Dependent Beauty As The Appreciation of Teleological Style

Abstract

One of Kant's most characteristic positions in his Critique of Judgment (1790) is that an object's perfection does not enhance its beauty. Although this may be surprising in view of the influential Platonic tradition which regards beauty as the very expression of perfection, Kant observes that the pleasure in an object's beauty and the pleasure in its perfection are distinct and independent pleasures. Although a coin collector, cat fancier, or butterfly enthusiast, for instance, might experience great pleasure upon perceiving a perfect specimen X, this pleasure does not determine that X must be beautiful. That some extremely rare and bizarre-looking insect perfectly exemplifies its biological type does not imply that the insect is pleasurable to look at. Upon such ordinary reflections, Kant recognizes an independence between perfection and beauty. From a more theoretical standpoint, Kant's sharp delineation between perfection and beauty rests substantially upon his claim that judgments of beauty are aesthetic, and do not, as such, provide any knowledge of the object's type. Relying upon an assumed opposition between sensation and intellection, he maintains that a judgment of beauty depends solely upon how the object's appearance makes us feel, and not upon any objective categorization of the object as a thing of a certain kind. More specifically, Kant claims that our judgment of an object's beauty depends solely upon how its appearance makes us feel, as we apprehend how its form is suitable for categorization and systematic understanding. The pleasure in beauty thus resides not in the pleasurable sensations the object might immediately stimulate, nor in the pleasure of noting that it fits some predefined category, but in our reflection upon how the object's design accords with our cognitive interest in systematic understanding. ' The pleasure we take in a beautiful object is indeed explained in reference to our capacity to acquire knowledge (a reference which accounts for the universality of the pleasure in beauty), but that pleasure depends upon no definitive knowledge of the object's type or purpose. Since they are aesthetic judgments, judgments of beauty are fundamentally noncognitive. In reference to the three basic kinds of pleasure mentioned above-pleasures of sensation, cognition, and reflection (of which the pleasure in beauty is a species)-Kant characterizes situations wherein we experience the pleasure of beauty in combination with the other two kinds of pleasures. When judging a flower's shape to be beautiful and its pastel color to be sensuously charming, we combine the aesthetic pleasure of beauty with the aesthetic pleasure of sensation; when judging a flower's shape to be beautiful while noting how the flower perfectly exemplifies a specific kind of rose, we combine the aesthetic pleasure of beauty with the cognitive pleasure of perfection. When beauty is combined with charm, as in the former case, Kant maintains that the charming sensations can either enhance our perception of the object's systematic form (and hence, our appreciation of its beauty), or they can overwhelm our taste, and render it barbaric. If Kant were selecting paradigms of natural beauty, he would prefer delicately articulated snowflakes or the configuration of veins in a leaf to richly fragrant flowers and powerfully brilliant sunsets. Kant does not perceive any fundamental conflict between the aesthetic pleasures of beauty and sensation, since he acknowledges that the pleasure of sensation may increase our sensitiv-