The Origins of Kant’s Aesthetics by Robert R. Clewis

Robert Clewis’s The Origins of Kant’s Aesthetics is an exemplary work of Kant scholarship and research prowess, plumbing Kant’s pre-Critical and Critical corpus, spanning the breadth of his published writing, correspondence, university lectures, marginalia, and handwritten notes (Reflexionen). Clewis elucidates the influences on Immanuel Kant’s early, perfectionism-attuned views and consequent mature thinking on aesthetics. The novelty of Clewis’s work lies in its chapters’ respective attention to eight prominent themes in Kant’s aesthetics: ‘normativity, free (sensible) beauty, adherent (intellectual) beauty, creativity or genius, the fine artist, sublimity, ugliness and disgust, and humor’ (p. 5). In turn, Clewis’s systematic processual analysis is more expansive than antecedent projects like David Berger’s book – which solely deals with Kant on aesthetic beauty and normativity – but more focused than, for instance, Paul Guyer’s recent three-volume historical conspectus.¹ Clewis’s assiduous research is part of a most welcome tendency in recent Kant scholarship that exactingly engages with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aesthetics qua Kant.² The Origins of Kant’s Aesthetics will be of enormous interest to scholars and students of Kant’s theoretical philosophy in general and Kant’s aesthetics in particular, though, given Clewis’s accessible writing, it will also duly service art historians and art critics interested in the genetic history of aesthetic judgement. Given the ample intellectual fruit borne by each chapter, this review can hardly attend to the scope of Clewis’s arrayed project. The following, which remains summary, only glosses select facets of Clewis’s broader study, with particular emphasis on Chapter 3, which contains some of his most important findings. This reviewer hopes that it will galvanize readers to further engage with Clewis’s book.

Chapter 1 begins by introducing what Clewis calls Kant’s empirical ‘principle of sensible comprehension’, which has roots in Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) and serves as ‘[t]he main driver of the “rationalist” side of Kant’s synthesis’ of ‘the rational and the aesthetic, of logic and feeling’ in his early aesthetics (p. 32). This principle states that ‘[t]he beautiful facilitates sensible comprehension according to the laws of intuitive cognition or sensibility’ (p. 33). It is here that Clewis locates the roots of Kant’s normative claim that aesthetic judgements are ‘grounded on [empirical] laws of sensibility or intuition that, while […] based on the subject, are epistemically objective’ (p. 33). Clewis then turns to Kant’s December 1787 letter to Karl Leonhard Reinhold, in which Kant revealed three reasons for his ‘change of mind about the normativity of taste: a “sudden discovery” of an a priori principle of the faculty of feeling pleasure and displeasure; his take on the capacities and principles of the mind; and a new vision of a “teleology”’ (p. 48). This shift finds ‘the empirical generality of rules of taste’ turning ‘into a stricter universal validity in the sense that judgments of taste are based on a single a priori principle’ that facilitates, but is not grounded in, an ‘aesthetic education’ that makes contact with exemplary models of art and natural beauty (ibid.). Clewis demonstrates how this monumental shift is punctuated by a related development in Kant’s thinking on the normativity of aesthetics. While Kant’s early perfectionism hews towards identifying beauty with the concept of unity-amid-diversity, ‘[t]he normativity of aesthetic judgment goes from being grounded in laws of sensibility and consensus over time, to being grounded in an a priori principle of the faculty of feeling or of the power of aesthetic judgment’ (ibid.). In Chapter 2, Clewis considers the continuity between these two periods, averring that ‘Kant’s early notion that the beautiful is easily graspable in intuition carries over into the third Critique view that in pure beauty one attends to the “form” of this object’ (p. 50). Having outlined Kant’s thorough-going formalism, Clewis also reviews two formalist interpretations of Kant’s conception of free beauty, wherein no concept can exhaust or subsume the sensible form that a productive imagination renders in its pleasurable lingering/wandering activity before an object of taste’s sensible manifolds. One such view argues that it is the object of taste’s spatial form that ultimately determines a percipient’s free judgement of beauty; although Clewis does not deploy this appellation, these tend to be strongly object-dependent views.³ Other views—chiefly, those which emphasize percipient-dependence and tend to be more idealistic—underscore the creativity of the productive imagination in its harmonious free play with the understanding. However, one can also argue that a shift takes place within Kant’s thinking that finds him moving from the former position towards the latter. Appreciating why Kant ultimately moves from his earlier strongly object-dependent perfectionism towards the more subjectivist ‘free play’ position requires close engagement with the unity-amid-variety tradition, where judgements of beauty are ultimately anchored in an object’s proportionality or symmetry. Clewis’s perspicacious review accomplishes this in exacting fashion, engaging with the broadly Wolffian–Leibnizian German rationalist perfectionist tradition of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Georg Friedrich Meier (Baumgarten’s student), Moses Mendelssohn, and Johann Georg Sulzer, according to whom unity-amid-diversity consists in an object of taste’s proportion. He also analyses the empiricist tradition of Lord Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Joseph Addison, and Lord Kames, according to whom the perfection consists in a sentiment or internal sense felt by the percipient.

In Chapter 3, Clewis provides an overview of a different but equally important shift that occurs between Kant’s pre-Critical and Critical periods concerning the meaning of ‘self-standing’ (selbstständig) beauty and adherent/dependent beauty. This chapter will be familiar to readers acquainted with Clewis’s paper ‘Beauty and Utility in Kant’s Aesthetics’.⁴ However, the book chapter contains a number of modifications to Clewis’s earlier view, prompted by Emine Hande Tuna’s recent argument according to which Kant’s early aesthetic thinking does not subscribe to ‘unificationism’, the theory according to which ‘[t]he inner perfection of a thing has a natural relation to beauty’ such that ‘the subordination of the manifold under an end’, or its goodness, is compatible with and can further its beauty.⁵ In light of Tuna’s objections to his original article, Clewis’s third chapter figures as one of the finest works of scholarship on Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgement. Clewis demonstrates how, in his pre-Critical, perfectionist period, Kant deploys the ‘self-standing’ term to describe beauty that enjoys what he will eventually call ‘[o]bjective purpose’ in § 15 of the Critique of the Power of Judgement,⁶ or a purpose-based beauty that ‘fulfill[s] the aim or function of the object in a manner that is aesthetically or sensibly pleasing’ (p. 71). That is, Kant ‘undergoes a change of referent arising from his view that purpose-based (or adherent) beauty is not as lasting or stable as free beauty – and thus of less enduring interest’ (pp. 71–72). By the time that he writes the third Critique, Kant has moved away from his earlier position that the ‘self-standing’ in beauty is grounded in the understanding’s concept of the object of taste’s aims or the artist’s purpose. However, one can identify the lasting impact of Kant’s earlier conception of ‘self-standing’ beauty in his mature notion of adherent beauty. Clewis’s argument concerning Kant’s mature account of adherent beauty is as follows:

Clewis’s engagement with ‘this earliest phase’ of Kant’s aesthetic thinking, according to which ‘the kind of beauty that is self-standing (lasting, independent) is the one tied to purposes and/or concepts, including intellectual content’ (p. 89), is incredibly well-researched and thoroughly argued. Chapter 3 includes analyses of numerous ‘Reflexionen’ from the mid-1760s that betray Kant’s unificationism. For example, in a ‘Reflexion’ from around 1779–1780, Kant argues that ‘the self-standing [selbständig] beautiful […] can serve to make general concepts intuitive and prepares appearances from distinctness through general concepts’ (AA, 16:118, quoted on p. 84). Clewis’s analyses demonstrate how Kant, well before the CJ, departs from the German rationalist aesthetic tradition, with Kant disambiguating ‘three kinds of form: that of logical and aesthetic perfections, and a third kind, a “form of sensibility” that unites the aesthetic and logical (or conceptual) perfections’ (p. 85). Kant’s unification of logical and aesthetic cognition is rather ingenious, evincing a kind of beauty distinct from that which consists in merely intuitive-sensible form. This unificationist ‘form of sensibility,’ Clewis demonstrates, ‘facilitates the understanding’s perfection and makes concepts intuitive’ with regard to self-standing beauty, as the object’s form elicits pleasure that is intersubjectively/universally valid (p. 85). Clewis goes on to analyse a related ‘Reflection’ from 1769 to elucidate how Kant argues that ‘[t]he sensible form (or the form of sensibility) of a cognition’ can please ‘as a means to a concept of the good. The former is charm, the second the sensibly beautiful, the third self-standing [selbständig] beauty’ (AA, 15:276, quoted on p. 85, emphasis added by Clewis).

Unlike that which is ‘sensibly beautiful’ per its symmetry or harmony, self-standing beauty is a ‘“means” (in the sense of a vehicle of vehiculum) to the concept of the good, that is, an aesthetic or sensible response to the good’, or ‘a sensible presentation of the good’ (p. 85). Clewis exactingly and clearly shows how this is a unificationist view: the self-standing beautiful object’s sensible form is pleasing by dint of its harmony or symmetry and, simultaneously, ‘the object pleases in the intuitive concept’, with the concept expressing ‘the object’s relation to the good’ (p. 86). Specifically, it is the faculty of reason rather than sensibility that identifies the latter with utility. Clewis also engages with Kant’s 1772/1773 logic and anthropology lectures, such as the Collins Anthropology, to show how this is Kant’s considered view during this period, with Kant here introducing ‘the notion of a “thorough” liking’ whereby, ‘[i]f beauty is united with utility, the liking for it becomes more thorough [gründlicher] and enduring’ (AA, 25:176, quoted on p. 76); utility is here a kind of goodness that beauty is ‘“united” with’ (p. 87). Where ‘aesthetic perfection’ alongside ‘ease of sensible comprehension’ grounds ‘free beauty’, it is ‘logical perfection’ that grounds ‘self-standing beauty’ (pp. 87–88), meaning that one must know the end/purpose that the object services – for example, that the grandfather clock is supposed to tell time. Kant clearly states this in the Parow transcription where he observes that ‘[o]ne cannot take a thing to be beautiful until one knows what kind of a thing it is supposed to be. One must therefore always presuppose the idea of the thing’ (AA, 25:384; Clewis’s translation on p. 88).

Clewis’s excavating and collating of these transcriptions makes Chapter 3 of consummate value for those interested in the background of Kant’s mature thinking on free versus adherent beauty. One does wish Clewis would here elaborate on the implications of Kant’s blocking-unificationism, as it entails the import of authorial intent such that, without knowing the artist’s ambitions, one cannot properly judge the artwork as truly self-standingly beautiful. As Clewis highlights when elaborating on the ‘blocking’ aspect of Kant’s early aesthetic thinking, if something goes against the object of taste’s purpose or is a poor instance of its kind, it blocks the self-standing status of its beauty (p. 89). One wonders how fine-grained such antecedent knowledge must be for a percipient to properly judge a self-standing beauty; does it, for example, require the percipient espouse knowledge about what a landscape painting should accomplish versus a portrait? Does this extend to movements and genres as well, such that one needs to be acquainted with the norms of impressionism versus realism in order to properly judge a Seurat? That such queries remain open is hardly a fault in Clewis’s analysis; rather, it speaks to the sheer fertility of his findings.

Finally, in this chapter Clewis turns to the later period of Kant’s pre-CJ aesthetics, homing in on the Busolt Anthropology lecture from 1788/1789. Here, Kant espies a moralist rendering of the blocking-unificationist model where, per ‘the beauty/good relation’, ‘[g]oodness is understood here as both the morally and the instrumentally good’, with the object of taste’s external purposiveness serving as the ‘mediate’ good; this means that, conversely, ‘[w]hatever goes against the utility of a thing also contravenes its beauty’ (p. 94). In the Busolt lecture, Kant also introduces several themes that anticipate the CJ. As Clewis highlights, chief among them is that ‘the experience of beauty is “disinterested,” the beautiful object pleases with regard to its “form,” and the appreciator is “indifferent” to its existence’ (p. 94). Furthermore, Clewis highlights a very important development during this period where, contra philosophers who assign the pleasure of taste to purely sensual pleasure, or ‘the merely sensory gratification of the agreeable’, Kant conceives of taste as consisting in the ‘faculty of the understanding’ and, critically, encouraging ‘moral gratification (moralische Vergnügen)’ (p. 95).

Here we find Kant prefiguring the CJ’s notion of the beauty of art and nature as expressing moral ideas that do not fall under determinate concepts (see CJ, §§ 49, 51). The Busolt lecture anticipates the CJ’s conception of ideas of reason as counterparts to aesthetic ideas, where an artwork can be countenanced as having ‘spirit’ by aesthetically/sensibly expressing a moral idea to the imagination (see CJ, 5:313–19). As Clewis observes in Chapter 5, in the CJ Kant avers that beautiful artworks espouse ‘enduring attraction’ (p. 147) when their beauty is combined with a moral idea. Although he does not yet broach this connection in Chapter 4, Clewis does underscore §§ 42 and 59 of the CJ, according to which ‘one can take a morally based or intellectual interest in the experience of beauty’ and ‘the freedom of the imagination can act as a symbol of the freedom of morality’ (Clewis p. 85; see also CJ, 5:300, 354). In doing so, Clewis introduces Kant’s conception of objects of beauty as analogizing morality, with judgements of taste therein servicing man’s moral development. An important subsidiary point is that Kant’s unificationism amounts to the good of pleasure as being elicited via a concept, which is distinct from ‘the view that beauty is a mode of goodness or of perfection’ (Clewis p. 95; emphasis added). This point, which has hitherto gone overlooked by much of the extant scholarship, may initially appear to be a minor one but its implications are significant as it distinguishes Kant’s thinking from myriad orthodox aesthetic perfectionists. Clewis goes on to argue that Kant’s conception of adherent beauty in the CJ ‘incorporates the perfection or ends of the object into the aesthetic experience’, with Kant drawing on his earlier unificationism while illuminating his shift to conceiving of ‘free beauty’ as ‘self-standing, thereby giving priority to free beauty’ (p. 96).

Part II of the book contains Chapters 4 and 5, both of which involve fine art – the former engaging with artistic genius and the latter with classification. In §§ 46–50 of the CJ, Kant presents his account of the genius required to produce a work of beautiful fine art rather than ‘mechanical art’ (CJ, 5:306). In Chapter 4, Clewis demonstrates that Kant espouses two different accounts of genius, understood as the freedom of the imagination or a ‘raw originality’ impelling artistic creation (p. 104). The ‘thick’ conception genius concerns unrestrained, rampant originality that might very well produce ‘original nonsense’ if it is not accompanied by taste. On the other hand, the ‘thin’ conception of genius involves exemplary artworks wherein ‘genius controls and judges itself, finding communicable forms to express its original ideas’ (p. 108). Clewis shows how the two accounts stand in tension at various points in the CJ. This bifurcation comports with a distinction that Henry Allison, Joseph Cannon, Paul Guyer, and Otto Schlapp have similarly drawn. However, Clewis offers the novel suggestion that Kant’s defence of the ‘thick’ view contains a polemical critique of the ‘thin’ view; in particular, Clewis argues that ‘[t]he Sturm und Drang thinkers […] shape Kant’s thinking – by repelling him’ away from thinkers who cite the artistic afflatus of Schwärmerei and towards a ‘thick conception of genius’ (p. 112). This is quite convincing if we imagine, for instance, Kant responding to Herder, whose Critical Forests (1769) maintains that the force of poetry belongs to its capacity as an affective, passion-stirring vehicle. Clewis agrees with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode (1960), which argues that Kant sought to offer a replacement framework to the conception of passion offered by Sturm und Drang affiliates like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Georg Hamann. Again, one wishes Clewis could elaborate on this enormously interesting idea, citing specific passages from the latter two writers that betray their Schwärmerei-steeped conception of genius. Yet, once more, Clewis’s exercise of restraint aptly licenses future Kant scholars to plumb these annals.

Relatedly, Clewis highlights the influence of Edward Young, Shaftesbury, Hume, and Mendelssohn on the debate concerning the dangers of ‘fanaticism (Schwärmerei) and enthusiasm (Enthusiasmus)’ and Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Taste (1759) on Kant’s drawing a connection between taste and genius, where taste moderates and guides the exertions of genius. Clewis emphasizes how genius provides content or material to fine art by endowing a sensible form to aesthetic ideas (see CJ, 5:417). Genius, Clewis’s argument goes, is thus relatively close to ‘spirit’ (Geist), as it similarly enjoys the ‘ability to animate or enliven through ideas of reason’ (p. 106). Kant claims as much when he observes that spirit means ‘just as much’ as genius, demonstrating this point of confluence (p. 106n9; see AA, 25:782).

In Chapter 5, Clewis elaborates on Kant’s implicit taxonomy of the arts. Clewis identifies at least eight forms of fine art: ‘poetry, rhetoric (Beredsamkeit), painting, sculpture (Bildhauerkunst), architecture (Baukunst), horticulture (Gartenkunst), music and dance’ (p. 130). One of Clewis’s most interesting exegetic points is that Kant suggests an alternative scheme where fine art is divided into ‘the art of expression of thoughts (arts of speech) and art of the expression of intuitions—which is in turn divided according to form (pictorial art) and matter (art of the play of sensations)’ (ibid.). Furthermore, Clewis highlights Kant’s appreciation of the possibility to combine art forms and media, with theatre, for example, combining rhetoric and painterly representation (via scenography). Notably, however, Kant’s purposive/conceptual unificationism does not extend to cross-media combination. Clewis writes that Kant ‘doubts that such cross-media combination leads to a more beautiful product or work’ (ibid.). Although Clewis does not elaborate on why this is, Kant himself offers a possible answer when he claims that ‘in all beautiful art what is essential consists in the form’ (CJ, 5:326) and the latter is non-additive, regardless of the diversity of media that are incorporated.

The three chapters that comprise Part III engage in a number of detailed issues that have been recent topics of debate. These include the sublime as involving a ‘complex, negative-to-positive structure’ (p. 152); judgements of ugliness and whether Kant’s framework can countenance them; and humour. Chapter 6 is particularly interesting and speaks to an oft-overlooked development: that, in the CJ, ‘the sublime is supposed to have (subjective) universal validity or make a claim to intersubjective validity’, distinguishing Kant’s mature conception of the sublime from that of his early aesthetics, where ‘Kant denies that experiences of the sublime have universal validity’ (p. 155). Clewis’s articles on the sublime and his book The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom are indispensable genetic scholarship on Kant’s development of the dynamical and mathematical sublime.⁷ Although Clewis’s chapter is comparatively condensed, it instructively parses how § 24 of the CJ distinguishes the two kinds of the sublime, mathematical and dynamic, ‘based on whether the imagination interacts with theoretical or practical reason’, respectively (p. 152). Following Clewis, ‘[t]he experience of the mathematical sublime’ involves ‘a relation between imagination to the faculty of cognition (reason as theoretical faculty)’ in responding to ‘perceived extent or vastness’, while ‘[t]he experience of the dynamical sublime, in contrast, involves a relation between imagination (as sensibility) and the faculty of desire (reason as a practical faculty)’ (ibid.). One of Clewis’s findings is that, though the dynamical sublime is a response ‘to perceived power or great might’, its intentional object, or the dynamically sublime object proper, is ‘reason or an idea of reason’, rather than any specific powerful threatening object (ibid.); another is that Kant leaves room for adherent judgements of the sublime, or ‘judgments that take into account the purposes or aims of the object or thing in question’ (p. 176). Furthermore, Clewis shows how, in 1790, Kant comes to ascribe ‘universal validity’ to the sublime, rather than describing it as ‘a mere emotion (Rührung)’, with this reflecting his ‘moral turn’ (p. 178).

Chapters 7 and 8 deal with Kant on disagreeable sensations and humour, respectively. In the former, Clewis engages with the debate, spurred by Guyer, on whether Kant can accommodate aesthetic judgements of ugliness/pure negative aesthetic judgements of taste. Clewis finds the arguments for the position that there cannot be such judgements to be stronger than the affirmative position. Pace Alix Cohen’s argument concerning the ‘disinterested displeasure’ elicited by disharmony between the imagination and the understanding,⁸ Clewis delineates how a percipient’s disagreeable response to an object of ugliness can not be properly understood as disinterested (p. 207), for they take a ‘negative interest’ in the object, ‘which is still a mode of interest’ (p. 209), resulting in aesthetic judgement’s disinterestedness condition being vitiated. In the final chapter, Clewis reviews the theories of humour on offer and makes the case for reading Kant as a so-called ‘incongruity theorist’ (preceded by Hutcheson and Mendelssohn) whose views on humour also incorporate elements of release/relief and superiority theories. Drawing from Kant’s corpus, including a wry comical story that Kant apparently liked to repeat to his students, Clewis – who has previously produced a commentary accompanying Kant’s writings on humour, making him well equipped to analyse this lesser-engaged sub-specialization within Kant scholarship⁹ – demonstrates how, for Kant, comical amusement is ultimately induced by a ‘mismatch between the way things are and the way we expect them to be’ (p. 236).

It is no exaggeration to state that Clewis’s book will undoubtedly service future generations of scholars researching the themes in and developmental history underpinning Kant’s mature thinking in aesthetics. One expects that Chapter 3 in particular will serve as a locus classicus in ensuing scholarship on Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgement. Indeed, although it has just recently been published, Clewis’s book has already proven fruitful for subsequent Kant scholarship. For example, in his new article, J. Colin McQuillan has closely engaged with Clewis’s book to elucidate the points of consistency between several pre-critical and critical themes in Kant’s aesthetics.¹⁰ Given the fecundity of Clewis’s text, which is rife with myriad lines of potential intellectual flight, one can only expect more such articles into the future.