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So what is beauty? Can a work be called "beautiful" if it strikes terror? As an artist, should I embrace the "uselessness" of my work?
Explore Immanuel Kant's philosophy on beauty and the sublime, highlighting their characteristics and the concept of disinterested pleasure.
Key Takeaways
- Beauty and the sublime are two distinct but powerful aesthetic experiences defined by Kant.
- Beauty is characterized by order, harmony, dignity, and a rational ethical dimension.
- The sublime involves overwhelming awe, fear, and a sense of boundlessness beyond human comprehension.
- True aesthetic appreciation requires disinterested pleasure, free from practical or survival concerns.
- Kant’s framework helps understand the emotional and spiritual impact of art and nature.
Summary
- Kant views beauty as a complex concept that is both objective and subjective, connecting us to the mystery of being.
- Beauty has form, dignity, order, harmony, and an ethical dimension that transcends the artist.
- The sublime is distinct from beauty, evoking awe, wonder, and overwhelming feelings often linked to nature's vastness and power.
- Experiencing the sublime reveals human limitations and awakens a spiritual sense beyond reason.
- Kant contrasts the beautiful as rational and bounded with the sublime as irrational and unbounded, likened to Apollonian and Dionysian aesthetics.
- The sublime experience can be linked to feelings of holiness and transcendence over pain and terror.
- Kant introduces the idea of 'disinterested pleasure,' where true aesthetic appreciation is detached from utility or survival needs.
- Introducing ulterior motives or functions to beauty diminishes its value according to Kant.
- The video encourages reflection on personal pleasurable experiences to distinguish between encounters with beauty and the sublime.
- Kant’s aesthetic philosophy helps explain why art with elements of terror or anguish can still be powerful and moving.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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These are important questions, and Immanuel Kant had some fascinating answers. Let’s take a look!
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As discussed in my last video, "beauty" is a loaded term. Beauty is difficult to locate.
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It seems to permeate through a variety of things and at different times. It seems to be both objective and subjective, so it’s hard to pin down.
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The mystery surrounding beauty has baffled philosophers throughout history. One of the most influential philosophers who grappled with this topic lived in the 18th century, and he's a central figure in modern philosophy.
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His name is Immanuel Kant. Some view Kant like a modern version of Aristotle. Like Aristotle, Kant wrote a treatise on everything, but instead of writing about ethics and poetry like Aristotle, Kant focuses on all of the mental faculties and he writes a treatise
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on reason, understanding, and imagination. He tries to categorize and define these things. And in his attempts to wrap his mind around his mind, he makes some important contributions on beauty, which he unpacks in his writing.
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Kant believed beauty was important. And that’s because it connects us with the ultimate "mystery of being." To Kant, beauty is a democratic way of compelling us to be better.
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It’s a reminder to be our better selves and it helps take us out of our inner selfish world without being stern or demanding.
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Kant saw that beauty had some very important characteristics and qualities. First, beauty has a sense of form and dignity.
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There’s a way in which beauty holds itself in the world. And when artists create something truly great, that thing they create seems to take on a life of its own and slips beyond the artist.
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I think of great symphonies and masterpieces. There’s something about these creations that carry their own weight in the world.
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So there’s an inherent dignity there. Another aspect of beauty is that it seems to have a relationship with truth.
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When I’m critiquing my own art or the art of my students, there seems to be a rightness of forms.
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There’s a squishy objective aspect that I mentioned in the last video. And it allows the artist to do things like improve or refine.
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And when you can streamline a design and perfectly wrap it in elegance, there actually seems to be an ethical dimension that arises out of that editing process.
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Lastly, Kant found things like order and harmony to be bounded and contained within the beautiful.
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So when you see a design that’s balanced and harmonious—these are all characteristics you can recognize within the thing, so to some degree, someone could say it’s bound.
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Now before we move on, I want you to take a moment to think about some of your most pleasurable experiences.
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Ok, your most pleasurable experiences... As you reflect, I want you to think: What about the experience made it so pleasurable?
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Can you identify it? And as you think about that, I want you to reflect on the emotions you were having.
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So what emotions can you associate with these pleasurable experiences? Ok, so keep these experiences in mind because Kant recognized that there’s some diversity in our aesthetic encounters.
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There are these encounters with the beautiful, but there is another encounter that is just as moving.
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And it has powers that the beautiful doesn’t necessarily have... It’s something that Kant calls the "sublime." And for some of you, when you were thinking of a pleasurable experience, it may actually have had more connections with the sublime than with the beautiful.
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So it can be helpful to distinguish these concepts. They’re both moving and powerful, but there are some distinctions.
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So what is the sublime? Well, for Kant, the sublime is that which inspires a sense of awe, wonder, overwhelmingness.
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If I do a Google image search for "sublime," these are the kinds of images that come up.
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Usually, it’s vast landscapes that show nature’s power. It’s the overwhelming feeling I received when my family pulled over in our minivan and we all stood on a ledge and peered out at the Grand Canyon.
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All of a sudden, we were confronted with something so much bigger than ourselves. It’s terrifying and incredible at the same time.
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The sublime occurs when we feel awe or fear before an object or overwhelming power.
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Sometimes I find myself watching YouTube and being mesmerized by videos of these huge whales or tornadoes ripping through the landscape.
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Now, I know that sounds a little strange, but there’s something amazing about being able to reflect upon this at a semi-safe distance.
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I think it’s why I loved my skydiving experience and why I love roller coasters.
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I can get that overwhelming, near-death experience without being harmed. Some of you love hiking or skiing and you’ll literally travel to great heights to get this overwhelming, transcendent experience.
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It’s why people love Romantic landscape paintings. They were all about chasing this notion of the sublime.
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There’s a sense of boundlessness to the sublime. We don’t know what its limits are. And it goes beyond our ability to contemplate or judge and all of a sudden, we realize our own limitations.
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You know, when I think about Kant’s notion of the sublime, I can’t help but to make this connection with the idea of holiness.
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When the Biblical text describes encounters with that which is holy, we see there is a sense of awe and wonder—the feeling of being overwhelmed.
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There’s fear, yet at the same time, it’s amazing. Kant says that when we experience the sublime, there is this "aha moment" and we become awakened to the fact that we are not sensible creatures tied to reason.
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And it’s at this moment that with great joy, we realize there’s something within us that is greater than nature.
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We are not only rational creatures but spiritual creatures—with purpose and an ability to endure and transcend pain and terror.
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So to Kant, this incredible experience of the sublime proves that there must be something more to us, and when we get this feeling of transcendence, we realize we have a purpose and an ability to transcend the pain and suffering of the natural world.
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What a dazzling moment of insight! So for Kant, there are these two modes of great aesthetic experiences.
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On one hand, you have the beautiful, which contains form, order, and harmony. And in all these things, there’s a bound dignity and ethic to the forms.
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So that’s beauty, and you could look at this as this rational, Apollonian aesthetic. But then on the other hand, there’s the sublime, which is irrational because you can’t wrap your mind around it.
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It’s overwhelming and too much to take in. It awakens your senses and slips beyond your logical capacities.
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You could call it the Dionysian aesthetic. One might even argue that Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel captures these two different approaches.
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So here we are again engaged with these two extremes. The rational and the irrational.
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The thinking and the feeling. The objective and the subjective. The bounded and the unbounded.
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And I don’t know about you, but I find Kant’s unpacking of these modes to be helpful.
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It helps me understand why some things are so powerful even when they have elements of terror and anguish.
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I can see how these modes of the beautiful and the sublime can anchor the broad spectrum of our experiences of visual pleasure.
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But there’s something about Kant’s take on aesthetics that we haven’t tackled yet, and it has to do with what he calls “disinterested pleasure.” In order for Kant to make sense of the universal, objective aspect of beauty and the sublime,
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he felt like it needed to be tethered to something beyond our need for survival.
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He pushed it a step further and declared that beauty needed to be completely detached from utility and one's survival needs altogether.
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This is what he calls “disinterested pleasure.” So for Kant, as soon as you introduce an ulterior motive or function for the object, there’s a cheapening...
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To Kant, true beauty is something purely disinterested, it seeks nothing from the object, it has no hidden agendas, and it makes no demands.
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It’s completely free. To parse this out, he started distinguishing his terms. He started using terms like “pleasant” and “good” instead of beauty if there were any traces of human agendas or ulterior motives in the design.
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But to say something like “that statue is beautiful” would be an example of disinterested pleasure because there’s nothing loaded in one’s admiration.
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So what is art’s relationship to function and utility? To be honest, this is complex, and it’s something that I still struggle with.
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In a way, I can see why Kant makes this distinction. We are living in consumer-society that often puts usefulness and utility first and so there is a huge lack of understanding of the role and importance of beauty.
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I can search the depths of my inner being and try to express myself by spending weeks making a large painting, and then I’ll get comments like “well, how much can you sell that for?” As if to say that something is only valuable if it has market value or if it can be sold
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and the money used for utilitarian purposes. As an artist, this bothers me. It also bothers me when people argue that we should have art in schools because it will increase math scores or literacy.
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I mean it’s great that it does that, but that’s not why we should have art in school.
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I think it might be better to say, kids should engage in art because kids should engage in art.
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I guess there’s this underlying notion of art for art’s sake. There’s something about aesthetic experiences and the contemplation of our visual world and beauty—these things are an important to what it means to be human.The Earl of Shaftsberry said “science’s account of the world is incomplete.
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It can explain it but we still need to contemplate it…” So sometimes, we just need to stop and look at things.
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You don’t have to explain and exploit it for some other purpose. Not everything has to have utility to be important.
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The message of the flower could just be the flower! And to Kant, the idea of beauty was most evident when utility was no longer present.
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Let me give you an example. And some of you may have had this experience.
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When you hold a newborn baby in your arms, you feel this overwhelming sense of joy.
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You don’t want to do anything with the baby. You don’t want to put it to use or conduct scientific experiments, you want simply to look at it and feel the great surge of delight that comes when you focus all your thoughts
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on this baby and none at all on yourself. This is what Kant describes as a disinterested attitude.
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It is the attitude that underlies our experience of beauty. So that being the case, I want you to think about your own encounters with beauty or when you see beauty in nature.
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Do you have enough space in your life to contemplate and drink it in—not in service to some other goal—but on its own terms.
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You know, they actually say that taking selfies can take you out the of the moment because all of a sudden, we are not experiencing life in a disinterested way—you see something amazing, and then boom all of a sudden, we might be thinking of how we look or how we
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can use the image for some other use. So I think there’s something to this notion of disinterested pleasure and appreciating beauty not necessarily in service to something else or as a means to an end, but as an end
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in and of itself. I think about the 19th century architect Louis Sullivan, who famously declared “Form follows function.” When he said this, he aimed to recognize the importance of function and utility within human design and how one should let the function of something dictate the terms of the design.
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And, to be honest, I see what he means. And there’s an element of empathy and even ethics in the idea of allowing the function to lead when it comes to some design work.
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In fact, when we were on the architectural tour in Chicago, the tour guide made this point about Mies Van Der Rhoe’s designs.
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He said, Mies was able to create very functional designs but there was sophistication and elegance in how he did it.
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But others that came after him that lacked his aesthetic sensibility took this emphasis on utility and ran with it off a cliff.
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And unfortunately, when looking at architecture, we can see how an emphasis on utility and function can have disastrous effects.
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These are the buildings no one wants to preserve. And so we see the danger with overemphasizing utility and function.
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Now I say that, but personally, I don’t feel the need to draw a line in the sand like Kant and say all beauty must be strictly disinterested and anything that smacks of utility or has a functional element gets this other label.
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I don’t think we have to paint ourselves in the corner like this. I think there can be beauty in designs that wrap elegance and harmony into the function itself.
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Like well-designed signage or spaces. And I can see how in these situations, the beauty can actually be best appreciated through their function and through the engagement of their utility.
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I see how this has been abused when taken to the extreme, but I don’t think we have to parse terms here.
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Functional and useful objects can be beautiful but so can a bouquet of roses and a sunset.
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We need both, and we need to recognize the importance of both. So today we looked at Immanuel Kant, and we discussed his aesthetic categories of the beautiful and the sublime.
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We discussed how the experience of the beautiful or sublime often emits a feeling of transcendence which seems to indicate there’s something greater or bigger than ourselves or our mere animal appetites.
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Then we explored Kant’s idea of disinterested pleasure and contemplated art’s relationship with function and utility.
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Lots of fascinating ideas, and I’ve certainly enjoyed contemplating them with you. The beautiful, the sublime—these are things I chase after in my studio.
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And I’ve seen how grabbing ahold of these threads have led me to the ultimate source of being.
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A being who is completely holy and incomprehensible. And a being who is certainly beautiful beyond description.
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Thank you for your attention, we’ll catch you next time!
Topics:Immanuel Kantbeautysublimeaestheticsdisinterested pleasurephilosophy of artorder and harmonyaesthetic experiencetranscendenceethics in art
