The German Genius

friendliness, the third element, ought not to be overlooked either: “Only the joyful heart is capable of delighting in good.”
    F INE A RT AS THE P RODUCT OF G ENIUS
     
    The third of Kant’s great critiques was the Kritik der Urteilskraft ( Critique of Judgment ; 1790). In this, says Ernst Cassirer, “Kant touched the nerve of the entire spiritual and intellectual culture of his time more than with any other of his works…” 29 Kant’s starting point is the concept of purposiveness. Against the background of the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, and all the other developments considered in Chapter 2, Kant focused on the logic—or lack of it—in the relationship between parts and the whole. Which came first? Does that question make sense? An organism like an animal exists as a whole but consists of parts. The whole cannot survive without the parts and the parts cannot survive without the whole. What does it mean to be a part? Different species of animals, or plants, “belong” to higher taxa. What does this mean? Do these groups (genera, say, or families, though these categories did not have their modern meanings then) exist in any real sense outside our heads or is there some a priori process within us that determines how we understand parts and wholes and their relation? 30
    Before Kant, it was assumed that the Great Chain of Being was a true reflection of God’s purpose for nature. For Kant, even the purpose of nature, indeed the very concept of purpose itself, is built into our nature, so we can never know whether “purpose” exists outside ourselves. Our instinctive notion of purpose will determine the way we understand nature; nature’s laws do not exist “out there” we impose those laws on nature.
    This led Kant to his reflections on art. If the order of nature, as shown by its particular laws, reflects no more than our constitutional ability to impose a unity on nature, this comes about because the attainment of such unity is always coupled with a feeling of pleasure and “the feeling of pleasure also is determined by a ground which is a priori and valid for all men.” 31
    The phrase “valid for all men” is crucial. Art, for Kant, was a realm of “pure” forms, each complete in itself. “The work of art…has its own basis and has its goal purely within itself, and yet at the same time in it we are presented with a new whole, a new image of reality.” Science concerns itself with superordination and subordination in a causal capacity, leading from premise to conclusion. In aesthetics we grasp the whole immediately and its parts and their relation to the whole is immediate, not causal; we surrender ourselves to pure contemplation. The aesthetic consciousness “grasps in this very fleeting passivity a factor of purely timeless meaning.” For Kant, the aim of art is to evoke “disinterested pleasure.” The fact that many people find the same things beautiful, that beauty is “valid” for all men, aroused in Kant the notion of “subjective universality.” The fact that everyone attributes a similar pleasure to a work of art is, for him, a vital aspect of the experience. It was evidence—important evidence—of a universal voice not mediated by concepts. 32 Ideas in art are a more immediate kind of experience than other experiences.
    The importance of this distinction led Kant to consider geniuses, building on Lessing. “The creation of genius receives no rule from outside, but it is the rule itself. In it is shrouded an inner lawfulness and purposiveness. Genius is the talent (natural gift) which gives rule[s] to art…fine art is only possible as a product of genius.” The existence of genius differentiated artistic productivity from scientific productivity. Kant argued that “there can be no genius in the sciences.” For him, the decisive difference lies in the fact that any scientific insight, as soon as it has been identified, possesses no form over and above the insight itself. The personality of the scientist doesn’t matter. In art, however, “the form of the product is integral to the insight conveyed.” 33
    Kant’s theory of genius became a rallying point for the Romantic movement and its view that the aesthetic imagination is the “begetter of the world and reality.” 34 We shall come to the Romantic movement in Chapter 8, but what distinguishes Kant’s own view, in purely philosophical terms, is that it went against the concept of “reason,” as