93 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART FROM HUME TO HEGEL Outline and Discuss Kant's conception of Genius As part of his Critique of the Aesthetic Judgement, Kant sets out to explain what constitutes a fine work of art, and in doing so he asserts that "fine arts must necessarily be regarded as arts of genius." (page 168, 'The Critique of Judgement', Immanuel Kant). He then goes on tojustify this, and to explain what genius consists of, and how a work ofgenius is arrived at. Kant begins by stating that for the representation of any work of artto be possible, it must have certain rules at its foundation. However,with fine art, the beauty of the object is judged independently of anyconcept, and therefore a work of fine art cannot have been derived fromany rule which had a concept as its basis. From this it follows that "fineart is only possible as a product of genius", where "genius is a talent forproducing that for which no definite rule can be given." (page 168). Itfollows from this notion of genius that as no definite rule can be given,the author will not be able to explain how the ideas that created the finework of art came to them. Kant now goes on to make an important distinction between thework of a genius and the work of what he terms "a man of brains." (page169). As rules cannot be laid down to enable others to create works ofgenius, the work of genius differs crucially from the work of a scientist. We may refer to Newton as "a man of brains...[but] all that Newton hasset forth in his immortal work on the Principles of Natural Philosophymay well be learned...but we cannot learn to write in a true poetic vein."(page 170). Scientists can explain the steps that they followed andmethods that they used to reach their discovery, but no fine artist canshow how their ideas came to them as they themselves do not know. We can therefore see that no matter how important the work of ascientist, it can never be termed t...
