Art and its Significance by Stephen David Ross

Author:Stephen David Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York press
Published: 1994-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

(iv) THE CONCERN FOR THE BEAUTIFUL IN NATURE AND IN ART. When Kant raises the question of the interest that is taken in the beautiful not empirically, but a priori, this question of the interest in the beautiful as opposed to the fundamental statement of the absence of interest in aesthetic pleasure raises a new problem and completes the transition from the standpoint of taste to the standpoint of genius. It is the same doctrine that is developed in connection with both phenomena. It is important, in establishing foundations, to free the ‘critique of taste’ from sensualistic and rationalistic prejudices. It is quite in order that here the question of the type of object being aesthetically judged (and thus the whole question of the relation between the beauty of nature and that of art) is not asked by Kant. But this dimension of the question is necessarily opened up if one thinks the standpoint of taste through—which involves going beyond it.7 The interesting significance of the beautiful is the really operative problem in the Kantian aesthetic. It is different for nature and art, and the comparison between the naturally and the artistically beautiful brings the problem to a head.

Here we find Kant himself.8 As we would expect, it is not for the sake of art that Kant goes beyond ‘disinterested pleasure’ and enquires into the interest in the beautiful. From the doctrine of the ideal of beauty we had derived one advantage of art as against natural beauty: the advantage of being a more direct expression of the moral. Kant, on the contrary, emphasises primarily (§ 42) the advantage of natural over artistic beauty. It is not only for the pure aesthetic judgment that natural beauty has an advantage, namely to make it clear that the beautiful depends on the consonance of the thing represented with our cognitive faculty. This is so clearly the case with natural beauty because it possesses no significance of content, and thus manifests the judgment of taste in its unintellectualised purity.

But it does not have only this methodological advantage; according to Kant it also has one of content, and he obviously thinks a great deal of this point of his doctrine. Beautiful nature is able to arouse an immediate interest, namely a moral one. Finding the beautiful forms of nature beautiful points beyond itself to the thought “that nature has produced that beauty.” Where this thought arouses interest we have cultivation of the moral sensibility. While Kant, instructed by Rousseau, refuses to argue back from the refinement of taste for the beautiful in general to moral sensibility, the sense of the beauty of nature is for Kant a special case. That nature is beautiful arouses interest only in someone who “has already developed his interest in the morally good.” Hence the interest in natural beauty is “related to the moral sphere.” By observing the unintentional consonance of nature with our pleasure, which is independent of any interest, i.e., the wonderful finality of nature for us, it points to us as to the ultimate goal of creation, to our ‘moral destiny’.

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