The beautiful is that which, without concepts, is represented as the object of a universal satisfaction [allgemeines Wohlgefallen]. (p.96)
Kant claims that judgements of taste/pure beauty are universal, by which he means that every human being may be expected to experience them similarly:
For since it is not grounded in any inclination of the subject (nor in any other underlying interest), but rather the person making the judgement feels himself completely free with regard to the satisfaction that he devotes to the object, he cannot discover as grounds of the satisfaction any private conditions, pertaining to his subject alone, and must therefore regard it as grounded in those that he can also presuppose in everyone else; consequently he must believe himself to have grounds for expecting a similar pleasure of everyone. (§6)
Because the judgement of taste is not grounded in any interest, the person judging brings nothing – no morals, no utility, no physical need, no financial stake, etc – that may impose upon the judgement. The consequence is that private, individual, idiosyncratic considerations have no influence. When we feel pleasure in e.g. a painting, there is nothing specific to our own senses, experience, etc, that grounds the judgement: the judgement is free. Therefore we are using only the built-in mental faculties (the hardware, so to speak) found in every human being. We may ‘presuppose’ that the faculties work the same for everyone, thus we should all expect a similar feeling of pleasure.1
This is reminiscent of, though not identical to, Hume’s claim that ‘the general principles of taste are uniform in human nature’2 and everyone would judge the same way if certain impediments were removed.
The judging subject therefore
will speak of the beautiful as if beauty were a property of the object and the judgement logical (constituting a cognition of the object through concepts of it), although it is only aesthetic. [my emphasis]
Why does Kant argue this? To answer that, we must refer to his theory of mind from the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), which he makes no effort to summarise here. On Kant’s epistemological model, the sensibility gives us sense impressions, then the understanding imposes concepts known as categories upon them, including properties like space, time and causality. These categories guarantee the objectivity of our knowledge. Individual human beings enjoy a common awareness of the world ‘out there’ because we share the same a priori faculties. The judgement of taste therefore should appear to us as if it were not subjective but objective.
But a judgement of taste, as we know, cannot rely on concepts and is not cognitive. Therefore it does not have the objective validity of empirical knowledge. Instead it has a subjective universality, that is, it is based upon a purely subjective feeling of pleasure, but that feeling acquires the force of objectivity because the a priori conditions for the feeling are present in every person. Kant is aware that something being at once subjective and universal is a paradoxical notion – he calls it ‘something remarkable’ (eine Merkwürdigkeit).
This illuminates Kant’s insistence, in the first moment, on disinterestedness: the judgement of taste must be disinterested for it to claim universal validity. The second moment deals with the logical aspect of quantity (whether the judgement is singular, particular or universal), and normally this would come first. Kant reversed the order and made his first moment about quality instead. This may be because he needed to establish disinterestedness in preparation for the discussion of universality.
The judgement of taste is impersonal, does not depend on sensory stimuli, allows no moral, political or other interest, and should be experienced the same by anybody. In Kant’s hands it is starting to sound oddly detached, and far removed from conventional notions of taste and beauty, let alone the flesh-and-blood world of human life and society. He is also deviating from the common notion that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. If that were true, judgements of beauty would be merely subjective, whereas Kant thinks there is more to it: the metaphorical ‘eye’ or equipment that humans have in common (our mental faculties) also brings something to the judgement.
The agreeable and the good
In §7, Kant compares the beautiful with the agreeable and the good in this new light of universality. The agreeable, he says, is not universal, because:
everyone is content that his judgement, which he grounds on a private feeling, and in which he says of an object that it pleases him, be restricted merely to his own person.
My sensory gratification of the agreeable is private: it is ‘agreeable for me’, a gratification of my unique body. Thus everyone has their subjective preferences and it would be a waste of time to have arguments over whether one is right or wrong to prefer red wine to white, etc.
For one person, the colour violet is gentle and lovely, for another dead and lifeless.
He is perhaps responding to Hume here, who never got beyond a standard of taste based upon the senses. Kant recognises that there can be ‘unanimity’ about the agreeable, e.g. when a host manages to please everyone’s senses with his or her entertainments. But he isn’t too concerned about this, dismissing it as only ‘comparatively’ universal, based on ‘general’ rules not universal ones.
Then very briefly he comments on the good, observing that its claim to universal validity relies upon a concept, which is not true of the agreeable or the beautiful.
Kant says the agreeable is based upon sensory gratification, but has yet to say positively what the beautiful is based upon. We do know that beauty, by contrast to the agreeable, is disinterested and free of any ‘private conditions’ – that is why the beautiful is universal whereas the agreeable isn’t even though both are subjective. No one is content that beauty be restricted to their own person; indeed, if it pleases merely one person we cannot call it beauty at all.
If he pronounces that something is beautiful, then he expects the very same satisfaction of others: he judges not merely for himself, but for everyone...
Instead of tolerating divergent opinions, the judge ‘expects’ (muten) and ‘demands’ (fordern) that others must agree, and ‘rebukes them if they judge otherwise’.
In §8 Kant compares the agreeable and the beautiful like this:
- the agreeable is ‘the taste of the senses’ (Sinnen-Geschmack), i.e. sensory gratification, making private judgements
- the beautiful is ‘the taste of reflection’ (Reflexions-Geschmack), making public judgements.
Both are aesthetic judgements, says Kant, but of different sorts. He observes that the judgement of taste may not, in practice, command agreement from everyone on particular cases, but that no one disputes at least the possibility of universal agreement.
Logic
Kant then considers, for the first time, the judgement of taste with explicit reference to the logical aspects. A judgement that is objectively valid through a concept must also be subjective, as it will be valid for the individual people who use the concept, too. But it does not go the other way: something subjectively valid (i.e. aesthetic) is not also objectively valid, because it does not relate to objects, only to subjective feeling. Thus, a universality that is aesthetic must be of ‘a special kind’.
The logical form of quantity of judgements comes in three kinds:
- Universal judgements take the form ‘All As are Bs’
- Particular judgements take the form ‘Some As are Bs’
- Singular judgements take the form ‘This A is B’ or ‘the A is B.’
All judgements of taste are singular, e.g. ‘this rose is beautiful’. If I try to compare roses in general – ‘all roses are beautiful’ – the judgement ceases to be aesthetic. A pleasure in a representation is in a particular item (a rose) and cannot be generalised to all items of that kind (all roses) since you cannot experience all such items (every rose in the world). Judging the beauty of all roses must instead be a logical judgement.
The universal voice
Kant reiterates that judgements of taste involve no concepts:
If one judges objects merely in accordance with concepts, then all representation of beauty is lost. Thus there can also be no rule in accordance with which someone could be compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful.
This lack of a ‘rule’ – Kant conceives of concepts as serving as rules – will come up again.
Kant goes on to introduce the notion of the universal voice (allgemeine Stimme). This phrase, which he never uses again, seems to be just another way of talking about subjective universality: that judgements of taste can be considered valid for everyone. He notes that only a logical judgement can postulate or assume everyone’s agreement. The judgement of taste therefore ‘only ascribes’ this agreement to everyone and thus the universal voice is ‘only an idea’. Because it is not logical and is only aesthetic, there is a lack of certainty about a judgement of taste, which is why we will not in fact always agree, even though the possession of faculties in common implies we should.
The free play of the faculties
Opening the last section of the second moment (§9), Kant raises a new issue:
whether in the judgement of taste the feeling of pleasure precedes the judging of the object or the latter precedes the former.
When we make a judgement of taste, three things are happening: first we perceive the object, then
- we make a judgement about its beauty
- we feel pleasure
These two responses could happen one before the other, or they could happen simultaneously. It seems reasonable to ask which it is. In fact for Kant it is very important. He even calls the question of sequence ‘the key [Schlüssel] to the critique of taste’. Certainly, from what follows, the judgement and the pleasure seem to be two distinct things.
If the pleasure precedes the judgement, Kant claims, the sensory object is prior to our decision about it. Our judgement would depend upon finding the sensation agreeable, and the agreeable is not a universal judgement. This matter of ordering lets Kant distinguish further between judgements of sensory gratification (pleasure precedes the judgement) and judgements of taste (judgement precedes the pleasure). In the latter you would perceive the object in a disinterested state, judge its beauty, and feel pleasure or displeasure ‘as a consequence’.
This merely subjective (aesthetic) judging of the object, or of the representation through which the object is given, precedes the pleasure in it... (p.103)
This seems counter-intuitive: in everyday terms we tend to think we judge something following our emotional response. But the question of sequence for Kant is really about the continuing theme of whether the judgement is universally valid or not. In a judgement of taste, the judgement precedes the pleasure.
We should here note a problem: Kant sometimes describes judgements of taste as ‘based on’ or ‘grounded in’ a feeling of pleasure, which would require that the pleasure come first. Here however he says the judgement comes first. Commentators have offered various solutions to rescue Kant, which I won’t get into here, but the contradiction is clear.
Kant introduces another new term – universal communicability (Mitteilbarkeit) or ‘communication of the state of mind’. This is another way of talking about the ‘universal voice’ and subjective universality. Only cognition, says Kant, can be universally communicable:
Nothing, however, can be universally communicated except cognition and representation so far as it belongs to cognition. For only so far is the latter objective, and only thereby does it have a universal point of relation with which everyone’s faculty of representation is compelled to agree.
The reflective judgement however is non-cognitive and non-determinate. How can we have universality then, given that the judgement of taste does not rely on a concept? Kant proposes that its universality ‘can be nothing other than’ a state of mind that he calls ‘cognition in general’ (Erkenntnis überhaupt)3. This is a special relation of the powers of representation to each other, which is found in aesthetic judgements. Remember, a representation is how an object ‘out there’ is given to us by our mental equipment. Kant explains in an important passage:
The powers of cognition that are set into play by this representation are hereby in a free play, since no determinate concept restricts them to a particular mode of cognition... Now there belongs to a representation by which an object is given, in order for there to be cognition of it in general, imagination for the composition of the manifold of intuition and understanding for the unity of the concept that unifies the representations. This state of a free play of the faculties of cognition with a representation through which an object is given must be able to be universally communicated, because cognition, as a determination of the object with which given representations... should agree, is the only kind of representation that is valid for everyone.
In ordinary cognition (explained in the CPR), the sensibility (which includes the imagination) provides an intuition and the understanding imposes a concept. In the CoJ, Kant is now proposing something new: that beauty incurs its own, special relation of the faculties. In free play, neither faculty imposes on the other. The human subject becomes conscious of a correspondence (Übereinstimmung) of the powers of cognition. Kant asks, how do we become conscious of this correspondence?
- If we became conscious of it intellectually, it would be through a concept. But the judgement of taste has no concept because it is a subjective feeling of (dis)pleasure.
- We must become conscious of it aesthetically, i.e. through sensation.
Kant expands on this:
The animation [Belebung] of both faculties (the imagination and the understanding) to an activity that is indeterminate but yet, through the stimulus of the given representation, in unison [einhellig], namely that which belongs to a cognition in general, is the sensation whose universal communicability is postulated by the judgement of taste.
The judgement comes first and is the ground of our pleasure in the ‘harmony’ of the faculties of cognition. Free play ‘animates’ our faculties, allowing the imagination to harmonise with the understanding without being determined by its concepts. The faculties are animated into an indeterminate activity that belongs to cognition in general. The German word that Guyer/Matthews translate as ‘animation’ is Belebung, which has an implication of ‘life’ (Leben); Bernard prefers ‘excitement’, Meredith and Pluhar prefer ‘quickening’; another option might be ‘enlivening’. This state of mind in free play is the subjective universal communicability of a judgement of taste. Being able to communicate our state of mind ‘carries a pleasure with it’.
Commentators on Kant have found section 9 puzzling and obscure. How do we prove that he is correct about the faculties and this peculiar relation of them? Arguably, Kant is fudging to get the outcome he wants, namely a way to achieve universality with a judgement that is non-conceptual. Robert Wicks, who describes Kant’s strategy of free play as ‘ingenious’, nicely sums up the import of us taking pleasure in ‘cognition in general’:
This is roughly analogous to looking at some object, and approving of the object in light of its capacity to lead us to appreciate the sheer pleasure of being able to see at all... Similarly, it is analogous to approving of one’s daily activities, not in view of some job that one has, but in view of their capacity to lead one to appreciate the pleasure of simply being alive.4
Our pleasure in the individual object or representation connects us with a more general, abstract sense of pleasure in our own cognitive powers. Whether or not we are persuaded that Kant is right, this is a rather lovely idea. Instead of looking to gain knowledge from the beautiful object we become aware of what Kant called in §1 the ‘feeling of life’ – a term connected etymologically with Belebung or ‘enlivening’. Kant concludes:
A representation which... is in agreement with the conditions of universality... brings the faculties of cognition into the well-proportioned [proportioniert] disposition [Stimmung] that we require for all cognition and hence also regard as valid for everyone (for every human being) who is determined to judge by means of understanding and sense in combination.
This becomes important later on, where he calls this mental disposition (Pluhar translates it ‘attunement‘ ) a ‘common sense’ (§21) and claims it is the a priori principle of taste. We will get to this ‘a priori principle’ in another post, but arguing the case for it is Kant’s stated goal in the CoJ.
He closes the second moment with a further definition of the beautiful:
That is beautiful that pleases universally without a concept.
‘Lawfulness without a law’
Kant’s theory of free play is one of the most important in his aesthetics. What it involves is sometimes labelled ‘lawfulness without a law’, or ‘free lawfulness’ (p124).
Kant sees concepts as, in part, rules or laws, applied by the understanding so the imagination can synthesise sense data. In the free play, the imagination and understanding harmonise in a way that generally obeys the rules of concepts (lawfulness) without actually using any (without a law).
Imagination in the free play... conforms to the general conditions for the application of concepts to objects that are presented to our senses, yet without any particular concept being applied, so that imagination conforms to the conditions of understanding without the constraint of particular concepts [SEP].
This is paradoxical, and Kant doesn’t really nail it down, leaving to commentators to delve into how it might work and why it would be pleasurable.5
Notes
1. To my knowledge Kant never considers the possibility that different people or groups of people might have different faculties or forms of intuition. This is curious, given he was sexist and racist, but that’s another topic.
2. David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste (1757), §28.
3. Christian Helmut Wenzel suggests translating it as ‘cognition as such’ i.e. cognition transcendentally conceived. See his book An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics (2005).
4. Robert Wicks, Kant on Judgment (2007).
5. See for example Hannah Ginsborg, ‘Lawfulness Without a Law_Kant on the Free Play’ (1997).
No comments:
Post a Comment
I welcome contributions to this blog. Comments are moderated.