Kantian Aesthetics: Free Beauty in Fine Arts

A rose is beautiful. The Mona Lisa is beautiful. What is the difference between these two objects in being beautiful? In Critique of Judgment, Kant famously answers this question with a demarcation between two kinds of beauty: free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) and adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). Natural objects, e.g., a rose, fall into the realm of free beauty while works of fine arts, e.g., the Mona Lisa, adherent beauty. Objects of free beauty do not presuppose conceptual understanding while that of adherent beauty do. We do not regard some objective rules, if any, for the beauty of a rose while some rules seem necessary for properly judging fine arts. However, Kant’s free–adherent beauty distinction is much more nuanced than what he makes explicit in Critique. The theoretical distinction is not as clear-cut as it appears, and this paper shows that a work of fine art as an object of adherent beauty is no more than a special form of free beauty. While taste - the faculty necessary for aesthetic judgments - may be restricted by, be a parergon to, or interact with our conceptual understanding, it necessarily remains free and uncontaminated. Genius - the naturally endowed ability to create fine arts - makes the corporeal existence of a work of fine art possible but is necessarily guided by taste. Furthermore, taste can be conditioned by our understanding but it necessarily guides and makes our understanding possible, i.e., any concepts presupposed for fine arts are aesthetic in origin. This paper concludes that the possibility of free beauty entailed by taste, therefore, is necessarily compatible with the adherent beauty of fine arts.