does Kant claim that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good in section 59 of his Critique of the Power of Judgment? The experience of the beautiful involves the presentation of several central features of moral experience. It is not identical to moral experience, but it is so similar in its form and operation (its “rule of causality”) that Kant finds it to be a valuable symbol of the moral experience (which seems to lack a pure and clearly identifiable phenomenal representation). Kant even labels the experience of beauty as a type of duty we expect of others, a claim that may cause some misinterpretations unless tempered by his moral philosophy. Kant surely cannot be talking about a duty to experience the beautiful, as he clearly leaves any such duty out of his moral writings (such as the Groundwork). Instead, he posits in later works such as the Metaphysics of Morals that respect for natural and animal beauty is an indirect duty to one’s self. Kant, unlike Friedrich Schiller, does not claim that taste is a necessary and sufficient condition for moral worth; Kant sees the symbolic presentation of beauty as an instrument for the development of rational control over one’s inclinations and the attainment of moral virtue. Kant’s argument in section 59 stems from the fact that the symbol of morality, the beautiful, is experientially available to all humans because their faculties are all similar in arrangement and can be naturally “activated” in free play by beautiful objects. What is demanded of everyone is the inherent claim within a judgment of taste—it demands the assent of all rational subjects sharing the same mental faculties (CJ 5:353).
It is in this judgment of taste (i.e., of the beautiful) that subjects gain a symbolic presentation of their moral vocation as a free being. Kant points out that in this experience, “the mind is at the same time aware of a certain ennoblement and elevation above the mere receptivity for a pleasure from sensible impressions, and also esteems the value of others in accordance with a similar maxim of their power of judgment.” The experience of the beautiful highlights the capacity of the agent to be separate from mere sensibility in terms of pleasure, which Kant links to an agent’s ability to be causally moved by nonsensuous reasons (the moral law). The power of judgment, through such judgments of taste, sees itself as giving law to itself—one is being pleased by some aspect of the world that is not directly related to their interests as a specific, animal being. The rules that apply seem to be supplied by the mind itself, even though the mind did not design this object or scene. This experience of the beautiful is contrasted by Kant to the “heteronomy of the laws of experience” in terms of empirical judging (CJ 5:353). In the latter instance, the power of judgment has laws foisted on it by understanding. In the case of judgments of taste, the power of judgment is the source of its own reflective laws.
This issuing of laws to one’s self involves the power of judgment in both the inner realm of mental faculties of the subject as well as with general qualities of experienced external objects. Thus, the intersubjective validity of judgments of taste comes from the power of judgment’s connection to the ground of inner freedom of the subject as a moral agent—this is the supposed supersensible that connects the theoretical faculty with the practical faculty to form a unity. As intimated in his previous two critiques, Kant is always concerned with how the two varieties of reason (practical and theoretical) serve each other or combine together. He posits in section 59 that the very ground that allows for claims of taste to be universally valid also relates to an experience (albeit symbolic) of such a substratum of freedom that connects the realms of reason and nature. While earlier parts of the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment” (a subsection of the CJ) deal with reasons why judgments of taste claim intersubjective validity, Kant claims in section 59 that the beautiful can provide particular subjects an experience of their moral freedom through symbolic presentation.
There are four main parallels between the experience of the beautiful and the morally good. First, Kant notes that judgments about the beautiful please immediately through the act of reflection and not through concepts, as is done by the good. The immediacy of feeling after the experiences of the beautiful or the morally good is a common element in this symbolization of the latter in the former. The second aspect concerns the nature of this pleasure—both the beautiful and the morally good lack a connection to antecedent desires. Interests arise after the experience of the beautiful or the morally good (moral feeling, empirical or intellectual interest in the beautiful, etc.). The pleasure created by both experiences comes from human nature’s implication of elements that go beyond sensible determination. In the case of the morally good, the moral law is the nonsensuous source of our autonomy, and for the beautiful, our mental faculties and their interaction with nature highlight a source of pleasure that transcends sensuous pleasure. The third important convergence is that the freedom of the imagination in judging the beautiful object is “in accord with the lawfulness of the understanding.” In moral experience the freedom of the will agrees with itself through its own rational lawgiving—it gives its own law to itself. In the experience of beauty, it is as if the imagination was issuing law in line with the dictates of the understanding, leaving these two faculties outside of their normal hierarchical relationship. Fourth, “the subjective principle for judging of the beautiful is represented as universal, i.e., valid for everyone, but not as knowable by any universal concept” (CJ 5:354). The concepts implicated in morality are universally valid, but they are determinate concepts; this feature results in a strict demand for adherence from subjects. The beautiful involves such a universal validity, but the lack of determinate conceptual content leads one away from demanding of others that they recognize a given object as beautiful. While the beautiful and the morally good differ in important ways, Kant finds that there are enough similarities in their experiential qualities to identify the former as a symbolic presentation of the latter in an agent’s interaction with the physical world.
Being the symbol of the morally good, the beautiful illustrates that the worlds of nature and freedom can converge. It is as if a part of the world of nature, in the experience of the beautiful object or scene, was designed by us to please our faculties of sense and understanding. The harmony created in us by such experiences seems as if it must be purposeful. While judgments of taste fall short of being an actual phenomenal experience of freedom, they can point the reflective agent to the realm of the moral through the world of nature.6 This bridging of the two realms through the sensible experience of the beautiful is Kant’s answer in the Critique of the Power of Judgment to doubts about the possibility of living up to the strict demands of morality in the physical world. Duty involves the idea of a will that includes subjective hindrances (inclinations) and as such locates the challenge to duty in the physical world—if an agent is to be virtuous, one must be able to surmount the physical forces (inclinations) in the physical world. The symbolic presentation of the morally good through the beautiful supports the possibility of countervailing inclinations being overcome in a human agent by respect for the moral law. This symbolic experience is taken by Kant to be more concrete evidence for the reality of the demands of morality—the only difference is that the present presentation of the beautiful provides for the possibility of future realizations of moral worth in a given agent’s will. Kant finds solace with the unification here of the two aspects of his critical philosophy—the straightforward command of the moral law and the possibility of the physical world being amenable to our following of this moral vocation.
Kant finds that such a presentation offered by the experience of the beautiful can have definite effects in moral development in addition to being a symbol of the morally good (aiding in comprehending moral experience and duty). Humans typically associate beauty with implications of moral quality, but the actual experience of the symbolic presentation of the morally good can have an even greater cultivating effect on an agent. Discussing this value of beauty as a symbol of the morally good and its associated judgment of taste, Kant states, “Taste as it were makes possible the transition from sensible charm to the habitual moral interest without too violent of a leap by representing the imagination even in its freedom as purposively determinable for the understanding and teaching us to find a free satisfaction in the objects of the senses even without any sensible charm” (CJ 5:354). Several claims are evident in this passage. First, Kant explicitly connects the judgment of beauty with moral development, although not in a causally necessary manner. The experience of beauty is one of the types of experience that can help us morally improve.
