models.”^31 As in the experience of beauty in nature, the audience must feelas
thoughthe product is favorable to our cognitive and practical interests as
subjects, something we can or could take as a model and follow after. It must
seem to us to model and anticipate a world of subjects who act all at once fully,
freely, expressively, and according todeeply purposive reason,without coercion
or constraint.
Kant’s accounts of both natural and artistic beauty have considerable
appeal. Natural and artistic beauty seem to engage and absorb the eye or
ear together with the attentive mind, and they seem valuable“for their own
sake,”rather than for the sake of any exterior cognitive or practical interest.
Dewey notes that attention to the formed work of artresemblesan experience
of thinkingaboutsomething else via the use of signs and symbols, yet the
focus remains on the work itself and on its qualities, which are evident in
attentive perception.^32 Attending to formal qualities and interrelations in the
work may well produce the kind of pleasurable absorption and have the kind
of value that Kant says it has. The satisfying arrangement of qualities or
formal elements isacriterion of art.
Yet we may also doubt whether Kant’s account is wholly adequate to the
varieties of art. Kant’s central terms“form of purposiveness”and“harmoni-
ous free play of the cognitive faculties”arevague and metaphysical. They do
not point to any neutral, uncontestable procedures for identifying successful
works. Though he holds that works of art do express indefinite“aesthetic
ideas”–ideas such as justice and freedom that can only be figuratively
symbolized, not directly embodied in things present to sense experience^33 –
his focus on formal elements and the pleasure of apprehending them may
underrate the representational and cognitive dimensions of some art. Many
works of twentieth-century art, including much of Dada, conceptual art, and
performance art, seem more provocative and“assertational”than intended
to provide pleasure in the apprehension of arranged formal elements.
Nonetheless, where provocative and assertational intentions wholly over-
ride the imperative to achieve satisfying form in a medium, then the status of
Wordsworth on the Reception of Genius,”inEssays in Kant’s Aesthetics, ed. Ted Cohen and
Paul Guyer (University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 179–93.(^31) Ibid. (^32) See Dewey,Art as Experience, p. 38.
(^33) On aesthetic ideas see Kant,Critique, trans. Guyer and Matthews, §49, pp. 191–96, and on
symbolization see §59, pp. 225–27.
Beauty and form 61