The purpose of design is both social and utilitarian. For design, the usefulness of created forms is critically important. However, at the same time, the form must be beautiful. Taking this into account, what does it mean to be beautiful ?

The 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant defined ‘free beauty’. The word free here means to be free from the purpose defined by a concept, and a typical example is the beauty of nature, because nature (e.g., a flower) is beautiful and pleasant in its own right, apart from any interest in what it can do. The reason why its form is beautiful and pleasant is that the elements that make up the form are unified in form and harmony.

According to Kant, ‘beautiful art’ imitates a form of nature free from concepts. Therefore, a work of art is beautiful purely in its form, harmony and unity of its elements, independent of its conceptual definition. For example, ‘Greek-style line drawings’ or ‘leaf-shaped decorations found on picture frames and wallpaper’ mean nothing, but are beautiful in their own right, independent of any conceptual definition. Kant says that music without lyrics and fantasy music without a subject also belong to this category.

This concept of free beauty is usually superimposed in the autonomy of art and artist that had subordinated to the church and the aristocracy, or the bourgeoisie. Modern artists at that time created things solely to realize the beauty, and even when they receive orders for their work, they did so independently, without being controlled by their clients in terms of the internal logic of their creations or the purposes for which they express themselves. Here, free beauty appears to us ‘as if it were natural’, thus implying independence from artificial or social forces.

However, in Kant’s view, this autonomy does not mean the arbitrary dictatorship of the artist. Kant believed that the judgment termed the ‘judgment of taste’, of whether or not beauty exists in an object, should be made in the background of a public composed of equal individuals capable of making such judgments. Each subject involved in the judgment must make a coherent judgment of beauty, independent of any authority or trend, while anticipating the normative standards required by the whole, and integrating them both.

Furthermore, for such a judgment to be possible, there must be no personal interest or pleasure in terms of the content of the material. This is what Kant terms being ‘without interest’ in judging beauty. When a person is captivated by the attractiveness of the materials that make up a work of art (for example, the colours, tones, or pleasantness of the subject matter depicted), this is a personal interest that seeks the fulfilment of one’s desires. In contrast, the judgment of beauty is concerned only with the interconnection, relationship, arrangement, and assembly of materials, so it is sufficient to simply appreciate the object of beauty; there is no need to possess it. The individuality of the material is then overcome by the form, and the satisfaction of form, or pleasure of a relation to the object, is realized.

The creator and the viewer are trained to leave their egos behind and make a fair judgment (‘pure judgment of taste’) only on the relationship between the elements, in other words, on the ‘form’ of the object. Simultaneously, the individual who does this must overcome their isolated individuality and be in a relationship with others. Therefore, the public involved in free beauty, so to speak, forms a beautiful human relationship. This is the dimension of aesthetic publicness, or what Habermas later defined as the ‘public sphere’, in which people become citizens who freely associate with each other without being bound only by personal interests. Kant’s judgment of the taste made by these associated individuals is called ‘reflective’. The possible ideal of the whole is anticipated from each perspective of the individual, and it also checks the individual’s possible prejudice. Kant named the logic of the formation of beauty ‘purposefulness without purpose’.

The logic of beauty followed by art is neither purposive rationality as a mere means to an existing practical purpose, nor mere individual, material, and immediate self-gratification without any overall vision. Beauty resides in the process of creation, which takes the form of seeking some objective but is not yet given that objective, and this is also demonstrated in the social process of criticism that judges beauty. While traditional works of art rely on a ‘representative publicness’ based on religious revelation and manifestations of power, Kant’s conception of the art of beauty relies on a ‘civic publicness’ based on the spontaneity of equal citizens.

Kant’s concept of free beauty continues to function as the norm of artistic beauty to this day. Although free beauty can find its predecessors in Aristotle’s and Alberti’s notions of beauty, Kant’s conception of beauty is modern and belongs to Enlightenment in the sense that it is realized through the civic publicness cultivated in the salons and circles of the time. Kant’s concept of free beauty also influenced the aesthetics of Schiller and other Romantics, but in such successors, the rational and enlightened dimension of judgment by the public organized in salons and circles was relegated to the successor, and the inner conviction and passion of the individual artist, the lonely ‘beautiful soul’ detached from others, and history that surpasses the individual, gradually degenerated public civil sphere.

As design cannot be free from a utility, it cannot be considered what Kant calls free beauty, and the judgment of its production cannot be purely aesthetic. In this sense, design at first seems to be a beauty attached to a practical object (see ‘Dependent Beauty’). However, the autonomy of modern design is established when it departs from the constitution of applied art in the sense of an aesthetic element added to a practical object. As long as modern design questions, in the context of public judgment, the beauty of the overall form that realizes functionality and the process of realizing it, as well as the social sense of what it should serve, design is repeating Kant’s constitution of free beauty in a certain way.

(Toru Koga)