About the four moments

After the introductions and preface, Kant opens the Critique of Judgement with a section he calls the ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’, comprising sections 1-22 of the book. This consists of what he calls the four ‘Moments’ (Momente) of the judgement of taste. A ‘moment’ seems an odd term: what does it mean?

Each of the moments discusses a particular aspect of judgements of taste¹. Because he is a highly systematic thinker, Kant bases his analysis on logical forms that he had also applied to the two previous Critiques. Like other philosophers of his time, he saw humans as primarily rational beings, and this rationality was best expressed through the discipline of formal logic, inherited mostly unchanged from Aristotle two thousand years earlier. In logic, a judgement may have four aspects, each with its own ambit:

• Quantity: whether a judgement is singular, particular or universal (i.e. whether it extends to one thing, some things, or all things).
• Quality: whether a judgement is affirmative/positive, negative or infinite/unlimited.
• Relation: whether a judgement is categorical, hypothetical or disjunctive.
• Modality: whether a judgement is a possibility (problematic), actuality (assertoric) or necessity (apodeictic).

This ‘table of judgements’ gives us twelve elementary forms of judgement. Take an example: ‘This apple is green’. This is a singular, affirmative, categorical, assertoric judgement. It is singular because it is one apple; affirmative because it says what the apple is (rather than what it is not); categorical because it affirms the predicate of a subject; assertoric because it asserts that something is the case.

Kant applies this system throughout his philosophy. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the table forms the basis for twelve different categories by which objects are organised by the understanding. For example, the hypothetical judgement (‘if A then B’, also known as a conditional) grounds our built-in tendency to interpret events causally. Kant was an obsessive systematiser, and deliberately so: he calls his structure the ‘architectonic’. Here is a definition by Howard Caygill of that important idea:

Architectonic refers to both the art of constructing a system of science on the basis of an ‘idea of the whole’ of the science, and to that idea itself, its ‘general delineation or outline’... Kant specifically explores the subject of architectonic in the third chapter of the CPR’s ‘Transcendental Doctrine of Method’ entitled ‘The Architectonic of Pure Reason’. There he sees it as ‘the doctrine of the scientific in our knowledge’ or the art of making ‘a system out of a mere aggregate of knowledge’... The system is characterised by an ‘organised unity’ which is the end to which the parts of the science relate, and in which they relate to each other.²

Kant builds this system because he thinks reason itself is architectonic.

I won’t try here to detail what all the kinds of logic in the table mean.³ Suffice to say that, for Kant, to understand judgements of taste we need to scrutinise them from four broad perspectives. Put together, they will show us what judgements of taste can do and what they can’t do. This includes deciding whether or not a given ‘this is beautiful’ judgement really is a judgement of taste – sometimes, Kant claims, it won’t be. What we are seeing here is Kant applying his critical philosophy to determine the limits and scope of these kinds of judgements. As he comments:

What is required for calling an object beautiful must be discovered by analysis of judgements of taste. In seeking the moments to which this power of judgement attends in its reflection, I have been guided by the logical functions for judging (for a relation to the understanding is always contained even in the judgement of taste).⁴

Note the stress here upon judgement. Kant is not asking ‘what is beauty?’ but ‘what does it mean to judge that something is beautiful?’

Across the four moments, he describes a number of features that must be true for a judgement of taste:

• §§1-5: First moment (quality). Disinterestedness.⁵
• §§6-9: Second moment (quantity). Universality. 
• §§10-17: Third moment (relation). Purposiveness. 
• §§18-22: Fourth moment (modality). Necessity. 

The moments therefore are supposed to be a kind of set of criteria for working out whether a given feeling of pleasure is a judgement of taste or something else – and Kant offers options for what it might be instead.

He does not explain why he uses the odd term ‘moment’, but it probably reflects the need for a special label given the peculiar nature of aesthetic judgements. Christian Helmut Wenzel offers this explanation:

‘Moments’ are not moments of time (at least not just that)... Consideration of the Latin root of momentum, movere (to move), and the notion of momentum in physics are helpful here. These moments are more than mere external aspects of the judgment of taste. They give it its essential force and life.⁶

For Kant they are based upon personal, subjective feelings, and therefore have an unusual relationship to logic. They actually aren’t logical judgements at all – nearly the very first thing Kant says is that the judgement of taste is ‘not a cognitive judgement, hence not a logical one’ (§1).

It is perhaps not obvious why Kant should try to organise the Analytic of the Beautiful on the basis of functions of logic and cognition, given that aesthetic experience is so personal, intuitive and emotional, and is on Kant’s own admission neither logical nor cognitive. In my view it is often an uncomfortable fit. Some commentators however defend Kant’s approach, for example Douglas Burnham:

It is often said that Kant is failing to properly address aesthetic experience from the start by trying to force it into these cognitive characteristics. However, Kant could equally well argue that if aesthetic judgement did not relate to judgement (and cognition) more generally, it would fail to have any wider significance for our wider mental life, and would be inaccessible to philosophy.⁷

The judgement is aesthetic, but as an act of judgement it refers to the same conditions of cognition as any other judgement, and must make reference to the table of judgements to guarantee its complete and unified discussion.  

In the next few posts I will look at the four moments in turn.

Notes

The green apple is a digital painting by me.

1. In Kant’s terminology, there is a distinction between ‘aesthetic judgements’ and ‘judgements of taste’, which we will come to later. Basically, aesthetic judgements come in various kinds and judgements of taste are one of those kinds.
2. Definition from Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (1995).
3. If you are interested in logical form there is good discussion on the SEP here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-judgment/#KinLogFor. However this stuff is not for the faint-hearted.
4. Kant, CoJ, footnote to p89.
5. In applying the logical aspects in the CoJ, Kant changes the normal order, discussing Quality first instead of Quantity, as you see here. I’ll suggest a reason why when we look at the First Moment specifically.
6. Christian Helmut Wenzel, An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics (2005).
7. Douglas Burnham, An Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgement (2000).