On the Aesthetic Judgment and the Beauty of the World
Quaeritur
Utrum iudicium aestheticum, quod Kant describit ut Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck, id est “purposiveness without purpose,” possit intellegi non tantum ut motus subiectivus delectationis, sed etiam ut indicium transcendentalis concordiae inter sensum et intellectum, ita ut in ipso sensibili appareat vestigium formae divinae, quae est principium omnis pulchritudinis creaturae.
Whether the aesthetic judgment, which Kant describes as “purposiveness without purpose,” may be understood not merely as a subjective feeling of pleasure but as an indication of the transcendental harmony between sense and intellect, such that within the sensible there appears a trace of the divine form, the principle of all creaturely beauty.
Thesis
The aesthetic judgment is the experience in which reason is reconciled with sense without the mediation of a concept, revealing an inner accord of faculties otherwise dissonant in ordinary cognition. In this gratuitous harmony, which seeks nothing beyond its own consonance, the intellect touches the trace of divine order. The beauty of the world, though a sensible experience, is an analogy of divine form, a prelude to theology in which the creature manifests the grace of its being.
Locus classicus
Kritik der Urteilskraft, §§1–22 (AA V: 204–231):
“Das Schöne ist das, was ohne Begriff als Gegenstand eines notwendigen Wohlgefallens erkannt wird.”
The beautiful is that which, without a concept, is apprehended as the object of a necessary delight.
and §9 (AA V: 220):
“Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck.”
Purposiveness without purpose.
In these early sections Kant defines the beautiful as that which elicits a feeling of purposive harmony between imagination and understanding, though this harmony cannot be determined conceptually. The judgment of taste thus mediates between the deterministic order of nature and the autonomy of freedom.
Explicatio
Kant’s Critique of Judgment begins with the analysis of aesthetic experience as a phenomenon that unites sensibility and reason without subsuming one to the other. In the judgment of taste, the mind finds itself in a free play. The imagination and understanding correspond spontaneously, producing a feeling of delight that is both individual and universally communicable.
This “purposiveness without purpose” expresses a peculiar transcendental structure. It reveals that the world, as it appears, is not alien to the human faculties of knowledge but proportioned to them as if designed for their accord. The necessity of the aesthetic pleasure, that is that everyone ought to find this beautiful, signals a claim to universal validity that exceeds private emotion.
The aesthetic judgment therefore discloses, though it cannot prove, a transcendental harmony between mind and world. It mediates between the mechanical lawfulness of the first Critique and the moral autonomy of the second, pointing toward a unity that will later demand the supersensible substrate. Beauty thus inaugurates the movement from mere cognition to the awareness of meaning within being.
Theologically interpreted, this experience bears ontological weight. The sensus pulchri is the creature’s pre-conceptual participation in the Logos. In the aesthetic delight that arises from proportion, radiance, and integrity, the human spirit experiences the trace of the divine wisdom through which all things are ordered. The harmony between imagination and understanding mirrors, on a finite plane, the eternal correspondence between divine intellect and created form.
Hence, beauty is not accidental ornamentation but manifestation. It is the appearance of order as grace, the epiphany of being’s intelligibility in sensuous form. The delight of the beautiful is thus the affective echo of divine affirmation: “and behold, it was very good.”
From this point of view, aesthetic judgment is not antithetical to theology but preparatory for it. It establishes the possibility of revelation through form. The same Logos who gives moral law and rational order also shines forth in the splendor of form. What Kant calls the free harmony of the faculties may therefore be seen as the creaturely reflection of that intra-divine harmony through which form, end, and delight coincide in God.
Objectiones
Ob. I. Empiricism argues that beauty is a sensory affection, and that the universality of aesthetic judgment is a fiction of communication, not a property of the object. No knowledge lies in delight.
Ob. II. Critical formalism claims that Kant himself denies that the aesthetic judgment can teach anything about God or the ends of nature. It is only a mode of reflection on our faculties, not a revelation of transcendental things.
Ob. III. The theology of the cross teaches that God is revealed in deformity and suffering, not in beauty. Beauty is the glory of the creature, but God hides beneath its opposite.
Ob. IV. Existentialism avers that beauty reveals nothing; it is an affective compensation for the absurdity of existence, not a vision of divine order.
Responsiones
Ad I. The feeling of beauty involves a claim to universal assent, and this claim transcends the private. Such universality without concept implies an objective ground of harmony between the faculties and the world. Even if empirical verification is impossible, the structure of the judgment presupposes a common rational order, an analogical participation in intelligible form.
Ad II. While Kant forbids metaphysical inference, he admits transcendental signification. The aesthetic judgment intimates the purposiveness of nature without defining its cause. Theology, interpreting this sign as vestigium sapientiae divinae, does not overstep critique but fulfills its openness. The “as if” of purposiveness becomes the “because” of creation.
Ad III. The cross does not abolish form but reveals its transfiguration. In Christ crucified, beauty and horror coincide; the pulchritudo crucis is beauty reconciled to truth. Thus, the theology of the cross deepens aesthetics: it discloses that true form is not symmetry alone but the radiance of love that gives itself.
Ad IV. Existential alienation misreads delight as flight. Yet the very capacity to perceive beauty amid suffering testifies to a transcendent order sustaining existence. Aesthetic joy is not escape but participation; it is the creature’s resonance with the intelligible goodness that grounds being against nothingness.
Nota
The aesthetic judgment marks the first recovery, after modernity’s fragmentation, of a holistic vision of reason and sense. Where the first Critique disjoined knowing from being, feeling here restores their secret unity. Beauty becomes the threshold by which epistemology turns toward ontology.
For theology, this signifies that revelation does not first occur in propositions but in splendor, in the radiance of form that draws the mind toward its source. In the delight of the beautiful, the soul anticipates participation: forma becomes praeambulum gratiae.
Determinatio
Aesthetic judgment is a harmony of the transcendental faculties; it is a sign of the concordance between reason and the world.
Beauty, in so far as it is sensible, is an analogy of the divine form in which the intellect and sense are joined together.
Delight in beauty is a pre-conceptual participation in the Logos, who is both form and finality of creation.
Aesthetics therefore prepares for teleology; feeling gives way to reflection, and purposiveness felt becomes purposiveness thought.
Transitus ad Disputationem XXXVIII: De Iudicio Teleologico et Fine Naturae
If in beauty the soul feels purposiveness without purpose, in teleology the intellect thinks purposiveness with an end implied. Aesthetic harmony awakens a sense of design; teleological reflection interprets that design as order.
Therefore, we advance to Disputatio XXXVIII: De Iudicio Teleologico et Fine Naturae, wherein it will be asked how the reflective reason, moving from the experience of beauty, comes to posit purposiveness as a principle of nature itself, and how this transition anticipates the theological doctrine of creation ordered toward the glory of God.
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