Beauty Without a Use

Kant noticed something about the way people talk that is easy to miss because it is so familiar. If you say you like the taste of canary wine and someone says they do not, there is nothing to discuss. If you say a painting is beautiful and someone says it is not, an argument begins, and neither of you thinks the argument is silly. Yet you cannot settle it by proof. There is no feature you can point to such that admitting the feature commits your opponent to the verdict.

So the judgement of beauty has two properties that look incompatible. It rests on a feeling rather than on a concept, which makes it subjective. And it speaks with what Kant calls a universal voice: it demands agreement from everyone, in a way that no report of a private pleasure ever does. The whole of the third Critique is an attempt to explain how one judgement can be both.

The first step is disinterestedness. Interest, in Kant's vocabulary, means a stake in the existence of the object. Hunger is interested: the pleasure of the meal requires that the food be consumed. Ownership is interested. Use is interested. Beauty, he argues, is not. You can find a palace beautiful while holding that it should never have been built and that you want nothing to do with it, and the judgement survives entirely intact. That independence from wanting is what separates the beautiful from the merely agreeable, and everything downstream depends on it.

The second step is the account of what is actually going on in the mind. Ordinarily the imagination presents material and the understanding subsumes it under a concept: that is a cup, that is a face, that is a threat. In the encounter with beauty the two faculties engage each other and harmonise without the subsumption ever happening. Nothing is decided. The fit is felt rather than known. Kant calls this the free play of the faculties, and it is the source of the pleasure.

The third step is the one that carries the weight and is the most contested. Since every thinking being has imagination and understanding, and since the harmony arises from their relation rather than from any private quirk, Kant concludes that what I feel is something anyone with those faculties would feel, which is why I may demand agreement even though I cannot prove anything. Strip that step away and his account collapses back into Hume's. Keep it and you owe an explanation of persistent, informed, permanent disagreement between people who have every faculty in good order, which he does not really give.

The sublime is treated separately and its structure is quite different. A storm at sea, a mountain range, a magnitude that exceeds what the imagination can hold together in one presentation: the first movement is a check, something like a failure. The pleasure comes second, when the mind registers that it possesses an idea of the infinite that no sensory magnitude can match. The sublime is therefore not a stronger beauty. It is displeasure converted, and what it reveals is not the object's quality but the subject's own faculty. Kant's readers have never quite stopped arguing about whether that is profound or a conjuring trick.

The framework still does real work in ordinary disputes. A poster wins an award for its composition and the client reports that it sold nothing. Kant separates these cleanly: judging that a poster works is judging it against a purpose, which makes it a judgement of the good, and the evidence for it is sales. Judging its composition beautiful abstracts from what it was for. Both verdicts can be correct at once. The argument between the studio and the client usually persists because each side believes the other is answering its question badly, rather than answering a different question well.