But as for the beauty ascribed to the object on account of its form, and the supposition that it is capable of being enhanced by charm, this is a common error and one very prejudicial to genuine, uncorrupted, sincere taste.Nevertheless charms may be added to beauty to lend to the mind, beyond a bare delight, an adventitious interest in the representation of the object, and thus to advocate taste and its cultivation.This applies especially where taste is as yet crude and untrained.But they are positively subversive of the judgement of taste, if allowed to obtrude themselves as grounds of estimating beauty.For so far are they from contributing to beauty that it is only where taste is still weak and untrained that, like aliens, they are admitted as a favour, and only on terms that they do not violate that beautiful form.
In painting, sculpture, and in fact in all the formative arts, in architecture and horticulture, so far as fine arts, the design is what is essential.Here it is not what gratifies in sensation but merely what pleases by its form, that is the fundamental prerequisite for taste.The colours which give brilliancy to the sketch are part of the charm.They may no doubt, in their own way, enliven the object for sensation, but make it really worth looking at and beautiful they cannot.Indeed, more often than not the requirements of the beautiful form restrict them to a very narrow compass, and, even where charm is admitted, it is only this form that gives them a place of honour.
All form of objects of sense (both of external and also, mediately, of internal sense) is either figure or play.In the latter case it is either play of figures (in space: mimic and dance), or mere play of sensations (in time).The charm of colours, or of the agreeable tones of instruments, may be added: but the design in the former and the composition in the latter constitute the proper object of the pure judgement of taste.To say that the purity alike of colours and of tones, or their variety and contrast, seem to contribute to beauty, is by no means to imply that, because in themselves agreeable, they therefore yield an addition to the delight in the form and one on a par with it.The real meaning rather is that they make this form more clearly, definitely, and completely intuitable, and besides stimulate the representation by their charm, as they excite and sustain the attention directed to the object itself.
Even what is called ornamentation (parerga), i.e., what is only an adjunct and not an intrinsic constituent in the complete representation of the object, in augmenting the delight of taste does so only by means of its form.Thus it is with the frames of pictures or the drapery on statues, or the colonnades of palaces.
But if the ornamentation does not itself enter into the composition of the beautiful form-if it is introduced like a gold frame merely to win approval for the picture by means of its charm-it is then called finery and takes away from the genuine beauty.
Emotion-a sensation where an agreeable feeling is produced merely by means of a momentary check followed by a more powerful outpouring of the vital force-is quite foreign to beauty.Sublimity (with which the feeling of emotion is connected) requires, however, a different standard of estimation from that relied upon by taste.A pure judgement of taste has, then, for its determining ground neither charm nor emotion, in a word, no sensation as matter of the aesthetic judgement.
SS 15.The judgement of taste is entirely independent of the concept of perfection.
Objective finality can only be cognized by means of a reference of the manifold to a definite end, and hence only through a concept.This alone makes it clear that the beautiful, which is estimated on the ground of a mere formal finality, i.e., a finality apart from an end, is wholly independent of the representation of the good.For the latter presupposes an objective finality, i.e., the reference of the object to a definite end.
Objective finality is either external, i.e., the utility, or internal, i.e., the perfection, of the object.That the delight in an object on account of which we call it beautiful is incapable of resting on the representation of its utility, is abundantly evident from the two preceding articles; for in that case, it would not be an immediate delight in the object, which latter is the essential condition of the judgement upon beauty.But in an objective, internal finality, i.e., perfection, we have what is more akin to the predicate of beauty, and so this has been held even by philosophers of reputation to be convertible with beauty, though subject to the qualification: where it is thought in a confused way.
In a critique of taste it is of the utmost importance to decide whether beauty is really reducible to the concept of perfection.
For estimating objective finality we always require the concept of an end, and, where such finality has to be, not an external one (utility), but an internal one, the concept of an internal end containing the ground of the internal possibility of the object.Now an end is in general that, the concept of which may be regarded as the ground of the possibility of the object itself.So in order to represent an objective finality in a thing we must first have a concept of what sort of a thing it is to be.The agreement of the manifold in a thing with this concept (which supplies the rule of its synthesis) is the qualitative perfection of the thing.
