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Introduction
According to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, we judge the beauty of things with taste and through “a free play of the faculties of cognition” (KU 5: 217).1 Yet, in §59 of the third Critique, Kant concludes his “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment” with the provocative claim that “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good [Sittlich-Guten]” and that the consideration of this relation is expected of everyone “as a duty,” namely, as a moral demand (KU 5: 353).
A curiosity arises. Since a judgment of taste is aesthetic and independent of practical concepts, the symbolic relation between beauty and morality consists not in their content but in the analogous form of our reflections on them. Apart from beauty, there can be many viable symbols of morality. Given this, it seems rather questionable that Kant singles out beauty as a special symbol of morality and associates it with a duty.
Kant does not explicitly solve the problem. Moreover, an answer to this question is obscured by the complexity of his theory of symbolic hypotyposis in general. Discovery of such an answer will not only enable a more profound understanding of Kant’s efforts to bridge the apparent gap between beauty and morality but also shed light on the systematic place of his aesthetics in completing the general task of the third Critique, namely, the mediation between domains of nature and freedom.
This question has not received much attention so far. Peripherally, with reference to Kant’s account of an intellectual interest in beauty, several commentators argue that beauty itself exhibits nature’s moral purposiveness and thereby serves as a source of moral motivation;2 however, as I shall show, such a substantive connection between the aesthetics and the practical would compromise the autonomy of taste that Kant painstakingly establishes.
In this paper, I claim that Kant’s theory of beauty as the symbol of morality contains two clearly distinct, yet correlated arguments: firstly, insofar as both beauty and morality arouse immediate, disinterested, free, and universal satisfactions, experience of the former strengthens our susceptibility to the latter, namely, our moral feeling, the promotion of which is a duty. Secondly, in judging the beautiful,...