Of every representation I can say that it is at least possible that it (as a cognition) be combined with pleasure. Of that which I call agreeable I say that it actually produces a pleasure in me. Of the beautiful, however, one thinks that it has a necessary relation to satisfaction.
Kant carefully talks of what we ‘say’ or ‘think’ of the pleasure in the beautiful, because his general conception of modality is that it concerns our attitude to the relation between an object and our feeling.1
Kant’s focus is on the pleasure we take in a representation when we judge its beauty, and why we feel that everyone ought to agree with us. He has already offered some explanation of this. Because the person brings no private interest to their judgement, he or she is relying on the built-in mental faculties found in every human being, and the judgement acquires a subjective universality a priori, based in the free play of our faculties or ‘cognition in general’.
Now he wants to explore the topic further, and decides the beautiful has a necessary relation to pleasure, but this necessity is neither theoretical nor practical.
- Theoretical: an objective necessity that everyone must feel identically. Scientific knowledge.
- Practical: an ethical necessity that asserts that everyone ought to behave morally.
An aesthetic judgement without concepts has a different character, neither objective nor practical. Kant concludes:
Rather, as a necessity that is thought in an aesthetic judgement, it can only be called exemplary, i.e., a necessity of the assent of all to a judgement that is regarded as an example of a universal rule one cannot produce.
Since the pure judgement of taste is not a cognitive or logical judgement we can only say that everyone should find the object similarly beautiful. ‘Exemplary’ means we cannot produce a cast-iron rule for beauty and must therefore depend on the example set by someone making an actual judgement. The scholar Christian Helmut Wenzel describes this neatly:
Someone has to step forward, so to speak, and actually make a judgment of taste before anyone can be expected to agree to anything. The judgment itself is exemplary. It looks like an example of a rule, as if a general rule preceded it. But in fact there is no rule to start with.2
The judgement’s subjective necessity is grounded in cognition in general, that is, the same conditions that are required to make theoretical and practical judgements possible. In all three cases there is an engagement of the imagination and the understanding, but the pure judgement of taste stands in its own special relation (i.e. free play) to those conditions.
We cannot look for necessity in our individual empirical experience – it can only be grounded a priori as a principle that applies to all judgements of taste. Kant wants to ask what that principle is.
The need for an a priori principle
The first thing we should ask is why Kant thinks we need an a priori principle.
He sets out his view in the CoJ’s Introduction, where in Section V he says that scientific study of the world needs indeterminate judgements that allow us to create new concepts. If a zoologist discovers an unknown animal, he or she will have no concept for it, and will have to create a new one (perhaps naming it after themselves in the process). We also need to know that the various laws that we discover will cohere into a predictable and reliable unity. Otherwise, says Kant, ‘no thoroughgoing interconnection of empirical cognitions into a whole of experience would take place’ (p70). It is important that our cognition and judgements should be universally valid (and communicable). If they were purely subjective, we could not establish objective knowledge of the world, and we would be stuck with scepticism.
Kant thinks (it is a bold claim, but he stands by it) the laws of nature, space and time ultimately come from ourselves, imposed by the categories of the understanding; so we perceive a purposiveness in nature that makes it seem as if nature was designed to coordinate with these cognitive faculties in us. To paraphrase:
The power of judgement must think of nature in accordance with a principle of purposiveness for our faculty of cognition. (p71)
This makes sense: in order for objective knowledge to be possible there must be a correspondence between nature and our equipment for knowing about it, otherwise our perceptions could just be random and yield no true knowledge at all. The lawful unity of nature strikes us as if it was designed for us:
hence we are also delighted... when we encounter such a systematic unity among merely empirical laws, just as if it were a happy accident which happened to favour our aim.
Kant does not say nature is in fact designed so that we humans can cognise it, just that it seems that way to us. If such design were true, we would have to address the question of God – a topic Kant discusses in the second part of the CoJ on teleology.
This then is why we need an a priori principle of judgement, namely the principle of purposiveness. This principle by itself does not give us knowledge of nature (it’s an ‘as if’) but it is the manner in which judgement must proceed: a necessary assumption.
The puzzle remains: if purposiveness is the a priori principle of judgement in general, what is the a priori principle of the specific faculty of taste, which is a kind of subcategory of judgement? The faculty of judgement in general includes theoretical and practical judgements. Purposiveness holds for the judgement of taste as well, but the judgement of taste is a particular kind of judgement: it is neither objective nor cognitive, with no reliance on determinate concepts. So where does it get its (exemplary and conditional) necessity? Kant proposes a further a priori principle.
Common sense
If judgements of taste were determinate their necessity would be clear; if they were merely sensory (subjective in the relativist sense) no one would claim they were necessary.
They must thus have a subjective principle, which determines what pleases or displeases only through feeling and not through concepts, but yet with universal validity. Such a principle, however, could only be regarded as a common sense [Gemeinsinn]. (§20)
The pure judgement of taste, our ability to declare an object beautiful and expect assent, is ‘conditional’ – it depends upon the existence of a common sense or sensus communis:
Only on the presupposition of such a common sense... can the judgement of taste be made.
Kant thus locates the necessity of pure judgements of taste in the a priori faculties of the mind. He makes clear he does not mean an external sense (of the spatial, material objects of the external world) but an inner sense (of our own states of mind). Nor does he mean ‘common sense’ in the everyday meaning of practical intelligence, but literally, as an inner sense we all have in common. It is a subjective principle of shared feeling that lets us judge beauty in the absence of rules, according to which we may ‘assume’ that our satisfaction in beauty is ‘a rule for everyone’. However, it is, like the ideal of beauty, a ‘merely ideal norm’ (§22), whose validity is only exemplary.
Why can we presuppose this common sense? In §21, Kant says that for our judgements to be universally valid, rather than mere private opinions, it must be possible for them to be communicable from one person to the next. We don’t all have to have the same personal tastes, but we must be able to communicate our feelings and reasons to each other in terms we all understand. Otherwise we are left with the spectre of scepticism. In this case, our disposition for a cognition in general – which he raised in §9 – must also be communicable, since without cognition the judgements couldn’t happen. This is why we can presuppose a common sense.
He adds that the cognitive powers must have a proportion [Proportion] – a relative balance or weight between them – that is ‘optimal’ for the animation of the imagination and the understanding. If we are doing arithmetic the understanding will be doing the work; if we are writing a poem the main player will be the imagination; in aesthetics the two achieve harmony. The relationship of the common sense to this free play is not clear. Here Kant calls it ‘the effect of the free play of our cognitive powers’. So it is not the same thing as the free play, rather an effect of it.3 There are quite a few similar terms flying around now: subjective universality, communicability, the universal voice, common sense / sensus communis – all these terms are ways of talking around the same, somewhat confusing process.
Can we prove any of this? I don’t see how we can, but Kant’s view is clear:
since the universal communicability of a feeling presupposes a common sense, the latter must be able to be assumed with good reason. (§21)
Common sense, then, is the subjective a priori principle of taste (‘taste’, you will recall from §1 p89, being the faculty for the judging of the beautiful). Note: the ‘necessity’ we are discussing is not that of the common sense itself but that of our satisfaction in the beautiful, and thus the judgement of taste, which draw their alleged4 necessity from our presupposition of the existence of the common sense.
Kant adds a caveat in §22, which is that the universal assent grounded in common sense is not an objective necessity, only a subjective one:
it does not say that everyone will concur with our judgement but that everyone should agree with it. Thus the common sense... is a merely ideal norm.
We treat the judgement of taste as if it were objective, but it has only exemplary necessity by virtue of a principle that is subjectively universal. If it was objectively universal, the judgements of taste would demand universal assent in a scientific, logical sense. Instead, as we are relying on an indeterminate norm, we cannot be certain that the judgement has been ‘correctly subsumed’. But we can’t understand the universality of taste – our demand that others should agree with us that a given object is beautiful – without presupposing a common sense a priori.
Kant concludes:
That is beautiful which is cognised without a concept as an object of a necessary satisfaction.
Notes
1. Pointed out in Christian Helmut Wenzel, An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics (2005), p77.
2. Ibid., p78.
3. Later, in §35, Kant seems to equate the two.
4. Kant himself refers to the necessity of the judgement of taste as ‘alleged’ in the header to §20.
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