PAUL GUYER
Kant and the Philosophy of Architecture
i. before and after kant
Architecture does not loom large in Kant’s aes-
thetics, nor has Kant’s thought about architecture,
such as it is, loomed large in the history of thought
about architecture. But there is a profound differ-
ence in the philosophy of architecture—by which
I mean here views about architecture in the writ-
ings of canonical figures in the history of philoso-
phy and philosophical aesthetics, not the broader
body of professional writing that might go under
the name of “architectural theory”—before and
after Kant.1 Given the indisputable influence of
Kant’s aesthetics on the next epoch of the disci-
pline, above all the aesthetics of German ideal-
ism in the forty years following the publication of
Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment in 1790,
it thus seems natural to look for the shift in philo-
sophical thinking about architecture within Kant’s
aesthetics. The shift is there to be found. The shift
I have in mind is from an essentially Vitruvian
conception of architecture, according to which its
two chief goals are beauty and utility, to a cogni-
tivist or expressivist conception of architecture, in
which, like other forms of fine art, architecture is
thought of as expressing and communicating ab-
stract ideas, not just aiming for beauty and utility.
The decisive factor in this turn, I would suggest, is
Kant’s thesis that all art involves the expression of
“aesthetic ideas,” that is, the expression of rational
ideas in a form that yields inexhaustible material
for the play of the imagination. But I will also
argue that the range of forms that this general
thought can take in the philosophy of architec-
ture, from the thought that a work of architecture
should express and communicate its own function
to the thought that it should express the nature of
its structure and of the physical forces that under-

c 2011 The American Society for Aesthetics
lie that to the thought that a work of architecture
should give expression to more abstract, meta-
physical ideas, can be seen as a consequence of, or
at least allowed by, Kant’s own loose specification
of just what sort of intellectual content aesthetic
ideas have.
To the extent that the philosophy of architec-
ture might be thought to have had any influence
on architectural theory, Kant might then be seen
as responsible not only for the idea that architec-
ture should express ideas but also for the com-
peting views about what ideas architecture should
express. Of course, as Hegel famously said, the owl
of Minerva flies only at dusk, that is, philosophical
analysis often follows changes in cultural or sci-
entific practice rather than producing them, and
expressivist developments in architectural prac-
tice and theory may have preceded rather than
succeeded the Kantian and post-Kantian shift
to an expressivist philosophy of architecture—
think of the executed and unrealized but pub-
lished work of Etienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-
Nicolas Ledoux from the 1770s, for example.2 But
even if the Kantian shift in the philosophy of archi-
tecture did not cause a shift in architecture proper,
it can at least be thought not to have closed off,
but to have left open, competing conceptions of
the intellectual ambitions and imperatives of ar-
chitecture in architectural practice and theory.
I will only briefly characterize the radically
divergent tone of philosophies of architecture
prior to and after Kant before I give my ac-
count of Kant’s own incidental yet influential
thought about architecture. Philosophical thought
about architecture before Kant, I asserted, was
dominated by the Vitruvian paradigm. The Ten
Books on Architecture of Marcus Vitruvius Pol-
lio, thought to have been written between 33 and
8 The Aesthetics of Architecture
14 BCE, are primarily a manual on the siting, de-
sign, and construction of public buildings of vari-
ous types, from breakwaters and city walls to tem-
ples and theaters, private villas, and construction
machinery, and devote only a few introductory
lines to what we might think of as philosophical
and aesthetic theories of architecture.3 In Book I,
Chapter II, under the heading “The Fundamen-
tal Principles of Architecture,” Vitruvius states
that architecture depends on ordinatio, disposi-
tio, eurythmia, symmetria, decor, and distributio
or oeceonomia, or (in the early twentieth-century
translation of M. H. Morgan) “Order, Arrange-
ment, Eurythmy, Symmetry, Propriety, and Econ-
omy.”4 In Book I, Chapter III, Vitruvius states
that all types of building must be constructed “with
due reference” to firmitas, utilitas, and venustas, or
“durability, convenience, and beauty.”5 The rela-
tions between these two lists and the terms within
them may be understood the following way. Firmi-
tas or durability is not an aesthetic quality or merit,
but a physical and historical quality of a building
and its other properties: it is what allows a build-
ing with its utilitas or convenience and venustas
or beauty to endure and be enjoyed over time. So
it is not a value in its own right but rather an in-
strumental condition for the continued enjoyment
of the intrinsic values of a building, convenience
and beauty. Similarly, on the first list, economy
is not so much an independent virtue of build-
ings but rather the requirement to realize them
and their other virtues as efficiently as possible,
that is, as cheaply as possible relative to the requi-
site durability of the structure: “Economy denotes
the proper management of materials and of site,
as well as a thrifty balancing of cost and com-
mon sense in the construction of works.”6 Order,
arrangement, eurythmy, symmetry, and propriety
are then left to realize the two more general goals
of utility and beauty. More particularly, order, eu-
rythmy, and symmetry all concern perceptible pro-
portions among the shape, size, and number of the
members of a building, features of its form that
contribute to its beauty; arrangement concerns the
layout or “groundplan” of the building, which con-
tributes to its utility as well as to its beauty, and
also the elevation of the building, which might
be thought to contribute more to its beauty than
to its convenience.7 And propriety concerns, to
some extent, observation of traditional and there-
fore beloved patterns for construction (use of the
orders of columns and entablature, for example),
but, more importantly, the proper design of the
building for its intended function, such as the loca-
tion of “sacred precincts” in “very healthy neigh-
bourhoods with suitable springs of water” and the
proper locations of bedrooms, libraries, baths, and
picture galleries relative to sunlight.8 Thus, or-
der, eurythmy, and symmetry contribute primarily
to beauty, while arrangement and propriety con-
tribute somewhat to beauty but more so to utility.
The two basic values in architecture remain utility
and beauty.
This Vitruvian emphasis on utility and beauty
as the two fundamental values of architecture re-
mained prevalent in eighteenth-century philoso-
phy of architecture prior to Kant. For illustration, I
choose two authors who not only express this point
with particular clarity but also who enjoyed enor-
mous popularity and influence in their own times
and places precisely because they gave such clear
voice to widely held assumptions. I refer to Chris-
tian Freiherr von Wolff in Germany and Henry
Home, Lord Kames, in Britain, Wolff being the
chief voice of the German Enlightenment until
he was dethroned by Kant and Kames being the
chief voice of the Scottish Enlightenment. Wolff
(1679–1754) wrote an enormous series of text-
books, beginning with logic and metaphysics and
then covering every known field of theoretical and
practical philosophy, first in German and then, to
reach a wider audience, and at even greater length,
in Latin. In his Vernünftige Gedancken über Gott,
der Welt, und der Seele des Menschen (“Ratio-
nal Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul of
Man”), or “German Metaphysics,” first published
in 1719, he used architectural examples to illus-
trate his central conception of perfection, which
he analyzed as the concordance of the parts of
any object or action for the realization of its goal.
But Wolff does not just manifest the Vitruvian
paradigm in his use of architectural examples in
his metaphysics; he also devoted an entire treatise
to architecture in his four-volume encyclopedia
of mathematics, which appeared both in German
and in Latin. Here, Wolff begins his treatise on
the Principles of Architecture with the claim that
“architecture is a science for constructing a build-
ing so that it is in complete correspondence with
the intentions of the architect.”9 This locates the
harmony or agreement in which perfection always
consists in the relation between the intentions of
the architect and the building that results from
his or her plans and supervision. However, as he
Guyer Kant and the Philosophy of Architecture
proceeds, Wolff makes it clear that the intention
of an architect is always to produce a structure
that is both formally beautiful as well as useful
and comfortable, so the perfection of the inten-
tion can only be realized through the perfection
of both form and utility in the building itself. Thus,
Wolff argues on the one hand that “[a] building is
space that is enclosed by art in order that certain
functions can proceed there securely and unhin-
dered,” and that “[a] building is comfortable if
all necessary functions can proceed within it with-
out hindrance and vexation.”10 These definitions
form the basis for a requirement of perfection in
the utility of a building. On the other hand, how-
ever, Wolff also introduces his standard definition
of beauty, namely, that “[b]eauty is perfection or
the necessary appearance thereof, insofar as the
former or the latter is perceived, and causes a
pleasure in us,” and then asserts that “[a] build-
ing must be constructed beautifully and decora-
tively.”11 This is the basis for the requirement of
formal rather than utilitarian perfection in a build-
ing. Through the remainder of the treatise, both
conceptions of perfection are at work. Thus, Wolff
argues that the parts of buildings should exem-
plify certain proportions simply because they are
pleasing to the eye, and he gives a lengthy analy-
sis of the proportions of the five canonical orders
of columns that is based throughout on the as-
sumption that certain proportions simply appear
more harmonious to us than others—this is indeed
the rationale for Wolff’s inclusion of this trea-
tise in his mathematical compendium.12 But Wolff
gives equal time to considerations of utility, begin-
ning with a (Vitruvian) discussion of the correct
use of building materials, continuing through dis-
cussions of structural matters, such as that lower
stories of columns must be heavier than higher
ones because they carry more weight and that the
pitch of roofs must be determined by balancing
the need to shed rain and snow (which points to-
ward a steeper pitch) with the weight of the roof
itself (which would argue for less pitch), and con-
cluding with discussions of such matters as (once
again) the proper sizing of windows for both illu-
mination and the human pleasure of looking out
on the passing scene, the location of staircases for
proper circulation, and the construction of priv-
ies with proper ventilation and seats that can re-
main clean. Our overall pleasure in a building,
in other words, depends on both its beauty and
utility.
9
We find exactly the same assumption in the
comments on architecture in the Elements of Crit-
icism published by the Scottish jurist and man of
letters Henry Home, Lord Kames, in 1761. Kames,
a cousin of David Hume whose lordship came
from his seat on the highest court of Scotland,
published numerous works of jurisprudence and
history, but his Elements of Criticism was one of
the most widely read works of the Scottish En-
lightenment and was certainly the mostly widely
read work of the Scottish school of aesthetics un-
til well into the nineteenth century. The general
premise of Kames’s work is that we enjoy the un-
hindered motion of the mind along what he calls
“ideas in a train,” and that beauty and other aes-
thetic qualities facilitate such motion in one way
or another; this idea may be regarded as one of
the forerunners of Kant’s conception of our plea-
sure in beauty as due to the free play of imag-
ination and understanding. But Kames does not
make any explicit use of this thesis in his chapter
on “Gardening and Architecture,” which is the
penultimate chapter of the lengthy Elements; by
this point in the book, he must assume that the
reader understands what beauty is. Instead, his
point is that gardens and buildings, and their var-
ious components, “may be destined for use solely,
for beauty solely, or for both,” thus that build-
ings in particular may be distinguished “into three
kinds, namely, what are intended for utility solely,
what for ornament solely, and what for both.”13
Thus, Kames does not suggest that each work of
architecture must possess both utility and beauty,
but he does suggest that these two are the sole
merits of architecture. He also suggests that it is
typically easy to design works that are intended
to be either merely useful or merely beautiful,
and that “[t]he great difficulty of contrivance, re-
spects buildings that are intended to be beauti-
ful as well as ornamental.”14 The greater part of
his discussion thus concerns how these two goals
are to be conjointly realized in the same objects.
Like Wolff, he begins his illustration of this point
with windows, doors, and stairs, mentioning how
various aspects of them are determined by util-
ity—since human beings are all pretty much the
same size, for example, whether in a large build-
ing or a small building, “[t]he steps of a stair ought
to be accommodated to the human figure, with-
out regarding any other proportion”—but yet con-
siderations of utility must also be combined with
the requirements of freedom—for example, while
10
“[t]he height of a room exceeding nine or ten feet,
has little or no relation to utility,” considerations
of proportion, that is, beauty, will often require
a greater height than that, indeed “proportion is
the only rule for determining a greater height.”15
A great hall with a low ceiling would just appear
mean and ugly even if it was as useful as one with
a higher ceiling.16 Indeed, Kames does acknowl-
edge that architecture can strive for “grandeur”
as well as utility—“Of all the emotions that can be
raised by architecture, grandeur is that which has
the greatest influence on the mind; and it ought
therefore to be the chief study of the artist, to
raise this emotion in great buildings destined to
please the eye”—and for Kames, grandeur is a dif-
ferent property from beauty.17 But like beauty, as
Kames’s words indicate, grandeur is “destined to
please the eye,” and so it can be regarded as a
purely aesthetic property distinct from utility. The
point remains that for Kames the most complex
works of architecture aim to combine utility on
the one hand with more purely aesthetic proper-
ties such as beauty and grandeur on the other.
One point on which Kames seems to go be-
yond both Vitruvius and Wolff and to point to-
ward post-Kantian philosophies of architecture
is his statement “[t]hat every building ought to
have an expression corresponding to its destina-
tion: A palace ought to be sumptuous and grand;
a private dwelling, neat and modest; a play-house,
gay and splendid; and a monument, gloomy and
melancholy. . . . A Christian church . . . ought . . . to
be decent and plain, without much ornament . . .
because the congregation, during worship, ought
to be humble, and disengaged from the world.”18
Here it might seem as if Kames is supposing that
buildings ought to express ideas or moods inde-
pendently of both their utility and their beauty.
But even though he uses the term ‘expression,’
which might be taken to imply such a conclusion,
his point is rather that buildings must encourage
certain moods in order properly to serve their func-
tions, in other words, for the sake of utility in a
broad sense. Thus, he introduces the comments
just quoted with these sentences:
Regularity and proportion are essential in buildings des-
tined chiefly or solely to please the eye, because they
produce intrinsic beauty. But a skilful artist will not con-
fine his view to regularity and proportion; he will also
study congruity, which is perceived when the form and
ornaments of a structure are suited to the purpose for
The Aesthetics of Architecture
which it is intended. The sense of congruity dictates the
following rule, That every building have an expression
corresponding to its destination.19
In other words, having both structure and orna-
ment that will produce a certain emotion or mood
in its inhabitants or visitors is part of what is nec-
essary for the utility of a building—a church that
does not promote the feeling of humbleness is
just not serving its intended purpose very well.
Thus, in spite of recognizing the emotional aspect
of the experience of architecture, Kames remains
well within the Vitruvian paradigm that utility and
beauty are its two goals.
How different things look a few decades later,
after Kant. Let us look at the views expressed
about architecture by the three leading aestheti-
cians of post-Kantian German idealism, namely,
F. W. J. Schelling, Arthur Schopenhauer, and
G. W. F. Hegel. In his System of Transcendental
Philosophy (1800), Schelling famously described
art (in general) as the “universal organ of phi-
losophy,” more truthful than philosophy itself,
because it is the product and expression of the
“identity of the conscious and the unconscious in
the self, and consciousness of this identity.”20 Two
years later, in the winter semester of 1802–1803,
Schelling gave a set of lectures on the philoso-
phy of art at Jena, which he repeated in Würzburg
in 1804–1805; these were only published posthu-
mously in 1859, but they were widely enough re-
ported to have been influential long before that.21
In these lectures, Schelling replaced his earlier
contrast between the conscious and the uncon-
scious with a contrast between the real and the
ideal, roughly the material and the mental, and ar-
gued that both philosophy and art each combine
both, though with an emphasis on the mental in
philosophy and the material in art, although art
is never merely material but uses the material to
bring out the mental nature of reality. The arts
differ in how real or material they are, with liter-
ature obviously being the least dependent on the
material media in which it is recorded and com-
municated and architecture, needless to say, being
intimately involved with and dependent upon the
material realm. But in order to count as an art at
all, architecture must de-emphasize its own ma-
teriality and emphasize the ideal, or intellectual
content. Schelling puts this point by radically de-
parting from the Vitruvian paradigm: instead of
combining utility and beauty, architecture must
Guyer Kant and the Philosophy of Architecture
demote utility to a mere condition of its beauty,
not a goal in its own right, and beauty in turn is
understood as the expression of something intel-
lectual. Schelling puts the first point plainly:
Architecture . . . would not be fine art if it addressed
merely need and utility. For architecture as fine art, how-
ever, utility and the reference to need are themselves
only condition, not principle. Every mode of art is bound
to a specific form of appearance existing more or less in-
dependently of it, and only the fact that art puts into
this form the impression and image of beauty elevates it
to fine art. Hence, as regards architecture, precisely the
expediency is the form of the appearance, but not the
essence.22
The term ‘form’ has been used in a myriad of ways
in the history of aesthetics and philosophy more
generally, of course, but here, contrasted to ‘es-
sential,’ it pretty clearly means inessential: serving
some need (of a client or patron) is of course what
it takes to get a building from drawing board to
construction, but it is not, in Schelling’s view, what
architecture is really about.
Schelling’s second point, that the primary pur-
pose of architecture is intellectual, the expres-
sion of some idea, is more obscurely put. He
next says that “[i]t was earlier proved that na-
ture, science, and art in their various stages ob-
serve the sequence from the schematic to the al-
legorical and from there to the symbolic,” that
“[t]he most primal sequence is numbers,” and that
“[a]rchitecture, as the music of the plastic arts, thus
necessarily follows arithmetical relationships.”23
This suggests that what architecture should ex-
press or symbolize is mathematical relationships.
Thus, insofar as its beauty lies in its expression, its
beauty lies in its expression of mathematical rela-
tionships, and that should be the primary goal of
the architect. In spite of the metaphysical route
to this conclusion, the result would in fact be
a version of formalism in an ordinary sense of
that term. However, several pages later, Schelling
states, with emphasis, that “[a]rchitecture, in or-
der to be fine art, must portray the purposiveness
within itself as an objective purposiveness, that is,
as the objective identity between concept and thing,
the subjective and objective.” His “proof” for this
assertion is merely the general statement that “art
as such is merely the objective or real portrayal or
representation of the identity of the universal and
the particular, of the subjective and the objective
11
such that these appear as one in the portrayed ob-
ject itself,” and it is certainly not clear how this
leads to the claim that architecture must portray
the “purposiveness within itself” or exactly what
that conclusion is supposed to mean.24 One thing
that it could be taken to mean, however, is that
a work of architecture should portray, symbolize,
or otherwise express its own purpose or intended
function, thus that the functionality or utility of a
work of architecture is not its primary goal and
source of beauty, but that its expression of its own
function is. Thus, each building type—a temple, a
church, a palace, and so on—should not merely
serve its function, but also should express its func-
tion. In his metaphysical way, Schelling thus seems
to state the premise that already informed the
projects of such architects as Boullée and Ledoux.
Arthur Schopenhauer was deeply influenced by
Schelling’s opposition of the conscious and the
unconscious, but in his magnum opus The World
as Will and Representation (1819), he gave it his
own unique twist: applying it to Kant’s distinction
between appearance and thing in itself, he identi-
fied appearance with consciousness of the particu-
lars and the in-itself with a single unconscious and
nonrational will manifesting itself in the particu-
lars of the phenomenal world. He then overlaid
this metaphysics with an ethical doctrine accord-
ing to which self-identification with the world of
particulars is the source of nothing but misery and
frustration, for in that world the satisfaction of
one personal desire leads only to the emergence
of another, not yet satisfied desire, and content-
ment, if not exactly happiness, can be found only
in detachment from the sensible world and self-
identification instead with the common, underly-
ing will, which makes everything personal seem
meaningless. He then famously argued that aes-
thetic experience is at least a preliminary step to
such contentment, for in such experience the ordi-
nary human subject becomes, at least momentar-
ily, a “pure will-less, painless, timeless, subject of
knowledge” because the object of such experience
is not an “individual thing as such,” part of the
frustrating phenomenal world of particulars, “but
the Idea, the eternal form, the immediate objec-
tivity of the will at this grade.” In aesthetic expe-
rience, the particular thing at one stroke becomes
“the Idea of its species, and the perceiving indi-
vidual becomes the pure subject of knowing.”25
By contemplating the various forms in which the
will manifests itself in particular things, the human
12
being is supposed to be able to detach himself or
herself from those particular things and his or her
always frustrated desires for them, at least for a
time. Schopenhauer then argues that different arts
express different aspects or “Ideas” of reality as
the objectification of the will. Architecture is the
first art because it expresses “Ideas that are the
lowest grades of the will’s objectivity”: because of
his view that the function of art is to free us from
all our concerns with the practical, he agrees with
Schelling that the goal of architecture cannot be
mere utility, but instead of inferring from this that
works of architecture should express their own
purposes, he instead holds that their function is to
present the “Ideas” or express the nature of most
elementary forces of the physical world. Thus, he
writes,
Now if we consider architecture merely as a fine art and
apart from its provision for useful purposes, in which it
serves the will and not pure knowledge, and thus is no
longer art in our sense, we can assign it no purpose other
than that of bringing to clearer perceptiveness some of
those Ideas that are the lowest grades of the will’s objec-
tivity. Such Ideas are gravity, cohesion, rigidity, hardness,
those universal qualities of stone, those first, simplest,
and dullest visibilities of the will, the fundamental bass-
notes of nature; and along with these, light, which is
in many respects their opposite. Even at this low stage
of the will’s objectivity, we see its inner nature reveal-
ing itself in discord; for, properly speaking, the conflict
between gravity and rigidity is the sole aesthetic ma-
terial of architecture. . . . From what has been said, it
is absolutely necessary for an understanding and aes-
thetic enjoyment of a work of architecture to have direct
knowledge through perception of its matter as regards
its weight, rigidity, and cohesion.26
In other words, the conclusion that Schopenhauer
draws from his complicated metaphysical and eth-
ical argument is that works of architecture should
express not their own function, but rather the na-
ture of their own construction and the physical
forces involved in and affecting that construction;
by his own idiosyncratic route he reaches a con-
clusion that we associate with Eugène-Emmanuel
Viollet-le-Duc and John Ruskin later in the nine-
teenth century and with classical modernists of
the mid-twentieth century, such as Walter Gropius
and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Yet another variant of an expressivist approach
to architecture is found in Hegel. Hegel initially
developed his philosophy in close contact with
The Aesthetics of Architecture
his former schoolmate Schelling, but he eventu-
ally gave it his own terminology: for Hegel, re-
ality and its history are constituted not by the
struggle between the conscious and the uncon-
scious but by “Spirit” coming to know itself; but
unlike Schopenhauer, who despised him for this
difference, for Hegel what thus gradually man-
ifests itself in natural and human history is not
nonrational will but reason itself: “the rational,
which is synonymous with the Idea, becomes ac-
tual by entering into external existence,” where
“it emerges in an infinite wealth of forms, appear-
ances, and shapes and surrounds its core with a
brightly colored covering in which consciousness
at first arises, but which only the concept can pen-
etrate in order to find the inner pulse,” and “[t]o
recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the
present and thereby to delight in the present—this
rational insight is the reconciliation with actuality
which philosophy grants to those who have re-
ceived the inner call to comprehend.”27 This view,
which Hegel first developed in his Phenomenol-
ogy of the Spirit (1807) and then elaborated in
his Science of Logic (1812–1816) and Encyclope-
dia of Philosophical Sciences (1817), became the
foundation for the lectures on aesthetics that he
gave from 1818 (in Heidelberg) to 1829 (in Berlin),
which were edited, amplified, and posthumously
published by his student H. G. Hotho in 1835.28
Hegel’s view is that “spirit alone is the true . . . so
that everything beautiful is truly beautiful only as
sharing in this higher sphere and generated by it,”
and that “[t]he beauty of art is beauty born of the
spirit and born again,” that is, all beauty is a man-
ifestation of “spirit” in general but artistic beauty
is the spirit in general made visible by spirit in par-
ticular, that is, human artists with their particular
mentalities and capabilities.29 By spirit in general,
Hegel means both reason and its personification
in the idea of the divine, and thus fine art
only fulfils its supreme task when it has placed itself in
the same sphere as religion and philosophy, and when it
is simply one way of bringing to our minds and express-
ing the Divine, the deepest interests of mankind, and the
most comprehensive truths of the spirit. . . . Art shares
this vocation with religion and philosophy, but in a spe-
cial way, namely by displaying even the highest [reality]
sensuously, bringing it thereby nearer to the senses, to
feeling, and to nature’s mode of occurrence.30
But the fact that art gives sensuous representation
to the ideas of the spirit or the divine is both the
Guyer Kant and the Philosophy of Architecture
glory and also the doom of art, “[f]or precisely
on account of its form, art is limited to a specific
content.” “Only one sphere and stage of truth is
capable of being represented in the element of
art,” namely, an understanding of the nature of
thought, reason, or divinity in physical imagery or
symbolism that is ultimately incapable of compre-
hending the true nature of spirit and thus must
eventually give way to religion and even more so
to philosophy, because religion also is still too de-
pendent upon imagery and too tied up with art
to yield “absolute knowing” of the spirit.31 This is
why “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and
remains for us a thing of the past,” even though
people will still go on building, painting, and poet-
izing, but necessarily for lower “vocations.”32 This
is Hegel’s notorious thesis of the “death of art.”
That art is necessarily an expression of ideas
about the spirit but also necessarily an inadequate
expression of an adequate conception of the spirit
or at best an adequate expression of an inadequate
conception of the spirit is particularly evident in
Hegel’s treatment of architecture. Hegel regards
architecture as having begun with the crudely sym-
bolic representation of crudely symbolic concep-
tions of the spirit, as in “the constructions of older
art in Babylonia, India, and Egypt,” and as hav-
ing reached its apogee in classical architecture, in
the form of the Greek temple, where the temple
serves as the housing for the representation of a
god in the human form of the statue that sits at
its heart.33 But such a representation of divinity,
although better than the purely symbolic forms
of earlier antiquity, is still inadequate to an ul-
timately philosophical understanding of spirit as
reason, and in any case in the classical temple
“the spiritual meaning does not reside exclusively
in the building . . . but in the fact that this mean-
ing has already attained its existence in freedom
outside architecture,” that is, in the statue that
the temple houses.34 Christian architecture, with
its domes or Gothic arches, points toward a more
adequate conception of spirit, but in so doing, it
also begins to dissolve the “immediate” unity of
classical architecture. Thus, architecture necessar-
ily tries to express a profound, metaphysical idea,
but is equally necessarily undermined by its in-
escapable attempt to do so.
In post-Kantian idealism, we thus find a uni-
form acceptance of the view that the goal of archi-
tecture is by no means simply to combine utility
with beauty, but is rather to express some idea
13
or ideas, with functionality being at most a nec-
essary condition but not part of the achievement
of the goal of the art and with beauty itself be-
ing redefined as expression rather than anything
more formal. This general view, as we have seen,
takes different forms: in Schelling the thought is
that a building should express its own function,
in Schopenhauer that it should express the nature
of its own construction and the physical forces on
which that depends, and in Hegel that it should ex-
press metaphysical ideas about divinity and spirit
itself. All of these views have been prominent in
later philosophy of architecture and architectural
theory, but our question here is how such views
so rapidly replaced the Vitruvian paradigm that
dominated eighteenth-century philosophy of ar-
chitecture. To see how this transition came about,
we must now at last turn to Kant.
ii. kant’s views about architecture
As I said at the outset, architecture does not loom
large in Kant’s own exposition of his aesthetic the-
ory. But his general philosophy of fine art would
have profound implications for the subsequent
philosophy of architecture, and architectural ex-
amples, or the example of architecture in gen-
eral, figure in significantly different ways at crucial
stages in Kant’s overall argument. So let us now
see what Kant says explicitly about architecture
as well as how his general philosophy of fine art
bears on the philosophy of architecture.
Kant expounds his aesthetic theory in the form
of a “critique of taste” and begins his exposi-
tion with the simplest form of judgments of taste,
namely, judgments of beauty, paradigmatically the
beauty of individual natural objects or works of
decorative rather than fine art, that is, works of
art that do not have content and meaning.35 He
proposes first that our pleasure in beauty is dis-
interested, thus that our pleasure in a beautiful
object is not dependent upon the judgment that it
serves any function in which we have an interest.
Such a judgment would of course presuppose a
concept of the function an object is supposed to
serve, so Kant excludes any concept of the func-
tion of an object from playing a role in the paradig-
matic judgment of beauty. In the next step of his
argument he generalizes this conclusion into the
exclusion of any concept whatsoever from playing
a role in a paradigmatic judgment of beauty. Yet
14
Kant also holds that judgments of beauty speak
with a “universal voice” or, like other judgments,
do not purport merely to report the idiosyncratic
response of one judge, but rather claim validity
for all who would respond to the same object,
at least under optimal circumstances.36 But even
though a judgment of taste must be independent
of any concept, in Kant’s view, it cannot be in-
dependent of our cognitive faculties altogether if
it is legitimately to claim such universal validity;
thus Kant introduces his famous hypothesis that
our pleasure in beauty is due to the “free play”
of the cognitive powers of imagination and under-
standing in which the presentation of the “man-
ifold” of experience as an object by the imagi-
nation (any experience of a manifold of content
that lasts more than a moment must involve the
imagination, since that is involved in any tempo-
rally extended experience that requires “repro-
duction” of more than immediately current expe-
rience) satisfies the understanding’s general inter-
est in cognition, namely, its interest in unity and
coherence, but without any “determinate concept
restrict[ing the imagination] to a particular rule of
cognition.”37 Such a mental state of free play is
particularly pleasurable precisely because it feels
to us as if our general goal of cognition is being
satisfied apart from the condition that would nor-
mally guarantee it.38 Kant then says that the qual-
ity of an object by means of which it can induce this
pleasurable state of free play can be called “the
mere form of purposiveness,” and then he equates
the “mere form of purposiveness” in an object
with “the purposiveness of [its] form,” where by
“form” he now means what both aestheticians and
artists have generally meant by form, namely, the
spatial or temporal structure of objects, Gestalt or
“figure,” for example, “drawing” (Zeichnung, de-
sign) rather than coloration in the case of painting
or “composition” rather than instrumentation in
the case of music.39 This last step in Kant’s argu-
ment, by which he reaches his famous and influ-
ential “formalism,” is a non sequitur, but as we
shall see, it is not in fact fatal to Kant’s ultimate
theory of fine art, which turns on a much more
liberal conception of what aspects of aesthetic
objects can genuinely induce the mental state of
the free play of the cognitive powers of imagina-
tion, understanding, and, as it turns out, reason as
well.40
Kant offers as paradigmatic examples of the
objects of the simple judgments of beauty that he
The Aesthetics of Architecture
initially analyzes such things as beautiful birds or
crustacea, decorative patterns on wallpaper, and
“fantasias” or “music without a text.”41 But he
does not exclude that purely formal beauty may
be found in more complex works of human arti-
fice, and indeed he uses an architectural example
in his very first illustration of what he means by a
disinterested judgment or taste: I would be mak-
ing an interested judgment, thus failing to make a
genuine judgment of taste if, when “someone asks
me whether I find the palace before me beauti-
ful, I . . . say that I don’t like that sort of thing,
which is made merely to be gaped at, or . . . in true
Rousseauesque style, I . . . even vilify the vanity
of the great who waste the sweat of the people
on such superfluous things.”42 This would seem
to suggest that a properly aesthetic judgment of a
work of architecture is made, so to speak, merely
by gaping at it, that is, that the aesthetic judg-
ment of architecture concerns only formal beauty,
not utility or disutility, not social costs or benefits,
not any function or dysfunction of the work. This
might suggest that Kant departs from the Vitru-
vian paradigm for architecture, not by adding a
requirement of conceptual meaning and expres-
sion to it, but rather by subtracting utility from
the chief goals of architecture and reducing the
goal of architecture to beauty alone.
This would be a misleading conclusion, how-
ever. For no sooner has Kant completed his initial
analysis of simple judgments of taste and the for-
mal beauty that is supposed to be their object than
he complicates his model of aesthetic judgment by
introducing a distinction between pure judgments
of “free” and “self-subsisting” beauty that fit the
initial analysis and more complex judgments of
“adherent” and “conditioned” beauty that go be-
yond it; and the latter judgments are character-
ized precisely by the fact that they do presuppose
a “concept of what the object ought to be . . . and
the perfection of the object in accordance with it.”
In particular, judgments of adherent beauty pre-
suppose a concept of what the intended function
or “particular end” of the object is, “by which the
imagination, which is as it were at play in the ob-
servation of the shape” of the object, would be
“restricted”—although apparently without the op-
portunity for free “play” disappearing altogether,
since Kant does after all call adherent beauty a
kind of beauty.43 Kant then immediately illustrates
his conception of adherent beauty with architec-
tural examples: thus he says that “the beauty . . .
Guyer Kant and the Philosophy of Architecture
of a building (such as a church, a palace, an ar-
senal, or a summer-house) presupposes a concept
of the end that determines what the thing should
be, hence a concept of its perfection, and is thus
merely adherent beauty. . . . One would be able to
add much to a building that would be pleasing in
the intuition of it if only it were not supposed to
be a church.”44 Kant does not expand upon these
comments, but presumably he has in mind such
commonplace assumptions as that a palace must
appear grand and imposing to project the author-
ity of government, that an arsenal must have thick
walls with few openings to serve as a secure bas-
tion, that a summer house on the contrary must
be light and airy, that a (Protestant) church must
keep its decor simple to induce the proper mood of
humbleness (as Kames had argued), and so forth.
Thus, Kant seems to recur to the traditional Vi-
truvian paradigm that a successful work of archi-
tecture must be judged to have both utilitas and
venustas.
To be sure, Kant is not very specific about pre-
cisely how utility and beauty or function and form
are to be related to each other in the “adherent
beauty” of a work of architecture. Some of the lan-
guage that has just been quoted suggests that, like
Schelling after him, he might think that the func-
tionality of a building is just a precondition of our
finding it beautiful, that is, that our appreciation
of the beauty of a building might be blocked if we
found it dysfunctional but that its functionality is
not a proper part of its beauty, which would then
presumably lie only in its formal properties. How-
ever, Kant’s remarks that the rules that might be
prescribed with regard to adherent beauty (unlike
free beauty, which does not allow any rules at all)
are “rules for the unification of taste with reason”
and that “the entire faculty of the powers of rep-
resentation gains if both states of mind”—the re-
sponse to function and the response to form—“are
in agreement” might seem to suggest that both
functionality and formal beauty are proper parts
of the judgment of architectural success.45 Indeed,
such remarks might even be thought to suggest
that architectural success requires some sort of in-
timate interaction between function and form, that
certain forms and functions be not merely compat-
ible with each other but in some way enhance each
other, thus that in such cases our pleasure in ob-
jects is not so to speak just added but multiplied.46
But this conclusion would only bring Kant back
to the point of accepting the Vitruvian paradigm
15
for architecture that he had initially seemed to re-
ject. What basis do we find within his theory for the
remarkable transformation of this paradigm that
we found in the aesthetic theories of his imme-
diate successors such as Schelling, Schopenhauer,
and Hegel? We find this in Kant’s theory of fine
art, which comes only much later in the Critique
of the Power of Judgment (namely, §§43–53) than
the opening “Analytic of the Beautiful” (§§1–22)
to which our discussion has thus far been confined.
Kant’s theory of fine art is designed to solve the
paradox that judgments of beauty must be inde-
pendent of concepts, yet works of art are products
of intentional and rational human activity, which
is, of course, guided by concepts.47 Kant’s resolu-
tion of this potential paradox is that both the cre-
ation and the experience of works of art are guided
by and indeed aimed at the presentation of con-
cepts, but, like the experience of natural beauty
and the production and experience of decorative
art, they are never fully determined by such con-
cepts. Kant expounds this solution by offering a
theory of both the production of works of fine art
and of the contents of such works. His theory of
the production of fine art is his theory of genius, ac-
cording to which the production of successful art is
guided by concepts, including technical rules, but
depends upon an innate “originality,” a “natural
gift,” that takes the artist beyond his own rules in
ways that he cannot formulate and allows him to
pass on exemplars of originality but not determi-
nate rules to successive artists.48 His theory of the
content of successful works of fine art is his theory
of “aesthetic ideas.” According to Kant, a beauti-
ful work of art must have “spirit”: “A poem can be
quite pretty and elegant, but without spirit. A story
is accurate and well organized, but without spirit.”
And spirit, “the animating principle in the mind,”
comes from an “aesthetic idea,” by which he
means
that representation of the imagination that occasions
much thinking though without it being possible for any
determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it,
which, consequently, no language fully attains or can
make intelligible.—One readily sees that it is the counter-
part (pendant) of an idea of reason, which is, conversely,
a concept to which no intuition (representation of the
imagination) can be adequate.49
By this in turn Kant means that a work of art with
spirit presents an intellectual idea, indeed in his
16
view, ultimately a moral idea, but by means of
an imaginative use of both form and material—
whatever counts as material in a particular art
form, perhaps images in the case of poetry, in-
cidents in the case of the novel or drama, colors
or pigments in the case of painting, ornament and
rich materials in the ordinary sense in the case of
architecture—that cannot be reduced to any rule
and that stimulate a free play of the imagination
with or between the content, the form, and the
matter of the work of art. Ultimately, then, Kant’s
conception of beauty in art is not the strictly for-
mal beauty that he discussed in the first fifteen
sections of the “Analytic of the Beautiful”; his con-
ception is rather that beautiful art always suggests
some profound intellectual content, but does so
by means of form and matter so rich that it cannot
be reduced to any rule but instead triggers inex-
haustible and pleasurable “motion” or free play
in the mind of its audience. Of course, such a work
must result from free play with an idea in the mind
of the genius who produces it, but even the genius’
conception of the object cannot fully determine
the audience’s response to it, for in that case the
latter would not also be an instance of free play
and would not be pleasurable.50
Kant next offers a classification and hierarchy
of the fine arts premised on the assumption that
all of the fine arts—rhetoric, poetry, sculpture, ar-
chitecture, painting, music (including opera), and
dance—present intellectual ideas aesthetically, al-
though of course some do it better or more fully
than others.51 (Actually, Kant next claims that all
beauty, whether of nature or art, involves aes-
thetic ideas [CPJ, §51, 5:320]; he fails to justify
this claim, but neither does he rest anything on
it.) Kant’s position is thus that as a fine art, archi-
tecture does contain aesthetic ideas and by their
means presents intellectual ideas, although it does
not do so as fully as poetry, but may do so more
fully than, for example, its sister among the plastic
arts, namely, sculpture.
Kant’s explicit discussion of architecture is
brief. Kant divides the sphere of “pictorial arts”
(bildende Künste, which could better be trans-
lated as “formative arts” were “form” not already
such an overworked term in Kant’s aesthetics)
into the two domains of “plastic” (Plastik) and
the “art of painting” (Malerkunst), and he then
subdivides the domain of “plastic” into sculpture
and architecture (using the two German words
Bildhauerkunst and Baukunst). His chief com-
The Aesthetics of Architecture
ment comes in the form of a comparison between
sculpture and architecture:
[Sculpture] presents corporeal concepts of things as they
could exist in nature (although, as a beautiful art, with
regard to aesthetic purposiveness); [architecture] is the
art of presenting, with this intention but yet at the same
time in an aesthetically purposive way, concepts of things
that are possible only through art, and whose form has as
its determining ground not nature but a voluntary end.
In the latter a certain use of the artistic object is the main
thing, to which, as a condition, the aesthetic ideas are re-
stricted. In the former the mere expression of aesthetic
ideas is the chief aim. Thus statues of humans, gods, an-
imals, etc., are of the first sort; but temples, magnificent
buildings for public gatherings, as well as dwellings, tri-
umphal arches, columns, cenotaphs, and the like, erected
as memorials, belong to architecture. . . . The appropri-
ateness of the product to a certain use is essential in a
work of architecture, while by contrast a mere picture,
which is made strictly for viewing and is to please for
itself, is, as a corporeal presentation, a mere imitation
of nature, though with respect to aesthetic ideas; where,
then, sensible truth should not go so far that it stops
looking like art and a product of the power of choice.52
This is a complex comparison that does not as-
sert a straightforward superiority of one art to the
other. It assumes that it is an essential aim of both
arts not only to be beautiful but also to express
aesthetic ideas, that is, rational ideas conveyed by
aesthetic means, by their use of forms and materi-
als: “Both make shapes in space into expressions
of ideas.”53 It also assumes (as any pre-twentieth-
century theory would) that sculpture imitates nat-
ural objects—even when it presents something su-
pernatural, such as a god, it does so by imitating
natural forms, for example, by adding the wings
of a bird to a human figure—while architecture
does not imitate natural forms and is thus not
limited to natural forms. In this regard architec-
ture would seem to have less constricted means
for presenting ideas and thus perhaps be able to
present a wider range of ideas through the indef-
inite number of forms and combinations of them
available to it. However, any work of architecture
also has a “voluntary end” or intended use that
restricts it and, apparently, what aesthetic ideas
it can present, and indeed this intended use is
the “main thing,” and in all architecture the “ap-
propriateness of the product to a certain use is
essential.” Thus, the restriction on what or how
Guyer Kant and the Philosophy of Architecture
aesthetic ideas may be expressed that is supposed
to follow from this is also essential to architec-
ture. So sculpture is restricted in what aesthetic
ideas it can represent or how it may represent
them by its restriction to the imitation of natural
forms, while architecture is restricted in its ex-
pression of aesthetic ideas by its requirement of
functionality, which is now apparently neither a
mere precondition of its aesthetic value nor one
component in its aesthetic value, but the primary
component.
Thus, Kant concludes that, in architecture, util-
ity, or in his own terminology “objective purpo-
siveness,” is always essential, but that the presen-
tation of aesthetic ideas is also always some part of
its beauty. Aesthetic ideas are in turn the expres-
sion of “rational” ideas, so Kant’s position might
seem to prepare the way for something closest
to Hegel’s position, that architecture, like other
arts, always aims at the expression of metaphysi-
cal ideas, although even with this addition, Kant
clearly remains closer to the Vitruvian paradigm
than do Schelling, Schopenhauer, or Hegel by ul-
timately insisting that suitability to intended use
is essential to the success of architecture. But in
practice, Kant seems to restrict the ideas presented
by art to moral or morally significant ideas, and in
this regard, his conception of what sorts of ideas
art, including architecture, can express seems nar-
rower than or at least different from Hegel’s. How-
ever, what we should probably conclude here is
that Kant does not offer any actual argument for
why all art must express rational ideas, a fortiori
specifically moral ideas, so what his theory actually
does is open the door for the post-Vitruvian con-
ception of architecture as expressing ideas with-
out entailing any particular restriction on what
ideas it can represent. Thus, while himself assum-
ing that architecture must express moral ideas,
Kant prepares the way for the different ideas that
architecture should express ideas of its own func-
tion (Schelling), ideas of the nature of physical
forces and its own construction (Schopenhauer),
or metaphysical ideas (Hegel). Kant does cross
the Jordan between pure Vitruvianism and post-
Vitruvian expressionism in the philosophy of ar-
chitecture, but once on the other side he does not
conclusively specify what road should be taken
further.
Kant also mentions stock architectural exam-
ples such as the Egyptian pyramids and St. Pe-
ter’s in Rome in his discussion of the sublime, but
17
there is no room to pursue that complicated sub-
ject here; it will have to suffice that for Kant, un-
like other authors such as Gerard and Kames, the
experience of sublimity is only triggered by nature,
and works of human architecture can at most be
“colossal,” which is “almost too great for all pre-
sentation” and “which borders on the relatively
monstrous,” but not infinite or even apparently
infinite enough to trigger the experience of the
sublime.54 Without a discussion of the sublime, I
will rest here with the conclusion that Kant at least
cracked open the door to an architecture of ideas.
In his theory of fine art as the expression of aes-
thetic ideas he had already swung the gate to the
expressivist philosophy of fine architecture wide
open. Although Kant remained more committed
to the primacy of function and thus to the Vi-
truvian paradigm in the philosophy of architecture
than his idealist successors were to be, it seems fair
to conclude that his theory of fine art opened the
way from the Vitruvian to the post-Vitruvian con-
ception of architecture within philosophical aes-
thetics. It also seems fair to conclude that the ab-
sence of an argument for Kant’s own specification
of what kind of ideas fine art must express left the
door open for the variety of expressivist theories
of architecture that we find in German idealism
and beyond.
PAUL GUYER
Department of Philosophy
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
internet: pguyer@sas.upenn.edu
1. For discussion of this term, see Hanno-Walter Kruft,
A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the
Present, trans. Ronald Taylor, Elsie Callander, and Antony
Wood (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994),
pp. 13–15.
2. Hegel’s famous statement about the owl of Min-
erva comes from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ele-
ments of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood,
trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge University Press, 1991),
Preface, p. 23. For the classical discussion and illustrations
of Boulée’s and Ledoux’s work and the expressivist phi-
losophy of architecture, see Emil Kaufman, Architecture
in the Age of Reason: Baroque and Post-Baroque in Eng-
land, Italy, and France (Harvard University Press, 1955),
especially chap. 12, pp. 141–180; for more recent discussion,
see Kruft, Architectural Theory, chap. 13, pp. 141–165, and
Henry Francis Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: A
18
Historical Survey, 1673–1968 (Cambridge University Press,
2005), pp. 36–43.
3. See Kruft, Architectural Theory, p. 21.
4. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, The Ten Books of Architec-
ture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan, ed. Herbert Langford
Warren (Harvard University Press, 1914), p. 13; for the Latin
terms, see Kruft, Architectural Theory, p. 25.
5. Vitruvius, Ten Books, p. 17; Kruft, Architectural The-
ory, p. 24.
6. Vitruvius, Ten Books, p. 16.
7. Vitruvius, Ten Books, pp. 13–14.
8. Vitruvius, Ten Books, pp. 14–15.
9. Christian Freiherr von Wolff, The Principles of Ar-
chitecture, in Anfangsgründe aller mathematischen Wis-
senschaften, new edition (Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Halle:
Renger, 1750–1757, reprint, ed. J. E. Hofmann, Hildesheim:
Georg Olms, 1999), Division I, Vols. 12–15, §1, p. 305.
10. Wolff, Foundations of Architecture, §4, p. 306, and §7,
p. 307.
11. Wolff, Foundations of Architecture, §8, p. 307, and
§18, p. 309.
12. Wolff, Foundations of Architecture, §§20–21, pp.
310–311.
13. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism,
sixth edition (Edinburgh: Bell and Creech, and London:
Cadell and Robinson, 1785), modern edition by Peter Jones
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), vol. II, chap. XXIV, pp.
685, 699.
14. Kames, Elements, p. 685.
15. Kames, Elements, vol. II, chap. XXIV, pp. 700, 701.
16. Of course, one might argue that considerations of
acoustics and HVAC as well as bodily circulation affect the
utility of a room, and therefore also enter into determination
of its height, but the point remains that whatever consider-
ations one enters onto the side of utility, there will still be
room for further features of design determined by consider-
ations of beauty alone.
17. The quotation is from Kames, Elements, vol. II, chap.
XXIV, p. 709. For the difference between grandeur and
beauty for Kames, see Kames, Elements, vol. I, chap. IV,
pp. 150–178.
18. Kames, Elements, vol. II, chap. XXIV, pp. 706–707.
19. Kames, Elements, vol. II, chap. XXIV, pp. 706–707.
20. F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism,
trans. Peter Heath (University Press of Virginia, 1978), p.
219.
21. F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, ed. and
trans. Douglas W. Stott (University of Minnesota Press,
1989). For information about the original presentation and
later publication of the lectures, see Translator’s Introduc-
tion, pp. xxvii, liii.
22. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, p. 165.
23. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, p. 165.
24. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, p. 168.
25. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Rep-
resentation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (Indian Hills, CO:
Falcon’s Wing, 1958), vol. I, §34, p. 179.
26. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, vol.
I, §43, pp. 214–215.
27. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, Preface, pp. 20–22.
28. The standard English version of the lectures is based
on Hotho’s second edition of 1842: G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthet-
ics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford:
The Aesthetics of Architecture
Clarendon Press, 1975). In recent years, there has been much
debate about the authenticity of Hotho’s edition, and some
of the original transcriptions of Hegel’s lecture courses, in-
cluding Hotho’s own, which turn out to be much shorter than
Hotho’s published version, have been published (although
not yet translated into English). These include the course
of 1820–1821, G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesung über Ästhetik, ed.
Helmust Schneider (Bern: Peter Lang, 1996); that of 1823,
G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst,
ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Seifert (Hamburg: Felix Meiner,
2003); and the course of 1826, G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie der
Kunst oder Ästhetik, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Seifert and
Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov (Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
2004).
29. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 2.
30. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, pp. 7–8.
31. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 9.
32. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 11.
33. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. II, p. 636.
34. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. II, p. 661.
35. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment,
ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cam-
bridge University Press, 2000), §9, 5:216. References to this
Critique (henceforth “CPJ”) will be located by Kant’s sec-
tion number and then the volume and page number of the
text as it appears in Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, ed. Royal
Prussian (later German, then Berlin-Brandenurg) Academy
of Sciences (Berlin: Georg Reimer, subsequently Walter de
Gruyter, 1900–) (the so-called “Academy edition”), where
it was edited by Wilhelm Windelband. The Academy edi-
tion pagination appears in the margins of the Cambridge
edition, so references to the page numbers of the latter itself
are not given. The best contemporary edition of the German
text is Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Heiner F.
Klemme, notes by Piero Giordanetti, Philosophische Biblio-
thek 507 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2001), which also includes
the Academy edition pagination as well as the pagination of
the 1793 second edition of the Kritik, the preferred original
edition.
36. Kant, CPJ, §8, 5:216.
37. Kant, CPJ, §9, 5:217.
38. See CPJ, Introduction, section VI, 5:187–188.
39. Kant, CPJ, §11, 5:221; §13, 5:223; and §14, 5:225.
40. For detailed support of the interpretation of Kant’s
argument offered in this paragraph, see my Kant and the
Claims of Taste (Harvard University Press, 1979; rev. ed.
Cambridge University Press, 1997), chaps. 3–6, and among
my more recent writings, especially “The Harmony of the
Faculties Revisited,” in my Values of Beauty: Historical Es-
says in Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap.
3, pp. 77–109.
41. Kant, CPJ, §16, 5:229.
42. Kant, CPJ, §2, 5:204.
43. Kant, CPJ, §16, 5:229–230.
44. Kant, CPJ, §16, 5:230.
45. Kant, CPJ, §16, 5:230–231.
46. For a fuller discussion of this point, see my “Free
and Adherent Beauty: A Modest Proposal,” The British
Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 357–366, reprinted in Values
of Beauty, chap. 5, pp. 129–140.
47. Kant, CPJ, §43, 5:303–304.
48. Kant, CPJ, §46, 5:307–308. I have discussed Kant’s
theory of genius in detail in “Autonomy and Integrity in
Guyer Kant and the Philosophy of Architecture
Kant’s Aesthetics,” Monist 66 (1983): 167–188, reprinted
under the title “Genius and the Canon of Art” in my Kant
and the Experience of Beauty (Cambridge University Press,
1993), chap. 8, pp. 275–303, and “Exemplary Originality:
Genius, Universality, and Individuality,” in The Creation of
Art: New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut
and Paisley Livingston (Cambridge University Press, 2003),
pp. 116–137, reprinted in Values of Beauty, chap. 10, pp.
242–262.
19
49. Kant, CPJ, §49, 5:313–314.
50. For further detail, see my “Kant’s Conception of Fine
Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (1994):
175–185, reprinted as chap. 12 of the revised edition of Kant
and the Claims of Taste, pp. 351–366.
51. Kant, CPJ, §§51–52, 5:321–326.
52. Kant, CPJ, §5:322.
53. Kant, CPJ, §5:322.
54. Kant, CPJ, §26, 5:253.