PAUL GUYER
Free Play and True Well-Being: Herder’s Critique of
Kant’s Aesthetics
The philosophical discipline of aesthetics, as
is well known, did not receive its name until
1735, when the twenty-one-year-old Alexander
Gottlieb Baumgarten introduced it to mean epis-
teme aisthetike, or the science of what is sensed and
imagined.1 But Baumgarten’s denomination of the
field was an adult baptism: without the benefit of
a name, aesthetics had been part of philosophy
since Plato attacked the educational value of many
forms of art in the Republic and Aristotle briefly
defended them in his fragmentary Poetics. In par-
ticular, Aristotle defended the arts from Plato’s
charge that they are cognitively useless, trading in
mere images of particulars rather than universal
truths, by arguing that it is precisely the arts, or at
least poetry, that deliver universal truths in a read-
ily graspable form, unlike, for example, history,
which deals merely with particular facts.2 And if
experience of the arts can reveal important moral
truths, then it can also be important to the develop-
ment of morality, the other pole of Plato’s doubts.
Some variant of Aristotle’s response to Plato was
the core of aesthetics through much of subsequent
philosophical history and, indeed, continued to
be central to aesthetics well into the twentieth
century—one need only think of T. W. Adorno.
In the eighteenth century, however, an alternative
response to Plato was introduced, namely, the idea
that our response to beauty, whether in nature or
in art, is a free play of our mental powers that is
intrinsically pleasurable and thus needs no episte-
mological or moral justification, although it may
in fact have epistemological and moral benefits.
This line of thought was introduced in Britain in
Joseph Addison’s 1712 Spectator essays on “The
Pleasures of the Imagination,” and developed by
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65:4 Fall 2007
subsequent Scottish writers such as Francis Hutch-
eson, Henry Home (Lord Kames), and Alexander
Gerard. It was only slowly received in Germany,
making its first sustained appearance in the em-
phasis on the pleasure of the unhindered activity
of our powers of representation in some of the
entries in Johann Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine The-
orie der schönen Künste (1771–1774), for exam-
ple, the entries on “beauty” and “taste,” but then
quickly becoming central to the aesthetic theories
of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller in the
Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and the
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind
(1795).3
Johann Gottfried Herder, who had done the
bulk of his work in aesthetics long before these
publications of Kant and Schiller, indeed even be-
fore the publication of Sulzer’s encyclopedia, re-
acted violently to the new aesthetics of play in his
late work Kalligone (1800), that is, “The Birth of
Beauty.” This work, published only three years be-
fore Herder’s death and after his renown had been
eclipsed by such new stars as Friedrich Schelling
and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, has never received
much attention, but beneath its bursts of ill-temper
it contains interesting and important criticisms of
Kant. The theme of Kalligone may be summed
up with this statement from its table of contents:
“Nothing harms immature taste more than if one
makes everything into play.”4 Here I shall show
not only that Kant has no good reply to some of
Herder’s criticisms, but also that if Herder had had
more sympathy for Kant’s expository method in
the third Critique, he might have realized that on
some of the central substantive points of his criti-
cism the distance between himself and Kant is not
354
as great as it initially seems. In particular, I want
to argue that Herder’s representation of Kant’s
aesthetics as a pure theory of mental play mis-
takes Kant’s initial analysis of the simplest form
of natural beauty for his whole theory of natural
and artistic beauty, and that if Herder had recog-
nized the importance for Kant of the more com-
plicated cases of adherent and artistic beauty, he
would have seen that there is considerable com-
mon ground between Kant’s aesthetics of free play
and his own aesthetics of the sensory apprehension
of truth.
i. some critical themes in herder’s early
aesthetics
Herder wrote most of his works on aesthetics early
in his career, twenty or more years before Kant’s
third Critique and thirty years before Kalligone.
The heart of this early work lies in the first and
fourth of the Kritische Wälder, or “Groves of Crit-
icism,” the first published in 1769 and the fourth
written around then but published posthumously,
although some of its central arguments did see the
light in Herder’s Plastik, an essay on sculpture be-
gun in 1770 and finally published in 1778.5 I do
not want to spend much of my time here on these
works, but do want to mention two themes that
anticipate important aspects of Herder’s later cri-
tique of Kant.
The first of these points is methodological.
Herder cast the fourth Grove in the form of
a criticism of the now justly forgotten Theorie
der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften of Frie-
drich Just Riedel.6 Herder particularly objected to
Riedel’s distinction among three supposedly alter-
native “methods of aesthetics, which he likes to call
the Aristotelian, the Baumgartian, and the Kame-
sian, where the Greek is supposed to have derived
his laws from the works of the masters, the mis-
erable, dry Baumgarten from definition, and the
Briton from sentiment.”7 At this stage, influenced
by Kant’s argument in 1764 that in philosophy def-
initions always come at the end of inquiry, not at
the beginning, Herder held that these are not three
alternative methods of aesthetics but, rather, that
aesthetic theory must begin from both the anal-
ysis of works of art and the analysis of our own
responses to them and only then arrive at defini-
tions informed by both these sources.8 “Is it not
the same soul and the same operation of the soul,
that presupposes a masterwork and observes art in
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
it, that presupposes the sentiment of the beautiful
and then analyzes this sentiment, and—no! does
not presuppose a definition, but gathers it both ob-
jectively from the artwork and subjectively from
the sentiment? Is this not one work of one soul, and
why then maliciously separate these ways in or-
der maliciously to slander them, when without all
three together there can never be an aesthetics?”
The importance of this criticism is its proof that
from an early stage Herder was suspicious of the
use of excessively abstract and a priori methods
in aesthetics, and although he did not think that
Baumgarten himself, whom he always admired,
was guilty of this, it will be a recurring charge in his
later polemic that Kant had, as it were, forgotten
his earlier suspicion of beginning philosophy from
abstractions and instead succumbed to an a priori
methodology.
The substance of both the first and the fourth
of the Groves of Criticism, however, and the main
reason for their enduring interest, is Herder’s cri-
tique of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön,
or on the Limits of Painting and Poetry.9 Less-
ing, in turn responding to the famous claim of Jo-
hann Jakob Winckelmann that the serenity (sup-
posedly) expressed by the face and especially the
mouth of the Trojan priest in the famous epony-
mous statue reflected the “noble simplicity and
sedate grandeur” of the Greeks, had argued that
this was not the source of Laocoön’s expression.10
Instead, he argued, visual arts are both confined
to the representation of a single moment of action
and constrained by the necessity of being beauti-
ful, and so must depict a momentary state of their
object that both intimates an entire sequence of ac-
tion and yet is itself beautiful, while poetry, which
deals with a succession of events in time, can de-
pict an object only by describing the process that
produced it, but can depict even an ugly or painful
object as long as its own description is beautiful.11
Herder applauded Lessing’s attention to the re-
quirements of specific media of art, but argued
that he did not go far enough in his analysis. Two
points are central to his extended criticism. In the
first Grove, he argued that it is music, not poetry,
which is the art of pure succession, and that the
fact that poetry uses artificial rather than natural
signs, which Lessing did recognize, means that in
the right hands poetry is capable of describing any
kind of object and expressing any kind of emotion.
In the fourth Grove and in the published work
on sculpture, Herder argued that Lessing failed
Guyer Free Play and True Well-Being: Herder’s Critique of Kant’s Aesthetics
to make an essential difference between paint-
ing and sculpture among the visual arts, and thus
failed to see that while painting is limited to the
beautiful depiction of surfaces, sculpture appeals
to our sense of touch, creating three-dimensional
objects that we really want to grasp and explore.
On Herder’s view, both sculpture and poetry thus
have a relation to truth that is missing from paint-
ing: poetry, precisely because it uses artificial signs,
can convey any truth rather than being limited to
mere beautiful surfaces, while sculpture, because
it really does not use signs at all, conveys to us the
true shape and feel of three-dimensional objects
in the physical world, to which we have to learn
how to correlate the natural but superficial signs
delivered by sight.
Thus, in the first Grove, Herder emphasizes the
broader reach of poetry as compared to both the
visual arts and music. Precisely because in appre-
hending artificial rather than natural signs, we typ-
ically think immediately of the meaning of those
signs rather than focusing on their own physicality,
and thus in taking in poetry we do not focus on the
physical or acoustical properties of the signs them-
selves, but on their meanings, poetry can represent
anything. In the case of poetry, “it is not the sign
itself but the sense [Sinn] of the sign that must be
felt; the soul must not feel the vehicle of the force,
the words, but the force itself, the sense . . . But
thereby it also brings every object as it were visibly
before the soul.”12 Herder then develops his view
by invoking Baumgarten’s characterization of po-
etry as “the sensibly perfect in discourse.” What
he now argues is that poetry actually achieves its
force by exploiting both the depiction of objects
as in painting and their energy as represented by
music.
Neither of these taken alone is its entire essence. Not
the energy, the musical in it; for this cannot take place
if what is sensible in its representations, which it paints
before the soul, is presupposed. But not what is painterly
in it; for it works energetically, in succession it builds the
concept of the sensibly perfect whole in the soul: only [in]
both together, I can say, the essence of poetry is force,
which works from space (objects, that it makes sensible)
in time (through a series of many parts in one poetic
whole); in short, therefore, sensibly perfect discourse.13
Once painting and music have been properly
distinguished from each other and poetry from
both, then it can also be recognized that poetry,
355
because it uses artificial rather than natural signs,
can present both objects and actions to us, and
in that sense present more truth to us than either
painting or music alone.
The main thrust of the fourth Grove is that
recognition of the distinctions among our senses
will explain the variety of both forms of art
and forms of aesthetic response. The premise of
Herder’s argument is that aesthetic response is
not the disinterested reaction of a special inter-
nal sense to purely formal properties of objects,
but is really the heightened response of various of
our senses to their appropriate objects. Herder re-
jects the traditional distinction between mind and
body, arguing that mind is essentially connected
to the bodily organs of sense, as well as rejecting
any suggestion that aesthetic pleasures are essen-
tially distinct from the other sources of our happi-
ness and unhappiness. In this connection, Herder
scorns Riedel’s thesis that the beautiful is that
“which can please without an interested aim and
thus also please if we do not possess it”—thus pre-
figuring one theme of his later critique of Kant’s
aesthetics.14 Instead, Herder argues that the phe-
nomenon of distance that Riedel mistakenly char-
acterizes as a general quality of disinterestedness
in all aesthetic response is a specific feature of the
visual perception of beauty, indeed that beauty
is, properly speaking, a property only of the vi-
sual.15 This in turn leads him to distinguish be-
tween sight as a sense for mere appearance and
touch as the sense for reality, and thus to the es-
sential distinction between painting and sculpture,
which, he charges, Lessing failed to make. Beauty,
Herder writes, appeals to the eye, but insofar as it
does so it is superficial, or even an illusion: “This
is in accordance with its etymology: for to intuit
[schauen], appearance [Schein], beautiful [Schön],
beauty [Schönheit] are related offspring of lan-
guage: it is here that, if we pay proper attention to
its particular application, that beauty is most orig-
inally found in everything that offers itself pleas-
ingly to the eye.” He continues:
In accordance with this first sense the concept of beauty
is “a phenomenon” and thus to be treated as if it were an
agreeable delusion [Trug], a delightful illusion [Blendw-
erk]. It is properly a concept of surfaces, since we prop-
erly cognize the bodily, the well-formed, and the solidly
pleasing only with the help of filling, and with sight
can see only planes, only figures, only colors, but not
immediately corporeal spaces, angles, and forms.16
356
Here, Herder insists that visible beauty arises
only from the most superficial features of objects,
not from their full reality, and that only feeling—by
which he here means the sense of touch—can put
us into direct contact with reality, or with the
deeper truth about physical reality. He expands
on this contrast in the essay on sculpture.
The living, embodied truth of the three-dimensional
space of angles, of form and volume, is not something we
can learn through sight. This is all the more true of the
essence of sculpture, beautiful form and beautiful shape,
for this is not a matter of color, or of the play of pro-
portion and symmetry, or of light and shadow, but of
physically present, tangible truth. . . . Consider the lover
of art sunk deep in contemplation who circles restlessly
around a sculpture. What would he not do to transform
his sight into touch, to make his seeing into a form of
touching that feels in the dark. . . . With his soul he seeks
to grasp the image that arose from the arm and the soul
of the artist. Now he has it! The illusion has worked; the
sculpture lives and his soul feels that it lives. His soul
speaks to it, not as if his soul sees, but as if it touches, as
if it feels . . .17
This is why Herder subtitles his essay after the
sculptor Pygmalion, who fell in love with the statue
of the beautiful young woman he had created and
was granted his wish that it come alive.
Herder’s emphasis on the sense of touch and its
centrality to the experience of sculpture builds on
his interpretation of the great eighteenth-century
debate about the relation between sight and touch,
in which John Locke, George Berkeley, and Denis
Diderot had all argued that we do not correlate the
deliverances of the two senses innately, but have to
learn from experience that an object that looks a
certain way also feels a certain way, or vice versa.18
But he takes this thesis a step further by arguing
that it is touch that reveals the true form of ob-
jects, while sight merely reveals or plays with their
superficial appearance. Thus, although sight ini-
tially seemed the paradigmatic vehicle of knowl-
edge, Herder ultimately concludes that “in paint-
ing there is merely beautiful deception” while in
sculpture there is “primary truth.”19 The passage
from Sculpture also displays what Herder thinks is
the significance of the perception of the true form
of objects through the tactile medium of sculp-
ture: it communicates to us the feeling of life in the
sculpture and in turn arouses our own feeling of
being truly alive. In the case of sculpture, both the
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
artist and the audience can fully feel the emotions
and passions of life that made Pygmalion wish that
his beautiful creation could come alive. This view
of the power of art is what Herder finds missing in
Riedel and perhaps even in Lessing himself.
These criticisms of Lessing and Riedel prefig-
ure several of Herder’s objections to Kant: he will
object to Kant’s abstract method in aesthetics, to
his failure to emphasize adequately the role of the
senses and the differences among them in his ac-
count of aesthetic experience and in his classifi-
cation of the arts, to an inadequate recognition
of the importance of truth, indeed truth in several
senses, in our experience of art, and to what he sees
as Kant’s inadequate emphasis on the way aes-
thetic experience gives us a feeling of being alive.
But what is missing from Herder’s early critical
aesthetics is an objection to the aesthetics of play,
for the simple reason that Kant had not yet made
that prominent in German aesthetics. In turning
now to Herder’s criticisms of Kant in Kalligone,
we will have to add that objection to his list of
charges.
ii. herder’s criticisms of kant in KALLIGONE
Kalligone is a polemic against Kant’s Critique of
the Power of Judgement, or, more precisely, against
its first half, the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power
of Judgment.” The work is loosely structured in
parallel with Kant’s work, although with numer-
ous digressions, sometimes even in dialogue form,
and statements of Herder’s own positions. Like
Herder’s polemic with Lessing in the Groves of
Criticism, his response to Kant’s work is longer
than its target, and all its themes cannot be dis-
cussed here. In ways anticipated in Herder’s ear-
lier work, Kalligone attacks Kant’s methodology
and his neglect of the concrete role of the senses in
a discipline that is, as defined by Baumgarten, sup-
posed to focus precisely on that. In an expression
of the naturalism that pervades his work, Herder
also attacks Kant’s appeals to the “supersensible”
in his interpretation of aesthetic experiences, es-
pecially the experience of sublimity. But Herder’s
most vehement objections are to Kant’s insistence
on the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment and
his exclusion of a role for determinate concepts in
the free play of the mental powers in aesthetic ex-
perience, which Herder sees as excluding any role
for the knowledge of truth in aesthetic experience.
Guyer Free Play and True Well-Being: Herder’s Critique of Kant’s Aesthetics
After a brief comment on Herder’s attack on
Kant’s methodology, I will discuss Herder’s crit-
icisms of the disinterestedness and nonconceptu-
ality of aesthetic judgment in some detail, and then
note his criticisms of the nonsensual and transcen-
dent rather than immanent character of Kant’s
aesthetics more briefly.
Herder prefaces Kalligone with an attack on
what he calls “transcendental influenza” and its
infection of the young, thinking no doubt not only
of Kant but also of the influence of Fichte and
Schelling in Jena, the backyard to Herder’s own
Weimar. Herder blames Kant for opening the door
to “a realm of endless chimerae, blind intuitions,
fantasms, empty spelling-words, so-called transcen-
dental ideas and speculations,” a made-up philo-
sophical language that ignores real human speech
and thus the real structure of human thought,
since, according to Herder’s deepest belief, “[t]he
language of human beings carries their forms of
thought in it; we think, sometimes abstractly, only
in and with language.”20 In Herder’s view, “[w]e
should, without all ‘Transcendental taste, whose
principle resides in the supersensible substratum
of mankind in absolute unconsciousness,’ form our
taste here below in consciousness, learn to know
the laws and analogies of nature, and use neither
the art nor the science of the beautiful for a game
[Spiel] or for idolatry, but should use them with
joyful seriousness for the cultivation [Bildung] of
mankind.”21 From the outset of his work, Herder
rejects a transcendental method in aesthetics and
shows his hostility to any reduction of aesthetic
experience to a form of play rather than to a com-
pletely serious experience of truth that is essential
to human development.
In the body of the text, Herder’s rejection
of transcendental aesthetics often remains be-
neath the surface of his specific objections to
Kant’s various claims. But one place where it
clearly emerges is at the end of Part I of
Kalligone, which deals with the “Agreeable and
the Beautiful.” Here Herder summarizes his
polemic by expounding Kant’s “Analytic of the
Beautiful” in the form of thirteen “postulates,”
and then questioning each. The last of these
postulates sums up Kant’s view in the thesis:
“The power of judgment for taste [Geschmacks-
urteilskraft] consists in judgments, rests on the
common sense, and operates [wirkt] with universal
validity toward universal communication; other-
wise, a free play of the powers of the human soul.”
357
To this summary, in what is supposed to be Kant’s
voice, Herder replies in his own voice.
That this empty, hollow, pernicious theory, which has
arisen from necessity, a critique without any critique,
has not originated in any serious study of the beauti-
ful, whether in objects or in sentiments thereof, needs
no proof. It has come about a priori from a supposedly
empty spot; a play of wit and acuity that is purposelessly-
purposive and purposively-purposeless.22
By saying that Kant’s theory has arisen a pri-
ori from “necessity” (Not) and to fill a “suppos-
edly empty spot,” Herder presumably refers to
Kant’s suggestion in the introduction to the third
Critique that since there are a priori principles
for understanding and (practical) reason, there
should be one for the power of judgment, the
third of the higher powers of cognition as well.23
He takes Kant to have decided in advance of and
without any serious study of aesthetic objects and
experience—the two prerequisites for any useful
definitions in aesthetics according to Herder’s ear-
lier criticism of Riedel—that there is an a priori
foundation for aesthetics, and that it lies in a free
play of mental powers that are universal among
human beings and therefore yield universally valid
judgments of beauty or other judgments of taste.
Herder scorns Kant’s theory of free play by say-
ing that it is itself a mere play of wit, and jeers at
Kant’s claim that this free play is purposive but
without a specific purpose by suggesting that it is
itself as purposeless as it is purposive.
It is no doubt unfair of Herder to accuse Kant of
arriving at his theory completely a priori; Kant’s
language in his introduction suggests rather that
he is merely asking whether there is an a priori
principle for aesthetic judgment analogous to the a
priori principles of understanding and reason—he
says that “one has reason to presume, by analogy,
that [the power of judgment] too should contain
in itself a priori, if not exactly its own legislation,
then still a proper principle of its own for seek-
ing laws”—and that this question will be answered
only in the following body of the work.24 As far as
Kant’s subsequent attempt to answer his question
is concerned, however, it is certainly fair of Herder
to claim that Kant proceeds with little, indeed vir-
tually no, detailed criticism of particular works of
art and of our experiences of them, though it could
be argued that this is work for critics like Lessing or
Herder himself, not for a philosopher like Kant. It
is less clear that Kant proceeds without any close
358
examination of our sentiments (Empfindungen)
in aesthetic experience, but perhaps this is a fair
response to Kant’s exposition of his aesthetic the-
ory in the form of an analysis of the logic of judg-
ments of taste rather than in the form of a direct
description of the feelings or experiences on which
such judgments are supposed to be based.
Having objected to Kant’s supposedly a priori
method in aesthetics, Herder also objects to Kant’s
attempts to read transcendent rather than imma-
nent significance into aesthetic experience. This
objection is central to Herder’s critiques of Kant’s
accounts of the sublime and of the beautiful as the
symbol of the morally good. About the sublime,
Herder writes:
That this view, this feeling, does not lie in the object but
rather in the feeling viewer [fühlenden Anschauer] . . .
no one since the beginning of the world has doubted;
but that the feeling of the sublime is of a supersensible
[übersinnlichen] nature, that it rests on a supersensible
reason aiming at an absolute totality, whose feeling does
not say something quite different to him? Only an un-
bounded fantasy steps into the infinite, only a reason that
has lost its measure dreams of an absolute totality.25
In his own interpretation of the experience of
the sublime, Herder stresses that what is central
is not the incompletable effort to grasp something
that exceeds the boundaries of human imagination
and reason alike, but rather the effect on our own
feelings of admiring something high and mighty:
the “feeling of the sublime” (Gefühl des Erhab-
nen) is one of “elevation” (Elevation, Erhebung).
“It elevates [us] to the sublime object; lifted above
ourselves, we become with it higher, more encom-
passing, wider. This feeling is not a cramp, but the
widening of our breast, raising our view and as-
piration, elevation of our being.”26 Herder locates
the significance of the experience of the sublime in
the feelings of empowerment it brings to us, not in
any intimations of a supersensible realm it might
be thought to yield.
There is a similar thrust to Herder’s critique of
Kant’s explanation of why the beautiful is a sym-
bol of the morally good. Herder interprets Kant
to argue that the beautiful is such a symbol be-
cause our experience of it “is related to something
in the subject itself and outside of it which is not
nature, also not freedom, but yet connected with
the ground of the latter, namely the supersensible,
in which the theoretical faculty is unified with the
practical in a common and unknown way.” He re-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
sponds: “The correspondence of objects with our
powers, the harmony of our powers with the ob-
jects, does not refer us beyond but keeps us firmly
within the boundaries of nature; and where is the
moral in this supersensible-arrogant feeling?”—
that is, within Kant’s “supersensible-arrogant”
interpretation of the moral significance of aes-
thetic feeling? In the conclusion of this passage,
Herder cannot refrain from reiterating his under-
lying view that Kant’s theory of an “understand-
ing and conceptless but yet universally valid judg-
ing, grounded in an objectless play of imagination
and communication,” is the “grave of all genuine
knowledge, critique, and sentiment.”27
Here, I will only say that Herder’s criticism of
Kant’s introduction of the supersensible into his
explication of the moral significance of the expe-
riences of the sublime and the beautiful cannot be
assessed separately from the general critique of
Kantian moral philosophy that he also intimates
in Kalligone.28 Kant certainly thought that in his
account of the experiences of the sublime and of
the beautiful as a symbol of the morally good
he had succeeded in describing experiences that
would have a positive and uplifting, not a cramp-
ing and restricting, effect on our psychology and
moral development because he thought it would
be uplifting for us to realize that we have a theo-
retical reason whose ambitions exceed the bound-
aries of our sense-based imagination, a practical
reason capable of formulating the moral law in
all its purity, and a freedom of the noumenal will
that allows us to act in accordance with that moral
law no matter what our prior history may seem to
imply. Herder’s objection is not really to Kant’s ac-
count of the psychological impact of an aesthetic
presentation of the elements of this moral the-
ory, but to the moral theory itself. I will hardly
attempt to adjudicate that dispute here. For now,
I will only note that in Herder’s own account of
the experience of the sublime, he intimates that
the observation of something objectively elevated
has a subjectively uplifting effect on us, thus that
in this aesthetic experience there is a parallel be-
tween the structure of the object of the experience
and the emotional effect of the experience itself.
This is a crucial premise of Herder’s general theory
of aesthetic experience as an experience of well-
being arising from a perception of the true order
of nature, which he opposes to Kant’s theory of
the disinterestedness of aesthetic experience and
attachment.
Guyer Free Play and True Well-Being: Herder’s Critique of Kant’s Aesthetics
Before I turn to that issue, however, which is cer-
tainly at the heart of Herder’s response to Kant, I
will say just a word about Herder’s objection that
Kant’s aesthetics does not pay sufficient attention
to the concrete role of the senses in aesthetic expe-
rience. The charge of insensitivity to the specificity
of the senses, as I have already mentioned, was at
the heart of Herder’s early aesthetics, beginning
with his critique of Lessing, and it manifests it-
self in various ways in his critique of Kant. One
point at which it is particularly clear is in his ob-
jection to Kant’s scheme for the classification of
the fine arts, a scheme based on the differing ca-
pacities of different media for meaning, tone, and
gesture, which Herder claims “throws us back into
the old chaos.” Kant’s basic division is between
the verbal (redende) and the formative or visual
(bildende) arts, and Herder says that Kant’s ac-
count of the “so-called verbal arts [is] built upon a
word-play, which makes them both into play, and
not in the technical sense of this word; and about
the formative arts as well as about the arts that ef-
fect sentiments nothing is said that serves for the
essence of each and the essence of all.”29 In con-
trast, Herder argues that any division of the arts, as
well as any account of the way in which different
arts need to be cultivated and contribute to our
overall cultivation and development, must attend
to the specificity of our senses.
The noble senses of mankind, eye, ear, hand, and tongue,
need cultivation [Ausbildung]; sciences and arts that cul-
tivate [kultivieren] them are called fine [schöne] sciences
and arts. What gives the eye a proper measure, a quick
judgment about correct, fitting, beautiful figures, and
forms the eye through the hand, the hand through the
eye; what accustoms the ear to hear with understanding,
not only the tones but also the thoughts of human speech;
what accustoms the tongue to express these thoughts, as
its nature and its purpose demand; that is fine art and
cultivates human beings.30
For Herder, any classification of the arts, as well
as any theory of aesthetic education and the contri-
bution of aesthetic education to general education,
must be based on a firm grasp of the differences
as well as the similarities among sight, hearing,
touch, speech, and song (for that, too, is among
the arts of the tongue), and in his view Kant does
not have that grasp. Nor does it seem too much
of a stretch to think that Schiller’s theory of aes-
thetic education is deficient in this regard also. Al-
359
though Herder does not mention Schiller by name
anywhere in Kalligone, he does begin the work by
bemoaning the influence of Kant’s third Critique
on his followers, and Schiller might be supposed to
be the foremost among these, although one with
whom Herder had to maintain cordial relations in
Weimar and perhaps spared for this reason.
There is much more that could be said on this
subject, but I now want to turn without further
delay to the two main topics of Herder’s criticism,
Kant’s theory of the disinterestedness of aesthetic
judgment and of the concept—and purposeless
play of imagination and understanding as the basis
of such judgment. Since Kant introduces disinter-
estedness in the first “moment” of the judgment of
taste and his theory of free play in the second and
third moments, and Herder’s discussion follows
the order of Kant’s, I, too, will discuss Herder’s
attack on disinterestedness first and his attack on
concept-less free play second.
Herder had in fact already expressed doubt
about disinterestedness as a fundamental aesthetic
category in his polemic with Riedel in the fourth
Grove. Here, he rejected Riedel’s definition of
the beautiful as “that which can please without
an interested aim [interessierte Absicht] and which
also can please if we do not possess it.”31 At this
point, however, Herder’s objection seemed to be
only that the concept of disinterestedness is not
“original,” that is, that disinterestedness by itself
cannot explain our pleasure in the beautiful and
thus could at best be a consequence of some more
fundamental explanation of beauty. In Kalligone,
however, he argues much more broadly that our
pleasure in beauty is not disinterested but, rather,
that it is intimately connected with our most funda-
mental interest, our interest in life itself. He does
this by rejecting Kant’s rigid distinction between
the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good, argu-
ing that all these notions are intimately connected
and that they all reflect our fundamental interest
in enjoying a harmonious, well-adapted life.
The first step in Herder’s argument is to re-
ject Kant’s identification of agreeableness with
sensory gratification narrowly understood. For
Herder, the agreeable (angenehm) is what “ex-
pands our existence, what makes us free, what
makes us rejoice. The poets of paradise, the
painters of that Elysium, what do they offer for
our feeling? Agreeable breezes cosset the blessed;
their elastic existence, without illness, without
anxiety, lives and moves joyfully and freely.”32
360
Alternatively, “[t]he agreeable does not merely
gratify, rather the inmost-agreeable expands, em-
powers, strengthens my existence; the inmost
agreeable is my living felt existence itself.”33 The
agreeable is what actually liberates and strength-
ens me and gives me a feeling of liberation and
strength, of not merely being alive but of living
freely and strongly. This feeling can come through
the engagement of any or all of my senses: “what-
ever preserves, promotes, expands, in short is har-
monious with the feeling of my existence, each
of my senses gladly accepts that”—Herder’s verb
here is nimmt . . . an, for he derives angenehm
from annehmen, and thus equates the “agreeable”
with that which we “accept”—“appropriates that
to itself, and finds it agreeable.”34 What gives us
such feelings is, moreover, universally pleasing,
because “well-being, welfare, health” (Wohlsein,
Heil, Gesundheit) are the “ground and end of the
existence of every living thing . . . We all desire
well-being, and whatever promotes this well-being
in any way is agreeable.”35
With the agreeable so broadly conceived, it is
then easy for Herder to suggest that the beautiful
cannot be rigidly separated from it, but must be
more like a species of it, namely, that which gives
us such agreeable feelings of well-being through
the “noble senses,” through figures, colors, tones,
and the re-creation of all of these through the ar-
tificial signs of literary language. To be sure, there
are specific contexts in which we might call some-
thing that is disagreeable good, or something that
is beautiful disagreeable, but these are the excep-
tions, not the rule.
Nobody doubts that in language different concepts are
designated with the words “agreeable, beautiful and
good.” A disagreeable medicine can be very good, while
the most beautiful cane is never agreeable to the head-
strong child. That much that seems beautiful to us is not
good is confirmed by the sad proof of the tree of knowl-
edge in the history of mankind. But since our nature in all
of its concepts and feelings is one nature, which thinks
and comprehends, which feels, wills, and desires, these
related concepts must all border one another, and how
they border one another? how they are to be separated or
connected?—that is the question. Mere contrasts do not
solve the riddle, even less so arbitrarily set verbal limits.
Cold approval, for example, is not adequate to genuine
beauty, as little as mere esteem and respect is adequate for
the truly good. This will also be desired, the beautiful also
known and loved; the agreeable finally or the acceptable
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
[Annehmliche], the well-pleasing [Wohlgefällige], rejoic-
ing, gratifying, blessing lies at the basis of all of them.
The end of our existence is well-being; how it is to be
attained, how limited, how its different branches are to
be subordinated to one another, that is the task, easier or
harder (depending on how one approaches it) in theory,
as in practice.36
While the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good,
which Kant construed as three fundamentally “dif-
ferent relations of representations to the feeling
of pleasure and displeasure,” do have to be dis-
tinguished in certain contexts, they nevertheless
are all expressions of our pleasure in a free and
healthy life.37 Given this assumption, it is not hard
for Herder to argue that so far from being disin-
terested, our pleasure in beauty is necessarily of
the greatest interest to us:
Beauty however has interest; indeed everything good has
interest only through it. For what does the word mean?
Interest is quod mea interest, what concerns [angeht] me.
If something does not concern [betrifft] me, how could
I find satisfaction in it? In order to please, the poet, the
artist, indeed nature itself must first be interesting to us;
otherwise everything that they offer us goes past us like
unseasoned fare, like empty husks.
Interest is the soul of beauty as it is of the good and the
true. Take away from it that through which it attracts
and binds us, or, what is the same, that through which it
communicates to us; what then do you have to do with
it? Give it interest, and a tale of Mother Goose pleases
more than a boring epic of heroism.
Interest in the beautiful; is there a purer interest? In con-
trast to that, what is cold self-interest [Eigennutz], philo-
sophical pride, arrogant self-love [Selbstliebe]?
No beautiful work of art or of nature shall therefore be
without interest for us.38
Now in this passage, while arguing that the
beautiful necessarily interests us, Herder also in-
sists that the beautiful does not appeal to self-
interest or self-love: pleasure and interest in the
genuinely beautiful as well as the agreeable and
good is universal, not personal or idiosyncratic. It
could well be argued that this is all that Shaftes-
bury meant when he introduced the concept of
disinterestedness into modern moral and aesthetic
discourse—for him, the opposite of disinterested
is mercenary, that which one wants or does just
Guyer Free Play and True Well-Being: Herder’s Critique of Kant’s Aesthetics
for a personal reward—and it is arguably all that
Riedel meant when he said that the beautiful is
that which can please us “without possession.”39
It would not be reasonable, however, to claim that
all that Kant meant by saying that the pleasure
in beauty is disinterested is that it must be able
to please anyone apart from personal possession
and use or consumption of the beautiful object;
he certainly seems to insist that the source of our
pleasure in the beautiful has nothing to do with the
sources of our pleasure in the agreeable and the
good, and thus to be open to Herder’s criticism if
Herder’s claim is that our pleasures in the agree-
able, the beautiful, and the good all ultimately rest
on our pleasure in the feeling of a free and healthy
life. Before we consider whether the distance here
between Kant and Herder is as great as Herder
thinks, however, let us consider one last charge on
Herder’s indictment of Kant, namely, his objection
to Kant’s theory that the experience of beauty is
an experience of a free and concept-less play of the
mental powers of imagination and understanding.
As I mentioned earlier, Herder’s antipathy to
Kant’s central notion of the free play of our cogni-
tive powers is evident from the outset of Kalligone.
In his preface, Herder writes bitterly:
Isn’t it tragic that the self-named only possible philos-
ophy should end up by taking from our sentiment all
concepts, from the judgment of taste all grounds for
judgment, from the arts of the beautiful all purpose, and
transforming these arts into a short or long, boring ape-
like play, that critique into a universally valid, dictatorial
sentence without ground and cause? Critique and philos-
ophy are thereby at an end.40
In the body of the text, Herder argues both gen-
erally that all responses to objects, feeling and sen-
timent as well as judgment, are accompanied with
a concept of the object, and more specifically that
our pleasure in beautiful objects is always a plea-
sure in a sensed or felt recognition of their adap-
tation to their environment, whether natural or
artificial, that is impossible without the applica-
tion of a concept to the object. Herder launches
his general attack immediately following his cri-
tique of Kant’s first moment. Kant’s second mo-
ment, Herder says, asserts that the “beautiful is
what pleases without a concept,” and the third
speaks of a “[f]orm of purposiveness without rep-
resentation of an end.” In Herder’s view, however,
“[t]hat something could please without a concept,
361
and indeed please universally, is contrary to nature
and experience.”41 He subsequently expands his
point by saying that what “is to be felt [empfun-
den] must be something, i.e., something substan-
tial [Bestandheit], an essence [Wesen] that mani-
fests itself to us; hence something true lies at the
ground of everything that is agreeable or disagree-
able for us. Sensation without object and its con-
cept is a contradiction in human nature, therefore
impossible.”42
Depending on how we take this claim, of course,
Herder may not be saying anything with which
Kant would disagree: Kant more than anyone else
argued that all experience of an object requires
consciousness of a concept as well as of empirical
intuitions of that object, the matter of which is
sensation. But he did hold that we could have a
feeling of pleasure in an object without considering
what concepts apply to it and, on the basis of such
a feeling, make the judgment that it is beautiful.
Herder is specifically rejecting that claim. On what
basis does he do so?
He does so by means of the more particular ar-
gument that our pleasure in beauty is in fact a plea-
sure in our sensed or felt recognition of an object’s
adaptation to its environment, and the premise
that such a pleasure cannot be felt without a recog-
nition of the application of a relevant concept to
the object. Herder argues for this by going through
a series of cases, precisely the kinds of particular
examples that he accuses Kant of neglecting. First
he considers figures (Gestalten), then colors and
tones, and then a series of kinds of natural things,
ranging from nonliving stones and crystals to living
flowers to human beings themselves. In all these
cases, he argues, we respond to a recognition of
the character of a thing and its relation to its en-
vironment that is necessarily mediated by our ap-
plication of a concept to it. For example, he argues
that a child’s pleasure in a colorful pebble and a
mineralogist’s pleasure in stones and crystals are
not different in kind, but only in degree, that con-
cepts lie at the basis of all these pleasures, and that
“each of these concepts contains something pur-
posive, for the apparent excellence or perfection
of the thing in a harmonious relation to the per-
ceiver.”43 “The beauty of flowers,” further, “is thus
(to stay with our language) the maximum of their
particular existence and well-being [Daseins und
Wohlseins]; they are beautiful to us, if our feeling
appropriates this maximum to itself harmoniously
and gladly. As with flowers, so with trees.”44 He
362
goes on to argue that we find animals beautiful
when we find them “in a way that is intuitable [an-
schaulich] for us, to be gifted with an undamaged
natural perfection, to live happily, harmoniously
with themselves in their particular way.”45 Finally,
a human being is found to be beautiful “when he
shows himself in his figure and in his gestures as
active to whomever may perceive him.”46 All these
perceptions, Herder argues, depend on perceiving
the object through or under an appropriate con-
cept, indeed a concept of its purpose, whether that
is the concept of a child or an expert.
The result of our conversation is therefore this, that
without concepts and the representation of an end the
word[s] beautiful and beauty are never in place. The flat-
ter the concept of the thing that we use is, the more
childish it is called. The more essential it is, therefore
the more accurate is our concept of its beauty. To think
of a sum of properties of the object without the object,
i.e., to think of beauty without everything beautiful, is a
dream; a feeling without any concept an illusion; and a
philosophy which by its own account is built upon such
an illusion is the most concept- and purposeless that has
ever presumed to this name.47
Before we consider whether this is a fair objec-
tion to Kant, more generally whether there is as
much distance between Kant’s views and Herder’s
as Herder himself believes, let us ask why Herder
thinks such perception of an object’s essence and
its well-being in its environment is so pleasing to us
and so important for our own sense of well-being.
The answer to this question is what we might
call a harmonic or sympathetic theory of the con-
nection between pleasure in well-being and truth:
Herder thinks that the perception of true harmony
and well-being in the things around us generates a
parallel harmony and feeling of it in ourselves. He
expounds this vision, which is the basis for his en-
tire argument, at a number of places in Kalligone;
we can take a few examples from his initial discus-
sion of the agreeable. For example, he describes
our perception of a beautiful tree:
This tree, so upright in its growth, in its branches and
twigs so varied and yet so harmoniously bowed—
In the structure and outline of its leaves, blossoms, and
fruits so manifold and yet so harmonious with itself.
From the highest to the lowest, from palm tree to moss,
to mold, to lichen. May we not rejoice that we live in a
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
world of good order and good form [Wohlordnung und
Wohlgestalt], where all results of the laws of nature in
gentle forms reveal to us as it were a band of rest and
motion, an elastic-effective constancy of things, in short
beauty as the bodily expression of a corporeal perfection
that is harmonious both within itself and to our feeling?
. . . Our sense feels this; we enjoy the fruits of this har-
monious nexus of order; everything disagreeable and re-
pulsive, all suffering makes us attentive to it even against
our will.48
The key idea here is not that we take pleasure
in the direct consumption of the fruits of a har-
monious nature, but that there is a kind of reso-
nance between harmony and well-being in nature
and our own sense of well-being: the perception of
harmony in nature makes our own being feel well-
ordered, just as the perception of disharmony in
nature inevitably although painfully attracts our
attention. Herder uses physical language, suggest-
ing strings vibrating in harmony with each other,
a page later:
The being or the constancy of a thing depends upon its ac-
tive forces being in equilibrium, hence on its being within
limits. Motion and rest constitute a maximum in it, and in
several members or aspects several maxima, exponents
of its constancy. If this confirmation to an enduring whole
is palpably sensible [sinnlich empfindbar] to us, and if
this found maximum is harmonious with my own feel-
ing, then the constancy of thing, as such, is agreeable to
us; if not, then it is ugly, fearsome, repulsive. The self-
constancy, i.e., the well-being of the thing thus stands in
relation to my own well-being, whether as friend or foe.49
This is the underlying vision of Herder’s aes-
thetics: our feeling of beauty does not arise from
a free play with forms that might be triggered by
something in the objective world but is not con-
strained by it; rather, the feeling of beauty is a sub-
jective response to the perception of objective har-
mony, a subjective feeling of well-being triggered
by empathy with the well-being of other things in
the world. Let us now see if the difference between
this vision and Kant’s is as insuperable as Herder
supposes.
iii. closing the gap between kant and herder
In this section, I argue that on three central points
the differences between Kant and Herder are not
Guyer Free Play and True Well-Being: Herder’s Critique of Kant’s Aesthetics
quite as great as the latter supposed. First, I sug-
gest that Kant himself interprets the feeling of the
free play of the cognitive powers in aesthetic ex-
perience as a feeling of life, and thus that at the
deepest level his conception of the source of aes-
thetic pleasure is not that different from Herder’s.
Second, I argue that while Kant begins his anal-
ysis with the simplest case of the free judgment
of natural beauty, which is supposedly not depen-
dent on our conceptualization of its object, as he
complicates his analysis of aesthetic experiences to
include the cases of the adherent beauty of works
of nature as well as of human art in the general
sense and of fine art in particular, he clearly rec-
ognizes the role of conceptualization in our re-
sponse to the work, and in the case of art, in the
production as the well the reception of the work,
and transforms his conception of free play with
the mere form of an object into a conception of
felt harmony between the form and the concept
of the object that is not so different from Herder’s
conception of the harmony in a beautiful object.
Finally, I argue that when Kant complicates his
initial conception of the disinterestedness of aes-
thetic judgment to take account of our intellectual
interest in the existence of natural beauty, he rec-
ognizes that our experience of beauty is an experi-
ence of well-being and being at home in the world
that is not unrelated to Herder’s conception of our
experience of beauty, although as Kant’s terminol-
ogy suggests, his conception of this interest may re-
main more intellectual and moralistic than Herder
himself would prefer.
First, then, the feeling of life: Kant mentions
the feeling of life explicitly only twice in the third
Critique, each time suggesting that all feelings of
pleasure or displeasure are related to the subject’s
feeling of life, indeed that representations please
or displease because of how they affect the feeling
of life.50 These remarks leave any connection be-
tween the free play of the cognitive powers and the
feeling of life completely unexplained. In the cen-
tral passage on the free play of the faculties, which
he calls the “key to the critique of taste,” how-
ever, in which he argues that only the explanation
of the experience of beauty as due to the free play
of imagination and understanding stimulated by a
given representation can justify the claim of the
judgment of taste to be disinterested, not based
on a concept, and yet universally and necessar-
ily valid, Kant does suggest a connection between
363
free play and the feeling of life when he describes
the condition of the imagination and understand-
ing as one of the “animation” (Belebung) of both
faculties.51 This is still quite gnomic, though, and
it would not have been unreasonable of Herder
not to have paid much attention to it. However, in
his lectures on anthropology—which, to be sure,
he began offering only in 1772–1773, a decade af-
ter Herder had studied with him—Kant makes the
connection between the free play of the faculties
and the feeling of life clear and central to his aes-
thetic theory, and indeed to his moral theory as
well. In the Friedländer lectures of 1775–1776, for
example, Kant argues that “[g]ratification or plea-
sure is the feeling of the promotion of life,” in-
deed that life itself “is the consciousness of a free
and regular play of all the powers and faculties of
human beings.” He equates the free play of our
powers and faculties with their unhindered activ-
ity, and thus finds the ultimate source of all plea-
sure in the unhindered activity of our powers: “The
play of the powers of the mind [Gemüths Kräfte]
must be strongly alive and free if it is to animate.
Intellectual pleasure consists in the consciousness
of the use of freedom in accordance with rules.
Freedom is the greatest life of the human being,
through which he exercises his activity without
hindrance.”52 Indeed, Kant completes this discus-
sion, which opens his lectures on the second part of
psychology, on the faculties of approval and disap-
proval with the remark that “[a]ll gratifications are
related to life. Life, however, is a unity, and in so
far as all gratifications aim at this, they are all ho-
mogeneous, let the sources from which they spring
be what they are.”53 Herder could have included
these sentences in the footnote from Kalligone in
which he objects to Kant’s supposedly complete
separation of the beautiful from the agreeable and
the good.54
To be sure, in the passages from the Friedländer
lectures thus far quoted, Kant connects “activity
without hindrance” with “the use of freedom in
accordance with rules,” and says that he is explain-
ing “the intellectual pleasure that tends toward the
moral.”55 It might therefore be thought that this
connection between life and the unhindered activ-
ity of our mental powers has nothing to do with the
case of aesthetic pleasure. However, in his earlier
discussion of “the concept of the poet and of the
art of poetry” in these lectures, Kant uses the same
language.
364
The harmonious play of thoughts and sentiments
[Empfindungen] is the poem. The play of thoughts and
sentiments is the correspondence [Übereinstimmung] of
subjective laws: if the thoughts correspond with my sub-
ject then that is a play thereof. Second, it is to be observed
of the thoughts that they stand in relation to the object,
and the thoughts must be true, and that the course of
thoughts must correspond with the nature of the mental
powers, thus with the subject and thus the succession of
thoughts with the powers of the mind.56
In the case of the experience of poetry, the feel-
ing of the free play and unhindered activity of the
mental powers is consistent with the existence of
laws for both the contents of the poetry and the
workings of the mind. Here, Kant clearly intends
his explanation of our pleasure in poetry to be
a special case of his general explanation of plea-
sure as the feeling of free play, which is nothing
less than the feeling of life itself. I suggest that
this connection between free play and the feel-
ing of life was a constant in Kant’s thought. To
be sure, in his mature theory of the free play of
imagination and understanding he will emphasize
that this harmony cannot manifest itself in the ap-
plication of determinate laws to beautiful objects,
but only in a general sense of the lawfulness of the
forms designed or apprehended by the imagina-
tion.57 But this does not change the basic point that
Kant thought that the feeling of pleasure in the
free play of the mental powers is a feeling of free,
unhindered life itself. In this regard, Herder’s the-
ory is not as different from Kant’s as he thought,
though I should add that there does remain a dif-
ference between Herder’s and Kant’s conceptions
of the role of the imagination in generating this
feeling of life: for Herder, as we saw, the subjec-
tive faculty of the imagination is like a string that
vibrates in harmony with some objective harmony
outside itself, while for Kant the imagination, cer-
tainly of the artist but even of the spectator, is a
more creative faculty that creates its own forms
in lawful harmony with the understanding’s gen-
eral requirement of unity, and therefore is actively
rather than passively responsible for the feeling of
life. Nevertheless, both theories certainly suppose
that pleasure arises from the feeling of free yet
harmonious activity and that objects of aesthetic
pleasure must in some way stimulate this feeling
of life.
I turn now to the question of the role of concepts
in Kant’s account of our experience of beauty,
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
which Herder thought inadequate. I suggest that
although Herder was in many ways a penetrat-
ing reader of Kant, he was not attentive to Kant’s
expository method in the “Critique of the Aes-
thetic Power of Judgment,” which starts by an-
alyzing only the simplest case of aesthetic judg-
ment, that of the free judgment of natural beauty,
but then progressively complicates the analysis
of aesthetic experience and judgment by showing
precisely that in more complicated cases concepts
can enter into our experience without undermin-
ing what makes it distinctively aesthetic. Kant’s
strategy is to start with this simplest case, in which
concepts are not supposed to be involved at all,
so that he can isolate the free play of mental pow-
ers as that which is essential to aesthetic experi-
ence, and then to find the free play of mental pow-
ers even in cases of aesthetic experience in which
concepts are clearly and heavily involved, such as
the experience of works of fine art. In this regard,
Kant’s expository method in the third Critique is
similar to his method in moral philosophy. In the
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant
starts with cases where moral motivation is most
evident, such as cases of good will in the absence
of all favorable inclination, like the case of the
miserable philanthropist, in order to identify the
fundamental principle of morality, but when he
develops the theory of the highest good in the Cri-
tique of Practical Reason and his theory of virtues
in the Metaphysics of Morals, he shows how in fact
the purity of moral motivation is consistent with
the presence and, indeed, cultivation of various
inclinations and with an interest in happiness, al-
though, of course, not merely one’s own happiness
but universal, unselfish happiness.
On Kant’s account, our judgments of adherent
beauty, artistic beauty, and, for that matter, the
sublime can all be regarded as aesthetic judgments
that are more complicated than the initial case of
the pure judgment of natural beauty, but that re-
tain what Kant has inferred from his analysis of
the latter is essential to all aesthetic experiences,
namely, a free play of cognitive capacities. I will
not discuss the sublime, although as I mentioned
earlier, Kalligone contains a criticism of Kant’s ac-
count of that, too. So I begin with adherent beauty.
Kant’s discussion of that topic is short—just one
section—and problematic. The problem is that he
says that adherent beauty presupposes a concept
of what the object ought to be and “the perfection
of the object in accordance with it,” although the
Guyer Free Play and True Well-Being: Herder’s Critique of Kant’s Aesthetics
preceding section of the “Analytic of the Beau-
tiful” has just asserted that beauty “is entirely
independent of the representation of the good,
since the latter presupposes an objective purpo-
siveness,” but that “by beauty, as a formal sub-
jective purposiveness, there is not conceived any
perfection of the object.”58 If the judgment of ad-
herent beauty presupposes a concept of what an
object ought to be and what it takes for it to be
perfect, how can it be a judgment of beauty at all?
The answer to this puzzle, I suggest, and have ar-
gued elsewhere, is that the experience of adherent
beauty is a genuinely aesthetic experience because
the concept of the perfection of the object never-
theless leaves room for the free play of the imagi-
nation and understanding in response to the form
of the object, or even enters into the free play of
the mental powers with the form, but does not fully
determine the response to the object.59 For exam-
ple, our conception of the proper floor plan for a
cathedral limits what forms we can find acceptable
for such a building, but does not fully determine
them, and a cathedral that we find beautiful is one
whose floor plan and other mandatory features
leave room for the free play of our mental powers
with its form or can even become part of the mate-
rial with which the imagination and understanding
play, when we feel that there is a harmony between
these mandatory features of the building and the
other features that contribute to our aesthetic ex-
perience of it, but a harmony that cannot itself be
derived from any rule. In fact, in his brief account
of adherent beauty, Kant suggests three different
ways in which the concept of the object and its pur-
pose can affect our aesthetic response to the ob-
ject: it can merely constrain what forms we could
find beautiful in the object without positively con-
tributing to our experience of beauty; the object’s
satisfaction of the conditions of its objective pur-
posiveness could be the source of a pleasure that
is additional to our purely aesthetic pleasure in it;
or we could feel a harmony between the object’s
objective purposiveness and all the rest of its fea-
tures that gives rise to a single experience of free
play and a single feeling of its beauty. All these
would be genuinely aesthetic experiences.
Concepts of the object also play a central role
in Kant’s theory of fine art, which is expounded in
three stages, the first his analysis of the concept of
fine art, the second his theory of genius and aes-
thetic ideas, and the third his classification of the
fine arts. In the first stage of his exposition, Kant
365
argues that a work of fine art must be the prod-
uct of intentional human activity, thus must always
have “a determinate intention of producing some-
thing,” and yet that what it aims to produce must
be nothing other than a free and pleasurable play
of the faculties of mind that is not constrained by
a determinate concept. Kant initially tries to re-
solve this apparent paradox by saying that “[i]n
the product of art one must be aware that it is art,
and not nature; yet the purposiveness of its form
must still seem to be as free from all constraint
by arbitrary rules as it were a mere product of na-
ture.”60 This makes it sound as if in the experience
of a work of art we must somehow both be aware
of and yet suppress our recognition of its artifactu-
ality and therefore intentionality, or even as if the
work of art must induce that state in us, deceiv-
ing us about its own intentionality. Kant’s theory
of genius and of aesthetic ideas as the characteris-
tic product of genius immediately supersedes this
initial impression, however. For what Kant argues
here is precisely that a work of art must have a
conceptual content or leading idea, but that what
makes it a successful work of art is the way this
idea is expressed in a “presentation . . . which by
itself stimulates so much thinking that it can never
be grasped in a determinate concept, hence which
aesthetically enlarges the concept itself in an un-
bounded way”; “in this case the imagination is
creative, and sets the faculty of intellectual ideas
(reason) into motion, that is, at the instigation of
a representation it gives more to think about than
can be grasped and made distinct in it (although it
does, to be sure, belong to the concept of the ob-
ject).”61 In other words, a work of art expresses a
concept, but that concept does not fully determine
our experience of the object; rather, it enters into a
free play of our cognitive powers—here clearly in-
cluding the faculty of reason as well as imagination
and understanding—that cannot be grasped by a
determinate concept, or be seen as determined by
that concept. For this reason, the experience of
art is a genuinely aesthetic experience although it
is not a “pure” aesthetic experience like the sim-
ple experience of a beautiful form in nature that
Kant initially analyzed and through which he dis-
covered the role of the free play of the faculties in
all aesthetic experience.
How does this account of Kant’s concepts of
adherent and artistic beauty narrow the gap be-
tween Herder and himself? Herder seems to sug-
gest that all experiences of beauty presuppose a
366
concept of what their objects ought to be and how
they ought to fit into their natural or human envi-
ronment, and Kant would not concede that point.
But, although Kant does not say this explicitly, it
would seem that the pure case of the experience of
natural beauty that he initially analyzes is only a
small part of our experience of beauty, and that
the experiences of adherent beauty and artistic
beauty actually comprise a very large part of our
aesthetic experience. If this is so, then on Kant’s
own view a large number of our actual cases of
aesthetic experience involve a free play between
the concepts of, or in, their objects and the rest
of the form and attributes of those objects, a play
that is free because it involves the relevant concept
but is not determined by that concept functioning
as a rule; and this, I suggest, brings Kant’s phe-
nomenology and psychology of aesthetic experi-
ence close to Herder’s. For the heart of Herder’s
account of beauty is that our feeling “appropri-
ates” itself to the concept of the object’s perfec-
tion that he claims is essential to the experience of
beauty “harmoniously and gladly.” I interpret this
to mean that for Herder, as for Kant, the concept
of the perfection achieved by a beautiful object is
more like a necessary than a sufficient condition
for our experience of its beauty, and that for the
latter we must also have an experience of a free
harmony of the object in all its particularity with
its purpose, thus a harmony that cannot itself be
derived from any mere concept of the object.
Finally, the most deeply felt and perhaps the
deepest of Herder’s criticisms of Kant is his attack
on the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment, his
insistence that there is a continuum rather than
discontinuity between our responses to the agree-
able, the beautiful, and the good. I suggest that
on the matter of disinterestedness, too, Kant be-
gins with a simple statement of a position that
then turns out to be more complicated than it
initially appears. There can be no question that
Kant wants to distinguish genuinely aesthetic ex-
perience from merely physiological gratification
of the senses, from the approval of utility, or from
moral approval, and that he does this by saying
that aesthetic judgment neither presupposes nor
gives rise to any interest in the existence of its
object. But numerous factors complicate this pic-
ture. First, Kant always defines pleasure as a state
of mind that is connected with a disposition to-
ward its own continuation, and in the first draft
of the introduction to the third Critique he adds
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
that pleasure is a ground “for producing its ob-
ject.”62 There are technical reasons why Kant does
not want to speak here of an interest in the con-
tinuation of pleasure and/or the production of its
object, but it is certainly reasonable to say that on
Kant’s own account any pleasure, including even
the purest pleasure in beauty, is accompanied with
some form of attachment to the possibility of its
own continued and future experience, and there-
fore ordinarily to the availability of the objects that
trigger that pleasure.63
Further, Kant explicitly argues that the prop-
erly aesthetic pleasure in beautiful objects enters
into combination with interests, also properly so
called, in the existence of those objects. Under the
rubric of the “empirical interest” in the beauti-
ful, he argues that there are societal reasons for
taking interest in the availability and possession
of beautiful objects; and although he denies that
there is any a priori relation of these reasons to
the experience of beauty, this is not to deny the
existence of such attachments.64 Under the rubric
of the “intellectual interest in the beautiful,” Kant
describes a reason for attachment to the beautiful
that is apparently supposed to be a priori, namely,
that the existence of beauty is a “trace” or “sign”
that nature is amenable to the satisfaction of our
moral interests.65 Kant’s conception of an intel-
lectual interest in the beautiful does not seem en-
tirely remote from Herder’s view that our sense
of well-being in an object is accompanied with a
corresponding sense of our own well-being, which
I have suggested is the core of Herder’s mature
aesthetic theory, although there are two key dif-
ferences. For one, Herder insists on a recognition
of an objective well-being to which our subjective
feeling of well-being is a response, while for Kant
well-being is always subjective, that is, our own,
and the satisfaction of our aesthetic aims and of
our moral aims may be parallel, but both are sub-
jective. Our aesthetic pleasure in natural beauty
is a sign of the possibility of our moral well-being
in nature, not a response to a harmony in nature
that has nothing to do with us. Second, Kant clearly
wants to keep the connection between the satisfac-
tion of our aesthetic aims and the satisfaction of
our moral interests separate although connected,
thus not collapsing aesthetic pleasure into moral
satisfaction and, further, Kant seems to suggest
that a sound moral interest in nature’s amenability
to our objectives is a condition of the intellectual
but aesthetic interest in the existence of (natural)
Guyer Free Play and True Well-Being: Herder’s Critique of Kant’s Aesthetics
beauty. From Herder’s point of view, that might
seem to be an excessive moralization of an inter-
est in the beautiful that should be entirely natu-
ral, although from Kant’s point of view Herder’s
insistence on the continuity of the beautiful and
the good might actually run the risk of an exces-
sive moralization of aesthetic experience. So no
doubt there are differences between them, but it
is misleading of Herder to suggest that Kant simply
fails to recognize that we have a real attachment to
the interest in the beautiful. Kant does recognize
that, but wants to keep that attachment somewhat
complicated and indirect in order to avoid the
risk of an excessive moralization of the aesthetic
but at the same time, I might suggest, also avoid
the risk of an excessive aestheticization of the
moral.
I conclude, then, that while there is considerably
more common ground between Kant and Herder
than might initially appear, and certainly than ap-
peared to Herder in 1800, there is also some good
reason for preserving Kant’s sense of the indirect-
ness and complexity of the relation between the
aesthetic and the moral rather than making the
connection as direct and simple as Herder risks
doing.
PAUL GUYER
Department of Philosophy
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
internet: pguyer@nous.phil.upenn.edu
1. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Meditationes
philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus/Philoso-
phische Betrachtungen über einige Bedingungen des Ge-
dichtes, ed. Heinz Paetzold (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag,
1983), §CXVI, pp. 86–87.
2. See Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 9, 1451a37–1451b10.
3. See Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der
schönen Künste, expanded 2nd ed., four vols. (Leipzig:
Weidmann, 1792–1794), “Geschmack,” vol. II, p. 371, and
“Schön (Schöne Künste),” vol. IV, p. 307.
4. Johann Gottfried Herder, Kalligone, in Johann
Gottfried Herder, Werke, ed. Günter Arnold et al., vol. 8 of
Schriften zu Literatur und Philosophie 1792–1800, ed. Hans
Dietrich Irmscher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker
Verlag, 1998), p. 660.
5. Johann Gottfried Herder, Sculpture: Some Obser-
vations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative
Dream, trans. Jason Gaiger (University of Chicago Press,
2002).
6. Friedrich Just Riedel, Theorie der schönen Künste
und Wissenschaften (Jena: Cuno, 1767).
367
7. Herder, Viertes Kritisches Wäldchen, in Herder,
Werke, vol. 2 of Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur 1767–
1781, ed. Günter Grimm (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher
Klassiker Verlag, 1993), pp. 262–263, both current and fol-
lowing quote. In the first extract, I translated Herder’s
Homischen as “Kamesian” since Henry Home is now usu-
ally referred to by his judicial title, Lord Kames. The 1764
work of Kant to which I refer in this paragraph is the prize
essay “Enquiry concerning the Distinctness of the Principles
of Natural Theology and Morality.”
8. See Kant, “Enquiry concerning the Distinctness of
the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality,” especially
Second Reflection, 2:283–286, in Immanuel Kant, Theoret-
ical Philosophy, 1755–1770, ed. David Walford (Cambridge
University Press, 1992), pp. 256–259.
9. The second and third of the Groves, not reprinted
in the modern edition of Herder, are a polemic against the
Leipzig rhetorician and philologist Christian Adolph Klotz.
10. Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and
Sculpture of the Greeks, trans. Henry Fusseli (London: A.
Millar, 1765), p. 30.
11. That visual arts are confined to the representation
of a single moment of action is a premise that goes back at
least to Jean-Baptiste Du Bos’s Critical Reflections on Poetry,
Painting, and Music (1719), trans. Thomas Nugent (London:
John Nourse, 1748), vol. I, pp. 71–72.
12. Herder, first Grove, p. 195.
13. Herder, first Grove, pp. 195–196.
14. Herder, fourth Grove, p. 291n.
15. Again a well-established idea in the eighteenth cen-
tury; see Joseph Addison, Spectator 411 (June 21, 1712);
Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, (1762),
ed. Peter Jones (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, [1762] 2005),
vol. I, pp. 141–142.
16. Herder, fourth Grove, pp. 289–290.
17. Herder, Sculpture, pp. 39–41.
18. See Herder, Sculpture, pp. 33–38.
19. Herder, fourth Grove, p. 314.
20. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 644, 647.
21. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 653–654.
22. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 747–748.
23. See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Intro-
duction, § III, 5:177. Citations from Kant will use the volume
and page number from Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, ed. the
Royal Prussian (later German, then Berlin-Brandenburg)
Academy of Sciences (Berlin: Georg Reimer, later Wal-
ter de Gruyter, 1900–). Translations will be from Immanuel
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer,
trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2000).
24. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Introduc-
tion, § III, 5:177.
25. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 882–883.
26. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 893–894.
27. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 954–955.
28. See Herder, Kalligone, pp. 908–912.
29. The referent of Herder’s ‘both’ is unclear; he could
be referring to Kant’s division of the verbal arts into poetry
and oratory. Herder, Kalligone, p. 939.
30. Herder, Kalligone, p. 944.
31. Herder, fourth Grove, p. 291.
32. Herder, Kalligone, p. 665.
33. Herder, Kalligone, p. 667.
368
34. Herder, Kalligone, p. 667.
35. Herder, Kalligone, p. 668.
36. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 672–673n.
37. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 5, 5:209
38. Herder, Kalligone, p. 730.
39. See Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftes-
bury, “Sensus Communis,” in Characteristicks of Men, Man-
ners, Opinions, Times, ed. Philip Ayres (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1999), vol. I, p. 55.
40. Herder, Kalligone, p. 648.
41. Herder, Kalligone, p. 675.
42. Herder, Kalligone, p. 688.
43. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 710–711.
44. Herder, Kalligone, p. 712.
45. Herder, Kalligone, p. 719.
46. Herder, Kalligone, p. 721.
47. Herder, Kalligone, p. 722.
48. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 687–688.
49. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 688–689.
50. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 1, 5:204,
and General Remark following § 29, 5:270.
51. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 9, 5:219.
52. Kant, Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, pp. 559–560.
53. Kant, Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, p. 561.
54. Herder, Kalligone, pp. 672–673.
55. Kant, Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, p. 560.
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
56. Kant, Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, pp. 525–526.
57. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, General
Remark on the first section of the Analytic, following § 22,
5:240–241.
58. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 16, 5:229;
§ 15, 5:226, 228.
59. Paul Guyer, “Beauty and Utility in Eighteenth-
Century Aesthetics,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35 (2002):
439–453, and “Free and Adherent Beauty: A Modest Pro-
posal,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 357–366,
both reprinted in Paul Guyer, Values of Beauty: Histori-
cal Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2005),
pp. 110–140.
60. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 45, 5:306.
61. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 49, 5:315.
62. First Introduction to the Critique of the Power of
Judgment, § VIII, 20:230–231.
63. On the reasons why Kant does not want to speak here
of an interest in the continuation of pleasure and/or the pro-
duction of its object, see Paul Guyer, “Disinterestedness and
Desire in Kant’s Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 36 (1978): 449–460, reprinted in Perspectives
on Kant, ed. Ruth Chadwick and Clive Cazeaux (London:
Routledge, 1992), vol. 4, pp. 232–248.
64. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 41, 5:297.
65. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 42, 5:300.