British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 39, No.

2, April 1999

KANT ON BEAUTIFYING THE HUMAN

BODY

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Robert Wicks

IN §16 of the Critique of Judgement, Immanuel Kant refers to Maori facial tattoos in
an effort to present a conception of aesthetic inappropriateness that stems from
his conception of dependent beauty. To recall, he states:

We could add much to a building which would immediately please the eye if only it
were not to be a church. We could beautify [verschonen] a given configuration with all
kinds of spirals and light but regular lines, as the New Zealanders do with their
tattooing, if only the configuration were not that of a human being . . .'

Kant acknowledges that spiral tattoos and their like can be beautiful as pure
designs, but he adds that they are incompatible with the ideally beautiful human
form, and concludes that if a person's appearance is to be beautiful, then such
designs ought not to be present. He grounds this aesthetic prohibition upon a
neoclassical sculptural ideal which imagines the human body in a condition of
anatomical perfection, and by asserting that this pattern is the aesthetically natural
expression of the human purpose—a purpose which is given a priori, and whose
content is moral—he amalgamates both aesthetic and moral considerations into
his objection to facial tattoos.
In order to evaluate Kant's disapproval of facial tattoos and of all comparable
configurational departures from the ideal human form, it is important to determine
1
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), §16, p.
66. All citations from Kant's Critique ofJudgement (hereafter cited as CJ) will be from Bernard's
translation, sometimes with minor modifications for the purposes of clarity. The German reads-
Man wiirde vieles unmittelbar in der Anschauung Gefallende an einem Gebaude anbnngen
kdnnen, wenn es nur nicht eine Kirche sein sollte, eine Gestalt mit allerlei Schnorkeln und
leichten, doch regelmassigen Zugen, wie die Neuseelander mit ihrem Tettowiren thun, ver-
schonern kdnnen, wenn es nur nicht ein Mensch ware; und dieser konnte viel feinere Zuge und
einen gefalligeren, sanftern Umnss der Gesichtsbildung haben, wenn er nur nicht emen Mann,
oder gar einem kriegerischen vorstellen sollte. (Kants Werke, Akademie Textausgabe, vol. V [Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1968], p. 230)

Maori tattoo designs were first recorded by Europeans in 1769, twenty-one years before the Critique
of Judgement was published. Sydney Parkinson, who was the artist for Captain James Cook,
documented the practice for the European audience.

© British Society of Aesthetics 1999 163

i6 4 KANT ON BEAUTIFYING THE HUMAN BODY

the extent to which his neoclassical conception of human beauty is defensible. In

addition, a certain puzzle arising from his aesthetic prohibition of facial tattoos and
their like should be resolved: how can forms which are admittedly beautiful in
themselves (such as spiral tattoo designs) detract from the beauty of a human being,
if, as Kant also maintains, beauty in general is the symbol of morality? This essay will
develop answers to these questions, and will reveal some underlying reasons for
Kant's disapproval of facial tattoos and their like, by examining how incompatibilities

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can obtain between sets of forms, each of which is acknowledged to be beautiful in
its own right. The conclusion will be that Kant's aesthetic prohibition of facial tattoos
is reasonable in reference to only one of two ideals of human beauty that reside
within this aesthetics, namely, to a neoclassical ideal as opposed to an expressionist
ideal.2 It will also be concluded that the expressionist ideal of human beauty
incorporates the neoclassical ideal as one of its specifications, and allows generally
that facial tattoos can enhance human beauty. In connection with the latter point, it
will also be shown that the expressionist ideal of human beauty is consistent with the
condition of moral respect which Kant intended his neoclassical ideal of human
beauty to embody exclusively.

1 TRUTHFUL APPEARANCE AND DEPENDENT BEAUTY

Under what conditions is it appropriate to require that a thing should present

itself directly and obviously as the kind of thing it actually is? What consider-
ations, for example, would justify a negative evaluation of an insect that looks like
a plant twig, a piece of glass cut to look like a diamond, a reconstructed building
or restored painting made to look centuries old, or, more clearly, a wolf in sheep's
clothing, a counterfeit coin which is presented as genuine, or an evil person who
is portrayed as a saint? Sometimes deceptive appearances are justifiable when
issues of survival are at issue, or when there is no real deception, but only an
acknowledged imitation. Where human beauty is concerned, however, Kant
strongly opposes deceptive appearances. More exactly, his conception of
dependent beauty—one which involves taking a thing's purpose into aesthetic
consideration—rests upon the idea of truthful appearance, for it requires that if a
thing is to be a beautiful one of its kind, then it must present itself clearly as the
kind of thing it is, without distortion, misrepresentation, concealment, or mask-
ing of its character. On this conception, the beauty of an item whose purpose
2
The contrast between Kant's 'formalist' theory of pure beauty as opposed to his 'expressionist'
theory of artistic beauty arises frequently in discussions of Kant's aesthetics, either to be developed
or rejected. This essay argues for the pnontization of the expressionist aspect, loosely following
some of Hans-Georg Gadamer's reflections on Kant's aesthetics in so far as he emphasized the
centrality of meaningfulness, metaphorical content, and expressiveness as central to the experience
of beauty The argument of this essay also implicitly questions the premisses underlying the
neoclassical aesthetic advocated by the supporters of National Socialism in Germany, as they were
exemplified in the public condemnation of Expressionist and Cubist art in the July 1937 exhibition
in Munich entitled 'Entartete Kunst' (Degenerate Art).
 ROBERT WICKS 165

must be taken into account cannot be limited superficially to surface appearances,

since the quality of an item's beauty as the kind of thing it is depends upon how
clearly the nature of the item is revealed within the beautiful presentation.3
Given Kant's aesthetic commitment to truthful appearance, it is appropriate to
consider how a thing's purpose can determine how it should, or should not,
present itself. This will illuminate Kant's account of dependent beauty in so far as
a judgement of dependent beauty presupposes a concept of a thing's purpose, and

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'the perfection of the object in accordance therewith' (CJ, §16, p. 65). Central to
understanding this idea within the present context, is a consideration of how
certain forms (such as spiral tattoos) can be beautiful in themselves, and yet
remain incompatible with a specific kind of object, on the grounds that these
beautiful forms somehow conflict with that object's purpose—a purpose
understood to determine, or at least circumscribe, rules for the object's config-
uration as a thing of its type.4 The aim, then, is to specify this 'somehow', such as
to understand the tensions between forms expressive of an object's purpose and
other forms which can also be present.
Kant explicitly, though very generally, describes the kind of incompatibility
that arises when some forms conflict with others which are required in an object
of a certain kind. This occurs when a condition for the object's ideal appearance
is violated—a condition which is the presupposition of a purpose 'which the
manifold of the given object is to serve, and which therefore is to be represented in it'
(CJ, §17, p. 66, emphasis added). So if any forms interfere with the representation
of the object's purpose, then these forms would be incompatible with the object's
dependent beauty. To clarify this key idea, various senses of how a form(s) can
interfere with, or be incompatible with, another form(s) can be distinguished.
To begin at the most general and non-problematic sense of incompatibility
between forms, an object's purpose may require the presence of certain forms, and
by requiring the presence of these forms, render impossible the presence of other
forms. A (non-porous) object whose purpose is to hold liquids, for example, requires
a concave structure (i.e. it must have upturned or upright edges), and it cannot be a
perfectly flat object. Being planar is incompatible with the purpose of holding

Friednch Nietzsche presents an alternative outlook in The Birth of Tragedy (1872). In his distinction
between Apollonian and Dionysian perspectives, he asserts that beauty is typically associated with
deception. Nietzsche's position is not altogether unrelated to Kant's, since he also acknowledges
that beauty issues from idealization. It is only that Nietzsche regards idealization as a mode of
falsification, whereas Kant understands it as a mode of revelation.
Although this essay directs its attention specifically to spiral tattoos, the broader aesthetic issue
concerns the kinds of artistic modifications to the human body which are compatible with Kant's
theory of beauty—a theory of beauty whose importance resides in its sustained focus upon the
rationally centred features in the experience of beauty. The case of Maori tattoos is noteworthy
for two reasons. First, the tattoos in question are fundamentally configurational, rather than
colorational, which is consistent with Kant's emphasis upon delineation as the core of visual
beauty; secondly, the cross-cultural context within which this example emerges helps to illuminate
some of Kant's claims regarding the universal application of his theory.
166 KANT ON BEAUTIFYING THE HUMAN BODY

liquids, and if some non-porous object is planar, then its form would prevent the
object from serving the purpose of holding liquids. One way, then, in which a form
can be incompatible with the purpose of an object, and incompatible with
restrictions on an object's form in view of its purpose, is if that form's presence
precludes the instantiation of a necessary condition for the object, and thereby
renders the object's instantiation impossible. This is an extreme and limiting case,
since here the presence of forms incompatible with the object's purpose simply

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renders the object incapable of instantiation. As applied to contexts of dependent
beauty, this situation would arise, for instance, if a certain kind of church required a
cruciform floor plan. The lack of that floor plan in some church would render it
impossible for it to be a beautiful church of that cruciform kind, no matter how
many other qualities of that kind of church the building happened to have, and no
matter how beautiful that building might otherwise be. We can refer to this kind of
incompatibility of forms as the 'impossibility of co-instantiation'.
Less exclusive cases of incompatibility of forms—the proper subject of this
essay—arise where the forms in question are co-instantiable, and yet still conflict
with each other.5 These situations are more directly relevant to understanding how
beautifully formed tattoos and similar designs could, within Kant's understanding,
be incompatible with the ideal human figure. Since a facial tattoo is etched upon the
skin surface, remains co-present with facial contours, and, in those instances where
the facial contours are themselves beautiful, allows some of this beauty to shine
through nonetheless, whatever conflict obtains between the tattoo's design and the
human face must be understood in reference to a conception of incompatibility
which allows for the possibility of co-instantiation of incompatible forms.

II KANT'S NEOCLASSICAL IDEAL OF BEAUTY

The alleged incompatibility between facial tattoos and the ideal of human beauty
can be understood against the background of a central feature of traditional
portraiture, which is that a good portrait should present a person truly at his or
her best. Faithful portraits represent people favourably in their 'true' or 'charac-
teristic' form, and typically achieve this by departing from a person's ordinary
appearance as a means to reveal the person's character. It might seem questionable
that a faithful portrait of someone would of necessity be a beautiful portrait, but
the techniques of traditional portraiture align the two conditions: departures
from the person's ordinary appearance follow from a process of idealization,
which, while eliminating those naturally occurring features believed to detract
from the expression of the person's character, further perfect the forms which
remain. So the process of idealization itself generates a superficially beautiful

Later in this essay, a relevant kind of conflict will be described in terms of differences in the
respective sets of associative meaning linked with alternative instantiations of the same expressive
property.
 ROBERT WICKS 167

portrayal (e.g. as seen in the photographic techniques of traditional wedding

portraiture), and the revelation of the person's character in the process leads to a
true portrayal, in so far as the person's character is itself consistent with beautiful
portrayal.6 G. W. F. Hegel expresses this understanding of portraiture in his
Lectures on Aesthetics, written a few decades after Kant's view was formulated:

[the artist] must omit little hairs, pores, little scars, blemishes, and grasp and represent
the subject in its universal character and in its steadfast individuality. It makes a great

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difference whether the artist merely reproduces a person's physiognomy, as it quietly
presents itself to him in its surface and external configuration, or whether the artist
insightfully represents the true features which express the subject's own soul. For the
Ideal necessitates, without exception, that the external form accord with the soul.7

If traditional portraiture aims to represent clearly a person's enduring character

by omitting qualities which interfere with the perception of that character, then
one can interpret Kant as saying that tattoos, like scars and blemishes, obscure
those facial forms which naturally express human character. The only difference
between tattoos and naturally occurring blemishes, etc., would be that the tattoos
are artistically imposed. This, admittedly unsympathetic, interpretation of tattoos
is defensible to some extent: in a culture where facial tattooing has a history of
illegitimacy, or has no substantial history at all, the general population might
regard facial tattooing as a kind of unsightly distraction, or as a mask, which
obscures the expression of who the. person really is.8 Alternatively, within a

A faithful portrait would of necessity be a beautiful portrait, only under the condition that the
person is good. If one assumes that there is some good in every person, then the techniques of
traditional portraiture would serve to bring out this quality in the portrayal A thoroughly demonic
character portrayed through the process of idealization would, on this conception, falsify the
presentation of that character. This conception of beautiful portraiture curiously implies that a
superficially beautiful portrait of a demonic person would not really be beautiful, even though such
a portrait might not be perceptually distinguishable from one of the evil person's twin sibling who
happened to be a good person. On the other hand, this conception suggests reasonably that the
incongruencies between form and content arising in cases of idealized depictions of demonic
characters would belong not to the sphere of the beautiful, but to another sphere, such as that of
the sublime, grotesque, or horrible.
G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Banden (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), vol XIII, p. 206
This is the judgement of John Liddiard Nicholas, a missionary who visited New Zealand in
1814—15. He describes the appearance of Te Pahe, a Maori chief

. . . he was highly tattooed, a mode of disfiguring the face which is generally practised by all the
savage tribes in the Pacific Ocean The barbarous process consists in pricking on the face with a
sharp instrument, a variety of semi-circular and other figures, and rubbing into the puncture a kind
of blue paint, or sometimes charcoal, which gives to the countenance a most disgusting appearance,
and makes it truly hideous to the eye of an European. On being laughed at one day by a gentleman
for having disfigured his face in so unnatural a manner, the sagacious chief immediately retorted
with pointed sarcasm; telling him he was quite as much an object of derision himself for having
put powder and grease in his hair, a practice which he thought was much more absurd than the
tattooing. (John Liddiard Nicholas, Esq., Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand, vol. I [London:
James Black, 1817], pp. 9-10)
168 KANT ON BEAUTIFYING THE HUMAN BODY

culture where facial tattooing has a history of legitimacy, someone who refused to
be tattooed might be perceived as incomplete in their facial configuration, and as
lacking an ingredient necessary for the full expression of their historical and
personal character.9 Kant's neoclassical ideal of human beauty aligns with the first
of these alternatives. It is even more extreme: his aesthetic prohibition of facial
tattoos asserts itself as a universally grounded, cross-cultural prohibition.
This ideal of human beauty implies that it is impossible to paint a beautiful

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portrait of a tattooed person in the traditional manner, such that the tattoos would
not detract from the person's beauty. The person's anatomical configuration might
include beautiful facial contours, but Kant's position is that the tattoos could not
enhance this beauty. Similarly, as we will note in a moment, this ideal also implies
that it would be impossible to paint, or sculpt, a beautiful portrait of a person whose
body is unusually formed (missing limb, extra digit, etc.), such that the unusually
formed aspects would not detract from the person's beauty. What remains somewhat
unclear with respect to these restrictions is why tattoos and unusual physical features
would necessarily be negative compositional elements. Portraits of tattooed people
or of people with unusually formed bodies, for example, could be revealingly
expressive of a person's character, and they could also be executed with a high degree
of idealization: tattoo forms can be sharpened and balanced with respect to their
contours; physically uncommon bodily forms can be rendered with smoother and
more balanced lines than they might in fact have. So neither truthful appearance nor
idealized modes of portrayal are in essential conflict with forms such as facial tattoos
and their like, which suggests that Kant's objection to facial tattoos depends upon
further considerations. As it turns out, his objection rests mainly upon a conception
of 'naturalness' of form defined in terms of a statistical norm, which he believes
constrains the forms which can be expressive of human beauty. For him, the ideally
beautiful human form is a complete human form, grounded upon an image
containing all of the standard bodily parts arranged in their standard configurations.
To appreciate why Kant emphasizes the statistically average human form as a
condition for human beauty, it is important to recall one of the most significant,
but easily overlooked, features of his conception of human beauty: it revolves
exclusively around the idea of'humanity in general.' This renders his conception
of human beauty completely generic:
The only being which has the purpose of its existence in itself is the human being [der
Mensch], which can determine its purposes by reason; or, where it must receive them
from external perception, yet can compare them with essential and universal purposes
and can judge this their accordance aesthetically. This human being is, then, alone
of all objects in the world, susceptible of an ideal of beauty, as it is only humanity in

9
The historian of Maori culture, James Cowan, writes: 'One can easily imagine how it was that in
former days an untattooed man was called a "naked fellow" The term for a face devoid of moko
[tattoos] is "papa-tea", which may be interpreted as "bare-boards"' (James Cowan, The Maoris of
New Zealand [Chnstchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1910], pp. 189-190)
 ROBERT WICKS 169
its person, as an intelligence, that is susceptible of the ideal of perfection. (CJ, §17,
p. 70)

A hallmark of both Kant's theories of knowledge and morality is an ahistoncal

focus upon universal constancies specific to either the human being, or to rational
beings. His theories of dependent beauty (of which human beauty is a species) and
of beauty in general follow suit. With an overriding interest in discovering the
constant patterns of h u m a n awareness, conjoined with his specific quest for

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unwavering principles governing aesthetic judgement, Kant maintains that the
a priori moral purpose of the human being limits the possible perceptual
configurations for human beauty. This complements his view that the a priori
epistemological conditions for human knowledge set constraints upon what can be
experienced as beautiful in general. 10 A person's bodily form can thus be beautiful
only if it does not contradict the expression of moral content. N o w Kant tends to
maintain that a person's bodily form can be morally expressive in a beautiful way,
only to the extent that that expression does not contradict the ideal way nature
intends a h u m a n body to look, which he locates in the set of perfect bodily
proportions expressed in the neoclassical ideal of human beauty. The crux of Kant's
objections to tattoos and their like depend upon this latter restriction upon beautiful
human form—how nature supposedly intends the human body to look—for we will
see below that it is not impossible for spiral tattoos to express moral qualities.
How, then, does Kant express this neoclassical ideal of h u m a n beauty, in
relation to which he maintains that facial tattoos are supposedly incompatible?
We find this in his discussion of the 'ideal of beauty' where he specifies the
conditions for the presentation of a beautiful human figure. These forms define
the natural configuration of the human being and are embodied in

. . . [an] image for the whole race, which floats among all the variously different
intuitions of individuals, which nature takes as the archetype in her productions of the
same species, but which appears not to be fully reached in any individual case. It is by
no means the whole archetype of beauty in the race, but only the form constituting the
indispensable condition of all beauty, and thus merely correctness in the [mental]
presentation of the race. (CJ, §17, p. 71)

Kant refers to the 'image for the whole race' as an 'aesthetic normal idea'—an
imaginary construction which is not necessarily beautiful, but which is the
configurational constraint within which human beauty can only appear. Any
form, then, which obscures or interferes with the presence of this basic config-
uration must diminish the presence of human beauty. Specific works of art which
instantiate this aesthetic normal idea include some of the best examples of
classical Greek sculpture (Kant refers to Polycleitus' Doryphorus), so it is fair to say

10
This issues from Kant's account of the pleasure in the beautiful as arising from the harmony of the
cognitive faculties (namely the understanding and the imagination).
i7o KANT ON BEAUTIFYING THE HUMAN BODY

that any human form which departs significantly from the Greek sculptural ideal
would depart from Kant's conception of how nature ideally intends a human
body to appear, and would thereby depart from the configuration within which
human beauty can be embodied.11
Since 'what nature intends' is only the aesthetic normal idea, it does not follow
that if a human being presents itself as nature intends, then that person's
appearance will be beautiful. It follows only that if a person's body does not

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present itself consistently with the way nature intends humans to look, then it
cannot be beautiful. There are consequently two ways for spiral facial tattoos, or
comparable configurations, to be inconsistent with the expression of human
beauty: they might be incompatible with the aesthetic normal idea, or they might
be compatible with this idea, but incompatible with the configurations necessary
for the positive expression of human beauty.
It is easy to imagine a carefully placed facial tattoo design on a Greek sculpture
which does not eliminate any of the sculpture's key facial contours. So spiral
facial tattoos need not preclude the presence of any configuration prescribed by
the aesthetic normal idea, and in this respect, they are consistent with the
expression of human beauty. Moreover, if they are strategically and tastefully
placed, it is not unreasonable to assume that the spiral designs could accentuate
the natural contours of the lips, or any other part of the face. Since they would
here highlight, rather than detract from, the natural configuration of the face, the
tattoos need not conflict with the compositional rules governing the ideal human
face, and so would remain compatible with the aesthetic normal idea in this
respect as well. Whether such designs conflict with the positive configurations
expressive of human morality, so far remains undetermined. Kant does, though,
provide some further detail on this matter:

The visible expression of moral ideas that rule people inwardly can indeed only be
gotten from experience; but to make its connection with all which our reason unites
with the morally good in the idea of the highest purposiveness—goodness of heart,
purity, strength, peace, etc.—visible as it were in bodily manifestation (as the effect of
that which is internal) requires a union of pure ideas of reason with great imaginative
power even in the person who wishes to judge of it, still more in the person who
wishes to present it. The correctness of such an ideal of beauty is shown by its
permitting no sensible charm to mingle with the satisfaction in the object, and yet
allowing us to take a great interest therein (CJ, §17, p 72)

Configurations which are positively expressive of morality are obtained from

experience, and include those expressive of 'goodness of heart, purity, strength,

" This implies that a damaged sculpture such as the Venus it Milo, if beautiful, would be beautiful
notwithstanding its lack of arms, and not beautiful in any way because of its lack of arms. If,
however, one admits that this statue is beautiful, then it becomes difficult to maintain—as Kant's
neoclassical ideal implies—that a person with a missing limb cannot have a comparable beauty.
 ROBERT WICKS 171

peace, etc.' If such configurations are to be beautiful, then they must be presented
such as to omit any 'sensible charm' that might obscure their formal clarity. Kant is
assuming here (controversially) that only configurations, as opposed to colorations,
can have the expressive properties requisite for the beautiful manifestation of moral
qualities.12 If we grant this assumption to Kant, then his position regarding the
inappropriateness of spiral facial tattoos must be either that the designs do not have
properties requisite for moral expression, or if they do, that the way they express
moral content conflicts with the way an ideal human configuration would do so.

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Since a spiral design can express strength (if the lines are sharp and bold) or
peace (if the lines are soft and delicate), the inappropriateness of spiral designs on
the human face can be neither that they are incompatible with the aesthetic
normal idea, nor that they are incompatible with beautiful human forms in
general, nor that they are incompatible with moral expression in so far as basic
expressive properties (when defined in the abstract) are concerned. If spiral
designs are inconsistent with the expression of human beauty, then the next
possibility is whether this inappropriateness resides in the way expressive
properties of the same general kind, namely those expressing moral content, can
come into irresolvable conflict within the same figure. By exploring this idea, we
will be able to explain how a beautiful configuration can express a moral content,
and yet still conflict with the neoclassical ideal of human beauty.

Ill INCOMPATIBILITIES BETWEEN ALTERNATIVE INSTANTIATIONS OF A SINGLE

EXPRESSIVE PROPERTY
If a person's face has the expressive property of 'strength' or 'peace', this implies
neither that the person is actually strong or peaceful, nor that the person feels
strong or peaceful, nor that the person is intentionally expressing strength or
peace. A sculpture of the person's head could have exactly the same expressive
property, so the property must arise from the facial configuration itself, and the
ways the configuration suggests the idea, in the present example, of either
strength or peace. How the configuration suggests this can be straightforward
or complicated, ranging from correspondences to the obvious and typical
behavioural ways in which people express strength (or peace, etc.) when they
communicate to others, to more metaphorically grounded associations, such as
how a facial configuration can be suggestive of a rock, or of a solid piece of wood,
or of a lion, or of a bear. A human face can look strong in thousands of different
ways: there are many strength-associated minerals, plants, and animals to which a
face can be related; there are many social contexts within which specific facial

12
This is a consequence of Kant's effort to establish a universally valid condition for judgements of
taste. Unlike colour perception, which varies with empirical differences in sense organs, he
believes that the perception of spatial delineations is more deeply rooted in the a priori form of
space, which one can assume others have invanantly Hence he regards colours as mostly
charming, as opposed to being fundamentally beautiful
172 KANT ON BEAUTIFYING THE HUMAN BODY

configurations would express strength (e.g. maintaining a straight face at a

disaster scene); there are many variants of subjective states, all of which are called
'strength', which have diverse behavioural manifestations. This complicated
situation is comparable for many of the expressive properties Kant mentions,
such as peace, purity, goodness of heart, and so on.
Kant's ideal of human beauty implies that a person's face can be beautiful only
if its form is consistent with what nature intends in the human face—an intention

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which he maintains is presented by the statistical average of all actual facial
configurations. So, using the example of a peaceful face, if the contours of a deer's
face depart significantly from the statistical norm of the human face (e.g. due to
the proportionally different placement of the eyes, given the different general
shape of the head), and if the contours of a cat's face more closely coincide with
this statistical norm, then, all else being equal, a person whose peaceful face
depended upon an association with a deer's for its expressive quality would be
less beautiful than a person whose peaceful face depended upon an association
with a cat. The specific way in which a face is peaceful makes the difference in
whether or not it can be a beautiful face. Furthermore, since this way often
depends significantly upon the metaphorical associations that ground the
expression of peace, then if the metaphorical associations are generally consistent
with the statistical norm for the human face (as described above in the cat/deer
example), then the face can be beautiful to that extent.
With the above in mind, we can now consider how a facial tattoo could express
strength or peace, and whether these ways are, or are not, consistent with the
qualities of a statistically average human face. One way for Kant to be correct in
his aesthetic prohibition of facial tattoos would be if there were an irresolvable
conflict between the ways tattoos express strength (for example), and the ways in
which any given face can express strength in a manner consistent with the
statistically average face. To investigate this question within Kant's framework, it
is necessary to regard the tattoos as purely abstract designs, rather than as repres-
entations, symbols, or inscriptions, since this is the condition under which he
admits that the configurations can be beautiful in general. With this assumption,
we can identify two ways in which spiral tattoos and their like conflict with the
neoclassical ideal of beauty Kant prescribes. These can be referred to as 'formal/
causal' conflicts and as 'semantic' conflicts.
First, there is an underlying question of what it means for a form to be
'consistent' with the statistical norm for a human face. Precisely specifying this
norm is difficult, but gross departures from the norm are obvious enough, such
as is the case when a face has no ears, or when the eyes are located on the sides
of the head, as is true for many birds. Such facial configurations would be
inconsistent with the statistical norm both in their shape and in their cause. With
respect to spiral tattoos, one might be tempted to argue that their presentation is
comparably inconsistent: neither are spiral configurations typical for the human
 ROBERT WICKS 173

face in so far as their appearance is concerned, nor do they commonly arise as a

matter of what nature intends. Such designs, then, would be inconsistent with an
expression which is both moral and beautiful.
The problem with this 'statistical norm' criterion with respect to its causal
aspect, at least, is that it renders all uncommonly occurring features necessarily
non-beautifying. However, from the standpoint of formal composition, some
extraordinary features could be beautifying (perhaps extra-large eyes would count

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as an example). So although nature might not intend such forms to be present as
a rule, they would remain consistent with the aesthetic normal idea with respect
to their configuration, despite their inconsistency with this idea with regard to
their cause. If a form is to be fully inconsistent with the aesthetic normal idea,
then a causal incompatibility will not suffice, although a configurational incon-
sistency alone would be sufficient.
Second, in addition to formal and causal incompatibilities, semantic incon-
gruities can arise in relation to spiral tattoos (and their like) and the normal form
of the human face. These can be described by reference to a noticeable difference
in overall content between the set of associative meanings connected with the
expressive properties ascribed to the natural forms of the human face, and the set
of associative meanings connected with the expressive properties ascribed to
abstract designs, even though the expressive properties themselves might be the
same (e.g. strength or peace). In the former case, the associations are predom-
inantly to animals, plants, minerals, and behavioural contexts; in the latter case,
the associations are predominantly to compositional qualities such as sharp edges,
unbroken colours, symmetries, thinness or thickness of line. This difference in
contents is comparable, though slightly less pronounced, to that between the
associations that typically accompany the meanings of spray-painted graffiti and
those which accompany the configuration of, say, a twelfth-century church door
upon which the graffiti had been sprayed.
If the semantic incompatibilities in the alternative instantiations of a single
expressive property are considered, then one important inconsistency Kant
appears to have been discerning between the typical configuration of the human
face and the configurations of spiral tattoos can be described as a disparity
between sets of associated meanings—an inconsistency comparable to how terms
such as 'holy' and 'trapezoidal' do not mix. The semantic clash between facial
contours and tattoo designs would reside in the difference between sets of
associative meaning, the effect of which would be to create an inconsistent, or at
least disjointed, atmosphere of meaningful associations within the perceiver.13 So

13
A comparable kind of clash can occur between the representational content and the materials of a
work of art, such as when a religious theme is painted upon black velvet, or when a cartoon
character is sculpted in bronze. This kind of semantic conflict, moreover, does not depend on any
differences in the configurations which embody the respective contents, as is clear from the
example of a duck-rabbit figure. In such cases, the respective associations depend on how the
i74 KANT ON BEAUTIFYING THE HUMAN BODY

although a face and a spiral tattoo upon that face might both express strength, as
might both a door design of an old church and the graffiti sprayed upon it, the
respective elements in these pairs would be inconsistent with each other in so far
as they do not express strength in terms of chains of associations which are
semantically blendable in any obvious way.
The present interpretation can explain how Kant identified a legitimate incon-
gruency between facial tattoos and the statistically average configuration for the

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human face, when we assume, with Kant, that the tattoos are regarded as abstract
designs. This interpretation also opens up the possibility that facial tattoos need not
be perceived as incongruous with the average human face, since metaphorical
associations are historically variable. In a culture where tattooed faces have a history
of legitimacy and where their meanings are deeply connected with family heritage,
etc., the chain of linguistic associations connected with the expressive properties of
the tattoos could easily be aligned with the chains of associations connected with the
expressive properties of the human face. In such a cultural context, the tattoos would
be more likely to be perceived as coincident with human facial expressions, since
within such a linguistic community, their expressive qualities would arise within a
more tightly integrated associative network.

IV KANT'S EXPRESSIONIST IDEAL OF HUMAN BEAUTY

If Kant's aesthetic prohibition of facial tattooing is understood exclusively in

reference to incompatibilities between sets of associative meanings that arise
between the average facial configuration and that of abstract designs, then his
prohibition remains limited to a very specific way of perceiving facial tattoos. As
noted above, within an alternative cultural context, their meanings might very
well cohere with the meanings of the average facial configuration. So this way of
interpreting Kant's aesthetic prohibition of facial tattoos, if plausible, remains
incomplete, for even if an alternative cultural context can align the sets of
associations linked, respectively, with the average human face and abstract
designs, Kant could still object that the spiral designs of facial tattoos do not arise
naturally and are far from typical designs for the human face. This formal/causal
incompatibility was mentioned above. Within the parameters of Kant's own
theory, though, this objection weakens as a consequence of a further point: Kant
recognizes that there is a natural quality to human creativity—to those very
energies from which issue artistic designs such as facial tattoos.14 This dual sense
of 'what is natural'—that of arising from nature, considered ideologically as
configuration is interpreted, rather than upon a consideration of differences in the respective
physical contour(s) from which issue the alternative chains of associations.
Kant states: 'Genius is the talent (or natural gift) which gives the rule to art. Since talent, as the
innate productive faculty of the artist, belongs itself to nature, we may express the matter thus:
Genius is the innate mental disposition (ingenium) though which nature gives the rule to art' (CJ, §46,
P 'SO).
 ROBERT WICKS 175

operating according to (non-humanly originated) purposes, and as that of issuing

from human nature as free—renders Kant's account of ideal human beauty less
straightforward than what is suggested by his core neoclassical statement
provided in §17 of the Critique of Judgement.
In his discussion of artistic beauty, Kant maintains that the artistic genius's
creative spirit is a natural energy, the expression of which produces images that
are extremely rich in their associative meanings.15 Kant also maintains that these
images are beautiful on account of their associative richness.16 This complicates

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any interpretation of Kant's aesthetic prohibition of facial tattoos, since one can
argue that if the tattoos are the products of artistic genius, then the configurations
of the tattoos are as natural, and can be as beautiful, as those which are consistent
with the statistically average human face.17 It appears, then, that within Kant's
own theory, two examples of 'natural products'—the image of the anatomically
perfect human body, and the imaginatively rich images created by the artistic
genius—stand in discord. The first of these, as we have seen, opens towards a
neoclassical aesthetic, while the second, as we shall see, opens towards an
expressionist aesthetic. Within the context of the former, facial tattoos depart
radically from the forms typical of the genetically produced human body; within
the context of the latter, facial tattoos are perfectly in order with the endless
varieties of creatively beautiful expression. One wonders, then, whether these
two aesthetic sensibilities can be coordinated or prioritized within Kant's theory
to yield a more determinate answer to the question of whether facial tattoos
necessarily, or usually, or in principle, detract from the beauty of the human face.
In its canonical formulation, Kant's aesthetic prohibition of facial tattoos rests
on the assumption that a beautiful face must be morally expressive and config-
urationally consistent with the statistically average human face. Due to Kant's
philosophical interest in identifying universal human conditions, rather than
conditions which vary from human to human, he submits that the generic human
form is the universal configurational constraint within which beautiful expres-
sions of morality can only occur. It might seem that what here motivates Kant's
position is an interest in remaining consistent with 'what is natural', and that his
chief objection to facial tattooing is that the configurations are neither natural
nor typical. This is certainly one of Kant's concerns, but, as noted above, his
characterization of artistic creative energies as also being natural tends to weaken
this argument. What appears to be a more weighty consideration in Kant's mind

15
Kant refers to these images as 'aesthetic ideas' (see CJ, §49).
16
He states that 'we may describe beauty in general (whether natural or artificial) as the expression of
aesthetic ideas' (CJ, §51) and that these aesthetic ideas, as the products of'spirit,' 'put the mental
powers purposively into swing' (CJ, §49).
17
This assumes a compatibility between Kant's account of beauty as grounded in the apprehension of
an object's suitability for cognition in general (CJ, §9) and his account of beauty as the expression
of aesthetic ideas (CJ, §51).
176 KANT ON BEAUTIFYING THE HUMAN BODY

is the task of identifying a configuration which, if not a priori, comes close to a

necessary and universal configuration, such that it can stand as the physical
flipside of the purely rational human essence. This presents itself to him as the
teleological idea of what nature intends in the formation of the human body,
through which moral contents can present themselves beautifully.
Central to this coordination between what nature intends (i.e. the 'aesthetic
normal idea') and the moral essence of the human being is the idea of respect:

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Kant's aesthetic prohibition on facial tattooing can be seen as a specific instance of
the more general principle that, with regard to the human body, one should
respect what nature intends. For Kant, the implication is that violations of the
rules governing the statistically average human face should be avoided, if a
beautiful presentation is desired. Through this focus upon the concept of
self-respect, we can understand him to be saying that we should respect persons
not only within the moral realm, in so far as they are rational beings in the
abstract, but within the spatiotemporal aesthetic realm as well, which entails that
we should respect the natural configuration of the human body, however this
configuration is specified.
Although this parallel demand for both moral and aesthetic respect might be
desirable and defensible, we can question Kant's specific advocacy of a neo-
classical ideal as prescribing the conditions for aesthetic respect. This becomes
apparent once it is noted that the categorical imperative, along with the categories
of the understanding, constrain their objects in ways differently than does the
aesthetic normal idea. In the former cases, the boundaries of the categories and
the categorical imperative remain rigid. There are no experiences where the
categories of the understanding only partially apply, and there are no morally
right acts which only partially fall under the categorical imperative. The aesthetic
normal idea, however, is only a statistically correct configuration and it remains
vague. Unlike the situations in epistemological or moral contexts, then, the rules
governing human beauty are indeterminate.18 An emerging question is whether
this indeterminacy and allowance for configurational nuance is broad enough to
allow spiral tattoos, or other comparable designs. If such designs are allowable,
then the fixity of the neoclassical ideal will start to dissolve.
With his conception of human beauty, Kant aims to transfer into the aesthetic
context the moral idea that we should respect humanity in each and every person.
This is what it means for human beauty to be a mode of dependent beauty
Although Kant's conception of humanity is completely generic, as is his aesthetic
norm for human beauty, there are further reasons to ask whether this aesthetic
norm must express this generality by following the neoclassical conception of
human beauty—a conception which restricts itself to anatomical perfection. One
18
This claim rests not only upon Kant's claim in the Critique of Judgement that there are no
determinate rules for creating beauty (§46), but also upon Kant's general definition of an ideal of
imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason (A570/B598).
 ROBERT WICKS 177

can speculate that in having advocated a neoclassical ideal, Kant may have been
misled by his more specific designations of the categories of the understanding
and the forms of space and time as formal constraints of human experience, such
that he was led to seek a very specified designation of the configurational
constraints of human beauty. However, rather than having formulated an ideal of
beauty by trying to construct an aesthetic mirror of the epistemological
conditions which render possible the pleasure in the beautiful in general (namely

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the structure of the understanding as it participates in the harmony of the
cognitive faculties), perhaps an alternative more closely attuned to the constraints
required by dependent beauty would have been to formulate an ideal of beauty by
constructing an aesthetic mirror of the moral conditions which render possible
the pleasure taken in human beauty. The resulting ideal would be based, not on the
categories of the understanding as the theoretical archetype, but upon the more
open and abstract categorical imperative. This leads to an expressionist, as
opposed to a neoclassical, ideal of human beauty which allows a broader
conception of aesthetic freedom.
If moral respect is the respect of humanity within a person, then it is important
to recall that Kant characterizes this respect as a very generalized respect for law.
He derives specific moral prescriptions from the idea of law itself, taken in the
abstract, and grounds morality upon the mere intelligibility of action. In itself, the
categorical imperative remains purely generic and does not, in any absolute sense,
prescribe any situationally exact moral determinations regarding what should or
should not be done ahead of time in any anticipated context. The variables of
anticipated moral contexts can vary over time, between cultures, languages, etc.,
so the specific features of what will count as an intelligible action significantly
remain without prior determination, even though we know ahead of time that,
whatever we do, we ought to act consistently and systematically. If, in this way,
Kant's moral theory can be interpreted as a very open-ended one, then the a priori
dimension of Kant's philosophy expressed in his categorical imperative does not
exactly match the set of more specified constraints which we encounter in his
epistemology, all of which operate to determine the structure of the future
precisely. This distinction establishes a rationale for maintaining that Kant's
expressionist aesthetic should take precedence over his neoclassical rendition of
human beauty.
For Kant, human creativity is the expression of a natural energy, so artistic
creations are natural in this respect, and the distinction between art and nature is
somewhat blurred. He also maintains that a beautiful presentation is an intelligible
(systematic, organized, etc.) presentation, so artistic creations which are system-
atically organized will be beautiful in proportion to their organizational intensity. In
this very general way, the conditions for beauty and the conditions for moral action
coincide, and for this reason Kant maintains that beauty is a symbol of morality.
Their adherence to systematicity is analogous. Now if a creative act results in a
178 KANT O N BEAUTIFYING THE HUMAN BODY

beautiful product, this can be seen as a mode of acting in an intelligible way—a mode
of acting which is analogous to acting morally. Within Kant's vision, making
beautiful things is analogous to acting morally. Moreover, acting creatively is acting
freely, so respecting the systematically organized products of human creation would
be a mode of respecting that freedom which distinguishes humans as rational beings.
One respects humanity in one's person by acting intelligibly, pure and simple.
This would 'include, as just noted, the rational activity of making beautiful

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designs. If one applies such designs—such as spiral tattoos—upon a human body,
it is difficult to imagine how, in itself, this could express a lack of general
self-respect, especially if the forms have morally expressive properties as well.
Within this more global aesthetic context, a person would have in view an entire
set of forms that constitute a personal presentation—a set of forms which would
include, but not be exhausted by, whatever bodily forms are given. There
could be conflicts among these forms, certainly, but the ideal of human beauty
operating here would be different from what Kant prescribes in his neoclassical
ideal of beauty. The ideal, rather, would be to integrate with style all of one's
bodily forms, including one's clothing, facial decorations, etc., into an systematic
whole—into a Gesamtkunstwerk, so to speak—which would harmonize what
nature intends with what artistry can imagine, without subordinating either set of
beautiful forms to the other, since all are equally 'human'. Within the context
of human beauty, one can restrict oneself to a neoclassical ideal, and perhaps
prefer a toga to a trimmed toupee, but this would be adhering to a particular style
of aesthetic intelligibility, rather than to the universal mode of aesthetic intel-
ligibility.
In sum, to decide whether or not facial tattoos and their like are consistent with
human beauty, it makes more sense within Kant's aesthetics to rely upon general
criteria of aesthetic intelligibility, rather than upon a more circumscribed neo-
classical conception of what nature intends as a matter of anatomical perfection.
Kant admits that it is natural for humans to be creative, and if the products of
human creation are systematically structured and morally expressive, then there is
no prima-facie lack of self-respect involved in their application to the human
body. In light of these considerations, Kant's neoclassical ideal of human beauty
should be seen as only an aspect of a more complete expressionist ideal which,
while acknowledging the constraints of intelligibility, and hence, human respect,
allows for far greater individual and cultural variation than the neoclassical ideal
can admit.19

Robert Wicks, Department of Philosophy, The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019,
Auckland, New Zealand. Wmail: r.wicks@auckland.ac.nz.

" This essay was presented to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa
in August 1998. I would like to thank Roger Ames, Ron Bontekoe, Arindam Chakrabarti, and
Jeannie Lum for their constructive commentary and discussion of the essay.