Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics by Paul Guyer. Published 2005 by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 359 pages, US$70 (hardback), ISBN 0 521 84490 8.
Paul Guyer has proven to be one of the most penetrating scholars of Kant’s aesthetics, weaving a distinctive thread into the tapestry of contemporary aesthetics with strands of historical analysis, textual criticism, and his own original contributions to the philosophy of beauty. In Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Guyer brings together a series of closely related essays on the development of aesthetics since the beginning of the modern period. Three of thirteen pieces contained in this 360 page volume are appearing for the first time. The others had been previously written or published, mostly in the 1990s.
Guyer contextualizes all of the essays within the perennial Platonic questions regarding our knowledge of beauty and the relative value we place upon it both among other types of human experience and within society in general. He believes that Immanuel Kant offered the most thought-provoking analysis of both the ancient Platonic questions and the related issues of more recent origin. “Kant’s analyses of aesthetic experience, aesthetic creativity, and the connections between the aesthetic and the moral responded to the complexities of all these in ways that ensure their continuing interest and fruitfulness” (x). Guyer is deeply convinced that Kant should be taken seriously in his “third critique” (The Critique of Judgment). Kant may not be as obtuse and convoluted as many commentators have taken him. He was, however, aware of the need to somehow connect pure and practical reason as he presented them in the first and second critiques (The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason). Kant prefaces his third critique by acknowledging the need to build a bridge over the “chasm” separating “theoretical cognition of nature” and the “laws of freedom”. Guyer comments that it is “not clear what chasm he has in mind” (200), but suggests that Kant should be taken on his own terms. Guyer also assumes a critical stance not only toward the results of Kant’s critique, but toward Kant’s method of proceeding based on his own prior definitions and conclusions.
A recurring theme in Guyer’s scrutiny of the Kantian texts is that the ideas contained within them are more complex and organic than they first appear. The various sorts of pleasure discussed by Kant, for example, “should not be taken as a scale of pleasure and value” (xiii). Different sources of pleasure involve different types of interaction between cognition and emotion, sense and intellect, and imagination and understanding. Most importantly, considerations of the beautiful and the sublime lend themselves necessarily to a consideration of moral values. That there are “inescapable connections between aesthetic and moral values” (xviii) is a driving argument throughout the book.
Guyer opens the book with two essays that narrowly focus on the early history of modern aesthetics prior to Kant. Here he lays the groundwork for what follows with a close examination of the discipline of aesthetics as it evolved in the early 18th century. He indicates that the concept of aesthetics was evolving even within the minds of those generally recognized to be its founders. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, for example, expanded his definition of aesthetics considerably over the period of fifteen years between his dissertation entitled Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (Philosophical Meditations Regarding Some Aspects of Poetry) in 1735 and his groundbreaking work Aesthetica (1750). But even this evolution must be placed within the wider context of early aesthetics as represented in the works of the Earl of Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, the Abbé Jean-Baptiste De Bos, and Francis Hutcheson. Guyer prudently reminds us that these early pioneers of the philosophy of beauty were deeply inspired by a flourishing interest in the character and value of beauty in a society increasingly enriched by the fine arts of literature, painting, sculpture, and music. Guyer further illustrates how the common idea grouping theses thinkers together is the “freedom of the imagination”. Thus, Kant himself, albeit in a uniquely novel way, entered a discussion that had already been in progress throughout the 18th century.
Guyer clarifies the relationship between Kant and his immediate predecessors in aesthetics by highlighting Kant’s practical philosophy. Kant introduced a highly original distinction between negative and positive freedom that, according to Guyer, has too often been overlooked. Guyer argues that we need to understand this distinction if we are to appreciate the complexity of Kant’s theory as well as the inherent difficulties posed by the notion of the “freedom of the imagination”. Kant understands negative freedom as the absence of determination or control in human action. He delineates positive freedom as the power of self-determination and self-control in the human agent. Kant constructs his moral philosophy upon the notion of positive freedom. His aesthetic theory, however, finds itself in a state of tension between the poles of negative and positive freedom.
Guyer goes on to analyze the complexity of Kant’s aesthetic philosophy through the lens of the negative/positive distinction in regard to human freedom. The aesthetic judgment is characterized by disinterestedness; that is, it is made independently from the mere sensible agreeableness one happens to find in an object. The aesthetic judgment is also made apart from any acknowledgment of the object as a good under a specific determinate concept. These principles led Kant to conceptualize the aesthetic response as a harmony of free play between the cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding.
It is this central insight that Guyer turns to in the first of his eight essays on Kant in Values of Beauty entitled “The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited”, which is also the first of the three essays appearing for the first time in this book. Guyer notes that “the concept of the harmonious free play of imagination and understanding is obscure, and Kant’s attempts to explicate it do not obviously succeed” (78). Nevertheless, to reassume the problematic, as Guyer illustrates, is well worth the effort. After succinctly summarizing the major points of Kant’s argument, Guyer attempts to clarify some of the confusion. The “most obvious” problem with Kant’s “precognitive” approach, according to Guyer, is that “it may seem as if everything ought to be beautiful, or at least capable of being found beautiful” (88). Guyer explains: “If our feeling of beauty in a given manifold is a response to the fact that it satisfies a condition that must be satisfied in every case of cognition, even if it does not satisfy all of the conditions that must be satisfied for actual cognition, then why don’t we experience beauty in every case of cognition” (88)? Guyer categorizes the various attempts by Kantian scholars to resolve this problem. He hints that a solution might be found more readily through a greater openness to the role of the objects of taste in aesthetic judgment. Most attempts to resolve the problem focus on the conditions surrounding the cognition of various objects by a knowing subject. Kant, in fact, never dismissed the idea that our faculty of concepts could be at work even in the absence of determinate concepts. Guyer also proposes textual evidence suggesting that Kant focused more on the formal aspects of objects experienced through the free play of the imagination and the understanding.
Guyer demonstrates his own intellectual dexterity by offering a purely philosophical explanation of the problem. He points out that the prior question underlying the entire problematic is why the “flitting back and forth among an indeterminate multitude of concepts for a single object should be pleasing” (93). Guyer finds definitions relying solely on pleasure as the state of mind by which we desire to prolong the experience to be an unsatisfactory description of that which is distinctive about the experience of beauty in contrast to other types of pleasure.
Consequently, Guyer boldly suggests that the notion of a harmony of the faculties that rejects absolutely the involvement of determinate concepts might simply be inadequate. He finds evidence in Kant for a further specification of the concepts involved in aesthetic experience as being indeterminate in regard to the end or use of the experienced object. By this further specification, a door is opened for what Guyer calls a “metacognitive” approach to the theory of free play as opposed to the precognitive and multicognitive approaches. Though Guyer admits that we are hard pressed to find passages in Kant that explicitly support this approach, he shows how it is possible to sketch this approach from passages suggesting that the imagination and intellect are bound by certain determining aspects of the objects of aesthetic experience. A close reading of Kant allows us “to suppose that in the experience of beauty in an object we recognize that the ordinary conditions for cognition of such an object are satisfied, yet (we) also feel that our experience of the manifold presented by the object satisfies our demand for unity in a way that goes beyond whatever is necessary for the satisfaction of those ordinary conditions” (103).
In an essay entitled “Kant on the Purity of the Ugly”, Guyer proposes further practical applications of the precognitive, multicognitive, and metacognitive approaches to aesthetic judgment through an investigation into our experience of the ugly. Guyer’s metacognitive approach paves the way for a new consideration of how to categorize the ugly among the various types of aesthetic experiences. He once again provides evidence in Kant for the inclusion of determinate concepts in the complex experience of aesthetic objects. The harmony between the understanding and the imagination must always be present in an aesthetic judgment, but the role of concepts is flexible. If the experience of the ugly lacks a concomitant harmony of faculties, therefore, it cannot be a pure object of aesthetic experience. Guyer, of course, rightly notes how such a conclusion raises more questions than it answers. In this essay, Guyer takes the opportunity to explain once more in detail what he means by a “metacognitive” interpretation of free play. This interpretation “recognizes that for Kant all consciousness of an object must involve its subsumption under some determinate concept, so that the felt harmony of the manifold of representation of unity must be a feeling that it is unifed in some way that goes beyond the unity that is dictated by whatever determinate concept the object is subsumed under – as it were, an excess of felt unity or harmony” (149). Such an interpretation, which Guyer had already elaborated in his earlier essay, convinces him that, insofar as the harmony of the faculties is defective in the experience of the ugly, it cannot be purely aesthetic. Rather, it must involve a response of disagreeableness and an act of moral judgment.
Guyer’s attentive critique of Kant’s position on the aesthetic experience of the ugly introduces a core motif resounding throughout book: the experience of the beautiful is best understood in some relation to the good. Guyer writes:
I suggest that the conclusion that the experiences of the ugly and the sublime are not purely free and reflective aesthetic experiences is not only consistent with everything Kant says about those experiences themselves, but also consistent with what he has to say about beauty, for the simple reason that on Kant’s account by no means all experiences of beauty are pure aesthetic experiences or experiences of free beauty either – many experiences of beauty, after all, are experiences of adherent beauty connected to a determinate concept of the beautiful object’s function (Critique of Pure Judgment, §16) or of artistic beauty connected to the determinate intention of the artist, although in the case of a work of genius in some way going beyond the intention (Critique of Pure Judgment, §49) (161-162).
Guyer believes that it may be possible to argue that, in Kant’s analysis, all aesthetic experiences (i.e., of the sublime, the ugly, and even the beautiful) are mixed. As Guyer shows earlier in the book, this interpretation might situate Kant within the early modern period of aesthetics in a more coherent way.
Guyer offers one more original essay in this collection which helps flesh out his ideas concerning the relationship between aesthetic and ethical values. In “The Ethical Value of the Aesthetic”, he compares the dynamic between the aesthetic and the moral as it appears in Kant, Archibald Alison, and George Santayana. As evident in his other essays on Kant, Guyer believes that Kant underestimated the necessary role of morality in at least some aesthetic judgments. Nevertheless, a perusal through the Third Critique in light of the First and Second Critiques leads Guyer to believe that Kant had presupposed a number of links between aesthetics and ethics. In this essay, Guyer clarifies six such links: [1] Kant seems to purport that the aesthetic experience can “present morally significant ideas to us” (196); [2] the experience of the sublime seems to impose upon our moral faculty a “pure principle of morality to act in accordance with it” (196-197), despite the fact that nature strives to thwart all attempts to do so; [3] the beautiful, rather than the sublime, symbolizes certain aspects of our moral condition; [4] the existence of a beautiful object in some way suggests a “pleasing fact about our situation in the world” (199); [5] “aesthetic experience is conducive to proper moral conduct itself” (199); and [6] the emergence of shared common tastes in society can bring about a conversation between the educated and the uneducated so as to raise the standards of society in general, including ethical and political standards.
In a way similar to the two earlier essays, Guyer argues that Kant’s own reasoning can corroborate these ties between the aesthetic and the moral, but Kant himself falls short of drawing out the full strength of these ties in his conclusions. As a foil to Kant, Guyer offers the aesthetic theory of Archibald Alison, who seems to compliment Kant in his employment of the free-play theory, but differs considerably from him in that he “does not regard this pleasure as ever being occasioned by any purely cognitive play with the formal properties of objects” (210). Alison accentuates the emotional impact of aesthetic experience that occurs through the personal associations we string together when we are confronted with an object causing aesthetic pleasure. Kant, Guyer reminds us, saw such a strong emphasis on subjective emotional states as a threat to the universal validity required for judgments of taste. What is most intriguing to Guyer, however, is that Alison’s emphasis on emotional states accompanying aesthetic experience draws to the fore their role in developing moral character. Alison assumes that “aesthetic experiences will always produce morally beneficial and never morally deleterious emotions” (214). While this invites some obvious objections, Guyer believes that Alison’s approach contrasts sufficiently with Kant’s to provoke a reconsideration of the aesthetic-moral dynamic.
Guyer turns to the work of George Santayana as a paradigmatic example of such a reconsideration. While withholding direct credit or blame to any specific individuals for the then-wallowing philosophy of aesthetics, Santayana tried to distance himself from the metaphysically saturated aesthetic theories emerging from the late-German Romantic period. Guyer argues that Santayana’s fresh approach to the aesthetic-moral questions foreshadowed much of the mid-twentieth century work in the field. As he attempts to sketch how “beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing”, Santayana, in Guyer’s words, shows how “both formal aspects of objects and their emotional associations, and indeed qualities of their very matter itself, can yield pleasure that is positive, intrinsic, and objectified” (217). Santayana’s openness to including all three ways in which objects present themselves in the aesthetic judgment improves upon the “reductive” views of Kant and Alison (219). In fact, Santayana goes on to affect a sort of inversion of the aesthetic-moral problem. Guyer expresses a strong dose of sympathy for Santayana’s project: “we should not always look at aesthetics as if it must be the handmaiden of morality, but can think of morality as in fact the handmaiden of aesthetics” (220).
In the essays subsequent to “Ethical Value of the Aesthetic”, which Guyer groups according to the sub-heading “Mostly After Kant”, he draws out the implications of a theory of aesthetic judgment that depends upon some exercise of the moral power. He connects this question with the issue of the concept of art and its definition, and exemplifies his willingness to dialogue with other intellectuals on the aesthetic-moral question by engaging Mary Mothersill in an essay entitled “The Value of a Theory of the Beautiful”.
Overall, Guyer’s book demonstrates once more his capacity for discussing elusive ideas and almost impenetrable Kantian passages in a fluid and lucid prose. On the other hand, reading through the thirteen essays in Values of Beauty belies Guyer’s tendency to recycle his fundamental insights into Kantian aesthetics. I do not fault Guyer for this, for to do so would mean incriminating myself and every other scholar who chips away at a narrow niche in the academy. Guyer well deserves to dwell securely in the niche of Kantian and early modern aesthetics. He refuses to hide in that niche, but rather openly shares what he discovers while probing every nook and cranny. Philosophers in aesthetics are eagerly awaiting a further record of his discoveries, which he has entitled Imagination and Freedom: A History of Modern Aesthetics. In the meantime, I recommend Values of Beauty for those with a desire to deepen their understanding of Kant and his legacy in the history of modern aesthetics.
Daniel B. Gallagher is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Sacred Heart Major Seminary at Villa Stritch In Rome, Italy.
Note: This review was first published on August 17 2007 by JUST Book Reviews.
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