Kant's Ideal of Beauty as a key to the Critique of Judgment

For me, section 17 "Of the Ideal of Beauty," has always been one of the most difficult passages in the Critique of Judgment. (I am using the J. H. Barnard translation, Hafner Press, 1951).  But I think I have found the key to its understanding.  My current take on it is that it contains important intimations of what will happen later on in the book, particularly in the section on fine art, and can be seen as the entire CJ philosophy in a nutshell. I also see it as both taking into account cultural relativism but also seeking to transcend it by way of the notion of a rational ideal of beauty that goes beyond mere empirical considerations.  It is consonant with his egalitarianism, and it is noteworthy that what would normally be taken to be the paradigm of a western-dominated conception of universal beauty in the sculpture by Polycleitus, which itself was taken as "the canon" in Ancient Greece, is rejected, or at least downplayed, as nothing more than something at the level of the empirical.  One can also see here an anticipation of Hegel since the classical, as represented by Polycleitus, and humorously, perhaps, by Myron and his cow, is sublated in the last paragraph by the rational ideal which would be better represented by what Hegel would call "the Romantic," for example the self-portraits of Rembrandt, in which the inner spirit and inner beauty shows through, overcoming that which is merely average based on a mere mechanical combination of elements. When I discuss the concept of beauty in regards to humans the notion of inner beauty being more important than mere external beauty: this section exemplifies and elaborates on this perception, but also in terms of a creation of an ideal beauty within oneself, a kind of aesthetic self-molding that was elaborated later in Nietzsche, Foucault and Shusterman. Perhaps molding an inner beauty within oneself allows for perception of, and judgment of, inner beauty in others and in their representations.

The section (#17) begins by reiterating that there can be no objective rule of taste, and yet the sensation of satisfaction or dissatisfaction attending the object considered beautiful or ugly is universally communicable in the sense that we can expect, or even demand, that everyone experience it as being beautiful or as having the same attendant sensation.  Kant suggests that it is hardly even probable that this accord will exist in all times and ages, but it ought to exist based on "deep-lying grounds of agreement in judging of the forms under which the objects are given" these grounds being the way that the faculties of the imagination and the understanding respond to forms that are designed or look designed and thus have a certain purposefulness of look.  He then says that we consider "some products of taste as exemplary."  Those who have already read the book may note that the word "exemplary" is also found in the the section on fine art.  Also, as with the genius later, it turns out that taste cannot be acquired by imitating others, but must be "an original faculty" and that, although imitation of a model may show skill, taste requires ability to "judge the model itself."  Again this reminds us of how genius will later be described as creating its own rules.  So it looks like the man of taste is someone who is operating already like a person of genius.

Kant then says that "the highest model, the archetype of taste, is a mere idea which everyone must produce in himself and according to which he must judge every object of taste" etc.  He is saying that the archetype or ideal is something that we create within ourselves, and is not, for example, simply a set of works that has stood the test of time, or even some paradigmatic works set up by a particular culture.  The level of autonomy given to the good critic is stunning. Again, this reminds us of the ability of the genius to create his or her own rules or even his or her own world.  Creating the internal model of beauty is interestingly like creating the original work of fine art, one that exhibits what Kant calls "aesthetic ideas."  

Then it turns out that this idea is a rational concept which is correlated with an ideal which is itself a "representation of an individual being" seen as implied by the idea.  The ideal depends on the "indeterminate idea that reason has of a maximum," which is to say that it depends on the notion of "the best."  So we create within ourselves an ideal of beauty which is connected to the ideal notion of the best.  We are not in immediate possession of such an ideal, but we "strive to produce" this ideal of imagination in ourselves.  

Then the question is whether we arrive at such an ideal, a priori or empirically.  Kant's answer will be in a sense both.  But the a priori method is much more important.  Kant then surprisingly tells us that  the beauty "for which an ideal is to be sought" must be "fixed by a concept of objective purposiveness."   This is a paradox as it seems to go against everything he has previously told us about beauty. As a result, it is not aesthetic as ordinarily understood.  Kant had already undercut or modified his original idea of the aesthetic as pure by introducing the notion of appendant or dependent beauty.  Now he indicates that the ideal of beauty "cannot appertain to the object of a quite pure judgment of taste" as it is "in part intellectual."  There has to be an "idea of reason in accordance with definite concepts" that lies at its basis.  And this idea determines its internal possibility a priori.  Hence there cannot be an ideal of beautiful flowers, furniture or views, nor even an ideal of appendant beauty as in a beautiful house, tree or garden, since these are nearly as vague as free beauty.  It must be related to something the purpose of its existence is in itself, i.e. man, since man can "determine his purposes by reason" and this is why man is alone "susceptible of an ideal of beauty," given that "only humanity in his person, as an intelligence...is susceptible to the ideal of perfection."  

Why turn to man as the ideal of beauty?  Why introduce the notion of man as the ideal of beauty in this book or at this point?  The reason seems to be that only man is connected in this way to the supersensible realm, the realm of soul, God and immortality, the realm that needs to be supposed but which cannot be proved to exist.  Now, Kant continues, there are two "elements" in all of this, the one being the "normal idea" and "the rational idea" i.e. two ideals of beauty.  He spends a lot of time on the normal idea, but what he is really interested in is the rational idea to which he devotes a short paragraph at the end.  I take the normal idea to be a not-to-useful empirical approach to the ideal of beauty in man.  It is the approach that most people take to the ideal of beauty, and it is superficial.  The normal idea is "an individual intuition (of the imagination), representing the standard of our judgment (upon man) as a thing belonging to a particular animal species."  We know Kant would be disinclined to take it seriously since it treats humans as merely animal.  

The "rational idea" by contrast is one that focuses on the "purposes of humanity" which cannot be fully represented in sense but the phenomenal effect of which can be revealed.  The normal idea is taken from experience. By contrast, when we are talking about the purposes of humanity or its purposiveness, a purpose to which "only the whole race [of humanity] and not any isolated individual is adequate" the rational idea of this "lies merely in the idea of the judging subject."  It is this "aesthetical idea" which can be represented in a model, i.e. in a work of art, and presumably fine art, although he is not supposed to be talking about that in this part of his book.  I take an example of such a model to be a work of art that represents humanity by way of representing an individual human, say a self-portrait by Rembrandt.  

Where Kant may go wrong to some degree in this section, or perhaps he is merely being intentionally devious or playful, is in saying that we can make "how this comes to pass" intelligible through a "psychological explanation."  Let us assume that he is just being tricky, for the next paragraph, the penultimate in the section, is almost a joke.  In this paragraph he describes the imagination as reproducing "the image of the figure of the object" from a great number of objects of different kinds or even the same kind, and, by comparison, unconsciously letting "one image glide into another," thus coming up with an average which can serve as a common measure.  For example, we see a thousand full-grown men (as all adults have seen at least), compare their sizes, and judge a "normal size" by way of letting the images of these "fall on one another."  And so "this is the stature of a beautiful man," except that how can anyone take seriously the idea that a mere average size is what makes a man beautiful or have a beautiful stature?  The idea of equating the beautiful with the average is absurd.  Moreover, size has little to do with beauty anyway.  Kant, in short, is messing with us. The normal idea is purely mechanical.  It is as though we were dealing with the philosophy of Democritus, rather than Kant. The "various impressions of such figures on the organ of internal sense" through a "dynamical effect" produces the norm.  As he admits, the result can be arrived at mechanically "by adding together all thousand magnitudes, heights, breadths, and thicknesses" and dividing by the sum of one thousand.  The average man, based on all of this applied to all of his parts, is the "normal idea."  

But then it turns out it is the normal idea "in the country where the comparison is instituted."  The possibility of relativism in beauty raises its ugly head.  The "normal idea" on this culturally relative interpretation or variation implies that the "Negro," "European," and "Chinaman," would all have a different normal idea of beauty, something which may be true empirically, given that what we see as physically beautiful in a human is based on what we are used to looking at plus the fund of judgments of beauty we heard when growing up. 

Kant then seems to transition from this culturally relative moment to "the whole race" by which he means humanity itself, but still talking in terms of the normal idea.  The normal idea for the whole race "is the image for the whole race," and it is this idea "which nature takes as archetypes in her production of the same species" but which is not reached in any individual case.  (Why Kant should intrude the intentions or plans of nature here is not clear.)  But we know we have not gotten far here since Kant insists that this is "by no means the whole archetype of beauty in the race," and in fact is only a necessary condition for correctness in the mental presentation of humanity. The Doryphorus of Polycleitus and the Cow of Myron are examples he gives of such correct representations, but ones which do not reach beyond the normal idea.  Kant emphasizes this by ending the paragraph with reiterating that the presentation of this sort "is merely correct." Moreover, the representation does not please by its beauty, he says, but simply by not violating the condition of correctness necessary for beauty.  It is not, in short, sufficient for beauty.  So we need to move beyond that which is merely considered racially or ethnically correct, or based on the dynamic psychology of the imagination in its associative mode, to the rational (and perhaps to imagination in its productive or creative mode).

The last paragraph contains the key to the section.  As Kant previously observed, we can only expect the ideal in the human figure (as opposed to any other part of nature or in the human artifactual world which could be represented), and this ideal "consists in the expression of the moral" which provides the basis for the object itself pleasing universally, and not just as being merely correct.  What we are looking for is "the visible expression of moral ideas that rule men inwardly." Although we can get this from experience, "the idea of highest purposiveness" in man found in such virtues as "goodness of heart, purity, strength, peace" is only visible in the body or portrait through a "union of pure ideas of reason with great imaginative power."  This is precisely what we find later that the genius artist is able to accomplish with his or her aesthetic ideas.  This further step away from the empirical is required not only in the object itself but in the perceiving subject and, Kant insists, in the creator of the work, i.e. "still more in him who wishes to present it."  We know finally that this ideal of beauty is correct, or rather escapes the realm of the merely sensible, if the satisfaction is not infected by "sensible charm." 

Now this judgment is not "purely aesthetical" since we take a "great interest" in it because of its connection with morality.  But this is not a bad thing for Kant.  

The great irony of this section is that it is immediately followed by the moral of the entire Third Moment, the "explanation of the beautiful derived from this Third Moment," which is that "Beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object, so far as this is perceived in it without any representation of purpose."  The irony is that this explanation has been transcended, bracketed, or perhaps even sublated, since the ideal of beauty does involve purposiveness, even more than dependent or appendent beauty, which was an odd enough exception earlier on.  Here there is a representation of purpose, although not a logical one. Rather, it is the way that the moral qualities, or inner spirit, shines through some great portraits, for example.  I find myself here thinking of Davide's Oath of the Horatii (1785) where the virtue of courage shines through action, but also, perhaps more appropriately, the portraits of Rembrandt, where an inner light of personal character, sometimes of tragic sadness, as well as deep humanity, seems to shine through.  As said, previously, this is similar to what Hegel refers to as "The Romantic."

Hegel's Three Stages of Art, But Nietzsche to Be Preferred

Hegel’s Aesthetics following the Ross anthology Art and Its Significance pp. 149-153.   From the Knox translation.

Hegel divides his “science” of aesthetics into three sections.  The first concerns the idea of the beauty of art or what he calls “the Ideal.”  He stresses that the idea of beauty in art is not the Idea as such, which would be studied by metaphysics and which, I suspect. would be much like a Platonic Idea.  He speaks of the Idea of beauty in art rather as one which is “shaped forward into reality” and is immediately unified with this reality.  Whereas the Idea itself is “absolute truth” the Idea of beauty in art is both individual reality and reality destined to embody the Idea.  This implies a demand that the Idea and its configuration in reality should be adequate to each other.  When the Idea is shaped in this way it is the Ideal.   He urges us not to confuse the Ideal with the notion of precisely representing the Idea in a shape.  This would confuse truth of the Ideal with “mere correctness,” i.e. correct expression of the meaning of the Idea in the shape.  For contents can be represented adequately without having the artistic beauty of the Ideal.  In comparison with such an Ideal, that (overly precise) representation may appear defective.  So defectiveness in art is not just due to lack:  defectiveness of form sometimes results from defectiveness of content.   The Chinese, Indian and Egyptian religion and art is defective in this way:  they never get their god images “beyond formlessness or a bad and untrue definiteness of form.”  Their mythological ideas therefore fail to achieve true beauty.  The reason is that the ideas are “indeterminate, or determined badly.”   [By contrast, Kant believes that the aesthetic ideas of an artistic genius are indeterminate.]  They do “not consist of the content which is absolute in itself.”  In one of my favorite sentences he writes:  “Works of art are all the more excellent in expressing true beauty, the deeper is the inner truth of their content and thought.”  (148)  It may well be that this is true regardless of his own interpretation of it.  He contrasts this approach to art against that which stresses imitative accuracy, in which skill is able to imitate “natural forms as they exist.”  There may even be an “abandonment and distortion of natural formations” in the art which is based on “intentional alteration” coming out of the artist’s own mind.  This passage seems to foretell the possibility of modern art with all of its distortions.  It follows that some art may be imperfect even though it is technically good in its “specific sphere.”  It is simply defective “in comparison with the concept of art itself and the Ideal.”  [This is somewhat similar to Kant’s idea of merely academic art that is not informed by genius.]  In the highest art, of course, Idea and presentation are in accord with one another.  The Idea also “must be determined in and through itself as a concrete totality” which would give it the principle of its being.  This principle is made particular in external appearance.  The Christians may represent God in human form because the Christian God [in Jesus Christ?] is known “in himself as spirit.”  If the Idea is determinate/concrete then this makes particularization possible.  In other cases, as in other religions, the determinacy may be imposed from outside and the shape is thus merely external to the abstract Idea.  So “the truly concrete Idea [as in the Christian case] alone produces its true configuration” and thus the Ideal.

The next stage in the argument concerns the development of the ideal into particular forms of the beauty of art.  He writes that “because the Idea is in this way a concrete unity, this unity can enter the art-consciousness only through the unfolding and then the reconciliation of the particularizations of the Idea.”  This development allows artistic beauty to acquire “a totality of particular stages and forms.”  That is, artistic beauty evolves through the totality made up by the Symbolic, Classical and Romantic stages.   These forms are different ways “of grasping the Idea as content” i.e. “different relations of meaning and shape.”

The Symbolic.  Here the Idea is “in its indeterminacy and obscurity” or bad determinacy.   Since it is indeterminate it does not have enough individuality for the Ideal.  It is too abstract and one-sided and this means it is “defective and arbitrary.”  So it is merely searching to portray the Idea and does not truly present it.  It is “struggling and striving.”  In the symbolic form the Idea has its shape in “natural sensuous material.”  But it is imposed on perceived natural objects in an external way.  They are to be interpreted as if the Idea were present in them.  This kind of art, [for example, an Assyrian representation of a lion] can only give an abstract idea of, for example the lion’s strength.  But since this relation is abstract we are conscious of the fact that the Idea is foreign to the natural phenomena.  The Idea then “seeks itself” in them “in their unrest and extravagance.”  It “exaggerates natural shapes”  and “staggers round in them, it bubbles and ferments in them, does violence to them, distorts and stretches them unnaturally”  and tries to elevate them by way of “diffuseness, immensity, and splendor.”  There is a contrast and incompatibility between the Idea, as here indeterminate, and the natural objects as determinate.  The Idea then takes a negative relation to the objective world and is taken as sublime, above all of these non-corresponding shapes.  The natural phenomena are seen as incompatible with their non-mundane meanings.  This is found in the pantheism of the East which either “ascribes absolute meaning to even the most worthless objects” or “violently coerces the phenomena to express its view” and then becomes “bizarre, grotesque, and tasteless.”  A third alternative is that it turns the abstract freedom of the one substance or God against all phenomena “as being null and evanescent.”  [Perhaps this refers to Zen.]  In all of this the Idea and shape remain incompatible. 

[The symbolic mode of art insofar as it is associated both with the sublime and with the indeterminate seems to be set up as an attack on Kant who understood the aesthetic ideas as indeterminate and as sublime.  It is as though Hegel believed that Kant’s idea of fine art and the artist genius is stuck at the first stage of art.] 

The Classical.  Here, the double defect of symbolic art is “extinguished.”  The defects are (1) Idea is presented as indeterminate “or determined abstractly” and (2) meaning and shape have a defective correspondence which is “purely abstract.”  Classical art is “the free and adequate embodiment of the Idea in the shape peculiarly appropriate to the Idea..”   Both shape and Idea are in harmony.  Thus it gives us a vision of the completed Ideal actualized.  This is not a purely formal correspondence between content and configuration.  If it were, then “every portrayal of nature” for example of every flower or scene as content would be classical.  The content of classical art is the concrete Idea in the sense of concretely spiritual.  The spiritual is the inner self.  So what, in nature, “belongs to the spiritual in and for itself”?  “The original Concept” [i.e. God?] “invented the shape for concrete spirit.”  That is, God created the world with the idea in mind of correspondence of spirit and natural shape.  Now the “subjective Concept,”  i.e., in this case, the spirit of art has found the shape “and made it…appropriate to free individual spirituality.”  The Idea, as spiritual and individually determinate, assumes this shape, i.e. the human form.  Some have seen [such] anthropomorphism as degrading the spiritual but since the goal of art is to bring the spiritual before our eyes in a sensuous manner it must anthropomorphize “since spirit appears sensuously in a satisfying way only in [this] body.”  Physiology [biology] thus insists that life develops necessarily to the human form as the only one appropriate to spirit.  [Maybe in his time, not in our own!]  The form of the human body in this regard counts only as the natural shape of spirit.  Because of this it is not affected by the “deficiency of the purely sensuous” or from the fact that our “phenomenal world” is merely contingent and finite.  Spirituality as content “must be of such a kind that it can express itself completely in the natural human form” and not tower above it.  So, spirit is determined here as “particular and human” and not as purely absolute and eternal, since it can only express itself in the latter sense as spirituality.  But this is a defect in classical art and this defect brings about its dissolution and “transition to a higher form.” 

The Romantic.  The romantic form cancels the unification of Idea and reality found in the classical and “reverts” in a “higher way” to the opposition of these two sides as found in symbolic art.  [This is also found in Nietzsche’s later idea of the conflicted marriage of the Apollonian and the Dionysian.  Indeed, Nietzsche’s account is similar to Hegel’s: the Dionysian (especially the pre-Greek Dionysian) representing the symbolic, the Apollonian representing the Classical, and the tragic synthesis of the two representing a return to the Dionysian by way of the Apollonian.]   Oddly, Hegel holds that it is Classical art that achieves the “pinnacle” of what art can achieve, and that whatever is defective in it is what is defective in art itself, i.e. that art takes spirit as its subject matter and yet can only give it in sensuously concrete form.  In blending the spiritual and the sensuous it fails to represent the true nature of spirit which is “the infinite subjectivity of the Idea.”  As “absolute inwardness,” the Idea cannot freely “shape itself outwardly” in a bodily form.  The romantic form then goes beyond the classical.  This content is what Christianity asserts of God as a spirit in contrast to the Greek religion exemplified in classical art.  The unity of the divine nature and the human in classical art is “only immediate and implicit” and is manifested sensuously.  It is because the Greek god is naively intuited that it is in human shape.  Hegel contrasts the Greek god, which is individual and particular in substance and power with [the Christian] which possesses oneness “as inward subjective knowledge.”  The content of Classical art is knowledge of implicit unity that can be perfectly presented in bodily shape.  But once this is elevated into self-conscious knowledge we come to the tremendous, even “infinite,” difference between, for example, man and animal.  Unlike the animal, man is not confined to the implicit and immediate but becomes conscious of his animal functions and lifts them into self-conscious science.  Because he knows he is an animal, he ceases to be an animal and knows himself as spirit.  So the unity of divine and human nature “is raised from an immediate to a known unity” and the truth is no longer the spiritual in the body but “the inwardness of self-consciousness.”  Christianity brings God before our imagination as “absolute in spirit” and thus no longer particular.  It “retreats from the sensuousness of imagination into spiritual inwardness,” and thus, this, and not the body, is the medium of truth’s content.  The unity of the divine and human is “only by spiritual knowing and in spirit.”  So this new content is freed from immediate and sensuous existence which is now seen as negative.  So, romantic art is “self-transcendence of art” but “in the form of art itself.” 

[It is hard for me to see the advantage of this move since it is hard to know just what spiritual inwardness is.  Instead of abandoning the sensuous imaginative element it might be better to simply see Hegel’s move as a stance that allows us to find a greater depth in works by, e.g. Rembrandt, than in those by the great Greek sculptors.  Self-consciousness or “knowing thyself” goes back as an ideal to the Greeks, especially to Socrates.  So it is nothing original.  Moreover, contra Hegel, I think there is something else to Christianity of value to aesthetics, perhaps what is caught more by Tolstoy, with his emphasis on empathy and love.  I don’t think we can get the inwardness of Christianity just through a Platonic-like self-consciousness connected with rejection of the sensuous.  If we follow Nietzsche, instead, we have the capacity to combine the sensuous, the imaginative and “saying yes to life” as will to power.  In my view Nietzsche’s philosophy overcomes the limitations of Hegel’s when it comes to aesthetics, religion, and even self-consciousness since it engages in a true dialectic.  Hegel is just dressing up Plato by putting it all in a setting of historical development.]

Hegel then uses language like “free concrete spirituality” to describe the romantic.  [Incidentally, his romantic stage has little to do with the period now called “the Romantic period.” This more common definition of “Romantic” is associated mainly with art of the early 19^th century but sometimes with the late 19^th century.  Thus it is associated with Hegel’s own time.  Hegel seems not to have been much interested in the art or music of the decades in which he was writing, although his closeness to Goethe is well known.]
Now, art “cannot work for sensuous intuition.”  [In a sense one can say that art becomes non-aesthetic.  But I think that this is neither possible nor advised.]  Art must “work for the inwardness which coalesces with its objects simply as if with itself.”  Words like “feeling” and “emotion” come out.  This spiritual feeling “strives for freedom in itself.”  Hegel also speaks of “the inner world” as the content of the romantic and of “depth of feeling.”  One thinks of the ways in which works by some artists, for instance Raphael and Rembrandt, seem to represent or exhibit a deep inner world of feeling. 

Let’s say that exhibiting such a world of feeling is important, that what the Classical world lost was the ways in which humans have existential angst, deep love, and other deep and conflicted feelings.  Setting aside the religious idea, we seem once again to move in the direction of Nietzsche. To see this inwardness as a “triumph over the external” is to treat it like the Platonic soul that leaves the cave:  but the notion of “inwardness” implies not looking to the Forms but looking to one’s private life of intense emotions.  Both Hegel and Plato would agree, however, that “what is apparent to the senses …sinks into worthlessness.”  And that is a problem they share.

Hegel concludes his discussion of the Romantic by observing that, since the Romantic needs an external medium for its expression, and since spirituality has “withdrawn into itself,” the “sensuous externality of shape” comes back, as it was there in symbolic art.  It is treated as “inessential and transient.”  The individual, i.e. “the subjective finite spirit,” is also treated as inessential.  Thus in drama, individuality of plot and character become unimportant.  Instead imagination is freed to represent what is present “exactly as it is.”  This is in contrast to how it distorted the world under the symbolic mode.  The external medium of art now has its home “in the heart” and not in the external world.  It finds “reconciliation with itself” in chance, accident, grief and even crime.”  [One thinks of Dostoyevsky here, in which a path to the spiritual is found by way of a reaction to crime.  Or perhaps Hegel is pointing forward to the novelistic realism of Zola.  The use of the word “crime” here is a great mystery.]   So, as in the symbolic, the separation of Idea and shape come back except that here the Idea is no longer deficient.  Rather, it is “perfected in itself as spirit and heart.”  This is why it cannot adequately be united with the external.  [But I think this is exactly wrong with a painter like Rembrandt or Vermeer.]  In the end, then, the Ideal is transcended “as the true Idea of beauty.

Does it make sense to speak of after the beautiful?

I have been reading the very interesting new book by Robert B. Pippin, After the Beautiful:  Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism.  (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2014.)  The book attempts to show how Hegel's philosophy can be applied to modernist painting after his time, in particular the work of Manet and Cezanne.  It also has some things to say about Clark, Fried and both Hegel and Heidegger or art and truth.  The idea of "after the beautiful" is that the concept of beauty is no longer (or was no longer in the modernist period) of any great importance to art.  A possible summary of the position can be found in the following sentence:  "if we look at art and art history as a component of a collective attempt at social intelligibility - how we attempt to make ourselves intelligible and answerable to each other - and this is a uniquely sensible affective modality, the success and failures of such a project continue to be available to us in and indispensable way in visual and in other arts."  (240)  This seems right to me  -- are does not die after Hegel or Danto, for that matter, and yet what is not clear is how this pathway excludes the concept of beauty.  If beauty is taken as a marker for the value dimension of whatever comes to us in "sensible affective" modalities, then it is hard to see how it can be transcended.  I suspect that Pippin has simply identified beauty with various no longer viable or currently questionable concepts of beauty.  Yet concepts change, and to identify beauty entirely with Kant's or Hume's concept of beauty makes no more sense than to identify sensibility and the affects with their concepts of these things.  Pippin clearly sees "painterly meaning" as replacing such things as "beauty, pleasure, and taste."  (65)  Yet, if we are going to think in terms of meaning in relation to the aesthetic or the painterly, how can this exclude beauty, pleasure and taste?  Like Pippin I find both Manet and Cezanne to be powerful and moving.  Surely something here is being communicated.  But at the same time I mark them high on the scale of beauty, the possibility of aesthetic pleasure, and as objects of taste.  Of course, Hegel, Pippin's favorite author, does neglect beauty, mentioning it infrequently, and downplaying the beauties of nature.  But even he, as Pippin is aware, ends his lectures recognizing the, as Pippin quotes at the end of his book!, "indestructible bond of the Idea of beauty and truth" (144).  Pippin goes so far as to say that the "modernist equivalent to beauty as the 'promise of happiness' is this promise of meaning..."   (59) where success in this promise is related to what Manet's figures do when they "confront" the beholder.  But isn't the immense power of Manet's work a matter of just this, and isn't this also how beauty manifests itself here?  Let's not confuse surface beautiful effects and mere prettiness with beauty.  

Pippin's chapter 4  "Art and Truth:  Heidegger and Hegel" has perhaps the most importance for everyday aesthetics, although Pippin himself seems not to be aware of that.  Through Pippin's reading of Heidegger on the origin of the work of art, a reading which seems, for the most part, to be correct, one sees the glimmer of a possible alternative theory of beauty, one that can allow for a close relationship between art and everyday life in the way that great art reveals something about the everyday (although perhaps at the same time also concealing something).  Pippin writes:  "A painting is some kind of embodiment of the 'happening' of truth - basically, as we shall see, the happening or being at work of the 'world' or horizon of possible significance that constitutes a world in various dimensions of the art of an age."  (102)  Setting aside the somewhat irritating circularity of defining painting in terms of art, what is interesting here is the idea that painting can reveal something in the world that happens.  Heidegger speaks of this as the "Being of beings" coming "into the steadiness of its shining" which is the same thing as "the truth of beings setting itself to work."  Unlike Pippin, I take "shining" to be the new word for, or signifying a new manifestation of, beauty.  Pippin himself puts it this way:  "In the most general sense Heidegger is trying to reanimate the question of the relation between 'beauty' and 'truth,' but where the beautiful is not understood as a matter of the subject's experience....and where truth is disclosure...and not 'correctness.'"  (111)  I am fine with truth not being correctness, but what puzzles me is how beauty would not be a matter of subject's experience.  As I understand it, Pippin is defining "experience" in a highly subjective and isolated way, and not, for example, in an expansive Deweyan way, i.e. in terms of the interactions of the (necessarily socialized) live creature with its environment.  

The approach to beauty and the relationship to everyday life is made somewhat clearer when Pippin draws together the various comments Heidegger made about Cezanne along with Merleau-Ponty's more extensive discussions of that artist.  Here we stress that the "presence" of beings that is brought forth in Cezanne is something revealed in such a way as to have "vitality or vibrancy."  (116)  The stillness of Cezanne is "accompanied by an extraordinary vitality or vibrancy even a kind of vibration or pulsing of life in the objects..."   Pippin thinks that this is best illustrated by a comment from Greenberg (1971) in which he speaks of the paint vibrating and dilating rhythmically both in terms of  illusion of depth and flat pattern.  But this is typically Greenbergian in failing to recognize the way in which paintings constitute and reconstitute the world:  the vibration Heidegger and Merleau Ponty speak of is surely not just in the painting.  Pippin is not unaware of this and captures the thought when he says that for Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty "the meaning of this painterly effect, the 'vibration,' is some intimation of the object's actually coming into being, its "birth," as if composing itself....taking intelligible form.  He further quotes from Merleau-Ponty about the painter:  "The world no longer stands before him through representation; rather it is to the painter to whom things of the world give birth by a sort of concentration or coming-to-itself of the visible."  (119)  

OK, so the great painter reveals something about the world in getting beneath the surface, through capturing something symbolized by this talk of "giving birth." The painter then reveals the world to us somehow as lost, a pantheistic world in the Spinozistic sense.  In that world we were still able to listen to Being, and as Heidegger would put it, these great paintings preserve this possibility.  But this is not the ordinary way of seeing objects of everyday life, not ordinary in our Western world anyway.  Great painting, particularly of the sort exemplified by Cezanne, challenges the ordinariness of the ordinary.  It challenges us, for instance, not to see things as merely a matter of imposing form on matter. Vibrancy is just another word for beauty, although of the deep sort. 

It is a major mistake, by the way, for Pippin not to see the way in which the entire Origins essay is about the thing-being of things.  I think the problem is that Pippin is overly influenced by a certain reading of Being and Time and applying that to the origins essay.

Perhaps this is why he does not quite get the point when he says that by "event" of birthing  "They [Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty] mean to say that it is 'as if' everything of relevance to the bare intelligibility of the object, its simply and meaningfully being there at all, occupying space, confronting us in a kind of mute presence, can be somehow 'made visible' in the painting....powerfully present."  (121)  Intelligibility by itself is not enough! What is made powerfully present, rather, is the beauty in the strong Neoplatonistic sense of emanation and also the Spinozistic sense of the spiritual aspect of a world which is at the same time entirely material  (Spinoza superceding Plotinus here).  

Pippin then, not surprisingly, takes a somewhat different approach to Cezanne's later bather paintings (1894-1906) than I would.  For him these paintings "could be understood as expressing the ever more limited possibilities of answering [questions concerning the point of modern easel painting and the possibility of social relationships involving mutual intelligibility of action], or perhaps intimations of the suspicion that they cannot be answered or that they can be answered only at the level of the shareability of a rather brutish material meaning."  (129)  He thinks it not incorrect to say that in these paintings the earth (in Heidegger's sense) is winning over the word, and that the bathers are world-poor.  (But this accepts the whole earth/world dichotomy, which itself may be problematic, as a kind of acceptance of dualism.) 

I think that Cezanne here is trying to dig even deeper into the possibility of a Spinozistic way of viewing the world, and that this is what Heidegger was trying to get out of Van Gogh.  But then I also think that Pippin is engaged in a heroic struggle to fit his progressivist left-Hegelian politics in with his strong responses to painting, and this just can't be done here, even though it can be done to some extent when talking about Manet.  Cezanne seems to have gone beyond politics to our deeper existential situation as humans.  

Hegel's Aesthetics and Aesthetic Atheism

Hegel's lectures on aesthetics can provide useful stimulus and some intellectual support for aesthetic atheism.  What I will have to say about Hegel is not intended to be a contribution to Hegel scholarship, nor do I intend here to produce something that is consistent with an overall Hegelian position.  I just want to use him (and specifically "Chapter 1: The Range of Aesthetic Defined..." I will quote from Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, the Penguin edition, translated by Bosanquet, 1993) got inspiration.

Hegel is already in the right ball-park as far as aesthetic atheism is concerned insofar as he rejects traditional religious belief and replaces God with "the Absolute."  One does not have to go so far as to believe in the Absolute as some entity that evolves through history to find Hegel useful here.  The very idea that the physical world has a spiritual aspect manifested in art, religion, philosophy and science may be sufficient ("spiritual aspect" to be defined in a way that does not allow dualism or a separate spiritual realm or set of entities).  Aesthetic atheism, unlike physicalist atheism of the sort we find in Dawkins, finds deep value in these great manifestations of the human spirit, even including religion.  Like Hegel, the aesthetic atheist may find Rembrandt's The Night Watch thrilling because it manifests the spirit of the Dutch people and indeed Europe in general at a particular stage in history, as also Van Eyk's Ghent Altarpiece at another stage in history.  So when Hegel says "In the origination, as in the contemplation, of its creations we appear to escape wholly from the fetters of rule and regularity" (7) we can see the point as similar to Kant's comment about the creation of new rules by the genius artist, except in this case the emphasis is on the freedom of the artist's imagination, or the "freedom of the productive and plastic energy" of the art itself.  Hegel's reference to free art as expressing "cheerful vigorous reality" as opposed to mere abstract thought reminds me here of Nietzsche's comments on the healthy spirit.  And Hegel's "Not only has art at command the whole wealth of natural forms in the brilliant variety of their appearance, but also the creative imagination has power to expatiate inexhaustively beyond their [the natural forms'] limit in products of its own" allows that the arts flesh out meaning in the world of ideas, including those provided by science.  

In connection with this line of thinking, this passage is striking:

"Fine art is not real art till it is in this sense free [i.e. self-determined, as science is when it rises to the level of free search for the truth], and only achieves its highest task when it has taken its place in the same sphere with religion and philosophy, and has become simply a mode of revealing to consciousness and bringing to utterance the Divine Nature, the deepest interests of humanity, and the most comprehensive truths of the mind.  It is in works of art that nations have deposited the profoundest intuitions and ideas of their hearts; and fine art is frequently the key....to the understanding of their wisdom and their religion."

The aesthetic atheist agrees, except that "the Divine Nature" is deleted or transformed into something more like "the deepest interests of humanity."  Note that the very idea of the Divine Nature is identified in this paragraph with the way in which nations have profound intuitions.  So we already have a way of putting this in atheistic or humanistic terms.  Nor need we accept some sort of Platonistic view of nations as clearly separate and distinct, but rather we may talk about various possible units larger than the individual:  civilizations, cultures, sub-cultures and sub-sub-cultures, all of which can participate in the process of self-expression Hegel describes in which individual self-expression becomes an expression of that larger-than-individual unit (perhaps even progressively so, through a series of larger units reaching to the species and genus).  Nor need we go along with all of Hegel's absolutist talk of "highest," "only," "deepest" and "profoundest" to find inspiration in this idea that the spiritual aspect of Being is precisely in the world-as-we-experience-it, a physical world with a spiritual aspect.     

Except that of course, the aesthetic atheist story is one that reverses Hegel's hierarchy, and the aesthetic becomes prominent in this case.  So when Hegel says, "This is an attribute which art shares with religion and philosophy, only in this peculiar mode, that it represents even the highest ideas in sensuous forms, thereby bringing them nearer to the character of natural phenomena, to the sense, and to feeling" we take this to be the paradigm of the aesthetic and also of the religious, unlike Hegel.  And when Hegel says "The world, into whose depths thought penetrates, is a supra-sensuous world, which is thus, to begin with, erected as a beyond over against immediate consciousness...." this is precisely what Kant rightly thought as going beyond the limits of reason and into illusion.  At most, the suprasensuous realm can only be an abstract and empty idea that represents what Hegel then calls "the power which thus rescues itself from the here" of "actuality and finiteness of sense." There is nothing wrong with the rescue insofar as moving away from the sensuous and immediate is a necessary part of the dialectic of knowledge (going back and forth being required) but only with the thought that cognition cannot do this by escaping the sense world entirely:  it can only seem as if doing so, and can only be useful insofar as this is a useful fiction.   To have any real nature these ideas need to be fleshed out by imagination, which takes us back to sensuous immediacy.  Contra Hegel, then, there is no reason to believe in an "infinite freedom of the reason that comprehends."  (10)  Rather than "breaking through to the idea," which Hegel thinks is the purpose of fine art, the products of fine art (and also religion and philosophy) break through to what Kant called "the aesthetic ideas" of which the idea in Hegel's sense is only the abstract and empty marker, at best.  So when Hegel says,  "...we must...bear in mind...that art is not, either in content or in form, the supreme and absolute mode of bringing the mind's genuine interests into consciousness"  the aesthetic atheist replies: sure! and neither is anything else, least of all philosophy or religion.