The capital feature in Kant's Criticism of the Judgment is, that in
it he gave a representation and a name, if not even an intellectual
expression, to the Idea. Such a representation, as an Intuitive
Understanding, or an inner adaptation, suggests a universal which
is at the same time apprehended as essentially a concrete unity, It
is in these aperçus alone that the Kantian philosophy rises to the
speculative height. Schiller, and others, have found in the idea of
artistic beauty, where thought and sensuous conception have grown
together into one, a way of escape from the abstract and separatist
understanding. Others have found the same relief in the perception
and consciousness of life and of living things, whether that life
be natural or intellectual.--The work of Art, as well as the living
individual, is, it must be owned, of limited content. But in the
postulated harmony of nature (or necessity) and free purpose,--in the
final purpose of the world conceived as realised, Kant has put before
us the Idea, comprehensive even in its content. Yet what may be called
the laziness of thought, when dealing with this supreme Idea, finds a
too easy mode of evasion in the 'ought to be': instead of the actual
realisation of the ultimate end, it clings hard to the disjunction
of the notion from reality. Yet if thought will not _think_ the ideal
realised, the senses and the intuition can at any rate _see_ it in the
present reality of living organisms and of the beautiful in Art. And
consequently Kant's remarks on these objects were well adapted to lead
the mind on to grasp and think the concrete Idea.
56.] We are thus led to conceive a different relation between the
universal of understanding and the particular of perception, than that
on which the theory of the Theoretical and Practical Reason is founded.
But while this is so, it is not supplemented by a recognition that the
former is the genuine relation and the very truth. Instead of that,
the unity (of universal with particular) is accepted only as it exists
in finite phenomena, and is adduced only as a fact of experience.
Such experience, at first only personal, may come from two sources.
It may spring from Genius, the faculty which produces 'aesthetic
ideas'; meaning by aesthetic ideas, the picture-thoughts of the free
imagination which subserve an idea and suggest thoughts, although their
content is not expressed in a notional form, and even admits of no
such expression. It may also be due to Taste, the feeling of congruity
between the free play of intuition or imagination and the uniformity of
understanding.
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