Who adorned the cave?

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a German philosopher from Königsberg. In the Critique of Judgement he mentions a cave on the Greek island of Antiparos. Its formations are splendid enough for him to call them a glory. In the same breath he accounts for them as the effect of seeping water. Did the visitor see a marvel, then, or merely the result of water doing its work? Kant needs both descriptions. They answer different questions.

What a mineral name tells us about the eye

Even the names in his list are revealing. When people see “flowers of iron”, they reach for a word from the world of plants. Yet neither a blossom nor an artist’s hand was needed to produce the shape. Kant has just described a liquid turning solid and the difference it makes whether a body can crystallise freely or meets an obstacle as it forms. Explaining how a mineral acquired its outline does nothing to explain its beauty away. Knowing how it came about is precisely what makes it such a useful example for the question he wants to ask.

Many of those mineral crystallisations, such as clusters of spar, glass-head ore and flowers of iron, often yield forms as beautiful as art could ever conceive; and the glory in the cave of Antiparos is merely the product of water seeping through beds of gypsum.

– Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft, p. 194.^[1]

What the word “merely” explains

A small word in the second half of the sentence has a great deal of work to do. The splendour of the cave is “merely” the product of seeping water when the question concerns its origin. It does not follow that our delight is merely a mistake. We can look at these forms as though someone had taken care to arrange them without claiming that anyone intended them for our eyes. The bed of gypsum need know nothing about the beauty of what it produces. The viewer is free to admire the formation; the water, for its part, can remain water.