On Creating Meaningful Art

resented in terms of its natural aspect, ratios, colors, and proportions. It will not be purple, wider than it is tall, or larger than the mountain it is growing on. It will be natural in its representation. What may be the most significant statement here, however, is that Kant sees fine art as intrinsically purposive, as that which advances the culture intellectually. It uplifts society, and does not tear it down. John Gardner seems to be reflecting on Kant’s aesthetic when he writes in his book, On Moral Fiction :

The traditional view is that true art is moral: it seeks to improve life, not debase it. It seeks to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of the gods and us. I do not deny that art like criticism, may legitimately celebrate the trifling. It may joke, or mock, or while away the time. But trivial art has no meaning or value except in the shadow of the more serious art, the kind of art that beats back the monsters and, if you will, makes the world safe for triviality. That art which tends toward destruction, the art of the nihilists, cynics, and merdistes, is not properly art at all. 20

Though Kant is helpful in holding a high standard by setting limits around the idea of fine arts, his view is incomplete as the final word. Because Kant applies his categorical imperative to aesthetics, he places beauty in the subject of the aesthetic experience, and not in the object. In other words, he believes beauty is universal and subjective: that every rational human being who has a developed taste will have a similar aesthetic experience: such a one will see the beautiful in the senses, and contemplate it in the intellect. As one might imagine, Kant’s expectations are too high, and ultimately they are unreasonable. Therefore, his aesthetic falls short of providing a viable conceptual basis for art and beauty by itself.

20 John Champlin Gardner, On Moral Fiction (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 5-6.

Hegel, however, is helpful when he romanticizes Kant’s aesthetic philosophy and thus provides some promising insights that liberates the fine arts from mere universal subjective human contemplation. Hegel seeks to synthesize the subject and the object by allowing for the Platonic Ideal, or the Absolute beauty, to be a divine spirit on an incarnational journey to reveal itself, to give itself expression in art. 21 Thus, in his Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel ascribes to the fine arts a cultural and educational function akin to religion and philosophy. He writes,

Fine art is not real art till it is in this sense free, and only achieves its highest task when it has taken its place in the same sphere with religion and philosophy, and has become simply a mode of revealing to consciousness and bringing to utterance the Divine Nature, the deepest interests of humanity, and the most comprehensive truths of the mind. 22

21 Technically, Hegel asserts the divine spirit expresses itself in all of history and in part through art and then more completely in religion, especially the Christian religion, and then finally in philosophy.

22 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Bernard Bosanquet, and Michael Inwood, Introductory lectures on aesthetics (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 9.