Kant's analysis of the significance of works of fine art is a species of his general analysis of beauty. Fundamental to Kant's concept of the function of works of art is his notion of the communication of aesthetic ideas, which are said to be creations of artistic genius conveyed through artefacts. This article explores Kant's treatment of aesthetic ideas by specifying their logical and epistemological characteristics: in what ways can aesthetic ideas be said to be conceptual, and in what ways are they basically intuitive? After detailing the relation of aesthetic ideas to concepts and to the cognitive powers Kant holds to be necessary for both cognition and the experience of beauty, this article goes on to address the question of the intersubjective communicability of such ideas, bringing to the fore Kant's reliance on the notion of aesthetic Geist to describe the relation of idea to audience through artwork.

Characterizations of Kant's doctrine of aesthetic ideas range from ‘peculiar’ (Sassen Reference Sassen1991/2003: 174) to ‘complex, if not abstruse’ (Crawford Reference Crawford1982/2003: 158), or indeed even ‘unenlightening’ (Crawford Reference Crawford1982/2003: 164). The obscurity of Kant's notion of the aesthetic idea is evinced by the fact that the writers of such descriptions as these frequently hold conflicting views concerning the very properties Kant means to ascribe to aesthetic ideas.Footnote 1 In order to elucidate Kant's theory of the mind's production of these ideas, it will be useful to contrast his assessment of the interplay of the cognitive powers in this production with his assessment of their interaction in the cognition of empirical concepts. In both cases, the representation in question (whether an aesthetic idea or an empirical concept) arises from the imagination acting in concert with the understanding and sensibility.

In the cognition of objects of experience, the action of the imagination is regulated by the understanding such that the reproductive power of imagination operates according to a determinate concept of the object. Without such a concept, there could be no unified (i.e. self-identical) object; there could only be a succession of intuitions (Kant Reference Kant1998: 224; CPR B125–6). Kant notes in the third Critique that ‘When the imagination is used for cognition, then it is under the constraint of the understanding and is subject to the restriction of adequacy to the understanding's concept’ (Kant Reference Kant1987: 185; CJ 5: 316). In cognition, the understanding constrains the imagination precisely because concepts function as rules for cognizing an object as the same object from one moment to the next. An unregulated imagination could never cognize objects, since cognition in the strict sense is ‘a whole of compared and connected representations’ (Kant Reference Kant1998: 228; CPR A97) united according to a rule prescribing norms for empirical association. In cognition, the imagination moves along only on the track laid for it by the understanding.

Kant's analysis of the interaction of the cognitive powers that motivates the composition of fine art (schöne Kunst) contrasts sharply with his assessment of the relationship of the imagination to the understanding in the cognition of objects. We may, I submit, draw an analogy between the relation of mechanical art (which Kant defines as that which ‘merely performs the acts that are required to make a possible object actual, adequately to our cognition of that object’: Kant Reference Kant1987: 172; CJ 5: 305) to fine art and the relation of the imagination's action under the regulation of a determinate concept to the imagination's free action in the creation of an aesthetic idea. Kant explains that mechanical art requires the existence of a determinate concept prior to the formation of the product. As for a work of fine art, however, no such concept pre-exists and determines the creation of the artwork. Indeed, Kant advances a stronger claim: not only does no such concept determine the work, but as the art of the beautiful (das Schöne), no determinate concept could ever govern the creation of fine art. That which is judged to be beautiful is judged as purposive without the determinate concept of some purpose.Footnote 2 ‘Even though the purposiveness (Zweckmäβigkeit) in a product of fine art is intentional’, Kant remarks, ‘it must still not seem intentional … there must be no hint that the rule was hovering before the artist's eyes and putting fetters on his mental powers’ (Kant Reference Kant1987: 174; CJ 5: 307). Were the rule to ‘hover’ thus, it would be the imagination that would be ‘fettered’ in service to whatever determinate concept, provided by the understanding, governed the artistic production.

Kant clearly felt the weight of the onus probandi concerning how a product of fine art might be free (i.e. of rigid conceptual determination) and yet not merely chaotic, displaying no regulation whatsoever. His solution is to posit genius (Genie) as ‘the innate mental predisposition through which nature gives the rule to art’ (Kant Reference Kant1987: 174; CJ 5: 307). For Kant, genius cannot be a faculty for cognizing empirical concepts (since its rules are not determinate), but nor is it simply the imagination, since it regulates in some way the work of that cognitive power. In a sense, it is useful to interpret Kant as deriving the regulative operation of genius negatively from the notion of fine art: to the extent that fine art – as art judged to be beautiful – must be intentionally purposive, it must somehow be rule-governed. Any governing rule, however, must be known neither to the mind judging the artwork (or else the work could never be the object of a pure aesthetic judgement, since such a judgement would always be alloyed with the (logical) judgement of the work's adequacy to the concept) nor to the genius creating the artwork (or else the work would be a product of mechanical rather than fine art). Genius, therefore, cannot amount to a faculty for freely determining the will, since it can have no concept of any determinate purpose that would qualify as an object of the will's interest. It is in this sense, and for this reason, that Kant claims that it is through genius ‘as nature that it gives the rule’ to the artwork (Kant Reference Kant1987: 175; CJ 5: 308): the operation of genius is natural, not free.

Returning to the above analogy, we recall that the production of mechanical art is governed by a given determinate concept. With respect to fine art, it is Kant's contention that genius is the talent for discovering and expressing an analogous representation that motivates the creation of the artwork, i.e. the aesthetic idea, which Kant defines as a representation that encourages a lot of thought but to which can be ascribed no determinate concept. Aesthetic ideas begin from objects of experience and conjoin other representations thereto, thus forming an idea that exceeds any determinate concept thereof. It might be said that the totalizing impulse of reason is the formal cause of the aesthetic idea: the imagination, impelled by reason, expands a representation beyond the bounds of the understanding in an effort either to express sensibly a rational idea (e.g. God, the soul, freedom, etc.) or to express a possible object of experience with a completeness and totality that could never be experienced (cf. Kant Reference Kant1987: 182–3; CJ 5: 314). Reason provides the guiding principle for aesthetic ideas in that it acts as an organizer for diverse representations in this way (cf. Kemal Reference Kemal1986: 56).

Francis Coleman clearly expresses the relation of genius to concept, idea, and artwork as follows:

Once the imagination has begun to produce representations free from the understanding's laws for proper association, the understanding's capacity for comprehension in a determinate concept has been exceeded, and from that point the production of fine art amounts to the expression of an aesthetic idea, i.e. an intuition to which no concept is adequate. Thus, as Kenneth Rogerson puts it, the absence of regulation by determinate concepts is a necessary condition for the ‘free harmony’ of the cognitive faculties described by Kant:

It is concerning the beauty of the resulting product that taste judges reflectively without concepts even though a concept – i.e. that which constituted the basis for the aesthetic idea – is known to have been fundamental to the work's creation. According to Kant's conception of creativity, then, the imagination orders the manifold of representations freely, and the relevantly reflective aesthetic judgement claims that there ought to exist some concept under which the manifold can be comprehended, even though this concept cannot be known as a determinate rule in advance of the production (cf. Crawford Reference Crawford1982/2003: 162–3). ‘It is the task of taste’, as Sassen puts it, ‘to ensure internal coherence’ according to its reflective judgement (1991/2003: 174).

Thus determinate concepts are not absent from the formation of aesthetic ideas; indeed, an aesthetic idea involves connecting such a concept with multiple representations. What distinguishes the formation of an aesthetic idea from the cognition of an empirical object, however, is the fact that in the latter case the activity of the imagination operates in service to determination by the understanding, while in the former case it does not. Rudolf Makkreel points out the sense in which this distinction is relevant to Kant's account of the activity of artistic creation:

According to Kant, in the cognition of any experience, representations are produced by the imagination according to the understanding's rules with respect to empirical association. In the case of the formation of aesthetic ideas, however, Kant holds that the imagination is free from such rules, allowing the mind to ‘process that material [of empirical representations] … into something that surpasses nature’ (Kant Reference Kant1987: 182; CJ 5: 314). Indeed, one of the reasons Kant calls these mental conglomerations ‘ideas’ is because their content exceeds the bounds of any possible experience (cf. Crawford Reference Crawford1974: 120). In cognizing objects as such, the imagination serves the understanding with regularly associated representations. In forming aesthetic ideas, the understanding serves the imagination with an initial empirical concept on the basis of which the imagination freely connects other representations that are otherwise unrelated to the exhibition of that concept (Kant Reference Kant1987: 183; CJ 5: 315). In so doing, creative imagination ‘sublates’ the regular experience of nature by reorganizing those otherwise unrelated representations around the initial concept (cf. Zuidervaart Reference Zuidervaart1984/2003: 201). As Makkreel points out, ‘the creation involved in aesthetic ideas is not an Urbildung, or original formation, but a kind of Umbildung, or transformative process’ (1990: 120).

Turning now to the question of aesthetic Geist and communicability, our situation is aptly put in the following formulation by Zuidervaart: ‘Unlike any other representation generated by the human mind, an aesthetic idea has bound up with it a free but natural feeling of an inconceivable but communicable state of mental harmony’ (1984/2003: 203). We turn here to the two conjunctions included in this seemingly paradoxical statement, attempting to assess the respective senses in which the expression of an aesthetic idea can seem ‘free but natural’ and the sense of its harmony ‘inconceivable but communicable’. As Kemal, for example, points out with respect to the first of these juxtapositions, in order for Kant's aesthetic theory to be compatible with the rest of his philosophy, it must show how a work of fine art, which is an object existing in the phenomenal world, is not determined by natural necessity. Kant's treatment of how it is that genius ‘gives the rule to art’ is thus a crucial component of his theory of the creation of works of fine art (cf. Kemal Reference Kemal1986: 37–8). As I have already explicated, the Kantian notion of genius is that of a talent that operates without a determinate concept regulating its activity, but genius is nevertheless said to be responsible for giving the rule to art (Kant Reference Kant1987: 174; CJ 5: 307).

The notion of a rule not based on a determinate concept may seem more than a little puzzling to a careful reader of the Critique of Pure Reason; the general notion of a rule (Regel) employed in the first Critique is tied analytically to that of a concept (Kant Reference Kant1998: 235; CPR A113).Footnote 3 Already in the third Critique, however, Kant has introduced a type of non-conceptual (i.e. non-objective) rule, viz. in the analytic of the beautiful, specifically in his treatment of the third moment of judgements of taste (Kant Reference Kant1987: 64–84; CJ 5: 219–36). Thus the notion of a rule without a concept should be familiar by the time Kant turns his attention to the expression of aesthetic ideas in fine art. Nevertheless, Kant thinks that one of the ramifications of the fact that the rule given through genius is not determinately conceptual is that ‘genius itself cannot describe or indicate scientifically how it brings about its products’ (Kant Reference Kant1987: 175; CJ 5: 308). The lack of a determinate concept to regulate the activity of genius entails the inability of genius to describe the rule it gives to its creation, as if sketching a blueprint for the artwork. Later Kant draws a similar conclusion when he notes that the imagination thinks more in the formation of an aesthetic idea ‘than can be comprehended within one concept and hence in one determinate linguistic expression’ (Kant Reference Kant1987: 184; CJ 5: 315). Though he does not explicitly identify conceptual comprehensibility with the capacity for determinate linguistic expression, he does seem to view the former as at least a necessary condition for the latter.Footnote 4 Determinate conceptual communication can never be adequate to the content of an aesthetic idea, which is just to say that, because its rule is not derived from determinate concepts, fine art cannot communicate its content through determinate linguistic expression. It might be said, therefore, that the artist must indeed possess a concept in order to express an aesthetic idea, but that concept is not a determinate notion of the work itself. Rather, it would be the concept of a purpose, specifically, that of expressing the aesthetic idea in an artefact (cf. Makkreel Reference Makkreel1990: 122).

It is important to emphasize that the incapacity of genius to express the rule of a work of fine art through determinate language is not a contingent matter for Kant. In view of his ascription to genius of the role of giving the rule to fine art – that is, the art of the beautiful – Kant cannot, as a matter of logical consistency, allow that genius possesses the ability to articulate its rule via determinate linguistic expressions: insofar as fine art differs from mechanical art, genius cannot have any determinate concept of (or rule for) what it means to produce – if it did, it could not be the faculty responsible for creating works judged as purposive without a purpose, since a purpose simply amounts to purposiveness relative to a determinate concept (cf. Kant Reference Kant1987: 64–5; CJ 5: 220). If an object has been judged to be purposive and there exists a determinate concept of the rule for producing that object (e.g. as in the production of a lawnmower), then a purpose for the object has been determined. Thus although genius begins its activity of discovering an aesthetic idea by attending to various representations, were genius able to cognize the rule for its production of fine art according to some determinate concept, the artwork could no longer be judged as beautiful; it could in that case only be judged as being a more or less adequate instantiation of that concept. Thus for example Rogerson explains Kant's reluctance to assimilate judgements of beauty to judgements of adequacy as follows:

Rogerson goes on to argue that ‘perfectionism allows little room for creativity or originality’ (Rogerson Reference Rogerson2008: 36). This latter claim declares the incompatibility of perfectionism with genius; the former describes perfectionism's incompatibility with taste.

Just as genius is unable to determine the rule for its production of fine art prior to its creation of the work, nor can the rule be determinately evident (i.e. apparent in the form of a determinate concept) to the observer, however much taste she may possess. Because of the nature of judgements about the beautiful (i.e. they are regulative rather than determinative), her reflection on beautiful (schöne) art must be accompanied by the feeling of the artefact's freedom from rules. As such, the work of art must appear unintentional, i.e. fine art must appear as if it were natural, and nature as if it were an artist (Cassirer Reference Cassirer1938: 271). Thus Kant's account of creativity proposes to unify two opposing philosophical notions, i.e. the freedom of genius from heteronomous rules and the exemplary – not just original – quality of the artefact, which implies that the artefact appears as if determined by some rule (cf. Sassen Reference Sassen1991/2003: 172). But if the rule for the production of the artefact is not determinable according to concepts, how can any artwork serve as an example capable of imitation? As Kemal points out, that which is original is not necessarily creative: the creative product must also be exemplary, serving not just as a model but as a standard (cf. Kemal Reference Kemal1986: 47–8).Footnote 5

Kant's own admission of the difficulty of explaining the manner in which the apprentice is to imitate a rule given by artistic genius, without thereby simply copying the respective work of art, illustrates a dilemma inherent in attempting to choose to follow a rule not based on a concept. On the one hand, unless Kant is to equivocate entirely on the notion of a rule, he must expound on some sense in which the rule given through genius can be followed, and it would seem prima facie that the ability to follow this sort of rule (as opposed, e.g. to a natural law) presupposes knowledge of that rule's content: that is, if the apprentice is to choose to follow the artist's rule, she must begin by knowing that rule. In cases of any conceptually grounded (i.e. determinate) rule, there would ostensibly be no problem, since the artist could simply communicate the rule to the apprentice by describing it. As we have seen, however, there is on the other hand the fact that rules for fine art are by definition conceptually indeterminable. So long as beauty cannot be determined according to concepts, the rule for a work of fine art must be in a sense ineffable. How then is the apprentice to follow a rule that can never be given to her in descriptive language?

Kant does little more than throw up his hands at the question, concluding for the sake of consistency that the apprentice must experience a model of the artwork (hearing or reading a description of it will not do) and then be mentally aroused after the fashion of the genius who created the original work (Kant Reference Kant1987: 177–8; CJ 5: 309–10). It is important, I submit, to see why such an answer seems at first unsatisfying given the way in which the dilemma was posed above. In one's initial estimation of a case of aesthetic rule-following, it may seem as if the apprentice chooses to follow the rule given by genius to a work of art. Given the modest premise that choosing to follow a rule presupposes knowledge of that rule, the problem arises as to how the apprentice could ever know a rule that is in principle non-cognizable. Attending to Kant's initial description of the nature of genius, however, we see a flaw in our setup of the dilemma: through genius, nature, not freedom, gives the rule to art. A work of fine art is the product of a talent that does not possess the power to control the occasion or manner of its production (cf. Kant Reference Kant1987: 175; CJ 5: 308). Once nature has given the rule to a work of art, any following of that rule that does not amount to mere aping is no more a matter of free choice than was the initial creation of the artwork. Indeed, following a rule given through a work of fine art and thereby creating a new work of fine art must, according to Kant's account of aesthetic genius, be closer akin to following a law of nature than it is to determining the will according to an object of interest. Thus although genius cannot describe its rule to the artistic apprentice, this counts as no loss for the aspiring artist, since the creation of her own artwork would not in any case involve her choosing to follow a determinate rule.

To concede that genius is unable, using determinate linguistic articulation, to communicate the rule given to a work of fine art is not, however, to say that the aesthetic idea is altogether incommunicable. In fact, Kant claims that there exists a special mental capability for the communication of these ideas:

As we have already noted, the faculty of genius is comprised of two powers: first, that of the discovery of aesthetic ideas, which involves the free play of the imagination operating independently of rules for association and of the conjoining of various representations to an empirical concept given by the understanding. The second power of genius, described in the passage above, is that of the expression of the resultant aesthetic idea. Geist is Kant's term for the principle governing this expression (Kant Reference Kant1987: 181–2; CJ 5: 313–14).Footnote 6 More specifically, Geist is the ability to express aesthetic ideas so as to allow the artist to communicate the harmonious ‘mental attunement’ produced by those ideas (Kant Reference Kant1987: 186; CJ 5: 317). Without Geist, this unity of the host of various representations intermingled in the aesthetic idea would not be communicable at all, which is just to say that no unified work of art would be possible without Geist. Stronger claims might be advanced concerning the role of expression in Kant's aesthetic theory,Footnote 7 but at least we may affirm Cassirer's declaration that ‘Geist is nothing else but the indefinite harmony of the mental powers, their subjectively purposive relation … It gives life to the work of art, and a work of art which is ohne Geist is lifeless’ (1938: 279). This harmony may be said to be ‘indefinite’ in that it is not definable simply by explicating the logical attributes of some determinate concept (cf. Kant Reference Kant1987: 183; CJ 5: 315), but through Geist the aesthetic idea lives in its expression as a true unity, a unity which would seem to be the ‘original concept’ to which Kant refers.Footnote 8

Zuidervaart further explains the significance of Geist within the framework of Kant's aesthetic theory by pointing out the practical importance of expression:

The artistic genius may possess an aesthetic idea within himself, but Geist is a necessary condition for the actualization of that idea as an object. Geist publicizes the idea for the enjoyment of the artist's audience and the inspiration of his apprentices. It can be inferred from this that without Geist the notion of beauty would not be predicable of the artwork viewed through the lens of aesthetic ideas, since only Geist is capable of universalizing the idea through its objectification. Through the artwork, Geist communicates the aesthetic idea without describing it.

Geist, then, is a power of aesthetic expression, though not one that employs determinate language in an attempt to describe an aesthetic idea. Although the precise sense of the phrase ‘determinate linguistic expression’ (Kant Reference Kant1987: 184; CJ 5: 315) is perhaps unclear, it seems safe to assume that, at least, Kant means that the use of language for the purpose of the logical exhibition (i.e. the analysis) of a determinate concept is inadequate for the expression of an aesthetic idea. Non-linguistic examples of such expression are found in works of non-linguistic art, such as painting or sculpture. For instance, Caravaggio's The Sacrifice of Isaac conveys a variety of ideal content: representations of power, obedience, freedom, and love are interlaced with a great deal of emotional force. This communication is aesthetic in the Kantian sense in that it is accomplished without the medium of determinate language or concepts. The Geist that animates Caravaggio's work amounts to the artist's capacity for non-conceptually communicating the content of the ideas involved in its creation.

In some artistic media, Geist does employ language to convey an aesthetic idea (e.g. in poetry or oratory), but in so doing, language is used for the communication of ‘aesthetic attributes’ rather than ‘logical attributes’ (Kant Reference Kant1987: 183; CJ 5: 315). The final lines of Robert Frost's ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ are revelatory of the sense in which the communicative power of Geist differs from ‘determinate linguistic expression’. Frost's poem does not differ syntactically from the sentence structure of English language employed ‘determinately’. Rather, the distinction seems to be a semantic one, operating at the level of the entire work. Part of the aesthetic significance of the poem involves the repetition witnessed in the final lines (‘And miles to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep.’). The repetition of the clause contributes nothing to the logical exhibition of any concept; the linguistic expression of the last line is logically identical to that of the previous line. Nonetheless, it deepens and resituates the ideal content at play in the rest of the poem. On Kant's account, when the language of poetry is connected with aesthetic Geist, there is something about the resulting whole that exhibits the sense of the aesthetic idea in a way in which the same language could not be used to express the idea if it were a determinate concept.

This aesthetic mode of expression, whether linguistically mediated or not, is generally conceivable as symbolism. Since an aesthetic idea cannot be communicated conceptually (by contrast, say, with linguistically expressible concepts), the artist must represent it symbolically such that the ‘presence’ of the aesthetic idea in the artefact inspires different aesthetic ideas in the audience (cf. Sassen Reference Sassen1991/2003: 175). Thus as, for example, Rogerson notes, ‘Kant suggests that ideas can only represent symbolically by suggesting that which cannot be literally exemplified’ (2008: 38). Kant's own term for the process through which aesthetic ideas can be communicated non-discursively is ‘symbolic hypotyposis’ (symbolische Hypotypose) (Kant Reference Kant1987: 226; CJ 5: 351). It involves the reflective specification of some object as the symbol of another that is quite different from the first. Unlike discursive language, symbolic hypotyposis does not attempt to reproduce a concept in words but instead ‘indirectly’ communicates an idea via representational analogies (cf. Makkreel Reference Makkreel1990: 123–5). It is through the power of Geist that symbolic hypotyposis is achieved, and for Kant, such symbolism is the highest – and indeed the only – form of expression achievable by works of fine art.

It therefore seems no exaggeration to say that but for aesthetic Geist artworks would on Kant's account be expressively opaque, remaining mysteries even to the artists themselves. Geist gives non-discursive form to the ideal content (i.e. aesthetic ideas) expressed in works of fine art. This claim has heretofore been recognized by many, but its centrality to Kant's theory of art's expressive capacity seems not to have been a matter of particular emphasis. The philosophical and historical importance of Kant's special notion of aesthetic Geist ought not to be lightly dismissed; it appears to have resonated particularly strongly with G. W. F. Hegel, whose aesthetic theory is grounded in just such a concept.Footnote 10 Makkreel recognizes this link in passing, noting that ‘Kant anticipates, if only fleetingly, the whole tradition from Hegel through Dilthey that links spirit with various modes of objectification’ (Makkreel Reference Makkreel1990: 122, n. 5). Hegel himself regarded Kant's aesthetics as ‘the starting point for the true comprehension of the beauty of art’ (Hegel Reference Hegel1975: 60). Perhaps it may be said that for both Kant and Hegel, aesthetic Geist is essential to the communicability of the ideal content of this beauty. The extent to which this claim is univocal for the two philosophers seems worthy of further investigation.