Free Play and True Well-Being: Herder’s Critique of Kant’s Aesthetics
Paul Guyer, Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania
(paper for the workshop ‘Herder and Anthropology’, University of Oslo 29-30 May 2006; not for
citation)
The philosophical discipline of aesthetics, as is well known, did not receive its name until 1735,
when the twenty-one year old Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduced it to mean episte*me*
aisthetike*, or the science of what is sensed and imagined. But Baumgarten’s denomination of
the field was an adult baptism: without the benefit of a name, aesthetics had been part of
philosophy since Plato attacked the educational value of many forms of art in the Republic and
Aristotle briefly defended them in his fragmentary Poetics.
In particular, Aristotle defended the arts from Plato’s charge that they are cognitively useless,
trading in mere images of particulars rather than universal truths, by arguing that it is precisely
the arts, or at least poetry, that deliver universal truths in a readily graspable form, unlike, for
example, history, which deals merely with particular facts. And if experience of the arts can
reveal important moral truths, that it can also be important to the development of morality, the
other pole of Plato’s doubts. Some variant of Aristotle’s response to Plato was the core of
aesthetics through much of subsequent philosophical history, and indeed continued to be central
to aesthetics well into the twentieth century -- one need only think of Adorno. In the eighteenth
century, however, an alternative response to Plato was introduced, namely, the idea that our
response to beauty, whether in nature or in art, is a free play of our mental powers that is
intrinsically pleasurable, and thus needs no epistemological or moral justification, although it
may in fact have epistemological and moral benefits. This line of thought was introduced in
Britain in Joseph Addison’s 1712 Spectator essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” and
developed by subsequent Scottish writers such as Francis Hutcheson, Henry Home (Lord
Kames), and Alexander Gerard. It was only slowly received in Germany, making its first
sustained appearance in the emphasis on the pleasure of the unhindered activity of our powers of
representation in some of the entries in Johann Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen
Künste (1771-74), e.g., the entries on “beauty” and “taste,” but then quickly becoming central to
the aesthetic theories of Kant and Schiller in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and
the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (1795).
Johann Gottfried Herder, who had done the bulk of his work in aesthetics long before these
publications of Kant and Schiller, indeed even before the publication of Sulzer’s encyclopedia,
reacted violently to the new aesthetics of play in his late work Kalligone (1800), i.e., “The Birth
of Beauty.” This work, published only three years before Herder’s death and after his renown
had been eclipsed by such new stars as Schelling and Fichte, has never received much attention,
but beneath its bursts of ill-temper it contains interesting and important criticisms of Kant. The
theme of Kalligone may be summed up with this statement from its table of contents: “Nothing
harms immature taste more than if one makes everything into play.”
Here I want to show that Kant has no good reply to some of Herder’s criticisms, but also that if
Herder had had more sympathy for Kant’s expository method in the third Critique, he might have
realized that on some of the central substantive points of his criticism the distance between
himself and Kant is not as great as it initially seems. In particular, I want to argue that Herder’s
representation of Kant’s aesthetics as a pure theory of mental play mistakes Kant’s initial
analysis of the simplest form of natural beauty for his whole theory of natural and artistic beauty,
and that if Herder had recognized the importance for Kant of the more complicated cases of
adherent and artistic beauty, he would have seen that there is considerable common ground
between Kant’s aesthetics of free play and his own aesthetics of the sensory apprehension of
truth.
1. Some Critical Themes in Herder’s Early Aesthetics
Herder wrote most of his works on aesthetics early in his career, twenty or more years before
Kant’s third Critique and thirty years before Kalligone. The heart of this early work lies in the
first and fourth of the Kritische Wälder, or “Groves of Criticism,” the first published in 1769 and
the fourth written around then but published only posthumously, although some of its central
arguments did see the light in Herder’s Plastik or essay on sculpture, begun in 1770 and finally
published in 1778. I do not want to spend much of my time here on these works, but do want to
mention two themes that anticipate important aspects of Herder’s later critique of Kant.
The first of these points is methodological. Herder cast the fourth Grove in the form of a
criticism of the now justly forgotten Theorie der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften of
Friedrich Just Riedel. Herder particularly objected to Riedel’s distinction among three
supposedly alternative “methods of aesthetics, which he likes to call the Aristotelian, the
Baumgartian, and the Kamesian, where the Greek is supposed to have derived his laws from the
works of the masters, the miserable, dry Baumgarten from definition, and the Briton from
sentiment.” At this stage, influenced by Kant’s argument in 1764 that in philosophy definitions
always come at the end of inquiry, not the beginning, Herder held that these are not three
alternative methods of aesthetics, but rather that aesthetic theory must begin from both the
analysis of works of art and the analysis of our own responses to them and only then arrive at
definitions informed by both of these sources. “Is it not the same soul and the same operation of
the soul, that presupposes a masterwork and observes art in it, that presupposes the sentiment of
the beautiful and then analyzes this sentiment, and -- no! does not presuppose a definition, but
gathers it both objectively from the artwork and subjectively from the sentiment? Is this not one
work of one soul, and why then maliciously separate these ways in order maliciously to slander
them, when without all three together there can never be an aesthetics?” The importance of this
criticism is its proof that from an early stage Herder was suspicious of the use of excessively
abstract and a priori methods in aesthetics, and although he did not think that Baumgarten
himself, whom he always admired, was guilty of this, it will be a recurring charge in his later
polemic that Kant had as it were forgotten his earlier suspicion of beginning philosophy from
abstractions and instead succumbed to an a priori methodology.
The substance of both the first and the fourth of the Groves of Criticism, however, and the main
reason for their enduring interest, is Herder’s critique of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön,
or on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Lessing, in turn responding to the famous claim of
Johann Jakob Winckelmann that the serenity (supposedly) expressed by the face and especially
mouth of the Trojan priest in the famous eponymous statue reflected the “noble simplicity and
sedate grandeur” of the Greeks, had argued that this was not the source of Laocoön’s expression.
Instead, he argued, visual arts are both confined to the representation of a single moment of
action and constrained by the necessity of being beautiful, and so must depict a momentary state
of their object that both intimates an entire sequence of action and yet is itself beautiful, while
poetry, which deals with a succession of events in time, can only depict an object by describing
the process that produced it, but can depict even an ugly or painful object as long as its own
description is beautiful. Herder applauded Lessing’s attention to the requirements of specific
media of art, but argued that he did not go far enough in his analysis. Two points are central to
his extended criticism. In the first Grove, he argued that it is music, not poetry, which is the art
of pure succession, and that the fact that poetry uses artificial rather than natural signs, which
Lessing did recognize, means that in the right hands poetry is capable of describing any kind of
object and expressing any kind of emotion. In the fourth Grove and in the published work on
sculpture, Herder argued that Lessing failed to make an essential difference between painting and
sculpture among the visual arts, and thus failed to see that while painting is limited to the
beautiful depiction of surfaces, sculpture appeals to our sense of touch, creating threedimensional objects that we really want to grasp and explore. On Herder’s view, both sculpture
and poetry thus have a relation to truth that is missing from painting: poetry, precisely because it
uses artificial signs, can convey any truth rather than being limited to mere beautiful surfaces,
while sculpture, because it really does not use signs at all, conveys to us the true shape and feel
of three-dimensional objects in the physical world, to which we have to learn how to correlate
the natural but superficial signs delivered by sight.
Thus, in the first Grove, Herder emphasizes the broader reach of poetry as compared to both the
visual arts and music. Precisely because in apprehending artificial rather than natural signs we
typically think immediately of the meaning of those signs rather than focusing on their own
physicality, and thus in taking in poetry we do not focus on the physical or acoustical properties
of the signs themselves, but on their meanings, poetry can represent anything. In the case of
poetry, “it is not the sign itself but the sense [Sinn] of the sign that must be felt; the soul must not
feel the vehicle of the force, the words, but the force itself, the sense...But thereby it also brings
every object as it were visibly before the soul.” Herder then develops his view by invoking
Baumgarten’s characterization of poetry as “the sensibly perfect in discourse.” What he now
argues is that poetry actually gets its force by exploiting both the depiction of objects as in
painting and their energy as represented by music:
Neither of these taken alone is its entire essence. Not the energy, the musical in it; for this cannot
take place if what is sensible in its representations, which it paints before the soul, is
presupposed. But not what is painterly in it; for it works energetically, in succession it builds the
concept of the sensibly perfect whole in the soul: only [in] both together, I can say, the essence of
poetry is force, which works from space (objects, that it makes sensible) in time (through a series
of many parts in one poetic whole); in short, therefore, sensibly perfect discourse.
Once painting and music have been properly distinguished from each other and poetry from
both, then it can also be recognized that poetry, because it uses artificial rather than natural signs,
can present both objects and actions to us, and in that sense present more truth to us than either
painting or music alone.
The main thrust of the fourth Grove is that recognition of the distinctions among our senses will
explain the variety of both forms of art and forms of aesthetic response. The premise of Herder’s
argument is that aesthetic response is not the disinterested reaction of a special internal sense to
purely formal properties of objects, but is really the heightened response of various of our senses
to their appropriate objects. Herder rejects the traditional distinction between mind and body,
arguing that mind is essentially connected to the bodily organs of sense, as well as any
suggestion that aesthetic pleasures are essentially distinct from the other sources of our happiness
and unhappiness. In this connection, Herder scorns Riedel’s thesis that the beautiful is that
“which can please without an interested aim and thus also please if we do not possess it” -- thus
prefiguring one theme of his later critique of Kant’s aesthetics. Instead, Herder argues that the
phenomenon of distance that Riedel mistakenly characterizes as a general quality of
disinterestedness in all aesthetic response is a specific feature of the visual perception of beauty,
indeed that beauty is properly speaking a property only of the visual. This in turn leads him to
distinguish between sight as a sense for mere appearance and touch as the sense for reality, and
thus to the essential distinction between painting and sculpture which, he charges, Lessing failed
to make. Beauty, Herder writes, appeals to the eye, but insofar as it does so it is superficial, or
even an illusion: “This is in accordance with its etymology: for to intuit [schauen], appearance
[Schein], beautiful [Schön], beauty [Schönheit] are related offspring of language: it is here that,
if we pay proper attention to its particular application, that beauty is most originally found in
everything that offers itself pleasingly to the eye." He continues:
In accordance with this first sense the concept of beauty is “a phenomenon” and thus to be
treated as if it were an agreeable delusion [Trug], a delightful illusion [Blendwerk]. It is properly
a concept of surfaces, since we properly cognize the bodily, the well-formed, and the solidly
pleasing only with the help of filling, and with sight can see only planes, only figures, only
colors, but not immediately corporeal spaces, angles, and forms.
Here Herder insists that visible beauty arises only from the most superficial features of objects,
not from their full reality, and that only feeling -- by which he here means the sense of touch -can put us into direct contact with reality, or with the deeper truth about physical reality. He
expands upon this contrast in the essay on Sculpture:
The living, embodied truth of the three-dimensional space of angles, of form and volume, is not
something we can learn through sight. This is all the more true of the essence of sculpture,
beautiful form and beautiful shape, for this is not a matter of color, or of the play of proportion
and symmetry, or of light and shadow, but of physically present, tangible truth....Consider the
lover of art sunk deep in contemplation who circles restlessly around a sculpture. What would he
not do to transform his sight into touch, to make his seeing into a form of touching that feels in
the dark....With his soul he seeks to grasp the image that arouse from the arm and the soul of the
artist. Now he has it! The illusion has worked; the sculpture lives and his soul feels that it lives.
His soul speaks to it, not as if his soul sees, but as if it touches, as if it feels -which is why Herder subtitles his essay after the sculptor Pygmalion, who feel in love with the
statue of the beautiful young woman he had created and was granted his wish that it come alive.
Herder’s emphasis on the sense of touch and its centrality to the experience of sculpture builds
upon his interpretation of the great eighteenth century debate about the relation between sight
and touch in which Locke, Berkeley, and Diderot had all argued that we do not correlate the
deliverances of the two senses innately, but have to learn from experience that an object that
looks a certain way also feels a certain way, or vice versa. But he takes this thesis a step further
by arguing that it is touch that reveals the true form of objects, while sight merely reveals or
plays with their superficial appearance. Thus, although sight initially seemed the paradigmatic
vehicle of knowledge, Herder ultimately concludes that “in painting there is merely beautiful
deception” while in sculpture there is “primary truth.” The passage from Sculpture also display
what Herder thinks is the significance of the perception of the true form of objects through the
tactile medium of sculpture: it communicates to us the feeling of life in the sculpture and in turn
arouses our own feeling of being truly alive. In the case of sculpture, both the artist and the
audience can fully feel the emotions and passions of life that made Pygmalion wish that his
beautiful creation could come alive. This view of the power of art is what Herder finds missing
in Riedel and perhaps even in Lessing himself.
These criticisms of Lessing and Riedel prefigure several of Herder’s objections to Kant: he will
object to Kant’s abstract method in aesthetics, to his failure to emphasize adequately the rôle of
the senses and the differences among them in his account of aesthetic experience and in his
classification of the arts, to an inadequate recognition of the importance of truth, indeed truth in
several senses, in our experience of art, and to what he sees as Kant’s inadequate emphasis on the
way in which aesthetic experience gives us a feeling of being alive. But what is missing from
Herder’s early critical aesthetics is an objection to the aesthetics of play, for the simple reason
that Kant had not yet made that prominent in German aesthetics, In turning now to Herder’s
criticisms of Kant in Kalligone, we will have to add that objection to his list of charges.
2. Herder’s Criticisms of Kant in Kalligone
Kalligone is a polemic against Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, more precisely against
its first half, the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment,” loosely structured in parallel
with Kant’s work, although with numerous digressions, sometimes even in dialogue form, and
statements of Herder’s own positions. Like Herder’s polemic with Lessing in the Groves of
Criticism, his response to Kant’s work is longer than its target, and all of its themes cannot be
discussed here. In ways anticipated in Herder’s earlier work, Kalligone attacks Kant’s
methodology and his neglect of the concrete rôle of the senses in a discipline that is, as defined
by Baumgarten, supposed to focus precisely on that. In an expression of the naturalism that
pervades his work, Herder also attacks Kant’s appeals to the “supersensible” in his interpretation
of aesthetic experiences, especially the experience of sublimity. But Herder’s most vehement
objections are to Kant’s insistence upon the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment and his
exclusion of a rôle for determinate concepts in the free play of the mental powers in aesthetic
experience, which Herder sees as excluding any rôle for the knowledge of truth in aesthetic
experience. After a brief comment on Herder’s attack on Kant’s methodology, I will discuss
Herder’s criticisms of the disinterestedness and non-conceptuality of aesthetic judgment in some
detail, and then note his criticisms of the non-sensual and transcendent rather than immanent
character of Kant’s aesthetics more briefly.
Herder prefaces Kalligone with an attack upon what he calls “transcendental influenza” and its
infection of the young, thinking no doubt not only of Kant but also of the influence of Fichte and
Schelling in Jena, the backyard to Herder’s own Weimar. Herder blames Kant for opening the
door to “a realm of endless chimerae, blind intuitions, fantasms, empty spelling-words, so-called
transcendental ideas and speculations,” a made-up philosophical language which ignores real
human speech and thus the real structure of human thought, since, according to Herder’s deepest
belief, “The language of human beings carries their forms of thought in it; we think, sometimes
abstractly, only in and with language.” In Herder’s view, “We should, without all
‘Transcendental taste, whose principle resides in the supersensible substratum of mankind in
absolute unconsciousness,’ form our taste here below in consciousness, learn to know the laws
and analogies of nature, and use neither the art nor the science of the beautiful for a game [Spiel]
or for idolatry, but should use them with joyful seriousness for the cultivation [Bildung] of
mankind.” From the outset of his work, Herder rejects a transcendental method in aesthetics and
shows his hostility to any reduction of aesthetic experience to a form of play rather than to a
completely serious experience of truth that is essential to human development.
In the body of the text, Herder’s rejection of transcendental aesthetics often remains beneath the
surface of his specific objections to Kant’s various claims. But one place where it clearly
emerges is at the end of Part I of Kalligone, which deals with the “Agreeable and the Beautiful.”
Here Herder summarizes his polemic by expounding Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” in the
form of thirteen “postulates,” and then questioning each. The last of these postulates sums up
Kant’s view in the thesis that “The power of judgment for taste [Geschmacksurteilskraft] consists
in judgments, rests on the common sense, and operates [wirkt] with universal validity toward
universal communication; otherwise, a free play of the powers of the human soul.” To this
summary, in what is supposed to be Kant’s voice, Herder replies in his own voice:
That this empty, hollow, pernicious theory, which has arisen from necessity, a critique without
any critique, has not originated in any serious study of the beautiful, whether in objects or in
sentiments thereof, needs no proof. It has come about a priori from a supposedly empty spot; a
play of wit and acuity that is purposelessly-purposive and purposively-purposeless.
By saying that Kant’s theory has arisen a priori from “necessity” (Not) and to fill a “supposedly
empty spot,” Herder presumably refers to Kant’s suggestion in the Introduction to the third
Critique that since there are a priori principles for understanding and (practical) reason, there
should be one for the power of judgment, the third of the higher powers of cognition as well. He
takes Kant to have decided in advance of and without any serious study of aesthetic objects and
experience -- the two prerequisites for any useful definitions in aesthetics according to Herder’s
earlier criticism of Riedel -- that there is an a priori foundation for aesthetics, and that it lies in a
free play of mental powers that are universal among human beings and therefore yield
universally valid judgments of beauty or other judgments of taste. Herder scorns Kant’s theory
of free play by saying that it is itself a mere play of wit, and jeers Kant’s claim that this free play
is purposive but without a specific purpose by suggesting that it is itself as purposeless as it is
purposive.
It is no doubt unfair of Herder to accuse Kant of arriving at his theory completely a priori; Kant’s
language in the Introduction suggests rather that he is merely asking whether there is an a priori
principle for aesthetic judgment analogous to the a priori principles of understanding and reason
--he says that “one has reason to presume, by analogy, that [the power of judgment] too should
contain in itself a priori, if not exactly its own legislation, then still a proper principle of its own
for seeking laws” -- and that this question will be answered only in the following body of the
work. As far as Kant’s subsequent attempt to answer his question is concerned, however, it is
certainly fair of Herder to claim that Kant proceeds with little, indeed virtually no detailed
criticism of particular works of art and of our experiences of them, though it could be argued that
this is work for critics like Lessing or Herder himself, not for a philosopher like Kant. It is less
clear that Kant proceeds without any close examination of our sentiments (Empfindungen) in
aesthetic experience, but perhaps this is a fair response to Kant’s exposition of his aesthetic
theory in the form of an analysis of the logic of judgments of taste rather than in the form of a
direct description of the feelings or experiences on which such judgments are supposed to be
based.
Having objected to Kant’s supposedly a priori method in aesthetics, Herder also objects to Kant’s
attempts to read transcendent rather than immanent significance into aesthetic experience. This
objection is central to Herder’s critiques of Kant’s accounts of the sublime and of the beautiful as
the symbol of the morally good. About the sublime, Herder writes:
That this view, this feeling, does not lie in the object but rather in the feeling viewer [fühlenden
Anschauer]...no one since the beginning of the world has doubted; but that the feeling of the
sublime is of a supersensible [übersinnlichen] nature, that it rests on a supersensible reason
aiming at an absolute totality, whose feeling does not say something quite different to him? Only
an unbounded fantasy steps into the infinite, only a reason that has lost its measure dreams of an
absolute totality...
In his own interpretation of the experience of the sublime, Herder stresses that what is central is
not the incompletable effort to grasp something that exceeds the boundaries of human
imagination and reason alike, but rather the effect on our own feelings of admiring something
high and mighty: the “feeling of the sublime” (Gefühl des Erhabnen) is one of “elevation”
(Elevation, Erhebung). “It elevates [us] to the sublime object; lifted above ourselves, we become
with it higher, more encompassing, wider. This feeling is not a cramp, but the widening of our
breast, raising our view and aspiration, elevation of our being.” Herder locates the significance
of the experience of the sublime in the feelings of empowerment it brings to us, not in any
intimations of a supersensible realm it might be thought to yield.
There is a similar thrust to Herder’s critique of Kant’s explanation of why the beautiful is a
symbol of the morally good. Herder interprets Kant to argue that the beautiful is such a symbol
because our experience of it “is related to something in the subject itself and outside of it which
is not nature, also not freedom, but yet connected with the ground of the latter, namely the
supersensible, in which the theoretical faculty is unified with the practical in a common and
unknown way.” He responds: “The correspondence of objects with our powers, the harmony of
our powers with the objects, does not refer us beyond but keeps us firmly within the boundaries
of nature; and where is the moral in this supersensible-arrogant feeling?” -- that is, within Kant’s
“supersensible-arrogant” interpretation of the moral significance of aesthetic feeling? And in the
conclusion of this passage, Herder cannot refrain from reiterating his underlying view that Kant’s
theory of an “understanding- and conceptless but yet universally valid judging, grounded in an
objectless play of imagination and communication,” is the “grave of all genuine knowledge,
critique, and sentiment.”
Here I will only say that Herder’s criticism of Kant’s introduction of the supersensible into his
explication of the moral significance of the experiences of the sublime and the beautiful cannot
be assessed separately from the general critique of Kantian moral philosophy that he also
intimates in Kalligone. Kant certainly thought that in his account of the experiences of the
sublime and of the beautiful as a symbol of the morally good he had succeeded in describing
experiences that would have a positive and uplifting, not a cramping and restricting effect on our
psychology and moral development, because he thought it would be uplifting for us to realize
that we have a theoretical reason whose ambitions exceed the boundaries of our sense-based
imagination, a practical reason capable of formulating the moral law in all its purity, and a
freedom of the noumenal will that allows us to act in accordance with that moral law no matter
what our prior history may seem to imply. Herder’s objection is not really to Kant’s account of
the psychological impact of an aesthetic presentation of the elements of this moral theory, but to
the moral theory itself. I will hardly attempt to adjudicate that dispute here. For now, I will only
note that in Herder’s own account of the experience of the sublime, he intimates that the
observation of something objectively elevated has a subjectively uplifting effect on us, thus that
in this aesthetic experience there is a parallel between the structure of the object of the
experience and the emotional effect of the experience itself. This is a crucial premise of Herder’s
general theory of aesthetic experience as an experience of well-being arising from a perception
of the true order of nature, which he opposes to Kant’s theory of the disinterestedness of
aesthetic experience and attachment.
Before I turn to that issue, however, which is certainly at the heart of Herder’s response to Kant,
I will say just a word about Herder’s objection that Kant’s aesthetics does not pay sufficient
attention to the concrete rôle of the senses in aesthetic experience. The charge of insensitivity to
the specificity of the senses, as I have already mentioned, was at the heart of Herder’s early
aesthetics, beginning with his critique of Lessing, and it manifests itself in various ways in his
critique of Kant. One point at which it is particularly clear is in his objection to Kant’s scheme
for the classification of the fine arts, a scheme based on the differing capacities of different
media for meaning, tone, and gesture that Herder claims “throws us back into the old chaos.”
Kant’s basic division is between the verbal (redende) and the formative or visual (bildende) arts,
and Herder says that Kant’s account of the “so-called verbal arts [is] built upon a word-play,
which makes them both into play, and not in the technical sense of this word; and about the
formative arts as well as about the arts that effect sentiments nothing is said that serves for the
essence of each and the essence of all.” In contrast, Herder argues that any division of the arts
as well as any account of the way in which different arts need to be cultivated and contribute to
our overall cultivation and development must attend to the specificity of our senses:
The noble senses of mankind, eye, ear, hand, and tongue, need cultivation [Ausbildung]; sciences
and arts that cultivate [kultivieren] them are called fine [schöne] sciences and arts. What gives
the eye a proper measure, a quick judgment about correct, fitting, beautiful figures, and forms the
eye through the hand, the hand through the eye; what accustoms the ear to hear with
understanding, not only the tones but also the thoughts of human speech; what accustoms the
tongue to express these thoughts, as its nature and its purpose demand; that is fine art and
cultivates human beings.
For Herder, any classification of the arts as well as any theory of aesthetic education and the
contribution of aesthetic education to general education must be based upon a firm grasp of the
differences as well as the similarities among sight, hearing, touch, speech, and song (for that too
is among the arts of the tongue), and in his view Kant does not have that grasp. Nor does it seem
too much of a stretch to think that Schiller’s theory of aesthetic education is deficient in this
regard too -- although Herder does not mention Schiller by name anywhere in Kalligone, he does
begin the work by bemoaning the influence of Kant’s third Critique upon his followers, and
Schiller might be supposed to be the foremost among these, although one with whom Herder had
to maintain cordial relations in Weimar and perhaps spared for this reason.
There is much more that could be said on this subject, but I now want to turn without further
delay to the two main topics of Herder’s criticism, Kant’s theory of the disinterestedness of
aesthetic judgment and of the concept- and purposeless play of imagination and understanding as
the basis of such judgment. Since Kant introduces disinterestedness in the first “moment” of the
judgment of taste and his theory of free play in the second and third moments, and Herder’s
discussion follows the order of Kant’s, I too will discuss Herder’s attack upon disinterestedness
first and his attack upon conceptless free play second.
Herder had in fact already expressed doubt about disinterestedness as a fundamental aesthetic
category in his polemic with Riedel in the fourth Grove. Here he rejected Riedel’s definition of
the beautiful as “that which can please without an interested aim [interessierte Absicht] and
which also can please if we do not possess it.” At this point, however, Herder’s objection
seemed to be only that the concept of disinterestedness is not “original,” that is, that
disinterestedness by itself cannot explain our pleasure in the beautiful and thus could at best be a
consequence of some more fundamental explanation of beauty. In Kalligone, however, he argues
much more broadly that our pleasure in beauty is not disinterested, but rather that it is intimately
connected with our most fundamental interest, our interest in life itself. He does this by rejecting
Kant’s rigid distinction between the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good, arguing that all of
these notions are intimately connected and that they all reflect our fundamental interest in
enjoying a harmonious, well-adapted life.
The first step in Herder’s argument is to reject Kant’s identification of agreeableness with
sensory gratification narrowly understood. For Herder, the agreeable (angenehm) is
What expands our existence, what makes us free, what makes us rejoice. The poets of paradise,
the painters of that Elysium, what do they offer for our feeling? Agreeable breezes cosset the
blessed; their elastic existence, without illness, without anxiety, lives and moves joyfully and
freely.
Alternatively, “The agreeable does not merely gratify, rather the inmost-agreeable expands,
empowers, strengthens my existence; the inmost agreeable is my living felt existence itself.”
The agreeable is what actually liberates and strengthens me and gives me a feeling of liberation
and strength, of not merely being alive but of living freely and strongly. This feeling can come
through the engagement of any or all of my senses: “whatever preserves, promotes, expands, in
short is harmonious with the feeling of my existence, each of my senses gladly accepts that” -Herder’s verb here is nimmt...an, for he derives angenehm from annehmen, and thus equates the
“agreeable” with that which we “accept” -- “appropriates that to itself, and finds it agreeable.”
What gives us such feelings is moreover universally pleasing, because “well-being, welfare,
health” (Wohlsein, Heil, Gesundheit) are the “ground and end of the existence of every living
thing...We all desire well-being, and whatever promotes this well-being in any way is agreeable.”
With the agreeable so broadly conceived, it is then easy for Herder to suggest the beautiful
cannot be rigidly separated from it, but must rather be more like a species of it, namely that
which gives us such agreeable feelings of well-being through the “noble senses,” through
figures, colors, tones, and the re-creation of all of these through the artificial signs of literary
language. To be sure, there are specific contexts in which we might call something that is
disagreeable good, or something that is beautiful disagreeable, but these are the exceptions, not
the rule:
Nobody doubts that in language different concepts are designated with the words “agreeable,
beautiful and good.” A disagreeable medicine can be very good, while the most beautiful cane is
never agreeable to the headstrong child. That much that seems beautiful to us is not good is
confirmed by the sad proof of the tree of knowledge in the history of mankind. But since our
nature in all of its concepts and feelings is one nature, which thinks and comprehends, which
feels, wills, and desires, these related concepts must all border one another, and how they border
one another? how they are to be separated or connected? -- that is the question. Mere contrasts
do not solve the riddle, even less so arbitrarily set verbal limits. Cold approval, for example, is
not adequate to genuine beauty, as little as mere esteem and respect is adequate for the truly
good. This will also be desired, the beautiful also known and loved; the agreeable finally or the
acceptable [Annehmliche], the well-pleasing [Wohlgefällige], rejoicing, gratifying, blessing lies
at the basis of all of them. The end of our existence is well-being; how it is to be attained, how
limited, how its difference branches are to be subordinated to one another, that is the task, easier
or harder (depending on how one approaches it) in theory, as in practice. While the agreeable,
the beautiful, and the good, which Kant construed as three fundamentally “different relations of
representations to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure,” do have to be distinguished in certain
contexts, they nevertheless are all expressions of our pleasure in a free and healthy life.
Given this assumption, it is not hard for Herder to argue that so far from being disinterested, our
pleasure in beauty is necessarily of the greatest interest to us:
Beauty however has interest; indeed everything good has interest only through it. For what
does the word mean? Interest is quod mea interest, what concerns [angeht] me. If something
does not concern [betrifft] me, how could I find satisfaction in it? In order to please, the poet,
the artist, indeed nature itself must first be interesting to us; otherwise everything that they offer
us goes past us like unseasoned fare, like empty husks.
Interest is the soul of beauty as it is of the good and the true. Take away from it that through
which it attracts and binds us, or, what is the same, that through which it communicates to us;
what then do you have to do with it? Give it interest, and a tale of Mother Goose pleases more
than a boring epic of heroism.
Interest in the beautiful; is there are purer interest? In contrast to that, what is cold selfinterest [Eigennutz], philosophical pride, arrogant self-love [Selbstliebe]?....
No beautiful work of art or of nature shall therefore be without interest for us...
Now in this passage, while arguing that the beautiful necessarily interests us, Herder also insists
that the beautiful does not appeal to self-interest or self-love: the pleasure and interest in the
genuinely beautiful as well as the agreeable and good is universal, not personal or idiosyncratic.
It could well be argued that this is all that Shaftesbury meant when he introduced the concept of
disinterestedness into modern moral and aesthetic discourse -- for him, the opposite of
disinterested is mercenary, that which one wants or does just for a personal reward -- and it is
arguably all that Riedel meant when he said that the beautiful is that which can please us
“without possession.” It would not be reasonable, however, to claim that all that Kant meant by
saying that the pleasure in beauty is disinterested is that it must be able to please anyone apart
from personal possession and use or consumption of the beautiful object; he certainly seems to
insist that the source of our pleasure in the beautiful has nothing to do with the sources of our
pleasure in the agreeable and the good, and thus to be open to Herder’s criticism if Herder’s
claim is that our pleasures in the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good all ultimately rest on our
pleasure in the feeling of free and healthy life. Before we consider whether the distance here
between Kant and Herder is as great as Herder thinks, however, let us consider one last charge on
Herder’s indictment of Kant, namely his objection to Kant’s theory that the experience of beauty
is an experience of a free and conceptless play of the mental powers of imagination and
understanding.
As I mentioned earlier, Herder’s antipathy to Kant’s central notion of the free play of our
cognitive powers is evident from the outset of Kalligone. In his Preface, Herder writes bitterly:
Isn’t it tragic that the self-named only possible philosophy should end up by taking from our
sentiment all concepts, from the judgment of taste all grounds for judgment, from the arts of the
beautiful all purpose, and transforming these arts into a short or long, boring apelike play, that
critique into a universally valid, dictatorial sentence without ground and cause? Critique and
philosophy are thereby at an end.
In the body of the text, Herder argues both generally that all response to objects, feeling and
sentiment as well as judgment, are accompanied with a concept of the object, and more
specifically that our pleasure in beautiful objects is always a pleasure in a sensed or felt
recognition of their adaptation to their environment, whether natural or artificial, that is
impossible without the application of a concept to the object. Herder launches his general attack
immediately following his critique of Kant’s first moment. Kant’s second moment, Herder says,
asserts that the “beautiful is what pleases without a concept,” and the third speaks of a “Form of
purposiveness without representation of an end.” In Herder’s view, however, “That something
could please without a concept, and indeed pleasure universally, is contrary to nature and
experience.” He subsequently expands his point by saying that
What is to be felt [empfunden] must be something, i.e., a continuant [Bestandheit], an essence
[Wesen] that manifests itself to us; hence something true lies at the ground of everything that is
agreeable or disagreeable for us. Sensation without object and its concept is a contradiction in
human nature, therefore impossible.
Depending on how we take this claim, of course, Herder may not be saying anything with which
Kant would disagree: Kant more than anyone else argued that all experience of an object requires
consciousness of a concept as well as of empirical intuitions of that object, the matter of which is
sensation. But he did hold that we could have a feeling of pleasure in an object without
considering what concepts apply to it, and on the basis of such a feeling make the judgment that
it is beautiful. Herder is specifically rejecting that claim. On what basis does he do so?
He does so by means of the more particular argument that our pleasure in beauty is in fact a
pleasure in our sensed or felt recognition of an object’s adaptation to its environment, and the
premise that such a pleasure cannot be felt without a recognition of the application of a relevant
concept to the object. Herder argues for this by going through a series of cases, precisely the
kinds of particular examples that he accuses Kant of neglecting. First he considers figures
(Gestalten), then colors and tones, and then a series of kinds of natural things, from stones and
crystals to a series of living things ranging from flowers to human beings themselves. In all of
these cases, he argues, we respond to a recognition of the character of a thing and its relation to
its environment that is necessarily mediated by our application of a concept to it. For example,
he argues that a child’s pleasure in a colorful pebble and a mineralogist’s pleasure in stones and
crystals are not different in kind, but only in degree, that concepts lie at the basis of all these
pleasures, and that “each of these concepts contains something purposive, for the apparent
excellence or perfection of the thing in a harmonious relation to the perceiver.” “The beauty of
flowers,” further, “is thus (to stay with our language) the maximum of their particular existence
and well-being [Daseins und Wohlseins]; they are beautiful to us, if our feeling appropriates this
maximum to itself harmoniously and gladly. As with flowers, so with trees.” He goes on to
argue that we find animals beautiful when we find them, “in a way that is intuitable [anschaulich]
for us, to be gifted with an undamaged natural perfection, to live happily, harmoniously with
themselves in their particular way.” Finally, a human being is found to be beautiful “when he
shows himself in his figure and in his gestures as active to whomever may perceive him.” All of
these perceptions, Herder argues, depend upon perceiving the object through or under an
appropriate concept, indeed a concept of its purpose, whether that is the concept of a child or an
expert:
The result of our conversation is therefore this, that without concepts and the representation of an
end the word[s] beautiful and beauty are never in place. The flatter the concept of the thing that
we use is, the more childish it is called. The more essential it is, therefore the more accurate is
our concept of its beauty. To think of a sum of properties of the object without the object, i.e., to
think of beauty without everything beautiful, is a dream; a feeling without any concept an
illusion; and a philosophy which by its own account is built upon such an illusion is the most
concept- and purposeless that has ever presumed to this name.
Before we consider whether this is a fair objection to Kant, more generally whether there is as
much distance between Kant’s views and Herder’s as Herder himself believes, let us ask why
Herder thinks such perception of an object’s essence and its well-being in its environment is so
pleasing to us and so important for our own sense of well-being.
The answer to this question is what we might call a harmonic or sympathetic theory of the
connection between pleasure in well-being and truth: Herder thinks that the perception of true
harmony and well-being in the things around us generates a parallel harmony and feeling of it in
ourselves. He expounds this vision, which is the basis for his entire argument, at a number of
places in Kalligone; we can take a few examples from his initial discussion of the agreeable. For
example, he describes our perception of a beautiful tree:
This tree, so upright in its growth, in its branches and twigs so varied and yet so harmoniously
bowed -In the structure and outline of its leaves, blossoms, and fruits so manifold and yet so
harmonious with itself.
From the highest to the lowest, from palm tree to moss, to mold, to lichen. May we not rejoice
that we live in a world of good order and good form [Wohlordnung und Wohlgestalt], where all
results of the laws of nature in gentle forms reveal to us as it were a band of rest and motion, an
elastic-effective constancy of things, in short beauty as the bodily expression of a corporeal
perfection that is harmonious both within itself and to our feeling?....Our sense feels this; we
enjoy the fruits of this harmonious nexus of order; everything disagreeable and repulsive, all
suffering makes us attentive to it even against our will.
The key idea here is not that we take pleasure in the direct consumption of the fruits of a
harmonious nature, but rather that there is a kind of resonance between harmony and well-being
in nature and our own sense of well-being: the perception of harmony in nature makes our own
being feel well-ordered, just as the perception of disharmony in nature inevitably although
painfully attracts our attention. Herder uses physical language, suggesting strings vibrating in
harmony with each other, a page later:
The being or the constancy of a thing depends upon its active forces being in equilibrium, hence
on its being within limits. Motion and rest constitute a maximum in it, and in several members
or aspects several maxima, exponents of its constancy. If this confirmation to an enduring whole
is palpably sensible [sinnlich empfindbar] to us, and if this found maximum is harmonious with
my own feeling, then the constancy of thing, as such, is agreeable to us; if not, then it is ugly,
fearsome, repulsive. The self-constancy, i.e., the well-being of the thing thus stands in relation to
my own well-being, whether as friend or foe.
This is the underlying vision of Herder’s aesthetics: our feeling of beauty does not arise from a
free play with forms that might be triggered by something in the objective world but is not
constrained by it; rather the feeling of beauty is a subjective response to the perception of
objective harmony, a subjective feeling of well-being triggered by empathy with the well-being
of other things in the world. Let us now see if the difference between this vision and Kant’s is as
insuperable as Herder supposes.
3. Closing the gap between Kant and Herder
In this section, I argue that on three central points the differences between Kant and Herder are
not quite as great as the latter supposed. First, I suggest that Kant himself interprets the feeling
of the free play of the cognitive powers in aesthetic experience as a feeling of life, and thus that
at the deepest level his conception of the source of aesthetic pleasure is not that different from
Herder’s. Second, I argue that while Kant begins his analysis with the simplest case of the free
judgment of natural beauty, which is supposedly not dependent upon our conceptualization of its
object, as he complicates his analysis of aesthetic experiences to include the cases of the adherent
beauty of works of nature as well as of human art in the general sense and of fine art in
particular, he clearly recognizes the rôle of conceptualization in our response to the work, and in
the case of art in the production as the well the reception of the work, and transforms his
conception of free play with the mere form of an object into a conception of felt harmony
between the form and the concept of the object which is not so different from Herder’s
conception of the harmony in a beautiful object. Finally, I argue that when Kant complicates his
initial conception of the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment to take account of our
intellectual interest in the existence of natural beauty, he recognizes that our experience of beauty
is an experience of well-being and being at home in the world that is not unrelated to Herder’s
conception of our experience of beauty, although as Kant’s terminology suggests his conception
of this interest may remain more intellectual and moralistic than Herder himself would prefer.
First, then, the feeling of life. Kant mentions the feeling of life explicitly only twice in the third
Critique, each time suggesting that all feelings of pleasure or displeasure are related to the
subject’s feeling of life, indeed that representations please or displease because of how they
affect the feeling of life. These remarks leave any connection between the free play of the
cognitive powers and the feeling of life completely unexplained. In the central passage on the
free play of the faculties that he calls the “key to the critique of taste,” however, in which he
argues that only the explanation of the experience of beauty as due to the free play of
imagination and understanding stimulated by a given representation can justify the claim of the
judgment of taste to be disinterested, not based on a concept, and yet universally and necessarily
valid, Kant does suggest a connection between free play and the feeling of life when he describes
the condition of the imagination and understanding as one of the “animation” (Belebung) of both
faculties. This is still quite gnomic, though, and it would not have been unreasonable of Herder
not to have paid much attention to it. However, in his lectures on anthropology -- which, to be
sure, he began offering only in 1772-73, thus a decade after Herder had studied with him -- Kant
makes the connection between the free play of the faculties and the feeling of life clear and
central to his aesthetic theory. In the Friedländer lectures of 1775-76, for example, Kant argues
that “Gratification or pleasure is the feeling of the promotion of life,” indeed that life itself “is
the consciousness of a free and regular play of all the powers and faculties of human beings.”
He equates the free play of our powers and faculties with their unhindered activity, and thus finds
the ultimate source of all pleasure in the unhindered activity of our powers: “The play of the
powers of the mind [Gemüths Kräfte] must be strongly alive and free if it is to animate.
Intellectual pleasure consists in the consciousness of the use of freedom in accordance with rules.
Freedom is the greatest life of the human being, through which he exercises his activity without
hindrance.” Indeed, Kant completes this discussion, which opens his lectures on the second part
of psychology, on the faculties of approval and disapproval, with the remark that “All
gratifications are related to life. Life, however, is a unity, and in so far as all gratifications aim at
this, they are all homogeneous, let the sources from which they spring be what they are.”
Herder could have included these sentences in the footnote from Kalligone (pp. 672-3) in which
he objects to Kant’s supposedly complete separation of the beautiful from the agreeable and the
good.
To be sure, in the passages from the Friedländer lectures thus far quoted, Kant connects “activity
without hindrance” with “the use of freedom in accordance with rules,” and says that he is
explaining “the intellectual pleasure that tends toward the moral.” It might therefore be thought
that this connection between life and the unhindered activity of our mental powers has nothing to
do with the case of aesthetic pleasure. However, in his earlier discussion of “the concept of the
poet and of the art of poetry” in these lectures, Kant uses the same language.
The harmonious play of thoughts and sentiments [Empfindungen] is the poem. The play of
thoughts and sentiments is the correspondence [Übereinstimmung] of subjective laws: if the
thoughts correspond with my subject then that is a play thereof. Second, it is to be observed of
the thoughts that they stand in relation to the object, and the thoughts must be true, and that the
course of thoughts must correspond with the nature of the mental powers, thus with the subject
and thus the succession of thoughts with the powers of the mind.
In the case of the experience of poetry, the feeling of the free play and unhindered activity of the
mental powers is consistent with the existence of laws for both the contents of the poetry and the
workings of the mind. Here Kant clearly intends his explanation of our pleasure in poetry to be a
special case of his general explanation of pleasure as the feeling of free play which is nothing
less than the feeling of life itself. I suggest that this connection between free play and the feeling
of life was a constant in Kant’s thought. To be sure, in his mature theory of the free play of
imagination and understanding he will emphasize that this harmony cannot manifest itself in the
application of determinate laws to beautiful objects, but only in a general sense of the lawfulness
of the forms designed or apprehended by the imagination. But this does not change the basic
point that Kant thought that the feeling of pleasure in the free play of the mental powers is a
feeling of free, unhindered life itself. In this regard, Herder’s theory is not as different from
Kant’s as he thought, though I should add that there does remain a difference between Herder’s
and Kant’s conceptions of the rôle of the imagination in generating this feeling of life: for
Herder, as we saw, the subjective faculty of the imagination is like a string that vibrates in
harmony with some objective harmony outside of itself, while for Kant the imagination, certainly
of the artist but even of the spectator, is a more creative faculty that creates its own forms in
lawful harmony with the understanding’s general requirement of unity, and therefore is actively
rather than passively responsible for the feeling of life. Nevertheless, both theories certainly
suppose that pleasure arises from the feeling of free yet harmonious activity and that objects of
aesthetic pleasure must in some way stimulate this feeling of life.
I turn now to the question of the rôle of concepts in Kant’s account of our experience of beauty,
which Herder thought inadequate. I suggest that although Herder was in many ways a
penetrating reader of Kant, he was not attentive to Kant’s expository method in the “Critique of
the Aesthetic Power of Judgment,” which starts by analyzing only the simplest case of aesthetic
judgment, that of the free judgment of natural beauty, but then progressively complicates it the
analysis, showing precisely that in more complicated cases concepts can enter into our
experience without undermining what makes it distinctively aesthetic. Kant’s strategy is to start
with this simplest case, in which concepts are not supposed to be involved at all, so that he can
isolate the free play of mental powers as that which is essential to aesthetic experience, and then
find the free play of mental powers even in cases of aesthetic experience in which concepts are
clearly and heavily involved, such as the experience of works of fine art. In this regard, Kant’s
expository method in the third Critique is similar to his method in moral philosophy. In the
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant starts with cases where moral motivation is
most evident, such as cases of good will in the absence of all favorable inclination like the case
of the miserable philanthropist, in order to identify the fundamental principle of morality, but
when he develops the theory of the highest good in the Critique of Practical Reason and his
theory of virtues in the Metaphysics of Morals, he shows how in fact the purity of moral
motivation is consistent with the presence and indeed cultivation of various inclinations and
indeed with an interest in happiness, although of course not merely one’s own happiness but
universal, unselfish happiness.
On Kant’s account, our judgments of adherent beauty, artistic beauty, and for that matter of the
sublime can all be regarded as aesthetic judgments that are more complicated than the initial case
of the pure judgment of natural beauty, but that retain what Kant has inferred from his analysis of
the latter is essential to all aesthetic experiences, namely a free play of cognitive capacities. I
will not discuss the sublime, although as I mentioned earlier Kalligone contains a criticism of
Kant’s account of that too. So I begin with adherent beauty. Kant’s discussion of that topic is
short -- just one section -- and problematic. The problem is that he says that adherent beauty
presupposes a concept of what the object ought to be and “the perfection of the object in
accordance with it,” although the preceding section of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” has just
asserted that beauty “is entirely independent of the representation of the good, since the latter
presupposes an objective purposiveness,” but that “by beauty, as a formal subjective
purposiveness, there is not conceived any perfection of the object.” If the judgment of adherent
beauty presupposes a concept of what an object ought to be and what it takes for it to be perfect,
how can it be a judgment of beauty at all?
The answer to this puzzle, I suggest, and have argued elsewhere, is that the experience of
adherent beauty is a genuinely aesthetic experience because the concept of the perfection of the
object nevertheless leaves room for the free play of the imagination and understanding in
response to the form of the object, or even enters into the free play of the mental powers with the
form, but does not fully determine the response to the object. For example, our conception of the
proper floor plan for a cathedral limits what forms we can find acceptable for such a building,
but does not fully determine them, and a cathedral that we find beautiful is one whose floor plan
and other mandatory features leaves room for the free play of our mental powers with its form or
can even become part of the material with which the imagination and understanding play, when
we feel that there is a harmony between these mandatory features of the building and the other
features that contribute to our aesthetic experience of it, but a harmony that cannot itself be
derived from any rule. In fact, in his brief account of adherent beauty Kant suggests three
different ways in which the concept of the object and of its purpose can affect our aesthetic
response to the object: it can merely constrain what forms we could find beautiful in the object
without positively contributing to our experience of beauty; the object’s satisfaction of the
conditions of its objective purposiveness could be the source of a pleasure that is additional to
our purely aesthetic pleasure in it; or we could feel a harmony between the object’s objective
purposiveness and all the rest of its features that gives rise to a single experience of free play and
a single feeling of its beauty. All of these would be genuinely aesthetic experiences.
Concepts of the object also play a central rôle in Kant’s theory of fine art, which is expounded in
three stages, the first his analysis of the concept of fine art, the second his theory of genius and
aesthetic ideas, and the third his classification of the fine arts. In the first stage of his exposition,
Kant argues that a work of fine art must be the product of intentional human activity, thus must
always have “a determinate intention of producing something,” and yet that what it aims to
produce must be nothing other than a free and pleasurable play of the faculties of mind that is not
constrained by a determinate concept. Kant initially tries to resolve this apparent paradox by
saying that “In the product of art one must be aware that it is art, and not nature; yet the
purposiveness of its form must still seem to be as free from all constraint by arbitrary rules as it
were a mere product of nature.” This makes it sound as if in the experience of a work of art we
must somehow both be aware of and yet suppress our recognition of its artifactuality and
therefore intentionality, or even as if the work of art must induce that state in us, as it were
deceiving us about its own intentionality.
Kant’s theory of genius and of aesthetic ideas as the characteristic product of genius immediately
supersedes this initial impression, however. For what Kant argues here is precisely that a work
of art must have an conceptual content or leading idea, but that what makes it a successful work
of art is the way in which this idea is expressed in a “presentation...which by itself stimulates so
much thinking that it can never be grasped in a determinate concept, hence which aesthetically
enlarges the concept itself in an unbounded way”; “in this case the imagination is creative, and
sets the faculty of intellectual ideas (reason) into motion, that is, at the instigation of a
representation it gives more to think about than can be grasped and made distinct in it (although
it does, to be sure, belong to the concept of the object).” In other words, a work of art expresses
a concept, but that concept does not fully determine our experience of the object; rather it enters
into a free play of our cognitive powers -- here clearly including the faculty of reason as well as
imagination and understanding -- that cannot be grasped by a determinate concept, or be seen as
determined by that concept. For this reason, the experience of art is a genuinely aesthetic
experience although it is not a “pure” aesthetic experience like the simple experience of a
beautiful form in nature that Kant initially analyzed and through which he discovered the rôle of
the free play of the faculties in all aesthetic experience.
How does this account of Kant’s concepts of adherent and artistic beauty narrow the gap between
him and Herder? Herder seems to suggest that all experiences of beauty presuppose a concept of
what their objects ought to be and how they ought to fit into their natural or human environment,
and Kant would not concede that point. But, although Kant does not say this explicitly, it would
seem that the pure case of the experience of natural beauty that he initially analyzes is only a
small part of our experience of beauty, and that the experiences of adherent beauty and artistic
beauty actually comprise a very large part of our aesthetic experience. If this is so, then on
Kant’s own view a large number of our actual cases of aesthetic experience involve a free play
between the concepts of or in their objects and the rest of the form and attributes of those objects,
a play that is free because it involves the relevant concept but is not determined by that concept
functioning as a rule; and this, I suggest, brings Kant’s phenomenology and psychology of
aesthetic experience close to Herder’s. For the heart of Herder’s account of beauty is that our
feeling “appropriates” itself to the concept of the object’s perfection that he claims is essential to
the experience of beauty “harmoniously and gladly.” I interpret this to mean that for Herder, as
for Kant, the concept of the perfection achieved by a beautiful object is more like a necessary
than a sufficient condition for our experience of its beauty, and that for the latter we must also
have an experience of a free harmony of the object in all its particularity with its purpose, thus a
harmony that cannot itself be derived from any mere concept of the object.
Finally, the most deeply felt, and perhaps the deepest of Herder’s criticisms of Kant is his attack
upon the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment, his insistence that there is a continuum rather
than discontinuity between our responses to the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good. I suggest
that on the matter of disinterestedness too Kant begins with a simple statement of a position that
then turns out to be more complicated than it initially appears. There can be no question that
Kant wants to distinguish genuinely aesthetic experience from merely physiological gratification
of the senses, from the approval of utility, or from moral approval, and that he does this by
saying that aesthetic judgment neither presupposes nor gives rise to any interest in the existence
of its object. But numerous factors complicate this picture. First, Kant always defines pleasure
as a state of mind that is connected with a disposition toward its own continuation, and in the
first draft of the Introduction to the third Critique he adds that pleasure is a ground “for
producing its object.”
There are technical reasons why Kant does not want to speak here of an interest in the
continuation of pleasure and/or the production of its object, but it is certainly reasonable to say
that on Kant’s own account any pleasure, including even the purest pleasure in beauty, is
accompanied with some form of attachment to the possibility of its own continued and future
experience, and therefore ordinarily to the availability of the objects that trigger that pleasure.
Further, Kant explicitly argues that the properly aesthetic pleasure in beautiful objects enters into
combination with interests, also properly so called, in the existence of those objects. Under the
rubric of the “empirical interest” in the beautiful, he argues that there are societal reasons for
taking interest in the availability and possession of beautiful objects; and although he denies that
there is any a priori relation of these reasons to the experience of beauty, this is not to deny the
existence of such attachments. Under the rubric of the “intellectual interest in the beautiful,”
Kant describes a reason for attachment to the beautiful that is apparently supposed to be a priori,
namely, that the existence of beauty is a “trace” or “sign” that nature is amenable to the
satisfaction of our moral interests.
Kant’s conception of an intellectual interest in the beautiful does not seem entirely remote from
Herder’s view that our sense of well-being in an object is accompanied with a corresponding
sense of our own well-being, which I have suggested is the core of Herder’s mature aesthetic
theory, although there are two key differences. For one, Herder insists upon a recognition of an
objective well-being to which our subjective feeling of well-being is a response, while for Kant
well-being is always subjective, that is, our own, and the satisfaction of our aesthetic aims and of
our moral aims may be parallel, but are both subjective. Our aesthetic pleasure in natural beauty
is a sign of the possibility of our moral well-being in nature, not a response to a harmony in
nature that has nothing to do with us. Second, Kant clearly wants to keep the connection
between the satisfaction of our aesthetic aims and the satisfaction of our moral interests separate
although connected, thus not collapsing aesthetic pleasure into moral satisfaction, and further,
Kant seems to suggest that a sound moral interest in nature’s amenability to our objectives is a
condition of the intellectual but aesthetic interest in the existence of (natural) beauty. From
Herder’s point of view, that might seem to be an excessive moralization of an interest in the
beautiful that should be entirely natural, although from Kant’s point of view Herder’s insistence
on the continuity of the beautiful and the good might actually run the risk of an excessive
moralization of aesthetic experience. So no doubt there are differences between them, but it is
misleading of Herder to suggest that Kant simply fails to recognize that we have a real
attachment to the interest in the beautiful. Kant does recognize that, but wants to keep that
attachment somewhat complicated and indirect in order to avoid the risk of an excessive
moralization of the aesthetic but at the same time, I might suggest, also avoid the risk of an
excessive aestheticization of the moral.
I conclude, then, that while there is considerably more common ground between Kant and
Herder than might initially appear, and certainly than appeared to Herder in 1800, there is also
some good reason for preserving Kant’s sense of the indirectness and complexity of the relation
between the aesthetic and the moral rather than making the connection as direct and simple as
Herder risks doing.
Notes
Works Cited
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema
pertinentibus/Philosophische Betrachtungen über einige Bedingungen des Gedichtes, edited by
Heinz Paetzold (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983), §CXVI, pp. 86-7.
See Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 9, 1451a37-1451b10.
See Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, expanded second edition, four volumes
(Leipzig: Weidmann, 1792-94), “Geschmack,” vol. II, pp. 371-85, at p. 371, and “Schön (Schöne
Künste),” vol. IV, pp. 305-19, at p. 307.
Johann Gottfried Herder, Kalligone, in Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, edited by Günter
Arnold et. al., volume 8: Schriften zu Literatur und Philosophie 1792-1800, edited by Hans
Dietrich Irmscher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), pp. 641-964, at p.
660.
Johann Gottfried Herder, Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s
Creative Dream, translated by Jason Gaiger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Friedrich Just Riedel, Theorie der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (Jena: Cuno, 1767).
See Kant, Inquiry concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and
Morality, especially Second Reflection, 2:283-6; in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy,
1755-1770, edited by David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 256-9.
Herder, Viertes Kritisches Wäldchen, in Herder, Werke, volume2: Schriften zur Ästhetik und
Literatur 1767-1781, edited by Günter Grimm (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag,
1993), pp. 247-442, at pp. 262-3. In the first extract, I have translated Herder’s Homischen as
“Kamesian” since Henry Home is now usually referred to by his judicial title, Lord Kames. The
1764 work of Kant to which I refer in this paragraph is the prize-essay Enquiry concerning the
Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality.
The second and third of the Groves, not reprinted in the modern edition of Herder, are a
polemic against the Leipzig rhetorician and philologist Christian Adolph Klotz.
Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, translated by Henry
Fusseli (London: A. Millar, 1765), p. 30.
A premise that goes back at least to Jean-Baptitste Du Bos’s Critical Reflections on Poetry,
Painting, and Music (1719), Part I, chapter XIII; in the translation by Thomas Nugent (London:
John Nourse, 1748), vol. I, pp. 71-2.
Herder, First Grove, p. 195.
Herder, First Grove, pp. 195-6.
Herder, Fourth Grove, p. 291n.
Again a well-established idea in the eighteenth century; see Joseph Addison, Spectator 411
(June 21, 1712), and Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (1762), chapter III; in the
edition by Peter Jones (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), vol. I, pp. 141-2.
Herder, Fourth Grove, pp. 289-90.
Herder, Sculpture, pp. 39-41.
See Herder, Sculpture, pp. 33-8.
Herder, Fourth Grove, p. 314.
Herder, Kalligone, p. 644.
Herder, Kalligone, p. 647.
Herder, Kalligone, pp. 653-4.
Herder, Kalligone, pp. 747-8.
See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Introduction, section III, 5:177. Citations from
Kant will use the volume and page number from Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, edited by the
Royal Prussian (later German, then Berlin-Brandenburg) Academy of Sciences (Berlin: Georg
Reimer, later Walter de Gruyter, 1900-- ). Translations will be from Immanuel Kant, Critique of
the Power of Judgment, edited by Paul Guyer, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Introduction, section III, 5:177.
Herder, Kalligone, pp. 882-3.
Herder, Kalligone, pp. 893-4.
Herder, Kalligone, pp. 954-5.
See Herder, Kalligone, pp. 908-12.
The referent of Herder’s “both” is unclear; he could be referring to Kant’s division of the
verbal arts into poetry and oratory.
Herder, Kalligone, p. 939.
Herder, Kalligone, p. 944.
Herder, Fourth Grove, p. 291.
Herder, Kalligone, p. 665.
Herder, Kalligone, p. 667.
Loc. cit.
Herder, Kalligone, p. 668.
Herder, Kalligone, pp. 672-3n.
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §5, 5:209.
Herder, Kalligone, p. 730.
See Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis, Part II, section III;
in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, edited by Philip Ayres (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1999), vol. I, p. 55.
Herder, Kalligone, p. 648.
Herder, Kalligone, p. 675.
Herder, Kalligone, p. 688.
Herder, Kalligone, pp. 710-11.
Herder, Kalligone, p. 712.
Herder, Kalligone, p. 719.
Herder, Kalligone, p. 721.
Herder, Kalligone, p. 722.
Herder, Kalligone, pp. 687-8.
Herder, Kalligone, pp. 688-9.
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §1, 5:204, and General Remark following §29,
5:270.
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §9, 5:219.
Kant, Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, 27:559-60.
Ibid., p. 561.
Ibid., p. 560.
Ibid., pp. 525-6.
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, General remark on the first section of the Analytic,
following §22, 5:240-1.
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §16, 5:229.
Ibid., §15, 5:226, 228.
Paul Guyer, “Beauty and Utility in Eighteenth Century Aesthetics,” Eighteenth Century
Studies 35 (2002): 439-53, and “Free and Adherent Beauty: A Modest Proposal,” British Journal
of Aesthetics 42 (October, 2002) 357-66, both reprinted in Paul Guyer, Values of Beauty:
Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 110-40.
Ibid., §45, 5:306.
Ibid., §49, 5:315.
First Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment, section VIII, 20:230-1.
See Paul Guyer, “Disinterestedness and Desire in Kant’s Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 36 (1978): 449-60, reprinted in Perspectives on Kant, Vol. 4, edited by Ruth
Chadwick and Clive Cazeaux (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 232-48.
Critique of the Power of Judgment, §41, 5:297.
Ibid., §42, 5:300.