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The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant's Aesthetic Formalism

Rachel Zuckert

Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 44, Number 4, October

2006, pp. 599-622 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/hph.2006.0075

For additional information about this article

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599t he pur pos i v eness of for m

* Rachel Zuckert is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University.

Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 44, no. 4 (2006) 599–622

[599]

The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant’s

Aesthetic Formalism

R A C H E L Z U C K E R T *

in the “critique of aesthetic judgment,” Kant claims that when we find an

object beautiful, we are appreciating its “purposive form.” Many of Kant’s readers

have found this claim one of his least interesting and most easily criticized claims

about aesthetic experience. Detractors hold up his aesthetics as a paradigmatic

case of narrow formalism;1 and even many admirers of Kant’s aesthetics take Kant’s

claims about form to be problematic, but argue that they are inessential to his

aesthetics (which includes more interesting, defensible claims).2 Though these

critics come to differing evaluations of Kant’s aesthetics as a whole, they agree on

two points. First, interpretively: that when Kant claims that it is the “form” of anobject we find beautiful, he means that in aesthetic appreciation, we find certain

spatial and/or temporal properties (such as proportion, line, shape) aesthetically

pleasing—and that such properties are exclusively responsible for an object’s

beauty. Second, evaluatively: that Kant is wrong, at least about this.

In this paper, I shall propose that we need not endorse either claim. I shall argue

that one may interpret Kant’s formalism as a claim that in aesthetic experience3

1 This is a widespread tendency in contemporary aesthetics—usually accompanied by criticism

of Kant’s (related) claim that our pleasure in such form is disinterested. One example is the series

of essays entitled “Beyond Kant,” in Beauty Matters , ed. Peg Zeglin Brand (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 2000).2 E.g., Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste [Claims of Taste ] (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1997), ch. 6. Similarly, in her work on the Critique of Judgment , Hannah Ginsborg scarcely men-

tions Kant’s formalism. There are some contemporary defenders of Kant’s formalism, notably Paul

Crowther (“The Claims of Perfection: A Revisionary Defence of Kant’s Theory of Dependent Beauty,”

International Philosophical Quarterly 26 [1996]: 61–74) and Karl Ameriks (“Kant and the Objectivity of

Taste,” British Journal of Aesthetics 23 [1983]: 3–17; “New Views on Kant’s Judgment of Taste” [“New

Views”], in Kants Ästhetik/Kant’s Aesthetics/l’esthétique de Kant , ed. Herman Paret [de Gruyter: Berlin,

1998], 431–47). Though I sympathize both with Ameriks’s arguments against the abstract subjectivist

view attributed to Kant, and with Crowther’s attempt to situate Kant’s formalist claims in the context of

rationalist aesthetics, I suggest a more radical re-reading of Kant’s formalist claims than either does.3

Consonant with standard practice, I shall use the terms ‘aesthetic experience’ and ‘aesthetic judgment’ to refer to experience or judgment of beauty, on Kant’s view.



600 journal of the history of philosophy 44:4 october 2006

we appreciate the object as an individual, as comprising all (or indeterminately

many) of its sensible properties as inextricably interrelated or unified to make the

object what it is; in other words, we appreciate what has been called an object’s

‘individual form.’ This reading, I shall suggest, allows us not only to understand

Kant’s aesthetics as intimately connected to his project in the Critique of Judgment (hereafter, CJ ) as a whole, but also to see Kant’s aesthetics, in general, as providing

a richer, more plausible description of our aesthetic engagement with an object,

or as less narrowly subjectivist than is frequently believed.

I shall proceed by presenting Kant’s claims about form, and the standard criti-

cisms thereof, and then turn to defend this alternative reading. Before I do so,

however, I wish to make some preliminary remarks about aesthetic formalism in

general. Contemporary discussion of formalism often takes aesthetic formalism

to be instantiated by the views of the twentieth-century art critics, Clive Bell and

Roger Fry,4 and Kant’s formalism is often implicitly equated with theirs (or the

kind of position attributed to them). I wish to resist that equation in this essay; to

that end, I start here by giving a wider sense of what formalism might be, drawing

especially on historical positions that were available to Kant.5

Broadly speaking, “formalism” is the view that, in aesthetic appreciation of an

object (usually a work of art), we do and ought to pay attention not to the object’s

representational content, emotional expressiveness, historical, institutional, or

social context (whether conditions for the production of the object or its effects),

but only to its form. Formalism is characterized in some sense, then, by what it

excludes, viz. considerations taken to be external to the object. But it does specifypositively (if vaguely) that the form of an object is what makes it beautiful.6

‘Form,’ however, can mean a number of different things, all of which (in some

sense) are the design or arrangement of an object’s parts, often of its sensible

properties. I wish to draw attention to three somewhat distinct ways in which one

may understand such form or arrangement of properties, which I shall call ‘prop-

erty-formalism,’ ‘kind-formalism,’ and ‘whole-formalism.’ Property-formalism is

the view that the form of an object can be described in terms of a set of specific

spatial or temporal properties that characterize the relations that hold among dif-

ferent parts of the object, and that these properties are responsible for the beautyof the object. Hogarth’s view that the serpentine line is the most beautiful line,

responsible for the greatest beauty of objects; ancient and Renaissance theories

that beauty lies in (certain specifiable) proportion(s) (e.g., the Golden Mean); art

4 Or, in music, by the nineteenth-century philosopher, Edward Hanslick.5 In my thinking about formalism, I have profited from Arnold Isenberg, “Formalism,” and “Per-

ception, Meaning, and the Subject Matter of Art,” in his Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism [Aesthetics ] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973): 22–52; Richard Wollheim, “On Formalism and Pictorial

Organization,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001): 127–37; Richard Eldridge, “Form,” in The

Blackwell Companion to Aesthetics , ed. David Cooper (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 158–62; and the “Formal-ism” articles by Lucian Krukowski, Norman Batkin, and Whitney Davis, in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics , ed.

Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 2:213–25. The types of formalism sketched here

are drawn from consideration of theories in the history of aesthetics, however, and differ significantly

from contemporary understandings of formalism articulated in these essays.6 Both Isenberg and Wollheim distinguish between ontological, or analytic, formalism (the view that

what a painting essentially is, is its form) and evaluative formalism (the view that the form is what makes

the object good/beautiful). Since Kant is concerned with the grounds upon which we call something

beautiful, I treat formalism as evaluative.




historical attempts to map the composition of an art work geometrically; or even

broader claims, e.g., that beauty lies in symmetry, are all examples of formalist

views that identify particular spatio-temporal-formal properties as responsible for

the beauty of objects.

Kind-formalism, by contrast, identifies the form of an object as that which

makes it a (good) exemplar of its kind. Examples of this type of formalism include

Aristotle’s analysis of tragedy, Lessing’s Aristotelian drama criticism, analyses of

musical pieces as good sonatas because they follow the development/movement

pattern of a sonata, and Hogarth’s claim that a warhorse is beautiful if it has the

fitness of its kind. Kind-formalism may well be less exclusionary than property-

formalism for, depending on the kind in question, the subject matter (e.g., the

action represented in a tragedy), external knowledge (e.g., musical conventions of

sonata form), or emotional effects (the end that may determine which elements

belong to a form) may be relevant to this kind of form. Such aesthetic theories

nonetheless have a claim to be called ‘formalist’ insofar as they involve the claim

that it is the arrangement of elements that makes the object beautiful and that

therefore the particular character of those elements (e.g., whether the action is

killing one’s father or burying one’s brother, whether the sonata is in A Major or

C Major, whether it expresses sadness or happiness) is considered insufficient to

establish the object’s beauty or lack thereof.

Whole-formalism, finally, invokes a much vaguer sense of ‘form’ than either

of the two preceding and is even less likely than kind-formalism to be identified

now as formalism. It is the historically frequently voiced claim that an object isbeautiful if it is ordered or unified, if its parts harmonize to form a whole—or,

more specifically, that beauty is a unity of diversity or of variety. Whole-formalism

may be cashed out in terms of property- or kind-formalism: this object (one might

argue) is unified or harmonious because it is proportionate, or because it has the

development pattern of a sonata, and/or these proportions or sonata forms are

pleasing (beautiful) because they ground such unity.7 Indeed, historically, almost

all aesthetic theories combine one or more of these elements, as I indicated in

using Hogarth twice as an example. Hogarth also adheres to whole-formalism: he

argues that the serpentine line is the most beautiful line because it is at once unifiedand various. Whole-formalism is, however, distinct from the other two formalisms,

for one may endorse whole-formalism while being largely indifferent to kind- or

property-formalist claims, as on Hutcheson’s and Mendelssohn’s aesthetic theories,

for example. Hutcheson argues that we have a sense of beauty whereby we perceive

the unity of variety, while Mendelssohn argues that in aesthetic appreciation, we

are sensibly aware of an object’s “perfection” (harmony of multiplicity).8 Again,

7 Kind-formalism itself arguably stems from a metaphysical view that kind-forms are responsible for

all unity of objects. Similarly, aesthetic theories influenced by Gestalt psychology may constitute a morerecent version of whole-formalism—based, like kind-formalism, on a broader theory, here of percep-

tion, rather than being.8 Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings [Writings ], ed. and trans. Daniel Dahlstrom (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1997), 14–17, 24, 50; Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original ofour Ideas of Beauty and Virtue [Inquiry ], in Philosophical Writings , ed. R. S. Downie (London: Everyman’s

Library, 1994), 15–19, 33–37. Both allow that we may perceive unity of diversity because of an object’s

proportion (Mendelssohn, Writings , 14; Hutcheson, Inquiry , 17–18), but take that to be one case among

many of unity of diversity, which is the defining factor in (our experience of) the beautiful.




whole-formalism is a formalist position: it claims that the arrangement (indeed

the whole arrangement) of the sensible properties of the object is responsible for

the beauty of the object, and it excludes external, contextual considerations, such

as social meaningfulness or manner of production.

We are now in a position to examine Kant’s formalist claims. As may already

be clear, I shall argue that Kant is generally taken to be a property-formalist,

but ought instead to be understood as a whole-formalist. Before turning to that

argument, however, I shall present Kant’s exposition of his formalism, and some

standard criticisms of it.

1 . k a n t ’ s e x p o s i t i o n

Kant presents his aesthetic formalism in the third Moment of his analytic of taste,

paragraphs10

–17

of the CJ . In the preceding two Moments, Kant has arguedthat aesthetic pleasure is disinterested and that in aesthetic judgments we claim

that all others ought to share our pleasure in (representing) the beautiful object.

In the third Moment, Kant turns to consider what about the object gives us such

disinterested, universally communicable pleasure, and concludes that “[b ]eauty isan object’s form of purposiveness insofar as it is perceived in the object without therepresentation of a purpose ” (5:236).9 In this statement, Kant suggests that the purpo-

siveness of the object and its beautiful form are inextricable from one another; as

I shall suggest below, they ought to be read as such. For the meantime, however,

I shall present Kant’s apparent positions concerning form and purposiveness

separately (as they are usually taken), and in that order.

Consistently with his procedure in the rest of his discussion of taste, Kant pres-

ents and defends his aesthetic formalism via arguments by contrast and elimina-

tion: he articulates what form is—and why it is the source of an object’s beauty—by

identifying what it is not. In particular, Kant contrasts the “form” (representation)

of an object with two sorts of “matter”: sensations, which are the matter of experi-

ence, and concepts, which are the matter of judgment.10

In paragraphs 13–14, Kant contrasts “beauty” with “charms,” i.e., pleasures in

mere sensations. Kant asserts that all properly aesthetic pleasure stems only from

attention to the form of an object, as distinct from the material components inour perception of it (i.e., colors and tones). If these latter play any role in the

beauty of an object, it is only to highlight its form (5:225–26). By contrast to these

9 Unless otherwise noted, all references to CJ are to volume and page numbers (e.g., 5:362-64)

from the Akademie edition (i.e. Kants gesammelte Schriften [Königliche Preubische Akademie der Wis-

senschaften,1902–]). Quotations are from the Pluhar translation (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). ‘CAJ ’and ‘CTJ ’ refer respectively to the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” and “Critique of Teleological

Judgment,” and ‘ FI ’ refers to Kant’s first, unpublished introduction to the CJ , which last will be cited

by volume (20) and page number from the Akademie edition. A/B page citations are to the Critique ofPure Reason (hereafter, CPR ), for which I employ the Norman Kemp Smith translation (New York: St.

Martin’s, 1989). Citations to the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (hereafter, ‘MFNS ’), and to

Kant’s anthropology and logic lectures, including the Jäsche Logic (hereafter, ‘ JL ’) are also to volume

and page number from the Akademie edition.10 See, e.g., 5:290 for such language. These contrasts correspond to the two sorts of judgments and

pleasures he opposes (from the first Moment on) to aesthetic judgment and pleasure: the agreeable

and the good.




material elements of perception, Kant glosses ‘form’ variously as the “shape,”

”outline,” or “design” of the object, or (for temporally changing objects) the “play

of shapes (in space, namely, mimetic art and dance), or … of sensations (in time)

[i.e., music]” (5:225).

In paragraphs 15–16, Kant contrasts our aesthetic judgment of an object’s form

with our judgment and approval of an object according to concepts, in particular,

with judgments of “perfection,” i.e., judgments that an object has all the requisite

properties of the kind of thing it “is supposed to be.”11 When we judge that a flower

is beautiful, Kant argues, we are not concerned with its botanical categorization or

with its function in the plant’s life; we judge it beautiful on different grounds, viz.

its form (5:229). Unlike his more explicit statements in paragraphs 13–14 concern-

ing what these “different grounds” might be (i.e., shape,12 play), in paragraph 15

Kant states only that when we appreciate an object as beautiful, we take pleasure

in “what is formal in the representation of a thing, the harmony of its manifold

to [form] a unity (where it is indeterminate what this unity is supposed to be)”

(5:227). Kant’s characterization here of “form” is cryptic, but we may note that

(the representation of) such form is similar to our representation of an object as

falling under a concept because it is unified, but also dissimilar because it is not

unified by being subsumed to a concept. We may also note in anticipation that it

is a statement of whole-formalism, i.e., that beauty is a kind of unity.

In paragraph 16 Kant draws controversial conclusions from this contrast be-

tween aesthetic judgment of form and conceptual judgment. Most of our judg-

ments about artistic beauty are not “pure” aesthetic judgments, but are judgmentsof “dependent” beauty, for in such judgments, we take into account what sort of

thing the object is supposed to be. To take one of Kant’s examples, our judgment

that a church is beautiful is dependent upon our prior conceptual judgment that

the church fits our conceptual standards of what such a building is and what it is

for. Kant includes in such dependent beauties all representational art. In those

cases, we must also have some concept of what the thing is supposed to be; or, more

properly, we must have two concepts that guide our judgment—first, a concept

of the nature of the art object (i.e., that it is supposed to be a representation),

and second, a concept of the kind of thing that is being represented. By contrast,Kant writes,

When we judge free beauty (according to mere form) then our judgment of taste is

pure. Here we presuppose no concept of any purpose for which the manifold is to

serve the given object, and hence no concept [of] what the object is to represent;

our imagination is playing, as it were, while it contemplates the shape, and such a

concept would only restrict its freedom. (5:229–30)

Kant appears, then, to suggest that our appreciation of (most) artworks might not

be an appreciation of them as beautiful (“according to mere form”) and/or that

representational content plays no role in artworks’ beauty.

11 Here, and in the following, I have modified Pluhar’s translation of this Kantian formulation (wases sein solle or was für ein Ding es sein solle ). I have also systematically changed ‘presentation’ (in Pluhar)

with ‘representation’ for Vorstellung, in concert with standard Kant-translational practice.12 Kant does repeat this characterization at 5:230 (quoted below).




Thus, Kant appears to identify form with the spatial or temporal contours of an

object (by contrast to sensation and conceptually specified kind or content), which

meaning of ‘form’ coheres too with his technical description of space and time

as the a priori “forms” of intuition in the Critique of Pure Reason (hereafter, CPR ).

Indeed we may restate Kant’s defense of his aesthetic formalism as a disjunctive

argument, in terms of his threefold distinction between types of representation in

the CPR : [i] aesthetic judgments must be based either on sensations or on form

or on concepts because these three options exhaust the kinds of representations

we can have;13 but [ii] aesthetic judgments are not based on concepts; [iii] nor

are they based on sensations. So [iv] they must be based on form.

Claims [ii] and [iii] restate the claims described above from paragraphs 15–16,

and paragraphs 13–14 respectively; with the addition of [i], the disjunctive premise,

they entail Kant’s formalist conclusion. It is now time, however, to look at Kant’s

grounds for these claims. Kant’s argument for [ii] runs as follows. If aesthetic

judgments of beauty were to rest on concepts, we would be able to prove that an

object is beautiful by showing that it had the requisite properties to fall under a

concept, either of beauty itself, or of a kind that would entail that the object is

beautiful. But, Kant argues, we cannot identify properties that all beautiful objects

share (we have no concept of beauty), nor can we identify a kind of object that is

always beautiful (beauty cannot be inferred from another concept). We can neither

predict nor prove that an object is beautiful; rather, each of us must experience

the object with pleasure in order to find it beautiful. Thus aesthetic judgments

cannot be based on concepts (5:215–16, 285).Kant’s justification for [iii] is based on his prior argument (in the second Mo-

ment) that in aesthetic judgments we require universal agreement from others,

and therefore they must be based on a representation that is universally com-

municable, shared, or shareable by all perceivers.14 Sensations, however, are not

universally communicable, but private; each person’s sensation of red may be

different (5:224, 291–92, 306). By contrast, one might argue, we all must experi-

ence the world in terms of space and time (according to Kant), since they are the

a priori forms of intuition necessary for the possibility of experience. Thus, our

perceptions of space and time must be universally communicable.

13 That is, of sensible objects; there are also rational ideas, but these do not present sensible ob-

jects. With Kenneth Rogerson (Kant’s Aesthetic: The Roles of Form and Expression [Lanham, MD: Rowman

and Littlefield, 1986], e.g., 34, 97–98), one might argue that ideas are the basis of aesthetic pleasure.

The CJ provides textual evidence for such a view in the term ‘aesthetic ideas.’ Yet however one is to

understand aesthetic ideas, they are not identical to rational ideas; they are produced by the imagina-

tion. And given Kant’s repeated assertions that one can appreciate the beautiful only by perceiving it,

rational ideas seem a very unlikely candidate as the source or object of aesthetic appreciation (as Kant

argues at 5:350–51).14 I note that, in accord with Kant’s terminology, one ought to distinguish between universal validity

strictly and universal communicability. The latter indicates only that a representation or claim can becommunicated, not that it is (more strongly) normative for others. That these two claims are separable

(for Kant) is attested by his treatment of aesthetic pleasure in the Anthropology lectures given in years

before the CJ , in which he argues that aesthetic pleasure is universally communicable (“public”), but does

not claim that aesthetic pleasure or judgment involves normative claims on others’ agreement. (See the

Busolt lectures [1788–89?], 25.2:1509–13.) The two are, of course, related since the former presupposes

the latter (How could one be justified in requiring others to share something that they cannot share?),

but here I concentrate on universal communicability.




Kant may seem, then, to be a rather strict property-formalist. He is, however,

rather less strict than (some) prior property-formalists, since he does not articu-

late any particular formal properties—whether proportions, line, or geometrical

shapes—that would make an object beautiful. In fact, Kant explicitly rejects such

pretended rules of beauty, arguing not only that there are no rules for beauty,

but also that geometrical regularity, in particular, is not beautiful, but “stiff” and

“boring” (5:241–43). Instead, in describing beautiful form, Kant says only that it

is “purposive without a purpose,” and I shall turn now to that claim.

In paragraph 10, Kant defines ‘purpose’ and ‘purposiveness’ as follows. “A

purpose,” Kant writes, “is the object of a concept insofar as we regard this concept

as the object’s cause … and [purposiveness is] the causality that a concept has with

regard to its object” (5:220). Kant thus understands purposes and purposiveness

as intentional. A purpose is an agent’s aim (described by a concept) or an object

created by such an agent, in accord with the agent’s intention. ‘Purposive’ de-

scribes the causality of such an agent, producing the object in accordance with

her intentions; it can also be used to describe an object as an effect of that kind

of causality.

In his discussion of beautiful form, however, Kant is concerned with “purpo-

siveness without a purpose.” He argues that we may expand our conception of

purposiveness beyond its identification with the actual, causal efficacy of inten-

tional agents:

we do call objects, states of mind, or acts purposive even if their possibility does not

necessarily presuppose the representation of a purpose; we do this ... because we canexplain and grasp them only if we assume that they are based on a causality according

to purposes … Hence there can be purposiveness without a purpose, insofar as we

do not posit the cause of this form in a will, and yet can grasp the explanation of its

possibility only by deriving it from a will … Hence we can at least observe a purpo-

siveness as to form and take note of it in objects—even if only by reflection—without

basing it on a purpose … (5:220)

Kant suggests here that an object is purposive without a purpose—or, as Kant con-

fusingly puts it, “purposive as to form”—if (loosely) it looks to us like something

that could have been created only by an agent, intentionally. If we judge an object

as purposive without a purpose, we judge it as if it were created intentionally,

designed for a purpose, according to rules, but without claiming definitely that it

was designed, and/or without knowing the rules, intention, or purpose according

to which the thing might have been made. It is this “as if” purposiveness, Kant

claims, that characterizes the beautiful object (e.g., 5:221, 226).

Through these claims about purposiveness, Kant connects his account of aes-

thetic judgment to his broader concerns in the CJ because purposiveness is the

principle Kant aims to defend in the CJ as a whole. Kant argues in the introductions

to the CJ that this principle is a transcendental principle, according to which we

must judge in order to obtain empirical knowledge of nature. For, Kant argues,

he has established in the CPR that we have some necessary, universal knowledge

of nature: the categorial principles (e.g., every event has a cause) are universal

laws governing all of nature. But these laws are not sufficient conditions for the

possibility of experience, specifically, for empirical judgments about objects, be-

cause they underdetermine the nature of nature; the contingent, empirical aspects




of nature could be so diverse that we could not formulate empirical concepts or

laws (5:183, 185; FI , 10:209). In order, then, to explain the possibility of empiri-

cal knowledge, we must presuppose that there are laws governing the empirical

nature of nature, that there is a principle of the “unity of diversity” in nature, and

that the contingent character of nature is designed for our cognition; we must

judge according to the principle of purposiveness (5:180).

Kant refers to this “purposiveness” not as purposiveness “without a purpose,”15

but usually as the “purposiveness of nature” (e.g., 5:180–81, 196). Kant does, how-

ever, also term it a purposiveness “of … form,” or “formal purposiveness” (5:181,

193), thus linking it terminologically with the purposiveness without a purpose

of beautiful form. Moreover, this “purposiveness” fits Kant’s characterization of a

purposiveness without a purpose in paragraph 10, for it too is a purposiveness we

attribute (reflectively) to nature, without claiming anything about its intentional

cause, the rules by which, or the ends for which, it was so caused. We cannot judge

that nature was designed by an intentional agent (i.e., God) on Kant’s view. Instead,

we must think of empirical laws only as if they were legislated or designed by an

understanding “not ours” (5:180).

Judgment according to the principle of purposiveness, then, represents a

Kantian, critical version of the argument from design, particularly in its cognitive

guise (as in Leibniz): design but no dogmatic claims about the designer. And,

like proponents of the (standard) argument from design, Kant identifies natural

beauty and organisms as paradigmatic examples of such (purported) design, as

instantiating order beyond mere uniformity under universal laws, as “exhibitions”of purposiveness (5:192–93). Organisms, that is, appear not to be random aggre-

gations of material parts, but to be unified: composed of contingent, diverse parts

that “belong” together, as if chosen to perform their particular functions. They are

as if designed. Natural beauty, likewise, appears to be a contingent orderliness in

nature, not necessitated by the universal natural laws. Indeed the very experience

of perceiving a beautiful object, Kant claims, is one of unity in the object, and of

harmony in ourselves, beyond that of normal experience. For normally, according

to Kant, if we are to represent objects as unified, we must employ a concept or

rule from the understanding, according to which the imagination unifies givensensations in concert (harmony) with the understanding’s conceptual rules (5:217;

CPR , A98–106). By contrast, in perceiving a beautiful object, we can represent its

unity and harmonize the imagination with the understanding without following

such a rule; we engage, as Kant puts it, in a “free play” of the cognitive faculties,

in which they “freely” harmonize (e.g., 5:287). And we can thus represent unity

without conceptual guidance, Kant argues, because the object is purposive for us,

as if designed for our representation of it. This superlative order of beautiful ob-

jects—the ease with which we can grasp their unity—explains, according to Kant,

15 Kant uses ‘purposiveness’ with varied specifications throughout the CJ , including to restate his

claim (from the first Moment) that our pleasure in beautiful objects is a disinterested pleasure (5:221),

and (as I shall discuss briefly below) to characterize the free harmony of the cognitive faculties (e.g.,

5:228) in appreciation of the beautiful. See Konrad Marc-Wogau, Vier Studien zu Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft(Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 1938), 69–71, 82–83, for an extensive examination of the varieties

and uses of ‘purposiveness’ in the CJ .




why we find such objects pleasing. We are pleased to find them formed (ordered,

designed) so well, as opposed to the potential chaos of empirical data with which

we could be faced (5:190–91, 222, 245).

Kant thus argues that what we appreciate in a beautiful object is its form, and

that we take pleasure in that form because it is purposive without a purpose, as if

designed for us. As noted above, these claims come under considerable criticism,

to which I now turn.

2 . c r i t i c i s m s

First, Kant’s claim that pure aesthetic pleasure concerns only form seems overly

restrictive. Do we really appreciate only spatial or temporal properties of objects

when we find them beautiful? Specifically, the representational content of a work

of art seems, often, to contribute to its beauty (as reflected in other philosophicaldescriptions of beauty as the unity of form and content). Likewise, Kant’s argu-

ments that purely sensory properties of the object must not be considered in pure

aesthetic judging seem questionable. Is it possible (one might ask in a Berkelean

vein) to distinguish firmly between “formal” and “material” properties of a sensed

object, particularly one as aesthetically experienced?16 Moreover, in what sense are

our perceptions of colors more private than our (non-conceptualized) perception

of temporal or spatial properties? Even if Kant has good grounds for asserting

that sensations are radically private, he may still be begging the question as to the

(purported) universal validity of aesthetic judgments; it may be that our sensa-

tions are private, and are intimately involved in aesthetic experience. So much the

worse, then, for the universal validity of such judgments. To sum up these various

lines of objection: as usual for Kant’s disjunctive arguments, the first premise of

his argument is open to the objection that there are missing alternatives. Why

not add another disjunct (e.g., both sensations and form or both conceptual judg-

ment and form) as alternative (more descriptively persuasive) bases for aesthetic

judgment?17

As noted above, many current defenders of Kant’s aesthetics tend to endorse

these criticisms of Kant’s formalist claims, and to add another: his formalism is

inconsistent both with his most fundamental claims about the nature of aesthetic judgment—that it is subjective because it is based not on the nature of the object,

but on the subject’s pleasure in perceiving it—and with his explanation of such

pleasure. As noted above, Kant explains that we feel such pleasure in perceiving

16 For this objection, see, e.g., Francis X. Coleman, The Harmony of Reason: A Study in Kant’s Aesthetics (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press,1974),46–48; Donald Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 102–10; Mary McCloskey, Kant’s Aesthetic (Albany: SUNY Press,

1987), 64–65. Kant suggests a somewhat different difficulty in distinguishing sensation from form: “we

cannot say with certainty whether a color or tone (sound) is merely an agreeable sensation or whetherit is of itself already a beautiful play of sensations and as such carries with it, as we judge it aesthetically, a

liking for its form” (5:324). Similarly, Kant makes an exception for “pure” colors in which we take aesthetic

pleasure because of their form (of temporal or spatial vibrations) (5:224–25). As will be discussed below,

these passages indicate that Kant’s distinction between form and (sensory) matter within perception

rests on complexity (as an arrangement of [multiple] parts, form is, ipso facto , complex).17 Guyer, who generally endorses this sort of objection to Kant’s disjunctive arguments, in practice

so objects to Kant’s arguments for aesthetic formalism (Claims of Taste , 204–05).




beautiful objects because they are purposive for cognition: we can represent them

easily, they allow us to engage in the free harmony of the faculties. It is unclear,

however, that form (in particular) is what would make objects peculiarly repre-

sent-able, or, therefore, especially pleasing. Nor (the argument continues) does

Kant need the universal communicability of form to justify our claims on others

in aesthetic judgment; for, according to Kant, the state of the harmony of the

faculties is itself universally communicable (5:217–18, 290 n.). The purposiveness

of beautiful objects may then be read (it is argued) to mean nothing determinate

about objects or their forms—just that they have the disposition to elicit a certain

(universally communicable, pleasurable) state in a subject. Thus we may eliminate

Kant’s formalist claims as incoherent and implausible mistakes from a (reconstruc-

tive) account of Kant’s aesthetics.18

The cost of such an interpretive elimination of Kant’s formalism is, however,

rather high. For, I think, most of us—at least in un-theory-laden moments—would

be loath to describe aesthetic experience as self-absorbed attention to our own

mental states, or to characterize a beautiful object as pleasing because it has

“whatever it might be” that would occasion a particular mental state. If anything,

aesthetic experience of the beautiful seems to be a rapt absorption in the object .Moreover, Kant’s formalist claims seem crucial for understanding the place of the

CAJ in the project of the CJ as a whole, since he marks this claim terminologically

as the locus of connection between the two.19 Yet, on both of the interpretations

so far discussed—the property-formalist reading, and the (partially reconstructive)

subjectivist reading—the link between the beauty of objects, biological functions,and empirical knowledge of the contingent aspects of nature is lost, exchanged

either for an arid, mathematical-sounding aesthetic, or for an abstract aesthetic

subjectivism.

18 So, e.g., Guyer concludes (e.g., Claims of Taste , 225). Allison concurs (Henry Allison, Kant’sTheory of Taste [Theory of Taste ] [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 133–35). More broadly,

Allison emphasizes the subjectivism of Kant’s aesthetics: “[according to Kant] it is not merely that the

discriminations of taste are made by something subjective [viz. pleasure] … that makes judgments oftaste irredeemably subjective; it is rather that what is discriminated is a state of the subject (a mental state

of harmony or discord) of which one can only become aware by feeling” (Theory of Taste , 129).19 It is, of course, not lost on commentators that Kant’s presentation of his aesthetic formalism is

embroiled with the principle of purposiveness; this connection often appears to be a further reason to

eliminate Kant’s formalism from reconstructions of his aesthetic theory. This principle (it is argued)

is obscure, and the connections Kant wishes to institute (via this principle) between the various top-

ics in the CJ are artificial, architectonically inspired (see Guyer, Claims of Taste , 70–74). Allison also

rejects Kant’s attempt to connect the principle of purposiveness as it is necessary for the production

of empirical knowledge, with the principle of purposiveness as it operates within aesthetic judgment

(Theory of Taste , 60–64), though he takes these types of judging to be connected insofar as both rest on

a principle of the “autonomy” (self-legislation, concerning itself) of judgment. By contrast, Ginsborg

(“Aesthetic and Biological Purposiveness,” in Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls , eds. Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman, and Christine Korsgaard [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1997], 329–60; “Lawfulness Without Law,” Philosophical Topics 12 [1997]: 37–81) articulates a unified

account of aesthetic and biological purposiveness in the CJ , on the basis of an interpretation of the free

harmony of the faculties. This account—which retains a role for purposiveness, but eliminates Kant’s

formalism—is perhaps the strongest alternative interpretation to that I propose here, though it, like

Allison’s, renders aesthetic experience (on Kant’s account) rather distant from engagement with the

character of objects.




3 . a n a l t e r n a t i v e r e a d i n g

These dismaying conclusions stem, I suggest, from failing to take seriously Kant’s

intimate connection between purposiveness and form—from reading “form” (sepa-

rately) to mean spatio-temporal properties and then somehow trying (and failing)to find such properties aesthetically pleasing or purposive for cognition; that is,

from reading Kant as a property-formalist who also happens to be making claims

about the purposiveness of beautiful objects. By contrast, I shall try to show that

we can read ‘purposiveness’ actually as characterizing the form of beautiful objects,

not simply as describing the object as occasioning a certain mental state.20 As such,

Kant’s formalism will be (from the first) understood as part of his overarching

project in the CJ , and as a plausible description of aesthetic experience. Indeed, in

the spirit of Kant’s statement, “whether this assumption [that nature is purposive for

us] is correct is as yet very doubtful, while the actuality of natural beauties is patentto experience” (5:291), I propose to start with a broadly Kantian characterization

of what that actual experience is like and then to develop an account of purposive

form as a characterization of what pleases us in such experience.

In aesthetic experience we tend to understand ourselves as being pleased

by certain objects (and not others), given what they are like. Whether or not

we believe that formal properties explain our pleasure, we tend to take certain

aspects of those objects to explain why we find them beautiful. If called upon to

defend our view that an object is beautiful, we can (however inchoately) suggest

that a certain property or other “makes” that thing beautiful. Say, for example,

the particular yellow and the particular curve of a daffodil’s petals, or Klimt’s use

of many vertical, almost-parallel lines, as well as the tones of soft blue and green,

in his Tannenwald-I .Such properties seem to serve as grounds for finding an object beautiful. They

are not, however, necessary conditions for beauty, as one can see from the vast dif-

ferences among the beautiful objects of the various fine arts, or between visual and

aural natural beauties. Nor are they sufficient conditions—or even (more loosely)

generally applicable reasons—for finding something beautiful. Bozo the Clown’s

neck ruff may be curved in the same way as a daffodil’s petals are, and his clothing

may be the same shade of yellow; a sketch I might make of a jail cell may involve a

large number of almost parallel vertical lines and may be partially colored in soft

blue and green. Yet I do not find either of these latter objects beautiful, nor am

I more likely to find them beautiful if these properties (shared with objects I do

find beautiful) are explicitly pointed out.

This sort of consideration leads Kant to argue (as noted above) that beauty is

not a concept, that aesthetic judgments are not “logical” or cognitive judgments.

Kant argues that we appreciate beautiful objects not insofar as they instantiate a

20 By contrast to the previously cited commentators, Jens Kulenkampff (Kants Logik des ästhetischenUrteils [Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978], 118–35) takes beautiful form to be (on Kant’s view)

characterized, itself, by purposiveness. Kulenkampff argues, however, that Kant fails to articulate a

non-tautological description of a purposive form (i.e., one that does not simply mean “pleasurable

for the subject”). Here I attempt to remedy this problem.




kind of thing, but instead as “singular” representations.21 This claim is perhaps

the least controversial in the CAJ , considered to be a banal refutation of rationalist

aesthetics. I suggest, however, that it also serves as a positive characterization of

beautiful objects. The “singularity” of beautiful objects not only means (as a nega-

tive claim) that beautiful objects are not beautiful because they are part of some

class, but also (as a positive claim) that we appreciate the object as the individual

it is. Precisely because the properties of a beautiful object are aesthetically valuable

only in the context of this very object, we experience the object as an individual

unity—specifically, a unity of diversity.

Understood as such unity of diversity (or variety), ‘beauty’ has frequently

been glossed as organic unity. Kant himself does not do so, but he does connect

organic unity and beautiful form in the CJ through his term ‘purposiveness.’ And,

through an analogy to Kant’s account of organic unity in the CTJ , I shall suggest

that when Kant claims that the beauty of an object lies in its purposive form, he

is (plausibly) claiming that beautiful objects are characterized by an organic or

purposive unity—a unity of diversity.22 Kant is not a property-formalist, but a

whole-formalist.

In the CTJ , Kant argues that the unity of diversity of organisms is distinct from

the (mere) “unity of space” that characterizes material objects qua material, as

determined by universal mechanistic physics (5:407–09). Objects considered

mechanically are taken to be aggregates of homogeneous, mathematically quan-

tifiable parts (bits of matter filling parts of space); like the space they fill, these

parts can be divided indefinitely further (into similarly homogeneous parts) with-out fundamentally altering their character. Objects so described are not unities

of their parts except insofar as the parts occupy contiguous parts of space and

adhere to one another by cohesive force, which is again understood as quantifi-

able and homogeneous in all matter.23 By contrast, organisms seem to be unities of empirically particular, diverse parts as such. Each part of an organism matters

to the functioning of the whole and seems to belong to the organism because its

particular, empirical character allows it to perform specific functions, in concert

with other, heterogeneous parts and functions. Correspondingly, each part is

what it is, does what it does, only in the context of the whole. Organisms oughttherefore to be understood, Kant argues, as comprising parts purposively related

to one another—as if they were designed (each part chosen, specifically, for its

particular character), as if each “is there” (to use Larry Wright’s term) as a means

to the end of the whole organism and, reciprocally, for one another as well.24

Mutatis mutandis (substituting sensible properties for parts/functions), this de-

scription is also quite apt for (our experience of) beautiful objects. As suggested by

the examples above, the properties that we identify as relevant to our experience

21 E.g., 5:219, 218, 339. Arnold Isenberg is the most noted proponent of this view in twentieth-

century aesthetics. I have drawn here upon his essay, “Critical Communication,” in his Aesthetics ,156–71.

22 Kant refers to beautiful form as combining “variety” and “unity” at 5:359.23 MFNS , 4:496. I base my account of mechanical composition here more broadly on Kant’s

“construction” of the empirical concept of matter in MFNS , 4:480–536.24 This account of organic unity is based on paragraph 65 of the CJ .




of an object as beautiful are contingent, empirical, and heterogeneous. No object

is beautiful merely by being an object; only its contingent, empirical properties

render it so. And just as organisms involve interrelations among parts as diverse,

as different from one another, these contingent properties are relevant to the

object’s beauty as different from one another. 25 A color or a line is beautiful in a

certain object due to its relations of contrast or complementarity with other, dif-

ferent colors, lines, etc.; a painting of only one color or comprising only one line

seems an unlikely or even impossible candidate for beauty.26 Kant’s observation that

geometrically regular objects are not beautiful (5:241–43) reflects such a view as

well: the “parts” of these objects (their sensible properties) are not heterogeneous

enough to maintain our interest.

Moreover, each of these properties seems to be precisely right, in its particu-

lar character. Just as in an organism, (we judge that each of) the heterogeneous

parts ought to be the specific way that they are, to perform their functions in the

organism—what Kant calls the “necessity” or “lawfulness” of the contingent (e.g.,

5:404)—so too do we have a sense of inevitability, necessity, naturalness about

the specific, empirical character of beautiful objects; “of course” that and only

that (color, chord, line, event, word) could belong there or then in this object.

Correspondingly, the character of each of these properties depends upon its place

in the whole: just as a hand qua living hand is unintelligible (or not what it is)

except as part of a body as a whole, so too do the vertical lines in Klimt’s paint-

ing function in the aesthetic experience of that painting as they do in no other

25 Properties are contingent, on Kant’s view, if they are not necessary characteristics of an object as

such, as defined by the categorial principles defended in the CPR . This focus on contingent, empirical

properties as (solely) relevant to aesthetic judgment may also allow one to duck persistent scholarly

worries concerning whether aesthetic judgment employs the categories. (For careful treatment of this

issue, see Fred Rush, “The Harmony of the Faculties” [“Harmony”], Kant-Studien 92 [2001]: 38–61.)

For if those (universal, homogeneous) properties of beautiful objects that ground their conformity to

the categories are not relevant to the judgment whether the objects are beautiful, the latter judgment

could be taken as supplementary to, and separate from, the categorial judgment that this object is an

object. The concept that is not determinative of aesthetic judgment is not the categorial concept of the

object, but the empirical concept of the object’s empirical kind. More strongly, I would suggest that the

manifold unified in aesthetic representation is so unified under a different description than the manifoldunified in categorial (schematic) synthesis. That is, just as in physical-mechanical description, we con-

sider the parts of the object to be homogeneous (their differences are understood only as quantifiable

differences of extension or intensity of force, and thus in turn as [actually] comprising aggregates of

larger or smaller numbers of homogeneous parts), so too in categorial judgment we unify the manifold

as homogeneous, i.e., as spatial and/or temporal. By contrast, just as in teleological judgment we note

the qualitatively diverse, contingent character of the parts, so too in aesthetic judgment do we note the

qualitatively diverse, contingent character of the items of the manifold (the sensory qualities of the ob-

ject). Thus I endorse Fricke’s suggestion that in aesthetic judging, we apprehend unity not according to

the categories, but according to a principle of “qualitative” unity (Cristel Fricke, Kants Theorie des reinen Geschmacksurteils [Kants Theorie ] [de Gruyter: Berlin, 1990], 57–64). See also Beatrice Longuenesse,

Kant and the Capacity to Judge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), for extensive discussion of

the distinction between reflective judgment (of which aesthetic judgment is a type) concerned withobjects as empirical diverse, and categorial unification of an homogeneous manifold.

26 Color field painting (e.g., Ellsworth Kelly’s work) may be a counterexample to this claim—if one

finds such paintings beautiful, rather than conceptually or historically interesting. Indeed, the theoretical

interest of Kelly’s work may lie in the fact that he self-consciously pushes the limits of aesthetics. Other

abstract painters (e.g., Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko), by contrast, employ a great deal of heteroge-

neity (shade, value, tonality of color, and texture) to create beautiful effects. I owe these considerations

to conversations with Anne Eaton.




context. These vertical lines are what they are only as presented in combination

with the other elements of the painting (e.g., the soft blues and greens, that it is

a representation of a forest, the mixture of pointillist and other brushwork tech-

niques, etc.). In my drawing of a jail, the almost-parallel lines are not “the same”

parallel lines (even if they are the same length and distance from one another, in

the same spatial position on a same-sized piece of paper, etc.) because they are not

in relation to—in the context of—the other visual properties of the Klimt paint-

ing. For just as the parts of an organism reciprocally serve as ends and means (to

one another’s functioning), in an object appreciated as beautiful, each property

serves as “means” (as contrasting and complementing) to the others’ salience, in

their particular, diverse characters, and vice versa . The parts of such a reciprocally

purposive unity (here sensible, empirical properties) are not intelligible (or not

beautiful) as what they are in isolation from their presence or role in the whole.

Conversely, as Kant suggests, cognitive analysis of (our representation of) an

object into distinct properties destroys our experience of it as beautiful (ViennaLogic , 24:844–45).

Thus Kant’s claim that beautiful objects are beautiful in virtue of their form

can be taken to mean that beautiful objects are beautiful in virtue of everything

about them, of all (or indeterminately many of) their sensible properties as related

to one another—i.e., briefly, in virtue of their overall design, arrangement, or

form. If one is looking for a property or characteristic that belongs to all objects

experienced as beautiful, this interrelated-ness of sensible properties appears to

be the only answer.27 There are no sensible properties that serve as necessary orsufficient conditions for beauty, but all objects experienced as beautiful are charac-

terized by precisely that characteristic, viz. the interrelatedness of their properties

(reciprocal complementarity or contrast) and, correspondingly, the non-translat-

ability of those properties (or of pleasure in them) from (the representation of)

one individual object to another.28 Each beautiful object is, that is, appreciated

as a unity of diversity.

27 Unless one chooses to identify beautiful objects either by an account of a distinctive cause (artistic

activity) or effect (appreciator’s response).28 Using the concept of supervenience, one might question this claim: if two or more objects are

identical in their sensible properties (and the arrangement thereof), why could we not infer from the

experience of one as beautiful to the claim that the other is beautiful (on the grounds that beauty is

supervenient upon those sensible properties)? Nothing in my interpretation is meant to preclude the

possibility that there are two such identical objects, which could offer the same aesthetic experience.

Rather, I mean to argue that, on Kant’s view, one cannot infer from our representation of one object’s

beauty (i.e., of it as individual, its properties as reciprocally related) to another object’s beauty. Kant’s

resistance to such a view, I shall argue below, should be understood to rest on Kant’s epistemology: we

could not so infer because inferences are mediated by concepts, which, as discursive concepts, are too

intensionally “thin” to characterize all the sensible properties of an object in their reciprocal relations of

contrast and complement. Leaving aside this argument, however, I suggest that one might well be able

to (or even ought to, given Kant’s arguments concerning the normative status of aesthetic judgments)replicate one’s experience of the first object as beautiful in experiencing the second (or, indeed, in

experiencing the first object as beautiful tomorrow). Such replicated experience would require, how-

ever, that one not merely note that the object has such properties—the same ones that the first object

has—but to consider them as related to one another, in this object alone, not as characteristics that

render it one of a class of objects. This difference in “structure” between classificatory representation

of objects’ properties and the representation thereof as beautiful may explain why, psychologically

speaking, such replication is difficult, or even why our rapt, aesthetic absorption in an individual




Though this is an abstract account of beauty, I argue, it captures our experience

of beauty more persuasively than the assertion that it is spatial or temporal form

that makes an object beautiful. Indeed it reflects the fact that aesthetic experience

is a deep engagement with an object as the particular object that it is, including the

potentially inexhaustible interplay among its sensible properties. And, as suggested

by my use of the Klimt painting as an example, these relations could obtain, as well,

among aspects of the “content” of representational art works, or even among these

and the sensible properties of the object—thus, possibly including something like

the unity of form and content.29 What is crucial for Kant’s account of purposive

form is that it involves our (imaginative) grasp of diverse, empirical properties of

an object as interrelated, reciprocally complementing and contrasting with one

another, not which sorts of such properties are to be so grasped. Thus, such for-

malism could accommodate our sense that art can be as beautiful as a rose.30 (On

this interpretation, however, Kantian aesthetic appreciation is still formalist, for it

comprises attention to the arrangement of properties in the object, independently

of its historical, social, material, conditions or connections.)

I have also argued that this account is interpretively preferable because, by

emphasizing the purposiveness of beautiful form, it places Kant’s formalism in

the context of the CJ as a whole: it connects beautiful form (at least by analogy)

to the form of the relations among the parts of an organism, and (because of the

emphasis on contingent, diverse empirical properties) to Kant’s epistemological

concerns about our ability to cognize order amid nature’s empirical diversity. It

is now time, however, to make the analogy to organic purposiveness more preciseand to qualify it, and, in so doing, to suggest how aesthetic purposiveness might

be connected to our projects in attaining empirical knowledge.

Thus far I have suggested that, in general, purposiveness is a relation of diverse

parts as diverse to form as unity (as means to end), and that it characterizes both

the relations among an organism’s parts, and among the sensible properties of an

object represented as beautiful. But these relations are also somewhat different

object is (often) disrupted by a recognition that there are others “just like it,” as in the case of mass

reproduction of art works. This is not (only or primarily) because such works have lost their novelty, Isuggest, but because our repeated experiences of similar objects can prevent us from attending to the

complex relationships that hold among the object’s sensible properties themselves, by encouraging us

to see the object merely as representative of a kind (for example, as a Monet-water-lily-painting, which,

just standardly has soft colors, impressionist brushwork, etc.) I owe these considerations to objections

raised by Susan Shell and Josh Devers.29 Later in the CJ , Kant indeed suggests that representational art objects can be beautiful (5:312).

As Kant discusses in paragraph 42, natural beauty may be more surprising and have a special, further

meaning for us, since naturally beautiful objects are not made by others in order to be so appreciated

by us, and they thus seem to be a promise of nature’s contingent order and suitability to our cognitive

(or moral) ends. Since my concern here is with Kant’s conception of aesthetic purposive form in gen-

eral, however, a close examination of his doctrines concerning art (including his analysis of dependent

beauty and aesthetic ideas) and its relation to natural beauty lies beyond the scope of this essay. Forsophisticated treatments, see Eva Schaper, Studies in Kant’s Aesthetics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press, 1979), 78–98; and Allison, Theory of Taste .30 As Guyer also concludes (Claims of Taste , 205–08). I disagree with Guyer, however, in that (I

argue) Kant should not be understood to be trying (unsuccessfully) to give criteria for picking out

beautiful from not-beautiful objects in his discussion of form. Rather, with his term, ‘purposive form,’

Kant is providing an informative description of what we appreciate in beautiful objects—how we take

their properties to be related to one another.




in the two cases; we judge that organisms are unified through the causal relations

of their parts, whereas the interrelation of properties of beautiful objects is not

causal. Kant marks this difference terminologically by distinguishing between

the “real” or “material” purposiveness of organisms and the “formal” purposive-

ness of beautiful objects.31 Second, unlike in aesthetic judgment, in teleological

judgments of organisms, we judge objects according to concepts: not only can we

conceptually describe the function a part plays in the whole, but we also judge

individual organisms as instances of their genera and/or species.32 In this respect,

judgments of organisms resemble another sort of judgment Kant terms “teleologi-

cal”: judgments of perfection, i.e., a judgment that an object has all the properties

that determine that an object falls under an empirical concept.

Such judgments of perfection can help us clarify what the formal purposive-

ness of a beautiful object might be, since, according to Kant, perfection is formal

“objective purposiveness,” or (formal) purposiveness with a purpose (5:226–28, my

emphasis).33 As we can see from Kant’s characterization of perfection as formal

purposiveness, ‘formal purposiveness’ refers not to causal relations among parts

nor to the causal history of the object (despite Kant’s definitions of ‘purposes’

and ‘purposiveness’ in terms of intentional causality), but to the arrangement

(or combination) of properties of an object as unified toward the end of concep-

tualization of that object. The object’s properties are purposive for judgment in

that they allow us to categorize (unify, judge) the object as falling under a certain

concept, or as belonging to a kind.34 As in organic and aesthetic purposiveness,

these logically purposive properties ought to be understood as unified with oneanother as diverse: perfection (for Kant) characterizes objects as they fall under

empirical kinds, which kinds are specified by reference to properties that, as het-

erogeneous from one another (as generic and specific “marks”), serve conjointly

31 5:193; FI , 20:221, 232–34. Kant also frequently refers to organisms as “objectively” (as opposed

to subjectively) purposive (e.g., 5:359). That is, organisms are themselves (judged to be) purposes,

not to be purposive for us (the judging subject), as are beautiful objects. Because Kant concludes that

these judgments of objective purposiveness are not objective, determinative judgments, but judgmentsin accord (only) with a subjectively necessary principle (5:397–98), however, I have eschewed the

terminology of ‘objectivity’ as misleading.32 In the CTJ , Kant is mostly concerned with the concept of “natural purpose” itself, but a number

of his examples (e.g., of spruce trees and sand [5:367]) indicate that he takes teleological judgments

to employ concepts of empirical kinds as well.33 Kant hesitates to call perfection ‘formal’ purposiveness because, he believes, in order to judge

that an object is perfect, we must judge it as an instance of a kind and thus judgments of perfection

involve a concept, or purpose, as the matter of the judgment. Nonetheless, Kant’s discussions both of

perfection and of geometrical objective formal purposiveness (5:362–64) indicate that (contra Guyer,

and some of Kant’s own formulations [e.g., 5:193]) for Kant formal purposiveness, or purposiveness

for judgment, is not merely identical to subjective purposiveness. Geometrical figures are, Kant argues,

objectively, but merely formally, purposive because they can serve many diverse cognitive purposes(are purposive), and we know that they do so objectively, but are not understood to be (themselves)

ruled by purposive causal interrelations.34 See the passage at 5:229 quoted above, in which Kant describes the manifold as “serving” an

object, as well as FI , 20:228–29, for a more detailed discussion of the various meanings of ‘perfection’

as objective purposiveness, which for reasons of space I cannot treat in detail here. My description here

concerns Kant’s concept of formal perfection in particular, of which I give a more extensive account

in my Kant on Beauty and Biology (forthcoming).




as means to constitute (our concept of) the kind.35 Such purposiveness (of objects

and their properties) is formal (i.e., for judgment), but it is nonetheless objective:

the object does objectively have these properties, which do (objectively, in accord

with the concept) determine it as an instance of a kind. The resultant second-order

property of perfection can, too, be objectively predicated of an object.

Kant’s claim, then, that the beautiful object is characterized by merely subjective formal purposiveness, or is purposive without a purpose (by contrast to perfection)

means that the object is purposively unified for judgment, but without a concept

that articulates the unity or “end” of the classification of the object. 36 Or, to put

the contrast between objective and subjective formal purposiveness in terms of

the “form” and “matter” of judgment, our aesthetic representation of a beautiful

object shares the form of judging an object to fall under an empirical kind (we

note, and unify diverse, contingent properties of the object towards the end of

recognizing it as a unified object), but in the absence of the “matter” of judgment,

i.e., the concept that articulates which properties are marks (of being of that kind)

and how they are to be related (as generic and specific). Instead, such properties

are unified with one another solely as presented in space and time, as visibly or

audibly in relations of contrast and complementarity.

Kant’s claim that we recognize the subjectively purposive form of the beautiful

object should be read not, then, as an abstract claim that we are pleased because

in some way we find the object suitable for cognition, but to mean that we take

its diverse, contingent properties to be unified with one another, not as falling

under an empirical kind, but as the individual that it is; we appreciate the object’sindividual form (or haeccitas ).37 In effect, I claim that we should invert the standard

understanding of Kant’s formalism; he is not a strict property-formalist, isolating

formal properties from the Form (kind) of the object. Rather, Kant endorses a

whole-formalism—beauty is a unity of diversity—which is closer to kind-formalism;

aesthetic form is, on Kant’s view, like Form, the unity of properties that makes the

object what it is, though this unity is not so represented conceptually (as pertain-

ing to a kind).

35 See JL , 9:39, 58–63. Kant’s discussion there concerns the perfection of concepts, not of objects,

but since we judge objects to be perfect in virtue of falling (adequately) under a concept of their kind,

this discussion (I suggest) applies equally to objects as to concepts.36 See 5:366 where Kant explicitly distinguishes subjective from objective (formal, cognitive) purpo-

siveness on the grounds that the latter can be conceptually determined. My account of purposive form

thus bears similarity to the suggestion made by various commentators—e.g., Nicholas Wolterstorff and

Robert Wicks (Wolterstorff, “An Engagement with Kant’s Theory of Beauty,” in Kant’s Aesthetic , ed. Ralph

Meerbote [Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1991], 105–27; Wicks, “Dependent Beauty as an Appreciation

of Teleological Style,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55 [1997]: 387–400)—that beautiful objects

are (represented as) characterized by “aptness” (in Wolterstorff’s term) for conceptualization. I take

my suggestions—drawn from the parallel to organic unity—concerning purposiveness as a recipro-cal, unifying relation among diverse, empirical characteristics as diverse to provide a somewhat less

abstract—and more phenomenologically satisfying—characterization of what such aptness might be.

Like Wicks, and unlike Wolterstorff, I emphasize that aesthetic purposiveness is, specifically, akin to

empirical conceptualization (of contingent characteristics) and that on Kant’s view, such purposiveness

cannot be a concept that we apply (according to specific criteria) to an object.37 As argued, on non-Kantian grounds, by David Wiggins, “Reply to Richard Wollheim,” Ratio 20

(1978): 52–68.




This connection of beautiful purposive form to kind-formalism—or, in Kant’s

terms, to the empirical classification of objects—can also help to understand the

connection Kant wishes to make between the purposive form of beautiful objects

and the concerns raised in the CJ introductions concerning how we are to find

order in the empirical aspects of nature, beyond that which we determine through

the categories. In aesthetic experience we find contingent, empirical properties

to be related to one another, but without an empirical concept by which we impose such relations. Thus aesthetic experience is both an instance of finding order or

unity among the diversity of specifically empirical nature, and (particularly when

it concerns natural objects) a sign that our cognitive hopes for finding empirical

order in nature are realizable.38

4 . a n o b j e c t i o n

By contrast to the property-formalist and subjectivist interpretations discussed

above, on this reading, Kant’s formalism is a plausible description of aesthetic

experience and is related to Kant’s other concerns in the CJ . But can it be recon-

ciled with Kant’s presentation of his formalism, particularly with his exclusionary

arguments about form (as described above)?

More than one might think. First, such a reading is consistent with Kant’s

description of form as shape or play in space and time. For such form is spatio-

temporal; the interrelation among sensible properties must take place in space

and time, in which all sensible properties are presented, and in which alone rela-

tions among these sensible properties obtain. Moreover, though Kant does gloss

‘form’ once as “outline” and several times as “shape” (Gestalt ), he never speaks

of ‘formal properties’ in the plural; he does not even vaguely mention “propor-

tion” or “line” (of some sort) as examples of form.39 Kant refers only to ‘form’ in

the singular, which, glossed as “design,” comes quite close to the interrelation of

sensible properties described above. Indeed Kant’s only description (apart from

purposive) of what kind of spatio-temporal form is beautiful is in paragraph 15,

38

See note 25. Insofar as our representation of beauty involves the representation of unity amongempirical, contingent properties as such, then, it may well—along with categorial judgment—comprise

a subjective condition necessary for any cognition, as Kant claims in his deduction of taste. I am, then,

sympathetic to Makkreel’s claim that reflective judgment—including aesthetic judgment—is necessary

for the “specification” of the categories (Rudolf Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant [Chicago:

Chicago University Press, 1990], 56–58). I would emphasize, as Makkreel does not, that this specifica-

tion must be governed by a different principle of unity than the categories, viz. purposiveness. More

needs to be said than I have space for here, however, about the similarities and differences between the

activities of aesthetic judging and of reflective judging as it contributes to empirical knowledge, and

their respective “products,” viz. non-conceptualized unity of an individual object and new, empirical

conceptualization of (kinds of) objects or the formulation of new laws.39 Contra , e.g., Crawford (Kant’s Aesthetic Theory , 96–99) and Rogerson (Kant’s Aesthetic , 160), who

use ‘formal properties’ interchangeably with ‘form.’ Kant does suggest at 5:329 that the mathematiz-ability of proportional relationships among tones in music demonstrates that such relationships

constitute form, which may appear to be an exception to my claim. Kant argues, however, that such

mathematizable form is merely a “condition” for the purposive form of the object proper, viz. “that

proportion of the impressions, in their combination as well as in their alternation, by means of which

it becomes possible to grasp them together and to prevent them from destroying one another.” Kant’s

qualification confirms, I suggest, that the decisive sense of form in aesthetics is not mathematizable,

spatio-temporal properties/relations as such.




i.e., the form of a beautiful object is the unity of the manifold in our representa-

tion of that object, where it is unclear what that unity is supposed to be—which

description is consistent with, even identical to, the interpretation I propose: a

unity of properties unified towards making the object what it is (without concep-

tual determination). Kant does attempt to identify aesthetic form more directly

with space and time as the forms of intuition, but I suggest that here we might

suspect Kant of some terminological confusion or architectonic temptation; Kant’s

concept of aesthetic, purposive form has less in common with geometrical figures,

and more with the “form” of empirical conceptualization, than he is sometimes

tempted to think.40

Second, although on my reading beautiful form does not absolutely exclude

the sensory or conceptual components of our representation of an object, I be-

lieve we can still make good sense of Kant’s contrasts among form, sensations, and

concepts/conceptual judgment. Kant’s contrast of form with sensations can be

understood as a contrast between the apprehension of an object as complex (as

an ordered manifold of multiple, heterogeneous aspects or parts) as against sensa-

tions, which are for Kant (by definition) singular, uniform, composed of only one

“part” (see, e.g., CPR , A 99) and indeed are that which is ordered by form.41 If the

account of aesthetic experience I’ve given is correct, complexity (not uniformity)

is a necessary factor in our appreciation of an object as beautiful. And if Kant’s

explanation of aesthetic pleasure—as arising because we find a non-conceptu-

ally-determined order among empirically given, contingent aspects of objects—is

correct, the interrelatedness of properties in purposive form would be consistent with that explanation—by contrast (again) to sensations, which are the chaotic

empirical data that need to be (somehow) conceptualized and systematized in

order for us to have empirical knowledge.

Moreover, the complexity of beautiful form—the heterogeneity of beauty-rel-

evant properties in each beautiful object—can ground Kant’s claim that aesthetic

pleasure in form is universally communicable (again by contrast to sensations)

without relying on Kant’s bald assertion that sensations are private. For the com-

plexity of beautiful form allows us to communicate our pleasure in beautiful objects

in a way that we cannot communicate our experience of simple, atomic sensorystates: we can indicate the different, component properties to one another, can

suggest how they relate to (contrast with, or complement) the other properties

40 Kant notes, and in fact rejects, the terminological, architectonic temptation to align the “aes-

thetic” of aesthetic judgment with the “aesthetic” of space and time in the Critique of Pure Reason on

the grounds that the latter does not characterize a type of judgment at FI , 20:222–23. See Rodolphe

Gasché, The Idea of Form (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 60–77, for a suggestive argument

against taking Kant’s discussion in paragraph 14 (including his identification of “form” with “shape or

outline”) at face value.41

See CPR , A 20/B 34: “Within appearances, that which corresponds to sensation I call the matter of appearance, but that which makes it that the multiplicity of appearance can be ordered in specific

relations I call the form of appearance … [T]hat in which alone sensations can be ordered and arranged

in a specific form cannot itself again be sensation, … and … must be considered apart from all sensation”

(my emphasis in bold). Here Kant makes it clear that all relations among sensations—all order among

multiplicity in appearance—must be considered to be form, and not to be (the) sensations (themselves),

since they are the components of the multiplicity so to be ordered. Kant also refers to the categorial

concept(s) of an object as the “form of an object.”




of the object.42 One could, then, learn (sort of) to find something aesthetically

pleasurable, not by having the beauty of the object proved to one, but by having

properties and their relations pointed out, and then come to “see” those proper-

ties in relation to one another in the context of the whole (the interrelations of all

the parts/properties of the object). Kant himself suggests this sort of Isenbergian

picture of critical communication: “the critique of taste … is the art, or science,

of finding rules for the empirical relation that the understanding and sensibility

have in the given representation (without reference to prior sensation or concept)”

(5:286; translation modified, my emphasis).

Perhaps more troubling for my reading is Kant’s exclusion of concepts from

aesthetic judgment.43 For on my reading, even though we do not have or employ

a concept of beauty (a rule by which we would prove an object to be beautiful), it

would seem that we do employ concepts in aesthetic judging, in that we identify

properties of beautiful objects and use them as grounds for our judgment that

this object is beautiful, or to communicate our pleasure to others.

But we use concepts or identify properties in our estimation of beautiful objects

in a way contrary to that in which we usually, “logically” use concepts or properties

to classify objects or to make objective judgments. As Kant puts it, in aesthetic judg-

ing we are not “referring objects to other objects according to concepts” (5:279,

my emphasis). We usually use concepts (or identify and understand properties)

to class objects as similar despite the fact that these objects also differ from one

another in other ways. When we judge a beautiful object, by contrast, we use

concepts (e.g., parallel line, curve, yellow, etc.) to point out certain properties ofthis particular object—to indicate the relations that hold “in the given representa-

tion” alone. These properties do not, then, operate (as they would in objective

judgment) as reasons or criteria by which we could apply another concept (in

this case, the second concept would be beauty). Nor do they function, properly

speaking, as properties in their own right; these “properties” are experienced as

specific to the individual object, and hence cannot serve to classify objects into

general categories.

Indeed that which we point out in aesthetic communication and appreciation

must be inaccurately represented by concepts, according to Kant. For we are, Kantasserts, not intuitive but discursive intellects. As discursive intellects, we require con-

cepts of less content but wider applicability, i.e., abstract rules for judgment—rules

given by the understanding (as we have seen) to guide the imagination in unifying

sense information.44 But the concept of any property involved in our experience

of the object as beautiful would have to include (its relation to indeterminately

many, or) all of the object’s sensible properties; for example, almost-parallel-lines-

as-they-relate-to,-contrast-with,-and-complement-the-other-visual-properties-of-Tan-

42 See the Busolt Anthropology lectures (25.2:1509) for Kant’s presentation of the universal com-

municability of aesthetic form, by contrast to sensations, in these terms. This is a reconstructive argument

concerning the CJ , however, for there Kant appears to argue that by subtracting empirical charms or

sensations, we may attain to universally communicable aspects of the (representation of the) object.43 See, e.g., 5:211, 231, 237, 281.44 This is a core Kantian doctrine; for a summary of it in the CJ , see 5:407.




nenwald-I .45 Such a concept would have to be something like a Leibnizean concept

of an individual object: a view of concepts that Kant famously rejects. Indeed, if

one insisted that aesthetic judgments were conceptual or logical judgments, Kant

claims, one would in effect be claiming (as Leibniz does, on Kant’s view) that we

have intuitive (divine) understandings ( FI , 20:227).46

5 . a f i n a l o b j e c t i o n

Finally, one must ask how (or whether) this interpretation of beautiful, purpo-

sive form—and of aesthetic judging as an intimate engagement with the object

in its individuality—might be reconciled with Kant’s repeated characterizations

of aesthetic judgment as subjective, as providing “no cognition” of the object, or

concerning the subject alone. Indeed, soon after the passage from paragraph 15

that I have been emphasizing, Kant writes: An aesthetic judgment … refers the representation, by which an object [Objekt ] is

given, solely to the subject; it brings to our notice no property of the object [Gegen- stand ], but only the purposive form in the determination of the cognitive powers, as

they are engaged with the object.47

Indeed, the interpretation I have proposed cannot be reconciled with Kant’s claim

here (and elsewhere in the CJ ) that aesthetic judging is “only” concerned with the

purposive form of the subject’s cognitive powers (and not at all with the object);

there are, in other words, textual grounds for the subjectivist interpretation. But, as

I have suggested, that subjectivist interpretation cannot be reconciled with Kant’sclaims that we do recognize a (subjective) purposiveness in the object in aesthetic

experience. Thus, in reconstructing Kant’s account, one must choose one or the

45 Cf. Nelson Goodman on analog symbol schemes (Languages of Art [Indianapolis: Hackett,1976]).

Though Goodman’s analog/digital distinction is meant to distinguish between different forms of fine art,

his characterization of analog symbols—briefly, that every difference can make a difference, by contrast

to digital, discrete symbols—is akin, I suggest, to the distinctive nature of aesthetic representation for

Kant, by contrast to conceptual representation or determinative, cognitive judgments about objects in

accord with discursive (universal, intensionally thin, abstract) concepts.46

Thus, like Ameriks, I take it to be consistent with Kant’s position (and with a commonsensicalunderstanding of aesthetic experience) that there is “some use” of concepts, or a “kind of concep-

tualism” in aesthetic judging (“New Views,” 440–41). Contra Ameriks, however, on Kant’s view of the

nature of concepts and of (objective or determinative) judgment, which way concepts are used matters .In objective judgment, concepts serve either as rules for the unification of an object (as on Kant’s

presentation of recognitional synthesis in the A deduction), or as grounds for such conceptual unifica-

tion (as “marks”). If, as I suggest, we use concepts in aesthetic judging solely to “indicate” aspects of

the whole, this kind of conceptualism does not render these judgments objective: no concept is here

the “determining basis” of the judgment (5:228) or of the unified representation of the object. Nor

can Kant hold that aesthetic representation of a fully individualized and unified whole is conceptual,

unless Kant were to reject his doctrine that concepts are discursive. Here, that is, Ameriks’s parallel

between secondary qualities and beauty breaks down: though the sensation of red may be subjective

in some sense, and is certainly not a concept on Kant’s view, we can formulate a concept of red (in factKant uses red as an example of a relatively “abstracted” concept at JL , 9:95), for it has determinate,

isolable marks (e.g., color, visible property) and does not include within it any and all other sensible

properties a red object might have.47 5:228, translation modified and emphases removed. The German text reads: jenes [viz. ein ästhe-

tisches Urteil ] … die Vorstellung, wodurch ein Objekt gegeben wird, lediglich auf das Subjekt bezieht, und keineBeschaffenheit des Gegenstandes, sondern nur die zweckmä bige Form in der Bestimmung der Vorstellungskräfte,die sich mit jenem beschäftigen, zu bemerken gibt.




other of these claims, and, for the interpretive and philosophical reasons given

above, Kant’s claims—also echoed in this passage—that we are “engaged with” the

object in aesthetic experience seem preferable.

Moreover, barring the ‘only’ in the above passage, this interpretation can, I

argue, be reconciled with Kant’s subjectivist claims here. For, first, in aesthetic

experience of purposive form, we are not, and cannot be, making objective judg-

ments on Kant’s view. Objective judgments cannot include ‘beauty’ as a predicate

because beauty is not a discursive concept; i.e., it does not have articulable marks

that could serve as grounds for the connection of it to other concepts. Nor may

aesthetic judgment be based on another discursive concept, since no concept can

comprise enough marks to ground an attribution of beauty. Correspondingly, the

“properties” or conceptually “indicated” aspects of the beautiful object (Objekt )cannot serve as (or “bring to our notice”) properties of a full-blooded object of

cognition (Gegenstand ), properties, that is, which might be used in empirical, ob-

jective judgments, or the formulation of empirical causal laws.48 For in aesthetic

judging, “properties” (as components of purposive form) are represented as inti-

mately interconnected to the entirety of the particular object’s sensible manifold,

and thus are not (strictly speaking) conceptual, cannot serve to classify objects,

and are neither grounded in, nor useful for, comparison of this object to other

objects (see 5:279, 286, as quoted above).

Kant cannot deem such, non-discursively-conceptualized representation of unity

of multiplicity or purposive form to be an objective, cognitive representation, for

this would commit him to a rationalist conception of cognition (as ideally com-prising fully individualized concepts). Indeed I would suggest that Kant’s strong

claim that it is only a purposive form in our cognitive powers that we recognize is so strong because Kant wishes to mark the difference between his and the Wolff-

ian rationalist’s (e.g., Mendelssohn’s) accounts of aesthetic experience; like Kant,

the rationalists claim that we apprehend, sensuously, a unity of multiplicity in the

beautiful object, which unified representation approaches cognitive ideals. On

the rationalist view, this representation can be understood as a (sensible, but)

cognitive achievement, while on Kant’s view of cognition and objective judgment

(as necessarily involving discursive concepts), it cannot.49

48 In the passage from 5:228, Kant distinguishes between a “mere” intentional object (Objekt ) of

a representation, and the “full-blooded” object of experience or knowledge (Gegenstand ) to which we

would objectively attribute properties. See Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1983), 135–36, on this distinction. Kant does not maintain this terminological

distinction consistently throughout the CJ , however, perhaps because he also uses ‘Objekt ’ more narrowly

to mean the object of thought —by contrast to the Gegenstand as sensibly represented (as, of course, is any

object represented as beautiful).49 Though this argument turns on Kant’s rather restrictive understanding of concepts (as rules

that include as their intensional content, and are governed by, specifiable marks, or necessary and

sufficient conditions for their application) and by extension of objective judgment, it may also bemeaningful for post-Wittgensteinian philosophers who reject this restrictive conception of concepts.

For even a looser doctrine concerning the nature of concepts will not, I suspect, include among

concepts an understanding of aspects of an object as in principle applicable or intelligible only in the

context of this particular object. Nor, I suspect, would beauty—as meaning the mutual interrelation

of contingent, empirical, sensible properties as mutually complementing and contrasting with one

another, as making the object what it is as an individual—seem a promising candidate for treatment

as a concept, in virtue of its indeterminacy.




Second, the interpretation of beautiful purposive form given here does not

preclude that in aesthetic experience the cognitive powers have, also, “purposive

form” in their engagement with an object (representing it as subjectively, formally

purposive) or that such powers are in a state of free harmony; indeed this account

would support such a claim. For on the account given here, in aesthetic apprecia-

tion we use concepts to articulate aspects of a complex whole grasped sensuously by

the imagination. Thus, in such cognitive activity, the usual relation between these

faculties is inverted, for here the understanding “serves” the imagination rather

than “vice versa ” (5:242). Nonetheless, in such cognitive activity, the imagination

freely or “unintentionally” obtains an end result consonant with the aims of the

understanding, viz. a grasp of the unity of the object (5:190).50 More specifically,

in terms of my interpretation of purposiveness (as a reciprocal unification of the

diverse as such), the imagination here may be said to unify the particular empiri-

cal characteristics in this representation, as they contrast with and complement

one another; in such unification, the imagination is approximating, or indeed

transcending, fully determinate, empirical conceptualization.

This imaginative activity, moreover, might plausibly be said to be judgmental

in character, and, as such, a necessary (subjective) condition for the possibility

of experience, as Kant claims in his deduction of the claims of taste. Kant sug-

gests that the aesthetic engagement with the object is (broadly) judgmental in

character in his characterization elsewhere of this engagement as ‘Beurteilung ’(e.g., 5:218). And on my reading, the engagement with the object’s purposive

form has a broadly judgmental character. For this cognitive activity involves notonly something like reason-giving (indicating particular aspects of the object as

beauty-relevant or as making the object what it is), but also—in parallel with the

conception of transcendental, synthetic judging, internal to all perception of

objects, developed in the CPR transcendental deductions—it is a synthetic grasp

of an object as a unified manifold, as a complex whole. Indeed this judgmental

activity may be said to constitute the purposive form of the beautiful object, just

as—or even in a stronger sense than—the transcendental, synthetic judgmental

activity constitutes objects as such, on Kant’s view. For, because our grasp of this

whole transcends discursive cognition—because we can articulate no concept thatgrounds the interrelation of complementary and contrasting sensible qualities we

find to characterize beautiful objects—these properties do not so “relate” objec-

tively, cannot be proved to be rightly so judged. Rather, such properties “relate”

to one another only insofar as they are experienced as such by a subject in this

particular state of imaginative attention. The beautiful object is, in other words,

(represented as) unified and individuated not as an exemplar of a kind, or under

a conceptual description, but only as the subject (currently) find its properties

reciprocally to contrast and complement one another—to “belong” together, as

50 Kant also glosses this free harmony of the faculties as a state in which they are in a special

“proportion” to one another (5:238–39) or in which the power of the imagination is “subsumed” to

the power of the understanding (instead of the imagination subsuming intuitions to a rule of the

understanding) (5:287), which puzzling descriptions might be read (metaphorically) to mean that

the imagination here unifies the manifold and so approximates to what the understanding usually

“does” in cognition.




she playfully and purposively unifies them. Thus, the unity of the object so grasped

can be referred solely to the subject.51

The subjective, formal purposiveness of the beautiful object alone cannot,

therefore, justify our claims on others to agree with our judgments of taste, for

we are (thereby) claiming not that they ought to recognize an independent truth

about an object, but that they ought to engage in such non-conceptually grounded,

imaginative unification of this object. This claim, however, might be justified by

reference to the character of the subjective, judgmental activity in so representing

an object. For we must engage in such non-conceptually governed unification of

empirical representations of objects to grasp order in nature beyond that legis-

lated by the categories. The subjective principle of purposiveness as governing the

subject’s representational activity in aesthetic experience may then be a subjective

condition for the possibility of experience.52

6 . c o n c l u s i o n

In this paper, I have proposed a view of Kant’s formalism almost diametrically

opposed to that with which we set out: the purposive form of a beautiful object

is not a restricted set of formal properties, but rather an arrangement of sensible

properties that allows us to have a richer experience of the object than we can

capture in discursive conceptual representation or cognitive judgment. As I have

argued, this reading not only renders Kant’s view a more persuasive description of

aesthetic experience, but also allows us to understand the connections Kant wishes

to establish between aesthetic experience, biological functions, and empirical

cognition. And it enriches our understanding of Kant’s fascination with aesthetic

experience. Kant is indeed interested in justifying our claims to the universal

validity of aesthetic judgments despite their lack of objectivity, but we may now

add that for Kant aesthetic experience must be provocative: both enticing and

problematic. Somewhat paradoxically, perhaps, aesthetic Beurteilung of purposive

form is a merely “subjective” judging because in its grasp of the object as an indi-

vidualized, unified whole, it transcends human, discursive, conceptual cognition.

Thus it gives us a surprising intimation of what it would be to transcend human

cognitive limitations, to have an intuitive understanding of a individual being asa whole, in all its particularity; it suggests that individual things—even the world

as a whole—are, in their contingent character, meaningful, intelligible, ordered

for us; it gives us a sense of what it would be to be divine.53

51 A complete explanation of this “reference” of the unity of the object to the subject would include

treatment of the relationship between representation of purposive form and the subject’s pleasure,

which I cannot provide here. It may comprise (as scholars, prominently Guyer, have suggested) a

second judgment about or in response to the subject’s engagement with the object, with which latter

I have been concerned.52

5:279, 290–91. This, along with the preceding paragraphs, is, of course, a necessarily sketchyaccount of Kant’s doctrine of the harmony of the faculties, and his deduction argument. For more

detailed discussion (broadly consonant with my view), see Fricke, Kants theorie , 48–63, 127–39, 151–60;

and Rush, “Harmony,” 54–60.53 I owe thanks to Gillian Barker, Steven Crowell, Michael Forster, Les Harris, Robert Pippin, Susan

Shell, audiences from the Committee on Social Thought and the Workshop on Continental Philosophy

at the University of Chicago, and from the Department of Philosophy at University of Texas, Austin,

and two anonymous reviewers for the Journal for comments on earlier versions of this essay I would

rachel zuckert kants aesthetic formalism

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