But third, and perhaps most important, my father was a painter, and very active during my college and graduate years (and thereafter, until he died at nearly 96). Every time I visited home, he would immediately drag me to his studio, show me his latest work and asked me what I thought. Well, I liked some and didn’t like others, but, especially when it’s your father, you think it would be nice to have something intelligent to say, based on principles. So I turned to aesthetics. Of course, what you learn from aesthetics is that there can never be principles that mechanically ground judgments about particular works of art. But you do learn about the varieties of things human beings have found valuable in the experience of art, and therefore about things that may be of value in particular works of art. So aesthetics does help you get beyond just saying I like this one and don’t like that one.

In your Values of Beauty, you suggest that we should re-think the history of modern aesthetics as being a development of two conceptions of the imagination: a negative and positive conception. Could you say a bit about what these two conceptions entail?

PG: This is an interesting suggestion, because I had not previously thought of that work in this way. That volume was a collection of papers written for different occasions, although with lots of common threads. It did include a paper on conceptions of genius, in which I argued that there have been two, one in which the genius is portrayed as especially gifted at perception, seeing things others don’t but then communicating what they have seen to others, the other, on which the genius is praised for his or her capacity for invention and originality, as well as for the capacity for communication. Of course, these two cannot be rigidly separated, because invention does not come from nowhere and the creative genius has to recognize possibilities for innovation in what already exists or has been done. Charles Batteux’s ‘reduction’ of art to the ‘single principle’ of the ‘imitation’ of nature (1746) might be taken as emblematic of this point, because on his account the artist must be both attentive to how nature is, but also must idealize or perfect it, i.e., invent as well as perceive. To some degree, the two are always linked, still, different accounts of creativity often do emphasize one aspect over the other.

Joseph Addison is the first person to begin synthesizing these two conceptions of the imagination. How did he do so and how did he open the way for subsequent developments in aesthetics?

PG: Addison’s account of the experience of beauty emphasizes perception, while his accounts of what he regards as the other two fundamental aesthetic categories (of course, he did not use the word ‘aesthetic’ yet, that not being invented by Baumgarten until 1735 and not becoming common in English until the nineteenth century), namely novelty and ‘grandeur,’ i.e., the sublime, might be thought to emphasize invention more, novelty obviously so, and grandeur because Addison’s account is that the mind takes pleasure in mighty mountain ranges and seas – the stock examples of the sublime – as ‘images of liberty.’ Thus there is an essentially metaphorical cast to this aspect of his theory, so in one case he emphasizes imagination as a form of perception, in the others as a form of invention or creation.

Kant’s aesthetics is the first philosophical exposition of these two notions of the imagination in aesthetics. However, the imagination, for Kant, plays also a central role in our reason more broadly. What does Kant take the imagination to be and what role does it play in aesthetic experience in particular?

PG: Kant’s basic conception of aesthetic experience is that it is the free play of the imagination within and with the limits of the lawfulness required by the understanding and his conception of art is that it is the product of such free play in the mind of the artist, communicated to an audience in works with ‘exemplary originality.’ A crucial consequence of these ideas, although Kant makes it explicit only in his account of the relation between an artistic genius and successor artists, is that the free play of the artist’s imagination must stimulate free play in the mind of the audience, so the artist’s own intentions can be exemplary and stimulating for the audience, but never completely dispositive, never fully determining their response.

In all of this, Kant does not actually say very much about what he means by imagination. In his theoretical philosophy, he begins with a conception often common to Locke, Wolff, Baumgarten and many others of the time, namely that the imagination is the ability to have images – sense-like representations – of objects not currently present; this can include both memory, the recall of images of objects previously present, but also foresight, or what Baumgarten calls ‘prevision,’ that is, images of objects not yet experienced…or maybe never to be actually experienced, except through art, as when we create images of objects not yet and maybe never to be actually experienced from images of bits and pieces of objects that have been experienced. It is the imagination as recalling previous experiences that is most emphasized in Kant’s account of cognitive synthesis, as in the Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason, but perhaps we could also argue that imagination as the ‘prevision’ of things that have not yet been experienced, but that can be is also assumed by Kant’s conception of the cognition of objects, since when we claim to know an object we are in fact tacitly committing ourselves to many predictions about actual or possible future experience. This is suggested, for example, by the symmetry of explanation and prediction in (at least mid-twentieth-century) philosophy of science. But when it comes to what Kant really means by the free play of the imagination in the aesthetic context, his examples tell us more than anything else. Above all, his conception of the aesthetic imagination emerges in his account of ‘aesthetic ideas’ as the ‘spirit’ of fine art: the imagination uses things it takes from experience, such as the image of an eagle, as ‘attributes’ to suggest things like the god Jupiter, which in turn suggest ‘rational ideas’ of power, morality, and so on, which can never be directly and fully presented in experience. So images both recalled and transformed – perceived and created – by the imagination suggest ideas without being either necessary or sufficient conditions for that.

Speaking of the imagination as ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ strongly parallels the way we generally talk of freedom. In Kant the relationship between the aesthetic and the moral is undeniable. But it’s also unclear why aesthetic experience makes an important contribution to these. You suggest that it concerns our need as sensible-affective beings for a similar kind of ‘presentation’ of the moral. How, in your view, does art have a ‘sensible-affective’ significance for our moral lives in Kant?

PG: I am convinced that it was his recognition of the moral potential of aesthetic experience that ultimately drove Kant to write a third critique and to connect aesthetic experience to a teleological attitude toward nature in that work, something he had not previously done.

Yet the relationship between aesthetic experience and its moral significance must be subtle, because the freedom of imagination that is essential to aesthetic experience and part of what makes it morally beneficial will be lost, if the aesthetic is too directly constrained by or too evidently in service of the moral. Kant’s slightly wayward disciple Friedrich Schiller recognized this point in his Letters on Aesthetic Education, arguing on the one hand that humans can become moral only through aesthetic education, but on the other that art cannot be didactic. I tried to capture some of this complexity in earlier work (Kant and the Experience of Freedom, 1993), with the phrase ‘the interest of disinterestedness.’

Kant recognized many different ways, in which aesthetic experience can be morally beneficial although once again without being either a necessary or sufficient condition for successful moral development. In the case of art, most obviously, Kant thought that great art paradigmatically has significant moral content, thus stimulates us to think about morality and moral issues without directly telling us what to do or how to live. But art also offers many opportunities for selfishness, as in the collector’s lust for possession (think of recent sales of Francis Bacon or Picasso paintings for prices well over $100,000,000), and for that reason Kant was also leery of art and stressed the ‘intellectual’ i.e., moral interest of natural rather than artistic beauty. He argued that the experience of natural beauty prepares us to love something without personal interest, as we must do to fulfil our imperfect duty of beneficence to others (although this calls for ‘practical’ rather than ‘pathological’ love), and that the experience of the sublime prepares us to love something even contrary to our personal interest, as morality may also sometimes call upon us to do. More generally, Kant argued that the experience of the sublime makes our moral powers palpable to us, although at the same time that we must be prepared by a certain amount of moral culture to be receptive to such feelings. In his last great work, the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, Kant argued that our attraction to the beauty of organic and inorganic nature is a disposition conducive to morality, and a spirit of wanton destructiveness toward such natural beauty will rub off on our dispositions to other human beings, the only direct objects of moral concern in Kant’s view. But it comes as a great surprise when, after having expounded his theory of aesthetic ideas as the spirit or essence of fine art in section 49 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, in section 51 he suddenly claims that all beauty, whether of art or nature, is the ‘expression of aesthetic ideas.’ He offers no explanation of this claim. My conjecture is that he simply assumes that morality is so central in human life that we project moral significance into non-human nature even when we know rationally that non-human nature is not really a subject or object for morality. This tendency would also be the explanation of something he mentions earlier in the book, our tendency to take different colors, different animals and plants, and so on, as symbols of different virtues or moral qualities.