Beauty as the Transition from Nature to Freedom in Kant's Critique of Judgment

Abstract

The splendid age of classical aesthetics, from Kant to Hegel, begins with Kant's Critique of Judgment. In that work, beauty has a central, systematic significance as the mediating link between nature and freedom. Precisely this conception of mediation proves to be the initial spark for the idealistic aesthetics that followed. Nevertheless, Kant himself did not think of that mediation as a higher, synthetic unity of nature and freedom. Such a unity could be conceived, if at all, only metaphysically, as was attempted in the various, idealistic metaphysics of art, initiated by Schiller and developed by Schelling and by Hegel. By contrast, Kant understands that mediation solely as a transition. It does not overcome the self-sufficiency of the principles of theoretical and practical reason along with their separate domains of nature and freedom, but rather leaves them with their original, autonomous validity. As intermediary, beauty thus does not identify, but only subjectively joins those principles and domains. The elaboration of beauty in this sense belongs to the systematic completion of the critical philosophy by means of a principle of reflective judgment: the principle of the purposiveness of nature. If the series of drafts of classical aesthetics beginning with Kant is considered typologically, in essence the following types of foundation for aesthetics may be ascertained. First, an aesthetics can proceed from the observer who, for example, judges something to be beautiful. It thus becomes an aesthetics of taste or evaluation. Also belonging to this fundamental type of aesthetics, as an empiricist variant, is an affective aesthetics. Second, aesthetics may proceed from an artist's original capacity to create. This creativity becomes the basis for predicates of aesthetic