Kantian Aesthetics Pursued 9781474472289

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Kantian Aesthetics Pursued ANTHONY SAVILE

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

© Anthony Savile, 1993

Transferred to digital print 2010 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Adobe Palatino by fEsthetex Ltd, Edinburgh, and Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7 486 0439 1

Contents Preface

v

1

ONE

Taste, Perception and Experience

Two

Necessity and Taste

17

THREE

Truth, Taste and the Supersensible

41

FOUR

Hume, Kant and the Standard of Taste

64

FIVE

The Idealism of Purposiveness

87

SIX

The Possibility of Art

101

SEVEN

Music

124

EIGHT

Architecture and Sculpture

157

Indices

181

Preface THREE CONSIDERATIONS have led to the title of this book. The past fifteen years have seen more concentration on Kant's aesthetic theory than any other part of the century, and, quite independently of the structural role that Kant's theory plays in the Critical edifice, it has gradually come to light how worthy a companion the Critique of Judgment is to his other major writings. In publishing Eva Schaper's Studies in Kant's Aesthetics in 1979, the Edinburgh University Press has already contributed once to this flowering of interest. It pursues its concern with the present volume. Then, three chapters of an earlier book, Aesthetic Reconstructions, were devoted to Kant's thought in this area. While I stand by the main web of what was offered there, important threads still need to be woven into that about which I had little or nothing to say. Also, I see now that some earlier choices of emphasis should be corrected, as well as a number of downright mistakes. For the most part, the present book pursues my interest in Kantian thought without covering the same ground as before in more than marginal ways. There, I was concerned to develop a fully integrated picture of the Critique's central theme, how universally committing aesthetic judgments can be supported from the extremely narrow experiential basis on which they are made; here, that issue is set aside, and others taken up in its place. Third, many of the more interesting aspects of Kant's aesthetic thought emerge only by extrapolation from hints and suggestions which are not extensively developed in his writing. So, the

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quarry has to be started and then hunted down over terrain that is not always well mapped out. For this reason, the aesthetics here pursued are 'Kantian' rather than, more restrictively, 'Kant's'. The reader will judge how successful this more speculative adventure has been. The elements making up these pages have been composed at different times and without a definite plan linking one to another. Nevertheless, they have an order. I begin with three chapters about the peculiar nature of taste and the problems that Kant sees taste as posing for a unified conception of empirical discourse. I suggest that he succeeds in forging a general theory of empirical judgment that encompasses the straightforwardly cognitive claims both of the natural sciences and of the more subjective judgments of our aesthetic and critical discourse without any unsettling discontinuity. How such a theory can find a place for the manifold subjectivity of the aesthetic, how room can be made for the normative demands of criticism and how it conceives of truth and rational argument in an area where corresponding facts and decision procedures are so notably elusive are central topics of his concern. Each is given a chapter of its own. Next, I situate Kant's thought in relation to that of Hume, with whose essay on taste he may or may not have been familiar. The leading idea here is that Hume was in fact concerned with a question that Kant, curiously, leaves largely unexplored, despite its obvious proximity to the issues just mentioned: how should the views of others, in particular of sensitive critics, be brought to bear on the formation of our own tastes and aesthetic opinions? If only we see Hume to be concerned with issues of aesthetic evidence rather than of aesthetic constitution, then, despite all his insistence on the autonomy of taste, Kant need not view his predecessor's teaching on this subject askance. Hume's reflections on taste complement and amplify what Kant offers; they are erroneously seen as shallowly harrowing the same ground. To perceive Kant's aesthetics as a satisfactory whole requires that what is offered in the early sections of the Critique ofJudgment apply smoothly over the whole range of the arts, even though issues of natural beauty lie at the centre of the field of vision. The main obstacle here is that the intentional nature of the artist's productions can apparently only get taken into account

Preface

vii

if the judgments that critics make of his work are fundamentally confused judgments of the good, rather than the full-blooded judgments of taste that they need to be. To circumvent the difficulty, we need a better grasp of the distinction between pure and dependent judgments of taste than anything that Kant himself explicitly offers. That, and preceding discussion of the ubiquitous application of the idea of purposiveness without purpose~ otherwise known as subjective formal finality, is supplied by the chapters on the idealism of purposiveness and the possibility of art. I should like to think that they contain material enough to absolve Kant of the charge of empty formalism with which he is so often, and so often dismissively, taxed. Finally, I offer two speculative attempts to develop a Kantian aesthetic in the direction of particular arts, namely music and architecture, the former being an art which attracts pure judgments of taste, the latter attracting dependent ones. The material on music is more abstract, and far more closely tied to the details of Kant's sparse text. The main problem here is, within a theory aiming to integrate the aesthetic within ordinary empirical discourse and to integrate the arts within the aesthetic, how music can be properly integrated among the arts. Success here is a· condition of success of the whole. In the final pages on architecture, I contend that unless true Kantian insights are respected, architects risk losing sight of what they are about and of running together arts that Kant clearly saw to be importantly distinct their own and that of the sculptor. In both cases, I try to bring out Kant's awareness that the significance of these two arts stretches far beyond anything that could be captured by considerations of form alone and how they, like other arts worthy of the name, are deeply involved in our formation of a solid and sustainable sense of self. The Kantian aesthetic demands pursuit beyond the confines of this book. It has profound practical implications as well as its own remarkable philosophical depths. A number of the present chapters have their origins elsewhere. Versions of 'Taste, Perception and Experience' and 'The Idealism of Purposiveness' were delivered to the 1981 and the 1989 International Kant Congresses respectively, and published in the associated Proceedings. 'Necessity and Taste' started life as a contribution to the 1986 issue of the Belgian journal Philosophica, but has mutated very considerably since its original

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appearance. Chapter Four, on Hume, was originally written for the Nature, Truth and Value: Essays in Honour of David Wiggins edited by Stephen Williams and Sabina Lovibond, 'Architecture and Sculpture' was delivered in 1989 as a contribution to a series of King's College London Centre for Philosophical Studies lectures on 'Philosophy and Architecture'. It has also appeared in a volume of essays commemorating the late Flint Schier, Virtue and Taste, edited by D. Knowles and J. Skorupski The remaining chapters appear here for the first time. Much of the final draft of this material was completed while I was on a year's secondment from my London college to the Palacky University at Olomouc in Czechoslovakia. I am most grateful to the University's Rector, Prof. PhDr Josef Jarab, CSc., for inviting me there at an exciting moment in the regeneration of that country, and to my colleagues in the department at Olomouc for giving me enough time to continue working on Kant while I was teaching there. I am also grateful to King's College London for granting me leave to go, as well as to that institution, the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, the British Council and the EC TEMPUS office in Brussels for making my stay in Czechoslovakia financially possible. It is notable, too, that the major British philosophical associations showed a keen interest in the expedition and in its outcome; I am happy to acknowledge with thanks both moral and material support extended to me by the Mind Association, the Aristotelian Society, the Royal Institute of Philosophy and the Analysis Committee. A.

s.

Olomouc, June 1992

CHAPTER ONE

Taste, Perception and Experience WHAT IS A JUDGMENT OF TASTE? Today, 200 years after the Critique ofJudgment's first appearance, this question ought to pose no problem, yet these judgments are regularly misdescribed and their content often misrepresented. We need to get this straight, and not just for its own sake. For one thing, only if we do so can the problem posed by the Transcendental Deduction be formulated with the sharpness that it demands. That is the central problem of Kant's aesthetics, and one on which I postpone all comment until the next chapter. 1 For another, without good order here, we shall have considerable difficulty in understanding what Kant perceives as the truly idiosyncratic nature of aesthetic judgments. Just what that amounts to will be the topic of the second half of this chapter. I

Judgments of taste have been variously identified as 'propositions in which beauty is predicated of objects', 2 as' assertions that a particular object is beautiful',3 as 'aesthetic appraisals' 4 and as 'judgments ascribing beauty to something'. s These models make a number of mistakes, one of which is common to all and is more serious and pervasive than the others. The first error is not to notice that we may well entertain the proposition that Helen is beautiful without judging her to be so. Contemplating the corruption of young Paris as a means to the coveted apple, Aphrodite may have reasoned thus: 'The lad will certainly be unable to resist the prospect of possessing the most beautiful of mortals; if Helen is mortal and beautifuC and no-one

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else more so, Paris' verdict in my favour is secure if I offer him Helen'. Arguing like this, the goddess has had to entertain the proposition that Helen is beautiful, but she has not judged her to be so. A judgment of taste, then, is not a proposition. Nor, second, is it an assertion. It is a quite general reflection that we do not need to assert p to judge that p, and this is as true in the case of judgments about the beautiful as anything else. Paris may have thought Aphrodite a terrible frump, but he was not rash enough to say so. And if all that concerned her was to win the fateful contest, she may not have given a fig whether Paris judged her the fairest at that wedding feast or not. Enough that he assert it at the right moment. Third, when we appraise, estimate or assess something - a cake, say, for its weight, at the village fete - we usually do so in advance of tests acknowledged conclusive for the purpose. When those tests eventually come to be made- by the vicar, setting the cake on the scales at the end of the day- the object is not appraised or assessed. Its weight is simply ascertained, and the ·referee judges it in the light of those tests. So too, I surmise, with beauty. Aphrodite may prudently have run a dispassionate eye over the likely candidates for Paris' (conditional) delectation, and she will then have appraised Helen as beautiful when she judged her so. But when in due course the moment came for Paris to discover whether Aphrodite had played him straight, he judged Helen beautiful by the best test that mortal men have, by the immediate pleasure that the sight of her gave him. He then made a judgment of taste, but surely without appraising, assessing or estimating that beauty. By contrast, Paris may well have had to estimate, assess or appraise Aphrodite if, despite all those divine bribes, he wanted to perform his umpire's role impartially, since to do that he had to make up his mind whether she was fairer than the other two contending parties, and that involved the question of just how fair each one was, and some just ranking of them. As far as understanding Kant goes, such delicate matters are neither here nor there. In reply, it might be said that Kant is insistent that, quite unlike the weight of the cake, there is no' decision by proof' of an object's beauty (cf. §56). We have to make up our minds as best we can, and we do that by estimating, or assessing or appraising the object in question. This, I think, is often true enough; and certainly it

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3

has to be conceded that the judgment of taste is a reflective, rather than a determinant, judgment. However, because in some cases, perhaps even in the paradigmatic ones, Kant thinks that our response to an object of beauty is quite spontaneous, there seems then to be no obligatory place for such judicious weighing-up as goes with these ideas. So, even though it is uncontentiously often in place, it is not of the essence. En passant, it is worth pointing out that many aesthetic appraisals, estimates or assessments are not judgments of taste, since they can be made on the basis of the wrong sort of information. Paris might have assessed Aphrodite as the fairest by consulting her track record among the gods. Even if he had come up with the right result, the method would have been wrong and his judgment not one of taste. Beauty being a concept that is essentially tied to human responses, appealing to the gods' reactions as a basis for assessment will rule it out even if nothing else does. The serious mistake that I alluded to, one which can only compound these last, is to assume that judgments to the effect that something is beautiful (scilicet propositions, assertions, appraisals) are always judgments of taste. A moment's reflection will show that they are not. At §1, Kant introduces us to the judgment of taste through a number of definitional constraints. It is, he tells us, a judgment in which 'we refer the representation not to the object ... but to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure'. Here, the reading of 'representation' as a perceptual experience of the object judged is not to be questioned. Nor can we take the subject that Kant alludes to as anyone other than he whosesoever representation is in point. Yet it is plain that there are numerous occasions on which we may judge that something is beautiful without perceptual experience of it, or without pleasurable response. Any one of the following cases should caution us against too ready an identification of the judgment of taste with the judgment that this thing or that, this person or that, is beautiful. (i) In search of Helen, I unexpectedly light upon her monozygotic twin, Clytemnestra. On the basis of my representation and my pleasure at her sight, I naturally enough judge Helen beautiful; but my judgment is not unmixedly one of taste, since it involves no representation of the subject judged, and refers no such representation to my feeling of pleasure or displeasure.

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(ii) Paris will certainly have judged Helen beautiful by reason of Aphrodite's description of her, even though at the time he had not yet seen her. To understand, we must suppose that Paris judged her so as a result of his pre-trial interview with Aphrodite, because, without coming to form that belief, he would have been undermotivated in awarding Eris' apple where he did. Hera's or Pallas Athene's quite enticing blandishments would have proved stronger. Again, a judgment that Helen is beautiful, only no representation. (iii) When Aphrodite appraised Helen before deciding what the most suitable bribe for Paris would be, she had indeed the necessary representation. Only, there is no reason to think that she 'referred it to her feeling of pleasure or displeasure'. She may very well have been unmoved but, for all that, quite able to recognise that Helen was just the sort of wench a normal, young, mortal male would go for. A judgment that Helen is beautiful nonetheless. (iv) Why did Homer judge Helen beautiful? We may suppose that he never saw her, and that he never sought the opinion of Aphrodite or of Paris. It was just the only explanation that he could find of the extraordinary naval manoeuvres which he had witnessed off the Boeotian coast. How else should she have launched a thousand ships and burnt those topless towers? (v) On first seeing Helen, Paris' judgment was indeed one of taste. Only, he soon had the misfortune to become infatuated with her. Smitten as he was, his pleasure was no longer, for Kant, properly disinterested. While continuing in that state to judge her beautiful, his judgment would no longer count as one of taste, even though, of course, its truth remained unaltered. (vi) One of the wedding guests, Ganymede, I suspect, videoed the feast and the subsequent contest, and many years later passed the tape on to Paris. On viewing it, the old man failed to recognise his younger self, but, seeing the expression of unalloyed wonderment spread over the callow youth's face as he turns towards Aphrodite, he judged him to have been in the presence of true beauty. Here, Paris does indeed judge Aphrodite beautiful on the basis of his own experience of her, only his judgment is entirely external to the experience. The judgment of taste and the experience on which it is based require a far greater degree of intimacy than that.

Taste, Perception and Experience

5

A positive suggestion emerges from these reflections. It is that while judgments of taste must not be identified with propositions, assertions or appraisals, they are indeed, and, indeed, unsurprisingly, judgments. Only, they are at most a subclass of judgments in which beauty is ascribed to something. In particular, and this for Kant is a matter of real definition, they are those judgments that something is beautiful which are made on certain preferential grounds. What unites the six examples that I gave of judgments of beauty which are not judgments of taste is evidently that, in each case, one or other of the conditions that fix these preferential grounds is unsatisfied. Famously, these grounds are that my judgment that something is beautiful should arise out of my own sensible experience of that thing (contrast (i) and (ii) ). The experience must have yielded pleasure (contrast (ii), (iii) and (iv)), and the pleasure in question must be disinterested (contrast (v)). Lastly, the judgment must result from within the crucial experience and not be merely externally related to it (contrast (vi)). Note, moreover, that this positive characterisation of the judgment of taste does not require it to be made in the presence of the object judged. A later judgment will still be one of taste, providing that it grow out of some past, disinterestedly pleasurable, perceptual encounter with the judged object. Had he only survived Philoctetes' arrow, Paris might in his dotage still have made a nostalgic judgment of taste about his erstwhile bedfellow, long after her restoration to Menelaus. (By contrast, earlier on, her fond mother, Leda, predicting how her infant daughter would turn out, could not. Hers would merely have been a judgment of beauty, cast in the future tense.) The important lesson to be learnt is that the features of perceptual experience, of subjectivity (the judge's own pleasure) and disinterest have all appeared in the identification of the judgment of taste in a way that is seldom, if ever, remarked. They do so not in elucidating the judgment's content, for about that nothing at all has yet been said; rather, they appear in specifying the grounds on which that content, whatever analysis it may receive, must be judged when it is offered in a judgment of taste. To notice this is to leave room to ask what Kant took the proper elucidation of the judgment that something is beautiful to be without being mesmerised by these three notions, and without being obliged

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to build them into it. Not distinguishing between the defining grounds of the judgment of taste and its content, commentators invariably try to locate these notions in the content itself, and they find that the space that something else should occupy is already taken up. Kant is then blamed for a muddle that is not of his making. I have said that Kant would not flinch at the suggestion that one who makes a judgment of taste may make the very same judgment as one who does not. So, in judging Helen beautiful, the content of my thought will be constant whether I do so as a result of seeing her, or after making discreet enquiries among her known admirers, or in coming to a satisfactory explanation of those naval manoeuvres. This is entirely as it should be, for we cannot make good sense of the idea that the content of a thought might be generally identified in terms of the grounds on which it is believed. What then could they be grounds for? Moreover, unless we could in general believe the same thing on different grounds, knowledge itself would be untransmissible. When you learn something from me, something has to enter the grounds of your belief that is absent from mine; namely, that my grounds for believing it are good ones. On pain of regress, that is not something that can standardly enter into my own grounds for believing what I do. This obvious fact alone refutes many claims about the correct elucidation of the judgment of taste's content. Consider, for example, the contention that 'when I say "the sky is beautiful" I mean directly that I experience the sky as beautiful and indirectly that the sky is beautiful. . . . In aesthetic judgments we are not uttering the ordinary kind of object-referring statementthere is a subject reference, which is the most important part of the meaning.' 6 I might well, however, judge the sky to be beautiful without seeing it - as do the blind who regret missing its beauty - so it cannot be any part of the content of my judgment (let alone its meaning) that I experience it in any way. In its content, there can be no reference to the subject, since no reference to the subject is made in many judgments of beauty that share their content with the judgment of taste without themselves being judgments of taste. We are obliged, therefore, to reject interpretations of Kant such as these: 'the object of the assertion is never a concept or a

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judgment, but always a surveyable given'; 7 'the aesthetic judgment is a judgment of a subject about himself'; 8 the judgment of taste is 'basically a disguised liking-report'; 9 'for something to be judged beautiful the capacity of feeling pleasure must, as it were, be set in motion' 10 - and so on, and so forth. II

What is so special about the judgment of taste? At §8.4, Kant claims that these judgments have their own particular form of universality; at §33.5, he says they are 'merely subjectively valid'. Such ways of speaking have never been found very clear, and it has often seemed helpful to bring out Kant's own insights by allying judgments of taste with those that in the Prolegomena go under the title of 'judgments of perception'. These, it will be recalled, are contrasted with so-called judgments of experience, and it is suggested that what is so strikingly odd about aesthetic judgments is that they present themselves as if they were judgments of experience, whereas in fact they are no more than judgments of perception. This familiar thought can scarcely be satisfactory, for it presumes an understanding of the Prolegomena's distinction that is open to question, and it goes on to mistake Kant's own understanding of the matter. On the view which I shall propose, and in sharp contrast to the general run of commentary, 11 the judgment of taste is more illuminatingly aligned with the Prolegomena's judgments of experience; only, when this alignment is carried through, the alleged peculiarity of what we might like to think of as judgments of aesthetic experience still remains to be spelled out. In the end, we shall find that what Kant proposes is something that will strike us as familiar, only it may come as a surprise that the original discovery is his, and not our own. The pressure to yoke together judgments of taste and judgments of perception comes largely from both being described as 'merely subjectively valid'. The trouble is that that expression is undefined in all its occurrences, and it takes on a different sense according to whether we are concerned with the grounds on which a certain judgment is put forward or with the content of the judgment, no matter what its evidential grounds may be. One might think that the context of the Prolegomena's discussion will settle the question of interpretation one way or the other,

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but this it does not unequivocally do. So, for instance, looking there for help in understanding the Critique of Pure Reason, a reader might say it is obvious that the subjective validity of judgments of perception concerns their content. Does not Kant explicitly say that the difference between the merely subjectively valid judgment of perception and the objectively valid judgment of experience is that the latter does, whereas the former does not, involve a category? Since no one judgment can be constituted of different elements, judgments of perception and judgments of experience cannot have the same content; and what distinguishes the content of the former is that it is 'subjectively valid only', about the judging subject, that is, whereas the objectively valid, category-involving judgment of experience is about the world beyond. There is, assuredly, an interesting class of judgments of this subject-restricted kind, but it must be evident that Kant does not think that aesthetic judgments belong to it. They are not about the judging subject's own states, and he is adamant that there is more to my claim that something is beautiful than that it strikes me, the disinterested onlooker, with delight. Kant makes the point sharply at §7.2: 'It would be ridiculous if anyone who plumed himself on his taste were to think of justifying himself by saying: this object (the building we see, the dress that person has on, the concert we hear, the poem submitted to our criticism) is beautiful for me. For if it merely pleases him, he must not call it beautiful.' Struck by this rebuff, one might think that the very language of 'subjective validity' should alert us to our having to do with grounds on which a certain content is offered, not with the content itself. This too is not without justification as a reading of the Prolegomena, for while Kant speaks of the judgment of experience importing a category to a representation that is a judgment of perception, he also (and inconsistently) suggests that it is the same subjective content that starts off being proffered in a judgment of perception and which then becomes objectively valid as we find ourselves asserting it on more compelling grounds. Then, the judgment of perception would be merely subjectively valid in that it advances a claim about the world (no longer confined to a mere report on the subject's own impressions) on grounds which may well not adequately support

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it. They hold valid for the subject, perhaps, in that they suffice for him or her to believe it. In certain circumstances though (Kant will say when these grounds are both universal and necessary), such judgments attain objective validity, and then we shall be making judgments of experience. As far as the judgments'content goes, a claim about the world unrestricted to the subject's own states, there is no difference between the two; what distinguishes judgments of perception from those of experience is just that the former are advanced on grounds that do not ensure their truth (which, of course, does not exclude their being true), whereas the latter are offered on grounds that do. Even if this reading of the distinction should provide a reasonable account of the judgment of perception, it fits the judgment of taste extremely badly. As we have seen above, that is properly taken as a judgment to the effect that something is beautiful that is advanced on the best grounds available to us, grounds that I have set out in some detail. And it seems to be Kant's view, or at least to follow from it (a topic discussed at some length in the next chapter), that some such judgments have to be true. If we light on one of those (one from the topmost drawer, so to speak), then it will not be a judgment of perception on this construal of them; ex hypothesi, the grounds on which it is advanced leave no room for error. In the particular circumstances of the case, my delight is of a kind that I could not enjoy unless everyone else were also to find themselves compelled to regard the object of my attention in a like spirit. Here, the grounds on which I judge the object beautiful would not be 'merely subjectively valid', yet certainly we have to do with a judgment of taste, indeed, with a judgment of taste of a sort that we might well wish absolutely typical. Typical or not, however, there is no difficulty in supposing that all our judgments of taste might be like this, and so that they should all be objectively valid in this epistemic sense. Hence they gravitate towards the side of experience rather than to that of perception. So far, then, the subjective validity of judgments of perception seems not to illuminate judgments of taste, whether we read the Prolegomena's distinction either metaphysically, in terms of content, or epistemically, in terms of grounds. Still, determined protagonists of. the comparison may say that it only takes a small shift in the matter to put things right, and, they will

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go on, we can do that while retaining Kant's initial desire to make the distinction between perception and experience one of content rather than anything else. What has gone wrong, they will suggest, is that we have fixed on the individual subject's own state of mind as he makes his judgment on the beauty of some object or other. However, the content of his assertion (under the Kantian analysis) is that all subjects should respond as he does to the object of his gaze. The judgment of taste is 'merely subjectively valid' in generally adverting only to states of mind in elucidation of the content. Further, it is peculiarly universal (the first limb of the idiosyncrasy, remember) in that the singular judgment that F is beautiful involves all appropriately specified subjects even though it is not of the form 'All Fs are G'. (It does not, as Kant puts it, 'extend the predicate to the object taken in its entire logical sphere'.) The proximity to the judgment of perception is evident: we are not making an assertion about an object as we speak, but only about various subjects' mental states. Does not Kant frequently enough make this plain? There is something absolutely right about this; only not enough. The universality of subjects' responses to the beautiful object is indeed what goes into the elucidation of the predicate, but it is only the first thing. A second, discussion of which occupies §§18-22 of the Critique, is that these responses should, in the appropriate way, be necessary. In itself this may be obscure, but it sounds initially quite undisturbing. However, it is quite remarkable that in the Prolegomena, when Kant discusses the notion of a judgment's objective validity, he also does so in terms of the necessity and universality of our assent to it. Just as here, there too universality alone is not enough to secure objectivity (we might all think quite waywardly, yet alike), and when, as here, we add necessity to that (meaning, I surmise, that the judgments we make are at the limit evidentially compelling), we are bound to cast about for an explanation. What Kant says in that context is: We must hold it [our judgment] to be objective, i.e. that it expresses not merely a reference of the perception to a subject, but a quality [Beschaffenheit] of the object; for there would be no reason why the judgments of others should necessarily agree with mine, if it were not for the unity of the object to which they all refer, with which they

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all agree and hence must also all agree with one another. (Prolegomena, §18 end) Agreement among subjects' mental states is thus rooted in the objects themselves. Certainly, the relevant passages from these distinct works lie at some distance from one another, and we must not simply move from one to the other without pause. Nevertheless, in the domain of aesthetic experience, as in that of judgment at large, agreement among subjects about how they must respond to some situation or object clamours for explanation, and this can only be given in terms of the constitution of whatever it is that elicits these responses. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant is perfectly forthcoming about this, for, despite his hesitation in allowing the aesthetic judgment to be unequivocally about an object, he does say that it brings its object under an indeterminate concept rather than a determinate one (§57). This is as much as to say that what makes the judgment true or correct is that the judged object possesses a particular sort of property, one whose presence cannot be mechanically determined by the application of some criteria! test. A different sort of property is in question altogether, but a property nonetheless, and to get right just what this is will finally enlighten us about the idiosyncrasy of the aesthetic.12 Before broaching that issue, I return briefly to the topic of perception and experience. In the Prolegomena, the point at which explanation of our responses in terms of properties is called for is the point at which judgments of experience take over from judgments of perception. So, if we follow Kant's train of thought there, we shall be forced to say that whatever the particular nature of the properties that are ascribed to things in our judgments of taste, providing that we have to allude to them in their elucidation, we shall be making judgments about objects rather than just about subjects' own mental states. And this is all it takes to ensure that in our aesthetic judgments we are, if all goes well, making judgments of experience rather than judgments of perception. The familiar assimilation of the judgment of taste to the latter is therefore mistaken. There is one textual matter that may seem to baulk this move. At §33.5, speaking of the judgment of taste, Kant says that 'its peculiarity consists in the fact that, although it has merely

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subjective validity, still it extends its claims to all subjects, as unreservedly as it would if it were an objective judgment, resting on grounds of cognition and capable of being proved to demonstration'. The clear implication is that, not resting on cognition and not being capable of being proved to demonstration, the judgment of taste is not objective at all, and hence cannot be assimilated to judgment of experience in the way that I have suggested. Now, the Meredith version that I have used faithfully translates the A edition here, which quite generally characterises an objective judgment as one that does not rest on cognition and so on. 13 But the Akademie text (following the B edition, which Kant himself preferred to work with) offers 'das' instead of 'was' at the crucial point, and in doing that quite changes the sense of the sentence in suggesting that there are perfectly objective judgments that are not based on cognition and which are not open to proof as well as ones that are. 14 And that is just what is needed. For while the judgment of taste is not an open and closed matter, it is one whose correctness or incorrectness depends on what the judged object is like. Unless that were so, we could not explain why we find ourselves universally compelled to respond to it as we do. The assimilation that I propose of judgments of taste to judgments of experience can stand, then. However, we still remain largely in the dark about their idiosyncrasy. We need to know what is so special about the property that makes such judgments true, when they are true. Something quite general in the epistemic nature of the matter is made plain in the discussion of the antinomy of taste, and I shall leave that topic for the chapter that deals with it. But if we want the greatest metaphysical precision in the matter that Kant ever comes up with, we should look to those paragraphs in which he explicitly discusses the peculiarity of the judgment of taste, namely §32. There we find an intriguing passage contrasting two very different sorts of property, and it merits close attention: To say: This flower is beautiful, is tantamount to repeating its [the flower's] own proper claim to the delight of everyone. The agreeableness of its smell gives it no claim at all. One man revels in it, but it gives another a headache. Now what else are we to suppose from this than that its beauty is to be taken for a property of the flower itself which does not adapt

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itself to the diversity of heads and the individual senses of the multitude, but to which they must adapt themselves, if they are going to pass judgment upon it. And yet this is not the way the matter stands. For the judgment of taste consists precisely in a thing being called beautiful solely in respect of that quality in which it adapts itself to our mode of taking it in. (§32.2) A cursory reading of these sentences might lead one to suppose that Kant is contrasting predications that are rendered true by their objects possessing a certain quality on the one hand, and, on the other, despite their not possessing one. Closer inspection reveals this not to be so. The judgment of taste holds that a thing is indeed properly called beautiful in respect of a quality, but one that adapts itself to our manner of taking it in. What does that amount to? A slightly more informative rendering (paraphrase perhaps rather than translation) of the German 15 might be that we call a thing beautiful only insofar as it lends itself to our way of responding to it. That way of putting it removes any unwanted suggestion that the object changes its character ('adapts itself') according to who comes across it; and it brings out rather more sharply than the original that it has a property that can only be described in terms of the way we are affected. The object is then said to possess what we have recently come to think of as the entirely subjective property of being liable to affect us (all) in certain ways, and, moreover, there is no reductive way of handling it that omits this relational reference to ourselves. The contrast which Kant is seeking in this passage, then, is between properties that are not essentially humanly-relational and those that are; in the former case we have to adapt ourselves to them 'if we are to pass judgment', in the sense that it is not our responses that will settle the matter, but whether the object passes some relevant non-relational criteria! tests. In the aesthetic cases, however, as Kant repeats time and again, there are no such tests available, and the object adapts itself to us, in that the only warrant that we have for its having the relevant quality (beauty or whatever) is whether we do and, we find, must respond to it in the appropriate way, that is, in the way in which the judgment asserts that it does so adapt itself to us, with pleasure in the case of beauty, with loathing in the case of ugliness, and so on. The subjective property that the object has is, then, nothing

14

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other than that of being liable to produce the relevant affective response in us. Nonetheless, there is something a little misleading about this passage taken in isolation. It does too little to suggest that our joint responses may be awry, which Kant elsewhere makes perfectly clear they may be. So, when we seek to pass aesthetic judgment on something, even though we are judging that the object adapts itself to us and our mode of taking it in, there will always be the question of whether in saying, on the basis of our own pleasure, that everyone must take pleasure in it, we really have located a liability of the object to affect people of the sort we are holding out that the object possesses. This is a matter of great sensitivity, as Kant shows himself aware in his discussion of the antinomy of taste, and I am sure that we should read this earlier metaphysical passage from §32 bearing in mind the later epistemic material from §57 that seeks to do justice to it. We can now say just where Kant thinks the peculiarity of the aesthetic judgment is to be found. It lies in ascribing a property to objects, but one that can only be elucidated in terms of our responses to them. Beautiful objects are those that have a propensity to call forth such a response of delight, and this propensity is ultimately what their beauty consists in. Furthermore, Kant thinks that the propensity has to be more largely specified as one to call forth this response from any (ideal) judge, and this thought he expresses in terms of the universality of the judgment of taste. The peculiarity of the generality is, as was said above, that it does not come in the form of a judgment to the effect that all Fs are G, but that it involves a universality within the elucidation of the singular claim: this F is G (beautiful). In one respect, this reading of Kant's ideas is unsatisfactory. It involves me in treating what he calls the 'mere subjective validity' of the judgment of taste as alluding to a peculiarly subjective property of the object judged, and this matter of content does not sit well with the language of validity and non-validity, be that subjective or objective. In mitigation, I can only say that Kant himself is none too careful about maintaining the distinction between reflections concerning the content of our judgments and the grounds on which we put them forward,

Taste, Perception and Experience

15

and, as he speaks of the judgment of taste, it is easy to suppose that he may have slipped from remarks about the nature of the grounds - with which we have seen him to be fundamentally concerned in setting up the main flow of the Critique - to remarks about the nature of the content that is judged on those grounds in setting out this more tributary issue. Finally it should have become clear that there is no unique position that can be clearly marked as belonging to the Prolegomena. A number of different topics are there intertwined. Now, one fertile way of seeing the discussion of subjective and objective validity there is as embryonic of an account of truth that the first Critique singularly omitted to supply. (There, Kant simply says that we can take the correspondence theory as providing a nominal definition, and then goes on jestingly to deprecate anything else (A58/9, B82/3). A nominal definition merely holds a gap, though, and leaves the main work undone. What he protests at, however, is not an attempt to do it, but an attempt to do it that takes the form of supplying a criterion of truth.) I have suggested that what Kant may be driving at is that a sentence or judgmeRt is true if and only if it is objectively valid. Since he insists that this idea is interchangeable with that of necessary universal validity (Prolegomena §19), the notion of truth will be understood in terms of judgments that compel universal assent once all relevant considerations are taken on board. When this idea is put together with the account which Kant proposes of a thing of beauty as one that provides us with universal and necessary delight, the judgment of taste will turn out to be true if and only if, when all relevant considerations have entered into play, assent is compelled to a claim that the object in question is so constituted that, when all the relevant considerations are brought to bear, ideal critics cannot but respond to it with delight.16 That is, the objective validity of the judgment (scilicet its truth) depends on just the sort of universality and just the sort of subjectivity that Kant claims single it out from others. NOTES 1. The issue is treated fully in chapters 4-6 of Aesthetic Reconstructions (Oxford, 1987). 2. B. Dunham, A Study in Kant's Aesthetic (Lancaster, 1933) p. 23. 3. P. Guyer, Kant and the Claim of Taste (Harvard, 1978), p. 8. See also H. W. Cassirer, Kant, The Critique of Judgment (London, 1938),

16

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

Kantian Aesthetics Pursued p. 178; G. Kohler, Geschmacksurteil und Aesthetische Erfahrung (Berlin, 1980), p. viii. E. Schaper, Studies in Kant's Aesthetics (Edinburgh, 1979) p. 53. See also E. Moutsopoulos, Forme et Subjectivite dans l'Esthetique de Kant (Aix-en-Provence, 1968) p. 17. E. Caird, The Critical Philosophy of Kant (Glasgow, 1899), vol. IT, p. 42. See also D. W. Crawford, Kant's Aesthetic Theory (Wisconsin, 1974) p. 23; Schaper, p. 55. R. L. Zimmermann, 'Kant: The aesthetic judgment', in R. P. Wolff, Kant (London, 1968) p. 395. Most recently, see David Bell, 'The Art of Judgment', Mind (1987), pp. 234-5. Kohler, p. 10. J. Kulenkampff, Kants Logik des Aesthetischen Urteils (Frankfurt, 1978) p. 60. See also Crawford, p. 36; Cassirer, p. 178. Crawford, p. 37. See also Moutsopoulos, pp. 17-18. F. X. J. Coleman, The Harmony of Reason (Pittsburgh, 1974) p. 37. Cf. L. W. Beck, 'Kritische BemerkungenzurvermeintlichenAprioritat der Geschmacksurteile', in Bewuflt Sein: Gerhard Funke zu eigen (Bonn, 1975), pp. 369-72; Schaper, pp. 18-52; and Bell, note 26. In the Critique of Judgment, this parallel claim perfectly mirrors the Prolegomena's concern for explanation: 'The judgment of taste must have reference to some concept or other, as otherwise it would be absolutely impossible for it to lay claim to necessary validity for everyone' (§57.2). 'Dessen Eigentiimlichkeit besteht aber darin, daB, ob es gleich bloB subjektive Giiltigkeit hat, es dennoch alle Subjekte so in Anspruch nimmt, als es nur immer geschehen konnte, wenn es ein objektives Urteil ware, das auf Erkenntnisgriinden beruht, und durch einen Beweis konnte erzwungen werden' (B edition). Kant is prone to waver here. Often he associates objective judgments with those that are cognitive and which are determinable by some criteria! test. But on occasion he shows awareness that this is too rigid a line to take. So, for example, at §56.2 he extends the notion of argument to determinate cognitive concepts as well as to indeterminate ones, and the kind of dialectical resolution of disagreements that this brings with it supposes a much more flexible attitude to them than he generally displays. 'Denn darin besteht eben das Geschmacksurteil, daB es eine Sache nur nach derjenigen Beschaffenheit schon nennt, in welcher sie sich nach unserer Art sie aufzunehmen richtet.' To put it like this brings out why in the end it is of such little help to compare judgments of taste either to judgments of perception or to judgments of experience. That comparison bears on the outer flanking clauses of this cumbersome expression; what is peculiar to the judgment of taste bears on the inner ones. The two issues are brought together here, but while they touch they need to be kept strictly apart.

CHAPTER TWO

Necessity and Taste in Kant's writing are that judgments of taste are synthetic a priori and that the beautiful is the object of a necessary delight. A third is that taste rests on an a priori principle. For one reason or another, these claims have often been neglected, or, if not neglected, at least underestimated. Unless we do them justice, though, there is little chance of our seeing the Critique for the marvellous work that it is. Here I do little more than outline what I take their content to be, and perhaps present them in a more perspicuous form than they have when appearing in the ceremonial attire of Kant's own language. TwO DOCTRINES TO THE FORE

I

I said that my first sentence expresses two doctrines, but it would be pardonable to suppose that in reality just one thought is announced, albeit in two different ways. For one thing, Kant is frequently lax in his use of his technical terms, and the expressions 'a priori' and 'necessary' are often used more or less interchangeably. Second, if we attempt to read 'a priori' in its strict epistemic sense, the claim that a judgment to the effect that a particular object is beautiful is synthetic but can be known true independently of experience is plainly false. Charity requires us not to commit Kant to any such wrong-headed belief. Then also he writes (§37.2): 'A judgment to the effect that it is with pleasure that I perceive and estimate some object is an empirical judgment. But if it asserts that I think the object beautiful, i.e. that I may attribute the delight to everyone as necessary, it is then an

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a priori judgment.' Here one might discern a hint that the a priori nature of the judgment is to be explained in terms of its alleged necessity. Assimilating the one to the other, the a priori to the necessary, would avoid the falsity of the official reading as well as respect Kant's words. However, once we look at the detail of the aesthetic version of Kant's general critical problem, namely, how synthetic a priori judgments are possible at all, we cannot fail to notice that it differs significantly from its non-aesthetic peers. What Kant is concerned with in the last Critique is not with our absolute need to think in terms of the concept beauty, as we must with those of space and time and with the pure concepts of the understanding, but with our ability legitimately to assert on the sole basis of our own reaction to an object that others will respond in a particular affective way to it. So, at §36.3 he says: We may put the problem in this way: how is a judgment possible which, going merely upon the individual's own feeling of pleasure in an object independent of the concept of it, estimates this as a pleasure attached to the representation of the same object in every other individual, and does so a priori, i.e. without being allowed to wait and see if other people will be of the same mind? This quite atypical reading of the notion of apriority is not just stray. It echoes an earlier passage, at §32.3, that runs: Besides, every judgment which is to show the taste of the individual is required to be an independent judgment of the individual himself. There must be no need of groping about among other people's judgments and getting previous instruction from their delight in or aversion to the same object. Consequently his judgment should be given out a priori and not as an imitation relying on the general pleasure a thing gives as a matter of fact. These passages must be taken to heart if we are to understand what I said at the start of the last chapter Kant thinks of as the main problem of aesthetics, and this makes the assimilation of the doctrine of apriority to that of necessity quite impossible. If we are concerned with necessity, we are in one way or another concerned with the content of the judgment of taste; if we are concerned with apriority, we are concerned with the grounds on which that content is primarily advanced. To assimilate

Necessity and Taste

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the latter concern to the former prevents Kant's fundamental question from arising. It also needlessly obscures his doctrine of necessity. Keeping them apart does neither. It has the further virtue of aligning the issue of apriority with considerations of epistemology, as the terminology requires, and that of necessity with matters more nearly semantic. One thing that hinders clarity here is a pervasive misunderstanding, regrettably encouraged by Kant himself, of just what a judgment of taste is. Commentators have almost universally identified it with the assertion or the proposition that an individual object is beautiful. Having done that, they naturally enough see everything that Kant says about the judgment of taste as elucidatory of its content. Hence one source of the temptation to explain its apriority in terms of its necessity. However, since Kant is insistent that in a judgment of taste 'we refer the representation to the subject and his feeling of pleasure or displeasure' (§1.1), reflection on the fact that I may sometimes judge something to be beautiful or not without experience of it - as I may judge Helen so from reading Homer, or this month's playmate from perusal of Playboy's centrefold- should convince us that the traditional identification is mistaken. There are hosts of judgments that something is beautiful which are not judgments of taste. Those are but two. Accurately speaking, for Kant a judgment of taste is a judgment to the effect that something is beautiful made on the basis of and from within the subject's own disinterested experience of that thing. Consequently, not everything said about the judgment of taste has to be taken as qualifying its content, which, of course, is no different from the content of any other judgment that something is beautiful. Instead, we can read some of Kant's claims about it as informative about the kind of ground on which such a judgment is most usually and most securely to be made. A case in point is the assertion that the judgment of taste is a priori. To see what this comes to, recall the content that Kant assigns to the judgment that something is beautiful, whether or not it is propounded on grounds that constitute it one of taste. Setting aside for the moment all matters of necessity, his doctrine can be put perspicuously enough, if somewhat anachronistically, by saying that the judgment's intended truth-condition is,

20

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roughly, that the beautiful object is one that compelling elicits delight from any sufficiently good judge who disinterestedly contemplates it. Obviously under this analysis, that something is beautiful cannot be known a priori in the sense that it is something that we can come to know independently of all experience. We have to see it for ourselves, or, maybe, seek the advice of a reliable judge who has done so, or undertake a little market research to decide whether in fact everyone who views the object in the right frame of mind does enjoy the appropriate response. All these putative routes to knowledge require experience, and, there being no other that dispenses with it, it is false in the strict understanding of the term that the judgment is synthetic a priori. This is true whether the thought is advanced on grounds that constitute it a judgment of taste or not. However, in §§32 and 36, Kant offers a quite different under~ standing of' a priori'. The judgment of taste is said to be a priori in that it propounds a thought whose content is elucidated in terms of a universal claim about people's delight in its object made on

the sole basis of the judging subject's own pleasure in confronting it. It is a priori in that it pretends to knowledge of the universal claim without standing in need of any further support than that. The judgment is propounded without looking beyond the subject who makes it, almost as if to appeal to one's own experience in the matter would be to offer the judgment without any appeal to experiential grounds at all, hence prior to all experience. Understood in this way, the doctrine of the judgment of taste's apriority is philosophically uncontroversial. It turns out not to be a substantive claim at all. Rather, it is definitional of the concept judgment of taste itself. It is, however, an entirely different matter whether we can do without judgments of taste in our aesthetic discourse - a question that Kant quite properly answers in the negative - and a different matter again whether judgments of taste can ever be justified, which he answers in the affirmative. As far as the present claim goes, though, to speak in Kantian terms, it is just an analytic matter, and a stipulative one at that, that the judgment of taste is a priori. What is philosophically controversial is whether our knowledge that something is beautiful can ever be a priori in this somewhat curious sense, for that assumes that the judgment of taste, as

21

Necessity and Taste

defined, does provide adequate support for the claim that it advances. It is the major task of the third Critique to answer this contentious question and to answer it positively. Nothing else need be said about apriority. It may, however, serve a purpose to underscore the difference between the usual Kantian claim that a judgment is synthetic a priori in nature and the present doctrine that the judgment of taste is so. Nowhere else, so far as I am aware, is such an assertion pinned to a particular set of grounds on which a thought of a certain kind is paradigmatically judged. 1 In all other contexts, such a doctrine is indissolubly linked to the content of the thought that is alleged to enjoy this status. Once we spot this asymmetry between the question 'How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?' as it appears in aesthetics and as it appears in general philosophy, the overall unity of Kant's critical endeavour cannot remain entirely undisturbed. That is a matter for broader Kantian scholarship, though, and not my present concern. What is important here, and what we need to take away from this part of the discussion, is the sharp distinction between the content of a judgment and the grounds on which it may standardly need to be advanced. II

By contrast, that the beautiful is the object of a necessary delight is a matter of the judgment of taste's content and does not at all concern the grounds on which that content is put forward. The difficulty here is to see just how we are to understand the claim. Kant offers distressingly little positive help with it, so little indeed that one commentator has gone on record as saying that the doctrine is scarcely to be distinguished from the main strut of the analysis, viz., that the beautiful is the object of a universal delight. 2 How wrong this is, we shall see. The first thing we are told is negative. The necessity we have to do with is not apodeictic, and I take it that while that permits us to maintain the necessity of the analysis itself that comes in the form (1) O((x) Beautiful x iff (y)(DC, Pleases )), 3 it forbids us to write in any necessity into the analysis along the lines of (2) or (3): (2) (x) Beautiful x iff D(y)(DC, Pleases ) (3) (x) Beautiful x iff (y)(DC, D(Pleases )).

22

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These are both clearly false. (2) cannot be correct because it implies that beautiful objects could not possibly fail to please ideal disinterested observers who come across them. No natural object enjoys that property, for anything that the best judges find beautiful and whose contemplation actually offers delight might, had circumstances been different, have had a structure which left us cold, or which repelled the eye. Not even Narcissus would think it other than his good fortune to bring exceptionless delight to himself and his well-chosen admiring companions. As for (3), closer surely to Kant's way of speaking, that would only be true if beautiful objects could not have failed to please those ideal disinterested observers who actually come across them. Yet, no-one, no matter how ideal, is metaphysically bound to find those objects pleasing that do in fact delight them. A proper analysis of beauty must not suggest otherwise. To make progress, we do well to recall the motivation for the introduction of necessity into the analysis in the first place. It is originally required because, without it, Kant thinks that it will be not be possible to draw a satisfactory distinction between the beautiful proper and the merely agreeable. In the early sections of the Critique pleasure in the agreeable and pleasure in the beautiful are contrasted, and the contrast is drawn by reference to the supposed universality of the one and the merely private character of the other. But Kant himself is perfectly well aware that the distinction must extend to those things that are universally easy on the eye (say) and those that are genuinely beautiful to view, so the mere universality of the relevant pleasure cannot suffice to secure it. Now, although he also endorses the thought that what is agreeable gives rise to a pleasure that is based on some interest, while the beautiful does not, no-one aiming to do their best for him will want to make the distinction that he is seeking turn on that. Plainly there are non-beautiful things that we find agreeable independently of their satisfying any particular desires or interests that we have, and there is no obvious incoherence in supposing that, in certain circumstances, some such object might be regarded with universal delight. It would not on that account be beautiful. If Kant's concern is to rule out such 'fortuitously' universal pleasures in the case of true beauty, we might suppose that some weakening of (2) could serve the purpose. Is it not open to him

Necessity and Taste

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to say that our pleasure in it is necessary in the sense of being governed by something akin to a natural law? A beautiful object would then be one that we are 'bound to' take pleasure in by the operation of law (or at least lawlikeness), and quite distinct from anything that just accidentally pleases. Certainly, some version of this idea was current in the mid- and late eighteenth century - when the more nearly Kantian vocabulary of 'law' and 'lawlikeness' is replaced by that of 'rules' and 'principles' -but it is a view that Kant firmly, and rightly, set his face against. The details of this are discussed in Chapter Three, and here I do no more than make a couple of remarks that are more fully elaborated there. What strikes him as so wrong about the idea is that it threatens to contradict the frequently-repeated assertion that to judge something beautiful is not to bring it under a concept. If beauty were properly elucidated in terms of laws, we should be able to ask what these laws are, and in theory be able to tell, in advance of experience, what an object would have to be like for the judgment of taste to hold true of it. This, Kant sees, is nonsense. Further, it is an implication of his views about the genesis of beauty in art, that the poet or painter of genius must be able to subvert common expectations of what is required for artistic success, and that he achieves this in the production of beauties of an original and novel order. No attempt to construct our concepts of the beautiful around rules or principles or laws can accommodate this demand. The idea of delight in the beautiful as a necessary delight has therefore to spring from elsewhere. In the previous chapter, I mentioned the identity that Kant perceives in the Prolegomena between universal and necessary agreement in our judgments about something and their objective validity. What that strongly suggests is that he perceives a continuity between our aesthetic judgments and what he calls our 'cognitive' judgments, in that both are advanced as objectively valid (sic), 4 and that in both cases validity, correctness or, better, truth is a matter of the 'necessity' of the appearances or experiences on which we base them. In the one case, the object that we truly judge to be spherical cannot but strike everyone as spherical; in the other, the object that we rightly judge to be beautiful cannot but elicit a response of universal pleasure. There is, Kant will say, no other proper way to see the object cognitively

24

Kantian Aesthetics Pursued

than as spherical, no other way to respond to it aesthetically than with pleasure. And that, I believe, is what he supposes the truth of these judgments to consist in. This is clearly a necessity quite different from any yet encountered. The suggestion is sketchy, perhaps in the extreme, and some might think it not even worth developing. Is not an immediate response likely to be that there are no necessities of this sort? Are there not, no matter what the circumstances, very many different ways in which we can and do experience or respond to objects that are truly spherical, or truly beautiful? There is surely no necessity about any of them. However, such a retort mistakes the proposal, at least as Kant seems to intend it. The necessity which he is concerned with is scarcely one that can be guaranteed to bear directly upon you or me or, indeed, on any actual judge. 5 Rather, it is introduced in the first instance by reference to an idealized figure, one who is sensitive to whatever is, by the most exacting standards, pertinent to the issue at hand, and whose responses to and experience of what he judges are proof against criticism. 6 (Kant speaks of an ideal norm in brushing aside worries about his analysis that stem from absence of any actual universal agreement in our responses (cf. §22.1).) When ideal judges come upon something truly beautiful, they find that there is no other way to respond to it than with pleasure; and anything that might seem to motivate a different reaction would lay them open to criticism of a sort to which they are ex hypothesi immune. 7 For such hypothetical figures, the necessity of their responses is beyond doubt, and it is not touched by this first dismissive reflection. In its barest bones the proposal has the virtue of respecting Kant's three negative demands: the necessity envisaged is not practical; nor is it theoretical and apodeictic; nor does it imply the existence of, let alone reduce to, empirical laws on which a 'science of the beautiful' might be erected. Further, it serves well to secure the desired distinction between the beautiful and the merely agreeable. The agreeable object that just fortuitously pleases everyone may do so for explicable reasons, but in Kant's eyes it would be wrong to think that these would be reasons which would compel any ideally competent judge. So, in the case of the actually universally agreeable, no common response is forced upon us at all, hence we are not bound to take pleasure in

Necessity and Taste

25

what, in the imagined circumstances, we all do find so appealing. The threatened counter-example to the analysis evaporates because, even if we allow the case to be one that generates universal pleasure, all necessity is lacking. I envisage three objections being raised to this proposal. The most immediate is that it squares ill with what Kant textually says. When he introduces his discussion of necessity at §18, all he tells us about it positively is that we have to do with a necessity that is not theoretical or practical, but exemplary. The gloss which he puts on that is just that we regard our pleasure in the beautiful as exemplifying 'a universal rule incapable of formulation' (§18.1). Whatever this may amount to, it cannot but seem very far away from the suggestion that I am canvassing. There are two things here. First, a rule which we cannot formulate must not generate only necessities that simply reduce to the theoretical or apodeictic. Second, it must be different from an ordinary empirical law of the sort that Kant says cannot underpin aesthetic judgments. It cannot be a law like the others, only simply one from which we are cognitively excluded; for simple ignorance of it, even principled ignorance, will do nothing to impugn the apodeictic or theoretical status of its necessity. As for the first of these requirements, suppose for the moment that the aesthetic rule were just like other empirical rules or laws. Then, that a particular object must be G would be deducible from a law governing F things and the fact that the beautiful object in question is F. However, that necessity is at most a necessitas consequentiae, and is certainly theoretical. If we consider our experience of the thing (or our affective response to it), then just because it is G we shall (on my reading) ideally feel compelled to judge it to be G, experience it as G, respond to it in the right way. And this necessity is quite different, not of the theoretical or apodeictic kind. If, as is quite possible, we do not judge in accordance with it, we shall not be judging the object as we should. So, were we to take Kant's ineffable 'rule' in the very most straightforward way, that would leave ample room for, not exclude, the understanding of necessity that I envisage. To gloss it in terms of a 'rule' is quite in keeping with the message coming down from the Prolegomena. Anyway, we do not have to do with any ordinary empirical law in these cases. Also one might think that, since, on my account

26

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of the matter, the so-called 'exemplary' necessity attaches to just any truth whatever, it must be a puzzle why Kant makes mention of a rule at all, even an ineffable one. He seems not to need it. Perhaps the explanation is this. For anyone in the position of the ideal judge, it is a brute fact of experience that, confronted with particular beautiful objects of very diverse sorts, he finds pleasurable response to them and corresponding judgment utterly compelling. It is very natural to ask: must there not be something that makes it compelling? In parallel cognitive cases, this demand can often seem to be satisfied by bringing the particular case under a regularity, only not so in the aesthetic ones. There, however, to those who find this sort of explanation illuminating, Kant can point out that the individual object's beauty (its disposition to elicit the response of pleasure in the idealised judge) supervenes on its specific material constitution or, in more narrowly Kantian terms, on its particular form. Only, in general no specifiable material or formal constitution is either necessary or sufficient for the (ideal) occurrence of such a response. If one insists on' explaining' the compulsion to respond by bringing the individual case under a rule, the most that can be done is to say, in a rule-like way, that objects are beautiful if and only if in their matter, or their form, they are For G or H, etc. However, as the reflections about genius show, this disjunction is bound to be an open-ended one, and cannot be fully spelt out. s This is not just a matter of our cognitive limitations, rather it is a reflection of the genuinely and fundamentally ineffable nature of any such 'rule'. However, while little more than this can be said to make the necessity of the exemplary response to the individual object intelligible, 9 allusion to an ineffable rule may serve for Kant to underscore the fundamental continuity which he sees between aesthetic and non-aesthetic cases, despite their apparent and superficial dissimilarity. 10 The first objection does not stick. A second complaint will be that my reading of the exemplary necessity of our pleasure in the beautiful altogether passes over the most important feature of the Moment of Modality and concentrates attention on something that is not picked up elsewhere in the Critique. Kant speaks quite insistently in §19 and elsewhere of its being the case that everyone ought to take delight in the beautiful, and it may well seem that it is rather to this that

Necessity and Taste

27

he wants to direct his reader than to any unstatable 'rule' of the sort for which I have tried to find room. To the extent that this 'ought' plays a part in Kant's analysis, we must either present it as an immediate consequence of the necessity as understood or else see it as being nothing other than what rides under that name. There are no alternatives, the doubter will say, and my suggestion fails to oblige in either way. The trouble is that neither of these alternatives is tenable. Consider the first of them. The key feature of the aesthetic 'ought' is that it can be brought to bear on those whose tastes are unformed or insufficiently acute. So, Kant wants us to be able to say to others that, in circumstances in which they do not readily make a positive judgment of taste about some natural beauty or some outstanding work of art, they should readjust their response to it. Failing that, they lay themselves open to reproach. The 'ought', Kant notoriously says, lies on us almost as a duty (§40.6). And this prescriptive aspect of the idea cannot be supported simply by the thought that ideal figures in terms of whom I have cast our understanding of the exemplary necessity find they cannot but respond to these things with delight. To bring the 'ought' to bear on sublunaries such as ourselves, further premisses are needed, chief among which will be ones that connects ourselves to the idealized judge by a community of sense or a community of nature. As we shall see in the next section, this is precisely what §§19 and 20 are after, and it is enough to understand this to see that no taste-guiding 'ought' can be derived as a strictly immediate consequence of the necessity of the pleasurable response, read as I have read it. The other alternative is to treat the 'ought' simply as being the exemplary 'necessity', so that then Kant's analysis simply takes the form of claiming that a beautiful object is one in which everyone should take a pleasure rather than one to which an ideal beholder is bound to respond in that way. Now, given that the necessity is introduced to distinguish the beautiful from the merely agreeable, we shall have to say that, under this interpretation, the beautiful is what people should delight in, while the agreeable is merely what does provide pleasure (even universally, maybe) when divorced from the possession of whatever it is that gives rise to the aesthetic 'ought'. The pleasure which we take in the agreeable is gratuitous; that which we take

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in the beautiful is responsive to whatever bounty the object holds out. 11 The most glaring defect in this suggestion is that, when we say to someone who for one reason or another is not responsive to their surroundings, that they ought to find something that confronts them a source of delight, we like to justify ourselves by adverting to the thing's beauty. Any such move is now ruled out as an illusion. Let us not press this point, but ask instead what else might hold the prescriptive 'ought' in place. Patently, if we think that an object is beautiful if and only if everyone coming across it ought to take disinterested delight in it, that can only be because it holds out some reward or other to them. But 'holds out some reward' cannot just mean that the object universally delivers some reward, since there will always be those who do not or cannot reap it, and we must not allow their existence to falsify the claim that what they fail to respond to is beautiful. Is it not precisely to such people that we most naturally hear the 'ought' addressed? So, what ultimately holds the 'ought' in place must be that the object is one that is liable to provide receptive beholders with reward, and that they at least will find themselves bound to respond to it. Now, while more must obviously be said about just how this idea gives the 'ought' leverage on the insensitive and the unresponsive, in this context what is notable is that this is precisely the thought that has been moved aside to make room for the 'ought' -powered reading of Kant's' exemplary necessity'. If it cannot be dispensed with and is what underwrites the prescriptive side of our assertions, it must surely be this rather than the 'ought' itself that elucidates the exemplary necessity of the delight that beauty brings. To acknowledge this brings with it the reassuring benefit of once more making informative, not tautological, the idea that we ought to find a masterpiece such as, say, Titian's Flaying of Marsyas enthralling because it is beautiful. I said that if the 'ought' has any place in Kant's analysis at all, it can only be treated in these two unsatisfactory ways. And this is right, since the only 'ought' that might be immediately inferred from the necessity as I have proposed to read it is that, in favoured circumstances, sensitive or ideal judges ought to take pleasure in this or that rewarding object just as a matter of simple expectation. They are epistemically star performers, so to

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speak, and we can predict what their responses will be; so we shall say they ought to find delight here, but not there, and so on. Unsurprisingly, however, that is not what Kant is implying. What I think we should conclude from this reflection is that the 'ought' with which he is concerned in these important sections does not enter into the analysis at all; rather, it is consequent upon it. To say that the beautiful is something that we should respond to with delight does indeed augment our understanding of it once that is set up; but, as far as the nub of the concept goes, there it is quite absent. That is fully provided by the material that is already in place, and on which allusion to this 'ought' must be founded. 12 As I said, Kant's understanding of the necessity of our pleasure in the beautiful in terms of an ideal norm provokes the question of why that should concern us, how a truth condition for these judgments in terms of an idealized figure could possibly elucidate our use of the aesthetic vocabulary. We shall meet the same concern in the later discussion of Hume, but the issue is no less pressing here. The full answer, I am sure, has to lie in Kant's perception that our aesthetic language provides us with prime examples of the humanly-subjective elements of reality. We pick out what the world contains here in language that marks out just what creatures of our kind are responsive to. And the ideal of which Kant speaks is, as we shall see, necessarily no distant, superhuman figure, god or angel, say, impeccably responsive to the aesthetic rewards that nature objectively offers it, but a fully human soul, whose sensitivities are developed in the way of humans and which the reflective human intelligence will recognize as goods. In the vast majority of cases which we come across, even having an interest in whether this or that is an object of beauty is evidence enough that we stand at no great distance from the ideal figure in terms of whom Kant's analysis is cast. In many cases, we are at no distance at all from that position indeed, Kant takes this to be so obviously the norm that he passes by without comment - but, where our responses are deficient, from ignorance, say, or from blunted or undeveloped sensibility, there the 'ought' has leverage on us because our easy use and understanding of the aesthetic vocabulary is proof enough that we have already allied ourselves to these standards of good judgment.

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The last objection which I foresee is to complain how ridiculous it is to make the whole content of the claim that something is beautiful turn solely on the pleasure which it should give to the refined mind. But that, it seems, is what happens when both the necessity and the universality are sloughed off towards the idea of truth. Making those notions common to all analyses, which would be the effect of endorsing my proposal since all analyses are concerned with truth, all that remains specific to the beautiful is just the subjective response of delight on which Kant concentrates. That, it may be felt, is unacceptably unlifelike. However, this accusation deforms Kant's vision: the pleasure of which he speaks has its internal object, and that is the subjective formal finality of the representation of the beautiful object or its zwecklose Zweckmiifligkeit, the topic of discussion in §§ 10-17. But naturally that notion brings puzzles of its own. One may even wonder just how comprehensible it is. On the one hand, Kant insists (cf. §12.1) that this subjective finality or purposiveness the two expressions designate only the one property - is not a causal property of our representations (or of the things of which they are representations), so that that way of providing our aesthetic delight with an object is not available; but then neither do we, in finding something beautiful, consciously judge this property to belong to what we attend to so appreciatively. Yet how else can an object's finality be an internal object of our pleasure? It will not do to say that we make unconscious judgments to that effect, for there is no independent reason to think we do that, and, were we to do so, either unconsciously or for that matter consciously, we should have to allow that in Kant's book we would be making not an aesthetic judgment but a practical one. In his terms, our pleasure would then be impure and would disqualify our judgment as one of taste at all. So, the pleasure that is left to do all the work of the analysis cannot be elucidated in this second way either. The threat is that the residual response that is left carries all the weight of the analysis once the universality and necessity are filtered out cannot be made more lifelike by this sort of amplification. There is, however, another possibility: we take pleasure in the representation. That is agreed on all hands. But the representation is necessarily one that we 'contemplate', in Kant's own manner of speaking, or which we otherwise actively explore. (It

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would be to insist on the inessential if we tied Kant to his own choice of word here, with its usual overtones of drab passivity.) To speak of the representation as an object of our attention is misleading. Rather, we find the activity of representing the object to ourselves in the particular way in which we do enthralling. What is important is that the appreciation of the beautiful - the aesthetic judgment of taste - is the result of a (mental) activity, but one that is curiously not marked out by any very revealing expression that Kant actually uses. The beautiful object, then, is one that gives pleasure to the beholder - but that means to the observing, contemplating, scrutinizing (etc.) beholder in the course of his observing, contemplating and scrutinizing. And this suggests that the more fully-described object of his pleasure is the active representation of the object: that is what is the source of pleasure, the spectator's own activity vis-a-vis the targeted object. The object, then, is beautiful in giving rise (necessarily and universally) to this pleasurable activity. How does this connect with purposiveness? Kant's answer at §11.2 and §12.2 is that aesthetic pleasure is the consciousness of the beautiful object's purposiveness. Amplifying a little, we can say that to contemplate the object, or scrutinise it, or whatever, with pleasure is an index of the fact that our appreciation of it in its detail is purposive. Our activity brings us a beneficial enlargement of the mind (a gloss on purposiveness that I defend in Chapter Five). It is through this aesthetic delight which we take in our exploration of what is before us, be it visual or auditory or more purely intellectual, that this reward impinges on us in consciousness. This being so, it is evident why Kant should think, as a consequence of his analysis rather than as an integral part of it, that such objects are ones in which we ought to take delight. It is proper to them to facilitate a desirable enrichment of the mind in providing those who trouble with constructive models in terms of which to think about and respond to the world around them. They supply testable, sustainable ways of feeling and thinking about it and about our own relations to it through the very particularities of that engagement. This is something that we all have an inescapable interest in pursuing, and, since the delight that that pursuit yields is the manifestation in consciousness of this good, Kant can then speak of it quite comprehensibly as one which we have a sort of duty to make

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our own. My conclusion then is that this third objection to my account of the necessity with which Kant is concerned is no more tenable than the other two. The reader will decide whether other difficulties afflict it, but I confess I do not see what they might be. III

The remaining issue of necessity which I mentioned at the start was that the judgment of taste is based on a (subjective) a priori principle. This principle concerns what in the Moment of Modality Kant calls 'a common sense'. Only if there is a shared sense, he claims, shall we be able to make judgments of taste, meaning, I take it, that it is only under that condition that our responses, which we have seen to be the best grounds on which to advance aesthetic claims, can be taken as a reliable basis for asserting what we do. 13 He also puts it by saying that it is only on the assumption of there being a common sense that we can assert that someone ought to take pleasure in the beautiful object that gives us pleasure. Failing any such sense, that exhortation could enjoy no leverage. It will be obvious that allusion to a common sense in these sections must be to something quite distinct from the universal agreement that figures so prominently in the proposed elucidation of the term 'beauty'. From a purely textual point of view, if this sense were no more than that, it would be a mystery why this crucial principle should make its appearance so late and so laboriously on the scene when the topic of universality itself is introduced so much earlier and with such seeming ease (cf. §6).

Then, more substantially, we have seen that as far as analysis goes, the familiar universality amounts to no more than the contention that any ideally-placed judge will find a given beautiful object pleasing, and suggests nothing at all about how such, initially one might suppose quite hypothetical, judges stand in relation to us. As far as the mere content of our claims goes, we might perhaps suppose ourselves to stand at some distance from such seemingly august figures. The principle of a common sense however, controverts this, since it insists that there must be a suitable match between our responses and those that the analysis presents as ideal.

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How is this made out? And just what content does the argument force us to attribute to the principle? Suppose I judge something to be beautiful on the basis of and from within my own response to it, as a judgment of taste then, and wonder whether that gives me reason for thinking that ideal judges will respond similarly, and hence for making the same judgment about it as I do. I might initially imagine that the answer is 'No'. After all, I may reflect, if these characters' reactions should happen to be rooted in a markedly different psychology from mine, it might well be that their reactions will differ, even differ systematically, from my own. Then, even if some of their responses should mirror mine, others will not, and I shall be hard pressed to know when match is to be expected and when mismatch. So, as far as my envisaged judgment about this particular object goes, either it will be false (not all ideal judges agreeing with me), or, in the event of our agreeing, my response would not provide me with good enough grounds to expect them to do so, and so would not warrant my judgment even should it be true. And this would be so even if, in the sense that I have argued Kant uses the term, their judgment is necessary for them, and mine necessary for me. (What this last case shows is that the mooted common sense has to amount to more than the necessity of agreement about some particular cases. That could well enough stem from standing dispositions that are otherwise quite at odds with one another.) What Kant sees is needed to clear the hurdle is that my reflectively-controlled subjective impulse to make the judgment that I do, my propensity to find pleasure here, should stem from a psychology that I have sufficiently extensively in common with those whom I take to be normative in the matter, and as holding the position which he speaks of as ideal.14 To say that the judgment of taste depends on presupposing the existence of a common sense (§20.2) is one way of putting this, Kant's preferred way perhaps; another, more perspicuous, I think, than anything that he himself offers, though not substantially different, is to insist that the very ideality that is built into the content of our aesthetic judgments cannot outstrip or bypass the capacities and sensitivities of those who actually come to put them forward. 15 Ideal judges and our reflective selves have to go hand in hand here; failing this, aesthetic discourse is bound to falter. (And not only aesthetic discourse. Since this thought about a common

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sense is rooted in quite general reflections about truth and evidence, we have to think that such a sense is everywhere present. As Kant puts it at the end of §21, 'we assume a common sense as the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our knowledge, which is presupposed in every logic and every principle of knowledge that is not one of scepticism'. The term 'knowledge' here is used in an entirely unrestricted way.) One might think that there has to be more to it than this. After all, does not Kant stress that the principle is a subjective one (cf. §20)? And does not my way of putting it, concentrating as it does on the need for regular agreement between ourselves and the normatively ideal judge (and hence among ourselves), quite leave the subjective side of matters on one side? The answer is, it does not. I have insisted that at the core of Kant's discussion of truth lies the brute, further inexplicable, psychological fact of our finding ourselves obliged to give our assent to certain judgments in certain circumstances. Hence it is on the supposition of a shared inner sense of necessity that we rely to convert our agreements from ones that are merely fortuitous to ones that are genuinely objective. The shared inner necessity makes for agreement about objects; without that underlying disposition, we should get nowhere. The principle as read is quite as subjective as Kant requires. It speaks in favour of this understanding of Kant's thought that it connects up so smoothly with the aesthetic 'ought' that makes its appearance in these sections and on which I have just commented briefly. We saw there that it cannot rightly be located at the level of analysis. Moving beyond analysis, however, once we appreciate that those with whom we discourse about the beautiful must be supposed to share a liability to respond to objects as we do, when we find someone resistant to what strikes us as so obviously fine, it is very natural to say that they ought to respond as we do. The norm to which our linguistic practice commits us is a shared norm, and so it must be one that holds for others as much as for ourselves. Of course, a full explanation of the aesthetic 'ought' requires there to be some reason or, as Kant puts it, some 'interest', for them (and indeed for ourselves) to respond as we enjoin, but that issue lies beyond my present concern. 16 All that needs to be underlined here is that, without a common susceptibility to respond to the same objects in the

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same ways, the 'ought' on which these sections insist could get no grip at all. Lastly, this way of reading the principle has the further advantage of safeguarding Kant's deduction of (the possibility of) judgments of taste at §38 from unacceptable triviality. He says there that we can legitimize the transition from our own disinterested responses to things to our truth-claims about them, given (a) that we may presuppose a common sense and (b) that we have rightly subsumed the object under it (loc.cit., Remark). At first, this looks as if condition (b) requires that we are indeed judging the object truly, and that would obviously enfeeble the argument, making it too restrictive and at the same time epistemically impossible to deploy. But there is no need to view it like that at all. Far better to take it to require merely that we make our judgments in precisely the reflective and pondered way that will allow us to think that the supposed common sense of the first condition does speak in our own voice. Then the particular claims which we make will be warranted (whether or not they turn out to be true).17 'We assume a common sense as the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our knowledge', writes Kant (§21). Jumping forward a couple of centuries, we can scarcely help recalling another thinker's observation that 'If language is to be a means of communication, there must be agreement not only in definitions, but queer as it may sound, agreement in judgments also' (Phil Inv. §242). Is it correct, one goes on to wonder, to see Kant as a forerunner here of Wittgenstein? At first, it might seem not, since Kant's confidence in the existence of a common sense apparently sets out from his taking knowledge or experience (he uses the two terms more or less interchangeably) for granted. In §21, he claims that as long as we are not given over to scepticism, a common sense is required for the communicability of our knowledge; and in the Remark to §38, he might also be seen as taking unquestionable knowledge as basic to any aesthetic application of the thought, commenting there that the 'actual existence of beauties of nature is patent to experience'. Thus the leading thought would be that a common sense is necessary if we are to know common aesthetic (or other) truths, but that as far as logic goes we might perfectly well express

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in its absence the thoughts which we do. So, for instance, we might envisage our asserting different things to be beautiful (that term having for each of us just the sense that it does now) even though we found that we were pushed to respond as we do quite differently from one another in different cases. Unlike Wittgenstein, then, it would seem that in such an eventuality Kant might think that we could communicate with one another well enough, yet find that agreement was the recessive partner and disagreement the dominant one. However, we are not obliged to read him in this way. In the first place, when we reflect on his starting point, it may not be that what is patent to experience matters, viz. certain experiential truths, so much as its being patent, that is, its being judged or recognised an evident truth that nature holds out beauties to us. Then the support for the common sense to which Kant adverts would stem not from facts about which we agree, but from what we take to be sure evidence for them. And that Kant may be saying is only possible if we agree about crucial cases. Can we find any trace of an argument to support this interpretation? Here I can do little more than speculate, though in doing so I rely only on ideas that Kant himself clearly endorses. Kant might invite us to imagine trying to introduce our familiar aesthetic concepts into the language. Since we shall be aiming to talk about something more than our own personal responses (we are trying to make judgments of taste, that is, not judgments about the agreeable or the charming, which we know he thinks purely private (d. §39.1), we shall be aiming to locate properties of objects, and shall be committed to doing that on a rational basis. Failing that, we shall be forced to withdraw our attempt to establish the terms in regular use. In holding out things to be beautiful as conveying more than that I, the subject, find them pleasing, I commit myself to their pleasing an ideal judge with whom in favourable cases I see myself as being at one. Now, as we have already seen, the only way in which I can have reason to think that this condition is met is that others too should join with me in my judgments about a sufficient number of those favourable cases. If they do not, I must conclude either that I am merely speaking for myself and that I have not succeeded in introducing a notion that takes me beyond the agreeable or the disagreeable, or that there is no reason for me to think that

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the term I am using has any application. However, since my managing to introduce the term relies on my finding occasion to recognise that this or that is patent to experience, this will be possible only if we set out from common agreement in our judgments. The presupposition of a common sense for the possibility of experience and the need for agreement in judgment for the possibility of communication look therefore like two versions of the same thing. From here, we need travel no great distance to think that even to disagree with someone about what is beautiful is to communicate one's thoughts to them, and this, Kant can say, is only possible as long as disagreement among us is the exception and agreement the rule. So, someone who understands what it is that he and I disagree about should see that our disagreement calls for explanation in a way that agreement between us would not. The deliverance of a common sense is the point at which explanations terminate and are not themselves to be made any more intelligible (cf. §57.2). Anyone who finds the account which I have offered of Kant's conception of truth at all convincing (either textually or in its own right) will be bound to ask whether the doctrines outlined here do not take us even further than this Wittgensteinian view. For will it not be that we do not only have to agree sufficiently extensively in our judgments if we are to communicate about aesthetic matters, but, more, that the unified voice with which we speak will also give voice to truths not as a matter of good fortune but as one of necessity? The reasoning should be clear and, interestingly, quite untinged by any appeal to radical interpretation. Having the vocabulary means using it under the stress of reflection and critical scrutiny. It has been seen that the kinds of reflection and scrutiny of which we are capable unite us with judges whom we think of as normative in these subjective matters. Hence for us to have the vocabulary requires that, speaking as firmly as they do, we find occasions on which to assert that this object or that is a beautiful one. But since there is no more to the truth of what we say than that ideal critics should find their assent a necessary assent, provided that we must speak with them, on such occasions we speak truly if they do. Hence we must standardly speak truly in this area if we speak at all.

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At §22, Kant asks the teasing question whether the common sense of which he has been speaking is required as a constitutive condition of the possibility of experience, or whether it is merely a capacity that we have the very best of reasons to acquire. Curiously, he declines to answer the question, but it is clear enough what, on this interpretation of his thinking, he should say. In general, in order to have experience, to make objective judgments about how the world is, we do indeed have to have a common sense, because, failing all shared subjective pressure to agree with one another at certain points, we should not be able to introduce into our lives the means by which to express any experience that presents itself as ours. We would not, in the language of the Prolegomena, be able to make the transition from merely subjectively valid judgments of perception to objectively valid judgments of experience. But of course this by itself does not imply that we must be able to make true aesthetic judgments of the kind discussed in the third Critique, and the mere assurance that we need a common sense to have experience at all gives us no reason to think that that capacity will carry over in all possible realms of experience. There being little hope of showing that if there is to be experience at all there has to be aesthetic experience, a direct line from the constitutive need for a common sense to a constitutive need for a specifically aesthetic application of it is not to be had. On the other hand, Kant can well say that for those who do have aesthetic experience, a common sense is constitutive of it in the way just outlined. Taken in this rather limited way, the first half of his disjunctive question will receive an affirmative answer. Only we must not think that that does anything to exclude the question's the second half from receiving an affirmative answer too. The common sense is something to which we aspire as well as something that we need to possess if aesthetic experience is to be a possibility at all. Perhaps we do well to see this aspiration in terms of a training in giving it extensive voice, since, even if we have to regard the common sense as a natural capacity, how amply we find ourselves able to exercise it is a matter of practice and sound sense as well as one of native endowment. If Kant's interest in the beautiful is an interest in locating a property of things sensitivity to which is peculiarly rewarding for us, then we shall have reason to

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extend our native common sense as widely as may be proper. It would be an illusion to suppose that this is something we might hope to achieve without a good measure of dedication and effort. NOTES 1. Notice, though, that, while the grounds on which the judgment is advanced are a priori, what is empirical and synthetic is its content. 2. Karl Ameriks, 'Kant and the objectivity of taste', British Journal of Aesthetics 23 (1983), pp. 3, 4. 3. 'DC' stands for 'disinterestedly contemplates' here, and the universal quantifier (y) ranges over idealized judges rather than actual ones 4. This is despite the absolutely explicit claim that the judgment of taste is merely subjectively valid (cf. §33.4: 'Its peculiarity, however, consists in the fact that, although it has merely subjective validity, still it extends its claims to all subjects, as unreservedly as it would if it were an objective judgment, resting on grounds of cognition and capable of being proved to demonstration'). The issue is discussed in section II of the previous chapter. 5. Kant has to make room for p's being true, while seeming false to me and indeed actually seeming false to everyone. Once, the Earth assuredly looked flat, and no-one could do anything about it. Kant never got round to considering the details of his proposal. 6. I shall say nothing here about what just form criticism might take in the aesthetic case. What Kant has to say about that emerges from his discussion of indeterminate concepts, and that is discussed at some length in Chapter Three below. 7. At §18, Kant says that the necessity is not one that everyone will take pleasure, but that they ought to. A parallel thought must hold for straightforwardly cognitive judgments too. 8. Nor is it one which we would ever have much interest in spelling out if we could, except possibly as indicating paths which we know already to have been trodden and which any artist of ambition and repute had better avoid if he is to avoid being written off as a mere epigon. 9. At §57.2, Kant sees that intelligible explanations have to come to a stop, and there he invokes the notion of the supersensible to call a halt. I discuss this in Chapter Three, taking his appeal to the noumenal as essentially negative in nature. The present appeal to a 'rule' could well enough be understood in a similar way. 10. Of course, there could be a simpler explanation. Kant thinks that wherever there is a necessity there has to be a rule, that all necessities are in one way or another rule-driven. There are strong signs of this idea at work in the Prolegomena, where the peculiar necessity that belongs to objectively valid judgments is put down to the operation of the categories, which are themselves regularly spoken of as rules. But I surmise that there may be a less idiosyncratic thought at work as well.

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11. I put it like this here, first, in order to introduce something that can replace the ideal 'compulsion' that has been shelved by the objector and, second, to preserve continuity with what Kant himself will say, though of course he puts it in terms of purposiveness without purpose or subjective formal finality. The connection with 'bounty' or 'reward' is made out in Chapter Five. 12. One needs to take care here. The necessary and universal pleasure looks as if it is independent of the purposiveness with which §§10-17 are concerned. And just because that is so important, one might think that not everything is already 'fully provided'. But that would be wrong. The pleasure is only partially described by saying that it enjoys an exemplary necessity, but everything that is relevant is already present. It is not that only part of the phenomenon is before us; the whole is present, only it is less than fully described. It helps to remember that the sections on modality follow the discussion of purposiveness. The reader must be presumed not to have forgotten them. 13. Kant says that the common sense is a condition of the necessity advanced by a judgment of taste, and this could sound as if it is a condition of the truth of such judgment. But obviously he means that it is a condition of our putting forward such judgments as true (as necessary), and the putting forward in question is surely justifiable, not just wild. 14. In fact, he says the common sense is a mere ideal norm. Because of his way of speaking it would be easy to suppose that he thinks it is not realized, even that it cannot be realized. However, since the very next section argues that we are right to suppose a common sense any such inclination must be resisted. 15. At §21, Kant speaks of a common ratio of imagination and understanding in the synthesis of the manifold of intuition, which can only be determined by feeling, not by concepts. Since what is central here is the idea of what is common, understanding is probably furthered by concentrating on that and leaving the details of Kant's psychology on one side. (For some discussion of that, see David Bell, 'The Art of Judgment', Mind (1987), pp. 221-44.) 16. Cf. §40.1 and the ensuing discussion. Chapter 6 of Aesthetic Reconstructions explores the issue at some length. 17. The footnote to §38 makes plain that Kant recognises that the general legitimacy of judgment does not demand that we should never get things wrong. As he puts it there, 'if any mistake is made, ... this only touches the incorrect application to a particular case of the right which a law gives us, and does not do away with the right generally'.

CHAPTER THREE

Truth, Taste and the Supersensible WE GENERALLYMANAGE TO READ the Critique independently of

the idealistic metaphysic so central to Kant's thought elsewhere. At one important juncture, though, that current erupts in dramatic and puzzling fashion. I have in mind the sections of the book that present, and purportedly resolve, the antinomy of taste (§§56 and 57, together with the two immediately following Remarks). Kant is concerned there to situate the beautiful in its proper conceptual niche, and he appears to do this by unreservedly rooting it in the supersensible substrate of phenomena. When such stress has already been laid on the fundamentally subjective nature of the aesthetic, this unannounced appearance of the hyperobjective takes one aback. It is not at all easy to grasp what is afoot, and hard to believe that good sense is not making way for idle mystification. I

The problem arises from a desire to allow that taste is possible at all, a thought that brings with it the implication that aesthetic judgments are evaluable as true or false, correct or incorrect. 'Each to his own taste' puts paid to that, one might suppose; but Kant is firm. To endorse the familiar banality would be to abandon all idea of taste whatsoever, since for each of us to have our own taste is a strict impossibility (§7.2). Privatising aesthetic estimates in this way could only be a move of last resort. Setting aside this ultimately sceptical option, then, Kant holds that we are bound to endorse two seemingly opposed ideas: one, that there is no disputing about taste; the other, that it does permit

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of argument. These two are not of themselves evidently mutually inimical, but they come to seem so because of consequences that they generate. The first, Kant holds, implies that the judgment of taste does not bring its targets under concepts; the second that it does. Were this to express an unresolvable contradiction, we should be thrown back into the very position which we want to avoid. 1 The problem that the antinomy poses is how to escape it. To modern ears, the combination of 'cannot dispute, but can argue' is a strange one because we are wont to understand something different by its terms than did Kant. We equate the adage about the impossibility of disputes with the idea that each man is indeed his own best judge - the very banality which Kant rejects; also, we sometimes suppose that, unlike disputes, arguments are quite idle, and without any chance of issue. So, before troubling to think what Kant might mean, we find it difficult to distinguish either member of the endorsed pair from the option of last resort, and consequently come to think that the problem is even more immediate than Kant's somewhat artifically-derived antinomy suggests. Thesis and antithesis both imply the unwanted commonplace, so we suppose that the real problem is rather how to reject, not, as Kant thinks, how to accept them. However, we must avoid conflating the thought that there is no disputing about taste with the privatising gesture. In Kant's mind, the two are sharply distinct. For him, a dispute is a difference of opinion that lends itself to being conclusively settled or, as the antinomy's thesis puts it, to being 'decided by proofs'. The sort of case which he primarily has in mind would typically be a disagreement about some directly observable matter of fact. In making the judgment that a is F, I am seeking to bring a under a rule 'that is already given', and what is in question is simply whether or not I have correctly applied the rule to the case before me. Rules here are concepts; and for the basic cases from which he starts out, Kant thinks that there are intuition-based criteria that sharply determine the truth or the falsity of our judgments, criteria that for the case in point come with our original acquisition of the concept F. 2 Proof is provided one way or the other by a competent check on whether the conditions of the disputed term's proper application are manifestly satisfied.

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So, if you and I dispute, the relative length of two pieces of string, appeal to a tape measure definitively settles the matter; if we cannot make up our minds about the colour of a rare stamp, Mr Gibbons' patent philatelic nuancier will prove one of us right. 3 (The verb 'prove' is perfectly in place here.) Kant need not suppose that contending parties can always be brought to agree. The idea is only that in this domain, that of what he calls 'determinant' judgment (cf. CJ Intro. IV.1), there is an answer to moot questions, and one that is accessible to competent judges through intuition (though see section III below for some qualification of this). If for one reason or another such judges cannot bring the contending parties into accord, at least their skill will, as Hume had put it rather earlier,' afford a decision whereby one sentiment may be confirmed and the other condemned'. Now, at the very start of the third Critique Kant insists that judgments of taste do not bring their objects under concepts, and in saying this he is already denying them to be determinant, to be judgments that permit of dispute. For to bring an object under a concept is to ascribe to it precisely the sort of quality whose figuring in intuition settles disagreements one way or another, and to say that something is beautiful is to commit oneself to no claim whatsoever about how it must be (and hence must appear) if the judgment is a true one. 4 It is just because it provides us with no information of an intuitable sort that Kant declares that the judgment of taste is not cognitive or logical (§ 1.1 ). Elsewhere, and for the same reason, he says that the judgment of taste furnishes no knowledge (e.g. Intro. VII.2 or §9.3), and as we go on we shall do well to remember just how narrow the limits which he sets to that term really are. s Matters of taste do not lend themselves to dispute then, but we can at least argue about them. Again, Kant uses the term ('streiten' in German, rather uncomfortably translated by Meredith as 'contend', and by Bernard as 'quarrel') in an idiosyncratic way. For him, an argument is a difference of opinion that does have a right and wrong answer to it, only it is not one that can be settled by appeal to determinate rules for the application of the concepts involved, and which might fix what intuitable data will close the issue. Precisely, arguments are not idle debates. They are instances of disagreements in which, rather than trying to bring something under a given rule or concept, we seek to

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find a concept that fits the object in a way appropriate to our interest in it, and differences between us about how this should be done may be much more difficult to settle than when there are criteria already in place to fulfil the task. Here, Kant's idea is that arguments proceed more dialectically; 'they aim at bringing judgments into accordance out of and by means of their mutual opposition' (§56.2), 6 and, whatever we might exactly understand by this, it is clear that even though determinate proof cannot be supplied to settle a contentious issue, that need not of itself preclude one party to the debate from speaking truly, and another falsely. If what is involved in saying that judgments of taste fail to bring their objects under concepts is that they are not determinant judgments, not resolvable by appeal to criteria, then it would be something of a puzzle to see why any antinomy concerning them should arise. After all, we have said that arguments, which in Kant's jargon are expressed by reflective judgments (see Intro. IV.l), are not open to resolution by way of bringing their objects under determinate concepts, and so judgments of taste will have their rightful place here without any threat of contradiction. However, Kant goes on to stress that in the case of arguments, just because one party may hold the truth and the other not, we have to think that the object at issue is being brought under a concept. Thus at §57.2, he says: 'The judgment of taste must have reference to some concept or other, as otherwise it would be absolutely impossible for it to lay claim to necessary validity for every one'. Here, then, is the antinomy: judgments of taste both do not, yet also do, bring their objects under concepts. That is the paradoxical price they pay for being evaluable through argument as true or false without their central concepts being determinate ones. Kant's way of resolving the issue is to say that while judgments of taste do not bring their objects under determinate concepts, they do bring them under indeterminate ones, and when we think back to the early sections of the work, we need to remember that the claim that the beautiful is that which pleases universally without a concept (e.g. §9 end) should really be expressed in this more ample form: the beautiful pleases universally under an indeterminate, and not a determinate, concept. The amplification needs to be read into all

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the many other occurrences of the 'without a concept' doctrine. Although these simple reflections show us why Kant wants to accept the two initial claims (that is, both thesis and antithesis of the antinomy), how they are both distinct from the rejected banality and also why they are not really inimical to each other, a number of things remain unexplained. First, why should judgments laying claim to truth have to bring their subjects under concepts at all, where this comes to anything more than the truism that to make a judgment about an object at all, there must be something that we say or think about it, hence some concept under which the thing is said to fall? Second, what is it for a concept, like that of the beautiful, to be indeterminate? Third, why should the indeterminate concept that is especially relevant to aesthetic judgments be that of the supersensible substrate of appearances? These queries must not be left without answers. II

To answer the first query, if we consider the kind of truthevaluable singular cognitive judgments that Kant takes as basic and as foil to his reflections about taste, we might surmise, for the moment without any attempt at justification, that their truth will involve their subjects possessing some determinate property answering to the predicate-concept under which they are judged to fall. So, in the realm of sensory judgment (the realm of intuition, that is), what metaphysically speaking makes for the truth of what we say will be the existence of objects having properties that answer to our judgments about their bearers. Saying that in cognitive judgments we bring the targeted subject under a determinate concept is thus elliptical. The expanded thought is that in the judgment that a is F, a is indeed brought under the concept F, and, furthermore, if the judgment is true, the concept under which a is brought must answer to a property that the object possesses. Otherwise the judgment would fail of truth. The notion of truth is univocal. So, if Kant holds that the truth of cognitive judgments is determined in the end by objects and their observable properties, then it will not be unnatural for him also to hold that non-cognitive empirical judgments will also be true (when they are) only if their subjects possess some appropriate property or other, and that this is indeed what he

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is intimating when he says that the judgment of taste 'has to be founded on some concept or other, but such a concept as does not admit of being determined by intuition, and affords no knowledge of anything' (§57.4). It is this thought that supplies the antinomian pendant to the original claim that judgments of taste do not bring their subjects under concepts, the insight that to be candidates for truth at all they have at the very least to bring them under concepts. The difference between these judgments and the cognitive ones from which Kant starts out lies, then, not in the one bringing its subjects under concepts and the other not, but in their bringing their respective subjects under concepts of different kinds, determinate in the one case, indeterminate in the other. Against this background, the antinomy that so exercises Kant dresses up the following thought: if we are to avoid the sceptical banality, we shall demand that judgments of taste, just like determinate observation statements, should be objectively true or false. But judgments can only be true (or false) if their objects possess some appropriate property or other. In the case of aesthetic judgments, the property in question cannot be a determinate one. It is an indeterminate one, but an honest-to-God property nonetheless. Only, Kant finds that he has to account for that possibility by allusion to the supersensible. And now, one is bound to ask, does that not promise to introduce one new and grotesque embarrassment in order to avoid another? Should we not first enquire just what the urgency is to introduce properties in the way that I have suggested Kant thought necessary? In the present context, we know that an appeal to properties is helpful because it permits us to say that Kant's acceptance of the antinomy's antithesis (that the judgment of taste does bring its object under a concept) rests on more than the trivial thought that the judgment that something is beautiful brings its object under the concept beautiful. But there has to be a deeper motivation than this. The answer, I have suggested before, lies with Kant's conception of truth, but we must be careful just how that comes about. Many people will say that it is a consequence of the correspondence conception of truth that Kant mentions with some favour at CPR A 58 /B 83. And, they will go on, the general inadequacy of that conception cannot but leave Kant introducing his troublesome ontology in a merely vacuous way. We have to

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explain what properties are in terms of true sentences, so they can hardly throw much illumination over the notion of truth itself. However, this would be a mistaken way of reading Kant. I said at the end of Chapter One that the correspondence theory is only claimed to offer an acceptable 'nominal' definition of truth, and I take it that Kant will say that a more satisfying substantive theory offering a real definition has to be provided in some other way. (We must not take his derisive remarks about holding a sieve beneath a he-goat to stymie that: they merely warn us against trying to provide a criterion of truth that could be smoothly applied to all cases.) In the previous chapter, I suggested that he goes on to equate the notion of truth with that of objective validity, and then takes that to be the same as (or to be interchangeable with) the necessary and universal validity of judgment (Prolegomena §19). Under the interpretation of these ideas which I find most attractive, this will amount to the thought that a sentence or a judgment is true if and only if it is one to which everyone finds (at the evidential limit) they are compelled to put their name. A true judgment, then, for Kant, is one that is ultimately forced upon us by the available evidence. If this is indeed what Kant thinks, it is plain where objects and in particular their properties come in. The Prolegomena asserts that only appeal to 'a quality of the object' can explain the necessity that we feel to judge as we do; and in the Critique of Judgment we have already seen Kant saying that judgments of taste must refer to some property to make out any claim to people's necessary assent to them (§57.2). So here it is: if judgments of taste are to be truth-evaluable, there must be some indeterminate property that things possess in virtue of which our judgments may be true, viz. which makes assent to them necessary in the way that the substantive theory of truth claims it has to be. And since this property is nothing determinate, intuitable or cognisable, it must be something indeterminate, lying beyond the bounds of cognition and intuition, something, that is, which we can only situate in the land of the supersensible. III

In answer to the second query, in this reconstruction of Kant's train of thought, the appearance of the supersensible that emerges at the end is directly connected to the role of concepts and

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properties that are indeterminate, but, since that notion has so far been given no content beyond the contrast with what is determinate, the link is anything but clear. If determinate concepts are just those that are governed by criteria, when those are set aside, far too much is left over to make any direct connection with the supersensible so much as comprehensible, let alone appealing. To come anywhere near that target, more must be said about the division of concepts on which Kant is relying. First, the determinate/indeterminate dichotomy is not so much a metaphysical as an epistemic division, though apparently one with metaphysical implications. Were we concerned with a metaphysical matter through and through, we should have nowhere else to look than to a distinction between concepts that do and concepts that do not bivalently partition the world. Indeterminate concepts would then be those occurring in propositions that could not regularly be decided by proofs, insofar as there is no determinate answer, for all values of x, to the question of whether x is F. Then, in some cases, disagreements could not be settled just because there would be no right choice to make. But two things oblige us to set that idea aside. One is that Kant never gives any indication of querying the general tenability of bivalence. The other is that if he had had any such idea in mind, we should expect to find him mentioning the impossibility of settling aesthetic arguments in many cases, namely in those which fell between the stools of true and false, and we should expect the sort of critical arguments on which he concentrates to be located precisely in this part of the spectrum, and not in areas in which answers are rather easier to come by and to agree on. Going by the text, however, this is not his attitude; it is not that there is no correct answer to them that makes arguments so hard to settle: there always is an answer, but the evidence and indices of what it is tend to be peculiarly elusive and inconclusive. Second, once one moves away from central cases, the domain of determinate concepts needs to be broadened to include more than just those whose correct application is governed by simple, intuition-based criteria. A concept such as coloured, for example, would certainly be accounted determinate by Kant, even though there is no single intuition to which our judgment that an object is coloured must answer to determine that it is true. A stop-gap

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way of dealing with this and like cases will extend the range of the determinate in the right direction. Kant could start by saying that the determinate will cover those concepts for which we have a simple, criterion-bound rule of application or judgments whose truth or falsity can be decided on the basis of some iteration or combination of such rules. (Schematically, though, as we know, in the end, untenably, xis coloured might then be thought of determinately as a finite disjunct of criterion-bound simples; and, say, xis measurably large would be able to be settled by a finite number of applications of some agreed measuring procedure. Think of Figaro, as the curtain goes up, trying to determine whether the marriage bed will fit into the alcove outside the Almavivas' quarters: 'Cinque, died, venti, trenta ... '). Let us say that the simple, criterion-bound concepts and those to which such elementary extensions apply are essentially determinate. Their very nature determines that any instance to which they are applied can be decided, and how it can. Now, in addition to these, Kant also employs a notion of concepts that are determinable, and, although he tells us nothing about them, it makes sense to suppose that he holds we have concepts that can be made determinate (i.e. provided with a determinate decision-procedure applicable to all instances) even if they do not bring one with them in virtue of their content as we acquire them. Natural-kind concepts will supply a plausible example here. These determinables are concepts which Kant will suppose divide the world up bivalently, although at any particular time we may be unable to settle all cases that crop up just because we do not at the time well enough understand what we have to do with. But at a later date and with scientific advance we may come by such an understanding, and then (technical difficulties aside) we shall have a decision procedure that will handle the cases that previously we were unable to deal with and one which promises to be extensible over the whole range of cases that experience can throw up. So, discovering the atomic weight of lead puts us in a position to decide whether a sample of material is lead or not, whereas, before the advent and development of atomic theory, marginal cases (and not only these) baffled even the brightest. Because the possession of the theory brings no change to the concept lead, but merely leads to an alteration to our conception of the stuff, we have here a concept that epistemically became

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determinate after having been indeterminate; it was once an indeterminate, though ultimately determinable, concept. Similarly, the discovery of a lawlike connection between Fs and Gs will render the concept F determinate where previously it had not been even though G is thought of neither as criteria! for the presence ofF nor as constituting its essence (assuming, of course, that G itself is a determinate concept). The point of these somewhat speculative elaborations of what Kant tells us is to isolate what is peculiar about the beautiful and other members of the aesthetic menagerie. These notions are said to be indeterminate not just because they are governed by no criteria!, intuition-based tests - which is one quite natural way of taking Kant's initial denial that the judgment of taste brings its objects under (determinate) concepts (cf. §1.1). Nor is it that sure-fire decision-procedures for their correct application still remain to be found. Rather, they are concepts of a kind that we could not even in principle come to find such tests for; they are essentially indeterminate, or, as Kant puts it (at §57.2), 'essentially undetermined and also indeterminable' (an sich unbestimmt und zugleich unbestimmbar). Just to say that a concept is indeterminate (as the official resolution of the antinomy at §57.7 has it) does not therefore take us to the supersensible. For that, we shall in addition at the very least need to know that we have to do with the essentially (an sich) indeterminate. Otherwise, the prospect might stand before us of starting out with aesthetic judgments whose truth or falsity we could not determine (settle by decision procedures already available to us), but which we might think could come to be provided with grounds of proof. So, before we should even start to think about making out a connection between the beautiful and the supersensible, we need to show, in some way that might permit of extension to other judgments of taste than that with which Kant primarily occupies himself, that the concept of the beautiful is indeed indeterminate an sich. In effect, before making the recommended leap to the supersensible, we have to be persuaded not just that there is no developed science of the beautiful (making the concept a determinate one), but that there could not be one either (one which would make the concept indeterminate but, nonetheless, determinable).

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IV

The section of the Critique that starts by denying this possibility (§44) rests on the idea that a science of the beautiful would not permit of judgments of taste, since they do not bring their objects under any (determinate) concept. However, that is precisely what has to be shown, and the question must not be begged in this way. Possibly, Kant thought that our failure to observe any standing or simply iterable intuitable feature shared by things which we call beautiful was proof enough; but, once we remember that we have to show not just that the judgment of taste does not bring its objects under any essentially determinate concepts, but also that it does not bring them under any determinable concept either, such 'proof' is worth little. For anything yet said, it is an entirely open matter whether we might not discover intuitively accessible marks of the beautiful akin to the essence of a natural kind or whether we might not discover 'rules and principles' of the sort that Hume envisages in his essay on taste (cf. especially 'Of the Standard of Taste', paragraph 16) and the existence of which Kant declares to be absolutely impossible at the start of §34. The main attack on the question comes at §33. There, Kant argues that there can be no such empirical proof of the correctness or incorrectness of our judgments of taste on the ground that other people's uniform pleasure could never convince us of some object's beauty against the weight of our own responses; and further he holds that any 'a priori' (in the context meaning prescriptive) principles are always liable to be challenged by our actual responses, which are bound to carry the field at the end of the day. However, neither observation can entirely settle the matter, since a Humeanly-minded critic may well allow that if infractions of any putative rules or principles of taste did generally meet with people's approval, then it would be the rules that were at fault and not the responses that the poem to which they were applied evokes (cf. 'Standard of Taste', paragraph 9). 7 Rather, he will say that the fact that we can propose badly-chosen rules and principles shows no more than that our 'science of taste' can be poorly conducted. Any principle or law lies open to challenge from the side of experience, but our hope would be that we might one day light on some such rules

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that experience will endorse and which will resolutely resist reflective challenge. What Kant has to make out is that such a hope is a priori doomed to failure, and this he does not do. His resistance seems to be rooted in the idea that such rules would be merely empirical and not a priori, but he does not notice that that would still permit them to be sufficiently lawlike to satisfy the aspirations of the aesthetic 'scientist'. Not that he does not have the materials to hand. Suppose that someone like Hume suggests that if we look hard enough we shall find intuitively accessible reidentifiable forms (be they visual, auditory or intellectual) whose presence regularly determines objects' beauty. Kant's spokesman will reply that the mere fact that forms are found beautiful only under a representation, under a way of taking them, blocks the idea whether presented in a simple or a complex guise. In the simple version, there are forms whose presence is supposed to be a sure sign that the objects bearing them are beautiful; but, just because the same forms may be taken in indefinitely many different ways, now under this representation, now under that, and as a result now found beautiful and now not, we can have no confidence that an arbitrarily-selected object displaying the chosen formno matter what that form may be - will be a beautiful one. Since a determinate concept is one that allows absolutely any instance falling under it to be decided by proof, the concept of the beautiful is at least not determinate in this way. Still, we are now used to the idea of machine tables that fix whether a machine's output for a given kind of input is 1 or 0 for any instances of input, even though the output will differ from case to case. Such a thought might enthuse Kant's opponent for a more complex version of the scientistic proposal. If only we hunt far enough, he will say, we may hope one day to come up with psychological information sufficiently finely tuned to determine which individuable forms are beautiful and in which contexts and under which representations. That we cannot do so now gives us no reason to think that one day we shall not, and no reason to think that the beautiful is not an indeterminate, though determinable, concept. Kant's discussion of genius, especially at §49.12, supplies what is needed to close this loophole. The machine-table proposal could only stand a chance if there were a way of fully specifying

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the range of possible circumstances in which a given input can appear, and which bear upon the production of outputs. So, we should need to be able to specify the whole range of ways in which any given reidentifiable form (the input) could be taken (could be represented) and under which its contemplation would give rise to the necessary and universal responses of delight that make it beautiful. However, as Kant notes, the artist of genius always has it in him to provide us with striking new ways of taking things, and, in doing that, he serves as a model for his main successors by offering them fertile soil for their own similarly original handling of like or allied material (cf. §§47.2, 49.12). A consequence of this observation is that the ways which we have of representing reidentifiable forms and the cultural situations in which we come to do so are to all intents and purposes unlimited, and do not therefore have to be selected from a stock of possibilities that we know to be tightly (or even loosely) confined. There is thus no prospect of bypassing the underlying threat to the simple version of the scientistic dream by complications of the envisaged sort. Since similar considerations will apply to other judgments of taste than those involving the beautiful, we can accept it as a general truth about aesthetic discourse that its central concepts are indeed, as Kant claims, of their very nature indeterminable.

v In answer to the third query, an indeterminate concept, then, is one the correctness or incorrectness of whose application cannot be determined by any algorithmic decision procedure. Now, once coupled with the bivalence that he never questions, the theory of truth which I have been offering as Kant's own requires that correctness or incorrectness can always be settled, though maybe only at the evidential limit. Otherwise, judgments containing such concepts would not be necessarily valid in the sense 6Utlined, there being nothing else to a judgment's truth than its being forced on suitably equipped minds at that limit. So, it might seem that there is only one possible move which Kant can make to accommodate matters that are indeterminate, and that is to set the properties underlying true reports on these matters in the noumenal arena, one to which we cannot aspire but where there is the requisite evidential determinacy for a

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suitably-endowed intelligence. That, Kant might be supposing, is the only way to extend the notion of truth uniformly to concepts that are in principle 'non-cognitive'. While this seems to me a mistaken reading of Kant's mind, we must not reject it for the wrong reason. Someone might suppose that if the idea of truth is fundamentally the idea of judgment to which we are evidentially compelled to give our assent, the very supposition of the existence of some noumenal reality in principle closed to us must be without application. It is not that we could not know such a realm to exist; no true judgment could even record its existence. The very theory of truth in question will force us to treat the blankness of the noumenal as a metaphysical void, not simply as cognitive gloom. So Kant could not be using the noumenal to house properties that strike him as tiresomely indeterminate. This is a familiar enough interpretation of the dark side of Kantian metaphysics, though one that standardly depends on ascribing to him a verificationist account of meaning rather than an evidence-based notion of truth. (So, here one might envisage Kant saying that we can indeed understand the idea of the noumenal, only we can also see a priori that no positive claims about it will be true.) To accept this anti-noumenal protest, however, does not square with Kant's apparent readiness to contemplate the possibility that other minds than ours, pure intelligences (those of God and of angels, say), may have true intellectual vision of the very same things that present themselves to us phenomenally, but without the distinctive focus that is lent them by our kind of cognitive access, determined as it is by sensibility and understanding. There would be no reason of principle for him to suppose that such a purely intellectual insight into the world as it is in itself could not yield truth, or that the truth which it would yield to such a being would not be just what is captured by the concept truth that is ours (the very concept truth, that is). s The notion of truth, I fancy we'l\ave to say, is elucidated by reference to the power of judgment, but not by our power of judgment. And in that case, the noumenal, if it exists, could be truly reported on even by us without our needing to be able to access it, and might then be supposed to make room for the indeterminate and anything else that should turn out to be cognitively closed to minds like ours.

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So, despite this objection, I suggest we preserve the idea of the noumenal in the more traditional way as the real, only the real that is for us unremittingly cognitively blank. Even so, there are a number of reasons for thinking that this is not where we should hear Kant to be situating the properties that verify our aesthetic judgments, and I shall come to these in a minute. Before doing so, however, it is worth noticing in passing that if this were indeed the best way to understand what was driving him towards the supersensible, he would be making an error. Putting the idea of bivalence together with his idea of truth, we should merely have to concede that there are many true assertions, among them many aesthetic assertions, on which we find we cannot agree and about which we cannot make up our minds. Argument about them is an open-ended affair, and for arbitrarily-chosen sentences involving indeterminate concepts it is impossible for us to decide at any particular moment whether they impose themselves evidentially or not. We cannot systematically make such decisions, and know we cannot do so, because many of our indeterminate judgments are made at times when there is no reason to think that we have brought, or are even able to bring, everything to bear on the particular matter in hand that can be brought to bear on it. So, it might look to Kant that there are truths (guaranteed by bivalence) that we cannot recognise as such and which are therefore properly thought of as noumenal, not phenomenal, material. The mistake here comes in moving from 'we (taken as we who make the judgment now, with our present intellectual limitations) cannot recognise these things' to 'we ·(taken as people with our intellectual capacities, using them efficiently to the limit) cannot recognise them'. This is a non-sequitur. Kant's notion of the aesthetically indeterminable is not the idea of what minds like ours cannot know (and, of course, he realises that many such judgments can perfectly well be known to be true or false), but only that for which we shall not ever have any mechanical decision-procedure that can be assured to cover all cases. So, when we have a moot case and we admit to ourselves that we cannot argue for sure either that For that not-F, this in no way impugns the idea that our judgment is assessible as true (or false) even when we take the relevant suitably-equipped judge to be one who has no intellectual capacities that outstrip ours in

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any interesting way. If there is one thing that might encourage one to think this is a mistake that Kant does make, it would be his restrictive use of the words 'cognitive' and the associated verb 'cognise', which confines them to the strictly determinable realm. But his tenacity in the elusive realm of the aesthetic may better lead one to think that this is a merely stipulative matter of usage, and that it does not set limits on cognition itself or on what, in his eyes, we can, properly speaking, cognise. So much, then, for one possible reading of the antinomy's solution. It certainly has its attractions. It appears to preserve judgments of taste as solid candidates for truth and falsity; it avoids a retreat to the idea that each person is his own best judge that comes from denying that; it preserves both the thesis and the antithesis of the antinomy as Kant wants them, and it makes reasonably good (if ultimately flawed) sense of his resolution of the problem to which they give rise. Further, it makes it at least comprehensible why Kant should have thought that appeal to the supersensible cannot be avoided and that it gives us the 'unique key to the riddle of [taste]', although one which' there is no means of making further intelligible' (§57.8). Nevertheless, as I said, I very much doubt whether it gives the best account of the way in which Kant envisages the supersensible as making its appearance, and we should be moved to look for something better by admitting its evident deficiencies. The most apparent are, first, that the idea of argument as opposed to dispute was introduced to allow for the existence of disagreements about aesthetic appreciation that can be settled one way or another in a kind of dialectical progress. If the aesthetic properties to which argument needs to be sensitive are ultimately to be located as supersensible ones, however, there would be no way in which argument, even dialectical argument, could be properly sensitive to them. Any match that there might be between judgment and reality would only be fortuitous, and certainly could not appear as a match at all. And even if we might understand the idea of argument terminating in truth in such circumstances, what would remain incomprehensible would be the prospect and point of our engaging in argument about critical matters at all. Thus, Kant would be extremely badly placed to endorse the activities of critics in the way he does, allowing that they correct and broaden defective taste (cf. §34.2). If this really is

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the destination for which his aesthetics is bound, ultimately it will occupy no better a position than the sceptical one which it struggles so hard to avoid. 9 Second, although the text does indeed speak of the supersensible substrate of phenomena (at §§57.4 and 57.7), which is what I have relied on in my talk of supersensible properties of objects, it is notable that, as Kant goes on, his predominant way of speaking of the supersensible is as that in us, or as the supersensible substrate of humanity (§§57.5 and 57.8). This aspect of his attempt to 'disentangle the riddle of taste, whose sources are quite hidden from us' has been entirely neglected. It cannot be made to fit the tale which I have just told. Third, in discussing the peculiar nature of the judgment of taste in Chapter One, I claimed that Kant was explicit enough about what the property of objects was that gave rise to ideal universal delight. It was the peculiarly subjective property that things sometimes have, as I paraphrased it, of lending themselves to our way of responding to them (cf. §32.2), and, since he makes it plain that we do have to do here with a genuine property of things (eine Beschaffenheit einer Sache) it may well seem that he can appeal to this or other particular properties of the same sort in accounting for our readiness to agree with one another when well-conducted argument and sensitive scrutiny of things bring us into accord with one another about their aesthetic character. Appeal to the supersensible as the unique solution to the riddle then comes to seem otiose, and appears to stem from nothing more than the short-sighted stipulation concerning the application of the word 'cognitive'. VI

The effect of these criticisms should encourage us to think that Kant has something else in mind than locating indeterminable properties, like the beautiful or the loathesome or the obscene, in the noumenal as opposed to the phenomenal world. Any such move, motivated largely by the thought that we cannot come up with a sure decision-procedure for the application of such concepts, smacks more of despair than of good sense. So far as I can judge, there are two other possibilities open, either of which is more appealing than this. One is more positive than the other, and it will probably appeal more to those who seek an

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understanding of Kant that does justice to the somewhat exalted tone of his remarks about the 'unique key to the riddle of taste' that we find in these sections. The second option will play those tones very much una corda. What motivated the rejected reading which I have just been discussing was the thought that, to explain the truth of a judgment to the effect that p, we need to explain why it must seem to us as if p. When I judge truly that there is gin in my glass, it must be that it would seem that way to any competent judge; and what will explain this necessary appearance of gin is indeed just· that it has to do with the appearance of gin and nothing else. We invoke the existence of the object for the sake of the truth of the judgment about it; similarly, we invoke the properties of the object in explanation of (and for the sake of) the truth of our beliefs about it. Now, I surmise that when Kant reflects about aesthetic judgments, where the necessity that has to be explained is that everyone respond with delight (say) or loathing, he will feel that it is just not very helpful to do this by citing the subjective property of beauty which I have said that he has already put his finger on, to wit, that property which the object has of being liable to produce such responses as delight (or loathing) in good judges (cf. §32.2). Maybe that would be a sufficiently correct observation, but he would feel that reference to this property cannot exhaust the explanation which we can give for thinking that a particular response is one that we have to have. At this point, we might perhaps expect Kant to think that we are really compelled to respond not to the dispositional property just mentioned, but to whatever property it is that this dispositional property supervenes upon. Then he might suppose that, since that underlying property is anything but easy to spot and is certainly something unintuitable, the place to situate it will be in the supersensible. Interestingly, this is not how he moves. He is absolutely certain in his own mind what it is that makes our responses to beautiful objects so compelling; it is their subjective formal finality, otherwise known as their purposiveness without purpose. If an object (or a representation of an object) is genuinely subjectively final, or genuinely purposive, in the appropriate way, we could not respond to it as is proper except with delight (or except with love or disgust, or whatever). So, we introduce

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something into our discussion which has indeed the power to explain how sentences about indeterminable concepts like the beautiful are indeed true or false. The indeterminate concept of the purposive or the subjectively final will, as long as it applies to the case in point, explain why one sort of response does force itself upon us (at the limit) and another does not. I shall have quite a lot to say about purposiveness and finality later on and ignore the issue of how to understand them now. But one thing to notice is that Kant has two different ways of explaining how something is zweckmiiflig, ways which do more to complement each other than present themselves as competing alternatives. One is in schematic terms of the way in which a beautiful (and hence purposive) object or representation impinges on our various mental faculties. The other is in terms of the content of the thoughts through which it does so. Speaking within Kant's official psychology, the purposiveness of the beautiful representation sets the cognitive faculties of the mind (imagination and understanding) in harmony and lends the mind a kind of invigorating tone, fitting it for further cognitive exploits in the world beyond. Now, however quaint this may sound, we have certainly not left the realm of the phenomenal here, but it will seem obvious that the true (yet indeterminate) claim that a given object is purposive also requires explanation - otherwise, our tendency to think such a claim true on any particular occasion may only seem to have the necessity that would make it so. So, where should we look? There are two options: one is to introduce another (indeterminate) phenomenal consideration, to try to explain the matter empirically, and that will soon enough lead to regress. Alternatively, Kant can say that the regress must be stopped at the right moment - i.e. when we run out of empirically informative steam - and there is only one way to do this, namely by grounding the whole interlinked chain of explanations in something that cannot be empirically known, that is, in the supersensible. Here is where explanations have their origin, and it is that to which we must point in rounding off accounts which we attempt to give of such aesthetic properties as engage our philosophical attention and when we seek to acknowledge the possibility of truth and correctness in criticism.

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Such a positive appeal to the supersensible has the all advantages enjoyed by the explanation which we have already rejected, and, what is more, it avoids at least two (perhaps all three) of the objections which that attracted. For one thing, it makes plain why Kant wants to talk about the supersensible substrate of humanity at least as centrally as that of objects of our aesthetic attention themselves, because what it is that gives rise to the purposive way in which things impinge on us is ultimately something unfathomable at the bottom of our own nature as well as what lies at the bottom of the nature of things to which we attend. Reference to only one of the noumenally involved parties would be radically deficient. (And when Kant abandons the schematic psychology for something more perspicuous, because we turn out to be concerned with the way in which beautiful things we encounter are beneficial for the soul, exactly the same reflection will hold good.) Second, because we are no longer situating the beautiful itself in the noumenal realm, but leaving that as phenomenally accessible (though admittedly not straightforwardly so in intuition), there will indeed be point in arguing about it. In particular puzzling cases, we may not be able to settle the disputed issue, but at bottom there would be something (ultimately noumenal) to determine that our judgment was right or wrong, by generating the presence or absence of those elusive but phenomenally accessible explanatory features that determine the necessity and appropriateness of the best chosen aesthetic responses. There is a catch to all this, of course. It is that the appeal to the noumenal has been made respectable on the back of a logical misperception- though perhaps it is one that Kant might not have baulked at. When we ask what will explain the truth of 'x is purposive' or 'xis subjectively final', meaning what will make the seeming of purposiveness or the seeming of finality necessary, the reply is that it must be either something phenomenal or something noumenal; and, because not something phenomenal, therefore something noumenal. What gets us to the noumenal is that the phenomenal explanations quickly run out; indeed, for Kant, they run out almost immediately after we have spoken of purposiveness or subjective finality. And here it can hardly escape notice that this sense of explanatory impotence is very largely generated by taking 'something' as it occurs here to be

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a referring expression, one that will pick out the same thing on each occasion of its application. When Kant finds that he cannot supply this something phenomenally, he gives himself licence to go noumenal. But 'something' is not a referring expression. All that is required is that in different cases, works of art or natural things will be beautiful by being purposive in their own particular way, and, when we ask what makes them purposive, all explanation is given by the provision of a detailed critical description of the thing bringing out how it works for us purposively or finally, rather than the citation of some mysterious, quasi-causal, general explanation of the matter. At that point, the correctness of the detailed description will do very well to explain why the response of delight is one which we find compelling and why the noumenalloses all its positive appeal. Nothing more is needed. Maybe Kant did make such a mistake. Maybe, too, his lastditch attachment to the supersensible in the resolution of the antinomy of taste rests on it. I cannot judge; however, I do believe that there is a perfectly Kantian way of thinking about the noumenal that is not open to this criticism, and one which no is weaker than the interpretation just discussed in those respects in which it is strong. If we think back to the first Critique, we find there an alternative, fundamentally negative, role being marked out for noumenal considerations. These do not intimate the frustrating presence over the cognitive horizon of necessarily ineffable, but true, explanations for phenomenal things, eternally closed to us. Rather, they simply serve as areminder where the quest for explanations must come to a halt. So, Kant famously writes: The concept of a noumenon is a merely limiting concept, the function of which is to curb the pretensions of sensibility; and it is therefore only of negative employment. At the same time it is no arbitrary invention; it is bound up with the limitation of sensibility, although it cannot affirm anything positive beyond the field of sensibility. (CPR A255/B311 ff.) If we bear this in mind and apply it to the present discussion, there will be little difference between saying that the necessity to judge something beautiful is rooted in the supersensible and saying that the necessity to make that judgment cannot be

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provided with any fuller explanation than that when all is taken into account there remains nothing else to think, and that there remains nothing else to think for the reason that the response of delight that the beautiful object calls forth is one that is entirely proper to it, given that it has the material and intellectual constitution which it does and that it is presented to us in the social and cultural setting in which it is. In particular cases, good critics will have much to say that is interesting and illuminating about what makes this or that particular object one to which the response of delight is apt and requisite, but to attempt to offer anything specific and informative in the critical manner as a matter of purely general theory would be quite absurd. Does this give a satisfactory reading of the claim that here we have the unique key to the riddle of the capacity of taste, but one which cannot be rendered more intelligible? Notwithstanding the notably positive and elevated tone of the Antinomy sections, there is some reason to think that it does. The capacity that presents Kant with the riddle of taste is just the capacity to make judgments which are true and yet indeterminate, and it rests in the end on our finding that we are bound in certain circumstances to respond in certain ways to certain objects, where this being bound cannot be explained discursively and without residue from inside - since to do that only provides additional factors that bear on our being bound and which will themselves need explanation- yet cannot be explained from the outside either. The trouble comes when we yield to the temptation to think that Kant is suggesting a further positive explanation of the force of the necessity; but we do not have to think of him as doing that. The more generous way of taking his allusions to the supersensible is as a reminder of just where our questions must stop. In the context of his philosophical ruminations, that serves as a closure to a discussion which leaves us with a fully naturalistic account of taste, and one that smoothly integrates our aesthetic and critical perceptions into the rest of our earthly vision of things. NOTES 1. This is because it is a necessary truth that judgments of taste are not liable to dispute. Hence the falsity of the thought that they are open to argument, which one would derive by reductio, would entail that, there, each man does have his own taste. Given the unavailability of

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4. 5.

6. 7.

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disputes in aesthetics, everything is going to turn on the nature of arguments. Of course, the term 'criterion' is anachronistic; but, as far as Kant's characterisation of determinant (bestimmend) judgments goes, it is not a bad approximation to what he has in mind. It is only an approximation, however, because it neglects to make room for determinable judgments. This is on the assumption that our disagreement takes the form of a difference of opinion about whether the stamp has a particular colour. If we disagree by assigning different colours to the stamp, then of course the nuancier may prove us both wrong. It will become apparent that this is a claim that Kant wants to make only about determinate concepts, not indeterminate ones. If aesthetic claims themselves are responsive to evidence and evaluable as true or false, it will be natural to hear these repeated assertions as limiting themselves to the genuinely objective domain, and it will then be of interest to ask where Kant sees its boundaries to lie. (Textual support for this idea can be found at §9.3.) To locate them by reference to criterially-driven concepts of the sort just mentioned would, however, be far too narrow. See the discussion of determinable judgments below. In fact, Kant says that this way of settling disagreements applies both to arguments and to disputes, only it initially seems more obviously applicable to cases of the first kind than of the second. 'Did our pleasure really arise from those parts of his poem, which we denominate faults, this would be no objection to criticism in general: it would only be an objection to those particular rules of criticism, which would establish such circumstances to be faults, and would represent them as universally blameable. If they are found to please, they cannot be faults; let the pleasure, which they produce, be ever so unexpected and unaccountable.' In fact, Kant says that there could be no purely intellectual thought, since thought requires understanding, and hence the deployment of the categories (cf. CPR B71). Perhaps, at his strictest, then, even if the power of judgment and our power of judgment need not be coextensive, he will say that there could be no true judgment about the noumenal. However, this leaves God and the angels in a poor position, since their intellectual intuition must be a vehicle of truth if it is to be of any service at all. For my purposes, however, we can regard this issue as a red herring; what is crucially important is that the limitations of human minds are not allowed to dictate the range of truth itself. Kant has no hesitation about that (cf. CPR B72). Scarcely, but not more. At Intro. VII.2, Kant speaks of making inferences from our pleasure to the subjective finality (purposiveness) of the beautiful object. He also identifies its subjective finality as the crucial property to which our pleasure is a response and also confesses that that finality is not an intuitable feature of the object (eine Beschaffenheit des Objekts selbst). Putting those things together with the location of the judgment of taste's determining ground in the supersensible, he might be offered the option of saying that our pleasure can sometimes give us an arguable lien on the supersensible of a highly indirect kind.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Hume, Kant and the Standard of Taste DISCUSSIONS OF KANT'S AESTHETICS coming from the Englishspeaking world will start with a preliminary section on Hume. The implication is that whether or not Kant had read his predecessor's reflections on taste, he has the same targets in view as Hume and generally makes more of an impact on them. When one reaches the details of this programme, things are less clear, for it turns out to be quite hard to say how Hume and Kant differ when they are read as concentrating attention on the analysis of the claim that this or that is beautiful, elegant or whatever. Uniformity of sentiment among Hume's true judges and ideal universal delight among Kantian critics amount to much the same thing, and it is entirely uncertain how much of the remainder of Kant's analysis (issues of necessity and purposiveness, that is) are not either already accommodated within Hume's more discursive way of talking, or else better simply forgotten. This, I think, is a fruitless and mistaken way of viewing the relationship between the two philosophers. They are largely concerned with different issues, and what is of moment to the one is only marginal to the other. Consequently, we do better to see them as complementing each other rather than competing. In the previous chapter, I stressed how Kant thinks that truth-directed arguments are in place in aesthetic discourse whereas cut-and-dried disputes are not. What is notable about arguments is that they are often so very difficult to settle, and that they advance in dialectical fashion, something about which Kant has very little to say. I would like to suggest that the most

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coherent reading of Hume is one that represents him as asking how the responses of outside parties can be brought to bear in the conduct of critical disagreements. In the detail of his answer he does much more than Kant to describe the manner in which dialectical arguments advance. To make good this claim, I try to show that alternative readings of Burne's essay falter, and then also to say why it is wrong to suppose that Kant's response to Hume must be outrightly dismissive. A close reading of Hume should do much to help us understand just what it is to 'bring judgments into accordance out of any by means of their mutual opposition'(CJ §56.2) The peculiar focus of my interest is underscored by siting this chapter on Hume here rather than at the beginning. I

What is wanted is a manner of resolving differences about taste that avoid the extremes of a scientistic conception of aesthetic reality and of radical subjectivism. The first treats critical assertions as verified by the existence of 'real qualities' in objects, an almost technical term, I think, whose compliants would be straightforwardly non-relational properties; 1 radical subjectivism, by contrast, assimilates them to assertions about, or expressions of the judging subject's own sentiment about their subject matter. In place of these unsatisfactory rivals, Hume holds out 'a Standard of Taste, whereby differences of men may be reconciled, or at least the one confirmed and the other opinion condemned' ('Of the Standard of Taste', paragraph 6). 'Reconciliation' here does not consist in the discovery that the parties in some dispute are mistaken about the relation of their views to one another, the standard somehow enabling them to see behind merely verbal differences to an underlying agreement between them. Hume makes this plain well before floating his own proposal, remarking that although such illusory disputes regularly occur in the sciences, in matters of taste genuine disagreements are far more common. Rather, a reconciliation of divergent views takes place by those in disagreement applying the proffered standard and then coming to see that at least one of them has to abandon his earlier way of thinking (together with the sentiments integral to it), so that in the end their judgments and sentiments fall into accord.

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Furthermore, application of the standard is to reconcile critical differences by bringing sentiments into accord with a correct view of the matter. This is evident from Hume's thought that while we may indeed find it impossible to get some critics to agree, at least when we are uninvolved in the dispute we can see how the standards should be applied, and then 'a decision [is] afforded condemning one sentiment and confirming another'. Plainly, condemning and confirming would only make sense if we take the change of view that is looked for to be in the direction of correctness, and not falling just anywhere. 2 Notoriously, the standard consists in the joint verdict of true judges, those who have a rare combination of 'strong sense, united with delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice ... This can alone entitle critics to this valuable character [i.e. that of being true judges]; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty' (paragraph 23). When it is asked why appeal to the true judge should impress contending parties, the answer is presumably to be found in the relation between the judge's verdicts and what makes one of the disputed assertions true. The sentiments that the verdicts of true judges express are, it may appear, simply constitutive of these truths, and, since disputing parties are in search of truth, once they come to recognise the constitutive relation that the standard establishes, the assumption is that they will be moved to follow it without demur. The main trouble is practical, and it comes in discerning what the true judges' verdicts in fact are. But about that Hurne is fairly sanguine: 'In reality/ he reports, 'the difficulty of finding, even in particulars, the standard of taste, is not so great as it is represented .... Just expressions of passion and nature are sure, after a little time, to gain public applause, which they maintain for ever.' This interpretation of the standard is very largely fuelled by passages from earlier writings. So, in the Treatise, the idea of vice is accounted for in terms of a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in us towards particular actions (e.g. wilful murder). 'Here is a matter of fact; but 'tis the object of a feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of

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blame from the contemplation of it' (Selby-Bigge (ed.}, p. 468). Likewise, in 'The Sceptic', composed fifteen years or so before the essay on taste, we find: '(D]eformed, odious, beautiful, amiable, these qualities are not really in the objects, but belong entirely to that sentiment of the mind which praises or blames' (Lenz (ed.), p. 122); a little further on, and directly on aesthetic judgment, Hume says: 'Beauty is not a quality of the circle. It lies not in any part of the line whose parts are all equally distant from a common centre. It is only the effect, which that figure produces upon a mind, whose particular fabric or structure renders it susceptible of such sentiments' (ibid., p. 125). These claims are already so well established in the earlier writings that when we now find Hume claiming that 'beauty and deformity, more than sweet and bitter, are not qualities in objects, but belong entirely to the sentiments' (paragraph 16; emphasis added here and above), it is entirely natural to suppose that the idea is central to the view on offer and that a perfect continuity reigns between the earlier and the later views. The constitutive reading of the standard looks sufficiently solidly anchored in Hume's thought, though for future reference we should note that it is far from the only thing that is anchored there. 3 While the larger part of the essay is given over to finding a sufficiently sensitive specification of the true judge, towards its very end, Hume raises a number of queries that he professes to find no more than marginally irksome. Yet they ought to give him pause, because unless circumvented they will show that the standard cannot work. There are four of them, and they are interesting enough to set out in some detail. First, there are two issues of 'inner frame'. 'A young man, whose passions are warm, will be more sensibly touched with amorous and tender images, than a man more advanced in years who takes pleasure in wise, philosophical reflections, concerning the conduct of life, and moderation of the passions. At twenty, Ovid may be the favourite author, Horace at forty, and perhaps Tacitus at fifty' (paragraph 29). We are to assume that our attention is fixed on true critics of the already specified kind. If we demand joint (uniform) verdicts from them, that is, agreement in their sentiments, the very differences of frame deriving from their variously mature mental habits will ensure that there are none, or at least that there

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are far fewer than we might like to think. Hume infers that there is nothing to choose between these authors if what we are seeking is a ranking. 'It is almost impossible not to feel a predilection for what suits our particular turn and disposition. Such preferences are innocent and unavoidable, and can never reasonably be the object of dispute, because there is no standard by which they can be decided' (paragraph 30). Since it seems so eminently right to refuse to rank Ovid, Horace and Tacitus, it is tempting to approve Hume's dismissal of the query. Yet any such sympathetic response ignores a greater threat, one which Hume also failed to notice or else too cavalierly brushed aside. If we fix on good judges who are distinguished from one another only in ways to which no exception can reasonably be taken, and find their voices discordant or otherwise failing to sound in unison, there just are no 'uniform verdicts' that their diverse sentiments propose. Since such verdicts are supposedly constitutive of the valuationally central aesthetic qualities of the writing under scrutiny, assertions that invoke them cannot be correct. In the situation described, Ovid will precisely not be amiable; Horace not elegant; Tacitus not estimably judicious and terse. 4 Parallel remarks may be made about the second issue of internal frame which Hume mentions, this time built around those natural dispositions that distinguish people at the same stage of their maturation and which tend to stay with them throughout their lives. 'One person is more pleased with the sublime, another with the tender, a third with raillery' (paragraph 30), and their sentiments are correspondingly diverse. There is no clear limit to such peculiarities, but, if we look for uniformity among well-chosen critics to determine whether, say, the sublime Milton merits that title, more has to be said than that we are concerned here only with innocent differences between good judges. Since Hume fares no better with this version of the difficulty than the last, one may begin to suspect of a measure of irony lying behind his apparent confidence. This suspicion grows as we turn to issues of' external situation' and introduce material that bears on the standard's diachronic aspect. We are to consider our approach to foreign or temporally distant cultures (our own included, of course). Given our particular background, it is not easy for us rightly to appreciate,

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say, Terence or Machiavelli. Over time, evaluative responses to these and other authors vary, since in different ages the very same features of their writing take good judges in different and sometimes estranging ways. Here, Hume is more openly aware of the threat to his project than before. In response, the description of the standard-setting good judge is refined: we are to fix attention on those who are learned and reflective in addition to possessing the qualities already listed. These will then be the judges best able to abstract from matters that might otherwise inhibit favourable responses, and so serve as suitable guides, whose voices will coincide with the finest critics of the past (learned and reflective ones too, we may presume). Despite hailing from a different background than their predecessors, they are unlikely to be upset by conventions that are, critically speaking, neither here nor there. The learned will be best placed to know what the assumptions of naturalness were for earlier ages and what were merely formal conventions; the reflective will fix which responses to the conventions are appropriate, determining which are acceptable and which strain the imagination too far. If this is how Hume reasons, he is unduly optimistic. Judgments of the learned and the reflective may themselves be expected to differ at different times. What it is that such people see in the past as being of interest and not distressingly strange will itself be liable to vary as their own conceptions of what is natural and what is far-fetched are tempered by their own experience, where, inevitably, this is experience that is different at different times. The objection reaches far. Almost any aesthetically interesting property may be encountered in a setting that makes it difficult for a later audience to appreciate and sharply identify. But under the last consideration, even when the ideal critic is more closely characterised than before, the constitutively construed standard for that property, namely uniform response among accredited judges, will be certain to break down once diachronic considerations are allowed to surface. Hume handles his final hesitation in a curiously asymmetrical way. Our estimation of literary works is not independent of their moral tenor, and revolutions of morality lead good judges from different periods to disagree about them. One expects to find him dealing with the point by refining the character of the good judge yet further, and holding out to us the prospect of a uniformity

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that we do not notice because of the way in which important constancies of sentiment become lost among the many dissenting but irrelevant voices that make up the motley of critical history. He does nothing of the kind. Instead, he appeals to the sound moral judges of his own day and insists that we are bound to follow them. A very violent effort is requisite to change our judgments of manners, and excite sentiments of approbation or blame, love or hatred, different from those to which the mind from long custom, has been familiarized. And where a man is confident of the rectitude of that moral standard by which he judges, he is justly jealous of it, and will not pervert the sentiments of his heart for a moment, in complaisance to any writer whatsoever ... nor is it proper for us to do so. (paragraph 33). By the end of the essay, then, it may appear that Hume has to all intents and purposes abandoned his proposed standard, even though he presents what he offers to his reader as no departure from it. Since he introduces these four objections of his own accord, yet plainly cannot answer them in accordance with his programme, it can easily seem that his attitude is more equivocal than at first it looks. So, one may well wonder whether, beneath the calm surface of the writing Hume surmises that there just is no safe passage between the Scylla of a purely non-relational aesthetic reality and the Charybdis of radical subjectivism. In that case, the best-advised position to take in critical disputes will be that of the ironical sceptic. II

To stave off defeat at this stage, we need do little more than draw out something implicit inHume's remarks about the development of the tastes of the ideal critic, one, it will be recalled, who has developed his natural inclinations and sentiments by means of practice and comparison. Plainly, it would be unreasonable to expect the very same person to guide our judgment in just any area. Rather, we shall think that one who makes himself expert in one particular field will be a good guide for it, and when we look in another direction we shall seek advice from someone else. Similarly, we shall expect Hume to think, in accordance with his dictum that we turn our attention most readily to matters

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that resemble us, that the practised eye that is perfected by comparisons will best be able to make judgments of a limited kind, in areas in which it is naturally inclined to exercise itself. Once this is granted, the original proposal might be better understood as specifying the true judge not with respect to just any area of interest, as Hume seems to envisage, but to an area appropriate to his interests, his character and his background. Then we shall not require the older man to serve as standard for Ovid (interest), though maybe he will serve well for Tacitus. Equally, the person with a penchant for the sublime (character) will not be well chosen as an appropriate standard to judge Candide. Nor shall we expect the home-grown judge (background) to be well placed to provide the best critical assessments of writing of foreign provenance. This refinement of Hume's rougher specification is only to be seen as a refinement of the standard itself. Identifying the most competent critic for the judgment of Ovid by reference to the interests of the young, and so forth, will do nothing to prevent the greying sage from sharply appreciating that poet's merits, nor, mutatis mutandis, prevent the precocious youth from enjoying a well-founded admiration for Tacitus. As far as the standard itself goes, however, it is a different matter. There, the criterion of good taste in respect of one author or another will be the sentiment of someone whose interests, temperament and background naturally draw them to works of the kind in point and whose responses are most appropriately chosen for the writer in question. s With this adjustment made, greater warmth might greet the proposal. The standard does now yield a much more uniform response to literary works up for evaluation than it could hope for before. Many divergencies of taste that previously made for trouble emerge as innocuous. Not only do absolute questions such as 'Is Ovid a fine poet?' receive a clear answer, as before they did not, and as Hume did not care to admit; also, we can appreciate, as before we could not, why it is right to say that there is no evident ranking to be made of Ovid and Tacitus, or of Addison and Milton. The standard as now formulated just does not cater for comparisons between writing of significantly different sorts. 6 If this move avoids the first three hazards, what shall we now say of the licence that Hume surprisingly grants to abide on our

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own moral standards as against those of the culture from which an alien work proceeds? Where the ideas of morality and decency alter from one age to another, and where vicious manners are described without being marked with the proper character of blame and disapprobation, this must be allowed to disfigure the poem, and be a real deformity. I cannot, nor is it proper that I should, enter into such sentiments. (paragraph 32) Notice first that this passage makes no mention of our moral sense as opposed to any other. The contrast is simply between a sensibility that takes pleasure in what is vicious and one that does not. When, a little later, Hume does speak with satisfaction of our moral superiority (as in the preference which he expresses for the moderns against the ancients), that too can be taken as a contingent, factual, matter, reflecting the good fortune that we have of being able to judge more easily in accordance with the well-developed ethical dimension of the standard than did some of our predecessors. Hume is, after all, perfectly entitled to believe that, as it happened, that refined standard was happily realised in mid-eighteenth-century French or enlightened and liberal Scottish and English society and not in the culture of classical times. Putting it like this will help him to avoid the charge of foreign (or subcultural) chauvinism or parochialism. (Nothing has been said about the reason for insisting on the place of such a dimension within the standard, but let us just take that on trust.) Then, second, just as the relativisations of the standard that resolved Hume's earlier worries grew out of a more precise sense of what commitment to practice and comparison amount to, so also here we may reflect that the concern for humanity that sets itself against barbarity and indecency is itself a natural outgrowth of the strong sense and associated reflection that Hume has built into the specification of his standard at the outset. A person of strong sense can scarcely fail to be someone of developed ethical sensibility. So, if we think of foreign material that offends that sensibility, even if, as a matter of fact in the culture from which it stems, the best local judges approve it, there is room enough to think that we should not take them as fully compliant with the standard. It is not in the least parochial or chauvinistic after hard reflection to think that our standards

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prevail here. As Hume observes, it is a truth of fact that we cannot easily set aside standards of which we are confident; what is more, by those very standards themselves, there being no others available, it is not proper that we should. III

The passage last cited touches on a normative strand inHume's thought, also rooted in his earlier writings, but one which sits most uncomfortably with the present reading of the proposed standard. When he demands that the sound judge mark the moral deformities of the literary work with their proper measure of blame and disapprobation, this is no stray remark. Elsewhere, he observes that' the good qualities of an enemy', though 'hurtful to us', nonetheless 'command esteem and respect' when we consider them without reference to our own particular interests', and that 'tho' 'tis certain a musical voice is nothing but one that gives a particular kind of pleasure; yet 'tis difficult for a man to be sensible that the voice of an enemy is agreeable, or to allow it to be musical. But a person of fine ear, who has the command of himself, can separate these feelings and give praise to what deserves it' (Treatise, p. 469; emphasis added). All that has yet been said to motivate anyone to emulate the sentiments of the true judge, when they are initially in disgreement with them, has been that good judges speak true and that we have an interest in truth. But this is unimpressive because, as soon as we come to see that truth in these matters is constituted by the sentiments of good judges, all motivation will crumble. That good judges' sentiments differ from our own cannot by itself lead us to exchange our judgments and feelings for theirs. If, in addition, we are now told that it is proper to be moved by this or that, in the way that good judges are, one is bound to ask what it is that makes it proper for the good judges themselves to respond as they do. This question the constitutivelyread standard cannot answer; but it is fundamental, and without a satisfying answer to it the standard collapses. This point underscores a recent objection of David Wiggins's to Hume's proposal, that his standard is unfaithful to our understanding of what a good judge actually is, in particular for having 'insufficient regard for the properties attributed to objects within the critic's or judge's sentiment of approbation' (David Wiggins,

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Needs, Values, Truth, p. 192). The idea of the good judge needs to be far richer than anything that the constitutive picture of him can provide, because, without something more, the normative idea of the propriety of his responses, as indeed the centrality of practice and delicacy of discrimination to the good judge's character, must remain so much eyewash. The proposal sounds in order by mimicking our actual practice, but at the same time it removes from it anything that might give these ideas the substance which they purport to possess. Earlier, I said that the constitutive interpretation of the standard is very largely rooted in Burne's earlier writings, but there will be those who discern in his essay's account of critical discourse additional and self-standing underpinning for it. That is, while allowing that Burne's position is ultimately untenable, whether he recognised it or not, they will say that it is one from which he is theoretically unable to detach himself. A passage from the start of the essay, embodying a general claim about evaluative discourse, might be cited in support. The sentiments of men often differ with regard to beauty and deformity of all kinds, even while their general discourse is the same. There are certain terms in every language which import blame, and others praise; and all men who use the same tongue must agree in their application of them. Every voice is united in applauding elegance, propriety, simplicity, spirit in writing; and in blaming fustian, affectation, coldness, and a false brilliancy. But when critics come to particulars, this seeming unanimity vanishes; and it is found, that they had affixed a very different meaning to their expressions. 7 (paragraph 2) Here, Hume is less concerned with overall comparative judgments of the kind on which I have so far focused than with finer-grain verdicts, those that must provide the bases underlying any serious overall evaluations. Going by this passage, one might possibly come to think that, at the level of fine grain, our aesthetic language works for Hume in the following fashion: a particular term, elegance', say, or fustian', comprises two distinct elements, one that is quite neutral with regard to sentiment and the other of which is sentiment-involving. Now, what we find in practice is that, although people say that they approve of elegance, in fact they often call something elegant of I

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which they disapprove. This is where disagreements typically lie. People agree readily enough about the applicability of a term's neutral element, but differ in the sentiment which they attach to it. And just because, in our ordinary meaning, 'elegantly' analytically implies favourable response, these divergent judges, insofar as they employ that word, must be using it in a different sense from the rest of us. Bipartite models of evaluative language are familiar enough, and their origin is sometimes traced back to Hume. s If this view really were Hume's own, there would indeed be no satisfactory explanation of how the wisdom of true judges can legitimately be brought to bear in disputes of taste. Since they are cast in the role of reconciling sentiments in the way outlined at the start, their main task will not be to get people to agree on the neutral element of their aesthetic vocabulary's terms. That is here presented as a relatively uncontentious matter, and where there are differences of opinion we may presume them to be quickly resolvable. 9 Rather, the true judge serves to get quarrelling parties to feel the same sentiments, hence on this particular vision of the matter to agree that the poet about whom the parties disagree has produced truly fustian verse or truly elegant rhymes or, alternatively, to agree that the work is fustian or elegant only under the 'ambiguity' that reverses the usual response and leaves the neutral element untouched. Yet, all that the established critic has to rely on to achieve this is an appeal to snobbery or ungrounded exercise of intellectual muscle, since his exercises of practice and comparison are not permitted to have any reference to anything beyond themselves 10 · Two examples that illustrate the passage show beyond dispute that this picture of critical discourse is a travesty of Hume' s own. In the one, we are to imagine Homer and Fenelon disputing the virtues of their respective heroes. Fenelon opines that Achilles' deeds are too mingled with ferocity to count as estimably heroic; and as for Ulysses' prudence, that contains an undue degree of cunning and deceit to merit the epithet. Plainly, the disagreement here is not simply one of attitude to something that is uncontroversially agreed between the two authors. Rather, what is in question is whether Achilles is genuinely heroic, Ulysses genuinely prudent. As Hume envisages it, the true judge will be best placed to decide the matter, not in the sense of stipulating

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the answer or forcing approval or disapproval on us, but in the light of his greater sensitivity to the details of the cases. The brief discussion of the Muslim and the Christian that follows supports the diagnosis. The former 'bestows praise on such instances of treachery and inhumanity ... as are utterly incompatible with civilized society ... Every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers' (paragraph 4). Here, the disagreement in evaluation of some deed does not stem from disagreement of attitude to an acknowledged treachery; rather one party is so insensitive to what the case actually shows up that he does not even judge the deed to be a treacherous one. Prejudice blinds the Muslim to what is before him. The imagined Christian, immune to that particular prejudice, recognises what the Muslim does not. These examples do, I believe, make the normative aspect of the judgments quite comprehensible. The good judge is sensitive to something about the situation that makes it one to which a certain evaluative attitude is, in Hume's terms, proper, and one that commands the associated sentiment. And this way of seeing the illustrations provides the basis for thinking that the true judges' attitudes are ones which have weight for me. For I have an interest both in what is present - making my reaction to the work a reaction to what it has to display - and in making my reaction one that is called for by what is on display. As Hume points out, we cannot drive in a wedge between seeing what is on display for what it is and our reaction to it, as if it were just up to me to react as I will once my judgment of the facts is made (as is suggested by the bipartite account of the matter). Seeing and judging Ulysses' prudence for what it is cannot be divorced from my estimation of it, and any aberrant evaluative response will itself call in question whether I do see it for what it is. Here lies the force of the observation that 'in every language there are certain terms which import praise, and others blame'. What counts most decisively against the constitutive reading of the standard, however, is not that it cannot achieve its ends, which Hume might have failed to spot, but that it entirely neglects the story of Sancho Panza's kinsmen and their function in the essay. That anecdote is told to illustrate the importance to the good critic of possessing delicacy of taste, where 'the organs [are] so fine, as to allow nothing to escape them, and

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at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition' (paragraph 16). Clearly, one who possesses such delicacy must only make distinctions where there are distinctions to be made, and not be one simply to draw distinctions among things that come before him. This is explicitly a world-sensitive delicacy, and that it is so central a characteristic of Hume's true judges ('whether their taste be taken literally or metaphorically') is itself a powerful reason to believe that their verdicts cannot be constitutive of the truth of critical claims. The gloss on the story that Hume proposes bears this out. The tastevins' seemingly absurdly conflicting fine judgments are verified not by reference to their rare character, their practice and delicacy and lack of prejudice, but by the presence of the iron key with the leathern thong at the bottom of the liquid which they are sampling. The relevance of this for criticism is plain: 'Though the hogshead had never been emptied, the taste of the one [i.e. the pair of experts each of whom is sensitive to something particular in the wine] was still equally delicate, and that of the other [i.e. the scoffing onlookers] equally dull and languid: but it would have been more difficult to have proved the superiority of the former to the conviction of every bye-stander' (paragraph 16). A question of accommodation here has to be acknowledged. The key and its leathern thong are used by Hume as analogues of rules and principles, conformity to which supposedly evokes the sentiments of good judges, and not of the qualities themselves for which sound judges are claimed to serve as standard. And it is at this precise point that Hume so roundly asserts that 'it is certain that beauty and deformity, more than sweet and bitter, are not qualities in objects, but belong entirely to the sentiment, either internal or external' (ibid.). However, defenders of the constitutive reading of the standard cannot make anything of this. In context, the most that this textual observation will yield is that beauty is constituted by the joint verdict of practised judges as they manifest sensitivity to some feature of the objects which they confront (viz. their conformity to rules and principles)- one which is liable to elicit a corresponding approbation. Yet, since this formulation has it that the sentiments of true judges only enter the picture if they are responses to what is present in the object, it is not discernibly different from saying that beauty (for example) is a property that

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objects have in virtue of being thus and so conformed, to wit, the property of being liable to elicit such-and-such responses in sensitive and practised judges. This is a far cry from the claim that 'beauty and deformity ... belong entirely to the sentiment'. What Hume needs, but has not quite succeeded in articulating, is unabashed reference to something in the world for the good judge to detect distinct from the sentiments, yet distinct also from any supposed rules and principles that can be specified without reference to our sentiments and responses (different from key and thong, that is). Significantly enough, not finding such an articulation to hand, Hume himself goes on to speak of 'methodizing the beauties of writing or reducing them to general principles' (emphasis added), though quite how self-consciously he uses the phrase may be debated. Nevertheless, if we pick up the hint, this locution does suggest that Hume has it in mind to minimise the sort of full-bloodedly internalist account of the valuational properties that he proposes elsewhere. For what is methodised or reduced cannot be the sentiments themselves, but at best what produces them, viz. the beauties of the writing. That Hume is sensitive to this thought comes out sharply at the very end of the paragraph, where he identifies explicitly enough the individual work's conformity to a rule or principle as a beauty of the writing of which the bad critic wants the delicacy to be sensible. However, eschewing reductionism in the aesthetic domain as much as in the case of sweet or bitter and the other sensible qualities, we are bound to advise Hume not to say in the explication of his anecdote that it is the key and the leather that the tastevins taste. Rather, it is the taste of leather and iron that has infiltrated the wine that their expertise makes them sensitive to, and he will preserve the force of his tale by saying that (in line with his theoretically-induced belief in rules and principles), by parallel, it is their conformity to the rules of good writing that endows the poet's lines with the liability which they have to evoke the positive sentiments of good judges, but that that liability is what it is in objects that 'is naturally fitted to produce the feelings'. It is on this, not on the supposed rules and principles, that he really needs to concentrate. In mitigation of the lapse, we may recall just how difficult Locke, so much less

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drawn than Hume to run the two togeth~r, found it consistently to keep apart qualities and our ideas of them (cf. e.g. Essay, II. viii. 19). It is not absurd to think that Hume has made a similar slip here in conflating a liability to produce feelings on the part of some object with something 'belonging entirely to the sentiment', and, still looking for something in the object to call forth the sentiments, feels obliged to talk of rules and principles to supply the need. 11 As soon as the conflation is remedied, rules and principles become superfluous and can be happily dispensed with, or else treated on their own merits as a matter of merely peripheral interest. IV

Two issues remain. To be happy with this way of taking the essay, we still have to find a role for Hume's standard to play in critical practice. We also need to be clear how it is to do so. Now, even when constitutively taken, the standard's working would have required amplification. All that the abandoned reading actually proposed was a thesis about the truth-conditions of certain assertions central to critical discourse. It had nothing at all to say about how the parties might be brought to recognise the truth in any given case of critical dispute. This can be seen by reflecting that the good judge is essentially only a hypothetical, not a categorical, figure. An optimal response to some drama of ancient times that had never been performed would have been what fixed its literary worth, and that to which disputing parties would have been directed; but what should they do to identify it? The answer is clear: they must look to actually existing, welltrained judges for guidance, and now judges whose responses are certainly not constitutive of literary worth, nor proof against error. Such guides will (unsurprisingly) have just the character that Hume originally specifies in elaborating his standard; and they will have this character for just the reasons that Hume gives. They will provide the surest indication that we could have of what those hypothetical optimal responses might be, and they do this because they come as close as any actual evidence can bring us to what such a response to a given work would be. What this suggests is surely that, once true judges no longer act hypothetically and criterially for the truth or falsity of critical

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claims, but categorically and evidentially for the possession of valuationally interesting critical properties of literary works, because the very same epistemological issue arises here as there, we should simply shift our conception of the standard from the former back to the latter. The standard is now, and, I surmise, for Hume always was, conceived of as evidential for sound criticism, not constitutive of it. If you like, 'Of the Standard of Taste' is a contribution to the theory of aesthetic evidence, not to the theory of aesthetic nature. Once we see it in this way, we can look back at the sources of variation that occupied Hume before, and recognise that his reaction to them is entirely appropriate and not one to criticise. They do not strike him as difficultes because they are not difficulties, despite the fact that, on the abandoned reading, we might have expected him to have found them more troublesome than he did. So as far as evidence goes, uniform verdicts may be ideal, particularly when culled from a wide range of people; but, for the reasons which Hume notes, they are not very frequent among those whose judgment we think is likely to be trustworthy. On the other hand, we can certainly tolerate a degree of divergence among such people before we begin to think that they have nothing to tell us about what we find baffling. That is, under the constitutive reading of the matter, the standard operated in an on/ off manner, but, when it is taken evidentially, the question at issue is largely a matter of degree: how well supported is the judgment that this work is thus and so? Here, a less than uniform response will only rarely lead to a downright negative assessment. Further, speaking evidentially, there is very good reason not to narrow down the specification of the true judge in the way previously envisaged. The impact of widely (if not uniformly) shared responses among people of different temperaments and different humours is far more impressive than any uniform verdict among a narrowly-chosen band would be. It is similar when we consider diachronic matters. For the most part, the evidence of good judges available to us will be of those in our own culture, sharing many of our moral assumptions, and it should not surprise us that Hume thinks primarily of them. But even when we can appeal to native, temporally distant critics, there too we shall be well advised not to neglect the

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insights of those of our own place and period. This is all the more legitimate as we recall the store that Hume sets by persons of learning, taking care thereby that our own local guides should be ones best able to understand the foreign material which they address. Anyone brought up under the tutelage of Kant will suspect that, even if there remains a role for Hume's standard to play, the idea of evidential appeal to good critics is thoroughly wrongheaded. It suggests that, in forming my aesthetic views and critical opinions, my own responses to an object may simply give way to those of someone whom I recognise to be a good critic, even when my own responses are entirely at odds with what that person tells me. I just' grope about empirically among the judgments of others', as Kant disdainfully put it, rather than 'pronounce my judgment a priori and not as a mere imitation because the thing gives universal pleasure'1 2 (CJ §32.3). There is certainly one way of thinking about Hume's programme under which this accusation would be justified. 13 Maybe it chimes with what Kant himself believed was amiss with empiricist aesthetics. Let Peter and Paul disagree in some critical judgment that they make, yet be willing to settle their difference by consulting good judges, on whose identity they happily agree. Further, let these persons' sentiments concur with Paul's view of the matter. The idea might then be that Peter should accept what they say and, as a result, come to think that the work in question is as Paul claims it to be and not as he, Peter, is inclined to judge it. Now, given that reconciliation aims beyond mere agreement to agreement on what is correct, appeal to good judges should be capable of transmitting knowledge in such cases, so the view that Peter comes to form must leave him knowing that the work is indeed as Paul sees it and not as he does. This situation, Kant will protest, is incoherent - and rightly so. What goes wrong with it is not, surely, that aesthetic judgments cannot express knowledge. Certainly, the kind of subjectivism that connects aesthetic judgments with the discerning of phenomenally elusive subjective properties of things should not deny that. Nor can it be that aesthetic knowledge cannot be transmitted from one person to another. Reading Homer will, on certain suppositions about his claim to expertise in the matter, enlighten us about Helen's charms. So why not here? Well, in the

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case of Helen, we are at least presuming that if only we could be confronted by her and not merely by her wraith (as Euripides had Paris beguiled, and Mephistopheles Faust) we should enjoy the sentiment that Homer himself (or, better, his ultimate ancestral informant) enjoyed. And while that counterfactual's holding may not be sufficient to make Homer's putative knowledge transmissible to us, it does, with some qualification, seem to be necessary. 14 However, in the case which we are considering, the condition is not fulfilled, for we are trying to imagine that appeal to the true judges will settle the issue for Peter, even while he does not share their enjoyment of the work in question. So any attempt to bypass the subject's own experiential response by appeal to expert witnesses will fail. When Kant makes his remarks about what he calls 'heteronomy', he in fact does so in the course of rejecting any appeal to rules and principles by way of securing proof in critical disputes. However, this merely inserts another cog in the argument. To be told by a good judge that this work conforms to certain rules and principles and so should carry my approbation cannot provide me with knowledge here for just the same reason as before. We are supposing that, even if I could see the work conformed to some rule, it would still not move me. The argument proceeds as before. If this is how Kant did understand Hume, he misunderstood him. In the first place Hume's standard reconciles varying sentiments rather than just judgments, and this could only come about by people sharing their experiential responses to something rather than somehow sincerely agreeing in their judgments while differing sentimentally in petto. Nor will it do to suppose that Hume thinks that such agreement of sentiment comes about as a result of some prior agreement in judgment secured by consulting good critics first. What he makes plain is that the good judge tries to show the disputing parties what to see. He operates not by enouncing what Peter is to believe, but by getting him to respond to the poem with which he is having difficulty in the light of suggestions about what to look for. Belief is concurrent with response here; it does not precede it. The evidence of the good judge is, properly speaking, indicative, not inductive. 15 Textually, Hume says:

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When we show the bad critic an avowed principle of art; when we illustrate this principle by means of examples, whose operation, from his own particular taste, he acknowledges to be conformable to the principle; when we prove to him that the same principle may be applied to the present case, where he did not perceive or feel its influence; he must conclude on the whole that the fault lies within himself and that he wants the delicacy which is requisite to make him sensible of every beauty and every blemish in any composition or discourse. (paragraph 16) Against this background, we see now more precisely how a successful reconciliation can be expected to take place. The party whose response to a given poem changes has found that the true judge is able to show him something of which he had not been aware before, and so comes to make the judgment (incorporating the correct sentiment) that had up to then eluded him. The convert does not just agree verbally and keep quiet about his own unchanging response. His response changes as a result of commerce with the good judge in the face of the work itself If 'imitating another's judgment' were all that he did, then his utterance would be insincere; but there is no reason whatever to suppose that Hume has that sort of case in mind. Kant himself should be content with this suggestion. For one thing, he shares Hume's respect for critics: as he puts it, 'they correct and expand our judgment' (CJ §34); but they only do this by enabling us to respond appropriately to things to which previously we were not responsive. Second, he is adamant that the young poet - even when mistaken about the value of his work- should not just take the good judge's word for it. He has to be persuaded in the face of his own writing, and the way in which Kant, like Hume, supposes this to come about is by critics alerting him to the presence of some defect in his writing which he can then recognise, probably not something that he would have achieved without their help. Knowing what to look for enables him to see it. Finally, it would be perfectly in order for Hume to point out that discussion of aesthetic knowledge here can well be sidestepped. In the aesthetic domain, it is not so much knowledge that concerns us as appreciation. And appreciation, which may well provide knowledge, cannot bypass the experiential response.

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We all know of Helen's beauty; appreciation, alas, is beyond us. And when Hume's poor critic modestly supposes himself insensitive to things that the good judge tries to point out, what he regrets is absent appreciation, not present ignorance. Hume brings out these points well; he could only do so on assumptions about the role of good judges that view them evidentially, not constitutively; and evidentially in such a way as to give no toehold to Kantian reticence. NOTES 1. This is equally the target of Kant's often misunderstood claim that the judgment of taste does not bring an object under concepts, or is not 'a logical judgment'. (Cf. CJ §1). In the two cases, the negative claim ranges over both primary and secondary qualities as traditionally understood. The puzzle for both thinkers is what is left over. For discussion of Kant's perplexity, see the previous chapter. 2. Mary Mothersill curiously objects that Hume's 'two aims are at odds with each other: you do not "reconcile" sentiments by "confirming one and condemning another'" (Beauty Restored (Oxford, 1984), p. 183}. Hume would not suppose that you do. Nonetheless, once two parties' initial disagreement is reconciled, he who has given ground will look back at his earlier opinion and condemn it: likewise he will confirm the view of his erstwhile opponent. Confirmation and condemnation here result from 'reconciliation'. They are not thought of as a means to it. 3. I am thinking particularly of Treatise I.ii.8: 'From considering that beauty like wit, cannot be defined, but is discerned only by a taste or sensation we may conclude that beauty is nothing but a form, which produces pleasure, as deformity is a structure of parts which conveys pain; and since the power of producing pain and pleasure make in this manner the essence of beauty and deformity, all the effects of these qualities must be derived from the sensation ... ' (Selby-Bigg, (ed.), p. 299). Notice that it is the power here that Hume calls the essence, not the sensations themselves. 4. How might Hume have overlooked this? Within this interpretation, perhaps we have to say that he only imagines his good critics being consulted about their favoured authors, so that the young man is not presumed to say anything about Tacitus, nor the sage about Ovid. But since they are introduced in evidence of a certain (allegedly harmless) diversity of taste, their very presumed silence about authors whom they prefer not to confront must be revealing. To make for embarrassment, it is not necessary that sound judges should disagree about some given writer or other; it is quite enough that they should fail to speak with one voice, that is, that they should fail to agree. If this is what Hume thinks does indeed happen, his conclusion ought to be not that preferences of blameless good judges are all equally correct, so much as that a notion of critical correctness rooted in the uniform sentiments of sound judges is already seriously under threat.

Hume, Kant and the Standard of Taste 5. Reference to a kind here is important because we need to indicate the relevant interest while leaving it open how the true judge is going to respond to the particular author or work we are concerned to assess. 6. When Hume sets up his problem in terms of the ridiculous supposition that Ogilby might be as fine an author as Milton, or Bunyan as Addison, our amusement probably stems from the incongruous assumption that Bunyan and Addison write in the same, or easily comparable, styles. Here, if anywhere, Hume should be saying that there is no standard to choose between them. 7. Cf. also this passage from paragraph 5: 'Whoever recommends any moral virtues, really does no more than is implied in the terms themselves.... Of all expressions, those which together with their other meaning, imply a degree either of blame or approbation, are the least liable to be perverted or mistaken.' 8. Notice, for instance, how readily the phrase 'their other meaning' in the last footnote adapts itself to this bipartite account of evaluative language. 9. It is as if Hume would think of those as being matters of' real qualities' and subject to some unpuzzling, objective decision-procedure. The concepts involved would be ones that Kant thought of as determinate or determinable. 10. It is interesting to speculate how far distrust of much art criticism rests on some such fear. Where distrust is ineradicable, it may well be underpinned by just such a bipartite conception of critical language. 11. In 'The Sceptic', he reminds his readers 'of that famous doctrine, supposed to be fully proved in modern times, that tastes and colours and all other sensible qualities, lie not in the bodies but merely in the senses'. And he goes on: 'the case is the same with beauty and deformity, virtue and vice. This doctrine however takes off no more from the reality of the latter qualities than from that of the former; nor need it give any umbrage to critics and moralists. Though colours were allowed to lie merely in the eye, would dyers or painters ever be less regarded or esteemed?' I do not quite know what to make of the 'supposed to be fully proved', but it is certain that, in the context of the discussion of delicacy of taste, it needs to be taken to be ill-founded, otherwise the responses of true judges could not be indices of distinctions that are there to be made. 12. The term 'a priori' here should cause no alarm. Kant only means that the judgment is made on no other basis than the subject's own response to the object of his attention. 13. Perhaps there are two. The appeal to the 'joint verdicts of true judges' might lead one to represent Hume as envisaging a naively inductive appeal to the standard. Given his views about induction, this strikes me as most unlikely. To retain this aspect of the standard, as we surely must, we should see the concert of voices as significant in strengthening my conviction that, on the particular occasion that confronts me, the critics are sensitive to something that I am not, and my confidence that they have correctly identified what it is. But, as I claim above, this is not the end of the matter for Hume, merely a first step.

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14. In the case of the transmission of knowledge of sensible qualities, the condition has to be weakened to allow for deficient or non-functioning organs and also for known illusions. Similarly, some weakening will also be necessary here (though not for quite the same reasons), but, however that comes to be done, it will not allow the recalcitrant party to the dispute to clear the hurdle. 15. This is, I think, a difference from the way in which the actually existing good judge would have served evidentially on the constitutively-taken reading of the standard. There, joint responses of good judges look bound to function inductively; here, they need no longer be taken in that way. Predictive considerations are quite out of place now.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Idealism of Purposiveness I DO TWO THINGS HERE: negatively, I rebut a common reading of Kant's aesthetic idealism; then, more positively, I propose an alternative account, sketching a defence against the main objections which it has to face. The greatest reward that accrues from replacing the first reading with the second is that it enables us to minimise the importance to Kant of purely formal considerations in his vision of the beautiful. Undue emphasis on that too often prevents one from seeing the truly humane foundation that underlies his thought in this area. I

The idealism of purposiveness, both of nature and of art, is formally stated in the rubric to §58, but in fact is formulated earlier, in the Introduction (section VII) and again in the Analytic (§§10-12). It is the doctrine that the purposiveness internal to beauty is without purpose (ohne Zweck). Contrasted with this is its realism, which would be the view that its purposiveness is fully purposive, designed (mit Absicht). The interpretative problem is to say just what this idealism amounts to. Once genuine realism is abandoned at this point, commentators have usually found it necessary to fudge up something lest we find ourselves abandoning purposiveness altogether. 1 It is largely this challenge that motivates the familiar reading: the beautiful is what looks designed, although not for anything in particular. 2 The point of the phrase 'not for anything in particular' here is both to secure something positive, so that we do not have merely the false appearance of purposiveness (that is, an idealism that

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comes to the denial of purpose altogether), and also to back off from any particular commitment to specific purposes by way of indeterminacy (so that we do not have realism either). The device does not sustain scrutiny. First, the established reading has to face the question: is there genuine purpose here? Is the 'looks purposive' that it contains just misleading? If the answer to the first question is 'No', we do not have purposiveness at all, be it of the purposeless variety or not. Then the idealism of the judgment of taste is nothing other than a denial of a place to purpose in beauty's analysis, which is not what Kant wants. On the other hand, if the answer is 'Yes', then, although we may not be able to say what the purpose is, there has to be one, whether we know it or not. 3 That fork leads us back to realism, or so it seems, which Kant does not want either. The sharpest way of putting the issue is to say that the idealism of purposiveness, under this reading, is self-contradictory. If there is no purposiveness, that cannot be its idealism: if there is, it looks like realism. Second, when we reflect on the point of the original introduction of the idea, the 'seems purposive, though for nothing in particular' view turns out to be singularly ill-suited to do the work. As I read it, the appeal to purposiveness is designed to help us answer the central question of the aesthetic part of the Critique of Judgment: how can a universal claim concerning a pleasure which we take in something be properly warranted when based on nothing more than the judging subject's own individual response to it? 4 Kant's thought in §§10-12 is at heart that only if the said pleasure is grounded in some purpose shall we be in a position to think that the pleasure-giving object would strike others in the same way, hence be truly beautiful. The introduction of purpose, that is, gives our judgment general leverage. Failing that, we shall be left impotent in the matter. Now, if we try putting it by saying merely that a particular object seems to be purposive, and that this is ultimately why I find it so pleasing, the seeming is, as I judge it, merely a seeming to me. On the basis of my own experience, that is the most that I can say. Then I should only have reason to attribute the pleasure I find in the chosen object to others if they too found it purposive. Yet, on the sole basis of its striking me in that way, I cannot hope to ground the thought that it will strike others

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similarly. Consequently, the appeal to purposiveness ohne Zweck to provide a warrant for the universality embedded in the claim that something is beautiful is quite bleak. s One may think that there is a reply to this. In general, when we say that something appears this way or that, we presume that it will appear the same way to other reasonable judges. For instance, if I say that the sun appears hot today, I am not making a remark about myself, but saying something about the appearance that will be presented to practically anyone in the vicinity. Nonetheless, I do this on the basis of my own experience alone. However, this sort of example can only be used in cases where we have antecedent reason to think that the appearance of F is the manifestation ofF-ness, real F-ness showing itself. It must then be grounded in that of which it is the appearance. Applying this thought to the present case, the appearance of purposiveness could consequently only serve its major task provided it were the manifestation of a real purposiveness. Again, the purported Idealism would be a camouflage for a Realism of purpose (under the interpretation which I am attacking). Third, Kant himself does in fact identify the particular, real purposiveness that he has in mind, although we may certainly concede that it is anything but clear exactly what it amounts to. It is that the beautiful object is purposive for judgment. At various points, this is glossed along the following lines: in virtue of its form, the object judged seems designed to put the cognitive faculties in harmony with one another. It appears to cater for a need that we have to make cognitive sense of the world. 6 This very readiness of Kant's to identify a definite, though vague, purpose itself militates firmly against the 'for nothing in particular' view. Next, once we look away from the case of natural beauty to that of beauty in the arts, the received reading makes no sense whatsoever. Even construing Kant at his most formalistic, we would be supposing that a beautiful painting had to be one that looked as if, in its form, it were designed for something, but for nothing in particular. How can this possibly be brought to match our experience of art, particularly with art of an age whose canon of success, unlike that of our own days, was unquestionably that of beauty? It is often said condescendingly that Kant was insensitive to the arts, but that too easily

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becomes a weak excuse for not bothering to understand what he thought. Last, and I take it that this is decisive, when, in the Critique of Teleological Judgment, at §72.5, Kant explains the difference between realism and idealism of purpose, he is quite explicit. An object is purposive in general when it comes into being as a result of an idea or thought of its effects - as in the case of desire, say rather than just mechanically. That is, purposiveness provides a particular case of the causal explanation of the origin of something. Its idealism, by contrast, is purposiveness without design, or without a desire, or, as Kant puts it both there and in the Introduction (section VII), unabsichtlich (unintentional). All we have to do is to show that the quite literal reading to which this gives rise does not simply amount to a version of the contradictory idea just criticised. We are helped to see that it does not by various examples that Kant gives of what he calls external (or relative) purposiveness, where one thing occurs for the sake of or to the advantage of another. Droll cases which he instances are of tapeworms (serving, some say, to correct a deficiency in the vital organs), dreams (which, he likes to think, keep us alive through agitation of the imagination, when otherwise sleep would amount to being dead, particularly after a heavy supper), vermin (which encourage men to keep clean) and mosquitoes (that give idle savages an incentive to drain the marshes), and so forth (all §67.4). All are purposive, but in each case undesignedly so, without a purpose, that is. In each case, the purposiveness is Ideal, therefore, not Real. Evidently, what Kant has in mind is the functionality of these things, and he is quite clear that to say that something is functional relative to something else neither excludes there being a mechanical, or efficiently causal, explanation of its origin, 7 nor supposes that the object has that property because it has been designed to have it. So, the suggestion to which we are practically driven is that something's being purposiveness without a purpose is nothing other than its being undesignedly functional for an end; and purposiveness is Ideal just in case the function in question has its origin in an unthinking mechanism rather than a consciously chosen end, design or intention. Then, as Kant says of the purposiveness of beauty, 'spontaneously, and fortuitously (von selbst und zufiilligerweise) it accords with the needs of our

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faculty of judgment' (§58.2), occurring in nature just as a stroke of good fortune. The cumbersome expression 'purposive without a purpose' is thus not self-contradictory as some commentators have thought, s but is employed simply because Kant did not have any handy vocable to express the notion of functionality, which, most certainly, he did have. Even today, both German and English still use 'purpose' or 'Zweck' colloquially to express the idea of function, as in 'What is the purpose of that lever?', 'Zu welchem Zweck dient jener Hebel?' Above all, what we have to grasp is that this idealism of purpose is entirely compatible with the purposive object's conferring a real benefit upon us. Indeed, an object's being functional entails that it serves an end or a need, and there is nothing unreal about that at all. The difference between the two views is only the difference between a function that comes to be served as a result of choice and intentional design and one that is served naturally and, in Kant's words, spontaneously and fortuitously. In a moment, I shall defend this picture of the Kantian claim, but, before going on to do so, I want to introduce a parallel between the beautiful and something else which may occasion surprise, perhaps even seem slightly shocking. Some ways of speaking of natural materials are in their essence functional. They sort the world's contents relatively to the functions they serve. Thus, to say some stuff is a food, or is an engine fuel, is to hold it purposive, although only relatively, Kant would stress, and not as a self-contained natural purpose (cf. §64). In either case, the purposiveness is ideal rather than real, as he uses these terms. The existence of stuffs that serve as food is ultimately explained causally, in Kant's eyes, not by reference to any (divine) design that men's needs be catered for, or, in the case of engine fuels, by any design that motor vehicles should rush up and down the highways. Noting this, the suggestion which I want to canvass is that, as far as Kant is concerned, we are to allow that natural beauty is closely akin to food in its conceptual structure. Just as it is of the essence of food to strengthen the body and promote its growth, so too with beauty; with the difference that what it strengthens and promotes the growth of is the mind or the spirit, not the body. Beauty, Kant is telling us, has to be understood, at its very heart, as a spiritual analogue of food. Only if it is that can our critical,

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truth-oriented judgments containing the term have any rational foundation. II

I now proceed to offer a limited defence of my reading of the idealism which we have to do with against objections. The first complaint that will come to mind is that if to be beautiful is to fulfil a determinate function, such as nourishment, to judge something beautiful will be to bring it under a concept, namely that of being nourishing, rendering the judgment of taste unacceptably cognitive and non-aesthetic (cf. §1.1). The reply to this must be that when Kant sets aside cognitive matters as non-aesthetic, thus as not elucidatory of the beautiful, the sort of thing that he has it in mind to exclude is information about the object as it is on its own account (the phrase 'keine Beschaffenheit des Objekts, filr sich betrachtet ',glossing 'not a cognitive judgment', 'kein Erkenntnisurteil ', occurs at §58.2). Accordingly, to say that something is nourishing tells us absolutely nothing about how it is on its own account, but only that in some way or other it has this or that beneficial effect on other things (bodies or minds). So, to say that beautiful things are functional for us is not really to say anything cognitive (or logical) about them at all in Kant's sense of the term, for it provides no information at all about objects in this rather restricted sense. Equally, and maybe surprisingly, neither will judging something to be food or fuel bring it under a concept in this particular sense. 9 The second objection is that the judgment of taste is, on the reading which I propose, no longer autonomous. It is not determined by our pleasure and pain, but by something else external to us. This is precisely the consideration on which Kant relies at §58.3 to secure our agreement that the purposiveness internal to the judgment of taste is not Real. If the beautiful in nature were designed for an external (divine, say) purpose, then Kant says that we would not find its gauge (Richtmaj3) in ourselves; we should not be legislative (gesetzgebend) about whether something is beautiful or not. But consider now the (Ideal) judgment that something is a food: there we are the gauge, in that whether that substance is food or not depends entirely on how it affects us. If it does not nourish us, it will not be food. There is no ulterior standard in the matter beyond ourselves. Of

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course, in the case of food, we are not concerned with an aesthetic judgment, but, by contrast, we would be if we had to do with matter that was gauged by its giving us pleasure or displeasure. Only, that is precisely what is the case with beauty. It is not that we are legislative, or the gauge, or standard, in the sense that it is simply up to us to stipulate what is beautiful. Nevertheless, how things affect us in respect of being pleasurable is the last word as to whether they are beautiful. To see beauty as akin to food, therefore, does not deprive the judgment of taste of its autonomy, does not render our judgments heteronomous. Interestingly, Kant makes a mistake of reasoning at this point. From our being legislative in the aesthetic domain, he argues that the beautiful could not be designed for us in accordance with a purpose, and that therefore realism is false. Yet, if the very point of such a design were that we be pleased, then of course whether an object that was beautiful was really purposive or not would depend not only on its having its origin in the intentions of the designer but also on whether the intended effects were secured. We should then still be legislative. The purely aesthetic nature of the case does not of itself take us to the denial of realism, as Kant mistakenly supposed. 1o A third worry may be that if the beautiful were genuinely akin to the nutritious, a science of the beautiful might be possible, with principles of its own. I think that this danger may be warded off by reflecting that the kind of empirical principles which Kant had it in mind to deplore would be like the chemical or physical or mechanical ones that he thought of as characterising the natural sciences. Given that beautiful things are classed together only by a function whose satisfaction generates universal disinterested pleasure, there is no reason at all to think that there will be a set of lawlike conditions under which it is realised. Just to say that the beautiful is what has this function does not lead us to expect to be able to find any useful generalisations at all that might be cast in the aesthetic vocabulary. Kant himself even seems aware of this in his acknowledgement that it is fortuitous that the function is fulfilled in the nexus of causal connexions that dominate the world. It would consequently be particularly easy for him to allow that the functionality of the aesthetic supervenes upon the causal order, and from that vantage point he would find it particularly obvious that we could not seriously hope for a science of the beautiful.

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The mechanical production of beautiful things involves many different principles, and the physical features that are produced according to these different principles throw up functional advantages for us in many different ways. On my reading, then, Kant is under no pressure whatever to deny that it may require a special talent to produce such things rather than the straightforward application of a simple rule. Once we set aside design as the productive explanation (in accordance with Idealism) and realise that the particular psychic functions that the beautiful serves are not what natural-scientific principles are geared to, we are bound to think that we shall do better to apply to the genius than to the scientist in our aesthetic quest (cf. §58.10). The fourth objection is that Kant says that purposiveness is the determining ground of the judgment of taste. Now, it may be thought, if we make a judgment to the effect that something is beautiful and ask ourselves what it is that is so pleasing about the object that we judge, our Kantian reply must be given in terms of the object having a form that appears purposive, even though it is not designed. Yet this cannot fail to be utterly neutral about whether it is in fact purposive or not; equally, whether it is in fact functional or not. Does this not show that our pleasure is independent of whether the analysing judgment is right or wrong, independent of whether the beautiful has to be genuinely functional for us? The answer is that the objection quite misconceives how Kant envisaged purposiveness as the determining ground of judgments of taste. It assumes that we have to judge the object of our attention to be purposive if it is to be beautiful. But this is not so, being untrue both to our experience and to the text. In reality, we do not normally make any such judgment: we simply find the beautiful object (immediately) delighting us as we contemplate it, and when we ask ourselves what it is that the pleasure is directed at, what Kant believes we must cite is the particular form it has. We shall not mention any appearance of function. What Kant says - at §§11.2 and 12.211 - is that our pleasure is or constitutes our consciousness of the function. We are aware of the functionality of the thing via the pleasure which it gives us, and it is in this sense that functionality is the determining ground of our judgment. It is not that we judge the object (as represented) to be functional and then take pleasure in recognising it as such;

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rather, the pleasure which we experience is naturally (adaptively, perhaps) rooted in our representation's functionality, that being the way in which it manifests itself to consciousness. Putting it like this, we avoid all question of whether any judgment that we may make about the ground of our pleasure is right or wrong. An object is beautiful only if the pleasure which it gives us is our awareness of the object's purposiveness, and it could not be that unless the object were purposive for us, i.e. functional. The mislocation of what it is that is judged in respect of purposiveness lies at the root of the misunderstanding here explored. It promotes the mistaken view and blocks the right one. Once the focus is shifted, the rest falls naturally into place. 12 III

So ends this brief defence of my positive thesis. However, something important is missing. It is all well and good to say that Kant believes that the beautiful is akin to a food for the spirit, but can we say nothing more about what this quasi-nutritive function is and just how the beautiful performs it? Kant himself is explicit on the subject: a beautiful object is one that lends itself ffi!mediately to the harmony of the cognitive faculties, of imagination and understanding. It quickens (belebt, §49.9), or tones, the mind, so to speak. Nonetheless, there is something about this that is far too vague and, as it stands, quite unenlightening, particularly when cast in the idiom of Kant's faculty psychology. However, when he gets round to telling his reader something about how this mental quickening actually comes about, rather than saying what, psychologically speaking, it consists in, greater precision is on offer. There we see the direction in which his mind really moves. The place to look is in the discussion of Aesthetic Ideas, those individual representations of intuition that enable us to develop our thought about particular themes in enrichingly complex ways. The beautiful object, Kant insists, is an expression of an Aesthetic Idea (§51.1).13 It is one that strengthens the mind by giving us a new way to think about the topic which it handles, a new power of thought in dealing (reflexively rather than determinately) 14 with that theme and its cognates, beneficial for us in the conduct of our lives and in our search for self-understanding. Kant is careful to say that this is as much true of the beauty of

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nature as of that of art (loc. cit.). The psychic strength which we gain is dispositional, of course; through our aquaintance with the beautiful object, we learn to think and feel in new ways about a multitude of things, not just about the particular one that embodies the quickening aesthetic idea. There is one thing to be said against this: it seems to suppose that we cannot give a full account of beauty without appeal to Aesthetic Ideas, whereas Kant himself tends to speak as if they are something that the beautiful could be brought in to tame, as though beauty itself could already be fully understood independently of any reference to them. However, this could only be other than a mistake if we could explain the ground of the ought that attaches to the pleasure which people take in the beautiful, the interest that is (indirectly) combined with it (d. §41.1), independently of these ideas. We cannot. So, I take it that it is just wrong to think of the Aesthetic Idea as something that could be domesticated, made 'cultured and polished' by taste in this way (cf. §50.2). What we need to say instead is that the beautiful object is one whose representation embodies a universally pleasing Aesthetic Idea. Failing the culture and polish that this brings with it, the object may indeed express an Aesthetic Idea (of an uncouth and rough kind), yet it will not be a beautiful one. It is not so much that the beautiful is the ready-constituted tamer of the savage Ideas as that, for Kant, only civilising or humanising Aesthetic Ideas can be expressed by the beautiful; and unless an object is humanly enriching through the Idea which it expresses, it will not be a beautiful one. These last are all to be understood as a priori claims. One final observation: it might be thought that I have ignored the assertion which Kant repeatedly makes that the purposiveness which he has in mind when talking about aesthetic judgment is subjective. How could treating the beautiful as akin to spiritual food count as that? Surely it is an objective matter, if anything is, whether this, that or the other is nutritious, be it physically or psychically. The reply must be that what makes it a subjective matter for Kant is not the difference between its being really true and merely being held to be so by one who judges. It is that the fact in question is essentially dependent on our reactions and responses. That is how the notion of subjectivity is introduced at §1.1 (also

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at Intro. VII.l and §32.2), where the representation recorded by the judgment of taste is referred to the judging subject's own feeling of pleasure and pain. The beautiful is spiritual nourishment that manifests itself to us as pleasure. Therein lies its subjectivity. Still, the objection may be pressed. The last remark is surely no more than an evidential matter. It does not make the purposiveness itself subjective, only the manifestation of it in consciousness. Its subjectivity ought to be constitutive, not just evidential. As long as we do not insist that its subjectivity consist in being pleasurable along the strictest lines of §1, this demand can also be met. For, as we have seen, Kant stresses that we are legislative in the matter. It is the strengthening of the mind, which at the end of the day depends entirely on our own interests and our own judgments, that makes an object purposive for us or not. This is a constitutive matter, and, in Kant's usage, a subjective, not an objective, one. Is There does of course remain the large question of whether Kant's position as I have outlined it is correct. All I shall say is that, as it stands, it cannot be quite in order. The reason is that, in the rubric of §58, Kant extends the idealism of purposiveness beyond the realm of nature to art as well. Now, as he himself points out, art is made in an intention, and among the intentions central to its production in the hands of genius is the intention to produce something beautiful. It may, of course, be that even though the elucidation of beauty requires us to see it as serving a spiritually quickening function, the genius aiming at beauty does not design his work for that spiritually quickening end. In that case,its purposiveness will be without purpose even though its beauty is not. This is merely a matter of the intentionality of 'aim at'. Nonetheless, such quickening as his beautiful work effects could well be something that the artist aims at in its production, and, as we have seen, that is not excluded by the autonomy of aesthetic judgment. On the eminently reasonable assumption that Kant views the term 'beauty' as univocal, it would not then be an essential truth about it that it should be purposive without a purpose. 16 At most, we could say that it is essentially functional but not essentially undesignedly so; zweckmiiflig, that is, but not necessarily ohne Zweck. What this gives us is neither

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idealism nor realism, but indifference or neutrality between the two. NOTES 1. Even Kant appears to experience some difficulty here. Because there is no purpose, either objective or subjective, he says that we are concerned only with the form of purposiveness. To the casual reader, that is anything but clear in purport. 2. The interpretation goes back a long way, and perhaps it is rooted in Kant's own footnote to the summary sentence of §17. In 1892, J. H. Bernard uses the contrast of 'we judge the form of the object to be purposive, but cannot explain any purpose served by it' (formal and subjective purposiveness) with 'we have a definite notion of what it is adapted for' (real and objective) (Translator's Introduction, p. xvii, Hafner Library of Classics, New York, 1961). More recently, see inter alia E. Schaper, 'Configurations that appear patterned in conformity of parts without our being able to say what the pattern is for, except that it seems to be for our enjoyment', Studies in Kant's Aesthetics (Edinburgh, 1979), p. 125; also, to my chagrin, my Aesthetic Reconstructions (Oxford, 1987), p. 182, which I here disavow. An explicit instance of the move to indeterminate (i.e. unknown) purpose in order to avoid the apparent contradiction in the phrase 'p_~osiveness without a purpose' is J. Kulenkampff's K.ants Logik des Asthetischen Urteils, Frankfurt (1978), p. 121. 3. It would be quite unrealistic to insist in the analysis of beauty that we be ignorant of the purpose (cf. Schaper; or Kulenkampff, p. 121). Were we to lose our innocence, that would scarcely deprive the objects which we admire of their beauty. 4. It is this to which Kant refers in the rubric of §58 as 'the unique principle of the aesthetic judgment'. It is stated explicitly at §58.10; but, to understand what Kant says there, we have to know that, by saying that the judgment of taste has a priori validity for everyone, he means only that the subject's own response provides a conceptually guaranteed warrant for an assertion whose truth condition involves universal response. 5. Bleak too, it should be said, is the connection with the thought that if the pleasure is not in fact universally shared, it is one that ought to be. Kant shows that he does not forget this aspect of things at §58.9. 6. For instance at Intro. VII. 7. However it will be so under a different description, given (say) in chemical or mechanical terms rather than in terms of its utility. By contrast, when a 'real' purpose accounts for the origin there, Kant seems to believe that there is no alternative mechanical explanation to be had. I take it that he is here thinking of explanation expressed in the same terms. There is muddle here, but we are not obliged to follow him anyway. 8. For example, F. Heintel, Die Bedeutung der Kritik der iisthetischen Urteilskraft .fiir die transcendentale Systematik (Bonn, 1970), p. 63. Also Kulenkampff, who uses the perception to introduce his own version of the traditional reading.

The Idealism of Purposiveness 9. It has to be admitted that a consequence of this is that many ideas of perfection will not be cognitive either, which would take Kant aback. The trouble lies with his not having thought through the distinction 'cognitive/non-cognitive' in any detail. If we want to avoid this sort of embarrassment, the best thing might be to insist that what should be ruled out is information about how an object appears. To say that something is beautiful tells us absolutely nothing about that. 10. So, it would not do for Kant to retort that whether something is designed as having a purpose is not a matter of its outcome, but only of the mind of the designer, and so in that case we should not be legislative after all. We are concerned, remember, with things that are beautiful, so there we know that, were there a design at work in accounting for the existence of beautiful things, it would have to be one that hits its mark. And as for that, there we are legislative, the measure, the standard, the gauge. 11. At §11.2, he writes: 'It can be nothing else than the subjective purposiveness in the representation of an object so far as we are conscious of it, which constitutes the satisfaction that we without a concept judge to be universally communicable; and consequently this is the determining ground of the judgment of taste'. Again, in the following section, he says: 'The consciousness of the mere formal purposiveness in the play of the subject's cognitive powers in a representation through which an object is given, is the pleasure itself' (§12.2 emphasis added in both cases). 12. The only commentator that I know of who makes this point is Kulenkampff (p. 133). 13. This is puzzling, since aesthetic ideas are intuitions, not concepts. How can intuitions be expressed? One way of putting it might be to say that the beautiful object expresses an aesthetic idea in that it lends itself to being represented by us in an intuition that enrichingly expands our thought about a particular theme (a rational idea). The concept of the theme consequently acquires enhanced semantic depth through this representation. In the natural case, it will be up to us to discover the representation that has this feature. In the case of art, it will be a matter of rightly interpreting the work of the artist of genius. 14. This is Kant's technical usage for a judgment that does not simply bring an object under a given rule, but discovers a rule under which to bring it. The distinction is not worked out, but if it is to work at all it must be important here. 15. Kant says at §11.2 that subjective purposiveness is the representation of the object without any purpose (subjective or objective). The bracketed alternatives must mean for a private end of mine, or for a distinct utilitarian end (made for achieving f). But the first occurrence is undesigned purposiveness (functionality) for the psychic benefit for anyone who engages themselves with the object. Kant moves from this formulation to speak of the form of purposiveness, which must mean the same as purposiveness without any deliberated, intentionally chosen end. This is mere undesigned functionality again - what remains of the idea of purpose when intentional design has been removed (be it for an objective or subjective end). That the functionality is supposed to be carried

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by formal aspects of the representation (subjective finality of form) is an entirely independent thesis, from which it is easy enough to abstract. 16. It would be a mistake to suppose that the distinction between free beauty (in large part natural) and dependent beauty (in large part artistic) requires us to think of 'beauty' as being fundamentally ambiguous. The next chapter shows how to avoid doing so.

CHAPTER SIX

The Possibility of Art Critique enquires how beauty is possible, where that is seen as the question of how our individual responses of delight to the world could possibly underwrite true or false aesthetic judgments about it. The success of the theory that supplies the answer is tested in part by its ability to extend what it teaches us about the beauty of the natural world to the beauty of art. In terms that Kant himself would appreciate, we have to say how art is possible en route to showing how beauty is. I put it like this because, for Kant, art is of interest to us primarily on account of its beauty. Maybe the artist often fails to secure that goal, but the goal must be one that can be reached. Otherwise, Kant would feel, the activity of producing art will be pointless, and any extensive concern for its objects will be kept alive only through illusion and self-deception. Briefly, if beauty in art, and hence art, is not possible, neither is beauty itself, taken in the broad way that we commonly assume to be correct. In fact, of course, art presents no such threat. So, Kant's quite general account of beauty, erected primarily with an eye to handling the natural cases, must apply directly to it, or else, if it fails to do that, fall back weakly on some equivocation at this sensitive point. Now, no-one prior to Hegel, least of all Kant, has positively wanted to say that the beauty of art and the beauty of nature are so different in kind that division is forced upon the terms which we use to talk about them. 1 Nevertheless, no commentator whom I know of is entirely at ease in vouching for a convincing unity within Kantian theory. The result is that we are left to wonder whether the broad story is not radically THE

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flawed, failing application to one of the two main cases by which its success will be measured. I shall try to show that , properly understood, Kant's ideas are exposed to no such danger. I

First, some background. The discussion is usually seen as conducted around an undifferentiated notion of the beautiful, and the which account Kant offers of it, constituted by four principal claims. First to say that something is beautiful is not to bring it under a concept; by contrast, it is to speak of how it affects us, primarily with delight (§§1-5). Second, beautiful objects provide a delight that is ideally universal; did they not, we should have to do with some other notion, the agreeable, say, or the merely charming (§§6-9). Third, the universal delight provided by a beautiful object is a necessary delight. Its universality is normative rather than simply occurrent; everyone coming across it should take pleasure in it, whether or not they all in fact do so (§§18-22). Fourth, this exemplary delight is underpinned by its object being purposive without a purpose, or, in a typically tortuous phrase, enjoying a subjective formal finality (§§10-17). 2 As we know, Kant's primary examples are taken from nature, and the way in which his elucidation is standardly thought to apply is straightforward enough. A beautiful flower is first one that provides pleasure second to anyone who regards it in a purely disinterested fashion. More accurately third, it is one that we all have good reason (ought) to take delight in, and it is this in virtue of its particular form, something that we can identify in it independently of any concept (like the concept flower for instance). Finally, fourth, we see this form as if it were designed, though of course the form that the flower has does not in fact have any purpose whose achievement might justify our pleasure. The flower just seems to us to be purposive or designed, although not for any end that we can identify. That is what supposedly gives rise to the necessary and universal enjoyment which it provides and the admiration which it claims. To put it mildly, this interpretation sounds odd, but that is not what I am concerned with here. Rather, I want to bring out how the initial oddness is magnified as we move away from the natural beauty of things such as flowers and come to think about the artistic cases such as perhaps Fantin-Latour's

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paintings of flowers. Whatever we feel about the former, can we possibly allow that the beauty of Latour's roses is a matter of their striking us as designed in their form, although not for anything in particular? Can we seriously suppose that it is this through which such artistic paradigms acquire their strong hold on us, on our imagination and on our affection? Because affirmative answers to these rhetorical questions are so obviously unforthcoming, it is tempting to refuse to regard natural and artistic cases as belonging together. This can appear possible as a way of reading Kant by taking two short steps. The first capitalises on the distinction which he makes between different sorts of beauty, and the second goes on to apply it to the various arts in a kind of mopping-up operation. The distinction in question is, of course, that between free beauty and the dependent sort (c£.§16). A beauty is supposedly free when the judgment of the object's form as universally pleasing is· made without any thought of a particular purpose that the thing subserves; the dependently beautiful thing, in contrast, delights us in serving to perfection some function or other for which its nature fits it. To the disinterested viewer, it gives universal pleasure by way of being manifestly well adapted to its end. As Kant in fact presents it, the distinction cuts across the natural/ artefactual divide. For him, men and women furnish instances of dependent beauty (§16.4), as (curiously) pieces of furniture do of its free counterpart (§17.3). Nevertheless, in the realm of the fine arts, it is clearly dependent beauty that predominates; and, as Kant divides them up, at least the beauty of poetry and song, of architecture and of figurative painting systematically yield dependent cases, whereas only the beauty of improvisations and non-programmatic music and perhaps some sculpture is found to be genuinely free (cf. §51). Among the applied arts, Kant instances the free beauty of ornamental designs and patterned wallpaper, but otherwise we have to do with dependent matters. Why should this categorisation be thought helpful? For one thing, Kant himself insists that works of art are made in a certain intention, and this alone suggests that we shall be unlikely to view them as purposive without purpose. Instead, we shall wonder whether, represented under the intention with which they are made, they are ones to delight us. What is more, that generative

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intention is certainly not to pass them off as apparently having any indefinite purpose. This may clearly seem a step forward, and to think of such things as dependently beautiful, if beautiful at all, seems to move us modestly in the direction of reality. The ulterior thought then beckons that elaboration of the suggestion might eventually lead us to align the musical and the relevant sculptural cases with those of the other arts, thus more nearly equating free beauty with the beauty of nature, and dependent beauty with that of artefacts. Once the realignment is neatly performed, and ambiguity introduced into the meaning of the word 'beautiful', challenges to the theory of free beauty cannot be mounted from its failure to enlighten us about the beauty of the arts. The mopping-up in stage two protects natural beauties from the intractability of art. The trouble here, though, is that as we start to take comfort from Kant's distinction and see ourselves more realistically judging art beautiful as it adequately fulfils some definite intention, we risk losing something that we had not thought of abandoning as we took that step. That is, when Kant casts a critical eye at the use of the word 'beauty' as applied to things in the light of their perfection or effective purposiveness, he explicitly comments (§15.4) that these are mere confused uses of the word, and that we are really concerned with judgments of the good or the useful, not of the aesthetic sort at all. The consequence then threatens that those arts whose individual instances ate marked out as 'dependently beautiful' are not aesthetically beautiful at all. We do not make judgments of taste about them at all. So, the ambiguity that looked so promising in enabling us to handle the awkwardness of fit of the arts to the initially undifferentiated theory does not just introduce us to a novel aesthetic idea; it appears to take us out of the domain of the aesthetic altogether. Yet, since the vast proportion of the art that we admire and love falls squarely within that dependent bracket, on this fairly standard understanding of his thought, Kant looks condemned to make no proper sense of art at all.3 Matters are not improved here by the frequent sneer that Kant did not have much artistic sense anyway. That is merely a cheap way to deride him, and it works insidiously to deter us from thinking through what needs to be done to disentangle the material with which he presents us.

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Rather than consign fine art to the apparent waste bin of the dependently beautiful, notwithstanding the implausibilities remarked above, it is sometimes suggested that there is no very compelling reason not to treat it together with the freely beautiful. 4 In this, commentators are encouraged by the thought that, in handling art as dependently beautiful, they will inevitably be bringing it under a concept, and by the further thought that Kant is insistent that this is at all costs to be avoided. It may be that the work of art is made in a certain intention, but, it is reasoned, we are not obliged to find it beautiful only insofar as it matches up to that originating intention. Why should we not find a universally pleasing way to view it, one that may or may not coincide with the artist's initial thoughts about it, yet which nonetheless views it as if purposive, and one which finds an indeterminate sense in its combination of forms, without there being any possibility of rightly saying what that sense is? Proceeding like this at least allows us to preserve the univocity of the original account where it really matters, with art as much as nature providing instances of the freely beautiful. The only sacrifice demanded of the Kantian text is the radical reapportionment of his division of the arts between the two kinds of beauty, no longer now in the direction of the dependent, but firmly towards the free. Since the division between the two was one on which Kant did little work anyway, maybe he would not protest too much at this small element of rewriting. So, this alternative approach may suggest, leaching the dependently beautiful of all artistic content but leaving it replete with much else that need not be feared to subject the general theory to undue stress. As I see it, the fundamental difficulty with any such generouslymotivated move as this is that it cannot avoid implicating Kant in making utter nonsense of art, at least as much nonsense as accrued to the equally generous gesture in the opposite direction. At least it was clear enough to him that our understanding of significant works of the past needs to be taken as the artist wanted them to be taken (cf. §44.1), with the effect that a correct judgment of a work is bound to be one that sets out from the representation (or thought) under which the artist himself conceived of it. The spectator is precisely not free there to find a way of taking it that suits him or her, and then to declare the work beautiful as long as it is found universally pleasing under

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that specification. If, in Kant's name, the revisionary suggestion turns its back on this requirement, and insists that there need only be some such happy representation, it should not be forgotten how hard to evaluate such loosely-governed critical judgments will be. The gap between our intuitive judgments about the arts and what the proposal treating them as sorts of man-made objets trouves ultimately delivers is unacceptably wide. 5 Before going on, we should pause to ask what the ideal path would be through this morass. Surely it must be one that first allows us to make good sense of Kant's overall analysis, and then proceeds to apply it seamlessly across a free/ dependent divide that is genuinely aesthetic in both its elements. It will also be one which, when that is done, makes sense of at least the representative arts as falling squarely into the dependent category as Kant declares them to do. Further, it should be one which, when it addresses itself to the allegedly free body of art - to the purely musical cases, say - does not badly distort the phenomena. To achieve all this may sound a tall order, but I believe that it may be done as long as we avoid three errors that infect almost all discussion of these matters and which when running in consort quite bedevil the issue. The first concerns what it is to bring an object under a concept, or in Kant's terminology, to make a logical or cognitive judgment about it, as that phrase appeared in the first of the four principal claims above. The next arises in conjunction with the understanding of the phrase 'purposive without a purpose' and the corresponding Kantian notion of subjective formal finality that figures in the fourth principal claim of the analysans, and the last arises in connection with the correct understanding of the dependently beautiful itself, and the way in which that notion finds application to the arts. I shall say something about each of them, but, because earlier chapters have already extensively canvassed the first two, the largest part of the discussion will concentrate on the third. If there is one benefit that this may bring to the understanding of Kant, it will be to undermine the widely-shared perception of his aesthetics as being essentially formalist in nature. That perception was apparent in my little summary of the standard interpretation, and I shall argue now that it must be rejected. Since so much of the cold water that is poured over Kant's

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aesthetic thought stems precisely from the conviction that his out-and-out formalism traduces and trivialises our aesthetic practice, such an upshot cannot but be welcome. II

Kant begins with a distinction between judgments that are aesthetic and those that are cognitive (§1). The former do not, whereas the latter do, bring the object judged under a concept. The same idea figures in §6, and appears again in the summarising remark of §9: 'The beautiful is that which pleases universally apart from any concept'. 6 A good way of stating what is meant here is to say that cognitive (or 'logical') judgments to the effect that some individual is G are true provided only that there is some concept, G, which the object falls under on its own account, that is, quite independently of the judging subject and his reactions to it. Furthermore, we have already seen that these concepts are thought by Kant to be either determinate or determinable (lending themselves actually or potentially to some algorithmic decision procedure), whereas the aesthetic vocabulary is neither. Because judgments of taste are not determinably cognitive, beauty cannot be any such property. Nor should we expect a priori to find any standing observable feature uniformly displayed by those objects that are beautiful and in terms of which their beauty might be analysed. As Kant puts it at §6.1, 'from concepts there is no transition to the feeling of pleasure or unpleasure'. This is emphatically not to say that there does not have to be some standing feature that beautiful objects possess, and in virtue of which they are properly judged to be such. Most notably, the delight which we find in beautiful things is indeed grounded in just such a feature, to wit, in their having a disposition to produce such responses in reliable judges; and, what is more, they do this on account of enjoying some purposiveness without purpose, or some subjective formal finality. There is no inconsistency here with the non-cognitive doctrine of the aesthetic, because the relevant finality is a subjective matter, not an objective one. 7 To find that any beautiful thing enjoys subjective formal finality and to recognise this as constitutive of its aesthetic character is therefore still not to bring it under a concept, for it does not say anything about what the object is like - what it is

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like independently of what we make of it - nor is it something that lends itself to any determinate decision-procedure. This will remain true even though, in the particular case, we shall only be able to identify a given representation as subjectively final if we recognise that feature of it to depend on determinate objective properties of the thing. In no case, though, is the beauty of the object constituted by its having those objective properties or even by our universally taking delight in them. If anything, it consists only in its possessing this pleasing subjective formal finality, whatever we understand that to be. From this, I conclude that when Kant says that the judgment of taste does not bring the beautiful object under a concept, this leaves it entirely open for us to insist that in judging something to be beautiful we must judge it to be a beautiful F, where 'F' holds the place of whatever sortal or characterising term that introduces the object (or the form) so judged. For one thing, when you judge demonstratively 'That is beautiful', what you say will be true for Kant only if any thoroughly sound judge who comes across it would take a like contemplative pleasure in it. Now, for accuracy here, we obviously need to say everyone who comes across it and who views it as does the maker of the judgment. Otherwise, there would no real hope of the explicans ever being satisfied. So, perforce, we need some way of indicating to each other just which object we are judging, or what the form before us is, in which we take such delight. It will not do simply to say 'that', or to point optimistically in some direction. Now, what we standardly rely on to achieve this common understanding is to indicate the form that we think so striking by saying what object it is that has that form: so we say 'That young thrush is beautiful', or 'That mottled salamander is so', 'That picture of St Jerome is', and so on. And, for comfort here, we may as well notice that Kant himself is perfectly ready to cite judgments of taste canonically as: 'That F is beautiful'. Thereby, after all, he ensures that people consider the same form as he is interested in by stating what the form in question is the form of, or under what representation the object judged is found so pleasing. To stress the need to make apparent in a judgment of taste the term under which the judged object falls does nothing to contradict the claim that to be told that x is beautiful is to be told nothing objective about x in virtue of which it is so. To judge

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'that flower is beautiful' does, of course, tell us that we have to do with the form of aflower (that is the whole point), but it tells us nothing at all about what the flower (or its form) are objectively like. After all, there are individual flowers that are not beautiful as well as ones that are. They all share the form of a flower, so, if it is something about its form that lies at the source of its beauty and in which its beauty ultimately consists, we shall not be told what that is by this mere identification of the form concerned. Quite apart from anything else, and this must be by far the best way of putting the point, however anachronistic it may sound, the information that we are concerned with about a flower brings the judged object under a concept not via the judgment's predicate ('-is beautiful'), but only through the phrase that introduces the subject. By contrast, the 'apart from any concept' doctrine arises only in discussing what, in a technically more self-conscious age, we think of as the satisfaction-conditions of the predicate ' - is beautiful'. To concentrate here on the truth-conditions of closed sentences of the style 'That F is beautiful' encourages one to miss this simple, but fundamental, point. These observations are more than simply permissive. Once we see that judgments which we make of the form 'That is beautiful' are uninformative about what we may expect to find in the world until the designated object is recognised as being of a certain kind (and even then not in virtue of information conveyed by the predicate), their mandatory nature is evident. A beautiful form is necessarily a form of something, and we can only identify it as the form it is by reference to what it is a form of. It is not that we deploy the sortal to dragoon people in their judgment about the same thing. It is just that, independently of a specification of what the judged object is taken to be, there is no specification of the form or the representation we are engaged with. Since Kant thinks that it is a matter of form that determines the truth of a is beautiful, for anyone to make that judgment reliably they have to recognise a to be an F if they are to to pick out the form that a has and respond to that with pleasure. Of course, some judgments that we make are not verbally and explicitly of this kind. We may of course simply say, naming the object, 'a is beautiful', or demonstratively indicating it, 'That is beautiful', but the basic shape that such a judgment of taste will take in our thought, and quite independently of any concept, as Kant would

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say, must be: 'That F is beautiful'. The naming case presumes a capacity to recognise and represent the named thing to ourselves as of a particular type, and the purely demonstrative judgment presumes that we identify the indicated form as the form of some particular F or other. The direct relevance of this to the arts should be plain. Whether we ultimately are able to retain Kant's classification of them or not, in the case of both freely and dependently beautiful art it will involve no transgression of the 'apart from any concept' doctrine to say that we are bound to think of the work that we judge quite specifically under a representation that involves understanding it for what it is. Doing that, and in our judgment of it as beautiful matching our representation with what the author intended, will tell us nothing about what the work has to be like if our judgment of its beauty is to be true. III

The second misapprehension which I mentioned concerns the claim which Kant frequently makes, that the determining ground of our pleasure in the beautiful is a subjective formal finality of the object (§11), or what he also refers to as the idealism of its purposiveness (§58 rubric). It is this doctrine above all that is taken to push him and his reader in the direction of formalism. Just what the doctrine really comes to, and why it does not generate this conclusion, was the subject of the previous chapter. It should suffice here to record the main claims made and defended there. To say that something is purposive or final is to say that in one way or another it functions beneficially for us. The way in which Kant envisages this happening is through the way in which aesthetically satisfying objects in the natural world 'quicken the mind', and just how that comes about is something best left to the discussion of individual cases. When Kant says that the purposiveness is without purpose or that the finality is formal he means no more than that this functionality is not realised through intentional design. As far as natural beauties are concerned, the first point needs support even if the second one will be an obvious corollary; when we turn to the arts, Kant tells us a good deal about the way in which they are purposive (namely through the presentation of aesthetic ideas), but it is

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simply false that they have to offer the benefits which they do independently of any intention on the artist's part that they should do so. B This reinterpretation of subjective formal finality has two immediate and notable consequences. The first is that all difficulties arising out of the old idea that has been so central to Kant interpretation, namely that we have to see the beautiful object as if designed, but for nothing in particular, simply disappear. That idea, I submit, is largely mythical and is best left to fade into oblivion. 9 Once that is done we are free to bring the idea of formal finality to bear on the arts in a sensible way, and one which does nothing to upset the ambition of giving an elucidation of the beautiful that extends uniformly over natural and artistic cases. Second, as soon as we adopt the proposed revision, we are completely released from all pressure to think of Kant's beauty as a fundamentally formal matter. To say that beauty is formally final is not to say anything at all about its form-bearing properties. It is simply to assert that it is purposive or functional without the usual origin in intention or design. The contestability of that claim when we come to think about the arts is not so very serious, for whether or not the way in which the arts bring us reward is a matter of the artist's intention will have no consequences for the role to be played by matters of form and will not prevent us from thinking of individual works of art as bringing us particular spiritual goods Nothing much either has been or will be said here about exactly how Kant thinks that beauties which we encounter in nature and in art are functional, or spiritually beneficial, for us, enriching our understanding as we engage ourselves with them. A significant portion of the later part of the Critique is given over to that issue, and I have commented on the matter elsewhere. lO For the moment, though, we need only note that it falls directly out of Kant's elucidation of beauty that they should be so. What is more, he rightly sees that this truth is perfectly consistent with our taking a disinterested pleasure in them, in that our delight is not a response to or the recognition of the satisfaction by the object of some prior desire that we happen to have (§41.1). It is, he says, the way in which the benefit that we are offered is manifest in consciousness as we contemplate the object. This idea, I believe, will be one to cling to should any

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need still be felt to quell residual anxiety that judgments of taste about art are still uncomfortably close to confused judgments of the good. 11 IV

The final obstacle to providing a uniform account of beauty concerns the distinction between dependent and free beauty. We know already that we must set aside any thought that a judgment of dependent beauty can be identified simply by the presence of a sortal concept in the specification of the object under consideration. Judgments of both free and dependent beauties have the same canonical surface form: 'That F is beautiful'. What then does distinguish the one from the other? Insisting, as we should, on the univocity of the term 'beautiful' obliges us to say that the very same content is put forward in either case, except that the way in which this content comes to hold differs in the two cases. What this comes to is that the element of well-adaptedness to function (otherwise called 'perfection', or 'objective finality') is not something that enters at all into the analysis of beauty that is dependent. That restricts itself to the ideas of universal and necessary disinterested pleasure grounded in formal finality. However, we may allow that a judgment committing its maker to these things in respect of a sortally-identified individual may be made either in a way that involves such perfection or in ways that are independent of it. In the first case, the beauty in question will be dependent; in the second, free. Still, it will be evident that anyone offering this univocitypreserving reading of the matter has to meet the challenge which I raised before. Once our pleasure in an object is grounded in its falling under an (objective) concept, then other uncontested elements of the elucidation of beauty are no longer available. 'Dependent beauty' as a species of univocally-considered beauty appears to be incoherent, as Kant himself seems to own when he writes: Now the judgment of taste is an aesthetical judgment, i.e. such as rests on subjective grounds, the determining ground of which cannot be a concept, and consequently cannot be the concept of a definite purpose. Therefore by means of beauty, regarded as a formal subjective purposiveness,

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there is in no way thought a perfection of the object, as a purposiveness alleged to be formal but which is yet objective. (§15.4) Does this quotation decisively settle the issue of whether dependent beauty properly speaking is a possibility, and settle it negatively? Only if the standard account of what a dependent judgment of taste is is correct. For I have simply assumed, as do all commentators that I know of - encouraged therein by Kant himself - that that is a judgment that something is dependently beautiful which is founded on the thought that the chosen object is manifestly well adapted to its purpose. But two things should warn us that such an interpretation is mistaken. One is that this account of a dependent judgment of beauty now on offer is so unlike any real judgment of beauty that we might make. It is not remotely plausible to say that a dray-horse is beautiful as it is judged to look well fitted to its barrel-pulling duties, not remotely plausible to say that a clock is beautiful on account of being (or looking?) a good timekeeper, and so on. Then, second, the very clarity with which Kant rejects any reduction of beauty to perfection (§15.1 /2) and yet in the very next section introduces the dependently beautiful as a genuine aesthetic classification must mean that he sees the two as quite distinct. Everything that goes wrong with the traditional understanding of the matter does so, I think, on account of too narrow a conception of what Kant has in mind by contrasting the two sorts of judgment in terms of the one having a concept as its determining ground and the other not. We naturally read this as saying that, in the dependent case, the pleasure which we take in the object is one that we take because of its manifestly possessing a certain objective property, while in the free case this is not so. Even if Kant does little enough to forbid this reading, it is not forced on us. In his own introduction of dependent beauty, that is not how he speaks: There are two kinds of beauty: free beauty (pulchritudo vaga), or merely dependent beauty (pulchritudo adha?rens). The first presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be; the second does presuppose such a concept and the perfection of the object in accordance therewith. The first is called the (self-subsistent) beauty of this or that thing; the second, as dependent upon a concept (conditioned beauty), is ascribed

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to objects which come under the concept of a particular purpose. Here, there is no hint at all that the pleasure which we take in particulars of a type that falls under the concept of some objective purpose is one that we take in them because we judge them to be efficient or perfect. All that is said is that when an object is of such a type it is presupposed that its beauty requires perfection. Although Kant's manner of expressing himself is not particularly clear, he can surely be taken as saying that there are kinds of things instances of which are beautiful only if they are perfect of their kind (or functionally well adapted). Putting it like that, there is no suggestion that the pleasure that such individuals give us is grounded in their perfection: it is just that only the evidently perfect ones give us the pleasure. They have to be perfect to be beautiful. Full stop. If we cling to this fairly minimal idea, we shall be free to say that, apart from this difference between the two cases, everything else can remain the same. So, the question we must ask is: why it is at all urgent or plausible for Kant to say that there are two sorts of beauty? My answer to this is that he is facing the general question: 'What is it for Fs to be beautiful?' and that he notices two ways in which he might reply. According to one (that of free beauty), as long as the Fin question does not introduce an idea of a purpose, any instance of the type will be beautiful if it is of a suitably rewardingly pleasing kind. On the other hand, there are also those things which we think of in terms of a purposive concept, and their instances are only appropriately pleasing when they are manifestly perfect of their kind. Otherwise, they do not satisfy us aesthetically and are not beautiful. The reason will very likely be that their failure of perfection in one way or another is liable to inhibit their power to bring us reward, which is their particularly aesthetic Zweckmiifligkeit. This deficiency simply breaks their claim to our attention. To take an example that Kant discusses (§16.2), flowers are free natural beauties. We do not find our pleasure in particular instances of the concept flower coming up to the standard of being disinterested, universal and necessary only if they achieve a perfection set by the concept under which we identify and judge them. This may be for one of two reasons. Either the introducing concept does not set up such a standard, or alternatively, if it

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does, it is one that we are ignorant of or manage to abstract from in our assessment of the individual case (§16.8). On the other hand, there are things like churches which we only find beautiful when in their form they are manifestly well adapted to their purposes. Here, we are unable to abstract from the standard of perfection that comes with the identification of the individual as belonging to the dependent type: church. It is only the manifestly perfect church that can be truly beautiful.

v There is no tension, then, between a univocal account of beauty and a large measure of artistic beauty being of the dependent kind. However, this result does not take us far enough. It merely avoids one obstacle to understanding Kant as he would wish to be understood. To get further, what we imperatively need is to find plausible reasons for thinking that in the arts the truly aesthetic judgment of beauty is sometimes constrained by the requirement that the chosen work be perfect of its kind, failing which it will not provide the beneficial pleasure needed to make it beautiful. At first sight, this may seem an impossible task, for the constraint which I am contemplating seems to have no very clear sense. What is a perfect opera? Or song cycle? Or idyll? There seems to be no answer. But let us not be too quickly put off, for something that Kant tells us about the one dependent case which he thinks of as absolutely central provides illumination. This comes in his discussion in §17 of what he calls 'the Ideal of Beauty', and it concerns the beauty of man. There, he identifies the 'perfect' man of a certain race or culture as the typical man, a kind of physiological mean for a given culture, and his thought seems to be that only insofar as an individual approximates to this mean is there any real chance of our finding him able to embody or express the idea of human dignity (or morality), which is what the particular beneficial pleasure that he offers is grounded in for that particular case (§17.6). There is no need to dwell on the example. I cite it merely to introduce the thought that the demand for perfection can be taken fairly loosely. Thus taken, it can range over conditions of 'correctness' (d. §17.5) that we demand of a thing of a given type if it is to be universally and necessarily pleasing. The example of

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physiological typicality shows that what these conditions are is quite possibly an empirical matter, and need not be something that we spin out of the very concept under which we judge the individual whom we find beautiful, in that case the concept man. On the other hand, sometimes it may well be a constraint that is more closely linked to the relevant concept than that, as will often be the case with artefacts. How might we apply this thought to the arts? The first requirement must be that we pick out the right concept to concentrate on. One thing that we can see is that it will not be the concept work of art. For one thing, that is not in fact the concept which we actually use when we make a judgment of taste about the arts. For another, that is not a concept that forces us to make a judgment of dependent beauty, since works of pure music are good enough examples of art even though their beauty is supposedly free. Of course there does not have to be just one concept here. In fact there are many, but it is plain from Kant's own examples that he thinks that the central cases of dependently beautiful art primarily involve representation, saying notably that 'A natural beauty is a beautiful thing; a beauty of art (eine Kunstschonheit)12 is a beautiful representation of a thing' (§48.3), a phrase which can only have a limited application, since so many things that we think of as artistically beautiful, such as churches or music or certain suits of armour, will not fit the pattern at all. However, for the moment let me stick to representations and attempt to find at some reasonable candidate idea of perfection or 'correctness'. First, we need to ask what it is that we want of such things, and what would inhibit their achieving this. We know that this is the right question because of what Kant says at §16.5 about the beautiful warrior, the beautiful church and the tattooed Maori: namely, that in each case it would be possible to decorate them in more ornamented ways which, if we had not represented them to ourselves under the idea man, warrior or church, would leave us thinking that they were more pleasing, and hence more beautiful. Only given that we are judging them as we do, under these concepts, any greater embellishment than one which in fact makes them beautiful would detract from their ability to serve as warriors, churches or, as we have seen, in the last case, from expressing true human dignity.

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So, what is it that we demand of a representation or depiction as a condition of its perfection or 'correctness'? Not, of course, that it provide illusion that we are faced with the real thing. That we recognise a representation for what it is can scarcely count against its being a good one- unlike a counterfeit banknoteand is no constraint on the beauty of the representative picture. Rather, in standard cases we look to the representation to show us what the thing is like, to be informative in a certain manner. One that failed badly in this regard, by misrepresenting its subject, say, would be deficient in an important way. It would, I believe, be acceptable to Kant at least to say that a representation that was thus defective, by failing of lifelikeness or by being invraisemblable, would not be perfect in the somewhat lax use of the term that I am imputing to him. So as far as a beautiful work of representative art goes, we should find it incapable of satisfying us in the right way, incapable of expressing an enriching aesthetic idea or enlarging our thought about the topic that it treats, unless this minimal requirement were met, a requirement imposed by our interest in having a representation of the thing in question at all.13 Of course the idea is not worked out - barely in its infancy, one may say- but, however neonate, it does allow one to see for one large category of art why Kant can hold that its beauty is dependent and not free, and also provides the beginning of an argument for thinking him right. The thought is after all that, unless the condition of lifelikeness is preserved, we shall not be satisfied that our pleasure in the object is one that we can recommend to others as one that they have good reason to share with us. The connection between what Kant calls (§17.6) the negative condition of beauty (the perfection condition) and the positive one (the beneficial function condition that comes with purposiveness without a purpose) can doubtless be made closer. So one could say, in Kant's name, that any enlargement of the understanding of a theme that a particular representational work provides will be unsustainable unless it is erected around a reasonably lifelike instance. Once we leave behind the condition of lifelikeness at the recognitionallevel, the ideas that the representation will generate are unlikely to be applicable beyond the presented case. Yet the benefits that the arts bring us are closely connected with how we think about the world that we encounter;

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they are not restricted to the images themselves. If they were, then they could scarcely have the interest for us that they do. And this expansive interest in them has to be rooted in a recognition that at some level the representations that we are offered by the arts accurately enough capture their subject matter. At its crudest, this will apply directly to the case of portraiture; but, less crudely, it will apply to representative treatment of quite general themes. They have to be shown in a reasonably lifelike manner for any pleasure that we take in them to be one that is beneficial for us in the right way. If we have reservations about the leading idea here, that will be in part because of developments that have befallen the arts after the end of the eighteenth century. If Kant was blind to later possibilities it will not have been on account of any particular insensitivity to art on his part. If anything, it will more likely have been due to too great a willingness to regard the arts with which he was familiar as circumscribed by boundaries which were at this point more or less fixed. Even the Kantian genius, who gives the rule to art, would here encounter constraints of a kind that he would be bound to respect. How far the demand for lifelikeness can be stretched is hard to say; but at least we can use it to explain why, although Kant sets improvisations (Phantasiestilcke) and non-vocal music in the camp of free beauty, song and the dramatic musical work are assigned squarely to the dependent camp. Evidently, he thinks that the pleasure which we take in the melodies and their development may be inhibited from acquiring any depth if the verbal handling of the theme does not accord with real features of the subject as encountered in life itself. In addition, and quite distinct from any condition of lifelikeness, in the Musikgesamtwerk maybe, for 'perfection', even the character of the music has to be perceived as matching that of the verbally given theme, since only if it does shall we be able to think of the whole as fully satisfying. Imagine a pastiche of the Winterreise using the same music to words other than those furnished by the Muller poems, verses say in the light vein of Wilhelm Busch or, nearer home, of Edward Lear. However amusing or well turned such doggerel might be, the whole could not hope to be beautiful if the required fit of words to music and music to words were missing, as we may suppose it would be.

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A last suggestion that I shall make in confirmation of my proposed way of reading Kant concerns the case of architecture whose beauty Kant clearly thinks of as dependent, even though there is no place for anything like a requirement of lifelikeness in the achievement of perfection. Here, the thought must be that a building of whatever kind has a practical function that needs to be satisfied by any construction that we will allow to be beautiful. Once the architect's aesthetic interests begin to neglect this, if he thinks of his work as grandiose sculpture, say, or a kind of three-dimensional abstract, 14 he is bound to fail in his aim to build a beautiful edifice. The catch comes in saying why. It cannot just be that inefficiency of the building cannot be combined with pleasing design. It has to be rather that, once we have to deal with a building that neglects its function, be it church, palace or ordinary dwelling, its visible and felt inefficiency inhibits the responses that would make our pleasure one that we might have good reason to recommend to others. I have no more than a tentative suggestion here what such a reason might be. This is that the expressive idea that the beautiful church develops is one that enriches our lived and felt conception of the divine, and makes a contribution to fashioning our internal relation to it. If that is what is involved in the beauty of a church for Kant (and for us), then it is quite comprehensible that such ideas could only get a grip on such buildings as are well suited to their ritual purposes. Anything else will impede the expression and development of such thought. Mutatis mutandis, the same could be said of the bull-ring or the brothel, though in these cases one may well wonder whether any efficiency of the construction would stand any chance of expressing Kantian ideas. For myself, I would say that the arena at Ronda does so, but I remain to be convinced by Ledoux's Palais d'Amour. However that may be, such at least is a start to taking understanding of the dependently beautiful beyond the purely representative arts. Kant has no more to say about this matter, and leaves all the work to his reader. I shall follow his example. VI

I have suggested that Kant's reputation as an aesthetic formalist may have been undeservedly acquired. Of course, it cannot be

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denied that he does say that our pleasure in the beautiful has formal matters as its object. That is, he speaks without qualm of the finality of form as well as of the form of finality. But, after the remarks that I have been making, we should see that as far as doctrinal matters go there is no particular reason for him to insist on this. If formal considerations enter into his account of the beautiful, they do so in at most a superficial and easily detachable fashion. 15 This is evident when we see how, within his developed theory, none of the following matters which I have discussed positively requires reference to form at all: what we judge to be beautiful as we make a judgment of taste in its canonical form; what we are to understand by saying that something is purposive without a purpose; what it is about beautiful objects that permits the normative requirement to take delight in them to be satisfied. More than this, we should think that when we turn to the arts, and in particular to the representative arts, Kant does not even talk as if form is the fundamental matter - once he has left his theoretical concerns aside as more or less settled. What we have seen is that if we take him as he writes and understand why we are to think of given cases as dependent beauties rather than free ones, what determines that a certain way of handling a given theme is one that excites delight or not (at least as a negative condition) is whether, for example, it is lifelike or somehow functional in respect of its end. If anything could be called a matter of content rather than one of form, it is surely that. As the matching positive condition, we are to think whether the representation also pleases us through the way in which it enourages us to think enrichingly about its subject matter. Again, not a purely formal concern; anything but. If someone were to say now that it handles its subject matter by treating it in terms of formal values, that seems to have no bite. For it would not be the formal values that make a difference, but what it is about the way in which the chosen theme is handled that enriches us. The appeal to form at this point is quite otiose. Consequently, I am very tempted to think that Kant's reputation as a formalist is more to be laid at the feet of convinced formalists who admired him than at his own. As I say this, you may fancy that you hear the Master turning in his grave. But his very cramped position was not one that he himself chose with the clearest vision of which

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he was capable, and then he should feel much more comfortable facing the right way up. NOTES 1. Hegel notoriously claimed the beauty of art to be 'higher' than that of nature, but whether that puts him in the way of thinking the term ambiguous is unclear. For him, 'higher' is explained in terms of being endowed with consciousness, natural beauty merely evoking pleasurable response, artistic beauty pleasingly embodying thought. But this radical difference between the two leaves it quite open whether Hegel would be bound to say that we have to do with two different species of the same thing or two quite distinct things. Bound or not, I fancy that he would in fact locate ambiguity here, since for him the lowest form of beauty proper is found in architecture, not in nature. Be this as it may, it should become plain that Kant would view the Hegelian conception of natural beauty as a travesty of the truth anyway, particularly if it is supposed to be a faithful, though critical, rendering of Kant's own. 2. That the third and fourth claims appear in the reverse order in the text makes it difficult to appreciate that the fourth serves to explain the third. As Kant writes (cf. §§11.2 and 12.2), what the fourth explains is the universality of the second, but what it really aims at is the normativity of the judgment. In Kant's analysis, it is unfortunate that the third and fourth appear separately. He would have done better to exchange the 'universal and necessary pleasure' locution for one that he does not use, and speak of 'universally necessary pleasure' 3. For one version of the criticism, see Stephen Bungay, Beauty and Truth (Oxford, 1984), p. 16: 'As a pure judgment of taste involves no intellectual interest (§16), and art is distinguished by "aesthetic ideas" (§§42 ff.), aesthetic judgements appear to have nothing to do with art; indeed, artistic judgment must be intellectual as well as, or even rather than, aesthetic'. 4. Cf. Paul Guyer in 'Interest, nature, and art: A problem in Kant's aesthetics', Review of Metaphysics 31 (1977 /8), 580-603. 5. I mean that the explicans of 'o is a beautiful work of art' would take something like the form: (E Representation x)(A DisinterestedSpectator y)(y [has good reason to] take pleasure in o sub x), and then be correspondingly hard ever to show either false or true. 6. It vigorously surfaces again at §15.4. 7. Textual justification for this can be found at §11.1 and at Introduction VII.2 However, the divisions within purposiveness are complex and I postpone discussion of them until section III. See in particular note 9below. 8. The reason is that the artist's work may be beautiful through bringing us a benefit , the thought of which did not guide him in its construction. Of course, he may have been guided by it, but whether he was or not will be a contingent matter. This has the consequence for Kant's general theory that the third principal claim should really be stated in terms of a purposiveness that is perhaps without purpose, eine Zweckmiifiigkeit moglicherweise ohne Zweck. I believe that it is simply his exclusive concentration on

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natural cases in the first half of the book that prevents him from noticing this. The adjustment is quite minor, and should cause no offence, unless, pursuing the thought outlined in the next note, it is (wrongly) believed to lead to the veritable contradition of §15.3. 9. Very largely, though not entirely. To come to see the text uniformly like this is not quite as easy as I may have made it sound. The clearest support for the standard view is found in the footnote that concludes §17, but it is not enough simply to quote Kant's words. We have to ask why he talks there of the tulip being one in which we find a certain purposiveness, yet which in our judgment is not referred to any purpose at all. My suggestion is that he thinks of purposiveness, otherwise called 'finality', schematically as dividing into substantive (real, mit Absicht) finality and formal (ideal, ohne Zweck) finality. Of each division, we may envisage cases which are either subjective or objective. Under the head of substantive purposiveness, an object is subjectively final if it satisfies some private desire of mine; it is objectively final if it is well designed to its end. In these cases, 'mit Absicht' looks very much as if it is identified with having a definite function, and this notion evidently has little enough to do with being intentionally devised. When we turn to the formal head, Kant says that objective formal finality is 'a veritable contradiction' (§15.3), and to obtain that result he has again to mean by 'ohne Zweck' without a definite purpose. The contradiction arises from thinking that something that has objective finality, viz. a definite purpose (just as under the substantive head), could yet fail to have a definite purpose (by being formally rather than substantively purposive). However, we have seen above that subjective formal finality is also contradictory when taken like this: 'subjective' has surely to mean not objective, hence, not determinate, and that conflicts with genuine purposiveness, of which the subjective formal sort forms a subheading. It is at this point that Kant has no option but to turn to the 'unintentional' gloss on ohne Zweck (cf. §10.2): 'There can then be purposiveness without purpose, so far as we do not place the causes of this form in a will'. Then, admittedly, objective formal purposiveness will not be a contradiction (think again of fuel or food), but that is just the sacrifice that has to be made to retain subjective formal finality as a workable classification at all. The remark about the tulip in the footnote to §17 cannot withstand this objection. My argument, then, is that to make sense of formal or purposeless finality at all, as opposed to substantive finality, as Kant crucially needs to do for his account of beauty to run, we are obliged to follow the 'unintentional' gloss all the way through. But one can see how the traditional view arises by starting from the substantive cases and neglecting the impossibility of carrying the sense of the denial of 'mit Absicht' across to the formal ones in our understanding of their formality (their being ohne Zweck). Because it is the only interpretative comment which Kant himself offers, it is comprehensible, if unsustainable, that people should try to follow his footnote and say that the beautiful object is one that is seen as purposive, though for no purpose in particular. It is worth noting that, under the revised reading which I propose something of this idea is preserved. In saying that the beautiful object is one that serves a beneficial function or purpose, we do

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12. 13.

14.

15.

refrain from saying what purpose that is. Just some function has to be fulfilled. However, this is not an indefinite function, even though it is left indefinite what definite function it is. Notice also how the suggestion which I am canvassing fits perfectly well with Kant's leading and frequently-repeated idea that susceptibility to pleasure in the beautiful'indicates ... a purposiveness in the objects in relation to the reflective judgment' (lntro. VII.6) or 'a quickening of the cognitive faculties'. Cf. Aesthetic Reconstructions, Chapter 6. 'It is the mere form of purposiveness by which an object is given to us, so far as we are conscious of it, which constitutes the satisfaction' (§11.2). 'The consciousness of the mere formal purposiveness in the play of the subject's cognitive powers, in a representation through which an object is given, is the pleasure itself ... ' (§12.2). Since the pleasure constitutes our consciousness of finality, it cannot result from a judgment that some anterior desire which we have is satisfied, which it would have to do if it were an interested satisfaction. This is unhelpfully translated by Bernard as 'artificial beauty'. Cf. §60 'As for the scientific element in every art, which regards truth in the presentation of its object, this is indeed the indispensable condition (conditio sine qua non) of beautiful art, but not beautiful art itself'. See here for instance Bruno Zevi's account of the intellectual history of the Bauhaus, particularly in the case of Mies's mentor Theo van Doesburg in Poetica dell'Architettura Neoplastica (Einaudi, 1974), pp. 15-73. If on anything it rests on the unhappy epistemological idea that there is no answer to scepticism about the common nature of our secondary quality experience, whereas primary quality (i.e. 'formal') experience is not so endangered. Since the judgment of taste requires everyone who makes the same judgment as I do to take pleasure in the object which I claim is beautiful, I shall need some assurance that others' assent and dissent is rooted in an experience of it that they share with me. Ergo, it has to be an experience rooted in formal matters (§14.2). To give up the underlying epistemological assumption here will leave everything of importance in Kant's general aesthetic theory untouched. The importance of the assumption to his discussion of music is discussed in the next chapter.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Music KANT'S AESTHETIC THEORY is often called formalist, in the sense

that only what we represent to ourselves expressly in spatial or temporal terms can properly be candidates for aesthetic appraisal. Anything else in our representation, in particular the mere 'matter of sensation', can at best support judgments of charm. These amount to little more than claims that the judging subject himself finds a pleasure in the object judged, one that he may or may not share with others, but which in either case is not stuff for rational debate. Put this idea together with the innocuous thought that Kant would certainly have accepted, that all the fine arts must be capable of sustaining justifiable judgments of taste, and it will follow that they must all deliver up something formal to our experience of their fundamental subject matter. Should we, within a given range of experience, find inspection to yield no such thing, then no matter what we may like to say, no matter how we may find ourselves speaking, sustained reflection will compel us to demote the topic from its aspirations to be art to something more lowly, to mere entertainment or enjoyable diversion and no more. How thoroughgoing Kant's formalism in fact was is a matter for debate, and in the previous two chapters I have tried to show that it is no more than a superficial trait of his thinking, one which it is easy to help him overcome without distorting the main tenor of his teaching. However, in one particular domain it is of considerable interest, because, by following it through as far as he would like us to, we come to see how rich his thought about the particular arts can be, and how deeply and systematically that

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is interwoven with the general aesthetic which he expounds. 1 I have in mind the domain of music, and this may seem surprising since not only is it common to scoff at what Kant has to say about it, but also because at first blush it might seem so plain that what we find beautiful there is at least as much the sensuously given matter of aural experience as anything purely formal within it. This blush Kant finds most difficult to resist. What motivates his concentration on formal matters, here as elsewhere, is a combination of two things. The first is the belief that, in a sense to be explained, the judgment of taste has to be communicable; the second is his curious endorsement of the common enough tenet that the purely sensory nature of our experience is essentially private. 2 On Kant's account, a judgment of taste, viz., a judgment that this or that is beautiful, made on the basis of my own response to the object in question, is true only if any suitably trained person who comes disinterestedly to judge it will share in the delight that it gives me. 3 Now, evidently it is not going to be good enough simply to check through the pleasures of those who make a judgment about the same object as I do to determine whether this condition is met. What is needed is to consider the way in which the object strikes them, the representation which they make of it and judge it under, and to allow as pertinent only those responses based on representations of the object that coincide with my own. 4 This is a demand that will be satisfied only if there can be adequate reason to think that when I say I represent an object, a, as F and you tell me that that is how you represent it too, the experiences which we report are of the same ilk. Failing that, our judgment is said to be not communicable. It is the logical privacy of 'the matter of sensation' or, as we might say, of secondary quality experience, that guarantees its incommunicability. The sense which we give our words for the sensible qualities is, for Kant, answerable only to the content of our experience; and the possibility of undetectably variable sensible experience from person to person encourages the spectre of people agreeing in their judgments while differing in the representations that their judgments report. This epistemological gap is one that Kant sees no way of closing. Hence he holds that if a representation under which I assess something as beautiful is to sustain that judgment, it will need to exclude everything

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belonging merely to sensation, and pick up only formal, publicly scrutable, material. Only thus can communicability be secured. Such must be the argument underlying the condensed remarks at §14.3: A mere colour, e.g. the green of a grass plot, a mere tone (as distinguished from sound and noise), like that of a violin, are by most people described as beautiful in themselves, although both seem to have at their basis merely the matter of representations, viz. simply sensations, and therefore deserve only to be called pleasant. But we must at the same time remark that the sensations of colours and of tone have a right to be regarded as beautiful only insofar as they are pure. This is a determination which concerns their form and is the only [element] of these representations which admits with certainty of universal communicability; for we cannot assume that the quality of sensations is the same in all subjects, and we can hardly say that the pleasantness of one colour or the tone of one musical instrument is judged preferable to that of another in the same way by everyone. Under the heading of the formal elements of experience, Kant understands anything that is mathematically representable, fundamentally the spatial and the temporal and anything explicable in terms of them, notably, movement. Just why he is so sure that these are elements of experience communicable with certainty is a somewhat speculative matter, since the texts contain no discussion of the doctrine. But for the moment we can perhaps allow that two highly abstract considerations are liable to move him in that direction. One is the thought that the known falsity of solipsism demands that there be something in experience that is communicable, and, since it cannot be what is immediately given to us in sensation, it must be found in what that leaves out, that is, in matters of form. Second, Kant's general doctrine from the first Critique that space and time are a priori forms of intuition, imposed on our experience by the very structure of our minds, encourages the view that the way in which we synthesise incoming sensory data will share a species-wide, interpersonally scrutable, common structure. There is no room for undetectable variation in experience here, hence communicability is assured. These two gestural ideas could certainly do with any strengthening that might be available, and I shall return to the issue as it

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bears on our judgments about music as soon as more substantive material to work with is to hand. Against this background, we appreciate sharply the problem lying at the heart of the brief discussion of music in §§51, 53 and 54 of the Critique of Judgment. How can it be legitimately reckoned among the fine arts? The proposal which Kant makes is in outline clear enough. We are to distinguish between mere sound and tone. The former is the material aspect of auditory experience, tone belonging to its formal side. s There needs to be something such as tone if the art of music, as we think of it, is possible at all; and also tone must be the central element of any auditory experience that we make genuine aesthetic judgment about, such as birdsong, for instance, whether or not we think of that as fully musical. The interpretative difficulty is to decide whether the tone which Kant speaks of is a real element of our experience or whether he is merely driven to invent it by the less than fully compelling motivation just outlined. It is a difficulty that makes Kant acutely uneasy. My suggestion will be that what he has to tell us is initially interesting just because the tone which he struggles to find fits our experience of music so well, even though the route that he travels to reach it is one which we shall not expect to follow and which causes him to stumble badly. We have a tendency to run down what he has to say just because it is driven by unacceptable theory, but the price that we pay for doing so is to lose sight of the rich intuition which he has about our total experience of sound. To make good these claims, I shall first speak in some detail about his conception of tone. A second source of interest, philosophically more taxing perhaps, will come to light later. II

What then does Kant think tone is? Rather, what does he think it must be if it is to satisfy that constraint on experience which alone could allow us to talk of beautiful sound? His response to this question is somewhat uncertain. He is clearly drawn to one quite definite answer, but only under an interpretation of it that matches our experience of sound and music singularly badly. Strange as it may seem, I suggest that this instinctively preferred thought is that tone is a primary quality of sound, and, similarly, its analogue in the visual domain is that (colour-)tone

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is a primary quality of colour. The reader's task will be to relieve Kant of the difficulties to which this predilection gives rise if that can possibly be done. In §14.4, immediately after the passage just discussed, Kant endorses the Eulerian acount of sounds and colours, commonly favoured at the time. They are wavelike events, isochronous pulsi of the ether in the case of colour, vibrations of the air in that of sound. Both occur independently of our perception of them. When we perceive them, we do so by means of sensory representations that are the outcome of subpersonally synthesising or processing a manifold of inputs to which our bodies are sensitive. So, in the case of a sound, disturbances of the air impinge on our eardrums in ways that, once processed, lead to our having a unitary auditory experience, one that can be represented as a triple consisting of a measure of each of pitch, volume and timbre, say , the whole thing constituting (in Kant's jargon) a synthetic unity of the manifold of sensation. 6 Each of these three experiential elements of sound is akin to a Lockean idea of a secondary quality in conveying no information whatever about the sound as it is apart from our perception of it. 7 Information of that kind is provided by the natural sciences, and Kant is fairly confident that Euler has done the necessary work. Further, as we have seen, what is given immediately to sense is purportedly incommunicable. While the triple that represents my perception of soundS may represent your perception of it too, so also may the triple , where pl;ep2, vl;ev2 and tl;et2. There is no knowing for sure which situation really obtains. By contrast, Kant is inclined to think that naturally existing sounds possess primary qualities as well as the causal powers to occasion sensations, and in the case of sound he cites the time intervals between the vibrations (cf. §§14.4, 51.10). The thought here must be that if only we could represent these to ourselves in perception as such, we should have found elements of our representations that would be genuinely communicable. Recall §14.3 again: 'sensations of colours or tones can only be regarded as beautiful insofar as they are pure. This is a determination which concerns their form, and is the only element of these representations which admits with certainty of universal communicability.' What Kant calls 'form' I have assimilated to the

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primary qualities of objects, and these, being expressible through arithmetic, geometry or mechanics, look well suited to escape his original difficulty. With this thought in mind, the choice of time intervals between vibrations as the matter of tone seems a reasonably natural theoretical idea. However, while sounds and colours may, surprisingly, possess primary qualities, that is not to say that we form representations of them as such in perception. Indeed, as far as the time intervals between vibrations or pulsi go, Kant acknowledges that this is most unlikely, saying that it is 'probable that the velocity of such vibrations far surpasses all our faculty of judging in perception between them' (§51.10). 8 It is for this reason that he has some serious doubt whether we are aware of musical tone at all, and one main reason why he thinks that the idea of music as a fine art (rather than a pleasant entertainment) is open to question. We do, of course, have a secondary quality experience of pulsi (as pitch, volume and timbre), but that is not what is needed. Only an awareness of them in terms of their formal, mathematisable nature will serve. 9 (Cf., e.g.: 'To this mathematical form, although not represented by determinate concepts, alone attaches the satisfaction that unites the mere reflection upon such a number of concomitant or consecutive sensations with this their play, as a condition of its beauty valid for every man. It is this alone which permits taste to claim in advance a rightful authority over everyone's judgment' (§53.2).)

Using the un-Kantian vocabulary of primary and secondary qualities and the equally un-Kantianly-expressed distinction between qualities and ideas of qualities is helpful precisely because it brings out more sharply than could my earlier suggestions why Kant held the formal elements of experience to be communicable, while the matter of sensation is not. The underlying thought is the Lockean one, familiar enough to Kant, that our representations, or ideas, of primary qualities resemble those qualities while those of secondary qualities do not. Schematically, I have a correct representation of an object's primary quality F, as long as the object is F apart from my perception of it and in my perception of it I represent it as F; as far as the secondary qualities go, my representation of something as G cannot be matched to any non-relational property, G, of the object, since there is no

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such property. At, most it can be correlated with a relational property, H, viz., the property of being disposed to be represented by me and my likes as G, which property is nothing like my G-type experience of it. By itself, this does not yet get us to the desired communicability. But, for that, we only have to add in the reflection that if you and I both represent a primary property, F, of a correctly, we shall each do so through representations that present it to us as F. And unless this happened in the very same way for each of us, the resemblance between representation and property, supposedly held in place by the doctrine from general philosophy, would break down. Likewise for anyone else. So, I suggest, Kant would like to conclude that the formal, primary-quality elements in our representations of physical things and occurrences are communicable just as representations of their purely sensory elements are not. Kant never says this much, indeed he never discusses the idea further than in the slight passage from §14 to which I have alluded. But to my mind, unless we understand him as working with this thought in mind, the idea that tone needs somehow to be present to us as a represented time interval between vibrations will remain mysterious. Certainly, the gesture which I made before to account for the communicability of the formal aspects of representation was only skeletal, and it does at least take on something like the clothing of flesh when amplified in this way. Be this as it may, Kant baulks at accepting the suggestion because our experience of sound shows up nothing that amounts to awareness of its primary qualities as such. He has a further reason to reject it too. We are happy to admit, he says, that there are people who 'have the sharpest hearing' yet cannot distinguish tones; there exist people with the best sight in the world who cannot distinguish colours (that is, the 'tone' in colours). Now, I take it that to have the best sight in the world is to be able to discern as much about an object as it reveals to sight, and likewise with acuity of hearing. So, it is written into our way of thinking about such incapacities that they are not to be taken as insensitivities to some perceptible feature of sound or of objects' visually perceptible properties. Therefore, whatever tone is to which such people are insensitive, it will not be a primary

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quality of sound, nor will colour-tone be a primary quality of pulsi of the ether, for, if it were, these perceivers would not be blessed with perfect sight and hearing; they would be cognitive underachievers. Notwithstanding this setback, Kant does not conclude that we have no experience of tone. He simply says that it is uncertain whether we do or not. In many people's aural experience, there is something lying outside the triple which it is hard to attribute purely to sense, which would imply that it was not tone, or to reflection, which would suggest that it was. He continues his discussion of music on the assumption that tone is indeed what this something is. At this point, we might hope that he would offer a description from the inside of what he is talking about, but here we are disappointed. On the other hand, at the very start of the paragraph that has been occupying me (§51.10), Kant does offer a confident characterisation of tone in implicitly causal terms, saying that 'the art of the beautiful play of sensation (externally produced), which admits at the same time of universal communication, can be concerned with nothing else than the proportion of the different degrees of the disposition (tension) to which the sense belongs, i.e. with its tone' (emphasis added). I suggest that detaching this from the commitment to the generation of a mathematisable primaryquality type of representation will serve Kant's purpose well. Eschewing the primary-quality interpretation then, let us understand this more obscure proposal simply as a description of what it is in the hearing of a sound that we are sensitive to when it provides us with experience going in any way beyond the provision of sensible information in the form of synthesised triples such as . The idea seems to be that when vibrations of the air impinge upon us in the production of auditory experience, they do so by causing sympathetic vibration of the eardrum, which is thereby alternately tensed and slackened. Kant speaks here of a proportion of tension, and I suppose we might take this either as a measure of the absolute amplitude of the variations in the eardrum's departure from its position of rest (when we are exposed to no sound), or else as a degree of tension lying somewhere on a scale whose extremes are those which coincide with the highest and lowest pitches to which we are sensitive.

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To make things graphic, let us surmise that in this model, just as the vibrations that impinge on us activate three sorts of sensory receptor in the ear with the result that cognitive information is processed in the form , so there is a distinct feature of the situation of interaction between sound and our bodies which (in some people at least) adds a further dimension to their experience of sound, namely the degree of tension of the ear's sympathetic vibrations (taken either absolutely or in relation to the limits just mentioned). Then, we might schematically represent the auditory experience of someone who is sensitive to tone no longer as a triple, but as a pair, consisting of a triple of sensory 'matter' and a singleton, being its 'form'; thus:.IO This suggestion is utterly different from the more Locke an one just canvassed and set aside, although perhaps Kant did not see this. That would have had the experience of a person sensitive to tone represented as a quadruple , not as a pair. The new way of putting it allows us (and Kant) to say that when the susceptibility to tone is wanting, 'as regards its [the sense's] use for cognition of objects, it is not at all deficient but is peculiarly fine', since cognitive experience of the sound will be of the triple only and not enriched by anything stemming from the relation of the ear's movements to its extreme limits. So, when this latter element is absent, as in the experience of those who are tone-deaf, they can still score perfectly in the cognitive dimension, since they can discern all the sensible information about externally existing sound that the ear is able to detect. A further advantage of this way of seeing it is that it imposes no obligation whatever on Kant to say that the experience of tone is an awareness of the sound heard as stretching the ear by so much, which would after all be open to the same objection as the abandoned primary-quality suggestion. There is no such experience. What he can say instead is that some such fact about the physiology of hearing as he instances is responsible for 'the perception of an altered quality (not merely of the degree of sensation) in the different intensities in the scale of colours and . tones' (§51.10). For the sake of his musical theory, all that has to be true is that however the physiological factors responsible for this altered quality come to be processed, the experiential result should be one that is universally communicable. Since Kant

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does not offer any description of the experience from the inside, readers must simply do what they can to provide it, utilising any hints that Kant himself lets fall. At least we may notice that because Kant's official specification of the experience does not characterise tone from within, but only gives its cause, it leaves that space quite vacant. In the circumstances, this is something to seize on and exploit. One most revealing hint that Kant that drops is that we hear sounds as organised on a scale, a Tonleiter. It is a sufficiently plausible, or at least a comprehensible, speculation to suppose that he thought that steps in the heard scale are correlated to the increasing degrees of tension of the eardrum to which we are sensitive in hearing. 11 One note is heard as further away in the scale from a given note than is a second; a melody is heard as moving about the scale and coming to rest on a chosen tonic, and so on. Now, as this theme is developed, we shall soon enough come to outdistance anything that Kant gives us reason to expect, and, since I want to restrict myself to consideration of his thought, I shall not move much further afield than this. So, I shall merely say that as far as Kant's idea goes, it looks as though the essential thing in the internal description of tone is that we tend to hear sounds as arranged against an underlying background scale. Unless our experience had this quality, we would not be able to talk of such things as modulation, harmony and melody (three other tone-related notions that he mentions at §53.2). Hearing something as an end or a beginning will also belong to the experience of tone (though not so directly accounted for in the kind of physiological terms that he uses), and without too much strain he would be able to make some sense of rhythm in terms of a heard response to the recurrent time invervals between certain salient intensities of vibration impinging on the ear. What is fundamental to this sort of experience for Kant, be it of the basic Tonleiter or of rhythmic material, is that we judge it as ineliminably spatial or temporal, just as in fact Kant takes to be the case with our experience of primary qualities. We hear notes as at certain distances from one another and as having a certain direction or orientation. We also hear them in terms akin to those which we use of our own activities in space and time, as starting, stopping, coming to a halt, pausing, returning to a familiar place

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and the like. Although this furnishes but a sparse description of tone in experiential terms, it is nonetheless rich enough to let us ask whether, for reasons that Kant himself might accept, it can satisfy the demand for communicability (and, if so, why only something like this will be able to do so). Certainly, if the trick cannot be turned for Kant's basic Tonleiter, it cannot hope to carry over to any other things that might be called on to amplify the system, since they can only be introduced by reference to it. So how is it to be done? First, we should be clear that there is no hope of using the same tactic as before, since experienced tone is no longer represented as a feature of the externally prevailing situation that we represent to ourselves in perception. What corresponds in the world to our perception is not tone but only its cause. So, any alleged resemblance between our experience of tone and the qualities of sound that cause that experience would not only be a myth, but a useless myth to boot. Nevertheless, the judged spatiality of the tonal experience (even if this spatiality has to be construed as metaphorical) does offer Kant something to exploit. 12 The point is this. In pairs of the form , while the first member may differ internally from person to person in the perception of the very same sound, as long as all parties judge the sound as tonally R- as lying at a certain point on the basic Tonleiter, say, or as moving in such-and-such a direction, or as coming to a halt at a certain point - the experiences that gives rise to their judgments must be the same. There is no room for different people to make the same judgment on the basis of different tonal experience (except for the marginal, and questionably intelligible, case of a mistake being made by one party, claiming his experience of a given sound to be as Rl when in fact he experiences it as RZ). The source of this impossibility is located in Kant's insistence that tone has to be something that results from reflection and not from sense (cf. §14.4, and §51.10). 'Reflection' here has a meaning close to that given to it in 'The Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection' in the Critique of Pure Reason. 13 It is, he writes, 'the consciousness of the relation of given representations to our different sources of knowledge' (A260/B316.) As I understand this in application to the present case, when we experience sounds as having a certain tone, we do so as a result of (unconsciously)

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comparing what we hear with a degree of tension of the kind already discussed or with other sounds in relation to a scale of tones that is held in place by the different possible degrees of the eardrum's tension. So, for example, to hear a certain note as a high one is to be sensitive to what is given to (synthesised by) sense and to come to set that (by some subpersonal relational judgment) in the higher ranges of the Tonleiter. In sum, it is to make a comparative judgment about the sound which we experience in sense as

. 1 4 How does this help? In the case of the secondary-quality experiences synthesised in the triple, we are for Kant not making judgments at all, just registering the bare elements of the sense experience themselves (though of course when we care to do so we express ourselves in judgments about our sensible experience). This fact and the privacy resulting from it are just what give rise to the communicability problem. However, once we abandon construing tone as one distinct element of a quadruple of sensations, and see it instead as the second member of a pair, arising on account of a judgment that we make about sound which we experience (and which has the causal history that it does}, there cannot be any undiscoverable divergence about it between us. The element of tone is constituted by a judgment that what is given in sensation lies at such-and-such a point in the scale. As long we make the same judgment, identity of tone is ipso facto guaranteed. Of course, people sometimes make different judgments about tones; sometimes even cannot settle their differences. This we all know, and we acknowledge as much in saying that some people are less gifted than others or that they need to be trained how to hear tones. But that was not the difficulty anyway, and disagreements of this sort are a common enough feature of judgments about even our primary-quality experience, where the threat of incommunicability does not arise. The difficulty was rather that when people do judge the same (in respect of the sensory matter of experience) they still cannot know what each other's experience is like. Now, in the case of tone, since we are speaking of an element in our aural experience that is fundamentally constituted by a judgment that we make about it, two people cannot sincerely and scrupulously describe the tone which they hear in the same terms while experiencing it

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in different ways. For them sincerely to say the same entails that their experience is the same. Any difference that there is between them on this point must ultimately manifest itself in a difference of judgment, and thus will not be problematic. The problem of communicability cannot arise for reflectively-generated tonal experience. An objector might protest that the tone-constituting judgment lies at the subpersonallevel and presents itself to us as an element of a unified experience. He may then go on to ask if it might not be that when people express themselves about tones, things are much the same as when they express themselves about the nature of their secondary-quality experience. That is, they articulate the same higher-level personal judgment without in any way manifesting divergence of their subpersonal judgments. In that case, Kantian tone would be no more scrutable than pitch, timbre and volume. This, however, is a poorly-improvised last-ditch stand. What spells its ruin is the falsity of the supposition that the subpersonal judgment is one that quite generally cannot be brought to consciousness. Abandon that, as we must, and the objection withers away.ls To be the subject of judgments of taste, then, music must concern itself with something communicable - and tone is that. Moreover, Kant also says that tone could be nothing other than 'the proportion etc.', and I think we can now see why this should be, providing that we follow the cautious causal reading of 'could be nothing other' as could be produced by nothing other. Even though tone cannot fail of communicability, there are evident cases in which people make divergent judgments about the same heard sounds. Notes that the western ear hears as ordered from low to high were reputedly judged in classical Chinese music to be ordered from high to low. Now, clearly an art of music is possible only if there is enough agreement among people in their tonal judgments, for if we heard different notes tonally in different ways too frequently, the composer would not know how reliably to provide the tonal effects he aims at. And I think that Kant may assume that the Eulerian mechanical-cum-physiological account of tone provides some empirical assurance that this requirement will quite generally be met. We do not, of course, judge tone in terms of degrees of the tension of the eardrum, even if that is what we are sensitive to,

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but he certainly does think that it is this which lies at the bottom of the tonal judgments that we do make, and, because that is the same in everybody, it is unlikely that the tonal experience which we have when confronted with the same sounds should defeat prediction. 16 To drive the point home, consider from Kant's point of view two people whose sensory experience of the same sounds is undiscoverably different from that of each other; let us also suppose that they both say that one sound is heard as higher than a second or even that the first is as high as can be. There is no separate element in their experience that consists in a 'being-higher-than' about which they can undiscoverably diverge. What they have done is to say that the same sounds to which they are exposed stand in a heard relation, sensitivity to which cbnsists in their making a judgment about it, probably in the first instance a subpersonal judgment, though one that can with practice and training usually be brought to consciousness. Suppose, though, that Kant had not told the causal story that he did; then, from his point of view, it would be something of a mystery why the two hearers should make the same judgment at all. Indeed, it would also be something of a mystery how their experience of the sound should incorporate any reflective element at all. As it is, he can note that we do tend to say such things, and then allude to a physiological account of the situation which supports expectations about agreement in judgment as well as about our representations. With this to rely on, the composer will have some reason to trust his own reactions to what he envisages setting down as a guide to the way in which his music will be heard by other ears and also about how it will be judged from the aesthetic standpoint. 17 A last observation about Kantian tone is this. As he speaks, tone is the formal in perception, and must fundamentally present itself in spatial or temporal guise. Now, all I have claimed in the last paragraphs is that, where an element of perceptual experience is constituted by judgment, there we have communicability. And it can be readily admitted that it is not at all clear that the output of such reflective judgment has to present itself to us in spatial or in temporal terms. But then isn't this all to the good? For it allows matters of tone to range wider than judgments that are quite as narrowly formal as Kant took them to be. Much tonal

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experience, we saw, is spatial and temporal in nature, and in this Kant will happily concur. What he needs is a way to extend his idea of form in music further than this, and now I think it can be seen how that might realistically be done. The effect of this will be to make the application of the term formalistic to Kant's musical aesthetic quite empty. That is surely as it should be. An ancillary benefit of the story which I have told about communicability is to make plain something that often puzzles readers of the first Critique as well as of the third. Why is it, one wonders, that our spatial and temporal experience should be immune from the sceptical query of §14 of the Critique of Judgment? My answer to this will be plain. The forms of intuition are not themselves elements of intuition at all, sensible or any other kind: they are fundamentally constituted by systems of judgment in terms of which our sensorily-given intuitions have to be perceptually synthesised. To see something blue over there is just to see something that is blue as being over there in relation to ourselves, and in recording our experience at a personal level we have incorporated into it a subpersonal judgment made in perception. In Kantian terms, it involves bringing what is given in intuition under a judgment involving space and time in a way that our cognitive apparatus obliges us to do. In terms of the schema used before, it might look like this: . Because space and time are effectively constituted by judgment, they are communicable; because we all use the same system of judgment, a function of the stable nature of the human mind, public experience is possible. And since Space and Time are only abstractions from systems of judgment that the mind is obliged stably to adopt in virtue of the structure which it has, it makes no sense to suppose that they might exist apart from the mind, an sich so to speak. They are not something to which we are sensitive in perception, merely something in terms of which we have to represent and make sense of whatever we do perceive. III

It will encourage us to think that the discussion of tone has been moving along the right lines if it can be used to explain why Kant thinks that only two senses yield any art that might be classified as offering a beautiful play of sensations, namely sight

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and hearing, with the arts of music and colour. (Not painting

simpliciter in the latter case, for figurative painting does not offer a beautiful play of sensations; it belongs to the plastic arts (§51.9). So for Kant, the art of colour, strictly speaking, might better fit abstract painting than anything else, though he certainly had no such anachronistic idea.) Why then are smell, taste and touch incapable of generating an art, a fine art that is, even though their various combinations can clearly be agreeable enough? Evidently, the reason is that they cannot be beautiful, and they cannot be that because what they offer to us is, on Kant's understanding of the senses, incommunicable. Furthermore, he must say that in these cases we do not have anything akin to tone which might provide the formal element in sensation, whereas we do have it in that of hearing and sight, though less surely in the latter case than in the former. (Those who take a principled dim view of abstract painting may not find this all that unnerving.) What this comes to is that we do not smell various perfumes as located on a scale. Of course, they can be more or less intense (as colour can) and can follow upon one another in wafts, but for smell there exists nothing like an internalised colour cube that underlies our capacity to see one colour as next to another, or one colour as lying between a couple of others, or one colour as opposed to another, and so on. Intensity of smell is purely a matter of what is given in sensation, as is hue and brilliance, and so is not a candidate for tone in this domain. The same applies to the senses of touch and taste. These three senses do not generate arts because they do not generate tones, and anyone who finds Kant's view of sensation in general attractive- and not everyone is fully confident of the power of anti-privacy arguments to expel inscrutability from our sensory qualia might find this an illuminating response to a puzzle that has long resisted attack. It might also be said that in its content it is a far sharper solution to the puzzle than the one which Hegel adopted, and on which I shall comment later. What is more, I think that it lies within the power of the Kantian reply to the question to answer the further query whether the absence of tone here is merely a reflection of the fact that we simply have not developed a scale for the minor senses or whether there is something about the structure of what they

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handle that makes it impossible for us to do so. Evidently, this question also demands an answer because there must have been a time when music had not developed precisely because there was no generally accepted Tonleiter against which people could situate and come to hear the various sounds to which they were exposed. In that case, we did manage to develop a sense of tone. Why should we not expect to do so with the three minor senses too? If my exposition of Kant has been reasonably faithful to his intentions, his answer will depend on whether there is a physiological underlay that would make the construction of such an internal tonal map a possibility. That is, we saw that in order to make an art, there has to be sufficient agreement in judgment about the place of individual elements on the scale, and that that was secured by a regular causal relation holding between certain proportions of tension of the sensory organ and the judgement about a tone. So, on Kant's view, the ability to generate a tone scale for other senses would seem to be at best private - or erratic - if it could be done at all, unless there were a sufficiently rich causal underlay to support such tone-consituting judgments. They have to have some physiological base to be possible for the individual, and Kant thinks that they would have to have a common base for an art to grow up in the area. Now, if this is all that bears on the issue, it is going to be a matter for the physiology of sensation to tell us whether there is anything about the relation of the sense organ to stimulation that falls upon it that could operate in providing the underlay for a common set of judgments here. I surmise that Kant himself would very likely have been struck by the thought that tastes, the feel of things, and probably also smells, are unlike sounds and colours in not being identifiable with any vibrations of air or ether, which might set up sympathetic resonance in the appropriate sense organ. To his mind, it is only because of this mathematical element in the situation that we can construct a scale of colours or a scale of sounds (cf. §53.2). However, I doubt whether we ourselves can be quite as happy as Kant might have been with the idea, because clearly the proposal has to be finished off by saying 'or anything else that might serve in an analogous way', and it would be rash to say that there might

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not be something that would serve if only we found ourselves making judgments on a quasi-spatial scale. Perhaps caution is the best policy here, and I leave the question no further answered than is done by saying that we seem in these cases not to have even any rudimentary start of a scale system. In its absence, it is no surprise that we cannot see how such a thing might be built up. Whatever the outcome of enquiry at this point may be, we must remember that a mathematically-based sense of tone is seen by Kant only as a necessary condition having to be satisfied by any sensory modality that is to support an art or that can permit genuine judgments of taste. It is emphatically not sufficient, and we shall need to return to the issue once we have seen how Kant handles this further material as it bears on the arts of music and of colour. IV

As important as the universal communicability of aesthetic pleasure is its exemplary necessity. There needs to be something about an object which we judge beautiful to warrant the demand that anyone ought to, or should, or has reason to, find pleasure in it, as do we. Failing that, in the case of music it will be misguided to speak of its beauty or to think of it as a major art. It makes best sense of the remainder of Kant's discussion to see him addressing this issue, and confirmation of its importance is already provided at the start of §51: 'We may describe beauty in general (whether natural or in the arts) as the expression of Aesthetical Ideas.' These Ideas had been introduced in §49 as the instrument to account for the legitimate authority that beautiful poetry and figurative painting have over us at the hands of artistic genius. Prospectively, they are to play that role here too. We saw that §51 ends somewhat uncertainly, leaving the reader to decide whether he can identify anything in his experience that might properly go under the name of tone, and thus whether or not music is potentially a fine art. Having disarmed the source of this uncertainty, we are free to read §53, which assays a sort of ranking of the several arts, as Kant would have us do, confident that tone is indeed a central element of musical experience, and that no obstacle presents itself on that score to the completion of the discussion. So, we can approach the issue of music's value

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head-on, and reflect on that from the point of view either of the mere play of sensation (i.e. tone-bearing sound) or of the enlargement of the mind that tone might produce via the Ideas which it generates. Kant's summary position is that on the first score music ranks high, but on the second, only low. The discussion in §53 is apt to mislead English-speaking readers (though not only them), for the translation which we tend to use talks of music's 'charm', and Kant describes the movement of the mind that the play of aural sensations brings with it as depending on 'mere sensations, without concepts'. Both expressions invite us to suppose that he is thinking of music as something that is no more than charming (angenehm), and thus not genuinely beautiful at all. It is an impression reinforced by the discussion of §54, where this is exactly the position which Kant adopts. However, as far as §53 itself is concerned, the word that Bernard translated as 'charm' is Reiz, and there is nothing in the text to lead the reader to think that that is equated with the merely charming (das Angenehme), which is incompatible with beauty. What is more, Kant expressly says that Reiz is universally communicable (§53.2), as he would not have done had he equated the two. So, when in that same paragraph he says that music speaks by means of mere sensations without concepts, we should not suppose that it is being downgraded and reduced to brute sensory experience. Tone remains a distinctive communicable element of our experience, even though not attributable to the discursive understanding generative of concepts. 1 8 How then is Kant to account for its exemplary appeal? His inability to say what tone is except in terms of its producing cause makes the question is a particularly difficult one for him to answer. But since he had already met with some success in his discussion of the value of poetry and figurative painting, 19 he is encouraged now to look again to the same theoretical device that served him so well there. The immediate problem is how to introduce it, precisely because conceptually-generated Ideas and sensorily-given tone are apparently so alien to one another. The story told at §53.2 is that tone is associated with Ideas, the association being originally formed in speech. Our thoughts frequently involve affect, and that gets expressed through tone of voice in giving utterance to them. In verbal communication,

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the tone with which people express themselves both indicates how they feel and brings it about that their hearers feel likewise. What is more, to pick up just the tone of someone's speech (with mumblers, say, or foreigners) is often enough to put us in mind of what the speaker was occupied with. That is, we are liable to associate from the affect that we are brought to feel as we hear someone talk to the topic that was engaging them. This topic is for Kant the Aesthetic Idea associated with tone. In music, the tones which we experience, being identical with those of speech, give rise to the very same Ideas that occur there, and by the very same mechanism. Anyone persuaded that music works other than by making us feel emotions expressed by tones of voice would be free to retreat to the less exposed position whereby music simply puts the listener in mind of these emotions, without feeling them. These will then be the Ideas which Kant is talking about rather than the topics associated with them, 'the objects of the affections' (§54.4). At this point, Kant contrasts music and poetry, and he observes truly enough that we would be lost if we tried to say that the Ideas evoked by music are of value in enlarging our culture and our discursive ways of thought. Something else has to do the work, and his finding is that this can only be the play of Ideas which we find accompanying our experience of the play of tone in any favoured musical piece. So, we reach the end of §53 having identified the locus, if not the nature, of musical value. The discussion proceeds as if after a disconcerting hiatus. In §54, Kant talks exclusively of the pleasures of gratification (Vergnugen) and treats as of a piece the value o(the play of sensations that occurs in the play of fortune (games of chance), in the play of tone (music) and in the play of thought (sallies of wit). The disjointed nature of the writing tempts one to think that the treatment of musical value is simply left unfinished. However that would be a mistake. What has happened is that, having acknowledged the indeterminacy of Ideas in music, Kant is quite at a loss to see how any value that they might generate could possibly extend beyond mere gratification. Once aesthetic Ideas attached to music are leached of determinate discursive content, he feels obliged to say that we value them only for the effect that their play has on our bodily well-being. Music's tones are mental occurrences brought about by vibrations impinging

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on the body; these are then associated with Ideas, whose play, following that of the experienced tones, works back beneficially upon the body. There is no more to it than that. 'We thus reach the body through the soul, and use the latter as the physician of the former' (§54.3). The trouble is that the resulting gratification is precisely not an immediate pleasure that we take in any act of genuine aesthetic judgment. In Kantian terms, it is a response to the satisfaction of an external desire or interest. Consequently, it does not enjoy any exemplary necessity at all, and music is not properly described as beautiful even though its subject matter (tone) is just what it would need to be if musical beauty were possible. It is for this reason, I take it, that Kant remarks that, like the art of jokes, music is better called a pleasant art than a fine one (§54.4). The pleasure that it produces is one whose value is too tenuous or erratic or conditional to support any fine art or, for that matter, even any full-blooded judgments of taste. Despite this abrupt setback, I shall try to show how mistaken it would be to write off the unified discussion of music that has now emerged from the Critique as no more than a sorry wreck. We should appreciate how very smoothly the introduction of tone can be combined with much else that Kant will view with favour in securing the exemplary necessity that he needs but could not properly deliver. The trouble is that the key is missing. Once that is supplied, Kant could not but be gratified to see the lock that resisted him turning so easily. To locate this key, though, we must first identify the more distressing weaknesses in the proposal which he actually makes and pinpoint the main snares that any generously-inspired reconstruction of his material must avoid. Four of these are particularly troublesome. The fundamental good furthered by the play of indeterminate aesthetic ideas that Kant seized on sorts ill with our experience of music. The feeling of bodily well-being to which he refers makes one think of the very finest compositions as offering us little more than foot-tapping Sousa marches or tunes that make one jingle the coins in one's pocket. Such feelings are just the wrong terminus. Further, the value that Kant ends up with is, as he himself saw, unable to meet the fundamental requirement on it. It is far too short on spiritual depth for that. It would be quite wrong, however, to put these defects

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down to musical insensitivity. It is not philistinism that moves him, but intellectual honesty; recognition of his failure before the perennial critical question: how is this or that possible? It is a question which, in the present case, does not begin to find an answer in the patent actuality of beautiful music, which we have absolutely no reason to suppose eluded him. Next, the particular Ideas which Kant lights on to discharge the main theoretical task are only associated with the tones of music. Had our social and linguistic training set up different associations than those which we actually have, our understanding of and esteem for, say, The Musical Offering or The Magic Flute would, incredibly, need revision. Admittedly, to parry this threat, Kant speaks of the laws of association here (§53.2), but the term 'laws' appears of courtesy, not of right. Once this is spotted, the difficulty will be avoided only by making it cease to matter which particular Ideas the association from tone is to lead to. All that can be allowed to count is their play, a movement from one Idea to another, back again and on to a third and so on, something that would be preserved were its bearers to vary. However, any such fallback has to be rejected, because that cannot be where their value lies. Nothing short of abandoning association will do. Depending on the temper and dispositions of those under whose tutelage the crucial associations are originally set up, the Ideas allied with musical tone will differ from person to person. All question of the correctness of attaching particular Ideas to particular pieces of music or to particular passages will therefore lapse. Music's ultimate value will then come unacceptably to depend on haphazard responses to it. This cannot be accepted, if only for the reason that it would oblige the composer to work without having sufficiently firm control of the value to us of what he produces, as if he might sensibly decide what to set down without any reference to that. In truth, any significant use that aesthetic Ideas can have must see them tied by some canon of correctness to the tones that are the musician's business. This Kant's proposal precludes. Finally there is no reason in his book why the value to us of the Ideas generated by music should attach to music, or attach to one particular piece of music rather than another. This is damaging because the point about the exemplary necessity of pleasure in

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the beautiful has to be made good at the level of the individual work or passage. But the criticism also applies when we seek to account for the value of music in general. That has to be distinct from the value to us of strings of witty jokes or of long, smoky poker sessions. Seeing no way of going beyond the agreeable and stimulating entertainment that all three offer, gratifying ultimately only for the feeling of well-being that the play of their associated Ideas produces, Kant would be hard pressed to explain why there is any point in getting one's young children to play the piano or the violin rather than poker. After all, as long as the stakes are kept reasonably low, poker is so much less trying for the family. IV

The challenge, then, is to satisfy the demands for truth to experience, for adequate depth, for a non-associative canon of correctness and for the non-fungibility of musical value in ways that Kant might happily endorse. A useful first step is to notice that while he takes over the technical notion of Aesthetic Ideas from his discussion of poetry and, to a lesser extent, of painting and sculpture, its extension to music is not rigorously required. He struggles with an indeterminate sort of 'Aesthetic Idea' and comes to grief; but it would have helped greatly to have noticed that any device that satisfies the valorising demands on it will do. Whether it is called an 'Aesthetic Ide~' or not, and whether or not it fits Kant's general characterisation of these as 'representations of the imagination which occasion much thought, without however any definite thought being capable of being adequate to them' (§49.3), does not signify. There is one distinct advantage, however, in keeping to the term 'Idea', and this is to remind us to look for the source of musical value more surely in thought than in the play of sensations themselves, or in its outcome in feelings of a bodily kind. Certainly, this is what Kant had originally hoped for. His ultimate frustration stems not so much from that ambition as from looking to the wrong Ideas to satisfy it and then turning elsewhere. A more promising option than his own, one that he does not even envisage, lies directly before him. This is to locate the Ideas which he is seeking immediately in tone itself, in those spatial and

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temporal kinds of (metaphorical) thought which occur in the proper appreciation of music and which are structured around the fundamental Tonleiter in ways already described. Kant was unable to take this line because he did not manage to describe the thoughts in question and did not even unequivocally identify tone with thought in the first place. But this is no obstacle for us now. Nor should it have been one for him then. What is more, if tones (or sequences of tones) are themselves taken for Aesthetic Ideas, we shall immediately bypass the objections arising from the looseness of association with which Kant entangled himself in introducing them (and bypass also the spurious consolidation that talk of associative 'laws' sought to provide). Cutting out Ideas-by-association, the value that we are in search of is prospectively pinned directly onto tone itself, without leaving room for any inconveniently severable link between them and it. Two desiderata then, truth to experience and non-association, are quickly secured. The proper locus of value is in tone, and as part of its very nature. A third comes automatically with these two. Correctness in Ideas attaching to music now becomes correctness in the hearing of tone, and that has already been sufficiently discussed. The only thing to add is that even when we detach correct appreciation of tone from the slightly Pythagorean and mathematisable background in which Kant sought to place it, our capacity to initiate others normatively into manners of hearing that we have ourselves acquired only with some difficulty and only over a longish period of training is enough for the purpose. There is no need to tie correctness to something for heard tone to be correct to, no need to mount, as it were, some outlandish 'correspondence theory' of the matter. The most arduous challenge of all is the remaining one, to say how, given the tonal character of musical experience, the delight which we take in its finest exemplars may be properly recommended to others. An encouraging thought here is that once Kant's own preferred association to affects and their objects is set aside, we are free from all pressure to meet the challenge by reference to the emotions and their expression, a gambit that has unsatisfactorily dogged philosophical reflection for far too long. This is not to suggest that emotion has no part to play in a total account of music's polymorphous value, but

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it certainly does not play an essential one. I remark this and pass on. In sensitivity to tones, melodies, modulations, harmonies and rhythms, we hear music as exploring an aurally given space, as expanding into unknown areas, and as playing with movement within a chosen domain or range. On occasion, this provides an acute and intense pleasure; and, in line with Kant's general aesthetic theory, if this delight is to justify our thinking of the sounds producing it as beautiful, it must be the manifestation in our consciousness of sensitivity to something about them that provides us with a spiritual benefit. 20 For Kant, the most satisfactory such benefit would be one that engages with our moral ideas, something that 'shows a proper worth in itself' (§54.11). He mentions a feeling of respect for moral ideas, and declares thatto amountto 'an esteem for self (for humanity in us)' (§54.9). Perhaps we cannot go all the way with this, but then perhaps we do not need to either. Nevertheless, the last of these ideas is suggestive. One thing we can say is that in the experience of music it is we, the hearers, and not just the musical works, that explore the space which manage to create in hearing its tones. Formally speaking, of course, the music is composed in such a way as to explore and play with heard space; but, apart from its being heard, this exploration is almost worthless. 21 And as the music is heard and played, it is as if, through its agency, the listening subject himself explores a novel space. One is not ideally placed as an unengaged or detached spectator listening to the movement of the line, and appreciating that for agility, daring or inventiveness or whatever. And when we try to describe the heart of musical value having its locus in the Ideas supplied by tone, it may be to this active aspect of our experience that we should turn. How can such exploration of aurally-given space make our pleasure in music potentially so substantive? As with any other pleasurable exploration of space, at the same time as coming to an appreciation of its contents, the subject comes to a sense of himself in relation to those contents. The experience of penetrating into an enlarged world is at one and the same time an experience of enlargement of the explorer's self. By this I do not just mean that it is an experience of being physically situated in larger and more fully populated surroundings, but of oneself as enriched

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by access to these and their contents. Thought about the contents of the spaces which I explore and thought about myself are inseparable from each other. This active enlargement of the sense of self through the exploration and familiarity with physical space comes about in a quite different way from anything that held is out to us in detachedly watching travel films or perusing holiday brochures or geographical magazines. The activity is of the essence. In musical experience, I suggest that a version of the same thing happens, though of course in relation to musical space and musical time and not their physical counterparts. Does this get us anywhere near the target? One pleasing feature of the suggestion is its reminiscence of Kant's own feeling of bodily well-being. But of course I do not mean, as he did, that music makes us feel healthy; less Cartesianly, and more realistically, the whole person is involved, and reflexively so, so that, to use a deliberately vague expression, the subject's sense of being is expanded. While this is not strictly for Kant a moral idea, it is close to something to which he does have an deep attachment. That is a development of one's talents and capacities, for, just as he believes that someone who neglects his talents is open to criticism for neglecting a blessing that fortune has bestowed on him, so too someone who does not learn to find pleasure in the various musical ways in which the self can be enlarged is also neglecting some aspect of desirable experience of self, one that our accessibility to music opens up. Tentative though the suggestion is at best, it is well fitted to satisfy the demand for substantiveness over which Kant's own proposal faltered. And if we think back to the deployment of Aesthetic Ideas in the context of poetry and the formative arts, we shall also remember that what Kant was moved by there was at bottom the thought that these Ideas bring us benefit by enlarging ourselves with thought and feeling about what impinges on us. Here we can say that the Aesthetic Ideas of music also enlarge the mind, only not in reference to what it encounters so much as by what, even if only transiently (§53.4), it feels itself to be. 22 On this score, gratifying continuity between the arts is on offer where Kant only had abrupt discontinuity to propose. To Kant's own theory, I raised the objection that it treated the deeply personal value of music to us as unacceptably fungible

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with others, with that of a good game of cards, say, or a night out at the music hall. It is important to be convinced that the answer which I am now offering in its place (not as a total answer to the question, but as an important element of any fuller one) does not run into the same trouble. In my intention, at least, it does not do this, because what is not cashable in other terms about the sense of self that appreciation of music develops is that it is achieved in this particular way, one that makes essential mention of music. The exploration of auditory space and the sense of self that comes with this can only be specified through reference to that very mode. That is a part of the world in which we become conscious of ourselves, and exchanging that for a different mode of experience would only lead to a different awareness of oneself in a different, though maybe analogous, dimension. So, music cannot be replaced by poker or joke sessions, because whatever value we find we get from them, even if it is something more closely connected with our sense of self than we are likely to suppose it to be, will be something else. Exactly the same is true when it comes to consideration of the particular musical piece and the question of why the value of one work is not perfectly exchangeable with that of another. The delight in exploration and expansion that one finds here is valuable because it extends our self-awareness in the particular musical way in which it does, specification of which again involves ineliminable reference to this very piece. It is no surprise that the only way of conveying that is by playing the piece and getting one's listener to experience it too. My suggestion has also to avoid making just any piece of music a beautiful one. But I see no reason to think that it has any such consequence. Much music is sadly uninventive in tone, much can depress, much does not engage us actively and much strikes us as trivial and banal, as coarse and vulgar. In such cases, it will be very little fitted to expanding the sense of self in a way that we find attaching at all, and such pleasure as it does provide will hardly be one seriously to recommend. I leave the discussion of musical value with one last remark. The tone around which everything has been based started out as a Kantianly formalistic notion. Form then gave way to a more generously-conceived notion of communicability, but, at the last, the issue of value has come to rest in an attachment

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which we have to a sense of being that we come to acquire in the exploration of musical space and time. It would be sad if, in moving like this, I were to encourage the thought that this is to return to the Kantian formalism with which we started out. We must remember that the musical exploration takes place through publicly-given pitches, volumes and timbres, and that they have as much a part in our pleasures and in the art of music as anything else. Nothing that I have said in this section should foster the suspicion that they cannot be accorded a fitting place. The restoration of music to its proper standing, for which I have sought Kant's approbation, does not rely on any such restrictions, and it is open to us, as it may have seemed forbidden to him, 23 to say that a given tone can only be fully characterised in terms of the way in which we think of a given pitch, volume and timbre, a heard sound, that is, and not just Eulerian pulsus.

v The earlier discussion of the minor, non-theoretical senses could only have satisfied readers at one with Kant on the incommunicability of our secondary-quality experience. Anyone else will probably say that, since that is a red herring, there is no need to situate the special aesthetic standing of sight and hearing in some preferential claim that they have to the gep.eration of formalities which cannot be supplied by the other three senses. Communicability is ubiquitous, so the original problem recurs. In the history of the subject, it was officially raised by Hegel in the Introduction to his Lectures on Aesthetics, and clearly he did not find much help in his reading of Kant. Hegel's own claim was that the data of sight and hearing manage to resolve an opposition between matter and form or sensibility and spirit in a way that the other senses do not, and that all art has as its essential character an aim to combine these opposites in harmony. 'What [the spirit] wants [in art]', he writes, 'is sensuous presence which indeed should remain sensuous, but liberated from the scaffolding of its purely material nature. Thereby ... the work of art stands in the middle between immediate sensuousness and ideal thought.' Smell, taste and touch, unlike the theoretical senses of sight and hearing, have to do with matter as such and its immediately sensible qualities. 'For this reason', he says, 'these senses cannot have to do with artistic objects, which are meant to maintain

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themselves in their real independence and allow of no purely sensuous relationships.'24 Standing by itself, such an explanation sounds vacuous. What is this middle point? What is the opposition supposed to be between the two extremes? Above all, what justifies the claim that the non-theoretical senses have any more to do with matter as such than the theoretical ones? Certainly, if one comes upon Hegel's ruminations from cold, these questions will seem too daunting. However, we are not in that position. Against the Kantian background two things should strike us. The first is that his idea that we need to distinguish between sound and its tone or colour and its tone is already the discovery of a way of talking about a middle point between what Hegel calls the purely material and the purely ideal. Experience yields sensory engagement with sensory material that is immediately judged by thought. What is more, quite independently of the issue of communicability, it seems to be a truth that the basic Tonleiter of hearing and the colour cube of sight make possible a more extensive development of this phenomenon for these senses than it is elsewhere. Second, the Critique ofJudgment makes it very apparent that we cannot proceed far in aesthetic enquiry before running into issues of value. As we read the classic texts, it is customary to think that it was Hegel rather than Kant who was the first to lay stress on this. However, there is something rather strange about this way of looking at the matter, since the spiritualisation of which Hegel speaks and which carries the idea of value for him is in such obvious need of detailed elaboration. Of course, it receives it both in the course of the lectures and from the general philosophy in which the Aesthetics is placed, but in the present case one might almost say that when we come to think about the details it is Kant rather than Hegel who has more to say. I have argued for Kant that it is through the notion of tone that we are able to explain how the major arts that are restricted to the play of the senses of sight and hearing can satisfy the demands of value on them that allow them to be integrated without discontinuity into the wider community of the arts. A closely connected idea may explain why the minor senses cannot aspire to join in. Like sight and hearing, they too will be restricted to the play of sense; and, while we can all agree that

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there are interesting and enjoyable combinations of perfumes or feelings or tastes, in the absence of any developed notion of tone they are bound to suffer from an inability to generate any interest of a deep-reaching kind. Fundamentally, tone is of importance not for its purportedly privileged communicability, which we had probably best forget about, but because, when we set aside the formative arts and those of speech, it is to tone and tone alone that we look to supply a framework within which any sufficiently worthwhile play of sensations can occur. Without tone, no substantive value; without value, no art. Unless and until taste, touch and smell develop an ample sense of tone, no Muse will offer herself to speak on their behalf. NOTES 1. The topic has the additional advantage of allowing us to reflect on the integration of the arts into Kant's aesthetic without having to worry about the complications introduced by the distinction between dependent and free beauty. The sort of absolute music around which Kant's theory is built will be freely beautiful, if beautiful at all, even though it is of course the artifice of man. 2. It is curious for the reason that it is quite at odds with the account of truth which I have developed in earlier chapters. Nothing could ever force on us the judgment that different people's sensible experience of the same things was undetectably different, so it is just not a possibility. Rather than take it as evidence that he did not think of truth in the way that I have outlined, I shall assume that Kant just did not notice this inconsistency. And, even if this epistemic motivation for the introduction of the discussion of tone lapses in the end as a result of straightening things up here, the valuational reason for doing so will remain untouched. It is worthwhile reflecting that if Kant had put together his thoughts about truth and his assumptions about what is genuinely communicable, he would have been able to retain aspects of our aural experience as properly musical which he thinks he is obliged to set down as mere irrelevant charms. 3. Kant never puts enough stress on the need to make essential reference to the trained judge in his account of the beautiful. Leaving that underemphasised makes his picture of it sound far too starry-eyed. 4. More accurately, this is where my own representation respects the way in which the object has to be understood, if we are talking of works of art. But Kant's starting place was with the beauty of nature, and there issues of correct representation did not arise. 5. In the passage from §14 that I quoted, Kant's use of the expression 'tone' is uncertain. If he is reflecting on common usage there, his own technical term will be a mere homonym. It may be thought that he is pointing to a distinction between tone and sound already marked in speech, and drawing attention to the pretheoretical place that formal concerns have already acquired in our common ways of thinking. Then his technical use of 'tone' will be quite continuous

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7. 8.

9.

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Kantian Aesthetics Pursued with the word's appearance here. What might count against the second reading is the closing remark, that we don't expect the same tone to be judged preferable to another in the same way by everyone. But that would be a mistake. Kant is perfectly well aware that we can (and often do) differ in our aesthetic preferences about formal matters. Sometimes this involves an error of taste; sometimes there is nothing in the situation that makes for convergence anyway. I suspect that Kant may think of the tone of a violin or the pure colour green as falling into the latter category. Were it not for the underlying framework of transcendental idealism, one might almost say that pulsi of the ether and vibrations of the air are colours and sounds as they are in themselves. Kant would resist that way of speaking and say that Euler's theory shows us how to think of the world apart from our perception of it, but nonetheless in terms that the structure of our mind obliges us to use. Particles and pulsi are theoretical phenomena, so to speak. Cf. §51.9: 'it is only the effect of these vibrations on the elastic parts of the body that is felt'. The same doubt is expressed at §14.4, although there is a curious textual divergence among the first three editions of the Critique of Judgment. After endorsing Euler's theory, Kant goes on to say that for the purposes of aesthetic judgment it would be important for our experience of tone to be pure, and that we perceive the time intervals, 'something that I doubt we do' ('woran ich gar sehr zweifle', according to the 1793 and the 1799 editions), or 'something I do not doubt we do' ('woran ich gar nicht zweifle' in the Academy Edition and, Bernard says, though Lehman (Reclam, 1966) denies it, in the 1790 edition). Bernard puts this down to a misprint. However the difference arose, I think that Bernard's adherence to the second edition must be correct, since that is so clearly echoed in §51 (and also in §54). What puzzles the reader, though, is that it appears to leave Kant in the position of denying that sounds and their combinations can properly be said to be beautiful, which he clearly finds uncomfortable. I should say that the assimilation of heard tone to primary-quality experience occurs in the course of working out the official statement of doctrine that is still to be discussed. I treat it first, however, because, so far as I can see, it is only if Kant is thought of as endorsing it that we can explain his uncertainty about the existence of tone. That the announced account of tone is in fact quite neutral about its offering us primary-quality experience is a bonus of which Kant does not seem fully aware. I use 'R' here to recall the relational nature of form, but we must be careful to remember that is an element of experience, in which no awareness figures of anything as a relation between vibrations and the eardrum or between vibrations of the eardrum and its limits of receptivity. Indeed he even goes so far as to say that the number of tones is 'fixed by intelligible differences', meaning, I suppose, that it is governed by the mathematisable facts of sound-production. (cf §51.10) His inclination to the primary-quality conception of tone is surely leading him towards Pythagoreanism here. But once that link is severed he

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13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

is free to abandon Pythagoras and 'the harmony of calculation' and ally himself with Aristoxenos of Taranto and 'the harmony of the ear' instead. The metaphorical nature of the spatiality is stressed by Roger Scruton in 'Understanding Music', The Aesthetic Understanding (Methuen, 1983), pp. 77-100. Although he does not mention him, it would be perfectly in line with this reading of Kant to see his discussion of tone in the essay as an elaboration of what is already implicit in Kant's thought. It has absolutely nothing to do with the 'reflexive' judgment (as opposed to determinant judgment) that is special to the third Critique. The matter is complicated by the absence of subpersonal judgment in Kant's account of synthesis. What he represents as a comparative judgment I am thinking of ultimately as a (non-comparative) judgment that results from sensitivity to a proportional (i.e. 'comparative') tension of the eardrum. The explication of Kant's 'reflection' requires subtle treatment here, and, as it receives it, will come to look less and less like the transcendental reflection of the Amphiboly. Nor, I think, should it be objected that these tone constituting judgments will be inscrutably different just because they involve reference to the inscrutable triple in each case, whose own inscrutability is thereby passed on. For Kant, the reflective judgment generative of tone is made about the sound, not about the experiential triple , and the sound is that publicly accessible object which we may hear in inscrutably different ways. The assurance is only a weak one, though; it will not secure anything that Kant would allow to be sure knowledge. If it did, the question would arise why an analogous consideration could not handle the incommunicability of purely sensory experience. How acceptable these reflections are is a quite different matter. I am only trying to explain Kant's apparent fascination with the physiology. It may well be that, under the domination of the primary-quality conception of tone, Kant is supposing it to be a fourth element of a sensorily-given quadruple. However, it seems to me at least as likely that he is just contrasting it with the discursive nature of aesthetic ideas as they appear in poetry or painting. This is painting that is surely better called 'conceptual art' than anything riding under that name today. The crucial sentences which I rely on are from §§11.2 and 12.2 and have attracted comment in the previous two chapters. For reasons that should now be apparent, I think it is correct to take the 'mere formal purposiveness' that Kant speaks of to refer to the benefit which we are conscious of with pleasure in hearing the play of sounds as we do. Almost, but not entirely, because an important element of musical experience is left out of this, and that is the experience of the construction of music in playing it. A competent pianist can, through the pattern of his fingers' moving, become sensitive to something that escapes the ear. Charles Rosen has spoken well of

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this element of musical experience in reflections on Bach's fugal writing. 22. Suggestive remarks are to be found at the end of Scruton's article, cited above. Particularly teasing is the thought that in hearing music 'you are the music while the music lasts'. 23. Cf. note 15. 24. Both quotations are from Hegel's Introduction to Aesthetics, ed. C. Karelis (Oxford, 1979), pp. 38, 39.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Architecture and Sculpture 'FAILURE IN EVERY DIRECTION of human effort is less frequently attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labour, than to a confused understanding of the thing to be done.' The topic exercising the author of this confident assertion was architecture. If his arresting surmise applies to the building of today as he supposed it did to that of his own time, the philosopher no less than the architect has some blame to bear. The origin of serious confusion is the philosopher's to sanction; its persistence, his to encourage. Not curbing it early on, he will have contributed his negative part to the growth of distortions of practice that gain hold and resist easy eradication. I

An optimistic assessment of the outlook for modern architecture was offered in an article that Sir Richard Rogers wrote for The Times of 3 July 1989. In essence, his message was that, should failure befall us in future, the fault will lie less with confusion of thought than with greedy or purblind commercial developers, with mean and unimaginative public authorities, and with shortsighted and timid decision-makers and patrons. The programme for the architect himself however, is clear and unconfused; and if he is only allowed his way by those forces that bear down on him so heavily in myriad practical ways, we may look forward to constructing public building as fine as any we have inherited from the past. Particular buildings that Rogers used to illustrate his conviction that the best modern building need not blush to stand

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beside earlier masterpieces included I. M. Pei's Louvre Pyramid, Sir Norman Foster's Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building in New York, and Alison and Peter Smithson's Economist Building in StJames's. He might equally well have cited, I am sure, Saarinen's TWA Building at Kennedy Airport, or the Arche at La Defense outside Paris. Had not modesty forbidden, the new Lloyd's Building in central London and the more immediately eye-catching Centre Pompidou would have made worthy additions to the list. As it happens, the various buildings which he cited illustrated a number of different virtues exemplified by the best of modern work, and I shall have something to say about some of them. But what I want to comment on first of all is something that Rogers did not remark on and that, to my eye, stands out about them all. This is their continuity and affinity with what we have come to think of as the most notable of modern abstract sculpture. What I mean by this is that our - and friends on whom I have tried this out suggest that I may not be hazarding much here if I speak for present readers as much as for myself - mental set, as we view these works, is quite different from that with which we approach so much of the city building of the past. We come upon these masterpieces, if that is what they are, as works of art in their own right. We see them as set apart from their neighbours, and, accustomed to thinking of modern sculpture as only fortuitously limited in size, find no particular difficulty in viewing these impressive edifices as of the same genre, only on a larger scale than is customary. The impression of continuity is itself no doubt also fostered by occasional sculptures, such as Richard Serra's Tilted Arc formerly in Lower Manhattan's Federal Plaza, or Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans' Wall in Washington DC, which take their inspiration from architectural models, and which have done something to familiarise us with abstract sculpture on a truly architectural scale. Of course, to say that we greet these buildings as if they were sculptures is not to say that we are right to do so. Nor is it to say that their authors were passing off as architecture what was really sculpture. These two ideas may be quite false. Nonetheless, I think it is not impossible to document a thought going beyond this bare record of my own impressions, and one that brings us

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close to a confusion of a kind that would indeed be heavy with consequence in the way that Ruskin warns us against - for his were the miniatory sentiments that I started with. The thought is not just that that modern architecture looks abstractly sculptural, but, more far-reachingly, that, in the minds of those who fix what architecture today is and what it is capable of in future, this art is thought of as fundamentally sculpture! in nature. In a nutshell, I am suggesting first that a prominent conception that modernist practitioners of the art have worked under is of architecture as fundamentally sculpture. In particular, I shall say that this is not a matter of stylistic preference. Rather, it falls out of an understanding of what architecture in its very nature is. At a later stage, I shall go on to say why such conception of their art is dangerously confused. However, before I can arrive at that point, I need to provide some evidence that such a confusion of conception really is what we are faced with. Let me start by pointing to four features which align an object with sculpture, and by contrasting them with more orthodoxlyconceived architectural counterparts. First, fine buildings tend to be thought of as possessing their aesthetic character and value in themselves, in abstraction from how they stand to their neighbours. How they fit in place with what exists already is a matter of what virtues they possess on their own account. Thus, Rogers wrote: if buildings like the great Gothic churches, the palazzi of Renaissance Italy or St Paul's seem to us to exist in a harmonious relation with their neighbours, it is not because they slavishly imitate them in size, style or material. Rather they embodied new building techniques and distinctive architectural forms quite unlike anything ever seen before. The contextual harmony that they seem to us to enjoy with their surroundings is the result of the juxtaposition of buildings of great quality, clearly and courageously relating across time. We may notice that, although this thought is taken to apply to good modern building, it does so not uniquely but just as a general case of a would-be general rule. This shows that we are not concerned with one way of viewing architectural success among alternatives, but are dealing with a quite general conception of what architecture is.

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Second, conceived of ideally as being self-contained, the architectural masterpiece is not wedded to its site. Like a piece of sculpture, it should be capable of displacement elsewhere without undergoing significant change or loss. Of course, there will be more or less felicitous settings for it, but ties to location are no more than contingent ties. In effect, this thought is a consequence of the last. The best test of this contention, of course, is the judgment of our eyes as we reflect on individual buildings that we meet. But further evidence of it is, I think, provided by the way in which modern building has lent itself so easily to internationalisation. Were it thought of as closely engaged with particular settings, transposition to different centres by replication would be far more of a rarity than it appears to be. This does not by itself speak for a conception of architecture, since we have to do only with architecture of our own particular period. But some index of the thought as ranging wider than this is surely to be found in a view of conservation that we are only now beginning to find upsetting, namely that which counts an important building as preserved as long as it is untouched, but which is relatively unconcerned by the razing of the building's less distinguished neighbours. The properly-thought-through view must be that the edifice of distinction is itself frequently damaged through lack of care for its surroundings. It would, let us note, be a mistake to say that this better idea is indistinguishable from the thought that we preserve a building only by preserving both it and its setting. A third indicative point is Rogers's willingness to say that 'architecture has always been primarily concerned with the relation of three-dimensional form, with the play of light or shadow, of space and mass rather than with ornament'. There are really two points here. One concerns the opposition between decoration and form, which I shall discuss shortly. Just now, I want to insist on the impossibility of telling whether we have to do with sculpture or architecture if the fundamental concerns are simply those of volume, light, shadow and three-dimensional form. Of course, they do all have their part to play, as no-one would deny; but to make them fundamental, and to see aesthetic character as ultimately borne by them, will make the distinction between the two arts more one of degree than of kind. Again, we may notice how Rogers's willingness to say that this concern

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with form has always been a feature of fine architecture supports the sculptural emphasis as one of conception rather than of mere stylistic preference. Fourth and finally, once the prime architectural concerns are identified in these formal terms, and buidings are thought of as fundamentally self-standing and detachable from their settings, it is natural to think of their aesthetic character as primarily visual and primary external. They are envisaged as displaying their character to the outwardly-placed and practically uninvolved eye. By contrast, they are relatively set against picking that character up from a lived commerce with their structure that might serve to give a sense to its forms, volumes and decorative detail. A consequence is that their aesthetic character comes to be thought of rather more as expressive than anything else. To use a metaphor that is not at all easy to avoid, it is not that architectural building is felt to embody the character that is its when it has one; rather it expresses or proclaims it. This too can be connected with a quite general idea that Rogers says we forget at our peril, namely that 'architecture mirrors society; its civility and its barbarism'. This, I take it, is not presumed to be the unique province of architecture, but is supposed to apply to every art. The ways in which it does so in the art that concerns us will radically depend on the three points already noticed and, because they are what they are, will once again make the assimilation of architecture to abstract sculpture very hard to resist. My next evidential point is this. To suggest, as I have been doing, that the modernist is developing a conception of architecture rather than a stylistic predilection allows us to understand two things which would otherwise remain something of a puzzle. Its explanatory force confirms the suggestion and provides further evidence of a conceptual shift having taken place. The first is that one thing that strikes the observer as he stands off from the battle between tradition and modernity is a kind of radical incomprehension that afflicts both parties. They consider the same work, but, whereas one finds it, say, 'harmoniously in tune with the ethical and scientific movement of the age', the other finds it barbarous, hostile to any humane involvement, a building that we cannot just ignore but have grimly to pass by or grit our teeth to enter. It is not, I think, surprising to find people making diametrically-opposed judgments about

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the same thing, but what is difficult to see is how, when both parties speak in the best of faith, as undoubtedly they do, they are incapable of seeing how the other can make the judgment that he does. Such repeatedly-encountered incomprehension cries out for explanation. To my mind, we have what we need for this in the thought that, when a building is judged as architecture under one conception of it, it will display some values and not others; when it is judged under a different conception of the art, it will announce quite different ones. So, assimilating a building to his version of architecture, the traditionalist cannot understand how the work could possibly be thought of as harmoniously in accord with the times, or at least cannot see how it could be held desirably such; whereas his modern-minded friend cannot see how it could possibly be judged as invasive, threatening, crushing and the like. The reason is that what escapes both of the disputants is that when the building is judged as a piece of architecture it is so judged under a way of thinking of that art, and according to that way of thinking so it will indeed possess the character that each party singly finds it so obviously to possess. In their way, they are both right, only they are not quite right in thinking that they are appreciating the same thing; they are not judging it, as Kant taught us to say, under the same representation. Because the difference of representation escapes them, neither being conscious that their appreciation has necessarily to be filtered through a conception of the art which they both sincerely care about, they are bound to think each other at best obtuse and at worst dishonest. And their frustrating conversations architects notoriously complain about the fruitlessness of these debates - only generate more incomprehension. What progress will turn on here, I fancy, is recognition that different conceptions of the art are in conflict, and that it is an a priori and primarily philosophical matter to bring that difference into the open and, if possible, to adjudicate between the rivals' claims. I said that seeing the debate between tradition and modernity as an issue of conception rather than aesthetic preference explains two things. The second of them is the remarkable way in which modernist artists have been able to ratify present practice from the past and perhaps even more to project with confidence into the future a practice that they have so managed to ratify from

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the past. The reason cannot be given in terms of confidence in an aesthetic preference alone: preferences change, and one predilection can no more be ratified by the past than it can be confidently projected from a present success into the future. On the other hand, once we operate with a conception of the art, then since it is acknowledged that the best works of the past belong to that same art, and that the same will be bound to hold true of the finest works of the future, as long as one sees oneself obeying the same conception-imposed canons as did those avowedly fine works of the Renaissance or the Mannerist era, so one may be assured of one's own day's virtue; likewise, as long as our successors adhere to the same conception-imposed considerations that motivate us, once our building has been ratified by the past, so we may confidently project our own procedures into the future. At the same time, the modernist allows himself to think that, because his opponents are operating with a different (and sadly erroneous) conception, they not only misunderstand the past but also, through that misunderstanding, threaten to deform the future by imposing onto it the untenable conception that permeates their own understanding of their activity. Nowhere does this kind of move come out more clearly than in the apologists for Le Corbusier's architecture as classicist in conception: he uses, it is said, at the Villa Stein at Garches outside Paris, for example, the same schema of proportions as, following Vitruvius, Palladia did in the Villa Foscari at Fusina; or again, in the Villa Savoye at Poissy, the same proportions as are employed in the Villa Capra outside Vicenza. Since architecture is primarily a matter of proportion, of handling of volume and of masses, we can, in all consistency, scarcely admire the Malcontenta and the Rotonda yet distance ourselves from the Villa Savoye and the Villa Stein. The thought that how the two pairs of buildings' proportions are seen may depend on something beyond the formal values that are underwritten by the quasi-sculptural conception of the art, something that falsifies the thought that they are significantly alike, just cannot arise. The fixing of the conception guarantees these works' aesthetic isomorphism. An objector to my suggestion may protest that it will only be proper to speak of confusion where there are alternatives, and the wrong one has been chosen. But, he will say, I have only 'shown' this in a quite factitious way. For, while I have spoken of taking

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architecture as abstract sculpture, it is not at all clear that there is anything else for which to take it. The expression 'sculpture', as I have used it, is after all only a name, and one that might here act merely as shorthand for the predominance of the way of treating buildings that I have been outlining. Nothing said so far demonstrates that, if this is indeed so, any notable mistake is being made, or for that matter any mistake at all. To this, I reply that one thing that seems ·to escape through the net is that the forms that the architect has to handle are the forms of a building, and a building thought of much more as building-in-use than as consisting of an ordered assemblage of construction materials. Architecture is quite different from that, and, once the thought of use is seriously implicated in the perception of the forms which we are offered by the builder, we shall no longer be able to talk of sculptural values as properly dominant. I might put it like this: the sculptural conception of architecture conceives of it as the art of handling stone and brick (wood and concrete)- i.e. physical materials that happen to have been used for building. The alternative conception of architecture, as architecture, I would like to say, is as the art of building-in-use. Just what the difference between them amounts to is something that I shall explore later. Here, I stress only that there is a difference. This being so, there is ample room for confusion to take hold, and the objection lapses. Second, perhaps it will be said that my calling the second of these alternatives a conception of architecture as architecture is tendentious. But that would not be right. Everyone will agree, when they think about it for a moment, that this is what architecture is. The difficulty is to see that there is a difference between erecting buildings that are beautiful as forms, and building buildings that are beautiful in their forms as buildings-in-use. We are so unaccustomed to making explicit the completion which I here somewhat cumbersomely bring out that it is easy to think that, as long as we have made a building with any aesthetic character at all, the character that it has must be an architectural one. But this is simply not true. To have an architectural character, it must have it through the thought that it is as a building that we are to consider and appreciate it. Once this thought recedes, as it does so markedly in the third of the four features on which I have just commented,

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we are in danger of losing sight of its architectural character altogether. While rejecting these protests, I shall be the first to acknowledge that the persuasive force of what I have said is not yet conclusive. It might after all be that while the description which I have offered of the modernist mind fits it closely enough, and while that cast of mind would indeed explain the two phenomena to which I have drawn attention, nonetheless some other conception may actually be at work than that towards which I have pointed. Of course, nothing that I could possibly say could hope to close that gap absolutely, but one thing is certainly missing which must be provided before my diagnosis of our present situation can be accepted with any confidence. What is lacking is any exploration of our intellectual history. Only if we can find historical sources that in one way or another strongly induce us to the sculptural and formalistic conception of our actual practice, that make it seem practically inevitable, shall we have done all that is possible or necessary to substantiate the point at issue. But with that done, even if the thesis would still not enjoy logical certainty, it would at least be morally certain that the sculptural conception prevails. Better than that, one cannot ask. In the next two sections, I propose to draw attention to two notable elements in the history of ideas that may be thought to operate in just this way. One of these is local in a way that the other is not. II

It is a truism to remark that, intellectually speaking, we are the

children of our past. What we think now, we think in large measure because of what our predecessors thought, whether or not we are aware of their having thought it. Very often too, what we think now depends on what our forebears made of their own precursors. Furthermore, just as our thought may have the shape that it does because of misunderstandings on our part of what our elders were once saying, so too our present thoughts may move as they do as a result of our elders' misunderstanding of their own mentors. So, without our knowing it, we may think as we do in consequence of a misunderstanding of someone whose thought we never encounter face-to-face, and of whose ideas we might, if pressed, deny all knowledge. The truth of that reflective

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remark is not at all at odds with a claim that a misunderstanding of the earlier figure permeates our own thought and practice. Commonplace though they are, these reflections encourage me to raise the question of whether this very phenomenon may not be at work here. In particular, I suspect that two rather dimly-perceived figures from the past are still powerfully at work in forming the presumptions that guide a considerable portion of our architectural habits. The first of these figures is John Ruskin himself. The gist of my story here is that a causally important source of the sculptural or formalistic conception of architecture which I have been speaking about stems, in Britain at least, from reaction to, and violent rejection of, Ruskin's account of architecture. As it happens, however, it is not a theory to which Ruskin himself would have given his assent, but is a misunderstanding of his ideas. The misunderstanding offers a patently absurd conception of what architecture is. It was natural to reject what seemed the crucial part of it by way of embracing abstract formalism. 'Architecture', writes Ruskin, 'is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power and pleasure.' Thus the opening of The Seven Lamps of Architecture (I §1). Later in the same section, he has another shot: Let us therefore at once confine the name to that art which, taking up and admitting as conditions of its working the necessities and common uses of the building, impresses on its form certain characters venerable or beautiful but otherwise unnecessary. Thus, I suppose, no one would call laws "architectural" which determine the height of a breastwork or the position of a bastion. But if to the stone facing of that bastion be added an unnecessary feature, as a cable moulding, that is Architecture. These are fateful words, for the immediate understanding of what Ruskin is offering is that the architectural is confined to the superficially-imposed, and in principle detachable, decorative handling of a building's forms. And that thought is surely one that calls to mind just the sort of fussy and self-satisfied Victorian or Edwardian or decorative mock-Tudor building that is such anathema to the modernist spirit. Detail, it sounds, is to be emphasised, and emphasised in a way that makes it

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distinct from, or at best in aesthetic terms tenuously related to, underlying structure. The architect's job, Ruskin leads one to think, is merely to decorate the cake; to the builder falls the more serious task of baking it. Once the debate is set up in these terms, though, it is perfectly understandable that the alternative that should have presented itself to those in whose past these words were directly active was one which insisted on the exclusion of the decorative element as a useless frippery that can only hinder us in the appreciation of underlying form. Once we strip away decoration as effete and jejune, what will remain to distinguish building and architecture - and of course Ruskin was quite right to insist that there is a distinction - is the handling of the pure, underlying structure to aesthetic effect. This means that there is nothing else left for architecture to be but the expressive handling of forms that satisfy the utilitarian requirements imposed by the contract to build. In this way, Ruskin's supposed theory is rejected not from top to bottom, but by retaining its two distinct elements, structure and decoration, and shifting the architectural emphasis from the superficially-conceived one to the more fundamental, underlying, other. As long as the bipartite structure of the theory is kept and its decorational element seen as idle excrescence, the rejection of the Ruskinian conception of the matter comes almost inevitably to centre around a quasi-sculptural formalism of the kind that I ascribed to modernist thought. It accepts the detachable idea of decoration that it reads into Ruskin's exposition, and, instead of making that the essence of architectural success, has success depend on the formation of what is left over when decoration is abandoned. And it is instructive to notice that just such a move is made in Rogers's article when, inveighing against his traditionalist opponents, he suggests that if we do not accept the modernist conception of building we shall end up with an architecture wrapped around a kind of decorative and ornamental work that can only lead to self-indulgent contentment and cosiness. The modernist position and the pseudo-Ruskinian one appear to the modernist as polar opposites: rejection of the one leads him immediately to acceptance of the other. With an eye to getting ourselves straight about the past, we should start by noticing how many things Ruskin says stand

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at odds with a rigidly bipartite reading of his proposal. A first is that he himself is dismissive of an icing-sugar conception of architectural decoration. Speaking of the lantern of St Ouen at Rouen, he wrote: 'It is one of the basest pieces of Gothic in Europe; its flamboyant traceries being of the last and most degraded forms: and its entire plan and decoration resembling, and deserving little more credit than the burnt sugar ornaments of elaborate confectionery' (Seven Lamps, II §8). Second, if the ornamental conception of architecture really had been his, it would have left us able to say that any sort of building can be a work of architecture. For any building can be encrusted with unnecessary but pretty decoration. Yet that is far from Ruskin's mind. Recall what he has to say about shop-fronts and railway stations: Another of the strange and evil tendencies of the present day is to the decoration of the railroad station. Now, if there be any place in the world in which people are deprived of that portion of temper and discretion which is necessary to the comprehension of beauty, it is there.... It is the very temple of discomfort, and the only charity that the builder can extend to us, is to show us plainly as may be, how soonest to escape from it. ... The railroad is in all its relations a matter of earnest business, to be got through as soon as possible. It transmutes a man from a traveller into a living parcel. (Seven Lamps, IV §21) Finally, and, I think, conclusively, Ruskin's various guiding Lamps make little sense when applied simply to the decorative and the ornamental. For instance, the Lamp of Sacrifice with which he starts 'prompts us to offer precious things, merely because they are precious, not because they are useful or necessary' (I §2). Now, if we simply expanded ourselves in precious but superfluous ornament, there would be no distinction to be drawn between the prodigal and the splendid. To apply that distinction in our criticism of architecture, we need to integrate the decoration to the body of the building and the idea which it expresses, an idea which is indissolubly connected with its use. This is confirmed by the previous thought about railway stations, where in Ruskin's mind use evidently impinges on what judgment we make of ornament. That there is little to be said for his particular example is quite immaterial.

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Or consider the Lamp of Truth. What Ruskin insists on, we should remember, is that a building is noble only if it is honest its honesty contributes to its nobility - and it achieves this by avoiding three main sources of deceit. First, it eschews the suggestion of a mode of structure or support other than the true one (as in pendants of late Gothic roofs); second, it avoids the painting of surfaces to represent some other material than that of which they actually consist (as in the marbling of wood) or the deceptive representation of sculptured ornament upon them; and, third, it refuses the use of cast or machine-made ornament. For my purposes, it is the first of these three that matters. How could that form of deceit possibly be understood unless we took the decoration that clothes it together with its relation to what it decorates? As Ruskin himself put it, In the vaulting of a Gothic roof it is no deceit to throw the strength into the ribs of it, and make the intermediate vault a mere shell. Such a structure would be presumed by an intelligent observer, the first time he saw such a roof; and the beauty of its traceries would be enhanced to him if they confessed and followed the lines of its main strength. (Seven Lamps, II §6) What is quite plain here is that, according to Ruskin himself, the aesthetic judgment of the decoration or embellishment cannot be made independently of its relation to the structure that is decorated or embellished. So, a reading of his leading architectural thought that identifies the architectural with the decorative is quite mistaken. What we need to say instead, and still keeping quite closely to his opening words, is that, on Ruskin's view, the architectural enters as soon as the material is handled in such a way as to embellish (meaning to make beautiful, not to add on a detachable beauty) or decorate it, so that the whole is noble, venerable or beautiful, where we are to understand that the given function could have been so embellished or decorated in several different ways (i.e. is not necessarily treated in that very manner which it is treated). In this revised formulation, I suggest that we have a completely neutral use of the terms 'embellishment' and 'decoration' that offers no particular handhold to building of the kind that modernism deprecates.

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Moreover, it can now be stressed that anyone who sought to diminish Victorian and Edwardian building within this conception of architecture would not be able to do so by speaking of the beauties of pure form, and setting decoration aside. The reason is that the decorative is no longer here thought of as a detachable element, but as a way in which a structural element is handled. In philosophical terms, it is less a part than a property, one might say, and any handling of structural elements that leads to the whole being beautiful would count as decorative or embellished handling. The rejection of decoration on this reading would then come more to the rejection of the aim of architecture as being aesthetically pleasing. And although this is perhaps what some modernist work has achieved, it is certainly not what is in its makers' minds when imprecations against decorative building are uttered. Rather, they would have to say that a particular manner of decoration or embellishment was unsatisfactory and then advocate another. Put like this, we are clearly in the area of a contentious matter of aesthetic preference, not in the a priori domain of how architecture itself is to be properly understood. III

In itself, this misreading of Ruskin would perhaps have been of little consequence. To leave a lasting trace, it needed to slot itself into a already powerfully established general aesthetic, suggesting how that might be rightly applied to the special domain of architecture. As before, this requirement does not depend for its fulfilment on practitioners studying or discussing the general theory. It only needs to be background in the intellectual landscape or to have been significantly involved in its formation. In the seventy years or so before Ruskin was writing (1850), the broadest aesthetic that we find is Kant's; and although that had certainly come under attack both from Schiller (in 1795) and, a little later, from Hegel (in unpublished lectures), because it was reasonably accessible to the student, unlike either of the others, it was better placed than theirs to make an impact on the landscape of ideas and to pass that impact on to us in our day. (However, en passant, let us just remind ourselves that in the architectural section of his Aesthetics Hegel does precisely introduce us to architecture as essentially 'inorganic sculpture',

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where he also likes to suppose its value for us to be symbolic rather than anything else - a view perhaps unwittingly echoed by Rogers, as we shall see.) Notable about Kant's thought has been its supposed advocacy of a priori formalism. Kant has seemed to teach us that it is of the very essence of the beautiful, that at which all arts (including architecture) are presumed to aim, that it should consist in a pleasing formal handling of a given material, and that in consequence any gifted exponent of an art must concentrate his efforts on the invention or discovery of suitably satisfying forms. To the architect set against the supposedly Ruskinian conception of his work, this echo from general theory could only come as welcome, offering comforting authority for his own rejection of the decorative-cum-embellishing conception of his art. It is a matter of considerable historical and intellectual interest, I think, that this entirely mistaken understanding of Kant is still with us. When we look in detail at the Critique of Judgment and see how he applies its doctrine to architecture, a quite different lesson emerges. It is a lesson that is confirmed by Kant's own brief remarks there about architecture and is one that any modernist must take to heart. Let me briefly expand. Kant's general aesthetic formalism is reputedly rooted in the combination of two a priori claims which he makes in the course of his general elucidation of the beautiful. One is that to say something is beautiful is not to bring it under a concept, but to relate it to our feeling of pleasure; the other is that the beautiful thing, be it natural or artefactual, must look as if it has been designed, though not for anything in particular; it is, in Kant's phrase, 'purposive without a purpose'. The first of these claims is usually taken to mean that an object is beautiful or not quite independently of any consideration of what sort of thing it is. To bring a building under a concept in our response to it would be to think of it first as a building and then more particularly as a church, or an arsenal or a counting-house. And if, at Kant's behest, we are to avoid doing this, an important step will have been taken in encouraging the architect to suppose that his work will be aesthetically successful or not, independently of all thought of the sort of building that he has built - indeed, quite independently of thinking of his erection as being a building at all. That it is one is a merely

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practical affair that impinges at most peripherally on the aesthetic merit of his efforts. So, although the forms which the architect constructs may in fact be responsive to function, our awareness of their being so is neither here nor there when it comes to their strictly architectural merit, to their beauty or their nobility. Even so stern a critic of the formalistic, sculptural view of architecture as Roger Scruton mentions Kant as one of its intellectual mainstays, and he does so for precisely this reason (The Aesthetics of Architecture, p. 10). And, rightly enough, he demurs. Our aesthetic judgments about something cannot be made in abstraction from what sort of thing it is. What is interesting about this thought is that that view is precisely one which Kant will endorse. For, when he says that to judge something beautiful is not to bring it under a concept, what he means is very largely that the predicate of our judgment, viz. ' - is beautiful', provides no determinate information whatever about what the object is like. Different things are beautiful in different ways, and to say that something is beautiful does not provide the slightest indication (beyond information already supplied in introducing it under a description such as 'That church' or 'This museum entrance') about its appearance. Moreover, it is perfectly plain, once one thinks about it, that Kant is obliged to hold that we always make our aesthetic judgments in respect of a concept under which the judged object is more or less explicitly considered. For to say something is beautiful is to say inter alia that anyone who contemplates it will, ideally, take pleasure in it. But, of course, this can only apply to those who view it under the same representation, or see it in the same way. When one comes to specify the way in which one views it, for the most part this will be done by citing the sort of thing which one identifies the object of one's attention as being, a church, an arsenal, a counting-house, a museum entrance and so forth. So, as far as the first matter that has repeatedly appeared to align the Kantian aesthetic with modern formalism goes, that rests on a complete misunderstanding of what he was telling us. What Scruton dissociates himself from is thus not a Kantian thought at all. It is just a misunderstanding of Kant, and one that the prevalence of the error gives ground for confidently thinking to be deeply entrenched in the intellectual landscape.

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However, this first point is perhaps less telling than the second in underwriting formalistic doctrine. For the claim that the beautiful thing has to be purposive without a purpose has always seemed hard to understand in any other way than as a claim that what our aesthetic judgment will turn on must be matters of form. The beautiful object, it is supposed, must look as if fashioned to answer to some purpose, yet without any particular purpose being identifiable - indeed, if, in addition, the object is not brought under any concept, how could it be? So, a thing's beauty is, if you like, a matter of its appearing intelligible. In its form, it is as if it intimates the happy resolution of some problem or other, some demand or other, although what the problem or demand is must not be discernible in the object that confronts one. There are all sorts of problems about this reading of Kant that I shall simply ignore. What I want to stress here is the way in which, at a distance, it encourages the sculptural view of building. To one who already supposed he had reason to reject Ruskinian thought, it could only have supported the trend. Yet, strange as it may seem, a correct reading of Kant will have nothing to do with this way of taking him, and will point us in a quite different direction from that assumed to be his by early critics and later admirers alike. The truth of the matter, which I have argued in previous chapters, is that when Kant says that something is purposive, as in the phrase 'purposive without purpose', all he means is that the object in question serves some function in our spiritual economy; it is rewarding or salutary for us in one way or another. The underlying point of this observation is to explain why we are right to think about the beautiful, as we do not think, say, about the merely charming, that everyone has reason to engage themselves with it, that there are good grounds for everyone to find pleasure there. On the other hand, to say, as Kant does, that this benefit is 'without purpose' means only that the benefit that is on offer is not one that the object has been intentionally designed to provide. (Kant is thinking primarily about natural cases here, not artistic ones, though his idea will sometimes happily extend there too.) His doctrine, then, is that the beautiful object serves us rewardingly even though no such aim has to be appealed to explain its existence. To apply this to

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architecture, its works will only be beautiful if in one way or another they provide us with pleasure that is a manifestation of our sensitivity to their providing a good for us, though that good is one the thought of which need not have been causally operative in the design or the construction of the building. Sympathise with this idea or not, one must immediately see that this proposal is not a formalistic one at all. For the value of the successful architectural work is no longer assessed through the pleasure that its forms give us, but through the sort and extent of reward that is held out to us in our awareness of them. This bounty is emphatically not the pleasure which the building provides, and the object of this pleasure is not the building's form. Of course, it may well be that vehicles of the reward are forms (masses, volumes, spaces, light and shadow and so on), but to say, as the formalist does, that those forms are beautiful which give widespread delight, is quite the wrong way of putting it. On Kant's view, those objects are beautiful which, through the qualities which they have (including their formal ones), minister enlargingly to our minds, and the forms that please us are beautiful not so much in pleasing us as in their ministering to us. How they are to do this is something that I shall turn to presently. But perhaps a moment's pause is in order here just to emphasise that a correct understanding of Ruskin and of Kant points emphatically away from architectural formalism. There is no sustenance for the modernist's sculptural conception of his art in either of these large figures from his past. IV

Putting together the historical excursus with my introductory observations, I conclude that it is morally certain, then, that the modernist conception of architecture does indeed embody a confusion. Fundamentally, this is the confusion between thinking of architecture sculpturally as the construction of beautiful assemblages of materials in the erection of buildings and thinking of it architecturally as the construction of beautiful buildings in the erection of buildings. The difference between the two is of course that the crucial aesthetic idea becomes attached to a different substantive in the two cases, and that only one of them is appropriate to the case of architecture. However, just to say that there is confusion here is not yet to say enough, for

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the confusion may not be anything other than benign. And it is only if there is something seriously amiss with making it that Ruskin's ominous words that I began with will apply to today's thought about what we have constructed around us. We shall see that the confusion cannot be so lightly dismissed by showing that the traditional, and now embattled, fully architectural conception of the matter does offer us goods that cannot be secured by its rival. This will take us far beyond the point at which we merely deplore the prevalence of low-quality work (as all parties to these discussions do), and enable us to see that even the finest constructional success under the formalistic regime cannot hope to secure for us what we are bound to look to architecture to provide. To do that, we must have a perception of what that need is, and I can think of no better way of introducing that topic than to focus now on the correct way to hear what our mentors Kant and Ruskin have to tell us. We saw above that, for Kant, a beautiful object is purposive in that it offers us some spiritual reward that will account for our wanting to say that people ought to engage themselves with it. His general thesis here is that this reward comes about through the way that the object in its particularity provides us with expanded ways of thinking about a subject that it treats. In abstraction from specifically architectural considerations, the beautiful object, in particular the beautiful work of art, expands our intellectual and emotional responses to significant themes that it engages us with. In doing that, it enriches us by making us possessors of fuller and deeper conceptions of the world than otherwise we should have. Furthermore, these are representations which we cannot but continue to deploy beyond the work that initially introduces them. It is true that Kant does not have very much to say about architecture, but what little he does say (at CJ §51.8) fits quite felicitously into this general line of thought, and it also indicates where we must expect to find a difference between it and the other principal plastic art that he does consider, sculpture, which for him, of course, is a figurative, not an abstract, art. What he insistently says here is that the ideas through which beautiful architecture has its effect on us are limited by considerations of the building's use, whereas in the sculptural case the fine statue merely expresses ideas connected with the representation of the

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naturally possible object. The point of this contrast is to draw our attention to the fact that, unlike the great work of sculpture (and how much less like the abstract sculpture than the figurative one), the truly architectural masterpiece has to exercise its power over us through the way in which it fashions those thoughts and emotional responses of ours which impinge on the sort of activity that the particular building houses. That is, the beautiful building is beautiful through becoming an embodiment of a constellation of mental states related to the activity that the building serves, be it worship, or military endeavour, or our relation to the past, or family life or whatever. Sculpture, by contrast, can never be essentially that, since in the purest of figurative cases, as also in the abstract ones, there is no use that is central to our understanding of it and about which it might aim to shape our thoughts. So, finally, provided that we can say just why it is important for us to elaborate ideas in the way that architecture can assist us to do, and provided that we recognise its special place in doing so, we shall appreciate clearly and precisely the danger that comes with a conception of the art that allies it with sculptural values rather than with those which are, properly speaking and traditionally, its own. Ruskin, and I mention him now for the last time, will surely concur in this. The reader will remember him saying: 'Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power and pleasure.' Everything should encourage us now to hear these words in the light of these last, truly Kantian, thoughts. In our sensible awareness of the buildings that surround us, we think of them both as buildings and as buildings with a particular use. Their beauty will consist in such a handling of them that increases our mental well-being and our mental power in the thoughts about those functions that they make available to us through the pleasure which their forms give us. Whatever we may think of the intensely moralistic streak in Ruskin's writing, the Lamp of Sacrifice, the Lamp of Truth, the Lamp of Power and the others become quite comprehensible against this background. On the other hand, as I have tried to show, they were not coherently understandable on the more common and dismissive reading of his work.

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What I have been saying might not seem so very striking. After all, it sounds banal to say that fine building cannot divorce itself from encouraging thought about and affective response to the activities that it houses. But we need to remember how far this truth stretches. In the first place, the activities for which building is constructed, be they devotional, memorial, civil, military or domestic, are activities by which our lives for the most part are formed. We live our lives through the institutions that cater for these activities, and, like it or not, the people who we become are in some significant part fashioned by the ways in which we manage to think of the institutions through which we live. So, it seems to me that in one line of procedure, the architect helps to fashion the institutions in which we live our lives, and does so not in the merely banausic sense that he makes the places in which they are housed - courts, houses, banks, universities and museums- but, more interestingly, he fashions them for us in getting us to construct a largely unconscious way of thinking about and responding to them, one which sets actual limits to the way in which we are liable to change them in practice. Even what we will come to do with them will itself largely depend on these unconscious modes of thought and feeling. It is no more than an extension of this thought to say that the sense which we find in our own lives, the sense of self that we develop, is intimately connected with how we come to feel and think about the activities and institutions that set the boundaries to how our lives are led. If what I have been offering here as an extension of Kantian thought is acceptable, then it will not be at all extravagant to think of the architect not simply as the builder of buildings, but also as the builder of institutions, and in consequence as shaping intellectually the men and women who inhabit them. This is certainly true, though of course it would be a gross exaggeration to say that he is the only such or even the most important such figure to do this. Moreover, we need also to remember that this will be true whether he is brutalist, pragmatist, rationalist, modernist, formalist or whatever. However, once this is recognised, it will be an imperative next step to be clear about the way in which a chosen aesthetic is likely to secure what we all desire - the fashioning of men and women who are attached to what they do and can aspire to find happiness in the lives that their history

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obliges them to lead. It must be a mistake to think that one mode of building is as good as another for this end. And I think that the chances are low of the architect playing well the part that here falls to him unless he can appreciate how the way in which he handles his material must engage his public with thought and feeling about that and then with consequential thought and feeling about themselves. They will also be low unless he acts in such a way as to fashion their self-conception in a way that engages their willing consent. It must be a failure if the ways in which our thought moves go against the grain of already established patterns of self-understanding. Here, the architect has to regard himself as cooperating with us, not domineeringly imposing himself on us. That should, although it does not, go without saying.

v Returning to The Times article from which I started, it is interesting to see what view of the future modernism of the kind that Rogers there endorsed holds out to us if it is allowed to practise according to its own best lights. What is at first sight curious is how little we are led to expect. An aim of creating a humane and beautiful environment is honestly announced, but, so far as I can see, the only suggestions that we are given for achieving it are throt1gh the celebration of modern technology and the exploitation of new forms and materials that the developing sciences will put in our reach to use for purposes of construction. In addition, it is held out to us by Rogers as something to look forward to that buildings will be flexible and adapt themselves more than the buildings of the past have done to changing climate and changing occupational demands. Now, as far as responses to the new resources of architecture go - even good architecture I suppose that there is nothing very surprising about that. But what is surprising is that it is in the exploitation of these novelties that the aesthetic merits of new work are foreseen to lie. This, for Rogers, is what is going to provide visual excitement and the feeling that we are in tune with the new scientific and ethical movements of the age. I said that at first sight this is curious. But on reflection it should be less so: and this for two reasons. The first is one that perhaps does not characterise modernism in its entirety but just

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appeals to one who has had some nodding acquaintance with, and undue respect for, neo-Marxist thought (as exemplified, for instance, in the writing of Theodor Adorno). This is the view which I cited before that 'architecture mirrors society; its civility and its barbarism. [In consequence,] its buildings can be no greater than the sense of responsibility and patronage from which they originate.' Now, if the sense of responsibility and patronage of which Rogers speaks is not that of the architect, but of his surrounding society, it cannot surprise us that he is unable to say much about what it will be possible for the architect to aim at, in ignorance, as he must be, of the future sense of responsibility and patronage out of which the buildings of the future are going to grow. But, surprising or not, I think that we should not pay excessive attention to the idea, however much it may appeal to Rogers himself. I have just insisted that the architect plays his part in shaping the institutions we live with and in fashioning our resulting conception of ourselves. It is, I suggest, not beyond the wit of the architect and of his philosophical colleague to reflect on what we might need to achieve by way of self-consciousness. It will not harm to set beside the passive neo-Marxist claptrap an older and far more subtle thought of Friedrich Schiller's, namely that the young artist should consort with the healthy work of an earlier age, and, speaking to his fellows in their leisure through his own noble works, provide them with pleasures that will slowly take hold of them and alter their desires and ultimately their actions and the very persons that they are. In this way, his work will indeed reflect his time, and not passively mirror it, because in the end it will actively shape it and embody its values. However, quite apart from neo-Marxist dogma, there is another reason that explains the bleak picture that is painted for us of the future. That is that it simply does not lie within the resources of formalistically-conceived architecture to engender thought and feeling of the kind that we are looking for when we speak, as Rogers wants us to, of a humane and beautiful environment. For these are thoughts that are intimately connected with our interaction with it and in which civil ways of interaction are given body in buildings sensitive to such sentiments. Looking back at my characterisation of some paradigms of modern

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architecture as abstractly sculptural in conception, we can see that this is missing just because the essence of modern abstract sculpture has been to forswear all that. Building that assimilates itself to sculpture, then, will forswear it too, and, trying to stick within the limits of architecture so conceived, there is bound to be an unbridgeable gap between announcing the worthy goal of such a humane and beautiful environment and reflecting on the depressingly reduced resources that are, under that conception, reckoned to be available to achieve it, to wit, a celebration of exciting new technology. How and why the second will take us to the first cannot be said because, to say it, it needs a richer theory than anything that modernist thought can supply. Two final remarks: one is the fairly trite one that if we are saddled with modernist work, its proponents ought to reflect that the sense of excitement and daring that they foresee it as expressing is unlikely to last long. Technology will move on, and the novelties of next year will soon look like the weary fumblings of last week. That we might provide a loving attachment to our past through these outmoded machines is beyond the bounds of belief. Second, and more important, when Rogers speaks of modern traditional building in pure pseudo-Ruskinian mode as 'clamping onto technologically sophisticated constructions a collage of disposable symbols like decomposed classical columns, pediments or cornices or flimsy Gothic turrets and Egyptian palm trees', he leads one to suppose that the values that the kind of work he prefers will achieve will also be by symbol (though of course symbols of a different kind and symbols of a different thing). Now, if what I have been saying throughout is right, it is a far-reaching mistake to think that architecture acts on us ultimately symbolically. It is far more direct than that, because it affects our perceptions and does not, as symbols do, bypass perception on the way to our intellect. If symbol is the nearest that the modernist can come to the achievement of the aesthetic success of which he dreams, it is not near enough. The sooner we come to realise that, the better it will be both for us and, let us hope, for our successors.

Index of Topics aesthetic evidence, viii, 79, 80 aesthetic ideas, 96, 104, 141, 142, 146 play of, 143-7 antinomy of taste, 41, 42, 46, 56, 62 arguments, 42-4, 55, 56, 64 common sense, 32-9, 140 concepts (apart from), 43, 44, 45, 46, 107-10

of perception, 7, 8, 9, 11 laws, see rules of association, 144-7 necessary delight, 17, 20, 23, 24, 29, 37, 40n, 62 necessity (exemplary), 25-8

objective validity, 10, 15, 23, 34 determinate/indeterminate concepts, 44, perfection, 115-19 47, 48,53 determinable I indeterminable concepts, principles, see rules purposiveness, ix, 30, 31, 58-9, 87-94, 49, 50, 51, 57, 59 97, 102, 104, 114, 171-3 determinant/ reflective judgments, subjective, 96, 99n, 107 43,44,95 formal (without purpose), 110, disputes, 41-3,56, 64 111, 121n exemplary necessity, see necessity rules,23,25,26,39n,42,51,77-8 free/ dependent beauty, lOOn, 105, 106, scale (Tonleiter), 133-40, 152 112, 153n sense formalism, ix, 89, 106, 119-20, 124-6, of self, ix, 148-50, 177-8 151, 167 of the beautiful, 24 functionality,87,90,91,99n subjectivity, viii, 5, 41, 92 subjective properties, 13, 14 genius, 23, 52, 53 validity, 7, 8, 9, 15 ideal judges, 24, 26, 28, 29, 33, 37, 70, 73 supersensible, 41, 45, 47, 53, 57-63 synthetic a priori, 17-21, 81, 85n judgment tone, 127-38, 143-4, 147, 152, 153 of taste, ix, 1-7, 12, 19, 20, 35, 40n, truth, 15,24,30,37,46,47,53, 62n, 108, 141 54,59,63n of the good, ix, 112 of experience, 7, 8, 11, 12

Index Locorum Critique of Pure Reason B71/2, 63n A58/9,B82/3,37,46 A255/B311, 61

Prolegomena §18, 10-11 §19, 15,47

Critique of Judgment Intro IV.l, 43 Intro IV.2, 43 Intro VI.1, 45 Intro VII.l, 97, 98n, 110 Intro VII.2, 63n, 121n §1, 3 §1.1, 19, 41, 43, 50, 92 §6,32 §7.2, 41 §8.4, 7 §9.3, 43 §9 end, 44 §11.1, 121n §11.2, 32, 94, 99n, 123n §12.1, 30 §12.2, 31, 94, 99n, 123n §14.2, 123n §14.3, 126 §15.4, 104, 113 §16, 103 §16.2, 114 §16.5, 116 §17.3, 103

§17.6, 115, 117 §18.1, 25, 39n §19,26-7 §20,26-7 §20.2, 33, 40n §21,34,35 §22.1, 24 §32.2, 12-14, 18, 57, 58, 81, 97, 98n, 110 §33,51 §33.4, 16n §33.5, 7, 11 §34,83 §34.1, 51 §34.2, 56 §36.3, 18 §37.2, 17 §38n,40n §38 remark, 35 §39.1, 36 §40.1, 40n §40.6, 27 §41.1, 96 §44, 51 §44.1, 105 §48.3, 116 §49.9, 95 §50.2, 96 §51, 127 §51.1, 95 §51.8, 175 §52.6, 65 §53, 127 §54, 127 §56,2 §56.2, 16 §57, 11,14 §57.2, 16n, 37, 39 §57.4, 46, 57 §57.5, 57 §57.7, 50, 57

Index Locorum §57.8, 56, 57 §58 rubric, 87 §58.2, 92 §67.4, 90 §72.5, 90

183 'Of the Standard of Taste' Paragraph 2, 74 Paragraph 9, 51 Paragraph 16, 51, 66, 77, 83 Paragraph 23, 66 Paragraph 32, 72

Index of Names Addison, 71, 85n Adorno, T., 179 Ameriks, K., 39 Aristoxenos of Taranto, 155n Bach, 156n Bell, D., 16n, 40n Bernard, J. H., 98n, 123n Bungay, S., 121n Busch, W., 118 Caird, E., 16n Cassierer, H. W., 15n Crawford, D. W., 16n Dunham, B., 15n

Lin, M., 158 Locke, 78, 128-9 Machiavelli, 69 Milton, 68, 71, 85n Moutsopoulos, E., 16n Ovid, 67, 68, 71, 84n Palladio, 163 Pei, I. M., 158 Pythagoras, 155n Rogers, R., 157, 159, 160, 161, 171, 178, 180 Rosen, C., 156n Ruskin, J., 166-76

Euler, L., 128, 136 Fantin-Latour, H., 102, 103 Fenelon, 75 Guyer, P., 15n, 121n Hegel, 139, 151, 152, 170 Heintel, F., 98n Homer,4, 19,75,81-2 Horace,67,68, 71,84n Hume, viii Karelis, C., 156n Kohler, G., 16n Kuhlenkampff, J., 98n Lear, E., 118 Le Corbusier, 163 Ledoux, C.-N., 119

Saarinnen, E., 158 Schaper, E., vii, 16n, 98n Schiller, F., 170, 179 Scruton, R., 155n, 156n, 172 Serra, R., 158 Smithson, P. and A., 158 Tacitus, 67, 68, 71, 84n Terence, 69 Titian, 28 van der Rohe, M., 123n, 158 van Doesburg, T., 123n Wiggins, D., 73 Wittgenstein, 35-7 Zevi, B., 123n Zimmermann, R. L., 16n