eighteenth-century germany: winckelmann and kant 45
suffering of its victims, as the Emperor Nero supposedly did by playing
the lyre while Rome burned. Yet Kant is determined to preserve the
possibility that human beings can do this paradoxical thing, and evalu-
ate an object without reference to the interests or purposes it may serve.
In all other kinds of thought and judgement we are under some kind of
compulsion—either the compulsion of our appetites (hunger, greed,
sexual desire, and so forth) or the compulsion of our moral principles
(philanthropy, duty, political conviction, and so forth). Even in purely
logical judgements we are constrained by the requirements of proof, or
by the limits of our objective knowledge. Only in the estimation of the
beautiful are we utterly free.
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Kant explains the delight we feel, in the contemplation of the beau-
tiful, as arising from the feeling that our mental faculties are in free
play; they are not impeded or curtailed by the limits of our knowledge,
the needs of our physical bodies, or the demands of our consciences.
For Kant it is crucial that this free play involves both our intellectual
faculties and our faculties of sense perception; only in the interaction of
these faculties do we feel delight in what it is to be a human being,
capable of both sensation and thought, and only in the freedom of their
interaction is this delight unconstrained and undirected to a finite
outcome.
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This produces a feeling of liveliness or expansiveness that
has no logical or practical limits—something we can get from no other
kind of experience, for in every other case there is some definite goal, or
some practical limitation, that stops the free play of the mind from
ranging further. We might compare Winckelmann’s descriptions of his
own responses to works of art, in which he often dwells on feelings of
intensified life.
For Kant the experience of freedom is unequivocally positive. But it
is not difficult to see how his theory could be controversial, not only in
the period of the French Revolution (which erupted in 1789, just the
year before the Critique of Judgement was published), but also in later
periods up to and including our own. If the judgement of taste is indif-
ferent to personal prejudices and biases, it is equally indifferent to
noble or altruistic motives. If it is not directed to an end or purpose, it
cannot oppress or manipulate, but neither can it benefit anyone or
accomplish any good deed. To the earliest critics of Kant’s work this
radical freedom of mind could seem terrifyingly amoral; more recently
it has been accused of escapism or political irresponsibility.
Yet it is also possible to interpret Kant’s aesthetics as politically
emancipatory. Such ideas are developed in the Aesthetic Letters (1795) of
Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), the dramatist and close friend of Goethe.
To think beyond the limits of existing knowledge, morality, or politics,
Schiller believes we need the radical freedom of the Kantian aesthetic.
He reconfigures Kantian disinterest into a new notion of ‘aesthetic
determinability’, a state brought about by the experience of beauty, in