[It is] Our Moral Duty to look for and find Beauty in everything as a Practical Approach to Life
MichaelAngela Solis
Abstract:
In this paper I want to explore Beauty and re-discover its ties with Moral Good. In the first section of this paper I am going to discuss Plotinus’ idea of Beauty and why his idea is imperative and cannot be dismissed in our current world today, along with Plotinus’ definition of Beauty I would also want to determine whether it is plausible to integrate Plotinus’ philosophy to help us achieve an aesthetic life with the Moral Good. In the second section of this paper I am going to discuss Kant’s ‘concept’ of Beauty and why he equated Beauty as the [only] symbol of Moral Good, in lieu with the possible problems of Kant’s Aesthetics. In the third section of this paper I want to know if Santayana and Dewey’s Aesthetics could be the ‘missing link’, from Plotinus and Kant’s transcendental ‘ethereal’ philosophy of Beauty and Moral Good to the more ‘earthly’ philosophy of Santayana and Dewey’s, to find out if this quest for Beauty has a practical application in today’s world as the embodiment of [us] moral human beings. In the conclusion section, I am aiming to resolve the tug-of-war between the ‘seen’ and the ‘unseen’ [subjective versus objective components of beauty] and which should come first in its hierarchy, so to speak, and if it is possible to integrate both subjective and objective view into one philosophy and thus by achieving this can set the tone for the Moral Good and as moral beings we can achieve a viable and feasible and beautiful aesthetic life.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Introduction:
1.1 Nietzsche’s ‘value’ and the Ugliness of Socrates [p.3-4]. 1.2 The Medieval beauty that turned ‘ugly’ [p.4-5].
1.3 Soul as a ‘value added’ criterion of beauty [p.5-6].
1.4 Beauty as an imperative and unshakable foundation to moral good [p.6-7]. 1.5 It’s what you do that makes you ugly! [p.7].
1.6 The Beauty Contest: Internal versus External Beauty as the indicator of Moral good [p.7-8].
1.7 Reasons I opted for Plotinus, Kant, Santayana and Dewey [p.9]. II. Prelude to Plotinus and ‘his Soul’ [p.9-10].
2.1 Beauty according to Plotinus [p.10-11]. 2.2 Soul as the unseen internal Beauty [p.11-12]. 2.3 Beauty and our moral responsibility [p.13-14]. 2.4 Conclusion [p.14-15].
III. Prelude to Kant’s Transcendental Philosophy [p.15-16]. 3.1 Beauty according to Kant [p.17-19].
3.2 Feeling beauty and its pleasure [p.19-20].
3.3 In Kant’s beautiful universe, Beauty is Universal [p.20-23]. 3.4 Beauty as the symbol of the Morally Good [p.23-27]. 3.5 What is ugly for Kant? [p.27-28].
3.6. Does Kant’s aesthetics have a practical value? [29-31]. 3.7 Conclusion [p.31].
IV. Prelude to Pragmatism to be ‘Practical’ or to be ‘Pragmatic’? [p.32-33]. 4.1 George Santayana ‘The Anti-Kant’? [p.33-35].
4.2 Santayana and his ‘interest’ in Aesthetics and Universality [p.35-36]. 4.3 Morality in Beauty [p.36-37].
4.4 Beauty as ‘Currency’ [p.37-38]. 4.5 The Beauty of Socrates? [p.38-39].
4.6 Beauty and the Beast: What is ugly for Santayana? [p.39-40]. 4.7 The Importance of William James [p.40-44].
4.8 Experiencing Dewey [p.44-50]. 4.9 What an ‘ugly’ experience! [p.50-55]. 4.10 Final Conclusion [p.55-57].
V. Acknowledgments, Bibliography and End Notes [p.58-65].
I. Introduction
1.1 Nietzsche and the Ugliness of Socrates:
My fascination with Beauty grew even more, when I came across Nietzsche’s bold claim that Socrates was convicted based on his looks, specifically speaking, based on his ugliness. In his own words, Nietzsche expressed that the Greeks persecuted Socrates on the basis of “monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animoi” [monster in appearance—monster in spirit] criterion. The
relevance of Nietzsche’s claim in today’s world piqued my philosophical curiosity deeply, for the reason that: nothing has changed since the death of Socrates, we are still quick to judge people as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and punish and reward them based on the way they look. In line with what Nietzsche said about this egregious fact of life, he continued to claim that, “The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it—what it costs usii”, I cannot help but wonder if Socrates was easily accused as a ‘corruptor of youth’
because of his lack of beauty, because there were so many accounts that Plato was a ‘good looking’ philosopher who was a faithful disciple of Socrates and yet not one trial was brought against him. I can only speculate, at this point that, maybe we as people, find it hard to associate ugly things to someone who possesses beauty—how can we, it would be irrational and even ‘unjust’ to do so, would it not? How can something ‘ugly’ come from someone who has beauty in the first place? If the lack of beauty has a steep price to pay then it is our moral duty to determine what Beauty is, to avoid misjudging things and human beings based on ‘ugliness’.
It is but fair, to briefly tackle the issue of ‘ugly/ugliness/lack of beauty/non-beauty’, Deborah J. Haynesiii considered ugly as a powerful word, the word originated from Old Norse: ugglig(r) which meant ‘fearful or dreadful’. It is suffice to say that given this definition of ugly, that ugly is akin to monstrous, and the word monstrous/fearful/dreadful/ugly if attached to a human being, could easily depict that person into something that is non-human/sub-human a monstrosity in nature, so to speak.
A good example of this is, Mary of Egyptiv, she was once a beautiful prostitute and because of her deep desire to pay her sins through penance, there were accounts of her living in the desert unrecognizable even to the point of being mistaken as a beast. I can only speculate that Mary of Egypt, did not all of a sudden turned into an animal-like-creature, that somehow we can parallel it to Franz Kafka’s, Metamorphosis, that the main character Gregory Samsa metamorphosed into a dung beetle that his family found it hard to treat him as a human being, because he physically ceased to be one. Unfortunately it is in our ‘human nature’ that we equate ugly with being repulsive and ‘beastly’, and maybe because if someone is ugly our repulsion transforms into fear and dread and unfortunately for Socrates and Mary of Egypt they too stopped being human beings.
1.2 Medieval beauty that turned ‘ugly’:
But is it sound to say, that there is beauty in ugly as well? In other words that, our intellect/mind, common sense, rational and logical sense would agree in unison that ugly has beauty and therefore without a shred of a doubt, we can come up with a resounding yes as our answer. To expound on the accounts of Mary of Egypt, I want to discuss briefly the medieval idea of Beauty. In the Dark Ages of our human existence, bodily beauty was a source of temptation and to lead a virtuous life meant to defile the body itself, and through the defilement or the condemnation of the body only one can achieve ‘true beauty’, meaning if beauty is virtue and virtue can only be gained through disfiguration as part of the ‘detachment’ from the human form then therefore the only ‘right’ or ‘moral’ thing to do is to desecrate the body. The body is the source of corruption, impurity, temptations and vices, then if one wants to possess beauty one has to abandon one’s attachment to the physical form and embrace the ‘pure-beautiful-form’ apart from the body, and also to sacrifice the body as an act of offering and even the act itself contains ‘beauty’ in itself. But if defilement, disfiguration, and dehumanization of the human body, in a nutshell to be ‘monstrous in appearance’, is a symbol of a saintly virtuous life and therefore translates into beauty of the individual—then why concern ourselves with the pursuit of Beauty instead of the pursuit of Sacrifice in the form of disfiguring the body or being ugly?
The obvious answer is: because there is no value in ‘being ugly’, there is no wisdom in the pursuit of disfiguring the body as the ‘symbol’ for a virtuous life and hence symbol of beauty
and rarely is there love in pain—therefore beauty is lacking. That is why, in the Dark Ages, only a select few achieved that type of beautyv, this was reserved for people who wanted to be saints and martyrs and not everyone wanted this at the cost of turning our bodies into beastly monstrous forms. What was the reason for this? I can only assume that because we are inherently vain, it is like looking in the mirror and liking what we see—I would even dare say, like Narcissus even to the point of falling in love with what we see, we should love the reflection looking back at us in the mirror, especially in our ‘moral mirror’. We value our physical appearance throughout the ages that even the reward of being saints would not suffice to give it up and devalue it.
The encompassing aspect and allure of Beauty should be for everyone and here is why, in Plato’s, Symposium, Socrates and a wise woman Diotima talked about love, beauty, good and wisdom and this transpired:
Those who love wisdom…is in love with what is beautiful…what is the point of loving beautiful things?...the lover of beautiful things has a desire; what does he desire? That they become his own…suppose someone changes the question putting ‘good’ in place of ‘beautiful’…a lover of good things has a desire…that they become his ownvi.
Socrates also equated happiness as the final product of loving wisdom and possessing the beautiful and the good. I can only assume that Socrates himself was aware of his ‘ugliness’ but even in his ugliness he advocated Beauty.
1.3 Soul as a ‘value added’ criterion of Beauty:
We are all aware that since time immemorial, the concept of the Soul has permeated different cultures in various ages, for example, in ancient Egypt they mummified their dead to prepare them for the afterlife and thus hopefully, the Soul in the afterlife would experience a blissful ‘life’. In China, for example, thousands of terracotta soldiers were sculpted to guard the Emperor in the afterlife.
Needless to say, through out the ages, since the dawn of our humanity, we have been leaving clues of our beliefs in regards to the afterlife and the soul. The soul has been an integral thread of our human tapestry. We can easily and readily align ourselves with something that is higher than us, like the Gods and Goddesses of ancient times, still up to this day most often than not—we still find it hard to see ourselves as mere ‘animals’, lacking ‘content’ like empty shells just mere existing and at the mercy of our bodily wants and needs, ergo, lacking a ‘Soul’.
The value of Soul and the importance of soul in beauty is so inter-linked that even in our current time, some beliefs for example, namely in Kabbalah they consider a celestial being the Archangel Jophiel as the Angel of Beauty [Jophiel stands for “Beauty of God”, “Divine Beauty”]. Once more I can only suggest, that maybe the reason for our deep need, almost bordering to desperation in association with the heavenly beings through Soul is our own vanity. In today’s world, no matter what science tells us, that we are just matter and when we die our bodies decompose and turn into dirt, or no matter how much Darwin has enlightened us by proclaiming that we are descendants of apes—our vanity keeps us from accepting science’s claims. We are descendants of Narcissus, falling in love with ourselves has been the main driving force of our pursuit of Beauty, Socrates echoed the ‘soul’ of Narcissus: we want to possess what we are looking at and what we are looking at should contain Beauty and Soul gives us Beauty because we are not just mere matter, Soul adds a certain value to our existence that we are celestial beings on earth that possess a Beauty that can stand the test of time.
1.4 Beauty as an imperative and unshakeable foundation of Moral Good:
Why Beauty? Why not valor? Why not achievements? Better yet why not sacrifice, like what Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. exemplified? I can only speculate, probably because not everyone can have the courage to be a martyr or not all of us would gladly give our lives for the sake of others, like in the Middle Ages only a few would volunteer for something that is somehow unattainable to benefit the rest of mankind at our expense. Once more, maybe it is our vanity that is at play here, as to why in the case of Moral Good, we somehow want something that we can look for and look at: a standard we can pursue that is attainable for everyone— a ‘representative’ of Moral Good so to speak, that we can claim
‘universal’, re-iterating what Socrates suggested, Beauty is something we should possess, and therefore attaching this to Moral Good, Beauty and Moral Good should be attainable and universal.
1.5 It’s what you do that makes you ugly!:
The wisdom of Aristotle, still echoes today that we are creatures of habit and you are what you do, as an example, a teacher can only be called one if he teaches; a King rules and does not beg. Our actions define who we are, what we do is the mirror of our character, and our character is the core of our being. But if we are creatures of habit, does it not mean that virtues can be ‘faked’ in a form of imitation? To expound, can a criminal not ‘counterfeit’ his goodness just by merely acting as a good man, habitually or copying someone else’s actions and can we also say that this criminal, is still the ‘same person’ in his core—his ‘true’ self? On the other hand if a holy man, performs ceremonies on Sundays but steals money everyday—do we still consider him a holy man? Of course not, the holy man is a thief and the criminal is a good man because for Aristotle it is succinct: you are what you do, your habitual actions create your identity, the Self. In lieu of this to lead a life of Beauty is to live a virtuous life, if a person acts like an animal through committing repetitive, habitual vices then he ‘becomes’ an animal, he becomes ugly. I mention Aristotle’s philosophy of habituation, because I see the need to differentiate and establish here that: 1) virtues done for the sake of possessing external beauty, as opposed to, 2) virtues done as a ‘innate’ outward manifestation of the internal beauty that emanates from the soul, which I am going to discuss later on.
1.6 The Beauty Contest:
Internal versus External Beauty as the indicator of Moral Good:
In this section, I want to weigh out and deliberate on which beauty, is and should be more important to us as moral beings and to provide the answer as to why this ‘type’ of beauty is the ‘real and true’ beauty that we should use as a benchmark to gauge our goodness and others and even possibly as our standard. A standard is something that we can all ground ourselves on, a
I see the importance of this aspect as a prelude to Plotinus and Kant, because of the relation of their philosophies on beauty and moral good, this somehow would release the tension between two different yardsticks of beauty that we as human beings go back and forth with like a pendulum, maybe out of confusion and/or convenience. Seeking for the answer erases the confusion by making as more active in participation in the pursuit of Beauty, and thus alleviating the laziness convenience provides us. The question to the problem is: If Moral Good is tied to Beauty then, which Beauty should ‘win’?
As I have mentioned in the previous section in my introduction, we can see the ‘impracticality’ or unattainability of the medieval idea of Beauty because of its negative relation to physical appearance. We also see the harsh, (mis) judgment Socrates endured because of his lack of physical beauty. We can only therefore accept and acknowledge, that our eyes lie to us most of the time, for example having an angelic face does not constitute a virtuous life, good character and a sound soul. It is suffice to say that we judge harshly and quickly when we use our senses as our tools to determine beauty—our senses mislead us and therefore we can also be led astray when it comes to judging the moral good which is, not only foolish, but also most importantly dangerous to say the least. In other words, our eyes that see quickly and easily judge what is most apparent to the senses in this case: the external beauty, (the eyes) also fail us to our detriment, to gauge and judge the moral good—we then therefore, need more reliable instruments so to speak, to ‘see’ moral good through beauty and we also need to consider ‘internal beauty/the unseen beauty’ as something more everlasting, less harsh in its judgments and more ‘honest’ and ‘humane’ so to speak for us to help live and experience an aesthetic life. And if we do listen to our senses, for example, in using our eyes and ears they still should be optimized to feed our soul, as what Horatio Hubbell said in his essay on, Aesthetics, [regarding the realm of beauty]:
There remain two senses to which all the world concedes the privilege of exciting in us the idea and the sentiment of the beautiful. They seem to be more particularly in the service of the soul. The sensations, which they give, have something purer more intellectual. They are less indispensible for the material preservation of the individual. They contribute to the embellishment rather than to the sustaining of life. They procure us pleasure in which our personality seems less interested and more self-forgetful…These two senses in fact is addressed in order to reach the soulvii.
1.7 Reasons I opted for Plotinus, Kant, Santayana and Dewey:
As I have mentioned the reasons why internal beauty is more relevant and maybe even in a practical way to see ourselves in teaching us to conduct our lives morally, I’m going to discuss in depth in chapter two the internal beauty according to Plotinus and his belief in Soul as the main source of beauty and virtues [moral good] and we should really ‘look’ at beauty without using our eyes but using our perception instead. In chapter three, I’m going to discuss Kant’s philosophy of beauty using, feeling, as its indicator, which somehow also adds to the ‘invisible’ beauty in a unique Kantian way. These two philosophers are somehow joined together by the philosophy that beauty should not be seen, but felt and perceived. In chapter four, I’m going to discuss Santayana and Dewey and their aesthetics and hopefully, through their pragmatic philosophy we can enhance our judgment of moral good subjectively but objectively embodied in us and through as in our aesthetic experience. I hope to assert in my concluding chapter that, there are no competing views, meaning that the ‘pie-in-the-sky’ philosophy can be brought down to earth and ‘make it work’: that the pragmatic approach to beauty does not collide with the transcendental approach but in fact enhances it, makes it ‘alive’, and that our judgment of a pragmatic ethical life is made more practical through Plotinus and Kant’s transcendental philosophy.
II. Prelude to Plotinus and ‘his Soul’
In this section, I’m going to briefly give a background on Plotinus to set the tone of the importance of his contribution in our discussion on Beauty and Morally Good. To give us a brief background on Plotinus, I find it interesting to use George Santayana’s essay, Dr. Fuller,
Plotinus and the Nature on Evil—to lay the ground on Plotinus’ life and philosophy. According
to Santayana the, “Alexandrian sage, though a pagan, was one of the first masters of what may be called the philosophy of Christendom, and he explored ideal regions to which some minds in all ages love to soarviii” because, “Plotinus was a well-learned man, almost a professorix. I mentioned that it is interesting to see an account of Plotinus from a pragmatic philosopher like Santayana for the reason that [maybe] there is something ‘practical’ or achievable in Plotinus’
philosophy as well. The following statement of Santayana would help us understand, why seeing beauty in a fragmented and segregated way through the use of our senses, we should instead consider Plotinus’ philosophy instead:
Plotinus in supposing that the good was single and a priori, in fancying it to be the creative power encouraged himself to ignore the greater part of its possible forms…reason requires him to assume integrity, if he has it not. He is a biologically but a single being, an indivisible engine and he can not work in two directions at once without disrupting his life and rendering himself incapable of any perfect achievement. Harmony, unity of direction, thus become his necessary method. The better man he is, the more strictly he imposes it on his wayward impulses…The first impulse of men in the presence of evil is to resist and try to abolish it; but when evil is seen to be ineradicable…their next impulse is to elude it in their own persons, so recasting their habits as to be strengthened against it and to lay up its chief treasures beyond its reach. This was the universal effort of Greek moralists, and of Plotinus among themx.
George Santayana, has given us an account of a philosopher that breathed life into his philosophy and not just paid lip service to it and the emphasis on the harmonious life of a single being, emanating beauty from the inside-out would reverberate into Plotinus’ opus, which I would discuss in depth in the following sections.
2.1 Beauty according to Plotinus:
Ennead I,vi is a part of Plotinus’ written work that deals specifically on Beauty, the rest of his
opus deals heavily on Soul. I’m going to focus on Ennead I, vi to explore Plotinus’ philosophy on beauty and to go more in depth, expounding on his philosophy through the leading scholar on Plotinus, Margaret Miles in her book, Plotinus: On Body and Beauty, in Ennead I,vi, Plotinus acknowledged the fact that much of beauty is seen, and we as humans belong in a physical body. Our physical body possesses beauty, but this beauty belongs to a lower rank of beauty, meaning that it is just a part of the summation of who we truly are as beings.
For Plotinus, we have three parts that comprise the whole: the body, mind/intellect and soul, and these three should be in harmony to have beauty. In other words, that our body is a reflection of our soul and that the mind is where the soul resides. Although it may sound simple than it is,
Plotinus’ philosophy on beauty and morality, still needs some scrutiny and probing because: if the body is the reflection of the soul, does this not remind us of the ‘monster in appearance— monster in spirit’ judgment? Although, it appears conflicting and almost hypocritical, Plotinus was not contradicting himself here—to further expound on this, according to Miles, Plotinus meant to have ‘self-care’ or a ‘healthy respect of the body’ as reflection of one’s soul. Miles, emphasized in her book that in Plotinus’ time, the Romans followed two extreme lifestyles: 1) body as a sacrifice through entertainment in Gladiatorial events, and just for pure amusement through blood and gore using humans as baits for wild animals at the Colloseo, or warriors and slaves pitted against each other in a form competitive sports where freedom, life and death where viewed as badges of honor and ‘medals to be won’, and 2) on the other end of the spectrum, it is the incessant worship of the body through the Roman Baths, body therefore was treated as a symbol of social status to be displayed and paraded in front of friends and strangers of the same social stratumxi.
Plotinus, did not despise the body and at the same time did not worship it either—in fact he gave importance to harmony and proportion, this brings us back to his claim that the body should be a reflection of one’s soul, the two together in harmony achieving a well-proportioned existence and life. Once more, Miles re-iterated Plotinus’ philosophy, by saying that “Because we tend to conflate ‘life’ with the physical and affective activity, we find it difficult to grasp Plotinus’ understanding of life as a spiritual entity identified with soul but permeating and animating body”xii.
2.2 Soul as the unseen internal Beauty:
Beauty for Plotinus according to Miles is detected when; “we see something as beautiful, when it matches the beautiful form that is ourselves, that is soul. We detect beauty by kinship, whether beauty in bodies or beauty in ideas, virtues or ways of lifexiii”. If body acts like a mirror of the soul, that reflects the soul from the inside out, what is this unseen beauty? This unseen beauty is what emanates from the soul and only our intellect/mind can help us perceive this beauty, it is seeing through the ‘mind’s eye’ so to speak that we can finally ‘see’ this vision of beauty, this
importantly goes within; going within through the mind’s eye to see this invisible beauty. In Plotinus’ own words, he expressed this by saying:
How, then, can you see the kind of beauty that a good soul has? Go back into yourself and look. If you do not yet see yourself as beautiful, then be like a sculptor, making a statue that is supposed to be beautiful, who removes a part here and polishes a part there so that he makes the latter smooth and the former just right until he has given the statue a beautiful face. In the same way, you should remove superfluities and straighten things that are crooked, work on the things that are dark, making them bright and not stop ‘working on your statue’ until the divine splendor of virtue shines in you, until you see ‘self-control enthroned on the holy seat’xiv.
For Plotinus, it is highly important to work on our own soul first—to do the internal work first and foremost, so that the futility and foolishness of looking for beauty on the outside/the external aspects of objects/forms/bodies/ways of life, can be avoided and thus beauty in wisdom and the beauty of soul can be achieved and experienced. This is important to comprehend because in the next section, I would discuss the moral responsibility we all have through beauty according to Plotinus.
I also want to briefly further discuss why going within us to see the beauty of our individual soul is highly valued by Plotinus, it is this internal ‘activity’ of perceiving the beauty of the individual soul that allows us to see this invisible beauty in others as well—we have to remember that for Plotinus, because we all possess an individual soul, there is a natural kinship to one another because each soul belongs to the Onexv, each individual ‘separate’ soul belongs to a ‘collective’
Soul. The One, possesses Mega Kalos or Great Beauty that simply, is, meaning the One doesn’t have to ‘exert’ any effort to possess beauty or ‘gives’ away beauty it just simply is beauty—and for Plotinus we all partake of that beauty because of our souls as individuals merge with the ‘One’. Needless to say, for Plotinus we already inherently possess this invisible beauty, but we have a responsibility, a duty, to ourselves and to others to willingly cultivate this innate-internal-unseen-beauty.
2.3 Beauty and our moral responsibility:
The active pursuit of Beauty and the wisdom we gain from this active participation should not just be for mere entertainment or a passing fancy; this pursuit should give us an ethical view of life not just an aesthetic one. For Plotinus according to Miles, “perceiving beauty is more fundamental; it underlies and supports the practice of virtue so that the primary effects of an active and alert perception of beauty are ethicalxvi”. Miles even went further by stating that it is ethically imperative to see beauty, she emphasized that for Plotinus the, “Inability to see beauty is a moral failure, since cultivating the ability to see beauty is within our power…it is an achievement, the integration of the intelligence and feeling by which we participate in beautyxvii”. I want to give importance to this because Plotinus’ philosophy of Beauty and Moral Good would resonate in Kant’s Philosophy, that morality is integral in our aesthetic judgment and beauty plays a primary role in our ethical judgment.
I want to briefly discuss in this section, Plotinus’ suggestion on how we can cultivate this appreciation of beauty to help us lead moral lives, because as Plotinus warned us, to fail to perceive beauty is to fail to see moral good. The failure to see beauty and moral good would thus, lead to an ugly life full of self-defeating and self-destructive vices. In his own words, Plotinus challenged his hearers and students by saying:
Would you like to consider the opposites, the ugly things that come to be in the soul, and contrast them with the beauties?...as such would contribute to what we are seeking. Well, then let there be an ugly soul, one that is unrestrained and unjust, filled with all the manner of appetites and every type of dread, mired in fear owing to cowardice and envy, owing to pettiness…deformed in everyway, a lover of impure pleasures, one who lives a life in which bodily pleasures are measured in vilenessxviii.
I see the need to mention this here, primarily because, for Plotinus our virtues and thus the beauty of the individual, comes from the beauty of the soul. Needless to say, virtues should not be a disingenuous act through imitation, faking acts of goodness to appear ‘beautiful’ is not ‘true
beauty’ and thus it is not a true manifestation of virtues. I also want to point out here that for Plotinus, in order for us to turn our backs from this ugly life and achieve a beautiful soul, we should practice contemplation and by doing so we can possess the inner beauty. The importance of contemplation for Plotinus according to Miles is that, “The direct apprehension, at the level of
perception, …is the quintessential human activity…because we are what we desire and what we
look upon, the formative effects of contemplation of beauty are crucial to human integrationxix”. For Plotinus, beauty is a form of discipline that can be achieved through contemplation it therefore becomes a part of the seer and lastly for Plotinus, distance plays no importance between the object and the seer—I can infer somehow this is probably what he means by perception. In other words, we do not need the object of our contemplation to be right in front of us stimulating us visually, but in fact it is the opposite for Plotinus, through the use of the mind’s eye we can still ‘see and perceive’ the object of our contemplation. And these objects of our contemplation [should be] are objects of beauties: such as courage, justice, wisdom, moral goodness and so on and so forth.
2.4 Conclusion:
At this point, we can now ascertain the reasons why internal beauty especially emanating from the soul as the source, to manifest our virtues is of grave importance. Moral goodness through virtues that are inspired by the beauty of our soul cannot be practiced just for pure vanity of appearing ‘beautiful on the outside’ but ‘ugly on the inside’ so to speak, because this would only connote disharmony, discordance and disunity these are things that Plotinus did not advocate: there should be unity, balance and harmony between the body, mind and soul and the way the individual lives her life and conducts herself, to possess real beauty. In this conclusion, I see the importance of Plotinus’ stance in Kant’s philosophy that I’m going to discuss in the next sections and as I conclude Plotinus, it is best to remember his wisdom, “what is really worth aspiring to is ourselves, bringing themselves back for themselves to the best of themselves; this is the well proportioned and…intelligent, beautiful life. The beautiful life is made beautiful by light from its sourcexx”. In other words, although the ‘unseen’ beauty is more difficult to ‘achieve’ somehow, because of the constant tending to the soul and the consistent attention we need to give to our practice of moral good, and the conscientious use of perception that goes beyond the appearance
and goes back within simultaneously to reflect on our own inner beauty, as a way of life is tedious, but it is worth pursuing so we can come back to ourselves, our true beautiful selves experiencing a ‘beautiful life’.
III. Prelude to Kant’s Transcendental Philosophy
In the following sections, I am going to discuss in depth what is Beauty for Kant and how we can ‘know’ this Beauty and in line with this I am going to expound on why Kant used Beauty as a universal [the only] symbol of Morally Good and hopefully to find out that Kant was not proposing something preposterous and Quixotic to his readers. I also want to discuss Transcendental Philosophy as a prelude, to set the tone for the following sections on Beauty and Morally Good in Kant’s Aesthetics because this can help us see beauty through Kant’s eyes, so to speak, and hopefully assent with him in his aesthetic judgment of taste.
Why is transcendental philosophy the encompassing approach in Kant’s aesthetics—given the fact that, Kant was a big proponent of reason, why can it not be a ‘rational judgment of taste’ instead? We need to define briefly what transcendental philosophy is, in order to get the feel of Kant’s aesthetics, I see the appropriateness of using Wenzel’s definition of transcendental philosophy, it is more accessible, to modern readers:
Said with respect to the a priori conditions and elements of our experience; more specifically, said of our knowledge, or investigation, of these a priori elements and their application in experience. “Transcendental” is not to be confused with “transcendent”: Transcendent is what lies beyond the limits of our experience, whereas the transcendental spells out what makes our (everyday) experience possible. There is transcendental knowledge, but there is no transcendent knowledge. The two are diametrically opposed to each otherxxi.
In other words, transcendental philosophy deals on the possibility of our everyday experiences and not limited in our ‘actual’ experiences. Whereas transcendent knowledge is impossible and as an example, I am using: death (to expound on this), we can never have knowledge of death, because that is beyond the limits of our experience—because if you are alive you can never
experience death and thus you can never ‘know’ it. Now, transcendental knowledge is highly important to take into consideration because it focuses on the ‘possibility’ of things and not the ‘reality/actuality’ of them because in the following sections, although Kant would almost sound like a ‘benevolent dictator’ who would respectfully demand the approval of everyone from a ‘private viewing’ of an experience into a universal one, he was not catering to our leniency but to our ‘understanding’ instead in the (knowledge) judgment of taste. Kant was fully aware that a subjective aesthetic judgment of taste is [or should be] a transcendental judgment. In his own words, Kant knew that, “this problem of the critique of judgment is part of the general problem of transcendental philosophy: How are synthetic judgments possible a priorixxii?”.
In order to equip us further in his Aesthetics, I see the need to briefly discuss what Kant meant by: a priori synthetic judgments. For Kant, reason alone can give us a priori judgmentsxxiii, and along with this, synthetic judgment means going beyond the content of the subjectxxiv. To expound on this further J.G. Shurman explained this enigma in his essay on, Kant’s Critical
Problem: What is it and in it for us?, by simply saying:
We are left, then, with the remainder of human knowledge, a priori synthetic judgments. And to explain under what conditions, and in what field, a priori synthetic judgments are possible, is to answer the critical question, as originally framed, What and how can reason know without all experience?...But what is still more extraordinary is this, that we have a whole class of a priori synthetic judgments which in no way enter into our sense experience or can be brought any of it to testsxxv.
What Shurman was explaining is that, for example, if a person declares ‘a triangle has three sides’, we can say yes to that because we already ‘know’ that all triangles (regardless whether it is an isosceles, acute, so on and so forth) have three sides: this is an example of an a priori
analytic judgment. Now when someone declares, ‘Kant is wearing a red coat’, we do not ‘know’
this statement for sure, whether it is false, true or can be proven, but it maybe a possibility: this is an example of a priori synthetic judgment, ‘we cannot test it’. In other words, can Beauty be an a
priori synthetic judgment? In the following sections, I hope to explore and (re) discover this
possibility and maybe even the practicality/applicability of Kant’s, Critique of Judgment, in relation to Beauty and Morally Good.
3.1 Beauty according to Kant:
Immanuel Kant found Beauty to be the only idea that can ‘represent’ the moral good, and in this section I’m going to discuss what Beauty is or should be according to Kant using Christian Helmut Wenzel’s, An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics: Core Concepts and Problems. According to Wenzel, beauty for Kant is critically linked with our, satisfaction (Wohlgefallen), which can also be translated as “enjoyment or pleasurexxvi”. For Kant, an individual may encounter three types of satisfactions and they are: Agreeable, Beautiful and Good—only the satisfaction on the beautiful is what the person should pay attention to, because Kant believed that, “beauty is valid only to human beingsxxvii”, meaning “the ability to find beauty is part of our human naturexxviii”. Although this may sound so simplistic, it is not, because Kant also suggested that this feeling of pleasure or satisfaction that is known only in the beautiful should be a disinterested pleasure. [But] This is what makes Kant’s proposal, complex, challenging and at the same time interesting because how can a subject feel pleasure (inwardly as a private feeling to know beauty) and simultaneously be ‘disinterested’ in one’s own feeling of pleasure? Kant cleared this confusion by stating:
We can easily see that, in order for me to say that an object is beautiful, and to prove that I have taste, what matters is what I do with this presentation within myself, and not the [respect] in which I depend on the object’s existence. Everyone has to admit that if a judgment about beauty is mingled with the least interest then it is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste. In order to play judge in the matters of taste, we must not be in the least biased in favor of the thing’s existence but must be wholly indifferent about itxxix.
The disinterestedness of Kant’s, is something that can not be dismissed in the judgment of taste because it teaches the person [I can parallel it] to ‘disengage’ one’s self from one’s interests and senses, needless to say it as a form of ‘instruction’ for the individual to keep in mind that as an agent of one’s taste—one has to put aside and put on hold, one’s preferences, prejudices and passions. This disengagement from one’s interests allows the person a certain type of freedom before the individual engages herself in a judgment of taste, and this frees her from the
imprisonment of her senses. The value of this notion of disinterestedness is important to our discussion because as I have mentioned in the previous sections—to become too engaged in our likings and interests, preferences and prejudices we are more susceptible to make the wrong judgment of an object, to re-iterate, even the wisest person like Socrates can be judged as someone monstrous due to the limitations of our senses, somehow most often than not, our senses are not our assets but our liabilities in our judgment of taste.
As I have mentioned, I parallel this disinterestedness with disengagement because it harkens to our ability to ‘step back’ along with the ability to temporarily ‘suspend our judgment’ and not allow our senses to (mis) guide us and influence us in our ‘verdict’ of beauty, too quickly, but instead to use our mental faculties to assist us into our judgment of taste. If we are armed with this ability to disengage ourselves, divorced from our interests, we teach ourselves side by side this notion of disinterestedness, along with the ability to reflect on the object. To expound on this notion of disinterestedness as a form of disengagement, I akin this with (to) personally viewing the painting of George Seurat’s, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, if a person views this painting too closely the individual would not clearly ‘grasp’ the whole painting, because the person would only see the individual dots scattered on the canvas, these dots actually comprise the whole painting to create a scenery of people enjoying their lives in a park, and thus the person is prone to give a (mis)judgment to one of the most valuable works of art (and maybe one of the most ingeniously beautiful paintings that we can experience the feeling of satisfaction from). To properly reflect on this painting requires the ‘stepping back’ to get the proper vista, of course, in the actual viewing of this painting the person has to literally step back, the individual has to take this action consciously in order to have the proper viewing and understanding of Seurat’s painting—this is analogous to what Kant proposed to us, as individuals participating in this judgment of taste, to hold our pre-conceived notions, prejudices, passions of what an object of beauty should be, because we can be gravely mistaken if we just rely on our senses to inform us of what a beautiful object is or is not/should or should not be, meaning, this disinterestedness is also a conscious (mindful) action and effort on our part—we have this ability and we can and should exercise it; to be disinterested from our interests is not to connote a passive judgment but instead an fully-engaged-participatory-activity in our aesthetic judgment of taste.
As we participate in this aesthetic judgment of taste as an activity of our disinterested feeling of satisfaction, then and only then can we give a verdict of what Beauty is and/or should be. Keep in mind that it is a feeling of pleasure that acts as a compass to (re) direct our attention to know beauty, meaning beauty for Kant has nothing to do with the actual appearance of the object— needless to say, we are not only free from our prejudices, passions, pre-conceived notions and senses but we are also autonomous beings who are not at the mercy of the object before us for our liking. In his own words, Kant emphasized it as, “Taste is the ability to judge an object, or a way of presenting it, by means of a liking or disliking devoid of all interest. The object of such a liking is called beautifulxxx ”.
3.2 Feeling beauty and its pleasure:
In this section I see the need to briefly elaborate on the differences between feeling and emotion because in today’s world the lines between feeling and emotion gets opaque every now and then, and to get a clear demarcation line between our feeling(s) and emotion(s) would help us understand why in this pursuit of beauty, Kant advocated feeling of pleasure but warned us from ‘charm and emotion’ mingling with our aesthetic judgment of taste, in his own words, “A pure judgment of taste is one that is not influenced by charm or emotionxxxi”. An essay in
Philosophical Review by, David Irons, sheds light on emotion:
Emotion, on the contrary, is an attitude or disposition towards something, it directs attention outwards and therefore impels to action that has reference to an object. When the agent is entirely under the influence of emotion, he acts, as he feels disposed towards the object just because he is so disposed and for no other reason. He is concerned with the object alone. The subject is in the background all in allxxxii.
As we can see from the above description of emotion, this is what Kant enlightened us to steer clear from, he even referred to it as having a “barbaric tastexxxiii”, needless to say if the object becomes all consuming that it ‘possesses’ us instead of us having self-possession then what we attain from this is not a judgment of taste but a mere barbaric expression of emotion. Kant advocated for the individual to be self-autonomous, this subjective activity is an important factor that would later on have an inter-play with the notion of sensus communis, he believed that in
order for an individual to have taste and thus later on participate with others in an aesthetic judgment, the person should be free from personal interest, and independent from any influence including charm and emotion.
As we move forward into the feeling of pleasure, because for Kant this is how we can ‘know’ beauty through the occurrence of our private feeling specifically the feeling of satisfaction in the beautiful. The question that I want to address here is: can we know beauty prior to experiencing it and having the possibility to go beyond the content of a subject? I see it appropriate to refer to Agnes Heller in her book, The Theory of Feelings, as she discussed in depth what feelings are from a philosophical point of view but for the purposes of our discussion I want to narrow it down to what is relevant to Kantian readers, for Heller, “feeling…informs us…the feeling of tiredness, that we need to rest…feelings regulate the social preservation and extension of the Self…feeling always informs regarding the relationship of the Self to the objectxxxiv.” In other words, feeling provides knowledge to us in regards to what is occurring internally, but most importantly it preserves the Self, meaning, it does not make the Self a prisoner of the object unlike emotion that produces havoc in the presence of the object; emotion puts the object in the foreground and the Self plays a second-fiddle to the object and is put in the background. Instead, feeling informs the Self to know ‘itself’ in relationship to the object, this ‘self-knowing’ (through feeling) also gives way to the preservation of the Self and its extension with society as well. Therefore, going back to Kant’s feeling of pleasure (satisfaction)—we can now see the importance of why feeling should be the guiding compass for us to know beauty, because the feeling of pleasure in the beautiful informs us of ourselves and allows us to extend our feelings with others in society to have a collective feeling of pleasure when we are in the ‘presence’ of beauty, because of this informative aspect of feeling we are not limited in our experience (s) to gain knowledge of ourselves and others in relation to an object.
3.3 In Kant’s beautiful Universe, Beauty is Universal:
Kant’s philosophy of beauty as a feeling of satisfaction experienced (privately) in us, invites the individual to extend this feeling and communicate it to others so that all can participate in this activity that is uniquely human to avoid any ‘misleading errors’ in judgment. In this section I am
going to discuss the faculties that we all have and that we can exercise to guide us in our collective pursuit of beauty, using Salim Kemal’s book, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory: An
Introduction. According to Kemal, when it comes to our ‘cognitive faculties’, “it is Kant’s
insight that our experience of this mutual positive relation of faculties gives rise to a ‘feeling of life’—a positive and healthy sense of our own power to think and actxxxv”. I mention this here, because, it is imperative to understand that even though, this feeling of pleasure (at first glance) may appear as an ‘exclusively-inclusive-experience’, this should not be the case, in fact Kant promoted sensus communis, a metaphorical platform for an individual to share and ‘act’ on her feeling of pleasure, meaning it is not a passive pursuit. Another facet that Kemal mentioned is that, “In aesthetic judgments, our thought and reflection are free to pursue their own extent of and powerxxxvi”, this ‘reflective power’ that we all possess nudges us not only to think but most importantly, to act.
Our reflective power on the feeling of pleasure in beauty, depicts a picture of a ‘practical’ approach to life, meaning: our judgment of taste is not only attainable but most importantly it gives us satisfaction—to judge beauty gives way to having the experience of a ‘feeling of life’ and Kant encouraged us to actively pursue it, participate in it, and compare our feelings and judgments with others; the satisfaction that we find in feeling beauty, makes this human activity ‘uniquely human’, in his own words Kant reminded us that, “Agreeableness holds for non-rational animals too: beauty only for human beingsxxxvii”. Kant also, explained that this sensus
communis, this shared sensexxxviii as such:
Instead, we must here take sensus communis to mean the idea of a sense shared by all of us, i.e. a power to judge that in reflecting takes account (a priori) in our thought, of everyone else’s way of representing, in order as it were to compare our own judgment with human reason in general and thus escape the illusion that arises from the ease of mistaking subjective and private conditions for objective ones…we compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others, and put ourselves in the position of everyone else, merely by abstracting from the limitations that happen to attach to our own judging.
This participation in the collective pursuit of beauty, not only guards us from, merely proclaiming a ‘biased opinion of beauty’ but guides us to have a universal aesthetic judgment of taste, the transcendental aspect of the judgment of taste tells us that: we should consider the ‘possible judgment of taste’ and not the ‘actual judgment of taste’ of others, meaning if I declare that I feel pleasure contemplating on a tulip and therefore the tulip is beautiful, and I communicate this to you, is it possible for you to feel the same pleasure that I am feeling as I reflect on the beauty of the tulip? If it is possible for you to feel the pleasure that I am feeling then maybe, this is possible for everyone as well, and to assent with me in my judgment of taste. In the next paragraph, I am going to discuss the ‘tools’ we can use to give us the ‘power to communicate’ our private feeling of pleasure.
In order to expound on the notion on the possibility of a ‘private feeling of pleasure’ extended to a universal judgment of taste and thus allowing everyone to assent with the individual, I am using, Terry Pinkard’s book on, German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism, according to Pinkard, “Kant concluded that aesthetic appreciation must therefore involve the way in which both imagination and intellect (der Verstand, “the understanding”) are in free play with each other—free in the sense that their interaction with each other is not constrained by any rulexxxix”. And also in this respect, imagination, for Kant should not be confused with the modern interpretation of ‘being lost in fantasy’ or the ‘the lure of the impossibility of things’, imagination (Einbildungskraft) according to Wenzel means:
For Kant, imagination plays an essential part in cognition and not just fantasy. By means of imagination we take up, recollect, and creatively combine what is given to us through the senses. In this imagination is guided by concepts of the understanding, empirical and (more fundamentally) a priori ones. Imagination mediates between sensibility and understandingxl.
I see the importance of Kant’s acknowledgement that all human beings possess these cognitive faculties that we should all exercise in an aesthetic judgment of taste. We also have to take into consideration that for Kant the harmonious free play of our imagination and intellect (the understanding) do not have to go against reason, in fact for Kant, “the very nature of reason itself demands that we go beyond the bounds of possible experience in certain ways if we are to
be able to make sense of our experience as a wholexli”. I see imagination, as one of the pillars in making us uniquely human, to briefly explain on this, through imagination we have the ability to look for the possibilities of our experiences and possibilities of what objects can be, for example: an animal would only have to adapt itself to its environment to preserve itself—us, humans on the other hand, have the ‘power’ to ‘create and mold’, things and circumstances to preserve the Self and possibly even make the self ‘better’ moral beings, therefore, reason coupled with
imagination and intellect are essential faculties of a self-autonomous agent because, this ability
to cognize, allows the individual to attain knowledge beyond the limitations of experience and it allows us to see the possibility of our experience.
3.4 Beauty as the Symbol of Morally Good:
In our world today, we communicate with each other in written, verbal and even body language, and in some inconspicuous ways—we also communicate through symbols [I even see language itself as a symbol in its usage and even in its ‘nature’ as part of its ‘evolutionary self’], we can see them in media, art, fashion and so on and so forth, for example, in some instances an eagle is [can be] the symbol of freedom. If we take these two ideas individually and apart from each other, it is very apparent that one has nothing similar with the other, meaning a bird cannot be equated with something abstract like (human) freedom, but we are also aware that symbols should not be taken literally by themselves—meaning we should not feel compelled to painstakingly look for actual differences and obvious similarities between the symbol and the object (or meaning/idea behind) that is being symbolized.
In other words, most often than not, the symbol and the object being symbolized (or the meaning being symbolized) gives us a sense of ‘familiarity’ between the two, it is almost as if the former has an ‘innate affinity’ with the later that we find hard to pin-point at first glance, but our ‘intuition’ or the way the two are represented in our intellect make it ‘appear’ seamless in our minds.
“Even if it made sense that beauty symbolizes morality…the mill symbolizes the despotic state…but so does a bulldozer…a chainsaw…then each is a symbol of despotism; none is the symbolxlii”. Along with Cohen, Paul Guyer in his book, Kant and the Claims of Taste, cautioned us that when it comes to beauty as the symbol of morally good, he mentioned particularly that, “A symbol is not identical with the object or thesis that it symbolizes, and the justifiability of demanding knowledge of the latter from everyone thus does not entail the justifiability of demanding sensitivity to the formerxliii”, basically for Guyer, the defiency of Kant’s demands for the sole claim of Beauty into the territory of morality, should be approached from two separate, entirely different aspects, meaning for Guyer since the two are not ‘identical’ the morally good and the beautiful are not of the same ‘breed’ so to speak, therefore for Guyer: Beauty is beauty and Morality is morality.
It is highly understandable (especially for modern readers of Kant to encounter this semantic ambiguity or what Allison would refer to as “cryptic”xliv) and it is my aim in this section to give clarity on this issue to understand why Kant chose Beauty as the all encompassing (universal) symbol of the moral good and to give us an in depth approach, I am using Henry Allison’s,
Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of The Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, to see if Kant’s claim
is indeed justified in this respect. To set the tone for this discussion, Allison reminded us of what Kant mentioned in the third Critique, and that is an aesthetic idea as, “a representation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e. no concept, can be adequate so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp itxlv.” In this passage, we can see that even Kant acknowledged that language itself could not fully express our ideas, therefore our idea (s) pertaining to beauty [which should not be under any concept of beauty because it is a feeling and not a concept] language also limits our abilities to fully comprehend (‘know’) beauty. And for this limitation of language, Kant also addressed that our rational ideas or ‘ideas of reason’, can only be exhibited through intuition, and I want to explain briefly what Kant meant by intuition as to avoid the confusion for modern readers [and hopefully clarify the discombobulating interpretation and meaning of the word in a Kantian usage and perspective], to expound on this, according to Hercules Bantas in his book,
Intuitions, as Kant defines them, are representations in our minds left by the evidence of our senses. Intuitions come in two forms, they are either pure (a priori) or empirical. Empirical intuitions coincide with the human senses and are colour, sound, taste, smell, and feel. Pure intuitions are time and space and are a priori in that they are logically independent of experience, but are informative in that they give us knowledge of our environmentxlvi.
In other words, for Kant our intuition helps us grasp a priori ideas that our senses [due to their limitations] fail to achieve and acquire otherwise. Allison referred to intuition, as
quasi-schematizing-functionxlvii, and he expounded on this by stating that for Kant this meant to, “strive
toward something that lies beyond the bounds of experience, and hence try to approach an exhibition of rational concepts (intellectual ideas), which gives to the latter the semblance [Anschein] of objective realityxlviii”. In other words, when language fails to ‘translate’ intellectual ideas into knowledge, our intuition does the work for us, the ‘power’ of intuition is to produce a quasi-schemata of our rational concepts. Another point that Allison emphasized, is that for Kant:
Aesthetic ideas, may serve as indirect exhibitions of their rational counterparts…to approximate imaginatively the completeness or totality that is thought in the idea but not attainable in experience, that beauty (both natural and artistic)…functions aesthetically, that is, apart from a determinate concept, as a symbol of moralityxlix.
In order to give credence to this passage, Allison expounded by stating, “For the claim…of the beautiful symbolizes the morally good…an isomorphism between reflection on the beautiful and the morally good…aesthetic ideas can symbolize morality without expressing moral ideasl.” In this passage, what Allison was clearly stating is that our ability to reflect on the beautiful (is adequate enough) to make the beautiful the symbol of the morally good, not the expression of morality.
To bring forth further elucidation on this perplexing and yet adamant claim of Kant on Beauty as the Symbol of Morally Good, I find a thorough dissertation by Sumangali Rajiva quite helpful and in his manuscript, Kant’s Concept of Reflective Judgment, the author explained that for Kant:
reason’s employment for aesthetic ideas is the supersensible substrate in the subject and of all the faculties or powers of the subject…the supersensible is presented as a possibility…accepted as the actual reference…we can move to the actual mediation of knowledge and morality via beauty as its symbolli.
Rajiva, also expounded that,“…where schemata are lacking and empirical examples will not do, we can resort to symbolslii”. Albeit Allison and Rajiva, justified Kant’s use of symbol as an analogon of a schema, which for Kant meant “the idea of maximum in the division and unification of the knowledge of the understanding under one principleliii”, for us to comprehend the supersensible substrate of humanity—this still does not give us an acceptable answer to our (Kantian) query as to why Beauty (“is the”) as the Symbol of Morally Good? We know [by now] the reasons for Socrates and Plotinus and their philosophical views of why and how beauty is intricately woven with morally good, but I want to probe deeper to find out why such is the case for Kant as well, and to avoid going off tangent in our discussion I am going to discuss briefly the Kantian perspective in his exclusive claim (for) Beauty as the Symbol of Morally Good.
In the Critique of Judgment, we can find that Kant discussed in §42 that, “…every activity of man…impels him as being directed to the ultimate purpose of humanity, the morally goodliv”. And for Kant, we should be interested in the beautiful per se because in doing so this sends the signal that we are moral beings and in his own words he explained this by stating, “ it s a sign of a good moral character to take an interest in the beautiful generallylv”. For Kant, this almost ‘familial’ intrinsic affinity translates from the feeling of pleasure (beauty) to moral feeling
(morally good):
And hence it seems, not only that the feeling for the beautiful is distinct in kind from moral feeling (as indeed it actually is), but also that it is difficult to reconcile the interest, which can be connected with the beautiful with the moral interest, and that, it is impossible to do this by an [alleged] intrinsic affinity between the twolvi.
Although for Kant, he explicitly stated that only natural beauty (beauty in nature) can be on equal footing, with the moral good, such as “a lily’s white color seems to attune the mind to the
ideas of innocencelvii”—I am not going to expound on his claim on natural beauty as superior to beauty in art in this section to avoid going off tangent in our inquiry. Thus, it is suffice to say that for Kant, there is no other symbol to ‘represent’ the Morally Good aside from Beauty.
3.5 What is Ugly for Kant?:
In this section I want to find out and know what is ugly for Kant in order to have a keener knowledge of [a Transcendental Kantian] Beauty. In §48 of Critique, we can see that Kant made it more explicit as the reason why Fine Art is inferior to Natural Beauty (beauty in nature), Kant stated that, “Fine art shows its superiority precisely in this that it describes things beautifully that in nature we would dislike or find uglylviii”. In other words, the only ‘upper hand’ that fine art has versus natural beauty is by depicting ugly (despicable ideas) ‘beautifully’ that in fact we would find almost revolting if we see such ideas in nature, for Kant, “…we then judge nature no longer as it appears as art but insofar as it actually is art (though a superhuman art)lix”. In the passage below Kant expounded on vast difference between natural beauty and ‘fabricated’ beauty in art, by explaining:
There is only one kind of ugliness that cannot be presented in conformity with nature without obliterating all aesthetic liking and hence artistic beauty: that ugliness which arouses disgust…art is almost confused with nature. Instead it has permitted (ugly objects) to be presented by an allegory—e.g. death by beautiful genius or warlike spirit by Mars, or by attributes that come across as likable and hence has permitted them only to be presented indirectly and by means of an interpretation of reason rather than presented for a merely aesthetic power of judgmentlx.
In other words for Kant, to ‘beautify ugly things’ would still count as ugly in and of themselves, e.g. famine (the idea, actuality and reality of it) can be presented through art in the most elevated way and in a beautiful manner, but even if it has beauty in the presentation of it still would not suffice to claim this art as something that possesses beauty.
In order to give more emphasis on Kant’s aesthetics and the ugly, I see it helpful to use Christian Helmut Wenzel’s, An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics: Core Concepts and Problems, posited and argued that the same ‘rules’ for knowing the beautiful in Kant’s aesthetics are the same rules that we can use in knowing the ugly. Wenzel stated that for Kant, “… calls judgments that claim that an object is ugly ‘negative judgments of tastelxi’”. This means that according to Wenzel, Kant found the same feeling of pleasure in the beautiful, can also give us the knowledge of the ugly only in so far that it creates the feeling of displeasure this time or what Wenzel referred to as “negative pleasurelxii”. Wenzel continued to expound on this claim by stating the following:
We shall see that there are good reasons to believe that Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment is intended also to cover judgments about the ugly. In fact, to treat them on equal grounds with those about the beautifullxiii.
In other words, it is of equal importance for us in this pursuit of beauty to figure and find out whether there is a place for ‘the ugly’ in Kant’s aesthetics and my intention here is not to confuse Kant’s sublime with the ugly [the confusion arises with the feeling of fear, awe and respect and maybe even fascination, that somehow can be inter-changed with the sublime and ugly because as I have mentioned in the introduction that the origin of the word ugly also translates into fear, and fear is another factor of the sublime]. According to Wenzel, in Kant’s philosophical development pre and post the third Critique, Kant claimed that, “aversion can be called a negative desire, hate a negative love, ugliness a negative beauty, blame a negative praiselxiv”. In lieu of this, Wenzel went on to say that: a priori synthetic judgment, the cognitive faculties and disinterestedness, universality (and on and so forth) would not be sacrificed when it comes to the assessment and judgment of the ugly, in order words the same exact philosophy behind the aesthetic judgment of taste of the beautiful is applicable (unaltered) in the ugly as he clarified this by saying:
In defense of Kant, we can say that he concentrated on the analysis of judgments about the beautiful simply because this analysis suffices to discover the notion of free play of the faculties and the a priori principle of subjective purposiveness, the establishment of which is his main interest in the third Critique. Kant may have taken for granted that a similar analysis applies to negative judgments of taste.
