking how inanimate nature can be the subject-matter of
42- S C H I L L E R ' S C O N C E P T I O N OF M O R A L I T Y
serious art, the criterion of suitability is formulated in the follow-
ing way :
I f by poetry in general one understands the art which places us in a
particular frame of mind through a particular effect of our productive
imagination . . . then there are always t w o demands which no poet
worthy of the name can a v o i d : First he must leave the imagination
free play and self-determination, and secondly he must stimulate a
specific sensation and be certain of his effect. A t first these t w o demands
seem mutually contradictory. F o r according to the first, our imagination
must reign and obey nothing but its o w n rule : according to the other
it must be subservient, and obey the rule of the poet. H o w does the
poet overcome this contradiction? B y this: that he prescribes f o r our
full imagination no other path than that which it would have to take in
its freedom, and f o l l o w i n g its o w n laws . . . (S.A., xvi, 252 f.).
And Schiller elaborated this relation between an interplay of
receptivity and activity toward the end of the paper. The poet
. . . may hint at these ideas, touch on those feelings : but he must not
complete them himself, he must not forestall the imagination of his
reader. A s definition becomes more exact it becomes felt as an oppres-
sive limitation. F o r the attraction of such aesthetic ideas lies precisely
m this : w e gaze into the content as into an unfathomable depth . . .
(S.A., xvi, 260).
For Schiller this is quite distinct from mere personal association:
it is a determinate suggestiveness, being led to find connections,
conclusions, and correspondences for ourselves, and in this lies
our freedom.
Clearly this sense of freedom is closely akin to that which
Schiller expresses when he says, 'The dogmatic teacher forces
us into the acceptance of his conception, the Socratic philosopher
drags it out of us, but the fine writer and poet gives us an
opportunity to draw it out of ourselves with apparent freedom5
(Jonas, iii, 397).
'To gaze into the content as into an unfathomable depth':
Schiller's aesthetic idea elicits an ordered but an unconstrain|d
making of connections. Working in a closely related tradition
coming down from Burke, and also concerned with the spon-
taneous rationality of the mind, Wordsworth is to talk similarly
of analogies that grow and grow in the mind.
Adherence to the rules of human anatomy or the patterns of
psychologically probable human behaviour (that consistency or
AND ITS VISUAL I M A G E 43
consistent inconsistency of Aristode) is not a sufficient condition
for mobilizing our spontaneous participation in the perception
of the human figure, or groups of figures, or human actions.
The presentation must also leave the imagination free play. And
the point does not require any metaphysical underwriting from the
conception of 'general nature'. We are particularly sensitive to
the continuities and modulations and symmetries of the human
form and of human action, but these must be played upon by the
artist. As Schiller had already said in the Ka/Iias-Briefe, the perfec-
tion of human form is not yet art, and in fact presents the artist
with a particular problem, of overcoming its independence of
our minds.
The human subject-matter was initially held up as the para-
digm of what was suitable material for art : it possessed an ideal or
norm, something intersubjective and available to human ration-
ality, and the external form had an inward emotional or even
moral connotation. But it then turns out that that ideal or norm
is itself valued for facilitating a certain use of mind. The ideal
subject-matter is valued for its suitability for bringing perception
and sensibility into play in a certain way. Schiller to some
extent obscures the transition by talk of inanimate nature being
drawn into the orbit of humanity : but this really means giving
inanimate nature an order which we can recognize and partici-
pate in, and one which has an emotional or moral connotation.
As in Kant's analysis of the pure judgement of taste and his
aesthetic ideas, the foundation of the intersubjectivity and ration-
ality of the judgement is shifted from the ideal object of classical
theory, to the special use of the mind. But there are two important
differences between the positions of Schiller and Kant.
For Kant, 'although in the apprehension of a given object
the sense is tied down . . . still it is easy to see that the object
may supply such a form . . . as the imagination would freely
project'.7 For Schiller, that there is this harmony between an
external form and an autonomous play of the imagination which
is prompted by the form, is the very focus of his theory.
Secondly, although in the Matthisson paper Schiller goes on to
talk about the interplay between the spontaneity of the mind
and its receptivity as itself being an image for a moral harmony,
it is far from being the same ideal of moral harmony as in Kant,
7
K.U.; General Remark on the Analytic of the Beautiful, 241.
46 M O R A L I T Y A N D ITS V I S U A L IMAGE

but the harmony of action and feeling. And as this is developed

in the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, this intimate connection
between spontaneity and receptivity is not merely a symbol IV
for some other state, but itself becomes constitutive of an ideal
equanimity. T H E AESTHETIC EDUCATION OF
MANKIND

THE discussion of the special use of perception as outlined in

the Matthisson paper recurs only half-way through the Aesthetic
Education of Mankind, as part of a more general argument, which
is presented in a series of letters. The letters are centrally about
the role of art in achieving harmony and completeness of per-
sonality. Schiller considers this problem not simply from the
point of view of the individual at a particular moment or on a
particular occasion, but as a matter of the development of his
life and as an ideal to be sought in the way we develop the social
condition of man.1
The most general view of human development, both through
history and through the lives of individuals, is simultaneously
Kantian and Platonic. We are seen to move through stages of
development from the state of sense and nature to that of thought
and reason. But within this scheme the particularly human destiny
is to realize a harmony of its two natures, sense and reason. It
is the role of art in this process which forms the core of the
Aesthetic Education.

i. Conditions of Experience
The ultimate concepts in terms of which human experience can
be discussed are regarded as those of 'person' and 'condition'
the self and its states and determinations (Letter XI, S.A., xii,
39). In this dichotomy the self is thought of, not as a referring
term, but, like Kant's 'transcendental apperception', as the
autonomous, spontaneous, rational ordering activity of mind.
And this is opposed to the passive, receptive, feeling aspect of
1
T h e most extensive recent study of the Aesthetic Education of Mankind is the Introduction
to the edition and translation of Elizabeth M . Wilkinson and L . A . Willoughby, letters
on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Oxford 1967). This contains an examination of recent
writing on the work. In the quotations in this chapter I have followed their translation
almost exactly.

48 T H E A ES THE! IC EDUCATION OF MANKIND
man.2 This opposition is also thought of as that between an
a-temporal substance and its changing conditions.
The basic purpose of man's mental life is seen as 'converting
all that he apprehends into experience, that is, into the unity of
knowledge, and to transform modes of phenomena given in
time, into a law for all time . . .' (ibid, xii, 40).
Confronted by an assertion of this kind, one's first response
might be that it would be hard to avoid one's apprehension being
part of one's experience. But 'experience' here means something
given an order beyond the level of mere fleeting perception, so
that one's transient experience provides content for the construc-
tion of a system of knowledge, which, qua system, is a-temporal.
And giving rational order to experience here carries the implica-
tion not simply of placing experiences within a framework of
systematic knowledge, but so controlling one's behaviour as to
make it conform to the moral law as Kant understood moral
law, i.e. acting according to maxims one is prepared to regard as
eneralizable.
Schiller writes of man : Only in as far as he changes does he
exist, only in so far as he remains unchangeable does he exist'
(ibid, xii, 41). What is meant by remaining unchangeable here
is continuing to exert his rational nature. But his rationality can
only have material on which to work in so far as he is also passive
and receptive.
ii. The Conditions Seen as Two Forces
The active, rational aspect of the human mind, and its passive,
receptive aspect are thought of not simply as the grounds or
conditions of experience, but as two forces, the equilibrium of
which is always liable to be disturbed. We may become diffuse
and fragmented in the quality of our lives by insufficient exertion
2
Schiller had already discussed a dichotomy of this kind in his first dissertation, where
he wrote : 'The mind \Seele\ has an active influence on the organs of thought', as opposed
to their being governed by mere laws of association. 'It can make the material perceptions
stronger, and at will fixate them . . . this is the work of attention...', and in this indepen-
dence Schiller saw the basis of our freedom from the causal necessity to which our animal
nature is essentially bound (S.A., xi, 37). Schiller's text in the Aesthetic Education, however,
is couched in terms which, as he notes himself, are derived from Fichte. Extended discussion
of the context from which Schiller drew the terms and metaphors he is using here does not
seem to be essential for following what Schiller himself is doing with the notions. For
references to the context see the notes by O. Walzel to Letters I V , X I , and X I I I in S.A.,
vol. xii, and notes to Schiller's Werke, Nationalansgabe, vol. xxi.
T H E AES1 HE HC EVUCAllUlM UP 1\1\ 4$
of our active reason, or we may become too rational, and insuffi-
ciently responsive and receptive to the external world. Thus in a
note to Letter XIII Schiller writes :
The pernicious effect upon both thought and action, of an undue
surrender to our sensual nature, will be evident to all. N o t quite so
evident, although no less important nor less frequent, is the nefarious
influence exerted upon knowledge and conduct by an over-preponder-
ance of rationality (S.A., xii, 48 f.).
And he goes on to characterize failures through excessive
rationality :3
One of the chief reasons why natural science makes such slow pro-
gress is that our preconceived notions are too inflexible. And ic
morality it would be no less difficult to determine which does more tc
impede the practice of generosity, the violence of our desires which
disturbs it, or the rigidity of our principles which chills it . . .
Thus Schiller has a basic conceptionone which applies ir
science as well as in morals and the rest of ordinary experience
which sees our functioning impaired by any imbalance betweer
the two fundamental aspects of personality.
Here, however, the dependence of experience upon the reci-
procity of these two forcesSchiller refers to them as the 'sensorj
drive' and the 'form drive'and the dependence of satis/actor
experience upon their balance, has no special relation to aestheti(
perception or to art. The special relation which Schiller envisage;
is introduced by means of the notion of a third drive : the Spiel
trieb ('play drive'), which is itself a drive to unite the other two
The sensory drive seeks to be defined, it wants to receive its object
the form drive wants to do the defining itself, it wants to produce it:
own object : the play drive is stirred to receive as it would itself havi
produced, and so produce in the way the sense aspires to receiv<
(Letter X I V , S.A., xii, 53).
The play drive is thus the search for a coincidence of the two de
mands of the mind. It is not a mere balance between the demands
as ordinary healthy mental functioning anyhow requires. It is th
3 F o r the classical sources and contemporary background of the need f o r knowledge t
be released from over-intellectualized rigidity, see particularly Herman Meyer, 'Schiller
philosophische Rhetorik', Schiller zum io. November lyjy: Festschrift des Euphorion, ec
R . Alewyn (Heidelberg 1959), pp. 9 1 - 1 2 8 . For anticipations of Schiller's 'middle state' se
. Bumler, Kants 'Kritik der Urteilskraft' (Halle 1923), pp. 1 3 2 f. See also note 1 of Chapte
II above, p. 7.
9200343 E
54 T H E AESTHETIC EDUCATION OF MANKIND
search for a state in which the mind's propensity to project its
own rules or expectations on to the objects it perceives coincides
with the characteristics the objects do in fact have. We can per-
haps clarity this by seeing in our own terms the ways in which
the search for this harmony may be frustrated. For instance,
where the mind catches the suggestion of a familiar form or a
regular pattern, further observation might reveal the form not
to correspond to expectations raised by what at first sight seemed
familiar or regular. In this case the search for harmony between
the spontaneous activity of the mind, set in motion by initial
observation, and its receptivity would be disrupted by the nature
of the material received.
In another case the mind might impose its interpretation or
projection completely on to some form, on the basis of the expecta-
tions set up by the form's initial suggestion, while remaining
unconcerned with counter-evidence. The harmony of the mind
would then be disturbed by our receptivity being curtailed.
There is then a third way in which the harmony of our
spontaneity and receptivity may be disrupted : that is where we
are presented with objects in the world which may provide an
opportunity for recognition or the discovery of order, and we
are mentally too supine to follow up the suggestions.
The harmony of the mind which is the objective of the play
drive thus has three conditions : first, that we do not simply
impose our mental schemata on our observations without also
remaining sensitive as to whether the material really fits our
projection, secondly that we do try to project, and third that the
material does correspond to expectations that are initially set up.
But here we do need to add a restriction which is implicit in both
Kant and Schiller : that the coincidence between roused expecta-
tions and discovery must never be so close that we are not aware
of the search and resolution, nor so simple as just to provide a
multiplicity of suggestions that can be sustained within a single
perspective.4
* This coincidence o f spontaneous and receptive activity is perhaps best understood as
the most specialised f o r m of the balance between the two sides of our minds. In the course
of the letters, that balance is characterized in a number of ways which can be ranged in a
series from the most general conditions of experience to experience of the very special
kind which we have in art. The most generalized is that of remaining responsive to the
wo!Id (and that which is presented to us in perception) while at the same time exerting
our power of ordering experience. Then there is a negative unity in not separating thinking
and perceiving, but thinking with reference to, or in intimate connection with perceivable
T H E AESTHETIC EDUCATION Uf jm/hiauvl- j,
In a later letter Schiller gives a very difficult, but I believe a
crucial account of remaining suspended between activity and
receptivity. Here he hypostatizes a pure state of sensation and a
pure state of spontaneous activity and asks how we could get
from the first to the second.
Man cannot pass directly from feeling to thought; he must first take
one step backwards, since only through one determination being an-
nulled can a contrary determination take its place (Letter X X , S.A.,
xii, 77 ).
Seeing spontaneous activity of mind and receptivity as incom-
patible determinations of the mind rather than joint conditions
of experience (or opposing emphases) has an oddly forced look.
It is to be attributed in part to the fact that Schiller is considering
this as a simplified model of a historical development from
sensation to thought. But also, perhaps, because it produces a
sense of impossibility and thus makes us enact the very process he
is to describe : that of loosening our hold on some object or
thought confronting our mind in order to reorientate toward it.
Schiller then goes on to say that in order to emerge from being
merely conditioned from outside oneself, and to become active
and free to determine oneself,
one must be momentarily free of all determination whatever, and pass
through a state of pure determinability. Man must consequently, in
a certain sense, return to that negative state of complete absence of
determination in which he found himself before anything at all had
made an impression on his sense (ibid.my italics).
examples. There is then the very special situation to which the play drive aspires, in which
we experience the interplay of expectation and fulfilment.
This view o f mental procedure aimed at in the play drive may be thought to be intelli-
gible in itself, but to stand in an awkward or inconsistent relation to the overall general
theory within which Schiller has placed it. The problem is substantially identical with that
already discussed in relation to Kant. F o r he has led us t o see experience as conditioned
by two forces or factors of the mind, its receptivity and spontaneity : while w e continue to
think of experience in this way w e do not consider the relation of the mind to an object
outside the mind. I f Schiller sustains the initial Kant-Fichte solipsism of the theory he
seems to start with, then he does not seem to have a place f o r objects o f perception in rela-
tion to these t w o drives : that is objects of perception independent o f the mind. Such objects,
not being internal to the mind, are hard to relate to a sense drive or form drive : f o r the
sense drive is presumably that aspect of the mind which senses : if it senses objects then
what does the form drive do ? We have, in order to follow Schiller, to make the adjustment
from the initial kind of dichotomy of two faculties of the mind to a division between the
mind on the one hand and external objects on the other. A n d then see opposition between
form drive and sense drive as that between an already ingrained habit and expectation and
fresh observation.
54 T H E AESTHETIC EDUCATION OF MANKIND
What Schiller is doing by producing the paradoxical opposi-
tion of pure determination from without and from within then
appears more clearly: it is to characterize the problem which
appears immediately one thinks of any perception or thought as
coextensive with our mind or occupying our whole attention or
mental scope. It then becomes very hard to imagine how we can
think about our thoughts, redefine our own perceptions. The
sense seems to be that if we have an object of perception or a
thought, this imposes a certain limitation on our mind. Our
mind is occupied with the thought or the object of perception,
and to the extent that it is so occupied, the thought or perception
delimits our state of mind. We may, however, free our minds from
this determination by both sustaining the perception or thought
while refusing to endorse it or accept it unquestioningly, or focus
on it in a single or consistent way.
Now this kind of flexibility toward objects of perception (be
they ordinary objects of perception like chairs, or 'intensional
objects' like imagined chairs or thoughts) is crucial to his concep-
tion of art. It is the detachment from the presentations of experi-
ence which gives the artist his mobilityhis refusal to accept
tilings at face value, or, to change the metaphor, to value the
face whatever reality may lie behind it. But this goes considerably
beyond the traditional German concept of Wahrscheinlichkeit. In
the way Schiller conceives it, it is not merely accepting what
appears or is suggested to the mind without asking what is really
there, as when we see a lake in the light of the setting sun as
the water on fire. For Schiller later goes on to describe this
independence in relation to the objects of experience in the
following terms :
M a n , as percipient s u b j e c t . . . is only availing himself of his absolute
proprietary right when he separates the appearance f r o m the essence,
and a rranges it according to his own laws. With unfettered freedom
he can weave together what nature has separated, provided that he
can think it together, and divide what nature has joined, provided
he can separate them in his mind (Letter X V I , S.A., xii, 107).
So the material of perception can be turned into elements for
reconstruction in the hands of the artist, presumably on the
basis of analogies within it. But why should this play be regarded
as involved in the freedom and harmony of the individual beyond
T H E AESTHETIC EDUCATIONUfjm/hiauvl-j,
the now rather well-worn point that it keeps spontaneity and
receptivity in play together?
ni. The Harmony of Personality
To answer this we must now place Schiller's ideas on the pro-
cesses of perception within the wider context of his view of
human personality.
The introduction of the play drive, a search for the coincidence
of our activity and receptivity, now takes on a symbolic value
which is not merely of the kind suggested by Kant at the end of
the 'Critique of Aesthetic Judgement' and by Schiller in the
Matthisson paper; that is, it is not a matter of a certain use of
perception in art serving as an analogue of a moral condition;
the play of our perception in art becomes constitutive of the moral
condition. The interplay of spontaneity and receptivity can be
exemplified in our relation to any work of art in that it is not
merely external to our sense of a work of art that our inter-
pretative projections find corroborating echoes from within the
work. For to feel we have not arbitrarily forced ourselves on the
work of art is internal to the kind of experience we seek of it.
This special use of perception takes on a range of comples
roles when it is related to the interest of subject-matter and the
sensuous material of art. The special use of perception is nc
longer, as in Kant, and earlier in Schiller, simply an analogy oi
moral or emotive ideas or treated separately from the interest oi
the subject-matter. Schiller now goes on to indicate how the us<
of perception modifies the impact of the sensuous material anc
subject-matter of art so as to preserve or enhance our inwarc
freedom, our personal harmony.5
s Schiller's conception of inward harmony involves a number of quite different idea
which he seems to conflate. Their application to art does not initially involve the difficultie
into which Schiller runs where he is discussing personal harmony simply as an ethical ideal
It is perhaps useful to note these ideas of personal harmony briefly before concentratiti]
on their application in the discussion of art, not because the main line of the argumen
depends upon these conflations, but because it is obscured by them.
First of all, Schiller has a positive ideal of man with all his mental powers in play; bu
this full play may be curtailed, and Schiller sees curtailment as o f three kinds which he doe
not distinguish very clearly. First, as w e have seen, there is the possibility of reason
sensibility, spontaneity or receptivity operating exclusively without the other, and thii
w e noted, could be given a series of senses. (At its most general, we should be robbed c
coherent experience altogether; more narrowly it may lead us to absurd biases in
thought, or we may be called upon to think without a sensory example. T h e most specialize

54 T H E AESTHETIC EDUCATION OF MANKIND
Schiller, as part of his vision of human freedom, has a con-
ception of balance of forces in the mind more detailed than
receptivity and spontaneity. Such balancing may be illustrated
by our sense of self-preservation being moderated by our sense
of dignity (Letter X V , S.A., xii, 57). And Schiller associates
balance between forces with completeness : excess on one
;ide will curtail some other aspect of our personality. Schiller
describes the ideal of wholeness, which is the ideal to which
art should bring us, in the following way :
T h e lofty equanimity and freedom of spirit, combined with power
and vigour, is the m o o d in which a genuine w o r k of art should release
us, and there is no more certain touchstone of true aesthetic excellence.
If, after an enjoyment of this kind we find ourselves disposed to prefer
some one particular mode of feeling or action, but unfitted or dis-
inclined f o r another, this may serve as an infallible proof that we have
not had a purely aesthetic experiencewhether the cause lies in the
object, or in our response to it, or, as is almost always the case, in
both at once (Letter X X I I , S.A., xii, 83).
The more general the m o o d and the less limited the bias produced
in us by any particular art, or product of the same, then the nobler that
art, and the more excellent that product will be (ibid.).
The ideal of balance or completeness is something which
Schiller thinks we could never in fact reach, and his talk of an
unbiased state of mind becomes more than a vague aspiration
only when it is discussed in the critical issue of works of art.
It might be thought that such an ideal of completeness would
in fact lead to a view that any distinctive character or attitude
whatever is destructive of art. But Schiller's concern here is not
lest a work of art or class of works possesses one mood or temper
curtailment would be one where w e were unable to use our spontaneity and receptivity as
we do in art.)
Secondly, Schiller sees curtailment or disharmony occurring through a man's mind
becoming so specialized, so directed to single professional operation (in answer to the
demands of society), that the rest of him lies undeveloped and his humanity distorted f r o m
its ideal nature which requires completeness (Letter V I , S.A., xii, 16 ff.).
Thirdly, the division of men into specialized functions means that each is no longer
representative of the community as a whole, and the government of the community as
a whole regards them as instruments. Because the individual can no longer represent the
whole, not only is he a mere instrument f o r the government of the state, but in his condi-
tion he is not able to participate in that government, because he no longer has the unity
of personality which such participation would require, the unity which would enable him
to identify with his other fellow citizens. For the contemporary discussion of this problem
see the notes to Letter V I in vol. xxi of the Nationalausgabe of Schiller's Werke, and the
notes to the Skularausgabe and Wilkinson and Willoughby, ed. cit.
T H E AESTHETIC EDUCATION Uf jm/hiauvl- j,
rather than another, but that the works must not leave our minds
in what we may term a pathological state, where this may mean
a pathological state of thought as well as emotion. The more
compelling the material, be it subject-matter or the sensuous or
intellectual interest of the medium, the more serious and the more
worthwhile the artist's achievement in both presenting it and not
allowing it to produce the constraint of unbalanced involvement.
Schiller considers the artist's control over the impact of his
material in two ways : one concerns the limitation of the impact
of particular art forms, and the second the limitation of the
impact of particular subject-matter or material. It is convenient
to start with the second of these.
. . . the artist must seek to overcome through his handling . . . the
limitations inherent in the particular matter he is treating. In a truly
beautiful work of art the contents should effect nothing, the form every-
thing; for only through the form is the whole man affected; through
the content, however, only one or other of his functions. The content,
then, however sublime and broadly encompassing it may be, always has
the effect of imposing a curtailment on the mind, and one can only
expect to have true aesthetic freedom in the form (Letter X X I I , S.A.,
xii, 85).
So far Schiller is pointing to content (Inhalt) and material
(Stoff) as that which the mind separates and combines : it curtails
the mind in that it is received by it, and is not the product of its
spontaneous activity, which alone is free. Schiller continues:
Herein, then, resides the real secret of the master of any art : that
he can make his form consume his material : and the more pretentious,
the more seductive this material is in itself, the more it seeks to impose
upon us, the more high-handedly it thrusts itself forward with effects
of its own, or the more the beholder is inclined to get directly involved
with it, then the more triumphant the art which forces it back and
asserts its own kind of dominion over i t . . .
But what does the mind do to bring the subject-matter under
control ? How does the 'fine art of passion' avoid becoming a
'passionate fine art' ? Schiller gives the broad outline of what the
artist has to achieve by describing what an insensitive spectator
or critic may miss :
If [the spectator] is either too tense or too relaxed, if he is used to
apprehending either exclusively with the understanding or exclusively
54 T H E AESTHETIC EDUCATION OF MANKIND
with the senses, he will, even in the case of the most successfully realised
whole, attend only to the parts, and in the presence of the most beautiful
f o r m attend only to the material. Receptive only to the raw material,
he has first to destroy the aesthetic organisation of a w o r k before he
can take pleasure in it, and laboriously scratch away until he has un-
covered all those individual details, which the master, with infinite
skill, had caused to disappear in the harmony of the whole. T h e interest he
takes in it is quite simply either a moral or a material i n t e r e s t . . . (Letter
XXII, S.A., xii, 86).
It is the fabric of the organization which prevents the subject-
matter h a v i n o- its ordinaryJ effect and interest. But what do we
know of this fabric, and how would it curtail the effect or trans-
form. the interest of the subject-matter?
It is this that Schiller describes when he says man 'separates
the appearance from the essence and arranges it according to
his own laws', weaving together what is separate in nature
provided we can think it together, and divide what nature has
joined, provided we can separate them in our mind.
If we assume that the form overcomes content, not in the
trivial sense that we simply attend to the making of relations and
ignore the content, which would run completely counter to the
whole force of the text, then we may see a number of ways in
which Schiller's account of the aesthetic state of mind may
modify the way the contents 'impose' on us.
In watching Oedipus lose his temper with Tiresias we catch
a glimpse of his personality, which reminds us of his encounter
with Laius at the crossroads. When Iocasta tries desperately to
pretend that the truth can be eluded'many men have dreamed
as much'we are carried back to the original attempt to elude
the prophecy. In such engagement with analogies within the
play we are diverted from complete subjection to literal' concern
with what will happen next. And this is surely very much in line
with what Goethe and Schiller mean by the correction of the
drama through giving it some of the character of epicthe epic
attitude being one in which one is not mentally placed within
the time of the action, but can survey the whole with hindsight.6
And such a fabric of analogy would constitute dividing up and
connecting together according to the spontaneous laws of our
own minds. In this way one looks across the divisions between
6 Music, at its most sublime, must become sheer form and affect us
'Ueber epische und dramatische Dichtung', Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe
(Stuttgart 1881), i, 346 f.
T H E AESTHETIC EDUCATION Uf jm/hiauvl- j,
events and people and sees how far one can be substituted for
another, concerning ourselves, that is, with semblance, separating
appearance from essence as we concern ourselves not with keep-
ing different incidents distinct, but with looking at them in so
far as they appear similar, that is, can be thought together. And
the appreciation of this fabric by the spectator involves the
artist leaving us with the freedom to make connections for
ourselves in the way he suggests in the Matthisson paper.
We may say, in the case of tragedy, that we have both a more
and a less generalized sense of freedom from constraint. The more
generalized sense, which will apply in all art, is the state of sus-
tained play of perception, which could occur whatever the con-
tent. There is then the more specific sense which relates to the
subject-matter : sustaining the play of perception involves modi-
fying the character of the subject-matter for our experience; we
are not simply carried along in the stream of the action, but
independently move about it, sustaining attention on it explora-
tively, analogizing one part with another, thinking one part
together with another, and separating it from the context in
which it occurs. We thereby arrest the practical concern which
we would have in so far as we confronted the action in the way
we would face real events. In this way freedom, in the sense of the
spontaneous play of the mind, provides freedom in the sense of
our not having to sustain a responsible, action-planning view
toward what we perceive, in particular, liberating us from emo-
tional concern which we would have in face of real suffering and
with which an unequivocal attitude to the plot would engage us.
iv. The Extension to Tainting
Similar considerations may be brought forward with regard to
music and painting : the sensuous appeal of the sound might be
thought to become a real awareness of music only in so far as
we attended to the transformations of motif, the multiplicities
of connection demanding the mobility of our attention. For
these might be thought to liberate us from mere sensuous involve-
ment (although formal interest generates further sensuous
involvement and vice versa).
with the serene power of antiquity. T h e plastic arts, at their most
54 T H E AESTHETIC EDUCATION OF MANKIND
perfect, must become music and m o v e us by the immediacy of sensuous
presence. Poetry, when most fully developed, must grip us as power-
fully as music does, but at the same time, like the plastic arts, surround
us with serene clarity. This precisely is the mark of perfect style in
each and every art : that it is able to remove the specific limitations of
the art in question without thereby destroying its specific qualities,
and, through a wise use of its individual peculiarities, is able to confer
on it a more general character (Letter X X I I , S.A., xii, 84 f.).
The balancing out of the biases of particular arts or subject-
matter would seem to have two kinds of implication : the first
and more general is simply that there is a natural bias in any one
art or material of falling too much on to the side of sense or feel-
ing, or on to the side of rationality or clarity of thought. But
Schiller is here pointing to something more precise than a vague
balancing out of psychological propensities. The demand that
music should 'become sheer form', and that the plastic arts must
'move us by the immediacy of their sensuous presence', becomes
a matter of liberating our minds, in perceiving and handling the
material, from the bias inherent in the material or type of art,
and this can only mean in Schiller's terms restoring or enforcing
our spontaneity or receptivity in the perception of the works
concerncd (whichever is most likely to suffer). The insistence on
the sensuous character of painting is a way of curtailing looking
at the representational painting simply for what it represents.
This is best amplified in a letter from Schiller to Goethe two
years later :
I have in the last f e w days been reading Diderot's Sur la Peinture,
to refresh myself by the company of this invigorating man. It seems
to me that Diderot, like many others, catches the truth with his feeling
only to lose it again with his rationalisations. He seems to me to be
far too concerned, in works which are aesthetic, with moral and extrinsic
aims, rather than seeking aims within the object itself and its presenta-
tion. F o r him the w o r k of art must always serve some further purpose.
A n d since the truly beautiful and perfect in art must necessarily be
humanly i m p r o v i n g , he seeks this effect of art in its content and in a
determinate result for the understanding, or f o r moral sentiment. 7
The avoidance of determinate results for the understanding or
moral sentiment, the concern with content to the exclusion of its
presentation, is an attitude which remains equivocally poised.
7
Letter of 7 August 1797, Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, i, 281.
T H E AESTHETIC E D U C A T I O N Uf j m / h i a u v l - j,
The insistence on the sensuous quality of painting, like that on
the order or pattern in music, is thus an insistence on our percep-
tual freedom. The insistence on each art taking on the qualities
of another becomes a way of insisting on the need for us to
transcend the readiest or most available mental 'set' toward the
art or subject-matter concerned, and in the case of painting this
precludes just 'reading off' the subject-matter and responding to
it sentimentally or morally.
What Schiller has done might be described in the following
way : he posited that any subject-matter or any sensory material
might bias the mind in one direction or another, and at least one
implication or suggestion of his thought is that an aesthetic
attitude is one in which the most obvious emotional tendentious-
ness of the subject, its most natural emotional or intellectual de-
mand, must, in art, be countered or curtailed.8 What is aesthetic
about an attitude is not that it is sensual, or angry, or relaxed,
or that it is unsensual and reserved. What makes it an aesthetic
attitude is that it counterbalances or transcends the attitude we
should most readily or easily adopt to the subject or kind of
object concerned.
We characterize the aesthetic attitude as being one in which we
sustain our ordinary interests and involvements, but without
maintaining them exclusively or unequivocally. We remain in-
volved in the tension of the plot of the novel, but as if from a
detached position, tracing the analogies and patterns, finding the
links other than those of literal connection.
It is at this stage convenient to compare in broad outline
Schiller's position with that of Kant. Kant isolated satisfaction
in the exercise of perception, and then sought to relate this satis-
faction (in the pure judgement of taste) to more extensive human
attitudes and the subject-matter of art. But the relation he estab-
lished was one of extreme rigidity. Only divine or heroic subject-
matter and attitudes of awe were included, and the mode of
8
Schiller's own thought on this has other strands and does seem open to conflations :
thus he writes to Goethe on the 24 November 1797 : 'Rhythm in dramatic works . . . treats
all characters and all situations according to one law, and, in spite of their inward differ-
ences, develops them all under one form, by which means the poet obliges his readers to
demand from all something general and purely human, be they ever so different in character'
(Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, i, 329). Here Schiller seems to be conflating the pro-
duction on an over-all effect on the one hand, and an effect which in some sense transcends
the literal distinctions between individual characters to reach something 'purer', more
general.
6o T H E AESTHETIC t-U UC^i L 1U\ r aiyiM ^
perception used to produce or enforce the attitudes was that in
which an ordered profusion eluded our clear grasp. It was in
Schiller's adaptation of ideas from Kant that we have the most
penetrating and flexible analysis of the relation between attitude,
exercise of perception, and subject-matter. Effectively Schiller
suggests a relation between attitude, subject-matter, and per-
ception which would apply throughout the arts, and have no
restriction on what subject-matter and what attitudes were in-
volved.
Schiller's position, as thus interpreted, forms the core of this
book. But he left only in broad outline a description of the way
perception transforms the interest of material or subject. A highly
economical and flexible theory of the play of perception, which
would supplement the position suggested by Schiller, is to be
found embedded in the psychological and philosophic writing of
Johann Friedrich Herbart. An examination of the Herbartian
theory, and then its application to vision, is the subject of the
next two chapters.
V
H E R B A R T ' S V I S I O N OF T H E M I N D
JOHANN FRIEDRICH HERBART'S conception of the opera-
tions of the mind was developed in the first thirty years of the
nineteenth century. It expands and criticizes aspects of Kant
which are central to the discussion of art and provides a way of
discussing those aspects of perception which Kant and Schiller
treat only in more general terms : the sense of order, the sense
of reciprocity between our propensity to project and perceive,
and the functioning of analogy and ambiguity.
His theory exhibits certain very basic logical difficulties, but
they are difficulties which have a particular importance in the
discussion of art, for they concern the relation of the coherence
or unity of an object of perception to the coherence or unity of
our inward states.
i. Presentations and the Self
Herbart's most general objective in constructing his psycho-
logical theory of mental development was to overcome the
dichotomy between the vision of the mind as active and the
vision of it as passive (the division between Leibniz and Locke) :
'The proposition that the mind [Seele] is originally a tabula rasa,
and the proposition that it produces that which is present to it
[ihre Vorstelkngen\ out of itself, must be united' (P.W., 18; v,
219). And Herbart sets out to do this in a way which would show
Kant's elaborate faculty psychology and a priori categories to
be superfluous (P.W., 118; vi, 1 1 4 ; L.P., 21; iv, 318). His
account of mental functioning is developed in terms of Vorstel-
lungen (which I shall here translate as 'presentations') and their
interaction in the mind.
Herbart's notion of a Vorstellung gathers a number of senses
as his theory develops : initially it means the exhibition of a single
feature to the experiencing mind. It is a phenomenal object
a thing as experienced. In the first part of his Psychologie als