Who is ultimately responsible for producing delight in nature

Kant argues that beauty is equivalent neither to utility nor perfection, but is still purposive. Beauty in nature, then, will appear as purposive with respect to our faculty of judgment, but its beauty will have no ascertainable purpose — that is, it is not purposive with respect to determinate cognition.

Indeed, this is why beauty is pleasurable since, Kant argues, pleasure is defined as a feeling that arises on the achievement of a purpose, or at least the recognition of a purposiveness Introduction, VI. The purposiveness of art is more complicated. Although such works may have had purposes behind their production the artist wished to express a certain mood, or communicate a certain idea , nevertheless, these can not be sufficient for the object to be beautiful.

As judges of art, any such knowledge we do have about these real purposes can inform the judgment as background, but must be abstracted from to form the aesthetic judgment properly. It is not just that the purpose for the beauty of the beautiful happens to be unknown, but that it cannot be known.

Still, we are left with the problem of understanding how a thing can be purposive, without having a definite purpose.

The Fourth Moment. Everyone must assent to my judgment, because it follows from this principle. By exemplary, Kant means that the judgment does not either follow or produce a determining concept of beauty, but exhausts itself in being exemplary precisely of an aesthetic judgment. With the notion of condition, Kant reaches the core of the matter. He is asking: what is it that the necessity of the judgment is grounded upon; that is, what does it say about those who judge?

Similarly, Kant wants to claim that the universal communicability, the exemplary necessity and the basis in an a priori principle are all different ways of understanding the same subjective condition of possibility of aesthetic judgment that he calls common sense. As we shall see, on the side of the beautiful object, this subjective principle corresponds to the principle of the purposiveness of nature.

Kant also suggests that common sense in turn depends upon or is perhaps identical with the same faculties as ordinary cognition , that is, those features of humans which as Kant showed in the Critique of Pure Reason make possible natural, determinative experience.

Here, however, the faculties are merely in a harmony rather than forming determinate cognition. Everything interesting and fundamental happened in the formation of concepts, or in the receiving of intuitions. But now Kant argues that judgment itself, as a faculty, has an fundamental principle that governs it. This principle asserts the purposiveness of all phenomena with respect to our judgment.

In other words, it assumes in advance that everything we experience can be tackled by our powers of judgment. But in the case of the beautiful, we do notice.

This is because the beautiful draws particular attention to its purposiveness; but also because the beautiful has no concept of a purpose available, so that we cannot just apply a concept and be done with it.

Instead, the beautiful forces us to grope for concepts that we can never find. And yet, nevertheless, the beautiful is not an alien and disturbing experience — on the contrary, it is pleasurable. The principle of purposiveness is satisfied, but in a new and unique way. Asking what this new and unique way is takes us to the second aspect. This account of common sense explains how the beautiful can be purposive with respect to our ability to judge, and yet have no definite purpose.

Kant believes common sense also answers the question of why aesthetic judgments are valid: since aesthetic judgments are a perfectly normal function of the same faculties of cognition involved in ordinary cognition, they will have the same universal validity as such ordinary acts of cognition.

The idea of a harmony between or among the faculties of cognition is turning out to be the key idea. For such a harmony, Kant claims, will be purposive, but without purpose. Moreover, it will be both universal and necessary, because based upon universal common sense, or again, because related to the same cognitive faculties which enable any and all knowledge and experience. Lastly, because of the self-contained nature of this harmony, it must be disinterested.

Up to now, we have had no decent argument for the existence of common sense as a principle of taste. At best, common sense was plausible as a possible explanation of, for example, the tendency to universality observed in aesthetic judgments. As Kant admits in sect. Such a demand for universality could be accounted for nicely if we assumed an a priori principle for taste, which might also explain the idea of universal communicability. This argument, however, is rather weak.

Kant believes he has an ingenious route to proving the case with much greater certainty. Throughout the Four Moments of the Beautiful, Kant has dropped many important clues as to the transcendental account of the possibility of aesthetic judgment: in particular, we have talked about communicability, common sense and the harmony of the cognitive sub-faculties. Kant then cuts off to turn to the sublime, representing a different problem within aesthetic judgment. He returns to beauty in sect.

These transitional passages feel much like a continuation of the Four Moments; we will treat them as such here, since also Kant claims that the sublime does not need a Deduction. Here, we will discuss only the second. Both explicitly are attempting to demonstrate the universal communicability and thus intersubjective validity of judgments of taste.

The four moments of the beautiful are then explicitly seen as being limitations on the conditions under which this judgment can take place no interest, purposive without determining purpose, etc. By this, he means that although the judgment is a judgment of the presentation of a particular singular object, no particular determination of either sensible intuition, or understanding forms a necessary part of the judgment.

In ordinary cognition of the world, this lack of restriction would be entirely out of place. It would be nonsense to judge whether a particular thing was a sofa without restricting my judgment to that particular thing, and to the concept of a sofa.

However, considered in general that is, in their essence as sub-faculties the faculties of imagination and understanding are likewise not restricted to any presentation or kind of sense, or any concept. Because such faculties in general are required for all theoretical cognition whatsoever, regardless of its object as Kant claims to have proven in the first Critique , they can be assumed present a priori, in the same form and in the same way, in all human beings.

The presence of the cognitive sub-faculties in their various relations is equivalent with the principle of the universal communicability and validity i. Therefore, an aesthetic judgment must be seen to be an expression of this principle.

The key move is obviously to claim that the aesthetic judgment rests upon the same unique conditions as ordinary cognition, and thus that the former must have the same universal communicability and validity as the latter.

It is just that, presented with the beautiful, our cognitive faculties are released from the limitations that characterize ordinary thought, and produce what above we called a cascade of thoughts and feelings. It is difficult to know what to make of this argument with the various other versions of it scattered throughout the text and the hypothesis it purports to prove. However, there is no doubting the fascinating and profound implications of what Kant is proposing.

For example, the notions of common sense and communicability are closely akin to key political ideas, leading several commentators to propose that what Kant is really writing about are the foundations of any just politics see e. Finally, of course, there is K. Overview: For Kant, the other basic type of aesthetic experience is the sublime. The problem for Kant here is that this experience seems to directly contradict the principle of the purposiveness of nature for our judgment.

And yet, Kant notes, one would expect the feeling of being overwhelmed to also be accompanied by a feeling of fear or at least discomfort. Whereas, the sublime can be a pleasurable experience. All this raises the question of what is going on in the sublime. Instead, what is properly sublime are ideas of reason: namely, the ideas of absolute totality or absolute freedom.

However huge the building, we know it is puny compared to absolute totality; however powerful the storm, it is nothing compared to absolute freedom. Three in particular are of note. First, that while the beautiful is concerned with form, the sublime may even be or even especially be formless.

Usually, we apply some kind of standard of comparison, although this need not be explicit e. The absolutely large, however, is not the result of a comparison. Now, of course, any object is measurable — even the size of the universe, no less a mountain on Earth. Dealing with a unit of measure, whether it be a millimeter or a kilometer, requires a number how many units but also a sense of what the unit is.

This means that there will be absolute limits on properly aesthetic measurement because of the limitations of the finite, human faculties of sensibility. An object that exceeds these limits regardless of its mathematical size will be presented as absolutely large — although of course it is still so with respect to our faculties of sense.

However, we must return to the second and third peculiar puzzles of the sublime. As we saw above with respect to the beautiful, pleasure lies in the achievement of a purpose, or at least in the recognition of a purposiveness. So, if the sublime presents itself as counter-purposive, why and how is pleasure associated with it?

In other words, where is the purposiveness of the sublime experience? Kant writes,. As Kant will later claim, objects of sense oceans, pyramids, etc. In fact, what is actually sublime, Kant argues, are ideas of our own reason.

The overwhelmingness of sensible objects leads the minds to these ideas. Now, such presentations of reason are necessarily unexhibitable by sense. Moreover, the faculty of reason is not merely an inert source of such ideas, but characteristically demands that its ideas be presented. This same demand is what creates all the dialectical problems that Kant analyses in, for example, the Antinomies. The sublime experience, then, is a two-layer process. First, a contrapurposive layer in which our faculties of sense fail to complete their task of presentation.

Beyond simply comprehending individual sensible things, our faculty of sensibility, we might say, now knows what it is for. We will return to this point shortly. The dynamically sublime is similar.

This is the difference, he says, between a rational religion and mere superstition. Again, the sublime is a two-layered experience. In particular, the sublimity belongs to human freedom which is by definition unassailable to the forces of nature. Thus we can begin to see the intimate connection between the sublime especially here the dynamically sublime and morality. The sublime, properly speaking, is possible only for members of such a moral culture and, Kant sometimes suggests, may reciprocally contribute to the strengthening of that culture.

So, the sublime is subjected to an empirical contingency. However, Kant claims, we are justified in demanding from everyone that they necessarily have the transcendental conditions for such moral culture, and thus for the sublime, because these conditions are as in the case of the beautiful the same as for theoretical and practical thought in general.

The claims about moral culture show that, for Kant, aesthetics in general is not an isolated problem for philosophy but intimately linked to metaphysical and moral questions. This is one more reason why it is important not to assume that the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment is a book merely about beauty and sublimity.

For example, only the dynamically sublime has any strict relationship to the moral idea of freedom. Again, Kant gives an interesting account of how magnitude is estimated in discussing the mathematical sublime, but skips the parallel problem in the dynamically sublime how does one estimate force?

Finally, many readers have found the premise of the whole discussion implausible: that in the sublime experience, what is properly sublime and the object of respect should be the idea of reason, rather than nature. He now turns to fine art. Kant assumes that the cognition involved in judging fine art is similar to the cognition involved in judging natural beauty.

Accordingly, the problem that is new to fine art is not how it is judged by a viewer, but how it is created. What provides soul in fine art is an aesthetic idea. An aesthetic idea is a counterpart to a rational idea: where the latter is a concept that could never adequately be exhibited sensibly, the former is a set of sensible presentations to which no concept is adequate.

It is the talent of genius to generate aesthetic ideas, but that is not all. Starting in sect. The notion of aesthetic judgment already developed remains central. But unlike the investigation of beauty in nature, the focus shifts from the transcendental conditions for judgment of the beautiful object to the transcendental conditions of the making of fine art.

In other words: how is it possible to make art? To solve this, Kant will introduce the notion of genius. But that is not the only shift. Kant stands right in the middle of a complete historical change in the central focus of aesthetics.

While formerly, philosophical aesthetics was largely content to take its primary examples of beauty and sublimity from nature, after Kant the focus is placed squarely on works of art. Fine art is therefore a secondary concept. Thus, the relation between nature and art is much more complex than it seems at first.

But, historically, his discussion of the concept contributed to the escalation of the concept in the early 19th Century. This can either be an empirical claim or, more commonly in Kant, a priori. On the other hand, nature as itself an object has several meanings for Kant. This includes things in space outside of us, but also aspects of sensible human nature that are the objects of sciences such as psychology. Kant begins by giving a long clarification of art.

As a general term, again, art refers to the activity of making according to a preceding notion. If I make a chair, I must know, in advance, what a chair is. We distinguish art from nature because though we may judge nature purposive we know in fact there is no prior notion behind the activity of a flower opening.

Art also means something different from science — as Kant says, it is a skill distinguished from a type of knowledge. Art involves some kind of practical ability, irreducible to determinate concepts, which is distinct from a mere comprehension of something.

The latter can be fully taught; the former, although subject to training to be sure, relies upon native talent. Thus, Kant will later claim, there can be no such thing as a scientific genius, because a scientific mind can never be radically original.

See sect. Further, art is distinguished from labor or craft — the latter being something satisfying only for the payoff which results and not for the mere activity of making itself. Art not surprisingly, like beauty is free from any interest in the existence of the product itself. Arts are subdivided into mechanical and aesthetic. The former are those which, although not handicrafts, never-the-less are controlled by some definite concept of a purpose to be produced.

The latter are those wherein the immediate object is merely pleasure itself. Finally, Kant distinguishes between agreeable and fine art. The former produces pleasure through sensation alone, the latter through various types of cognitions.

This taxonomy of fine art defines more precisely the issue for Kant. It is clearly not just a matter of applying good taste, otherwise all art critics would be artists, all musicians composers, and so forth. Equally, it is not a question of simply expressing oneself using whatever means come to hand, since such productions might well lack taste.

We have also investigated how it is for someone looking at a work of beauty to judge it. But it is not yet clear how, on the side of production, fine art gets made. Kant sums up the problem in two apparent paradoxes. The first of these is easy to state. Fine art is a type of purposeful production, because it is made; art in general is production according to a concept of an object. But fine art can have no concept adequate to its production, else any judgment on it will fail one of the key features of all aesthetic judgments: namely purposiveness without a purpose.

Fine art therefore must both be, and not be, an art in general. To introduce the second paradox, Kant notices that we have a problem with the overwrought — that which draws attention to itself as precisely an artificial object or event. Kant expresses this point by saying that, in viewing a work of art we must be aware of it as art, but it must never-the-less appear natural.

The paradox is that art the non-natural must appear to be natural. Kant must overcome these paradoxes and explain how fine art can be produced at all. In sect. He writes,. Genius is the talent natural endowment that gives the rule to art. Since talent is an innate productive ability of the artist and as such belongs itself to nature, we could also put it this way: Genius is the innate mental predisposition ingenium through which nature gives the rule to art.

In other words, that which makes it possible to produce fine art is not itself produced — not by the individual genius, nor we should add through his or her culture, history, education, etc. From the definition of genius as that talent through which nature gives the rule to art follows arguably! First, fine art is produced by individual humans, but not as contingent individuals.

That is, not by human nature in the empirically known sense. Second, fine art as aesthetic just like nature as aesthetic can have no definite rules or concepts for producing or judging it.

Third, the rule supplied by genius is more a rule governing what to produce, rather than how. Taste, Kant claims, is an evaluative faculty, not a productive one sect. Thus, the end of sect. Fourth, because of this, originality is a characteristic of genius. This leads Kant to make some suggestive, but never fully worked out, comments about artistic influences and schools, the role of culture, of technique and education, etc.

See e. According to the manner of presentation, he divides all fine arts into the arts of speech especially poetry, which Kant ranks the highest of the arts , the arts of visual form sculpture, architecture and painting , and the arts involving a play of sensible tones music.

Genius provides the matter for fine art, taste provides the form. The beautiful is always formal, as we have already discovered. Kept indoors by the coldest summer in a century following the eruption of the volcano Tambora in the Indonesian archipelago in April which threw so much debris into the stratosphere that the sun was literally blocked out across India, Europe, and North America , reading ghost stories for their amusement, the four friends decided on 16 June to have a contest to see who could write the most frightening story.

Could I ever wish to kill my own child? By including an image of the murder of her own son, William, in the novel, Mary articulated her deepest fear that an unloved and psychologically abused child, such as she herself had been, could become an unloving, abusive mother, even a murdering monster. Indeed, as a male scientist who creates a male creature, Victor eliminates the biological necessity for females at all.

The men work outside the home, as public servants Alphonse Frankenstein , as scientists Victor , as merchants Henry Clerval and his father , and as explorers Walton. As a consequence of this division, public intellectual activity is segregated from private emotional activity: Victor cannot work and love at the same time. He cannot feel empathy for his creature and chooses to work with large body pieces because doing so is easier and faster, despite the fact that his creature will be a deformed giant.

And he remains so self-absorbed that he cannot imagine his creature might threaten someone other than himself on his wedding night. The separation of the sphere of public masculine power from the sphere of private feminine affection also causes the destruction of most of the women in the novel. Caroline Beaufort dies from scarlet fever caught when she alone volunteers to nurse the contagious Elizabeth.

And Elizabeth is murdered on her wedding night. But this ideal family is ripped out of the novel when the creature enters their household, suggesting that Mary herself did not think such an ideal family could prosper in her time. Why does Victor finally refuse to create a mate for his creature, an Eve for his Adam, after having promised to do so? He rationalizes his decision to destroy the half-formed female creature:.

I was now about to form another being, of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant that her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighbourhood of man, and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation.

They might even hate each other; the creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he be again alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of his own species.

How will we get there? A clue given by the twentieth-century European philosopher Jean Gebser resonates with me. You can do with less. Yes, for myself writing this essay and probably for most of you reading it, we can. But does this spark brightness in our eyes and eager energy in the way that the concept of footprints of delight does for my students who linger at the end of class to discuss what we just shared? Martin Luther King Jr.

What will move us forward is the realization that we need to create harmonies between diverse human communities and their embracing ecosystems because our happiness depends on it. Let zoos and aquariums be centers that show how this can be done.

A footprint of delight: Exploring sustainable happiness Article London: Penguin Press. Materialistic values and goals. Annual Review of Psychology, 67 , The development of conservation behaviors in childhood and youth.

Clayton Ed. Oxford University Press. The Living Landscape. Portland, OR: Timber Press.