Form and Content in Kant's Aesthetics: Locating Beauty and the Sublime in the Work of Art

Form and Content in Kant's Aesthetics: Locating Beauty and the Sublime in the Work of Art KIRK PILLOW ON THE FACE OF IT, in his account of aesthetic judgment, Kant usually segregates considerations of beauty from the experience of the sublime. The sublime may have a place in aesthetic judgment, but it is not a matter of taste. Taste can only judge objects of reflection possessing some particular form, while formlessness typically characterizes the sublime; these modes of aesthetic judgment regularly exclude each other? Yet Kant does on occasion speak of the beautiful and the sublime in tandem. Thus in the Kritik der Urteilskraft he comments: "The exhibition of the sublime, insofar as it belongs to fine art, may be combined with beauty in a tragedy in verse, a didactic poem, or an oratorio; and in these combinations fine art is even more artistic. "2 Though ,This distinctionshould not, however, be construed too dogmatically. Rudolf Makkreel has pointed out what many of Kant's readers have overlooked, namely, that "Kant does not write that the sublimecan be found on/yin a formless object, but that itcan alsobe found there.... Thus what is judged to be sublime is not necessarily formless" ("Imagination and Temporality in Kant's Theory of the Sublime," TheJournal ofAesttteticsandArtCr/t/c/sm42 [a984]: 313). Kantinsistsat the outset of his Analytic of the Sublime that "the sublimemay alsobe found in a formless object"; the fact that Kant admits the possiblity of an experience of the sublimein an object with determinate form can only strengthen the thesis I wish to pursue in this paper. See Ak. 244, myemphasis. This and all further references to Kritik derUrteilskraftare to the Akademie edition,vol.5 09 o8) of Kants gesammelteSchriften, a9 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 19oa-83). In all my translations I have consulted Werner Pluhar's translationof the CritiqueofJudgment (Indianapolis:Hackett, 1987).In particular, I have adopted his rendering of Vorstellungas "presentation" instead of the traditional "representation," and of Darstellung as "exhibition" instead of the traditional"presentation." 9Kritik der Urteilskraft,Ak. 395. Kant's claim that the sublime, insofar as it belongs to fine art, may be combined with beauty may suggest that Kant admits only certain cases in which the beautiful and the sublime coexist, and that a work of art may be perfecdy artistic without this combination.Since I willargue that thejudgment of the sublimein a work attends to the content of the aesthetic ideas it presents, it will indeed be true that the combination of beauty and sublimity will exist solely in those works which present aesthetic ideas. Kant's example of foliage [4431 444 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:3 JULY a99 4 by nature quite different phenomena, Kant apparently thinks beauty and the sublime may be brought together in the presentations of fine art. But, as Kant similarly notes in the Anthropologie, the sublime should only be presented by means of the beautiful: "Beauty is the only thing that pertains to taste .... However, the exhibition of the sublime can and should be beautiful in itself; otherwise it is coarse, barbaric, and in bad taste."s Let us assume that beautiful presentations of the sublime may be accomplished as well in painting. Should we take Kant to mean simply that the artist may provide a beautiful rendition of some sublime subject-matter, such as a windswept mountainscape after the manner of Caspar David Friedrich? Or may quite separate aesthetic judgments of beautiful form and of the sublime be made in our reflection upon the same work of art? Rather than conceiving of sublimity in the work of art merely as the presentation of archetypally sublime topics (e.g., a raging seascape), may we understand aesthetic judgement to allow an experience of the sublime which complements and surpasses reflection on a work's beautiful form? In order to isolate pure aesthetic judgments of beauty, Kant distinguishes the relevant formal aspects of an object from its mere matter or sensible content. Now if judgments of beauty attend to the form of an object, one might suppose that a judgment of the sublime in the work would attend to the other side of the distinction, to...