6 Does Kant have anything to teach us about environmental ethics?

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2007 by Marc Lucht

According to Kant, seeing something as beautiful is experiencing that thing as if it were suited for our own cognitive purposes. He says that beautiful forms are like "ciphers" through which nature "speaks to us" in a figurative way. (34) To decipher the significance of a beautiful form is to sense on some level (but not to know) that nature is not merely an indifferent causal system from which we are alienated, but it is to find in some objects a "trace" that nature may be in harmony with the needs of reflective judgment. (35) In the apprehension of the beautiful, nature is felt as not entirely alien or antithetical to our needs and interests: we feel that nature is meaningful and can even relate to our moral ends.

Kant claims that this merely formal purposiveness is "beauty's own characteristic of qualifying" for a linkage with a moral Idea. (36) The apprehension of beauty is the felt consciousness that the order of nature is commensurate with human purposes. Thus he writes as if aesthetics reveals a trace of nature's purposiveness to feeling. In the aesthetic consciousness we feel that the principles governing the realms of nature and freedom are not as heterogenous as science and theoretical reason show them to be. The concept of purposiveness "makes the transition" from "lawfulness in terms of nature to the final purpose set by the concept of freedom." (37) Our apprehension of subjective purposiveness in the consciousness of natural beauty is a hint that nature, after all, may not be indifferent to our purposes, and the achievement of our moral aims is felt, though not known, to be possible in the natural world. Awareness of beauty gives evidence to feeling that nature is not mere alien mechanism, and the aesthetic consciousness involves an affective disclosure of the possible harmony of nature with our aims. And this feeling is, in part, the feeling of the enhancement of my life, of my own vital forces: My being is touched by and responsive to the world around me and of which it feels itself a part.

Aesthetics therefore has significant ontological implications. For all of this felt harmony between nature and subject has a foundation and an explanation. As becomes clear in his discussion of the antinomy of taste, Kant thinks that our sense of formal purposiveness is a disclosure of the commensurability of nature and reason because it rests upon a felt insight into the deep kinship or unity of ground out of which arise both human being and nature. He tells us that the deduction of taste leads to three ideas:

   first, the idea of the supersensible in general, not further
   determined, as the substrate of nature; second, the idea of the
   same supersensible as the principle of nature's subjective
   purposiveness for our cognitive power; third, the idea of the
   same supersensible as the principle of the purposes of freedom
   and of the harmony of these purposes with nature in the moral
   sphere. (38)

Kant in the third Critique attempts the beginning of a subversion of the sharp division between nature and human being accomplished in the earlier Critiques. It is the same supersensible substrate underlying our power of choice in relation to moral laws that is thought to be the hidden substrate underlying phenomenal nature. Thus the aesthetic consciousness is a felt reference to the supersensible substrate underlying both nature and subject. In the aesthetic consciousness, we feel we are much more a part of nature than we appear to be in more detached, disengaged theoretical thinking, which reveals only the heterogeneity of nature and self; we become aware in the involved responsiveness of feeling that there is no final conflict between the moral sense of being human and the sense of the cosmos, that we and nature share a deep connection, and spring from a common root. (39) According to Kant, who is always so sensitive to the finitude of human reason, there are many grounds for believing something besides rational or scientific evidence. Aesthetics helps us to become aware of and reflect upon nature in a new way, as no longer alien or disenchanted, but as a meaningful cosmos in which our aims make sense. In other words, the apprehension of natural beauty amounts to the feeling that there is no sharp bifurcation between subject and object. When the world feels amenable to our minds, our sense of isolation from the world diminishes.