Die Schönheit des Mittelmenschen: Stephan Balkenhol’s ‘Everyday Beauty’

Abstract

This essay considers Stephan Balkenhol’s ‘everyman and woman’ sculptures through the optic of Kant’s ‘ideal of beauty’ (§17, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 1790). I take a pair of miniature figures as my test case. Despite minor variations, all these sculptures depict the same generic man and woman, a man or woman who average or middling in every way. What could make depictions of average everydayness so compelling? For a clue, I turn to Kant’s ‘ideal of beauty’. This comprises a ‘standard aesthetic idea’ and an ‘idea of reason’: the former is a (culturally specific) ‘model image’ of the human being; the latter implicates Kant’s (universal) conception of ‘humanity in the person’, where the latter manifests itself through the former. I ask whether this illuminates Balkenhol’s work, suggesting that although the relevance of the former is clear, and the latter less so, there is reason not to rule it out.

1. The Broader Project

What follows is part of a broader project defending what I call ‘philosophical criticism’.¹ This project is in part critical and in part methodological; indeed, that it in large part is critical is central to what it proposes methodologically. The goal of this broader project is two fold: to demonstrate the remarkable capacity of works of contemporary art to function as spurs to philosophical reflection, if approached in a sufficiently generous spirit; and, in so doing, to establish the value of philosophical criticism as an alternative to the methodologies that currently dominate the philosophy of art. In outline, the proposed method is to look at a small number of thematically related works by a particular contemporary artist (sometimes as few as one or two) in the light of some concept of philosophical interest and the associated debates in philosophy. I see no reason why the proposed method could not in principle be applied to works of art more generally, but I only defend it within the domain of contemporary art.

Why ‘philosophical criticism’? The project is ‘philosophical’ in that it asks what concepts a given work calls for to make sense of it; it is ‘critical’ because to work out what concepts a given work calls for one must first pay close critical attention to the work(s) in question. So the first requirement of such a methodology is in fact critical: it is to figure out what concepts a given work calls for. This need not be obvious. Doing so requires not only critical sensitivity — paying sustained attention, informed by first-order artworld debate, to individual works of art — but taking works of art much more seriously as spurs to thought than even most philosophers of art seem willing to do.² So conceived, the task is clearly also philosophical: philosophers are trained in the fine-grained analysis of concepts used more or less unreflectively every day. The concepts I appeal to throughout are intended to bring out the philosophical significance of the works under consideration, but without losing sight of their specificity as art. Approached in this spirit, I believe works of art are capable of ‘talking back’, in part by drawing our attention to blind spots in the philosophical literature mobilised to make sense of them.

Philosophers of art often claim to take critical practice seriously, but whether they genuinely do is debatable. Philosophers typically lack the training, and sometimes also the patience, to engage with works of art and their criticism at this level of granularity. In part, this is a banal product of disciplinarity: this is simply not how philosophers of art have been trained to engage with works of art, contemporary or otherwise. In part, it is because philosophers of art, perhaps especially those in the Anglophone tradition, tend to be after if not general truths then at least claims that generalise over some appropriately specified domain, and such truths are not best pursued by reflecting intensively on individual works. As a result, works of art tend to function largely as decoration in such accounts: a bit of local colour for arguments that could in principle be run entirely independently. For this reason, I see the broader project as a proposal for departing from philosophical business as usual when it comes to thinking about art. I take this to apply, moreover, to standard ways of proceeding in both the ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ traditions.

Analytic philosophers tend to argue for substantively thin claims about art, and the kind of cognitive and sensible capacities that engaging with various, broadly defined kinds of art require. Kendall Walton, for example, famously claimed that photographs are ‘transparent’: they are pictures through which we literally, if indirectly, see the world and not merely its representation. Note that for a claim like this to be true, it has to generalise from the products of photobooths and roadside speed cameras, through mobile phone snaps uploaded to social media, to the highly sophisticated images of many artists. But it is hardly illuminating to be told of, say, Thomas Demand’s images that they are ‘transparent’: for even if true, this would be to miss everything of interest about them.³ Were the claims in question not substantively thin, however, they would fail to generalise over such a variety of cases. Something ‘thick’, which is to say demanding, about their commitments — in this case, as to what is required for something to count as a photograph — would rule out some stretch of cases one might think should be ruled in. Continental philosophers, by contrast, tend to forgo such generalisation, but instead require their readers to swallow large chunks of normatively or metaphysically demanding broader projects as the cost of endorsing their substantively thick claims about individual works.⁴ To take only the most egregious example: Martin Heidegger famously maintained that a particular Van Gogh painting (though it was never entirely clear which) discloses the ‘world’ and ‘earth’ of the agrarian peasant woman. That is, both the network of pre-theoretical assumptions that implicitly organise her existence and self-understanding, and whatever necessarily remains obscure or unmastered within such a horizon. But accepting such claims requires prior acceptance of Heidegger’s ‘epochal history of being’ and its alleged neglect by the entire Western tradition, from which such claims are downstream. These are hardly minor commitments. Much the same holds for the claims of other major figures in this tradition: without the general theories underwriting their interpretations of specific works, those interpretations lose all philosophical motivation. I take these examples to reflect a more general pattern: the analytic approach fails to illuminate why individual works matter; the continental approach makes the costs of doing so too high.

How should philosophers who want to engage seriously with works of art respond? My proposal is two fold: I suggest that philosophers give up on the kind of generalisation to which analytic philosophers aspire, as the cost of achieving substantive insights about individual works; but do so without writing the kind of blank metaphysical cheques often required to endorse substantive continental interpretations of art.⁵ The broader project models what this might look like in practice, by bringing this approach to bear on a number of contemporary works. The present paper would be one example: but depending on the nature of the works and concepts in question it might play out quite differently.⁶

2. Stephan Balkenhol’s ‘Everyday Beauty’

For over four decades Stephan Balkenhol has been making roughly carved and simply painted polychrome sculptures of clothed men and women from the trunks of single trees, often using a chainsaw.⁷ Typically, these figures, bearing clear traces of workmanship, stand atop squared-off bases of otherwise uncarved trunk serving as a pedestal, with which the carved section comprising the figure is continuous. It is not so much that Balkenhol’s figures seem to emerge from the wood — as Michelangelo’s unfinished slaves seem to emerge from the marble — as that they are clearly a part of the wood that they stand on, the wood that also supports them.⁸ As Balkenhol has aged, so too have his men and women, though not at quite the same rate as the artist himself. Balkenhol is now 67: in the mid-late 1980s, when his production settled into the recognisable style in which he still works today and Balkenhol was in his late twenties, his figures might have passed for roughly his own age, if not slightly older. By now they are clearly younger, having aged by no more than a few years for every decade since, such that his figures now appear to be in their early middle age: the men typically in their early forties; the women slightly younger, perhaps mid-late thirties.

Of course, Balkenhol has not only made sculptures of men and women, or — as I will argue — the same generic man and woman, as they have aged over time. He has also made sculptures of a variety of animals, whether alone, in small groups, or interacting with people in various ways. Alongside these, there has been a persistent line of quasi-mythological half-man, half-animal hybrids, notably men and women with the heads (and sometimes tails) of various animals or birds in everyday modern dress. These do not interest me for reasons that will become clear. By contrast, I find, and have always found, Balkenhol’s stock-in-trade every man and woman sculptures — a ‘standard’ man and woman in modern work clothing — strangely compelling. Judging from the literature, I am not alone. In common with every other artist approached in the spirit of philosophical criticism, my opening question is ‘Why?’ What makes these figures so aesthetically arresting, literally capable of stopping you in your tracks? As with the other works discussed, I attempt to answer it by turning to what strike me as promising, if not necessarily obvious, resources in philosophy — in this case the odd, and often neglected, §17 of Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (1790) titled ‘The Ideal of Beauty’.

More on that shortly: in order both to focus my remarks, and because I take them to be Balkenhol’s most engaging work, I will concentrate on versions of these every man and woman figures carved in one of the common, almost toy-like formats, that Balkenhol has employed for such figures over the years. The figures I have in mind are typically no more than a couple of feet high and stand on slim pedestals bringing them up to eye level (plate 1 and plate 2). Other than being carved from smaller trunks, and correspondingly reduced in size, they share the same general characteristics as Balkenhol’s larger figures. But something about their miniaturisation — the height of toddlers, but with the very different proportions of adults — makes them strangely compelling. There is something uncanny or dream-like about them, like toys or dolls miraculously come to life: shrunken, but not so shrunken that we do not feel called upon to respond to them as persons — something that their distinctly non-doll, non-toy-like features only intensifies.⁹ They strike us as, quite literally, little people come to life. Balkenhol has remarked that he intentionally steers clear of making life-sized figures, in favour of over- or under-sized figures, so that the viewer is never in any doubt that what she is confronted by is a sculpture rather than a person. In sum, there is no intent to fool the eye.¹⁰ In this respect, the work is entirely different in spirit, and not merely in finish or iconography, to the work of a hyper-realist artist like Duane Hanson.¹¹

What I shall henceforth refer to, generically, as Balkenhol’s ‘everyman and everywoman’ sculptures have evolved subtly over the years. They have not merely aged but slowly changed body type from the early, larger-than-life-sized gangly youths, to the somewhat stockier figures that Balkenhol seems to favour today — by no means overweight, just a little more solidly fleshed out, as befits early middle age. Untitled photographs from Balkenhol’s archive dating back to 1978–1979 suggest they may also track changes in everyday body types as increasing physical inactivity coupled with changing diets have made the average person much heavier.¹² Indeed Balkenhol’s figures are strikingly average: neither especially tall nor especially small, neither especially thin nor especially thick, neither especially young nor especially old.¹³ Their features are similar: symmetrical and even enough to appear handsome, but not exceptionally or memorably so. In all these respects, the figures seem to cleave to some middling ground or norm. Indeed, that there is nothing distinctive about these men and women seems very much to the point, as has often been remarked in the literature.

Eckhard Nordhofen discusses this in terms of the figures’ ‘neutrality’ across a broad range of registers: the absence of clearly identifiable clothing, whether for the boardroom or the workshop, renders Balkenhol’s figures strictly neutral between white and blue collar; the lack of any distinctive personal styling, whether of hair, make up or dress, that might be read as significant or expressive; and a corresponding absence of facial expression or hand-gesture. As he puts it: ‘Nothing abstract, just normal, yet nothing corresponds to the norm in a way that would remind you of the norm’.¹⁴ For his fellow artist Jeff Wall, Balkenhol’s figures carry ‘no attributes of occupation, labour or engagement’.¹⁵ For curator James Lingwood, ‘they do not […] embody any permanent system of values. If they embody anything at all, it is a simple and unaffected humanity’.¹⁶ In a similar spirit, Christian Michelsen singles out the quietude and lack of any discernible emotional expression as being what enables Balkenhol’s figures to rescind, equally, from affirmation or denial: ‘They do not communicate anything and do not proclaim any messages. Like the person who views them, they are simply present in the world. That is all. They do not answer questions. They just stand there, like the viewer. They embody suspending judgement’.¹⁷ Ludger Gerdes captures the general consensus well:

Above and beyond their basic objectiveness, [Balkenhol’s statues] neither embody nor proffer further meaning: they do not stand for any determinate human type, or social class, cannot be identified as representing any particular person, nor do they have any allegorical or symbolic function […] The figures tell no story, refer to nothing, have no message to convey — there is simply nothing whatsoever special about them. But it is precisely this which makes them exceptional. The power of the imagination is not neutralised but is instead immediately stimulated by the statues’ mute reserve.¹⁸

Harriet Zilch sees the figures’ undemonstrative and inconspicuous garb as an attempt to forestall the kind of unwanted narrative associations that cling stubbornly to the nude in the Western tradition. This became apparent to Balkenhol early on, when his first pair of larger than life male and female figures were widely interpreted as Adam and Eve, simply by virtue of their nudity. Largely forgoing the nude since, Balkenhol’s everyman and everywoman are now standardly clothed in relaxed, everyday wear. ‘As you normally don’t encounter people in the nude,’ Balkenhol observes, ‘I dress my figures in ordinary, everyday clothes’.¹⁹ The male archetype typically sports a white shirt open at the neck and black trousers. Though they occasionally wear a tie, they almost never wear a suit. Every woman’s apparel is more varied, as it is in real life, occasionally comprising a corporate trouser suit, but more often sensible knee-length dresses or skirts. This is the kind of unremarkable clothing one can expect to find in any reasonably casual office environment the Western world over.

While I do not disagree with any of this — indeed everything I have cited strikes me as perceptive and to the point — it seems to me that the resulting figures are not merely neutral: they are often also peculiarly indeterminate, a little ‘fuzzy around the edges’ even, in such a way as to never quite come into focus. This is something that Balkenhol’s signature finish, a roughly worked surface to which numerous splinters and curled shavings from chisel strokes continue to adhere, only accentuates. Similarly, their attire is not simply contemporary: there is also something oddly dated about it: the standard issue white shirt and dark trousers for the men, conservative, self-effacing skirts or dresses for the women avoid any suggestion of the kind of sports-inflected casual wear so ubiquitous today. This extends to the footwear: stolid work boots for the men, comfortably low and chunky heels for the women; nothing so casual or contemporary as trainers for everyday use. This has the effect of projecting the figures back into a simpler pre-televisual — certainly pre-social media — age. There is something not merely analogue but positively radio about Balkenhol’s world, an effect heightened by his figures’ tendency to gaze unfocused into the middle distance, with the abstracted air of those absorbed in their own thoughts or whatever it is they are listening to rather than seeing. As with their neither tall nor short, fat nor thin build, their unremarkable features and forgettable hair, so too with their indeterminate, neither formal nor scruffy clothing: there is nothing specific to pin them decisively to the present moment, despite somehow seeming generically ‘of our time’. Robert Fleck also thematises this: ‘[Balkenhol’s] figures look like people did shortly before the triumph of the consumer and media society in the 1960s. At the same time, they do not radiate anything nostalgic or backward-looking. They look transported, but as if they still belong to our present’.²⁰ Though it is hard to understand how this is possible — how could one and the same garb appear to be both pre-1960s and yet not backward-looking? — it nonetheless strikes me as exactly right.

It is important to recognise, however, that despite appearing generic Balkenhol’s figures could hardly be mistaken for universal: not only are they clearly modern twentieth century figures, they are almost invariably white. They also seem too self-contained and introverted to be easily read as American — a kind of European every man and woman then. More specifically, the carving and the polychromy suggest a Northern European rather than Mediterranean or Latin tradition, and the figures’ features, colouring and skin tone tend to bear this out, as does their clothing. Note the absence of short-sleeved shirts and light summer dresses. Beyond this, there does not seem to be anything specifically German about the figures represented, even if the medium of the work, carved polychromed wood, does seem very Germanic.²¹ This specificity or parochialism, depending upon one’s point of view, and corresponding lack of universality, is something the predominantly German-language commentary on Balkenhol’s work has been remarkably silent about to date. But even in a cultural context in which it is easier for this to appear standard, or simply pass unregistered, it is hard to regard such myopia as entirely blameless.

What gives these carvings of (so I shall argue) the same generic, Northern European everyman and everywoman, enlivened by only minor variations of dress or posture, such appeal? And that they are essentially the same generic man and woman — despite their gradual evolution and minor variations — strikes me as undeniable. The various series over the years in which Balkenhol has replicated the same man or woman, that is, a man or woman of identical size and build, features and clothing, in a variety of poses, or individual works comprising three or four such figures in slightly different poses, make this apparent. Much like the minor variations of On Kawara’s date paintings, given their much more significant underlying similarities, it is fundamental to Balkenhol’s project that he carves the same archetypal man and woman again and again.²² In both cases, the power of the work is enhanced rather than diminished by such repetition, gaining much of its persuasiveness from its cumulative effect. In each, the value of the oeuvre seems to be located across individual works rather than strictly within them. Or, rather, it is the way in which the individual works gather and thereby focus the concerns of the oeuvre that gives each work within it its individual charge. Because each partakes of the general commitments expressed by the whole, they make that underlying commitment apparent.²³ What might explain this? I think a suggestion can be found in §17 of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790), to which I now turn.

3. Kant on the ‘Aesthetic Standard Idea’ and the ‘Ideal of Beauty’

In the often neglected §17 of the third Critique, which many commentators claim to find confusing or unpersuasive, Kant asks whether there could be an ideal exemplar of beauty. That is, a particular sensible presentation, given in experience, fully adequate to the latter idea. ‘Ideas’ for Kant are maximally general, grounding thoughts that have no empirical conditions of application (such as God, freedom, the soul, and so on). Such ideas seek to provide an unconditioned ground for a particular domain of human knowledge or action. Despite having no empirical conditions of application — despite, that is, not ever being fully given in experience — ideas are not empty: they serve a regulative, action-guiding function. Were we not able to formulate and act under the idea of freedom, for example, we could not so much as aspire to act morally: absent the idea of it being possible to assert our will within the causal order of nature, we could neither be deemed the agent of, nor held responsible for, our actions. So the idea of freedom serves a regulative function for human beings, despite the fact that we cannot finally know whether we are free, freedom not being a possible object of experience for what Kant calls ‘finite rational beings’.²⁴ Beauty, conceived as an idea, should be understood similarly as the unconditioned ground for making judgements of taste, despite never being fully given in experience: it is an idea we must generate for ourselves and in the light of which we judge any prospective instance thereof. Just as we can never know whether we act purely from duty, so we can never know whether we have made a pure judgement of taste.

Given this, a question arises as to how an ‘ideal of beauty’ is possible: how could a sensible presentation — that is, something given in experience — ever be perfectly adequate to an idea, where the latter are understood precisely as what can never be so given. This is the question that §17 addresses. Were it possible, such an ideal would constitute an exemplary instance of beauty, one capable in virtue of its perfection of serving as a standard for judging any putative instance of beauty. As Kant puts in §17, an idea: ‘signifies, strictly speaking, a concept of reason’ where such indeterminate ideas point to the perfection of the concept in question. The idea of beauty thus constitutes what Kant calls the ‘maximum’ or ‘perfection’ of beauty, and the ideal of beauty would, accordingly, be ‘the representation of an individual being as an adequate to that idea’.²⁵ It would be a particular sensible instance that embodies such a maximum.²⁶

According to Kant, only human beings admit of such an ideal: ‘Only that which has the end of its existence within itself, the human being, who determines his ends himself through reason […] is capable of an ideal of beauty, just as the humanity in his person, as intelligence, is alone among all the objects in the world capable of the ideal of perfection’.²⁷ Kant’s justification for this abrupt and rather surprising claim amounts, at this point, to the observation that whatever is capable of serving as such an ideal must be ‘dependent’ rather than ‘free’: minimally, it must be a beauty tied to, and so at least partially constrained by, a concept of what the thing in question is.²⁸ Although Kant does not take this to be sufficient, he does take it to be necessary. More specifically, Kant says, ‘at its basis there must lie some idea of reason […] that determines a priori the end on which the internal possibility of the object rests’.²⁹ Kant’s reasoning seems to be as follows: the beauty of a building or a garden — or any other dependent beauty — is at least partially determined by how we understand the concepts in the light of which we judge them. If our understanding of the concepts at stake may vary, then so too can our conception not only of what would fulfil them, but of what would constitute an exemplary instance of the kind. This is immediately apparent if one thinks of a Protestant and a Catholic judging the beauty of a church’s interior: what might strike the former as histrionic or overblown, may seem just right to the latter; what might strike the latter as spartan or dour may seem just right to the former. By contrast, what Kant calls the ‘moral vocation’ (the end or purpose) of human beings is sufficiently determined by reason to ‘fix’ [fixieren] the beauty of the human form. Only in the case of what it is to be a human being is the end so determined. For this reason, only the human figure can function as a genuine ideal.

So understood, whenever a presentation of the human form approaches the level of the ideal, it must be one in which the moral ideas that govern human beings inwardly (‘goodness of soul, or purity, or fortitude, or serenity, etc.’) are outwardly apparent, shining forth in the appearance, comportment and actions of a ‘model image’ of personhood.³⁰ Only in virtue of manifesting such moral ideas can any particular empirical presentation of the human figure be universally pleasing. In sum, the moral purposes that are humanity’s highest calling must be fully manifest in the bodily expression of a perfectly representative instance of the kind.

As a form of dependent beauty, when we judge the beauty of a human being we cannot abstract from what we know about the function, end or purpose of human beings: rather, we take this into account so as to be able to judge whether its beauty is appropriate for an entity with such a purpose. Much that might freely please the eye might be added to the interior decoration of a church, for example, were the purpose of such buildings not to provide a quiet space for pondering the ultimate meaning of our lives, and from which such decoration would distract. As Kant’s infamous reservations about the Ta Moko tattoos of Ma¯ori warriors makes clear, he takes something similar to be true of human beings, but in an even more demanding sense: in order to judge the beauty of a tattooed body freely, we would need to abstract from our concept of the end or purpose of a human being, and this we should never do.³¹ For Kant human beauty is unique in this regard: as ‘ends in themselves’ human beings should never be judged freely.³² When we judge the beauty of a human being we must judge it in light of ‘the humanity in the person,’ or what it is to be human.

This is what Lisa Katharin Schamlzried calls the ‘inseparability problem’: the fact that when we see someone as a human being we cannot but see their external appearance as the visible expression of their inner character. For this reason, human beauty can never be merely physical: to see human beauty as human beauty requires seeing it as the visible manifestation of a person’s character. Not only do we find it psychologically difficult to abstract from our idea of what the human being is supposed to be when judging its beauty but, more strongly, we should not do so.³³ The ideal of beauty as Kant understands it thus comprises two parts: the sensible form of the figure presented and the moral purpose that is expressed through it. Take these in turn. Kant calls the former ‘the aesthetic standard idea’ that is, ‘an individual intuition (of the imagination) that represents the standard for judging [the human being] as a thing belonging to a particular species of animal’. The latter, by contrast, refers to an ‘idea of reason, which makes the ends of humanity insofar as they cannot be sensibly represented the principle for judging its figure, through which, as their effect in appearance, the former are revealed’.³⁴ This tortuous formulation makes Kant’s thought sound a good deal more obscure than it is. In sum: the ideal of beauty, taken as a whole, not only comprises the presentation of an exemplary (but standard) instance of a given kind, but the ends or purposes of that kind — here humanity — must be fully apparent in that instance. Given that for Kant the highest ends of humanity are moral, the moral purposes of the human being must be fully manifest in the generic instance that serves as the ‘archetype’ or ‘model image’ for the kind. As to how we arrive at an image that may be used as such a standard for judging instances of the kind, Kant offers both a psychological and a mathematical explanation, affording the former more attention:

the imagination […] knows how to reproduce the image and shape of an object out of an immense number of objects of different kinds, even of one and the same kind; indeed, when the mind is set on making comparisons, it even knows how […] to superimpose one image on another and by means of the congruence of several of the same kind to arrive at a mean that can serve them all as a common measure. Someone has seen a thousand grown men. Now if he would judge what should be estimated as their comparatively normal size then […] the imagination allows a great number of images (perhaps all thousand) to be superimposed on one another and […] in the space where the greatest number of them coincide […] there the average size becomes recognisable, which is in both height and breadth equidistant from the most extreme boundaries of the largest and smallest statures; and this is the stature for a beautiful man.³⁵

So understood the ‘aesthetic standard idea’ would be the look of a maximally average human being derived from a given sample through a process that, Kant makes clear, need be neither volitional nor conscious. Besides raising the question of its applicability to the kind of ‘averageness’ that Balkenhol’s commentators regularly flag, this passage — and indeed §17 as a whole — raises a question as to the influence of eighteenth-century German Classicism on Kant’s thought. In it one can hear an echo of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s claims in his early Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755). There Winckelmann champions the distinctively rich form of ‘imitation’ (Nachahmung) he takes to underpin the ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’ of Greek art:

The imitation of the beauty of nature either is directed at an individual model, or else it gathers observations from different individual models and brings them into oneness. The former means making a copy based on likeness, or a portrait; this path leads to the Dutch way of making forms and figures. But the latter path is the path to what is universally beautiful and to idealised depictions of the universally beautiful; and this is the path the Greeks took.³⁶

Winckelmann distinguished strongly between imitation and mere copying. Where the latter involves ‘slavish following’; the former involves an idealising projection of the understanding capable of transforming its object. Indeed, it is only through such idealising projection, according to Winckelmann, that the beauty of nature becomes apparent in the first place. Winckelmann further distinguishes here between an inferior and a superior variety of imitation: where the former focuses on a particular instance (‘the individual model’) the latter begins from such instances, but only to move beyond them towards generalisation and universalisation (‘the path to what is universally beautiful’). This is what Winckelmann believed the moderns of his day would do well to emulate in Greek art of the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. One can see Kant’s conception of the ideal as a peculiar transformation of idealisation so understood: like Winckelmann, it involves a movement beyond the particular; unlike Winckelmann, this is towards the maximally average rather than exceptionally beautiful.

Because Kant fails to cite Winckelmann in either his published writings or even his letters, however, scholars have been left to speculate on the true extent of his familiarity with Winckelmann’s writings. But increasing familiarity with Kant’s Nachlass, notably his notes on anthropology, makes clear that he was indeed familiar with his work. One can detect Winckelmann’s influence not only in Kant’s ‘Ideal of the Beauty’, not least his invocation of Doryphorus, the lost bronze believed to embody Polykleitos’s Kanon for the ideal representation of the male figure,³⁷ but even his more fundamental distinction between the beautiful (das Schöne) and the merely agreeable (das Angenehme), and the cognate distinction between beauty (Schönheit) and mere charm (Reiz).³⁸

Interestingly for our purposes, however, Kant recognises that the resulting model image or archetype will not be universal, but empirically conditioned by characteristic features of the items within the set from which it was generated. Since these may vary, both temporally (historically) and spatially (geographically), the resulting images that serve as a standard for judging will very likely be parochial to a specific place or time:³⁹

Now, if in a similar way there is sought for this average man the average head, the average nose, etc., then this shape is the basis for the standard idea of the beautiful man in the country where this comparison is made; hence under these empirical conditions a Negro must necessarily have a different standard idea of the beauty of a figure than a white, a Chinese person a different idea from a European.⁴⁰

Taken on its own, the ‘aesthetic standard idea’ serves a largely limiting or negative function for Kant. It constitutes the minimal aesthetic standards of correctness that must be met for the kind in question, such that anything that significantly departed from those standards could not count as beautiful for the kind in question. For this reason, it cannot contain anything specific to a particular instance, since this would fail to generalise across the kind. It must instead be maximally generic. But the aesthetic standard idea does not yet provide a sufficient condition for the beauty of the kind in question, here humanity, since this additionally requires the idea of reason that determines the ends of that kind.

Or so at least Kant argues. Various commentators have raised worries for his argument. Anthony Savile, for example, questions whether Kant has really demonstrated that only the human figure could serve as such an aesthetic ideal: Kant may have outlined his moral ideal, but why should we take this to be aesthetically significant? In response Savile unpacks some of the implications of judging human beings dependently: for something to be judged beautiful as or for a human it cannot suffer any serious imperfection in the way its ‘objective purposiveness’ (its end or purposes qua human) makes itself felt in the way it presents itself to us. In the case of a human being, its beauty cannot be marred by any deficiencies in the way the person’s moral excellence is revealed — whether in physiognomy, bearing or action. Given that, on the Kantian view, moral excellence is something we cannot but esteem, we could not fail to be drawn to its recognisable appearance in an ideal case; in that case its appearance would be a source of immediate satisfaction. Kant thus takes it that individuals who approximate to the moral ideal by manifesting their moral goodness in their bodily form and comportment will be found beautiful. So understood, the ideal of beauty would be the image of one whose inner goodness shines forth in their outward appearance and actions. If the purposiveness of man is indeed moral excellence and if beauty is, as Kant maintains, ‘the form of the purposiveness of an object,’ then the beauty of a human being will be the way in which their moral excellence is manifested bodily.⁴¹

Those sceptical of Kant’s inveterate moralising might still wonder whether the satisfaction at issue here is really aesthetic rather than moral. But even if one accepts that Kant has explained what is ideally beautiful for human beings about the human figure, taken as expressive of humanity’s moral purpose, one might wonder how this could possibly serve as an archetype of beauty per se. Take the beauty of anything that is not at all like human beauty perceptually: a woodland path, a dead flat sea, the dappled shadow cast by foliage on a white-washed wall, the muscular silhouette of a GT car, an exquisitely finished piece of furniture, a low-slung, cantilevered modernist house, a simple pot — the list is endless. Could the ideal of beauty, as Kant conceives it, generalise across such cases? Indeed, does it even make sense to expect an ideal motivated by Kant’s commitment to the idea of ‘the humanity in the person’ to encompass natural or artefactual beauty? While this account may preserve the primacy of moral value in our estimation of persons — perhaps even our aesthetic estimation of persons — has Kant offered us reason to see it as a plausible ideal of beauty per se? Little in the Kant scholarship addresses this worry head-on, but resources for a response can be found in David E. Cooper’s ‘Beautiful People, Beautiful Things’.⁴²

Cooper argues for what he sees as a traditional, but increasingly marginalised, ‘virtue-centric’ idea of beauty. On this conception, the primary home of beauty is understood to be the lived human body, that is, the body ‘as it engages in intentional movement, posture, facial expression, gesture, and other forms of comportment’.⁴³ Such features of the lived body are beautiful to the extent that they manifest admirable qualities of human beings — their virtues. So conceived, ‘a gesture may be found beautiful because it visibly expresses compassion, or a posture because it expresses dignity’.⁴⁴ By extension things and objects (whether natural or artefactual) are ‘beautiful only when suitably related to beautiful features of the lived body and only, therefore, when suitably related to human virtues’.⁴⁵

Cooper understands Kant’s ideal of beauty to be just such a virtue-centric conception. The ideal is to be sought in the human figure because, according to Kant, the ‘moral ideas that govern men inwardly’ are ‘visible in bodily manifestation’.⁴⁶ Cooper takes these ‘moral ideas’ to be essentially virtues: benevolence, purity, equanimity, dignity, patience, and so on. On the virtue-centric account something will be found beautiful only when, like the human body, it visibly manifests virtue.⁴⁷ Although such beauty is paradigmatically found in human beings, it can be extended to anything, including naturally occurring phenomena, works of art and even simple everyday artefacts, that partake of those virtues, such as elegance, grace or humility, that characterise human beings possessed of true beauty.⁴⁸ Borrowing from Yuriko Saito, Cooper suggests that the beauty of a well-wrapped package, for example, may reside in its ‘thoughtfulness’.⁴⁹ The point of the resulting account is to explain why beauty sometimes matters so deeply to people — hence why the experience of beauty can be so significant:⁵⁰

this integration of beauty with what matters to us is made readily intelligible if […] beauty is a manifestation — or appropriately related to a manifestation — of what is most admirable in human beings: their virtues. What guides the explanation offered by virtue-centrism is the plausible assumption that what matters most to us is us — we ourselves and our fellows. And few things matter more to us, presumably, than the vices and virtues we and our fellows display or pursue.⁵¹

Much like Savile, Cooper holds that ‘we appreciate things as beautiful when they are “experienced as exemplars of qualities that we prize in man [sic]”’, qualities such as boldness, generosity, delicacy, patience, humility, forbearance, modesty and so on.⁵² It is arguably a merit of this approach that it makes finding something beautiful a process that can be far from easy or straightforward: it may take considerable effort to discern whether an object exemplifies a given virtue and initial appearances may be deceptive. It is also a merit of the virtue-centric account that the virtues which the lived body — and, by extension, other things — can exemplify need not be restricted to the narrowly moral.

Faced with the worry about scope, the worry as to how Kant’s ideal might credibly generalise to non-​human forms of beauty and thereby stake a credible claim to be being an ideal of beauty per se, as Kant maintains, Cooper’s proposals strike me as probably the best that can be done in defending the generality of Kant’s ideal. Though undoubtedly a problem for Kant scholarship, particularly those concerned with the systematic relation and relative priority and independence of Kant’s moral and aesthetic theories, these broader stakes of the critical project need not detain us further, given our purposes here. With this outline of how Kant understands both the aesthetic normal idea and the ideal of beauty more generally in place, I want to consider whether it illuminates the persuasiveness of Balkenhol’s oeuvre.

4. Die Schönheit des Mittelmenschen

Does this account speak to what I am calling the ‘everyday beauty’ of Balkenhol’s figures? Take the two wings of Kant’s theory, the aesthetic standard idea and the idea of reason, in turn. The former, it seems to me, has obvious purchase, while the relevance of the latter may appear more debatable — even setting aside the plausibility of Kant’s argument. That is, even if one grants Kant’s argument for the ideal, it is not obvious how it might apply to Balkenhol. Although here it is worth recalling that, at least on the virtue-centric interpretation of Kant, it can take considerable effort to determine whether or not something, particularly a non-human object, exemplifies a particular virtue; so the kind of beauty at stake need not stare you in the face. There is one other wrinkle that should be acknowledged at the outset: Kant is concerned with the beauty of real people, and what would be required for the beauty of any individual to rise to the level of the ideal; he is not primarily concerned with the representation of people in works of art. The worry is that this may jeopardise the use that I want to make of his account in advance. I shall return to this worry once my proposals are on the table.

Start, then, with the aesthetic standard idea: that is, the claim that whatever may serve as the ideal of beauty for the human being (and I shall restrict my claims to this, rather than attempt to defend Kant’s generalisation of this ideal to beauty per se), it must be a maximally average instance of its kind, as determined by the relevant sample. As Kant acknowledges, this standard cannot be universal: its scope will be restricted by the characteristic features of people within the domain sampled. This idea sets the minimum threshold within the relevant domain that any person must meet to be in candidacy for the ideal. As such it is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for embodying the ideal. Do Balkenhol’s everyman and everywoman sculptures meet this threshold requirement? Here the answer has to be an unequivocal ‘yes’. As the commentators sampled at the outset attest, Balkenhol’s figures are strikingly average, whether this is framed in terms of ‘neutrality’, ‘normality’, lack of emotional expression or point of view, or simple inconspicuousness. Although I endorsed that broad consensus here, I also suggested that it may underplay features of the work that contribute to its indeterminacy. These include formal features, such as the way the roughly worked surfaces resist resolving into a clear outline, and thematic features, such as the inconspicuous, hard-to-date garb, and the anodyne, and correspondingly unmemorable, good looks.

All of this, I suggest, is precisely what one should expect of anything that clears the minimal threshold for the kind of exemplary instance or ‘model image’ Kant has in mind. Given the psychological process of super-imposing a range of cases that he envisages, the neither tall nor short, fat nor thin build and — if clothed — the neither smart nor scruffy, white nor blue collar, clothing is just what one would expect. One could even read the slightly fuzzy outline characteristic of Balkenhol’s figures as a product of just such processes: there may be a degree of indeterminacy as to precisely where the mean falls, particularly if reached in the psychological manner Kant imagines, an indeterminacy that Balkenhol’s everyman and everywoman preserve. But what about their middling facial features? Rachel Zuckert characterises looks of this kind, provocatively, as ‘boring beauty’, maintaining that they can be at best one kind of beauty, even for human beings: ‘this type of good looks is characterised […] by little interesting individuality of looks, no novelty or piquancy of expression, arrangement of features, or visual ‘character;’ it is suited, then, to the representation of ‘any’ human being (or ‘any’ woman or man)’.⁵³

Prima facie, one might have expected anything so lacking in distinction, so typical or average to be the very antithesis of beautiful, which is generally assumed to be exceptional, rather than ordinary. But here, as Zuckert shows by appeal to Francis Galton and more recent psychological research by Judith Langlois et al. on what is deemed ‘attractive’ in composite faces montaged from individual photographs, the experimental data appears to back Kant up: ‘These composite “average” faces are — if not stunningly beautiful — indeed quite attractive in a certain “ideal” or “regular” way’.⁵⁴ Specifically, ‘“averaged” faces seem both “prototypical” or representative […] and are quite good-looking, not common, not equivalent to the looks of any ordinary person’.⁵⁵ This is no doubt because the averaging that naturally results from the montaging technique gets rid of outliers, foregrounding the more regular mean that underlies such variation. What I call ‘everyday beauty’, a kind of nobility of everydayness, albeit on a level that actual people rarely embody, Zuckert characterises as ‘“classic”, “pure”, “innocent”, girl- or boy- “next-door”, or “standard” good looks’.⁵⁶ Such ‘standardly’ beautiful people are good looking, albeit in a bland or ‘boring’ way. Granting that in Balkenhol’s case such everyday beauty appears limited in advance to an exclusively Northern European image pool, I believe we have essentially the same phenomenon in mind. For all these reasons, Kant’s conception of the ‘aesthetic normal idea’ strikes me as highly apposite for characterising the beauty of Balkenhol’s everyman and everywoman.

But what about Kant’s second condition: that, in addition to meeting this minimal requirement, a person needs to manifest moral goodness or character to be found positively beautiful? That this average everyday specimen must also be someone whose moral beauty — what Friedrich Schiller might call their ‘grace’ — shines through in their appearance, bearing or actions. As Kant puts it:

the ideal consists in the expression of the moral, without which the object would not please universally and moreover positively (not merely negatively in an academically correct presentation). The visible expression of moral ideas, which inwardly govern human beings, can of course be drawn only from experience; but as it were to make visible in bodily manifestation (as the effect of what is inward) their combination with everything that our understanding connects with the morally good in the idea of the highest purposiveness — goodness of soul, or purity, or strength, or repose, etc. [die Seelengüte oder Reinigkeit oder Stärke oder Ruhe usw.] — this requires pure ideas of reason and great force of imagination united in anyone who would merely judge them, let alone anyone who would present them.⁵⁷

Zuckert, like Schamlzried, claims to find this plausible, appealing to the beauty that the expression of ‘deep piety, love, dignity or courage’ can elicit, as well as the beauty that our own ‘(quasi)-moralising’ interpretations of a given expression as, say, ‘serene or innocent’ can confer.⁵⁸ Are there respects in which this might apply to Balkenhol’s everyman and everywoman? At first sight, this seems harder to make out; but here it helps to turn to examples. I shall take two characteristically scaled-down figures, Man with light brown jacket (2012) and Turquoise Woman (2013), as installed in the recent exhibition Zeitfenster: Stephan Balkenhol trifft Alte Meister at Museum Wiesbaden as my test case (plate 3, plate 4, plate 5, plate 6, plate 7, plate 8, and plate 9).⁵⁹ The figures seem to be the standard age for Balkenhol’s figures, a kind of indeterminate early middle-age. The man, who wears dark Prussian blue trousers and a yellow ochre ‘Harrington’ style jacket over a white T-shirt, is perhaps slightly more causal than your standard Balkenhol figure; the woman, who wears a long turquoise jacket or light coat over a white dress with slightly heeled open-toed taupe sandals perhaps slightly smarter. But minor variations of this kind are common for Balkenhol’s sculptures, once one comes to particulars. Their symmetrical features, with good bone structure, high cheekbones and non-descript hair — short, but not too short, for the man, on this occasion a bun for the woman — are also typical. Unusually for Balkenhol, the woman’s gaze is directed down, arms hanging loosely by her sides, in a way that might be described as reticent or perhaps even modest, as if expecting to be approached, and not quite knowing how to respond. Though even here one does not get the sense of someone looking at anything, so much as turning their gaze inward. In common with his work more generally, her abstracted air gives an impression of someone more immersed in their internal thought processes than the external world.⁶⁰ The man looks straight ahead as Balkenhol’s figures generally do, though it is never clear precisely at what.⁶¹

The colour of these works really pops, as has become increasingly common over the years. Both figures show, very clearly, the workings of Balkenhol’s chisel. Taken together with the colour it gives the sculptures a remarkably painterly finish. Balkenhol often uses his chisel in the way a draughtsman might use differential cross-hatching, to pick out different planes of the objects depicted, albeit typically more roughly. This is especially pronounced here in the way the man’s Harrington jacket creases as it hangs on his torso (something its lighter colour relative to the trousers helps to emphasise). It is also apparent in the way the woman’s open jacket hangs relative to the white dress beneath it. Both make prominent use more or less horizontal strokes: close to horizontal for the dress itself, at a more acute angle for the jacket. Taken together with the colour, this serves to separate two items of clothing carved from the same piece of wood and separated by no more than a couple of millimetres of depth, while also serving to emphasise the woman’s slimness.

Both figures are very roughly finished: the woman’s legs, bare from the mid-thigh down, are alive with wood shavings and splinters, as are the man’s trousers. Indeed, Balkenhol’s figures often seem to be left noticeably rougher in their lower halves, as though the legs and feet were carved in such a way as to mimic peripheral vision, when focusing on the face and torso. Interestingly, this is more apparent with the men than the women: the men’s shoes are often little more than ciphers, indeterminate between boot and shoe. Although the woman stands at rest, her two feet evenly planted, the man appears on the verge of movement. With his right-hand thrust in his trouser pocket (a regular Balkenhol trope) and the weight clearly planted through his right leg, pushing that hip out and back, his slightly bent left leg implies movement, as though he is just about to lift that heel off the floor and step forward. There is an air of indecision or hesitation about his posture, however, making it hard to say for sure.

Although the figures in this exhibition, which locates Balkenhol’s sculptures throughout the museum’s permanent painting collection, are shown in such a way as to imply relations between discrete groups of figures and the historical works on display, the man and woman, whose apparently shared enjoyment in their clothing suggests they might be a couple, do not address one another in any way. Indeed, even when arranged into groups, suggesting some kind of rudimentary narrative, Balkenhol’s figures seem strikingly separate: not merely emotionally inexpressive, but also noticeably apart, though without appearing in any way aloof.⁶² Their immobility, absence of expression and unfocused gaze only add to this impression. Though apparently capable of looking, Balkenhol’s figures appear incapable of seeing. Neither addressing nor ignoring us, the figures’ gazes and our own simply pass one another by. Welzer also recognises this:

Balkenhol’s figures derive their vexing liveliness precisely from the fact that they do not show expression but are merely ‘there’ in their very strange presence. […] They form their very own reality […] Could there be a greater proof of the complete removal from time and freedom from context of these sculptures than the feeling that another reality is entirely present in them?⁶³

It is tempting to explain this ‘other reality’ by appeal to the distinction between work and object: although the figures may inhabit our space as objects they must transcend that space as works, on pain of collapsing back into mere objecthood.⁶⁴ This would contribute to their oft-noted air of inscrutability and distance: despite appearing to be precisely the kind of entity — our fellow human beings — one might naturally expect to encourage interaction, they inhabit a world separate from our own. But while it may be tempting to appeal to the generic idea that works of art and their phenomenal substrates inhabit distinct ontological domains to account for Balkenhol’s figures’ ‘complete removal from time and freedom from context’, it is inadequate to the specific challenge presented by his work. Even granting that the kinds of features that may be predicated of sculptures as objects (size, shape, weight, material, colour, etc.) cannot exhaust the kinds of features that can be predicated of them as works (emotional, psychological, expressive, etc.) on pain of the work reducing to its phenomenal substrate and thereby sinking back into mere objecthood, this does not account for a striking feature of his work. Bring any collection of Balkenhol figures together and it is immediately apparent that they are incapable of addressing or ignoring one another either. And this is true, remarkably, not only of large groups, such as his team of Footballers, complete with referee (2006) each of whom seems to be engaged in his own strange, solitary game (plate 10 and plate 11), but even of smaller, ostensibly more intimate, groups such as his series of Dancing Couples (1999), none of whom appears to be engaged in a joint venture (plate 12 and plate 13).⁶⁵ Were the issue simply one of the ontological gulf between (real and fictional) worlds, there should be no problem with intra-world interactions of this kind. But, as Jeff Wall noted perceptively early on: each of Balkenhol’s figures is ‘strictly speaking a monad: an isolated, condensed being’.⁶⁶

So much for the detail of these specific works, and their relation to Balkenhol’s project more generally. Does any of this speak to the two questions at issue: could these works fulfil the moral requirements for embodying the ideal of beauty, as Kant understands this, and can the latter speak to what one might call the ‘mediated beauty’ of people as depicted? Take the latter question first, since if this is not possible, the answer to former question would have to be ‘no’. If Cooper is right, the way to go here seems obvious: just as we regularly predicate emotional, psychological and expressive properties of everyday objects (a beautifully wrapped parcel is ‘thoughtful,’ an endlessly replenished waterfall ‘generous,’ a simple bowl ‘graceful’ or ‘calm’) that as non-sentient entities they could not literally embody or possess, so we may apply psychological and other predicates to works of art metaphorically.⁶⁷ I am going to assume rather than argue for this claim here since, were it not the case, many of our most routine aesthetic practices would turn out to be ill-founded or confused, and it is not my goal to defend the foundations of our basic aesthetic practices here. Moreover, even someone unwilling to grant that a sculpture could be legitimately described as ‘modest’ or ‘graceful’ would presumably be willing to grant that the person depicted by that sculpture could appear so, and that is all I need.

The more interesting question, given our purposes here, is whether these works embody moral features clearly enough to rise to the level of the ideal, as Kant understands it. Does the moral goodness of Balkenhol’s everyman and everywoman ‘shine through’ their depictions? Do the moral ideas that, in Kant’s words, ‘govern man inwardly’ achieve ‘visible expression?’ I remain genuinely unsure about this, and do not wish to overstate the case by manhandling the evidence to fit a prior philosophical agenda. What initially led me to Kant, while thinking about Balkenhol, was the feeling that his sculptures embody Kant’s conception of the aesthetic standard idea so well as almost to have been made with it in mind. But even if this element of Kant’s theory can be brought to bear on Balkenhol’s project — and I believe it is obvious that it can — this leaves the question of whether his works might fulfil the more demanding requirements of Kant’s ‘ideal of beauty’ as a whole unexamined. All I wish to say about this here is that I would not immediately rule it out: it seems to me self-evident that we would find anyone who characterised Balkenhol’s figures as (say) ‘belligerent,’ ‘aggressive’ or ‘rapacious,’ having seriously considered them, decidedly odd. Why that is bears thinking about. There is undeniably an air — albeit a vague, generalised or unspecific air — of goodness about them. Jeff Wall captured something of this air when he described them thus:

Balkenhol’s pale monadic figures, isolated from both universality and concrete social individuation, usually appear before us simply attired, in a dress or trousers and a shirt. They are like people who have recently come out of hospital after a serious illness, who cannot yet really return to active life, but who can get dressed normally and face things again. Like convalescents, their primary occupation is to complete their recovery. Soon, they may take up their tools and re-enter their complex, stressful social relationships.⁶⁸

Wall’s comments capture the palpable air of hesitation that many of Balkenhol’s figures exude. They seem not just stolid, but somehow also stuck: rooted to the spot, in much the way that each of them is, isolated and alone, rooted to their own individual tree trunk. But this may be to put the point too pejoratively; perhaps it would be better to note a general air of reticence about Balkenhol’s figures: the sense consistently conveyed of preferring to wait on the other to act, or simply upon what happens, rather than run the risk of acting precipitously. Certainly, the figures seem to manifest tremendous reserve: these are not the kind of people who bullishly thrust themselves forward.⁶⁹ Kant characterises the kind of moral ideas that supposedly ‘govern man inwardly’ and get ‘visibly expressed’ in the ideal as die Seelengüte oder Reinigkeit oder Stärke oder Ruhe usw. Werner S. Pluhar renders this as ‘goodness of soul, or purity, or fortitude, or serenity, etc.’ The more recent, and by now standard, Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews translation gives the latter two qualities as ‘strength’ and ‘repose’.⁷⁰ Though perhaps more literal, ‘strength’ and ‘repose’ capture the ideas of reason, specifically, Kant has in mind here much less readily than Pluhar’s ‘fortitude’ and ‘serenity’. Be that as it may, ‘fortitude’ and ‘serenity,’ alongside other markers of moral goodness such as ‘equanimity,’ ‘grace’, and ‘calm’ seem to capture the impression conveyed by Balkenhol’s figures very well indeed.⁷¹ For this reason, I do not want to rule out the possibility that what I am calling the ‘everyday beauty’ of Balkenhol’s Mittelmenschen might embody Kant’s ideal more fully, even if I have stopped short of mounting such an argument here. For that they do may well be what makes them so captivating, and why many have found themselves so drawn to them.

5. Coda: The Project Reconsidered

One final thought to close: I said in my opening remarks that — at its best — philosophical criticism as I understand it should in principle grant works of art the space to ‘talk back,’ by putting pressure on the philosophical literature mobilised to make sense of them. Call this philosophical criticism’s ‘regulative ideal’ in Kant’s sense of the term: that is, something it aspires to, even if it does not always achieve. One might worry, however, that there has been precious little ‘speaking back’ to Kant here. I feel the force of this worry. That said, it hardly requires works of art to raise worries about humanity’s ‘moral vocation’ or the universalism of Enlightenment thought more generally today. The metaphysics of moral personhood built into Kant’s idea of the ‘humanity in the person’ is both historically and culturally specific. Take that as read. Reflective readers will not immediately rush to criticism, however, since the assumptions underpinning our discomfort with such ideas are likely to be no less grounded in the doxa of our own day. But it bears asking whether Balkenhol’s work might put pressure on Kant’s thought in more local ways, ways that might indeed require something sensuously and not merely intellectually given, such as a work of art, to bring out. I mentioned Kant’s infamous remarks about Ma¯ori tattooing in passing. This is what he actually says:

The beauty of a human being (and in this species that of a man, a woman, or a child), the beauty of a horse, of a building (such as a church, a palace, an arsenal, or a garden-house) presuppose a concept of the end that determines what the thing should be, hence a concept of its perfection, and is thus merely dependent beauty […] One would be able to add much to a building that would be pleasing in intuition of it if only it were not supposed to be a church; a figure could be beautified with all sorts of curlicues and light but regular lines, as the New Zealanders do [Kant clearly has in mind the Ma¯ori here] with their tattooing, if only it were not a human being; and the latter could have much finer features and a more pleasing, softer outline to its facial structure if only it were not supposed to represent a man, or even a warrior.

Kant’s confident dismissal of such practices is just the kind of thing that one can expect to trouble a modern reader. But rather than simply dismissing Kant’s parochialism, it is worth considering whether anything about Balkenhol’s everyday beauty might put pressure on this view. I believe it does. I have stressed throughout that Kant’s Normalidee cannot be universal, since it is generated — at least notionally — through a process of averaging over a more or less limited domain, rather than the entire human race. Kant acknowledges one obvious entailment of this view: conceptions of the aesthetic standard idea must be relative. The deeply average, anodyne or ‘boring’ beauty of Balkenhol’s Mittelmenschen is (at best) Northern European: it may embody a certain local standard, but hardly a universal ideal. By parity of reasoning, Kant would have to grant that any standard reached by ‘averaging’ the appearance of Ma¯ori warriors would be very different. Indeed, Kant appears happy to accept that there will simply be different normal ideas of beauty, given how they are generated. That being so, should he really dismiss Ma¯ori practices of tattooing quite so confidently? That he does demonstrates that one aspect of Kant’s ideal is at odds with the other: the universalising morality of the idea of the ‘humanity in the person’ sits uncomfortably with his contextualist commitment to competing local aesthetic standards. So long as it is internally divided in this way, Kant’s ‘Ideal of Beauty’ will be unstable, as any local standard that happens to conflict with the demands of morality as Kant understands these will make clear. As such, Kant’s ‘Ideal’ provides not so much a workable archetype for human beauty per se, much less for beauty simpliciter, as the after image of a failed aspiration — the dream of a truly universal standard. Balkenhol’s persistent mining of just one set of local norms makes this apparent. By presenting those norms over and over, the work seems to say: this is what one — but only one — standard idea may look like. The implication is that others may turn out to look quite different, perhaps even in ways that put pressure on some of our most basic underlying assumptions.

Notes

I am grateful to two anonymous referees for their exceptionally helpful comments. Margaret Iversen read the paper in draft and pushed me to think harder about Kant’s remarks on Ma¯ori tattooing.

Footnotes

Diarmuid Costello is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is a past Chair of the British Society of Aesthetics, and a recipient of research fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and AHRC. He is the author of On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry (Routledge, 2018), and Aesthetics after Modernism (OUP, 2024); he is working on a collection of critical essays, provisionally titled Spurs to Thought: Philosophical Criticism and Contemporary Art.