Kant's Critique of Taste: The Feeling of Life 1108497799, 9781108497794

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KANT’S CRITIQUE OF TASTE

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment is widely recognized as a founding document of modern aesthetics, but its legacy has fallen into disrepute. In this book, Katalin Makkai calls for the rediscovery of Kant’s aesthetics, showing that its centerpiece, his investigation of the judgment of taste, paints a compelling portrait of our relationships with works of art that we love. At its heart is a scene of aesthetic encounter in which one feels oneself to be “animated” – brought to life – by an object, finding there to be something in one’s experience of it, beyond what there is to know about it, that one wants to explore and articulate. Tracing Kant’s insight that to judge is to reveal one’s sense of what bears judging, and hence of what matters, Makkai situates Kant’s aesthetics within his larger study, begun in the first Critique, of judgment’s fundamental role in the life of the mind.   is Professor of Philosophy at Bard College Berlin. She has published articles on Kant and film, and is the editor of Vertigo ().

KANT’S CRITIQUE OF TASTE The Feeling of Life KATALIN MAKKAI Bard College Berlin

University Printing House, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  , USA  Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Anson Road, #–/, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Katalin Makkai  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published  A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Makkai, Katalin, author. : Kant’s critique of taste : the feeling of life / Katalin Makkai, Bard College Berlin. : Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. :   (print) |   (ebook) |   (hardback) |   (paperback) |   (epub) : : Kant, Immanuel, -. | Aesthetics. | Judgment (Aesthetics) :   .  (print) |   (ebook) |  /.–dc LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/  ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgments Note on Citations

page vi viii

Introduction: A Twofold Peculiarity





The Art of Judgment





Communication and Animation in the Judgment of Taste





Subjectivity and Recognition in the Judgment of Taste





Modes of Attunement





Aesthetic Liking



Bibliography Index

 

v

Acknowledgments

Many individuals and institutions have helped me through this project, on which I have worked, on and off, for a long time. I have learned a great deal from conversations with my students in courses taught at Barnard College, Columbia University, and Bard College Berlin. I have also benefited from discussions with audiences at Simon Fraser University, Barnard College, Columbia University, the CUNY Graduate Center, Kenyon College, a conference on beauty at Auburn University, and several meetings of the American Society for Aesthetics, where I presented early versions of parts of this book, and with participants in a congenial KantKurs held at the University of Siegen. It is a pleasure to thank Pirachula Chulanon in print for his excellent research assistance. I am grateful to Barnard College and Bard College Berlin for their support of my work. Over countless conversations, my dear friend Rachel Zuckert gave indispensable feedback on drafts of these chapters. I cannot thank her enough for her suggestions and advice, always wildly intelligent, sensible, and kind, and for her unflagging encouragement, without which this book would be only a gleam in my eye. I have been buoyed by the support of Kelly Dean Jolley, Michael Kelly, Fred Neuhouser, and Charles Parsons. Richard Moran has been a wonderful mentor and a great friend, and I have drawn heavily on what I have learned from his writing and in conversation. I wish that I could give a copy of this book to Stanley Cavell as a token of my gratitude for all that he has given me as a thinker, teacher, mentor, and friend. I spent quite a few summers working toward this book in San Francisco, and I credit the progress I made to the happiness of life in the company of Ásta, Dore Bowen, Rebecca Groves, and Rebecca McLennan. During Anne-Gaëlle Argy’s impromptu gift of a stay in her Paris flat, the manuscript turned a decisive corner. Gabriele Zipf and Manfred Roeder cheered me on in Berlin, by the sea, in the mountains, and on a river, and heroically endured questions about Kant’s German. vi

Acknowledgments

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I thank Hilary Gaskin, Hal Churchman, and Thomas Haynes at Cambridge University Press for their expert and impeccable guidance and generous support. I am grateful to Divya Arjunan and her Production Team at SPi Global for their meticulous work and patience. My thanks go also to the anonymous readers who reviewed my manuscript. An earlier version of Chapter  was published as “Kant on Recognizing Beauty,” European Journal of Philosophy , no.  (). The argument has been somewhat reworked. I am grateful to the journal for permission to reprint. I dedicate this book to Zsuzsanna Bencsáth-Makkai, Mihály Makkai, Katalin Bencsath, Mihaly Mezei, Maria Bencsath, and John Douwes, sok szeretettel és hálával.

Note on Citations

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is cited by the page numbers of the first (“A”) and second (“B”) editions. Kant’s other works are cited by title or abbreviated title and by volume and page number of Kants gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Reimer, later de Gruyter, –), also known as the Akademie edition. “FI” is the abbreviated title of the first, originally unpublished, introduction to the Critique of Judgment. “CJ” abbreviates the title of the Critique of Judgment. Quoted translations of Kant’s writings are based on the Cambridge University Press translations specified in the Bibliography. I have often modified the translations, and often silently. References by name to sections of Kant’s works are capitalized (e.g., the Analytic of the Beautiful), and references to the corresponding subject matter are lowercased (e.g., the analytic of the beautiful).

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Zadie Smith loves the music of Joni Mitchell, but for a long time she could not stand it. What happened? “I didn’t come to love Joni Mitchell by knowing anything more about her, or understanding what an open-tuned guitar is, or even by sitting down and forcing myself to listen and re-listen to her songs,” Smith writes. “I hated Joni Mitchell – and then I loved her. Her voice did nothing for me – until the day it undid me completely.” Something changed, and in her search for words to articulate what it involved Smith lands on these: “A sudden, unexpected attunement.” I recognize the phenomenon that Smith is describing, and I share the sense of its significance, its being worth articulating and reflecting upon. Judging by the essay’s reception, I am not alone. I expect that I am also not alone in finding Smith’s characterization of her transformation to ring a certain bell. Kant’s Critique of Judgment springs to mind, since there Kant too, and famously, writes of an aesthetic attunement. At the heart of what 

 

Zadie Smith, “Some Notes on Attunement,” in Feel Free: Essays (London: Penguin, ), p. . The essay was originally published in The New Yorker in . My attention was first drawn to it by Rita Felski in a talk given at the Questioning Aesthetics Symposium in Dublin in . Smith, “Some Notes on Attunement,” p. . I retain the more familiar translation of Kritik der Urteilskraft. It is sometimes said that “power of judgment” is a “more accurate” translation of Urteilskraft (see, for example, the back cover and front matter of the Cambridge edition). The usual explanation is that the English term “judgment” is ambiguous between two distinct German terms, Urteilskraft and Urteil, the former naming an ability and the latter its acts or products. This is true, of course, but if the implication is that readers are in danger of taking “judgment” in “critique of judgment” to refer to the latter, I am not convinced. Grammar prevents such ambiguity: since the title is not Critique of the Judgment or Critique of Judgments, it is clear enough that the term is being used in former sense. (Consider that “reason” translates Vernunft as well as Grund, but this fact has not inspired qualms about calling the first Critique the Critique of Pure Reason.) For the most part, context – grammatical or otherwise – similarly disambiguates elsewhere in the text. I suspect that the underlying worry is less definitely that readers might at some point mistake one meaning of “judgment” for another, but rather that they might fail in some more general way fully to appreciate the fact the work is primarily and pervasively trained on the faculty of the mind (and not just its products). This fact about the text’s focus deserves, I agree, to be made as clear as possible. But there is an important advantage to rendering Urteilskraft as “judgment,” namely that this is how we would ordinarily put it in English –

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he dubs the judgment of taste is a felt attunement or harmony of the faculties of understanding and imagination. The association could be superficial, two writers having hit upon the same appealing term to capture ideas that ultimately have little in common. But in my view there is a genuine and interesting affinity between Smith’s and Kant’s visions of aesthetic attunement. Smith brings Kierkegaard into her discussion, but not Kant, and one reason that Kant might not have seemed a sympathetic interlocutor is that his account is structured around the judgment of taste, while Smith contrasts aesthetic attunement with the exercise of taste. As Smith conceives of taste, however, it is a capacity manifested, or exemplified, by the expert and connoisseur. The phenomenon of aesthetic attunement has little to do, I agree, with taste so conceived. But although it is a prevalent conception of taste – a conception, in fact, that Kant is sometimes assumed to share or even to have helped originate – it is not Kant’s: so I will be arguing. Kant rightly dissociates taste from expertise and connoisseurship. In the same vein, the fact that Kant’s account takes its orientation from the judgment of taste (and that it is part of a critique of judgment) should not be misconstrued: it does not mean that he unduly foregrounds the issuing of verdicts, or that he neglects aesthetic experience. Kant does not himself speak of “aesthetic experience,” but it is his work in the Critique of

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as when one says, “You’re going to have to use your judgment.” Of course, the term “power of judgment” can be understood. It provides, indeed, the kind of precision that is the point of technical terms or bits of jargon. But as with some technical terms or jargon, it runs its own risk of letting something fall out of focus, in this case the ordinary notion that readers of the German will register in Urteilskraft, and that it is important to read Kant as having in mind (as I argue in Chapter ). To that extent, “power of judgment” is actually less precise. “Power of judgment” is also cumbersome, of course, and the practice of strictly adhering to it quickly becomes awkward. I generally write “judgment” for Urteilskraft, but apart from the title, I often leave “power of judgment” unmodified in quotations from the Guyer and Matthews translation of the third Critique, and for the sake of continuity I also use the term in quotations from Kant’s other writings. Kant uses a range of terms that mean “attunement,” most prominently Stimmung, Zusammenstimmung, and Übereinstimmung. He also speaks of the faculties’ being in unison or of one voice (einhellig). (Instances of these terms can be found in § of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” for example.) It is worth noticing that Kant uses “attunement” not just to name a relationship of agreement between a subject’s faculties, but also to name a relationship of agreement between subjects in their judgments of taste. This is how he employs Einstimmung at CJ V: and Einhelligkeit at CJ V:. All of the foregoing terms can carry musical connotations, as of course does “harmony” (Harmonie). For further discussion, including discussion of the root Stimme (voice) and Kant’s sustained appeal to words invoking the voice, see Chapter . Smith adduces “the definition” of the connoisseur as “an expert judge in matters of taste,” wrapping the definition in her own quotation marks, so she is apparently reproducing some dictionary entry. See “Some Notes on Attunement,” p. . Smith’s contrast of attunement with taste is not meant to denigrate the latter. Her essay does not join in a distrust of the very notion of taste that has become common in reflection on art and culture.

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

Judgment that first takes seriously what the term names and makes natural its retrospective use to render Kant’s thinking. I certainly don’t want to claim that Smith’s vision of attunement is like Kant’s in every respect. But they might well be supposed to be wildly different, utterly foreign to one another, and what is most important to me – what makes the comparison most useful as the opening of a book about Kant – is to contest the picture of Kant upon which that sense would trade. Let us glance at some apparent obstacles to bringing the two together. Consider Smith’s way of putting how she feels about the music of Joni Mitchell, and specifically the album Blue. She says that she loves it. “When listening to [those songs], I know I am in the debt of beauty, and when that happens I feel an obligation to repay that debt.” Smith mentions a way of meeting that obligation or expressing that gratitude: she will seek out more of Mitchell’s music, especially from her “black period,” and “spend some time with it.” But she has already found one way, I think: writing this essay in praise of it. (That is of course not the essay’s only point.) These are indeed the kinds of thing that some works of art inspire us to say and to do, and there is of course a rich tradition, going back at least as far as Plato’s Symposium, of linking beauty with love and with indebtedness and praise. Kant, on the other hand, is often understood to regard the experience of beauty as a considerably more bloodless affair, consisting of a detached contemplation that is cut off from our ordinary modes of attachment to things and people, if it is not entirely sequestered within the mind. Let me quickly sketch my countervailing reading of Kant. Kant’s attunement of faculties of the mind is at the same time an attunement of the mind with an object. Aesthetic attunement need not be “sudden,” although it might, but in any case it is not the outcome of a project of knowledge. I find the object, or rather my experience of it, to matter, not with respect to any existing or imagined concern, but in its own right (as it were), simply as the source or object of the very experience that it has awoken in me. To find it to matter is to feel it to invite me into an improvisatory engagement with it. I want to stay with it – that is, with my experience of it – and to follow it out, to explore its character. It has come 

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In such contexts, I use “aesthetic” more narrowly than does Kant, corresponding (as a modifier of “judgment,” “experience,” “attunement,” and so on) with what Kant elaborates under the rubric of the judgment of taste, and at the same time (as I argue) with a familiar contemporary usage. For Kant, aesthetic judgment includes the judgment of taste as well as the judgment of the agreeable and the judgment of the sublime.  Smith, “Some Notes on Attunement,” p. . Smith, “Some Notes on Attunement,” p. .

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alive for me, or I for it. I care about the object and I feel that my engagement with it is what it merits. All this means that we are not as far from Smith’s conception as might have been supposed. Or consider the fact that Smith’s chronicle of finding attunement with Joni Mitchell is inextricably interwoven with particular and contingent circumstances: a car ride to a wedding; her longing for a sausage roll; a stop at Tintern Abbey; the sun’s emergence from the clouds; her husband’s recital of a line from Wordsworth. Kant, meanwhile, insists that liking for the beautiful is “disinterested,” and that the judgment of taste is not a report of one’s individual preferences but rather makes some claim to universality and necessity. Here we may seem to come up against a fundamental divide. But Kant does not deny – how could he? – that whether one is in a position to find something to be beautiful (or witty, or elegant, and so on) may depend on one’s personal history and specific circumstances. For her part, Smith does not attribute her attunement to any of these factors, either alone or in combination. Nor does she suggest that her love for Joni Mitchell’s music is tied to the memory of that occasion at Tintern Abbey, bound up with a special and private significance that it holds for her. And at no point does she so much as hint at a proviso along the lines of “I happen to find it beautiful, but of course to each her own,” or, as Kant puts it, “it is beautiful to me,” which he thinks we will instantly hear as ridiculous. Smith speaks of the transformation as an epiphany, a realization about Joni Mitchell’s music, a newfound awareness of its beauty, and not as a reshuffling among the things that happen to please her. The idea of epiphany might give pause, if it is understood to mean a miraculous transformation that is inexplicably wrought upon a person and in which she plays no active part. Thinking of aesthetic attunement along such lines would render the phenomenon more mysterious than it needs to be. It would also mark a genuine and important locus of disagreement with Kant. For Kant, appreciation of the beautiful has to be in some way in one’s own hands, and not just up to serendipity or fate (as we will see). But that is not what Smith has in mind either, I believe. Smith found attunement with Joni Mitchell’s music. This required  

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For “epiphany,” see Smith, “Some Notes on Attunement,” p. . I follow the practice of using feminine and masculine pronouns alternately in such contexts, i.e., when referring to a hypothetical person whose gender is irrelevant to the point. It is not a perfect solution. I considered using “they” as a singular pronoun, but since the singular first-personal character of the hypothetical person’s experience is frequently essential to my point, I decided (perhaps wrongly) that pronouns with exclusively singular usages might serve more clearly.

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something of her. Specifically, as she writes, she needed to lower her defenses and then to make, or to take, “a leap of faith.” The defenses she has in mind seem to include a kind of rigidity of sensibility and a fixity of ideas (of what music can be, for example). “Leap of faith” is of course subject to the same worry as “epiphany”; it might seem to function as a placeholder for the inexplicable, or to express an embracing of the inexplicable. But I think that Smith’s essay shows that what she means by a “leap of faith” is a substantive form of activity. It deserves to be thought of as something that one does or can try to do, and, by the same token, something that one can fail to do, or not manage to do. In order to find attunement with the music of Joni Mitchell, Smith had to make herself, or let herself be, open to it. So I would want to put it. For Kant too, as I will argue, aesthetic encounter depends on openness to the object. I imagine that the most uncontroversial identification of a note resonant with Kant in the first quotation from Smith concerns her remarks about what her attunement with Blue did not depend on. It did not depend on undertaking projects of understanding and knowledge, for example bringing to bear the history and theory of music, considering the album’s musical or biographical sources, analyzing its lyrics, and so on. It required, in fact, not leading with such projects – setting them aside. Kant’s account puts this point center stage. As the first sentence of the body of the Critique of Judgment declares, “In order to decide whether or not something is beautiful, we do not relate the representation by means of the understanding to the object for cognition” (CJ V:). Whatever this precisely means, it does not entail somehow suspending knowledge and the use of concepts altogether, or entering into a mysterious preconceptual relation to the object (although Kant has been read in both ways). Nor, of course, does Smith suggest anything of the sort. Smith had recognized the  

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On defenselessness, see Smith, “Some Notes on Attunement,” pp. –; on leaps of faith, see p. . The idea of “being open to” something recurs throughout Smith’s essay. I mean to be making the point that such openness constitutes a form of activity. As Smith notes, the lowering of her defenses against openness to Joni Mitchell was not deliberate. At the time she was occupied with something quite different; she was admiring the beauty of Tintern Abbey, a kind of beauty with which she had experience engaging. Thus her “critical mind lay undefended, focused on a quite other form of beauty” (“Some Notes on Attunement,” p. ). The example suggests that openness to a work need not mean focusing intently on it, or even focusing on it at all. But the fact that it was not undertaken deliberately does not, I think, mean that it was not expressive of her activity, as opposed to a condition that befell her (on the order of a headache, for example). Notice that Smith says that it was her critical mind that lay undefended, and that was therefore able to find attunement with Joni Mitchell. Smith does not present attunement as disconnected from the mind or from its critical powers – from criticism.

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melody of “Jingle Bells” in the introduction to “River,” and she did not have to block out this knowledge – or any other fact at her disposal – in order to find attunement with the song. In speaking of not “leading with the project of understanding,” I’ve been gesturing at a fairly straightforward idea: that aesthetic attunement with an object is not to be wrung out of the effort to subsume it under some existing structure of thought (recognizing it as instantiating some given kind or value; applying to it some theory or principles or generalizations). Let me call attention, now, to a certain picture of aesthetic experience that concurs with this straightforward idea, but that endorses a subtler version of leading with the project of understanding. It is, again, a picture that has been regarded as Kantian, or even as Kant’s own. This picture thinks of a work of art (or a good work of art) as fundamentally an object of meaning. A work of art (or a good work of art) has or is a meaning, sense, or point. Its meaning is all its own, however; it is essentially singular. No amount of acquaintance with other works or theories or principles will unlock it. (Here the picture calls on the straightforward idea about not leading with the project of understanding.) To appreciate the work, one has to make sense of it in its own terms. Since we are in the realm of meaning, we are in the realm of understanding, even of knowledge; but precisely because the meaning at stake is singular, its comprehension must be due to a special kind or form of understanding. I think that some version of this picture lies behind the description of aesthetic encounter that Alva Noë has offered. You are in front of a work of art “that strikes you as flat or opaque. You don’t get it. It is incomprehensible.” You look harder, or recall its title, or talk with a friend. “Something remarkable can now occur. The piece opens up to you; it discloses its face to you; you can see into it now and appreciate its structure. The piece now is present to you as meaningful.” The piece “opens up to you” because you opened it up, and the engine of this process was your work of understanding. “There is a name for the transformation in you that makes it possible for you first to perceive what is there before you: it is called understanding. . . . The work of art becomes visible through the understanding. Understanding enables us to perceive, factively, in the work,

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Smith, “Some Notes on Attunement,” p. . Her husband had not noticed it, and this did not stand in the way of his admiration of the song. This thought is not unique to the picture I am trying to identify. Arthur Danto, for example, holds that “works of art are embodied meanings” (What Art Is (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), p. ).

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what we could not perceive before.” Thus “aesthetic experience – the experience of the work of art – is an achievement of the understanding,” and it “is achieved by interrogating what is there before you.” This picture makes primary the having, and the working out, of meaning. Through understanding you open up the work’s singular structure and meaning. Where then does value come in? On one variant of the picture, a work’s having (singular) meaning is its having aesthetic value (being a good work of art, being beautiful, etc.). Its failing to have aesthetic value is its failing to add up to anything significant at all. Correspondingly, to appreciate the value of a work just is to appreciate its structure or meaning. A second variant distinguishes the having of (singular) meaning from the having of aesthetic value. A work of art has or is a (singular) meaning, but whether or not it is any good is a further matter. I can see how Kant might be read in terms of this subtler project of understanding, but in my view it misses the force of his account (as it more obviously does that of Smith’s). Broadly speaking, it gets the wrong way around the relation between meaning and mattering in aesthetic attunement. If the primary issue is taken to be one of understanding, then the road to aesthetic experience begins by asking, “What is going on?”, “What does it mean?” The question of whether the work – i.e., on this picture, its meaning – matters is either redundant (first variant) or in some way follows (second). By contrast: aesthetic attunement is not a prize won from the quest to understand. It dawned on Smith that her attitude toward a song of Joni Mitchell’s had changed when she found herself humming it. Some kind of 

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Alva Noë, Varieties of Presence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), pp. –. David Bell offers a similar characterization of “coming to terms” with Jackson Pollock’s Lavender Mist. “I walk over and stand before it at what I take to be something like the optimal distance; and I look. But it remains stubbornly problematic, obstinately refusing to yield whatever sense it may have.” The aesthetic response that he imagines arriving at, and that he offers as exemplifying Kant’s account, “has to do, for example, with the relation of parts to whole, and involves the feeling that the whole has an integrity, a point, in other words that its elements and limits are not arbitrary but comprise a mutually and internally self-determining unity” (“The Art of Judgement,” Mind  (), pp. –). I discuss Bell’s essay in Chapter . Noë, Varieties of Presence, p. . Noë enlists Kant as an ally: “We achieve an appreciation of the way the piece hangs together – what the work is – through activities I will refer to collectively as aesthetic discourse, or better, criticism. . . . Criticism is the way we make the adjustments needed to make sense of what is before us. Aesthetic experience happens against the background of criticism. This was Kant’s conception” (p. ). Since Bell’s Lavender Mist scene is meant to illustrate Kant’s judgment of taste, Bell’s interpretation belongs to this first variant. Of course it was not the sheer fact of humming that told her this: a musical “earworm” gets stuck in your head, but you don’t necessarily like it. It must have been the kind of humming, or something about the humming, or what noticing the humming then prompted. Smith remarks that what she noticed she was humming was “a strange piece of music” (“Some Notes on Attunement,” p. ).

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mattering came first, before any attempt to disclose or work out the song’s “meaning.” For Kant too, as I have suggested, the aesthetic encounter begins with finding a work to seem worth looking at or listening to, to matter (in a certain way: for its own sake). But although for both Smith and Kant aesthetic attunement means not leading with the project of understanding in either sense, even resisting the impulse to lead with it, neither thinks that understanding doesn’t enter at all, that we are simply outside the realm of meaning, sense, point, structure, etc. In the experience of mattering that Kant has in view, the subject finds that she wants to follow through and to make sense of the way in which the object (her experience of it) seems to matter. This engagement is what Kant calls the “free play” of the understanding and the imagination. The object (her experience of it) seems to be meaningful, and the natural expression and development of that feeling is to articulate and to unfold its apparent meaningfulness. I speak of “meaningfulness,” but that should not be taken to suggest that Kant concurs with the idea that (good) works of art have or are “meanings.” Nor, however, is it to suggest that (good) works of art do not involve meanings at all, that they must be nonrepresentational or abstract (as a kind of twentieth-century formalism might have it) or make no reference to other works of art. I have been focusing, as Smith and Kant do, on the phenomenon of finding aesthetic attunement. But it also happens that one falls out of attunement with a work. This needn’t mean coming to hate something that one loved. Kantian attunement is an encounter with an object in which it seems to hold out something that matters, something that is worth encountering and finding a way to articulate and to appreciate. As I put the matter earlier, it feels as though the object has come to life. Then falling out of attunement means that this sense of life goes out of reach. At worst, it is as though the work has gone dead for me. In the moment I may wonder whether it is I who have deadened it, whether the block is in me, or whether I am coming up against an aridity that is just there. (Even if it is never clearly just the one or the other, it is hard to say which possibility is more unsettling.) The work may then seem somehow to flicker (back) to life. There is no way of ensuring the advent of the feeling of life, or of ensuring that, once realized, it will be there the next time around. The

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Grasping what she was humming came after finding herself to care about it, and so would coming to understand what she liked about it. I think that Smith suggests that a certain wielding of “understanding and interrogation” nevertheless is, or can be, a kind of defense in its own right (see “Some Notes on Attunement,” p. ). This strikes me as an important thought.

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

company of others, in conversation or through the written page, can bring about a sudden experience of access; but it may not, or may in one moment but not in another. If we think of aesthetic attunement in this way, then what presents itself as the most costly risk run in approaching a work is not, in the first place at least, that of getting it wrong. The risk is rather that of stifling it, not allowing it to come to life. Or not allowing it to bring thinking to life. For its coming to life is not distinguished from its bringing thinking to life – from, in other words, its being animating. In characterizing this aesthetic experience of “finding the object to matter” in terms of “animation,” I have been tipping my hat to Kant. Among the figures that he enlists in the third Critique, Belebung is the one that I find most deeply evocative – that, if I may put it this way, I find most to bring to life an important kind of aesthetic experience, together with its wider significance for our condition as discursive intellects. It is, of course, closely related to those other hallmark figures: “attunement,” “harmony,” and “free play.” In their attunement, Kant says, the faculties of understanding and imagination are mutually “animating” or “enlivening.” As I said about “attunement,” this is not just a relation between those faculties but also a relation of both, of the mind, to the world. The faculties are, together, animated by an object. It is in connection with pleasure that Kant introduces the register of “life” to his aesthetic account. The very first section of the body of the text gives “the feeling of pleasure or displeasure,” or the capacity to feel pleasure or displeasure, as another name for the “feeling of life” (CJ V:). What this comes to in the case of the judgment of taste is that the mind is brought to life, and one’s pleasure is in this, in finding oneself to be brought to life by something (and not just in some resultant state of being “alive”). If beautiful art animates the subject who is open to it, then the artist who produces it is also, at a remove, a source of life. Crediting the poet with “providing nourishment to the understanding in play, and giving life to its concepts through the imagination” (CJ V:), Kant adduces a further respect in which the artist animates (in some cases, at least). “The poet ventures [wagt es] to make sensible [versinnlichen] rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of hell,  

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“[I]n the facilitated play of both powers of the mind (imagination and understanding),” they are “enlivened [belebt] through mutual attunement” (CJ V:). Thus Kant writes of “[t]he animation of both faculties (the imagination and the understanding)” to a certain activity (CJ V:).

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eternity, creation, etc.; as well as to make that of which there are examples in experience, e.g., death, envy, and all sorts of vices, as well as love, fame, etc., sensible beyond the limits of experience, with a completeness that goes beyond anything of which there is an example in nature” (CJ V:). (I am struck by Kant’s turning to an example featuring the topics of death (life’s intimate other) and love. I imagine that he is thinking of Dante’s Comedy, and especially Inferno; but I wonder whether the idea of aesthetic animation is seeping into the details of the example through which Kant is trying to make it “sensible.”) To succeed in making something like the concept of death – and likewise, I would think, the concept of life – “sensible beyond the limits of experience” is to give it expression that “stimulates so much thinking that it can never be grasped in a determinate concept” (CJ V:). The poem that does this provides an “expression” or “presentation” of death as an “aesthetic idea.” And it is through such presentation of aesthetic ideas that rational ideas can be made sensible (to the extent, or rather in the way, that they can). The expression of aesthetic ideas “animates the cognitive faculties and joins spirit to the mere letter of language” (CJ V:). In other words, the capable poet can infuse mere words with “spirit,” and her capacity to do so Kant also calls “spirit,” which, “in [its] aesthetic meaning,” is “the animating principle in the mind” that “animates the soul” (CJ V:). It seems clear that the “concepts” to which the poet “gives life through the imagination” include rational ideas. Citing another example which has expressly to do with life and death, a poem beginning “Let us depart from life without grumbling,” Kant says of the poet (Friedrich II) that “he animates his idea of reason of a cosmopolitan disposition even at the end of life” (CJ V:–). But I think that they also include such concepts as those of death, envy, and love, which are not rational ideas, and which we indeed find instantiated in experience, but without the “completeness” that, Kant suggests, the poet seeks – or dares, another sense of wagt es – to provide. In both cases, the poet’s life-giving has to do with making sensible something that eludes ordinary experience. In neither case is this making sensible a matter of exemplifying. Rational ideas do not allow of exemplification, since no intuition can be adequate to them (CJ V:). As for death, envy, and love, we already have examples on hand; the making

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On aesthetic ideas, see CJ V:–. “Expression” translates Ausdru¨ck and “presentation,” or “exhibition,” translates Darstellung. In §, the topic of which is the claim that “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good” (CJ V:), Kant discusses symbolization as a mode of presentation and argues that rational ideas are presented symbolically.

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sensible that the poet seeks is somehow supposed to transcend ordinary exemplification. This region of Kant’s thought deserves further exploration, but even in its outlines it seems to me to convey a simple but important truth. We are not meant simply to believe Dante’s depictions of the afterlife. Kant is surely right that even great art does not inform us about what lies beyond information. Nor does it apprise us of something that we might not otherwise have known about love, death, and what might be called the other existential conditions of human life. It affords another kind of contact with these matters – regulative ideas that point beyond our ken, and phenomena of everyday life that seem nevertheless to outstrip experience or that experience can never quite domesticate. I am inclined to think that what Kant has in mind is that poetry (and other forms of art) can bring to life their significance (importance, mattering) for us. The theme of life is not restricted to Kant’s treatment of the judgment of taste; it is in fact a prominent thread running through the Critique of Judgment. As is reflected in its title, the work as a whole concerns the capacity for judgment – I explore this topic in Chapter  – and Kant is specifically interested in the special and philosophically important relationship that the capacity for judgment has with the subject’s “feeling of life,” her capacity to feel pleasure or displeasure. This book cannot address the two other central topics of the Critique of Judgment, the judgment of the sublime and teleological judgment, but the figure of life appears there too. Pleasure in the sublime is “generated . . . by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the life-powers [Lebenskräfte] and the immediately following and all the more powerful outpouring of them” (CJ V:). The “Critique of Teleological Judgment” is everywhere occupied with life, since the teleological judgment that Kant has in mind concerns organic life. I will just mention one more intriguing context in which the theme surfaces. Like beautiful art, “the so-called seven liberal arts” depend on “spirit,” that “which alone animates the work.” It is for its sake that the teaching and learning of the liberal arts require “something compulsory, or, as it is called, a mechanism,” for otherwise the spirit “would have no body at all and would entirely evaporate” (CJ V:). On the traditional view of a liberal arts education as prerequisite for the  

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It is in the Critique of Judgment that Kant for the first time counts the capacity for pleasure and displeasure as a higher faculty of the mind (CJ V:). In this it differs from pleasure in the beautiful, which “directly brings with it a feeling of the promotion of life [Beförderung des Lebens]” (CJ V:).

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study of philosophy, this would mean that there is no getting to philosophy without learning how to bring a work of (liberal) art to life. A pair of clarifications is in order, if not overdue, before I go on. The first concerns the focus on works of art in my reading of Kant’s critique of taste, which might seem to go against the grain of the text. Kant does, of course, discuss art, but there are quite a few moments and ways in which he appears to privilege nature and its beauty, both within his aesthetic account proper and with respect to its larger systematic significance. There is a simple reason for the fact that I nevertheless focus on art. It is as an account of our aesthetic engagement with art that I have found Kant’s work to be especially illuminating. Or, if I may again put it this way, it is the aesthetic encounter with art that I have most found it to bring to life. I hope that my reading could be extended to encompass Kant’s treatment of natural beauty, but that is an undertaking I leave to another day. I might add that I think there to be room to wonder whether it is quite as clear as it may seem that Kant gives second-class status to the beauty of art. For example, Kant cites art, not nature, as the object of judgment’s a priori principle. The second point concerns the idea of beauty. The critique of taste turns upon the judgment of taste, and the object of the judgment of taste, what it directs itself toward and is responsive to, is beauty. This may  

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In this section, Kant is talking about “art” in a general sense that includes but stretches beyond “beautiful art” or “fine art” (the topic reserved for the next section). Specifically, I think that Kant’s account of taste, begun in the Analytic of the Beautiful, illuminates the aesthetic experience and judgment of art. I should add that I take the argument of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” to be continuous, so that, for example, the account of the experience of beauty in terms of the free play of cognitive faculties is of a piece with the account of beauty as the expression of aesthetic ideas. By contrast, for some interpreters the Analytic of the Beautiful together with the ensuing discussion around the Deduction proffers one aesthetic account, while the later sections in which Kant explicitly takes up the topic of art develop what really amounts to another. For a view of this kind, see Diarmuid Costello, “Greenberg’s Kant and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol.  no.  (). Although we have very different readings, I share Costello’s sense that Kant’s work offers resources for “retrieving aesthetics for contemporary debates about art” (p. ). See the table at CJ V:. When Kant says that “[w]e shall thus have to seek only the deduction of judgments of taste, i.e., of the judgments about the beauty of things in nature” (CJ V:), he can be (and has been) understood to mean that the deduction, and therefore also the fundamental problem that it is supposed to address, are not relevant to judgments of beautiful art. But I think that the remark’s specification of judgments about natural beauty is only meant to serve the contrast he is making with judgments of the sublime in nature, which he has just declared to require no further deduction (CJ V:) – hence the “thus.” It is striking, too, that even as Kant prepares for the deduction of judgments of taste, starting at §, his examples continue to be predominantly of art. Of course, a full discussion would need to address such thorny questions as what “adherent” beauty is (CJ V:) and how “perfection” is supposed to enter into the judging of the beauty of art (CJ V:).

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threaten to make Kant’s project disappointingly narrow and old-fashioned, particularly as it pertains to art, since especially (but of course not exclusively) since the early twentieth century, works of art are not routinely evaluated or evaluable in terms of beauty. Other values, some of which conflict with beauty, have risen to prominence. “Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided,” Marcel Duchamp apparently wrote, in reference to his Fountain of . A contemporary work of art is more likely to be meant to “disrupt” than to please. This concern, too, has less force than it seems. To begin with, schön is used more broadly than “beautiful,” both in Kant’s day and now. In this respect, schön is like the ancient Greek kalos (the breadth of which is greater still). Kant provides an example of the scope of the notion when he speaks of the Schönheit that “sallies of wit” can have. Quite apart from the resonances of schön, however, and more importantly, Kant’s account of the judgment of taste reflects a wide range of aesthetic experience and judgment, stretching beyond what is normally registered in “beautiful.” Kant’s “beauty” is better thought of as standing for “aesthetic excellence” or “aesthetic value,” and as subsuming an open-ended range of particular aesthetic values – including beauty narrowly construed. Let us suppose that a certain piece of contemporary art seeks to disturb or disrupt. But one will be disturbed or disrupted only to the extent that one has been able to feel engaged with it and so to find it worth engaging with. And it is this experience, finding something to be worth engaging with, that Kant’s experience of “beauty” names. 





  

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See Arthur Danto, “The Future of Aesthetics,” in Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Practice, eds. Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen, and Tony O’Connor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), p. . See the entry for schön in the dictionary of Johann Christoph Adelung, Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart (Vienna: Bauer, ), which reflects the German of Kant’s day. This edition of the dictionary is available online through the Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek at lexika.digitale-sammlungen.de. The  edition postdates Kant’s death in  (as well as Adelung’s in ), but earlier editions would have been available to Kant. See Christopher Janaway, Images of Excellence: Plato’s Critique of the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), chapter , especially p. . “Fine” has enjoyed a similarly broad, though now rather outdated, usage. Sometimes “beautiful” is used quite flexibly. One can speak of a beautiful act, even of a beautiful joke or gag (as in Kant’s example). The artist who hopes to have made a disturbing piece will be disappointed if your reaction is to walk away in disgust at the mere sight of it. Kant’s name sometimes comes up in connection with the “revivals of beauty” that first gained prominence in the s. But my sense is that its partisans tend to maintain the narrow construal of beauty. To that extent, the way in which they think of Kant as relevant to contemporary thought is quite different from what my reading suggests. On “revivals of beauty,” see James Elkins’s

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I.

Kant’s Question

The issue guiding the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” is the special character of the judgment of taste. It lays claim to a sort of normativity (to use a placeholder term that is not Kant’s). Yet it has a dimension of ineliminable “subjectivity.” Before entering into what this means, I’d like to observe that we do ordinarily take some of our aesthetic judgments to be normative in some sense. We present some of our aesthetic responses and judgments as more than mere reports about how we happen to feel. We enjoin others to share our appreciation of certain things; we deplore some of their aesthetic attachments. Zadie Smith reports her husband’s response to her profound annoyance at the sound of “that bloody piping”: “It’s Joni Mitchell. What is wrong with you? Listen to it – it’s beautiful! Can’t you hear that?” We endorse, question, and criticize the aesthetic responses of others, and regard our own as open, even subject, to such appraisal. At the same time, it is easy to grant that if any sort of judgment is to merit being labeled as in some sense “subjective,” then aesthetic judgment seems a likely candidate. One would probably have in mind the following sort of fact. No matter how ardently we feel about an object and its aesthetic merits (or demerits), we don’t imagine that we can just establish our claim on the feelings of others. For a person can’t be argued into liking something. It is possible, certainly, to make a terrifically compelling case. But no matter what anyone says, I cannot be bound to like or to love a work of art, much less to like or to love it in the way that another person does. The normativity and subjectivity of the judgment of taste constitutes its “twofold and indeed logical peculiarity [zweifache und zwar logische Eigentu¨mlichkeit]” (CJ V:). The phrase draws upon the twofold sense of Eigentu¨mlichkeit that is mirrored in “peculiarity,” its English counterpart. Thus Kant means that the judgment of taste’s joint subjectivity and normativity is a trait distinctive of it, or peculiar to it. (To call it “logical” is to say that it belongs to the very notion of the judgment of taste.) Kant also means that it is “strange and anomalous” (CJ V:). The strange, even “disconcerting [befremdlich]” (CJ V:) meeting of subjectivity with normativity raises a pressing question: How is this sort of thing, the judgment of taste, so much as possible? The fundamental undertakings

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Introduction to Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic, ed. James Elkins and Harper Montgomery (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, ), pp. –. Smith, “Some Notes on Attunement,” p. .

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of the critique of taste are to understand this as a problem, and then to arrive at some resolution of it. The problem will also serve as the frame of this book. Having said that, my main focus is on working out a proper understanding of the problem in the first place. In other words, I think that more attention needs to be paid to the “logic” of the judgment of taste, and to what its subjectivity and its normativity consist of. These are both more mysterious than they seem, and more familiar: more mysterious, in that they are not well served by recasting them in contemporary debates that employ that jargon; more familiar, because with them Kant has gone a long way toward capturing important aspects of aesthetic experience and judgment that deserve philosophical recuperation. To bring more clearly into view the strangeness of the judgment of taste, as Kant sees it, note that Kant articulates its normativity (as I have been calling it) in terms of a demand for agreement. When I make a judgment of taste, I demand the agreement of everyone. There is nothing odd, Kant thinks we will agree, about such a demand per se. Through another sort of judgment, namely cognitive judgment, one also extends a demand for agreement, but in its case the fact is quite unremarkable. There the demand amounts to something like the following. If I judge there to be a goldfinch in the garden, then I am claiming that that is how things are with the garden, and that you too ought to take it to contain a goldfinch, at least if you want to get things right about what’s going on in the garden at the moment. If you believe it to feature a goldcrest, or no wildlife at all, then you will be wrong. There is no mystery about any of this. What sets the judgment of taste apart, what is supposed to make its demand for agreement strange, is that it is a demand for agreement in pleasure. “When we call something beautiful,” it is “the pleasure we feel [that] we demand of everyone else as necessary” (CJ V:). (And it is in the role of pleasure that Kant locates the “subjectivity” peculiar to the judgment of taste.) In the following chapters, I will discuss Kant’s own development of these points. But I think that the strangeness of a demand for pleasure can be made out quite intuitively. On the way, it will be helpful to consider the following false start. The strangeness of a demand for pleasure might seem to lie in its apparent incoherence. Pleasure cannot coherently be the object of an imperative, it might be supposed, since a person cannot make herself 

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This is a regular refrain of Kant’s. See CJ V: for an early instance. Paul Guyer has argued influentially that the judgment of taste’s “demand” for agreement should be reconstrued as a prediction (or, more specifically, ideal prediction) of agreement (Kant and the Claims of Taste, nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, )). I concur with Guyer’s critics who have argued that such reconstrual distorts an important dimension of Kant’s thought.

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feel pleasure: it’s not up to her. Kant indeed declares that “an obligation to enjoy oneself is a manifest absurdity” (CJ V:). It is true that if a demand is to be coherent, it must be possible for its addressee to meet it (this is essentially the Kantian “ought implies can”). But it is not required that the addressee be able to meet the demand at will. Consider cognitive judgment, or belief. A person cannot make himself believe something; that is not up to him either. Yet this does not raise a question about the coherence of the demand for agreement internal to cognitive judgment. The insight of the worry about the apparent incoherence of the demand for pleasure is that if a pleasure (or a belief ) is coherently to be demanded of someone, then there must be room for him to exercise some kind of activity or agency with respect to that pleasure (or belief ) – not, however, a kind that would involve the capacity simply to elect to have that pleasure (or belief ). A pleasure or belief that I could adopt at will would in fact fail to be mine in the right way. Kant recognizes that there are different kinds of pleasures. Like a headache, a mere sensation is passively experienced. It befalls me or happens to me. It is superfluous and incoherent to demand a mere sensation of someone, including oneself. This is what Kant means in his remark about the “manifest absurdity” of “an obligation to enjoy oneself,” since the pleasure he calls “enjoyment” is pleasure in the “agreeable,” which is “that which pleases the senses in sensation” (CJ V:). But pleasure need not be mere sensation. There are pleasures that we take, and this does not mean that we can have them at will. These include, for Kant, the pleasure of the judgment of taste. If it is not a matter of believing on demand, what is the activity or agency invoked in a demand for belief? For a belief to count as mine in the right sense, I must take what I believe to be responsive to reasons justifying the belief. If I find myself believing something despite the fact that I recognize all the evidence to point to its contrary, then I am somehow saddled with a belief that I cannot identify with; my condition need not be pathological, but it will amount to a form of alienation from myself. And 

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I draw in these paragraphs upon a line of argument in Richard Moran, “Frankfurt on Identification: Ambiguities of Activity in Mental Life,” in Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt, eds. Sarah Buss and Lee Overton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), where Moran builds upon insights developed by Harry Frankfurt in the title essay of The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) and in essays in Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). See Chapter , Section . for a refinement of Kant’s contrast between the judgment of taste and the judgment of the agreeable.

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the point seems readily to carry over to the case of thought-dependent feelings, or feelings that are responsive to reasons, and thought-dependent pleasures in particular (“You ought be delighted by this outcome”). For Kant, these include the pleasures involved in practical (including moral) judgments of the good. But the instructive parallel provided by the case of belief might seem to run out too soon. The pleasure of the judgment of taste is not a thoughtdependent feeling, in Kant’s view. That is part of what he means by his insistence that the judgment of taste is not based on a concept. As Richard Moran shows, however, a form of pleasure needn’t be thought-dependent in order to be understandable as expressive of a person’s activity or agency (rather than as a mere sensation). A pleasure may not be thought-dependent, it may not answer to reasons, but unless it is a mere sensation, there are things one has to do in order to experience it. There are ways to take that pleasure. If I am to enjoy dancing at a party, I have to enter into it in the right spirit. Certain ways of being aware of my movements will sustain pleasure, while others will stand in its way; and I have to know which is which and how to cultivate one and let go of the other. There are norms internal to having such pleasures, and that is why it makes sense to press them on others (or on oneself ). We may thus concede that the judgment of taste’s demand for pleasure need not be incoherent. What persists, I think, is the sense of its apparent presumptuousness. It might be possible for others to take pleasure in a certain film, but by what right could I demand that they do so? How could I have the temerity to demand it even of my future self? Who is another to tell me what to take aesthetic pleasure in? In its apparent presumptuousness, I suggest, we identify something genuinely peculiar about the judgment of taste. It is registered in much of the language Kant uses to name the judgment of taste’s demand for agreement in pleasure: ansinnen, Zumutung, and Anmaßung. Kant’s translators have rendered ansinnen as “to impute” or “to ascribe,” Zumutung, in a similar vein, as “imputation” or “requirement,” and Anmaßung as “assumption” or “pretension.” But the terms have a more evocative flavor in German that is neutralized or blunted in such translation. Anmaßung, in particular, is more naturally rendered as “presumption” or “presumptuousness.” The issue is that the judgment of taste’s demand seems excessive, even outrageous.   

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I discuss this insistence in Chapter . Moran, “Frankfurt on Identification: Ambiguities of Activity in Mental Life,” pp. –. Adelung has that ansinnen is to demand (verlangen), “especially if the things one demands are illicit or indecent.” His sample sentence is Wie können sie mir so etwas ansinnen?: “How could you

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Introduction: A Twofold Peculiarity

I. Hume’s Fictive Key There is a final direction from which I’d like to introduce my discussion of Kant’s critical aesthetics. In this section, I consider David Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste.” Hume is, of course, a crucial influence for other regions of Kant’s work. Most famously, Kant credits his “remembering” Hume with awakening him from a “dogmatic slumber” and giving his “investigations in speculative philosophy a completely new direction.” Kant makes no such pronouncements about Hume’s influence with respect to his critical aesthetics. In fact, there seems to be no historical documentation on the basis of which we can be sure that he read “Of the Standard of Taste.” Still, many scholars have argued that the substance of Kant’s aesthetic account reveals a close engagement with Hume’s essay, and I join their company. My aim is to bring into relief the (sometimes surprising) ways in which Kant’s critique of taste constitutes a deep response to Hume’s essay. Hume sets his essay up in terms of two conflicting “species of common sense.” The first is the “proverb” that there is no disputing about taste. As Hume understands it, this means that no taste can be better or worse than another, and so “every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.” Common sense concurs in this thought not merely with philosophy – already an unusual state of affairs – but with skepticism in particular, the “kind” of philosophy with

  

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demand something like that of me?” or, more naturally, “How could you ask something like that of me?” See the entry for ansinnen in Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. edn. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, ). Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics V:. “As far as we know, Kant had in his library the German translation of Hume’s essay,” according to Jens Kulenkampff, “The Objectivity of Taste: Hume and Kant,” Noûs , no.  (), p. , n. . He may also have had access to it through friends. As to whether Kant actually read the essay, I gather that we must judge based on whether his work reveals traces of its influence. In Kulenkampff’s view, “Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment [sic] can be read as an answer to Hume’s essay” (“The Objectivity of Taste: Hume and Kant,” p. ). Theodore Gracyk says that Hume’s essay “stands to Kant’s mature aesthetic theory in much the way that Hume’s account of cause and effect stands to the Critique of Pure Reason,” which would mean, I take it, that it is the work with which Kant’s aesthetics is most deeply in dialogue. Nevertheless, Gracyk cautions that Hume’s aesthetic account is scattered across his writings, and only incompletely presented in “Of the Standard of Taste,” where (along with one or two other essays) it is usually sought. See Gracyk, “Hume’s Aesthetics,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Summer  edn., https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum/entries/hume-aesthetics/. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. . Thus judgments of taste are properly made with a certain modesty, of the sort Kant identifies with the judgment of the agreeable, where each judges for herself alone.

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which it is normally most at odds. The second species of common sense records the fact that there are some verdicts of taste that we would not hesitate to reject as “absurd and ridiculous.” Faced with someone who finds Ogilby’s verse to be as good as Milton’s (in Hume’s example), the principle of the “equality of taste . . . appears an extravagant paradox, or rather a palpable absurdity.” Hume navigates the tension without flatly dismissing either side. While the first species of common sense is not true as it stands, it – or, more accurately, the skeptical philosophy for which its “proverb” is an “axiom” – contains a grain of truth, namely that “no sentiment represents what is really in the object,” and that “[b]eauty is no quality in things themselves.” This grain of truth is compatible with the second species of common sense. Thus Hume concedes something about aesthetic qualities (as we would call them) that skepticism seizes upon, but denies that it entails the skeptical conclusion. We regard some tastes and some verdicts of taste to be better than others, and we are entitled to do so. Hume will even allow that some felt responses (“sentiments”) of beauty or deformity “may be pronounced erroneous” (which implies that others may be deemed correct). There are already striking affinities with Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” to note. As we’ll see, Kant will adduce an “antinomy” of taste, the language and substance of which are for many commentators the clearest signs that he was influenced by Hume’s essay, for he sets that antinomy up by way of two “commonplaces” about taste, and the antinomy itself seems to be modeled on Hume’s conflict between species of common sense. Kant will say that the antinomy recasts the apparent    

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Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” pp. –.  Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. . Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. . Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. . The first commonplace is that “[e]veryone has his own taste,” meaning that nobody’s taste is better or worse than anybody else’s (the skeptical conclusion), and the second is that “[t]here is no disputing about taste” (CJ V:; emphases removed). Somewhat confusingly, however, the two commonplaces do not simply transpose Hume’s two species of common sense, and there is no question of conflict between them. Kant points, instead, to a conflict between the first commonplace and the “proposition” that “[i]t is possible to argue about taste (but not to dispute)” (CJ V:; emphasis removed), which is a more specific variant of the second commonplace. Kant arrives at the antinomy proper by considering an apparent conflict enshrined within this proposition. The claim that there is no disputing about taste appears to conflict with the claim that it is possible to argue about it, because they appear to entail contradictory claims about the judgment of taste’s being “based on concepts.” Hume, as we saw, thinks that to say that there is no disputing about taste is to say that “everyone has his own taste” (the skeptical conclusion), and he denies both. Kant contests the move from the “no disputing” claim to the skeptical conclusion. Thus the conflict that Hume sees as real is for Kant merely apparent. I discuss Kant’s antinomy in Chapter .

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Introduction: A Twofold Peculiarity

conflict between the two peculiarities of the judgment of taste. Yet what Kant’s own articulations of the twofold peculiarity come closest to in Hume is not the conflict within common sense per se, but rather Hume’s negotiation of that conflict. Kant glosses what he calls the “subjective” character of the judgment of taste, its first peculiarity, in terms that sound like the truth that Hume acknowledges in the skeptical position. The judgment of taste is based on the feeling of pleasure, and through a relation of representations to pleasure “nothing at all in the object is designated” (CJ V:–). One “speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things” (CJ V:), which means that “a property of things” is not what beauty actually is. Kant’s second peculiarity of the judgment of taste, its claim to agreement (which I have tagged as its “normativity,” leaving open just what this comes to), is somewhere in the neighborhood of Hume’s admission that some tastes and verdicts are better than others. An interesting discordance also bears noting. For Kant the twofold peculiarity constitutes a pressing problem, the question of how it is so much as possible, which is what sets the whole “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in motion. Hume, however, does not express any bewilderment about the twofold thought in which his negotiation has issued. Nor does he offer much explanation of its basis. The crux of his view seems to lie in this claim: “Though it be certain, that beauty and deformity, more than sweet and bitter, are not qualities in objects, but belong entirely to the sentiment, internal or external; it must be allowed, that there are certain qualities in objects, which are fitted by nature to produce those particular feelings.” Here Hume reiterates skepticism’s grain of truth and pairs it with a development of the second species of common sense. The idea seems to be that “some particular forms or qualities” are such as to produce (cause) in us the sentiments or feelings of beauty (and the like) according to natural laws or “principles.” Just why this “must be allowed” Hume does not say. (Nor does he comment further upon its compatibility with skepticism’s grain of truth.) Are we to accept it as an obvious, or anyway obviously innocent, supposition? Yet it was Hume’s point that philosophy of the skeptical kind capitalizes on a false thought that, as a species of common sense, passes under the guise of plain truth. And so he has given his own reader reason to want some reassurance that he is not, similarly, marshaling a claim that only seems to be innocent.  

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The two sides of the antinomy are “nothing other than the two peculiarities of the judgment of taste represented above in the Analytic” (CJ V:).  Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. . Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. .

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It is not the case, Hume acknowledges, “that, on every occasion, the feelings of men will be conformable to these rules,” that everyone responds appropriately to beautiful (deformed, etc.) objects. In fact, a good deal that cannot be taken for granted needs to be in place. “Those finer emotions of the mind are of a very tender and delicate nature, and require the concurrence of many favourable circumstances to make them play with facility and exactness, according to their general and established principles”: many obstacles, in other words, may impede their “play.” Some will be “exterior” or external – there isn’t enough light, the volume is too low, someone is getting in the way. But Hume is most concerned with “internal” hindrances, those on the side of the one judging, which amount either to the (partial or total) lack of taste or to the incapacity (failure?) to exercise it properly. And this is where the “delicate nature” that Hume mentioned enters. The main internal hindrance consists of an insufficiently “delicate” taste, so of the (partial or total) lack of “delicacy of taste.” “This delicacy every one pretends to: Every one talks of it; and would reduce every kind of taste or sentiment to its standard.” It is not clear where this thought stands in relation to the realm of “common sense” or to everyday life – who, that is, this “everyone” is and what the context or spirit of his commitments is. This is, in any case, the juncture at which Hume explicitly thematizes his turn to philosophy. “[O]ur intention in this essay is to mingle some light of the understanding with the feelings of sentiment,” he declares, and that means providing a “more accurate definition” of the delicacy of taste. Toward this end he will make use of  



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Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. . Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. . “Play” is one – perhaps the most fascinating – among a range of figures to reappear in Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” but in a radically transposed sense, the effect of which is to emphasize that we are in a different philosophical universe. We will hear Kant say that taste involves a “free play,” even a “facilitated play” (CJ V:). Hume is invoking play in a mechanical sense, the sense in which the activation of one part of a machine might “set” another part “into play” (a phrase that Kant also uses at CJ V:, and it is precisely the “mechanical” implication that Kant’s readers find troubling). Hume’s next sentence revels in the mechanical: “The least external hindrance to such small springs, or the least internal disorder, disturbs their motion, and confounds the operation of the whole machine” (p. ). For “exterior” and “internal,” see Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. . A brief expansion on my parenthetical query about “failure”: I mean to be pointing to the question of whether Hume can make out a full-blooded sense of agency with respect to taste and aesthetic judgment – or, for that matter, judgment more generally. The question is not just the long-recognized one of whether his account can accommodate the possibility of errors of sentiment or judgment, but rather the further question of whether it (or its empiricist descendants) can do justice to the idea that in some cases of error a person has failed to feel or to judge as she ought to have felt or judged. I will argue that Kant’s idea of reflective judgment is centered on the agency of judgment. See also Juliet Floyd, “Heautonomy: Kant on Reflective Judgment and Systematicity,” in Kants Ästhetik/Kant’s Aesthetics/ L’esthéthique de Kant, ed. Herman Parret (Berlin: de Gruyter, ).

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a work of literature, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and in particular a “noted story” within it. Why this text? So as “not to draw our philosophy from too profound a source.” Instead of an explanation, Hume offers a gesture that allows him to shrug the question off. It seems intended as a breezy remark of no real consequence, there to glide us pleasantly along, yet it strikes me as somewhat pointed. It deprecates Don Quixote (or literature that works with comedy or satire, or literature more generally?), however mildly. It also mocks the pretensions of philosophy. Of course, it quite befits this genre of “polite” essay to laughingly avoid the scholar’s dry pedantry. But there are more serious matters behind the jibe. Nothing, indeed, was more serious for Hume as a thinker than the false claims to profundity in the name of which speculation and invention pass for philosophy. The ambition of his life’s work could be described as that of reforming philosophy so that it may earn the claim to illuminate, the claim he is drawing upon now (“light of the understanding”). It is in the name of such reform that he insists that philosophy restrict itself to the resources of experience and observation. To my palate, the remark lacks the panache of which Hume, a master stylist, is quite capable. Is a note of bitterness getting in the way? We know that Hume was disappointed by the reception of his own scholarly work. Or is something else coming through, an uneasiness about the very matters he is ostensibly being so lighthearted about – philosophy’s sources and its claims to profundity; philosophy’s powers and limits in addressing our ordinary lives (perhaps as against those of literature or of art more generally)? If philosophy’s proper ground is in experience and observation, then what are we to make of Hume’s turn to fiction? How do we know what counts as a datum of experience or observation, and what as speculation or invention? These are not, I think, idle questions. Recall Hume’s circumspection about the sources for his claim that “beauties . . . are naturally fitted to excite” feelings of pleasure. And as we are about to see, he draws quite a bit of philosophy out of the supposedly modest source that the Don Quixote story provides. We might wonder whether he must have put it there in the first place. Let us listen to Hume’s recounting of that story. It is with good reason, says Sancho to the squire with the great nose, that I pretend to have a judgment in wine: This is a quality hereditary in our family. Two of my kinsmen were once called in to give their opinion of a 

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Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. .

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Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. .

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hogshead, which was supposed to be excellent, being old and of a good vintage. One of them tastes it; considers it; and after mature reflection pronounces the wine to be good, were it not for a small taste of leather, which he perceived in it. The other, after using the same precautions, gives also his verdict in favour of the wine; but with the reserve of a taste of iron, which he could easily distinguish. You cannot imagine how much they were both ridiculed for their judgment. But who laughed in the end? On emptying the hogshead, there was found at the bottom, an old key with a leathern thong tied to it.

Although it involves what Hume calls “bodily” or “literal” taste, the “great resemblance between mental and bodily taste will easily teach us to apply this story” to “mental” or “metaphorical” taste, to which the appreciation of artworks belongs. Hume enlisted the anecdote, recall, in the enterprise of defining the delicacy of taste. The candidate at which he arrives is this: “Where the organs are so fine, as to allow nothing to escape them; and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition: This we call delicacy of taste, whether we employ these terms in the literal or metaphorical sense.” A particular picture is emerging. To have taste is to be able to detect certain qualities. It requires a sound “organ,” but the dispensations of nature are not enough. Taste must be developed or cultivated. For the qualities that it is for taste to register “may be found in a small degree, or may be mixed and confounded with each other,” so that only a taste that is highly “delicate” will be capable of registering and distinguishing them. It will turn out that delicacy of taste is a fundamental characteristic of the “true judge,” alongside “good” or “strong sense.” The anecdote has an air of artlessness – a kind of rustic plainness to suit the scene – and its elements (the “ingredients of its composition”?) are simple enough. Yet it is actually rather murky. We do not see clearly through to the bottom of it, whatever Hume might say about its not being especially deep. The obscurity has to do with what those elements are   

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Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” pp. –.  Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. . Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. . Commentators often say that Hume lists five qualities of the true judge, but strictly speaking there are two, and three kinds of discipline that serve or express them. Hence Hume’s formulation in the remark that “[s]trong sense, united to delicate sentiment [or delicate taste], improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character” (“Of the Standard of Taste,” p. ). The point of “practice” and “comparison” is to make taste more delicate. What Hume means by “prejudice” is the failure to take up the point of view of the audience for which an artwork is made, which may be that of a different time period or place, and it belongs to “good sense” to banish prejudice (and also to consider the artwork’s success in realizing its aim).

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Introduction: A Twofold Peculiarity

supposed to add up to, what the story’s significance is. If Hume is aware of this, the story is a kind of exercise for the reader to work through in some way, like an allegory or parable. But if Hume wishes us simply to accept that the key to the story is right there, that our task is more or less perfunctory, then we are entitled to wonder what the performance is all about, and what we commit ourselves to if we go along with it. The main source of confusion is the power that the story accords to the thong and key found lying at the bottom of the drained cask. What is that discovery supposed to show? Hume spells it out in his next paragraph: the thong and key “justified the verdict of Sancho’s kinsmen.” What is that verdict? In Don Quixote, the kinsmen’s express verdicts are spare: one kinsman reports that the wine tastes of iron and the other, concurring, adds that it tastes even more strongly of leather. It is Sancho who says that the kinsmen were asked to assess the wine’s condition and quality and to judge whether the wine is good or bad, and who seems to think that the thong and key attest to their expertise on all counts. Hume has the kinsmen themselves directly addressing the question of the wine’s goodness. On his retelling, the kinsmen’s verdicts are of the wine’s (qualified) goodness: one kinsman says that the wine is good apart from a taste of leather, and the other says that it is good apart from a taste of iron. There is already something odd about the idea that the discovery of the thong and key vindicates the claims that the wine tastes of leather and iron, for despite the presence of the thong and key, the wine’s flavor might not bear any trace of them, and the wine might taste of leather and iron anyway even if there had been no thong and key in it. Even if we let that pass, however, why should we allow that the discovery of the thong and key indicates anything at all about the wine’s goodness? It seems, on the contrary, more natural to take there to be two different, though no doubt related, matters at hand: the wine’s tasting of leather and iron (and the like); and its tasting good, or good but for this or that. The most that   

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Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. . Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (London: Vintage, ), p. . As Stanley Cavell writes, “the fine drama of this gesture is greater than its factual decisiveness – a bit quixotic, so to say: for the taste may have been present and the object not, or the object present and the taste not” (“Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays, updated edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. ). The final part of Cavell’s essay argues that the ordinary language philosopher’s appeal to “what we say when” is modeled by aesthetic judgment. Toward outlining the relevant aspects of aesthetic judgment, Cavell draws upon Kant, set against Hume’s use of the Sancho Panza story. I am greatly indebted to that essay, especially in this section, which can be read as a development of Cavell’s brief treatment (that also aims to bring it into contact with other regions of Cavell’s work).

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one might be willing to concede is that if the kinsmen have the one impressive ability (to detect the exceedingly subtle tastes that the thong and key must have imparted to the wine), it is not unreasonable to believe their claims to possess the other (to assess (the extent of ) its goodness). But this falls far short of the conclusion heralded by the story’s triumphant finale. The definition of the delicacy of taste in which the story issues, in Hume’s hands, might appear to help him respond to this doubt about the power accorded to the thong and key. On that definition, there is nothing more to delicacy of taste than the ability to “perceive every ingredient in the composition.” So if the kinsmen, upon sampling the wine, perceive the subtlest of its ingredients, those that elude less refined palates, then ipso facto they manifest an exquisitely delicate taste. But the difficulty quickly returns. For what are the “ingredients of the composition” that delicate taste discerns? If these are the tastes of iron and leather, and the panoply of other notes that may characterize a wine (for some unadulterated wines do taste of iron or leather), as well as bouquets and textures and so on, then Hume’s definition will be felt merely to beg the question. We are back at our sticking point, the sense that the ability to taste things like the flavors of leather and iron is not the same as the ability to taste goodness or merit, and that possession of the former ability does not entail possession of the latter. We have been given no reason – a stipulative definition is not one – to abandon this sticking point. The good appraiser of wine certainly must be able to detect ingredients of this kind, but that is not enough; she has also to be able to perceive whether and (if so) how they combine to make a good wine. And to these questions the discovery of the thong and key provides no answers. Hume’s definition is supposed to apply to taste in both its “metaphorical” and “literal” senses, so let us try to translate the scene to one of the appreciation of a painting. It is not obvious how to make the translation. In Titian’s late paintings, such as his Rape of Europa, there are patches of broad brushwork that look quick and effortless. Is this the sort of thing that corresponds to a wine’s tasting of leather or iron? What about iconographic elements, or visual references to classical mythology? Mary Mothersill suggests that the correlate would be the perceptible signs of a particular painter’s hand (as against that of someone in his workshop, 

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As Vasari points out, the effect is deceptive. In fact, “his paintings are reworked” and “he has gone back over them with colours many times” (Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. ).

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or a forger). In any of these cases, the parallel problem appears, possibly in an even stronger form. For all that Hume has said so far, to be able to judge of the painting’s merit, it is not enough to be able to detect such features. One has to be able to see whether and, if so, how they make for a good painting. Indeed, on some construals, notably that of Mothersill, it is not implausible to suppose that someone might be able to judge of a painting’s merit despite being unable to detect the correlates of the wine’s flavors of leather and iron. For all that Hume has said so far, in either the “literal” case (wine) or the “metaphorical” case (painting), the ability to perceive all the “ingredients of the composition” will amount to the ability to perceive goodness or merit only if the “ingredients” in question are construed as ingredients of its goodness or merit. But this construal empties the definition out. A good judge of wines (paintings, etc.) is able to detect all of the good-making qualities of a given wine (painting) and to detect whether and to what extent there are qualities that detract from its goodness. To be sure, but this doesn’t really tell us anything, since the only purchase that Hume’s account has given us on what those qualities are is that they are “naturally fitted” to be picked up by a delicate taste. We thus come up against a version of a much-discussed problem of circularity in Hume’s essay. Let us, however, keep our eye on the thonged key, and note that the present construal of the definition of delicacy of taste leaves its discovery just as inert as before. We’ve still been given no reason to imagine that it vindicates the ability to judge of goodness or merit. 



 

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“There is clearly something amiss with Hume’s parallel and the mistake is subtle and interesting. The real analogue in the artworld to Sancho Panza’s kinsmen would be someone like Bernard Berenson: he examines what is presented as a Correggio, on the basis of a barely perceptible (to the non-expert, imperceptible) swerve of line or brush stroke, infers that it is not Correggio but ‘schoolof’ (or clever forgery) and when the appropriate tests – pigment analysis, spectroscopy, whatever – are carried out, Berenson’s opinion proves to be correct” (Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. ). This is why Mothersill says there is a “mistake” in Hume’s parallel. One may possess taste without possessing the skills required for the attribution and authentication of artworks. Vasari says that Titian’s last paintings “cannot be seen from close up but appear perfect from a distance” (The Lives of the Artists, p. ), which suggests that the appreciation of those paintings actually requires not perceiving the broad brushwork that is characteristic of them. (This raises an interesting question: Why does Vasari praise this “technique” of Titian’s?) See Gracyk, “Hume’s Aesthetics.” It might be objected that Hume is relying on a thesis to span the gap: one asserting some kind of dependence of gustatory merit or value on qualities of the kind exemplified by the taste of leather in wine, and of aesthetic merit or value on whatever the “metaphorical” correlates are of the leathertaste kind of qualities. Perhaps so, but my point is that this would be a (another) substantive claim left unexpressed and undefended. If it is on its strength that Hume expects the discovery of the thong and key to work the desired effect on the onlooker, and the narration of its discovery to work

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

In Don Quixote these gaps contribute to the story’s subtle but distinct flavor of comedy. It is a kind of comedy to which the reader who has made the adventure of the preceding many hundreds of pages is deeply attuned. Sancho’s story calls up the outsized claims to, and displays of, prowess, ranging from the strange to the downright ludicrous, that are characteristic of the tale of knight errantry, the genre that the book satirizes. There is a special and gentle absurdity, a mild ridiculousness, to Sancho’s performance. It lies partly in his mimicry of the knight’s proud boasts in the dissonant context of winetasting. But it also internal to the story itself, and its heart (its key) is the nature of the found object. The key is not really a key, anyway not of the kind Sancho means it to be. It is no more apt to prove his kinsmen’s standing as judges of wine – and, not incidentally, Sancho’s own – than a shapeless lump of iron and a scrap of leather. Or any old thing, really. The fact that it is literally a key on a thong gives its inadequacy a pleasing irony. No reader can imagine that Cervantes hopes to impart a straight moral of the sort that Hume, for all his hints of playfulness, seems bent upon. Hume’s rendition of the story leaves most of the Don Quixote out of it, not merely because he excises it, but because he does not seem to appreciate the seriousness – the profundity – of its comedy. If there is a moral that Cervantes’s story points to, it is one that speaks to the problem with Hume’s appropriation of it. The story is about a fictive key that Hume wants to take as real. And while Hume gives the impression that he doesn’t especially need the story he has enlisted, that he could just as well have replaced it with something else, it will turn out to be quite essential to his own story – to be its submerged key. Hume tells us what corresponds to the thong and key in the case of “metaphorical” taste: “general rules of beauty” or “avowed patterns of composition.” In formulating such rules, we are presumably trying to track the principles according to which those “certain qualities of objects” are naturally “fitted” to produce appropriate feelings in good judges. As we saw, Hume says that these qualities can be very subtle, barely perceptible

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the desired effect on the reader, then the “sources” from which he is drawing his philosophy are considerably more “profound” than he acknowledges. In the lead-up to his story, Sancho drinks deeply and gratefully from the wine that the Squire of the Wood has offered and exclaims, “Oh whoreson, you damned rascal, but that’s good!” The Squire of the Wood remarks upon Sancho’s praising the wine by calling it “whoreson,” oblivious, apparently, to the possibility that Sancho was addressing him (not without fondness). The joke, which has its roots in an earlier conversation, is subtle enough that the reader might not notice it. Cervantes is showing that Sancho’s characteristic plain-spokenness allows of its own complexity and is no protection against misinterpretation. See Cervantes, Don Quixote, p. .

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

Introduction: A Twofold Peculiarity

to anyone without a heightened delicacy of taste. “Here then,” where that is the case, the general rules of beauty are of use; being drawn from established models, and from the observation of what pleases or displeases, when presented singly and in a high degree: And if the same qualities, in a continued composition and in a smaller degree, affect not the organs with a sensible delight or uneasiness, we exclude the person from all pretensions to this delicacy. To produce these general rules or avowed patterns of composition is like finding the key with the leathern thong; which justified the verdict of Sancho’s kinsmen, and confounded those pretended judges who had condemned them.

The rules enable us to prove the superiority of one side in a dispute, that of the “good critic.” And not merely “to the conviction of every bystander.” The rules also enable us to convince the “bad critic” of his own badness. [W]hen we show him an avowed principle of art; when we illustrate this principle by examples, whose operation, from his own particular taste, he acknowledges to be conformable to the principle; when we prove, that the same principle may be applied to the present case, where he did not perceive or feel its influence: He must conclude, upon the whole, that the fault lies in himself, and that he wants the delicacy [of taste].

The appeal to the thong and key, or to the rules of art, is supposed to force its target to concede that he is wrong about the object, or rather that he is not in a position to judge it. (Strictly speaking, if it shows that he lacks (“wants”) delicacy of taste altogether, then it is supposed to force him to concede that he is not in a position to judge on this or any other matter of taste, that he is only a “pretended” judge.) What is especially important is that the “bad critic” did not perceive what the better one did, and at the end of the imagined confrontation he still does not. Likewise, the wrong judges of Sancho’s anecdote, the ones who find the wine to be excellent, are, at its close, no more able to detect the wine’s goodness or its tastes of iron and leather than they were at its start. (Hume takes care to specify that they have not simply taken someone’s word for it that the wine is excellent. They are relying on their own taste, which is “dull and languid.”)    

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Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. . Emphasis added. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” pp. –.  Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. . Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. . Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. . Hume says that the bad critic appeals to “his own particular taste” to verify that the examples conform to the principle, but that is in the service of his accepting the principle. His conclusion is that he is lacking in delicacy of taste.

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

Hume’s picture of aesthetic justification seems to have carried the spirit of battle over from Don Quixote. The scene is one of victory, figured as reducing the opponent to silent submission. Without such rules, “it would not have been so easy to silence the bad critic, who might [otherwise] always insist upon his particular sentiment, and refuse to submit to his antagonist.” How do we know that the so-called bad critic isn’t just being bullied into retreat? A hardier soul might dig her heels in and conclude that the alleged rule must be rejected after all; something, even if she cannot say quite what, has gone wrong, either with it or with its application to this case. What would Hume’s rules look like, anyway? He provides no examples. Could any rules credibly be imagined to have the totalizing, silencing effect that Hume imagines? A rule of beauty or of art, whatever it might look like, seems even less suited to do the work Hume has assigned it than the thonged key to which it is supposed to be akin. Let us grant that there may be such a thing as evidence that the wine tastes of leather and iron. There is something odd about supposing the discovery of the thong and key to comprise such evidence. It is considerably more difficult to concede that it might comprise evidence for the wine's quality. There seems to be yet a different order of difficulty in making the same concession to a would-be “principle of art.” The thong and key comprise a palpable little object; no one will deny that it is a strap attached to a key, that it is made up of leather and iron, and so on. Surely no “principle of art,” no matter how carefully and methodically it is arrived at, could have the impressiveness, the sheer, decisive weight, of a thong and key. Surely no “principle of art” would be accepted as comparably speaking for itself. This is Kant’s view, and he thinks that we will recognize it as our own, if only we are honest with ourselves. Consider: How would you react if someone gave you a poem to appraise, and then invoked rules of poetic beauty to convince you that you are wrong to dislike it? Kant claims that you will find yourself thinking something like this: [L]et him cite Batteux or Lessing or even older and more famous critics of taste, and all the rules they established, as proofs that his poem is beautiful; and let certain passages, which are precisely those that displease me, very  

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Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. . Kant would agree. That is, if those flavors are there to be tasted, as Hume has it, then the claim that the wine tastes of them is a cognitive claim, like the claim that a certain meadow looks green (CJ V:), and there is such a thing as evidence for its truth.

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

Introduction: A Twofold Peculiarity well agree with rules of beauty (as they have been given there and have been universally recognized): I stop my ears, won’t listen to reasons and rationalizations [Vernu¨nfteln], and would rather suppose that those rules of the critics are false, or at least that this is not a case of their application, than that I should let my judgment be determined by a priori grounds of proof. (CJ V:–)

Although he mentions a priori rules in this passage, Kant thinks that we would be just as firm in our rejection of empirically based rules of the kind Hume has in mind, “generalizations” based on various kinds of observation. No rules could convince me that I am wrong. None could convince me to judge the object differently, to adopt another judgment. For that matter, no rules could convince me that I am right. To like (or dislike) the object is to feel pleasure (displeasure) in my experience of it, and where that feeling is absent, no rules can force it into being, or take its place. It is crucial to see that the real point is not about principles or rules per se. The real point is that nothing could function in the way Hume imagines the thong and key to function. There is nothing that someone could adduce that would be able to force, or to replace, my experience of liking an object aesthetically, and apart from that experience I am in no position to make an aesthetic judgment. This Kantian thought also exposes what Hume’s metaphorical thong-and-key is meant to do. It is meant to eliminate the dependence of aesthetic judgment on experience. That is, it is meant to answer to the desire for an impersonal, “objective” substitute for this dependence. It is an object of fantasy. The wish to eliminate the dependence of one’s aesthetic judgment on experience is related to a wish to eliminate one’s dependence on expression in securing legitimation and conviction, a wish that we see played out in Hume’s scenes of aesthetic confrontation. If an aesthetic judgment does not depend on one’s experience of the object, then naturally my defense of my judgment need not stake itself in bringing you to experience the object in a new way. Hume’s use of Sancho’s anecdote depicts criticism in such a way as to miss its very point. It distorts the speech act of criticism. It is as if Hume wanted to insist that the grammar of criticism is (just like) the grammar of empirical judgment, specifically perceptual judgment. But the 

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In Kant’s example, it is the author of the poem who asks for your judgment and insists that his poem is good. I have dropped this feature, because the reaction that Kant imagines does not, I believe, depend on suspicion about the poet’s stake in his poem or his ability to judge it impartially. Kant’s view is that we would reject rules in any case. His inclusion of this feature motivates the vociferousness of the rejection of rules in the scene he dramatizes, not the rejection as such. I discuss a further point of its inclusion in Chapter .

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

grammar of criticism is different. Imagine the following: () Someone claims that there is a goldfinch in the garden; no one else can see it. She insists: “I see it.” Later, the video camera shows that the goldfinch was, in fact, there, although for everyone else it was obscured by the trees. We say to her, “You were right.” () Someone enters an aesthetic verdict, say, “He plays beautifully, doesn’t he?” No one else can hear it as beautiful. She insists: “He plays beautifully.” Somehow – how? – we eventually come to the same conclusion. We might say, “You were right.” But then we are acknowledging her talents as a connoisseur, a musical gourmet, as it were, not as a critic. All that is required to be a connoisseur is to have an exquisite ear or eye; but that is not all that is involved in the task of the critic. The critic is one who makes their experience available to others. I take this to be part of what Stanley Cavell is getting at when he writes that in Hume’s appropriation, the Sancho Panza anecdote misrepresents the efforts of the critic and the sort of vindication to which he aspires. It dissociates the exercise of taste from the discipline of accounting for it: but all that makes the critic’s expression of taste worth more than another man’s is his ability to produce for himself the thong and key of his response; and his vindication comes not from his pointing out that it is, or was, in the barrel, but in getting us to taste it there.

The claim about where the critic’s vindication comes from is a claim about the grammar or “logic” of criticism. It is a claim, in other words, about what criticism is. It is essential to criticism that it stakes itself on its communicability. If you do not have a stake in your words’ communicating your experience to others, then you are not engaging in criticism. That does not mean that you are doing nothing at all. You might be expressing your own taste, or you might be asserting a belief. Kant has categories for each of these: the former is the judgment of the agreeable; the latter a kind of logical (cognitive) judgment. Cavell likely supposes that Kant would be friendly toward his remarks about criticism, for the larger context of his passage is an account of what makes Kant’s work on aesthetic judgment “deeper and obscurer” than   

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I borrow the example from Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” p. . Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” p. . The passage follows the sentence quoted in n. . Kant acknowledges that there is such a thing as an “aesthetically grounded logical judgment.” The example he gives is “the judgment that roses in general are beautiful” that “arises from the comparison of many singular” judgments of taste (CJ V:). (Compare: “Matisse’s cut-outs are beautiful.”) Kant does not mention other forms of aesthetically grounded logical judgment, so it is not clear whether he would contemplate singular ones.

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

Introduction: A Twofold Peculiarity

Hume’s. The focus on criticism might nevertheless seem to have caused us to drift away from Kant, since it is not a topic that he much discusses (although he touches on the fact that his own method of “critique” shares the name (CJ V:)). On the contrary, in my view, we remain in Kant’s company. As Kant elaborates the judgment of taste, it is of a piece with the critic’s offering, and not (for example) that of connoisseur. The aspiration to communicate one’s experience and one’s judgment, and to earning agreement (only) thereby, is internal to the Kantian judgment of taste. This might be surprising. In the passage detailing how we would react if someone tried to change our mind about the beauty of a poem on the strength of supposed rules, Kant might seem to conclude that there is nothing that anybody could say to (genuinely, legitimately) bring us around. It is not just “rationalizations” (Vernu¨nfteln in the sense of spurious faux-reasoning) that I will disregard: “I stop my ears, won’t listen to reasons,” Kant said (CJ V:). As we will see, however, Kant claims that judgments of taste are arguable. In Cavell’s words, the critic seeks to “produce for himself the thong and key of his response,” its sources or reasons, “and his vindication comes not from his pointing out that it is, or was, in the barrel, but in getting us to taste it there.” As “for himself” underlines, this is as much a matter of selfdiscovery as it is of the exploration of the object. What is finding and communicating the key to one’s response meant to bring about? The line about “getting us to taste it there” might suggest that the critic’s aim is to get us to “see” the work as he does, and to feel about it the way he does, all on the strength of the reasons he adduces. But I think that Cavell suggests, or should be read as suggesting, something slightly different, and more compelling – something that is also truer to Kant. It is a picture of a different kind of key and a different form of unlocking. Here a further level of context in Cavell’s essay is pertinent. Cavell’s comparison of Hume and Kant appears within an argument aimed at showing that the claims about “what we say when” characteristic of the ordinary language philosopher (so of J. L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Cavell himself ) are akin to aesthetic claims (properly conceived, so in the spirit of Kant rather than that of Hume). Cavell writes that the “philosopher appealing to everyday language turns to the reader not to convince him without proof but to get 

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“I will suggest that the aesthetic judgment models the sort of claim entered by these philosophers” (Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” p. ). The judgment of taste’s claim to speak with a “‘universal voice’ is, with perhaps a slight shift of accent, what we hear recorded in the philosopher’s claims about ‘what we say’: such claims are at least as close to what Kant calls aesthetic judgments [i.e., judgments of taste] as they are to ordinary empirical hypotheses” (p. ).

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

him to prove something, test something, against himself. . . . All the philosopher, this kind of philosopher, can do is to express, as fully as he can, his world, and attract our undivided attention to our own.” The words of the critic, and those of the person seeking agreement with her judgment of taste, are also meant to return us to our own experience, or to awaken us to it. Finding agreement with them may depend on their power, and on the power of the world they disclose, to attract us. 

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Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” pp. –.

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 

The Art of Judgment

The third Critique joins the preceding two in investigating an aspect of the human capacity for cognition. The principal topic of the Critique of Pure Reason was the understanding (despite its title, or, as Kant puts it, “strictly speaking”), while that of the Critique of Practical Reason was reason (CJ V:). The Critique of Judgment now focuses on judgment. Its body is comprised of two parts, the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” and the “Critique of Teleological Judgment.” Each of these parts launches into the business heralded by its title without addressing the basic context: why they are paired, and how they together constitute a critique of the power of judgment generally. Such matters are left to the fairly elaborate frame provided by the Preface and the Introductions (that is, the Introduction to the published volume together with the earlier draft, or “First” Introduction, commonly included in contemporary editions of the work). There the following claims emerge: . Judgment calls for its own critique, for . it must have a principle of its own (CJ V:). . There is a reflective power of judgment as well as a determinative power of judgment (CJ V:, FI XX:), and . it is as reflective (and not determinative) that judgment has its own principle (CJ V:, FI XX:). Hence the critique of judgment is the critique of reflective judgment, and the principle of judgment is the principle of reflective judgment. . It is (only) the critique of aesthetic judgment that belongs “essentially” to a critique of judgment (CJ V:).  

The whole critical enterprise can also be called “a critique of pure reason, i.e., of our faculty for judging according to a priori principles” (CJ V:). See pp. xlii–xliii of the Editor’s Introduction to the Cambridge edition of the Critique of Judgment for evidence that Kant replaced the First Introduction only for reasons of length, and that he continued to endorse its content even after the publication of the Critique of Judgment.

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

These claims all sound new: until now Kant has not regarded judgment as having its own principle or as requiring critique, has never mentioned a “reflective” power of judgment, and has denied outright the possibility of a critique of aesthetic judgment (A/B–). Through them Kant apparently aims to delineate the text’s internal coherence or unity, and also to situate it within a larger unified whole, that of the critical enterprise itself. The grand sweep is bound to strike even the sympathetic reader as extravagant. To begin with, it is hardly obvious that aesthetics and teleology should have anything to do with one another. It is no more obvious that a study that concerns the power of judgment generally should concentrate on aesthetic judgment and teleological judgment. One is more likely, in fact, to presume aesthetic and teleological judgment to be rather special, even peripheral, modes of judgment. The notion of reflective judgment is, it turns out, supposed to address such doubts. It is insofar as they are forms of reflective judgment that aesthetic judgment and teleological judgment are supposed to be related, and to be relevant to the project of a critique of judgment. But it is far from obvious that what the frame dubs reflective judgment captures something that aesthetic and teleological judgment can be recognized to have in common, not least because it is not obvious what reflective judgment is supposed to be, or how it is even supposed to count as judgment. The waters are further muddied by the fact that both Introductions seem to foreground, under the banner of reflective judgment, what sounds like something else again: namely the judging of nature as sufficiently unified to allow us to form empirical concepts and to arrive at empirical laws and, ultimately, a complete “system” of nature (see, for example, CJ V:–). The way in which the body of the text unfolds could not be said to help matters, for there the framing claims are largely invisible. The “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” and the “Critique of Teleological Judgment” rarely make contact with them or with their guiding notions – the power of judgment as such, the reflective power of judgment, and the principle of reflective judgment – and when they do, the contact is glancing. Thus the body of the text appears to encourage us to treat its frame as inessential or “parergonal.” 

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The frame also articulates a claim that sounds prima facie different: the power of judgment “provides the mediating concept between the concepts of nature and the concept of freedom, which makes possible the transition from the purely theoretical to the purely practical” (CJ V:). I haven’t the space here to discuss it, or its relation to the framing claims I do discuss. For a reading that identifies it as the main framing claim of the Critique of Judgment, see Fiona Hughes, Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (London: Continuum, ), especially pp. – and –. A parergon is “that which belongs in the whole representation of the object not as an internal constituent, but externally, as an addition” (CJ V:). Kant’s notion of a parergon, rendered famous by Jacques Derrida (The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago:

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The Art of Judgment

Small wonder, therefore, that it has been quite standard to dismiss the systematizing ambitions expressed in the frame of the Critique of Judgment as symptomatic of an arid obsession with the architectonic, especially among philosophers working within the Anglo-American “analytic” tradition. Over the past few decades, however, the English-language literature has evidenced a steadily growing interest in the setting of Kant’s study of aesthetic judgment. Initially this interest was directed mostly toward the links made within the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” between aesthetic judgment and morality. More recently, a wealth of work has taken up the challenge of situating Kant’s aesthetics within the frame provided by the Preface and Introductions. It has, correspondingly, become less common to look for Kant’s aesthetics in the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” alone,







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University of Chicago Press, )), appears in a passage in which Kant briefly discusses “ornaments” that are added to works of art; his examples are “borders of paintings, draperies on statues, or colonnades around magnificent buildings,” and a painting’s “gilt frame” (CJ V:). As ornaments, they remain extrinsic to the works of art themselves, as well as to their beauty. For Kant’s use of the term parergon in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, see Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. , n. . Through most of the twentieth century, the Critique of Judgment was neglected by the AngloAmerican “analytic” tradition. Ignoring its frame, not to mention its second part, that tradition took the text to boil down to a work in aesthetics, a field of philosophy that it particularly marginalized. For its European readers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the third Critique’s marking out of aesthetics as an important philosophical subject, together with its unifying and systematizing claims – especially insofar as they seemed to place aesthetics at the center or basis of philosophy – were enormously influential. Not surprisingly, therefore, in the twentieth century it was the “continental” tradition that was readier and quicker to take the Critique of Judgment’s selfpresentation seriously. See, for example, Gilles Deleuze, La philosophie critique de Kant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ) and Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, eds. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, ). See R. K. Elliott, “The Unity of Kant’s ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgement’,” British Journal of Aesthetics  (). Elliott’s title indicates that the question of unity, of how the text holds together, arises for the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” itself. See also Donald Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ); Kenneth F. Rogerson, “The Meaning of Universal Validity in Kant’s Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism  (); and Dieter Henrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ). See Rudolf Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Hannah Ginsborg, The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition (New York: Garland, ) and the essays collected in The Normativity of Nature: Essays on Kant’s Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Robert Pippin, “The Significance of Taste: Kant, Aesthetic and Reflective Judgment,” Journal of the History of Philosophy  (); Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste; Rebecca Kukla, ed., Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Fiona Hughes, “On Aesthetic Judgment and Our Relation to Nature: Kant’s Concept of Purposiveness,” Inquiry  () and Kant’s Aesthetic Epistemology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ); and Rachel Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).

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

in isolation from that frame. But if there is more confidence today that Kant is entitled to his framing claims, they nevertheless enjoy the attention mainly of Kant scholars and historians. They have not yet been received as compelling in their own right. Joining those who aim to recuperate the Critique of Judgment’s framing claims, I hope in this book to suggest the richness of (at least) some of them. What is the point of a critique of judgment, and what does a critique of aesthetic judgment have to do with it? The text’s frame assigns a special role to the critique of aesthetic judgment; this is the force of () above. The critique of aesthetic judgment is essential to the critique of judgment “since this [viz., the aesthetic power of judgment] alone contains a principle that the power of judgment lays at the basis of its reflection on nature entirely a priori” (CJ V:). Yet this claim might be read quite modestly. Judgment has a principle of its own, and thus requires a critique of its own, only insofar as it is aesthetic judgment. In its other guises or modes (including the teleological), judgment has no special principle of its own and thus does not warrant critique. Once the critique of aesthetic judgment is completed there is therefore nothing left to do under the banner of the critique of judgment. Other topics and issues may be worth pursuing, but they are not, properly speaking, internal to the task named in the book’s title. On this modest reading, the power of judgment as such does not really figure in the critique of judgment. A more robust reading, by contrast, would understand the critique of aesthetic judgment to be 



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The third Critique’s contributions are still overlooked even among Kant scholars. Hannah Ginsborg notes that “discussions of Kant’s ‘theory of judgment’ have typically taken little or no account of Kant’s treatment of judgment in the third Critique, suggesting thereby that Kant’s views on judgment are exhausted by his account of cognitive (in particular non-aesthetic) judgments in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Logic” (“Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Fall  edn, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall/ entries/kant-aesthetics/). Ginsborg cites as an example the same Encyclopedia’s entry on “Kant’s Theory of Judgment,” written by Robert Hanna (Winter  edn, https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/win/entries/kant-judgment/). I thus leave aside the “Critique of Teleological Judgment.” See Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology, for a reading on which the third Critique’s aesthetics and teleology, together with (what I am calling) its frame, trace a unified argument. This is how I understand Allison’s claim that the modes of purposiveness involved in the judging of nature as hospitable to our cognitive powers (discussed in the Introductions) and in teleological judgment “by themselves do not warrant a separate critique or division of philosophy. On the contrary, [Kant] insists that an investigation of them ‘could at most have formed an appendix, including a critical restriction on such judging, to the theoretical part of philosophy’ [CJ V:]. Thus, again, it is only taste or the capacity for aesthetic judgment, through which judgment legislates to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, that necessitates a separate critique. Or, as Kant puts it in the Second Introduction, ‘In a critique of judgment, the part that deals with aesthetic judgment belongs to it essentially’” (Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. ).

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“essential” because it discloses something (further) about judgment generally. The principle of aesthetic judgment is, or leads us to, the principle of judgment as such. In the spirit of the more robust reading, I will argue that Kant’s aesthetic judgment – specifically, the judgment of taste – models or “presents” (“exhibits”) an essential aspect of the human capacity for judgment as such. Thus I aim to take seriously the claim that the Critique of Judgment is concerned with the power of judgment as such, and the companion claim that the study of aesthetic judgment is essential to its endeavor. The key, in my view, is to appreciate the fact that the critique of judgment has to do with the capacity for judgment as we ordinarily understand it. This is also the key to grasping the significance of Kant’s nontransparent notion of reflective judgment, as well as the place of a critique of judgment in his larger critical project.

.

The Power of Judgment

The idea that judgment is a power of the mind that constitutes an important subject of philosophical study in its own right has not, on the whole, remained live since Kant’s work. But it has found one great champion in Hannah Arendt. Arendt planned Judging – which, save for its title page, she did not live to write – to be the third and final part of her work The Life of the Mind. In the Postscriptum to its first volume, Thinking, Arendt writes: “I shall conclude the second volume with an analysis of the faculty of judgment, and here the chief difficulty will be the curious scarcity of sources providing authoritative testimony. Not till Kant’s Critique of Judgment did this faculty become a major topic of a major thinker.” Arendt thus credits Kant with bringing the topic to life in the first place. But the scarcity of texts that Arendt mentions has persisted. If Kant is interested in judgment as a particular human capacity – or with judgment as a particular kind of act, not merely product of but expressive of that capacity – then this has not yet been inherited from him.

 

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Hannah Arendt, Postscriptum to Thinking, in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), p. . On the whole, I mean. Welcome exceptions include Samuel Fleischacker, A Third Concept of Liberty: Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); and Linda M. G. Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), which takes up Arendt’s interpretation, in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, of

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What stands in the way? Kant’s stake in judgment as such might be suspected of issuing from an antiquated and unappealing “faculty psychology.” Or judgment as such might simply not seem to be a fit candidate for philosophical scrutiny. Thus while one might concede the point in studying moral judgments (which would mean studying morality), or empirical judgments (so doing epistemology), or political or religious or aesthetic judgments (so working in the areas to which these respectively belong), one might not see any sense in trying to study judgment, or the “power” of judgment, simpliciter. There is nothing there to study – so it might well seem. Even if one puts aside the notion of judgment generally, as a power or dimension of the mind (a Kraft), in considering, say, moral judgment or empirical cognitive judgment it is likely to be an Urteil, a product or instance of judgment – judgment as an entity (whether epistemological, or mental, or something else) – and not a capacity for moral or empirical judgment that will seem to merit or to repay philosophical investigation. Or rather, the latter has been occluded by the former: as though the way for philosophy to study judgment as power of the mind is simply by studying judgments and their logical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic conditions as contents and as utterances. As though the capacity for judgment itself could be, at best, a subject for psychology, not philosophy. Yet the notion of judgment as a capacity or power plays a prominent and significant role in our ordinary lives. We credit some people with having good judgment, and are wary of the poor judgment of others. Sometimes the evaluative modifier is dropped: we say of someone that she has judgment or that she lacks it. Attributing (good) judgment to someone is not the same as taking her to be a good reasoner, or to have a solid grasp



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Kant’s account of the judgment of taste. Fleischacker and (following Arendt) Zerilli focus on judgment in political contexts. I read Kant as thinking about the power of judgment more broadly, so including ordinary empirical thoughts and claims to knowledge, but as I will focus on the freedom that judgment more broadly involves, there will be an important strand of continuity with such politically inflected interpretations of Kant on judgment. Hannah Ginsborg also reads Kant as taking up the topic of the power of judgment generally, and seems sometimes to endorse the views she attributes to him as contributions to current philosophical issues (see Ginsborg’s Introduction to The Normativity of Nature, pp. –). The conception of judgment that emerges from Ginsborg’s reading is, however, quite far from the ordinary. I discuss Ginsborg’s interpretation in Chapter . A recent essay opens as follows: “It is fair to say that the [Critique of Judgment] does not hold the same importance for us as” the two preceding Critiques, in large part because “judgement as such is discussed only in the Introduction and is in any case for us a topic in philosophical logic, which is certainly not Kant’s concern here, while the notion of a ‘power’ or ‘faculty’ of judgement does not resonate with our concerns” (Sebastian Gardner, “Kant’s Third Critique: The Project of Unification,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements  (), p. ).

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of some body of knowledge or some set of facts. We don’t say admiringly of someone that she has reason, or even that she has good reason, or good understanding. We might say that she is reasonable, or that she has an understanding (of people, of sailboats, of jazz); but then, I think, what we mean is (at least in part) what we mean in saying that she has judgment. We mean, that is, that she is adept at judging something to be a reason, and adept at judging its weight and significance. (For it’s one thing to be a sharp reasoner and another to know, or to be good at knowing, what counts as a reason at all in a given case.) We mean that she’s a good judge of people, sailboats, or jazz. (For it’s one thing to have knowledge of some set of facts, but another to know what fact – what piece of knowledge – is relevant at all in a given case. Knowing what counts as a reason or a relevant fact requires judgment.) To be a good reasoner, furthermore, is not necessarily to be good at knowing what merits reasoning, or when reasoning is, or is not, what is wanted; and, similarly, one might have a mastery of a field of knowledge without being adept at seeing when knowledge is, or is not, to the point. Perceiving when reasoning, or knowledge, is to the point, and when it is not, belongs to the domain of judgment. To possess (good) judgment is to be discerning. That is, to praise someone’s judgment is not just to appreciate her ability to render true judgments; it is to appreciate her ability to render acute, perceptive, keen, or insightful judgments. And to have judgment – that is, good judgment – is to know when and how to render judgment in the first place: it is to know what is worth, or what bears, judgment. In this light, judgment emerges as a fundamental mode of the mind, a condition of its discerning employment in any (or almost any) form. But there is another sense in which judgment is fundamental: for it is a mode that we identify with the spirit of a (particular) mind. This is crystallized in the fact that a person’s judgment (but not, say, her reason or her understanding) is open to our trust, confidence, or faith. I may find that I trust someone’s judgment, or I may put my trust in it; my trust in it may be shattered, or become a problem. And what is there for philosophy to say about any of this? I’d like, in the first place, simply to propose that Kant thought philosophy had something 

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I can lay my trust in someone’s understanding of (say) sailboats, but then the object of my trust is not just her store of knowledge but her ability to apply it in judgment. I can entrust myself to her understanding or to her reason, but there I am expressing my sense of being subject to her and my hope for her good treatment of me. When I trust her judgment, what I trust is its gaze out into the world; I need not (though I may) feel myself to be in its field of vision at all.

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to say about it. The Critique of Judgment is directed to the power of judgment in the rich sense that we recognize it to have in our ordinary lives. Moreover, Kant’s interest in the power of judgment in its rich and ordinary sense is not a novelty of that work. The third Critique may reflect some changes in Kant’s thinking about the power of judgment, but in treating judgment as fundamental to human thinking it is continuous with the critical project in general, and with the first Critique in particular. As the editors of the Cambridge edition put it, the Critique of Pure Reason is characterized by an “insistence on the primacy of judgment in human thought.” This sort of claim is likely to be cashed out in terms of a primacy of judgments (Urteile), in line with the tendency I’ve mentioned, and – to be fair – as the initial unfolding of Kant’s text itself encourages. But the first Critique also acknowledges the “primary” role of the power of judgment, in its rich and ordinary sense. Focusing on the ordinary notion of judgment as a power of the mind opens up a fresh perspective on the relation of the third Critique to the first. I am sympathetic to a view that has increasingly been gaining traction, namely that Kant’s aesthetic account, and his account of the judgment of taste in particular, makes an important contribution to his account of cognition (his epistemology). On my reading, however, this contribution does not consist of developing the “deep structure” of cognition, for example by further articulating the schematism or the synthesis that it involves. Rather, the third Critique develops Kant’s account of cognition by broadening it beyond the confines proper to the Critique of Pure Reason: by considering judgment as a power exercised by individuals living in a shared world, and, in particular, by taking seriously the fact that our cognitive relation to the world is not just one of making true or correct judgments, but also of judging aptly, where this capacity is expressive or disclosive of an individual mind. (Here it is worth remembering that “cognition” and its variants, which in English sound technical or jargonlike, translate perfectly ordinary German words for “knowledge.”)   

 

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Editors’ Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. . Emphasis added. This is the case with the remark just quoted from the Editors’ Introduction. The strongest version of this view holds that Kant’s account of empirical cognition depends on his account of taste. See the Introduction to Kukla, ed., Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy; Bell, “The Art of Judgement,” which I discuss in this chapter; and Ginsborg, The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition, which I discuss in Chapter . I borrow the term “deep structure” from Hughes, Kant’s Aesthetic Epistemology. To be fair, Kant’s use of the terms does – as is well known – diverge from the ordinary. In particular, he allows for such a thing as a false Erkenntnis (A/B). Hence I follow the practice of using “cognition,” “cognitive,” and so on.

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The Art of Judgment

. Judgment in the Critique of Pure Reason From the vantage point of the Critique of Judgment, as we saw, the cognitive faculty with which the Critique of Pure Reason is mainly concerned is the understanding. “We can trace all acts of the understanding back to judgments, so that the understanding in general can be represented as a capacity to judge [Vermögen zu urteilen],” Kant remarks, adding that the understanding is “a capacity to think [Vermögen zu denken]” (A/B). He later says that the capacity to judge and the capacity to think are one and the same (A/B). Notice the formulation of Kant’s remarks about the understanding: the understanding may be represented as a capacity to judge or to think, not as the capacity to judge (think). This leaves room for the idea that reason too may be a capacity to judge (think). Elsewhere, Kant indeed relates theoretical reason to judgment in much the same way. In a pre-critical essay, Kant declares that “the understanding and reason, i.e., the capacity to cognize distinctly and the one [viz., capacity] for syllogistic reasoning, are not different fundamental abilities [Grundfähigkeiten]. Both consist in the capacity to judge [Vermögen zu urteilen].” And if the Critique of Pure Reason’s commitment to “the primacy of judgment in human thought” expresses the “recognition that judgment is the fundamental form of all cognitive acts,” this presumably includes the cognitive acts of theoretical reason. Kant may extend the point to practical reason as well. In the Critique of Practical Reason’s Typic of the Pure Practical Power of Judgment, Kant says that “the use of moral concepts” is a matter of “the power of judgment.” Part of what Kant means, in saying that the understanding is a capacity to judge, is that concepts are employed in judgments, so that the application of a concept means the formation of a judgment. But, as I’ve suggested, there is more at stake. The understanding as such is the seat 

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  

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I translate Vermögen in the Vermögen zu construction (e.g., Vermögen zu urteilen) as “capacity” (e.g., capacity to judge). Otherwise, I usually translate it as “faculty,” as in Erkenntnisvermögen (cognitive faculties) or Vermögen der Regeln (faculty of rules). “False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures” II:. Guyer and Wood quote the passage in the Editors’ Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, p. , using the translation by David Walford in Kant, Theoretical Philosophy – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. . I have modified the translation, and the bracketed additions are mine. Guyer and Wood, Editors’ Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, p. . Emphasis added. Critique of Practical Reason V:. Kant goes on to claim that only “rationalism with regard to the power of judgment” will do justice to “the use of moral concepts” (V:). “Thinking is cognition through concepts. Concepts . . . [are] predicates of possible judgments” (A/B).

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of (transcendental or empirical) concepts or “rules.” The employment of the understanding is the activity of judging. (“The power of judgment has the greatest value. The good and bad use of the understanding rests on the power of judgment.”) That is, the understanding may be represented as a “capacity to judge” because in its activity the understanding is judgment. The power of judgment is, in other words, another side of the faculty of understanding; it is that faculty considered from the point of view of its activity. This is the deeper point in the thought that the understanding makes use of concepts by judging through them (A/B). Thus the “acts” (Handlungen) of the understanding are, properly speaking, acts of the power of judgment; and perhaps something similar can be said about the acts of reason. Then judgment is a (if not the) central mode of activity of the mind. Urteilskraft is Kant’s name for judgment proper, that power of the mind considered in itself. In the body of the Critique of Pure Reason it is first mentioned in the Analytic of Principles, where the transcendental analytic shifts its focus from the pure concepts of the understanding to their employment in the activity of judging. The Analytic of Principles opens with the following declaration: “General logic is constructed on a ground plan that coincides precisely with the division of the higher faculties of cognition. These are: understanding, the power of judgment [Urteilskraft], and reason” (A/B). As Béatrice Longuenesse has noted, the relationship between a Vermögen zu urteilen and Urteilskraft is illuminated by the distinction that Kant draws in his Lectures on Metaphysics between Vermögen and Kraft. Following Alexander Baumgarten, Kant casts Vermögen (which translates the Latin facultas) as “the possibility of acting, or tendency to act, that is proper to a substance” and Kraft (which translates the Latin vis, or force) as the actualization of that possibility.   

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“[A]s far as its form is concerned [a concept] is always something general, and something that serves as a rule” (A). Anthropology Collins XXV:. Up to this moment, Kant speaks rather of a Vermögen zu urteilen, as in the passages we’ve just seen, with one exception (that I know of ) in a footnote to the following remark: “Problematic judgments are those in which one takes assertion or denial as merely possible (arbitrary). Assertoric [judgments are those in which] it is considered actual (true). Apodictic [judgments are those] in which it is regarded as necessary.” The footnote reads: “Just as if thought were in the first case a function of the understanding, in the second of the power of judgment [Urteilskraft], and in the third of reason. A remark that awaits its elucidation in the sequel” (A/B). Béatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Charles T. Wolfe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), p. . Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, p. .

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The Art of Judgment Capacity [Vermögen] and power [Kraft] must be distinguished. In capacity we represent to ourselves the possibility of an action, it does not contain the sufficient reason of the action, which is power [die Kraft], but only its possibility. . . . The conatus, effort [Bestrebung] is properly speaking the determination of a capacity ad actum.

Drawing on this distinction, Longuenesse submits that “the” Vermögen zu urteilen “can be considered as a possibility or potentiality of forming judgments,” while the Urteilskraft of the Analytic of Principles and of the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft) “is the actualization of the Vermögen zu urteilen under sensory stimulation” or “in relation to sensory perceptions.” The suggestion is illuminating, although the construal I would offer of the “actualization” in which judgment consists returns it to a more ordinary register. Urteilskraft is a power of individual subjects (human beings) viewed in the context of their lives in the world and among one another. It is essentially responsive to the sensible world. Its conditions will not emerge, that is, unless we remember that the “actualization” of the potentiality of judging “under sensory stimulation” is a matter of the subject’s bringing judgment to bear on the sensible given. The point finds expression in the Critique of Pure Reason through its argument that judgment (Urteilskraft), by its very nature, must be – or, better, is – exercised. The declaration containing the first mention (in the body of the text) of Urteilskraft, which I quoted a moment ago, launches Kant’s prefatory remarks to the Analytic of Principles. These are followed by the short 



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Metaphysics Volckmann XXVIII:. Quoted in Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, p. , n. . Kant makes a similar distinction in the Lectures on Anthropology: “The powers [Kräfte] are sources of acts of exercising [Ausu¨bungen], and the faculty [Vermögen] is the sufficiency for certain acts” (Anthropology Collins XXV:). (Ausu¨bungen is tricky to translate in this context. “Exercises” won’t work. A plural form of the English gerund “exercising” would come closest, even though the German term is not a gerund. The Cambridge edition opts for “execution,” making Kant’s phrase “sources of execution.”) Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, pp. –. As the subtitle of her book indicates, Longuenesse is primarily concerned with “the” Vermögen zu urteilen or “capacity to judge” of the first Critique, which she interprets in terms of the formation of empirical concepts and identifies with what the third Critique calls reflective judgment (on this last point, see pp. –). As Longuenesse cautions, there are limits to the pertinence of the Lectures on Metaphysics distinction. Its context is a substance metaphysics of the mind, which the first Critique expressly rejects. Longuenesse adds another caveat: when Kant writes, in the Critique of Judgment, that “the subjective condition of all judgments is the capacity to judge itself [das Vermögen zu urteilen selbst], or the power of judgment [Urteilskraft]” (CJ V:), he fails to observe the distinction between “the” Vermögen zu urteilen and Urteilskraft. On my reading, there is no conflation here. The definite article and selbst make all the difference. The understanding is a capacity to judge. The capacity to judge itself, or as such, is the power of judgment.

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Introduction, entitled “On the Transcendental Power of Judgment in General.” It begins thus: If the understanding in general is to be declared the faculty of rules [Vermögen der Regeln], then the power of judgment is the faculty of subsuming under rules, i.e., of distinguishing whether something does or does not come under a given rule (casus datae legis). General logic contains no directions [Vorschriften] at all for the power of judgment, and indeed cannot contain any. For since it [viz., general logic] abstracts from all content of cognition, the only business that remains to it is to analytically divide the mere form of cognition into concepts, judgments, and inferences, and thereby to achieve formal rules for all use of the understanding. Now if it wanted to show generally [allgemein zeigen] how one ought to subsume under these rules, i.e., distinguish whether something does or does not come under them, this could not happen except once again through a rule. But for the very reason that it is a rule, it demands anew guidance from the power of judgment. And so it turns out that although the understanding is capable of being instructed and of being equipped with rules, the power of judgment is, rather, a special talent that cannot at all be taught, but can only be exercised [gar nicht belehrt, sondern nur geu¨bt sein will]. That is why it [viz., the power of judgment] is also what is specific to so-called motherwit, for the lack of which no school can compensate. (A–/ B–)

There are (at least) two arguments here. They are related but need to be teased apart. The first, corresponding with Kant’s setup, is tethered to general logic and its rules. General logic, or “merely formal logic” (A/B), is logic that “considers only the logical form in the relations of cognitions to one another, i.e., the form of thinking in general” (A/B). The passage indicates that general logic contains rules for judgment, namely “formal rules for all use of the understanding” (such as the principle of non-contradiction). As the “absolutely necessary rules of thinking, without which no use whatsoever of the understanding takes place” (A/B), they articulate conditions of thinking, which is to say of judging (since, as Kant said, thinking and judging are one and the same). Now if general logic sought to show or indicate in some general way how its rules ought to be applied, it would have to do so through a further rule. The application of this further rule would require the use of judgment, just because the application of rules is the remit of judgment (“the power of judgment is the faculty of subsuming under rules, i.e., of distinguishing whether something does or does not come under a given rule”). Since the rules of general logic are conditions of all judging, they are presupposed by any act of judging. As an act of judging, then, the application of the

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would-be further rule for the application of the rules of general logic would presuppose the capacity to apply the rules of general logic. In other words, the application of the would-be further rule for the general logic rules would presuppose just the capacity that it, the would-be further rule, was supposed to guide. Thus, general logic cannot provide rules determining the application of its rules. (Strictly speaking, it cannot provide nonredundant rules for its rules; the redundant rule for applying modus ponens, namely “apply modus ponens,” is obviously unhelpful. In what follows the qualifier “nonredundant” is left implicit.) Or, more accurately, there cannot be rules determining the application of the rules of general logic: they could be provided neither by general logic nor by anything else. It is thus particularly important to notice that as Kant is using the terms, Vorschrift and Regel are not interchangeable. Reading both as “rule,” and so reading Kant’s claim in the second sentence to be that general logic cannot provide rules for judgment, muddles the argument. After all, in the very next sentence Kant explains that the arrival at (“formal”) rules for judgment is the business of general logic. The point in Kant’s second sentence is not that general logic cannot provide rules, but that it cannot provide rules for the application of its rules. The second argument drops the tether to general logic and its rules. It is reflected in the conclusion drawn within the passage: “And so it turns out that although the understanding is capable of being instructed and of being equipped with rules, the power of judgment is, rather, a special talent that cannot be taught at all, but only exercised. That is why it is also what is specific to so-called mother-wit, for the lack of which no school can compensate.” At this point, Kant is talking about the power of judgment quite generally and about rules beyond those peculiar to general logic. In fact, as we will shortly see, the rules with which he seems now to be concerned are, paradigmatically, empirical rules and the rules characterizing empirical concepts. Again, there are several things going on in this conclusion – several conclusions, in fact – and they need to be teased apart. Kant’s first conclusion is that the power of judgment (as such, or wholesale) cannot be taught. This follows from the first argument about general logic, which may be why Kant does not spell it out. To teach something is to provide rules for it, Kant assumes. As we just saw, the rules of general logic cannot be taught, because they are conditions of judgment and so the possibility of their acquisition would presuppose their possession. If the 

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Kemp Smith translates both as “rule.” Guyer and Wood render Vorschrift as “precept,” which, in this context, strikes me as unnecessarily formal.

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. Judgment in the Critique of Pure Reason



conditions of something (here, judgment) cannot be taught, then it (judgment) cannot be taught. In a parallel passage in the Anthropology (where Kant makes explicit his assumption that teaching something is giving rules for it), Kant makes the case independently of the argument about general logic. [N]atural understanding can, through teaching [Belehrung], be enriched with many concepts and equipped with rules; but the second intellectual faculty, that of distinguishing whether something is an instance of the rule or not, the power of judgment (iudicium), cannot be taught, but only exercised [geu¨bt]. That is why its growth is called maturity . . . . It is also easy to see that this could not be otherwise; because teaching takes place by means of communication of rules. Therefore, if there were to be doctrines [Lehren] for the power of judgment, then there would have to be general rules according to which one could distinguish whether something was an instance of the rule or not: which would yield a query on into infinity.

Imagine that an individual lacked the power of judgment altogether. He might nevertheless know rules, even many of them (according to Kant). Suppose that we wanted to provide him with rules for applying one of the rules he possesses, for, in other words, distinguishing whether or not something falls under it. Lacking the power of judgment, the pupil would not be able to apply the proffered rules, would not, that is, be able to judge how to apply the proffered rules, and so would need to be given yet further rules to settle how the initially proffered lot are to be applied. And so on, ad infinitum. If one has the power of judgment at all, then it is possible, at least in principle, to develop it. Kant elaborates the point with some care a bit further on in the Analytic of Principles. There is one way in which judgment can be “sharpened,” namely through examples (A/B). You become a better diagnostician of thyroid disease, judge of philosophical work, and sorter of apples by encountering and assessing many, and (presumably) varied, endocrinological patients, philosophical works, and apples. As it turns out, this is the only way to improve one’s judgment. Judgment can only be improved by experience with specific cases, or, in other words, through practice. A sharpened power of judgment is simply a  

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Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View VII:. The passage, together with its surrounding context, is quite free of any mention of, or allusion to, logic, “general” or otherwise. The argument can be recast in terms of circularity, parallel to the first argument about general logic. To make use of any proffered rules, the pupil would have to apply them, which would require the very capacity, the power of judgment, that the rules were meant to furnish. (That first argument about general logic can also be recast as an infinite regress argument).

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The Art of Judgment

mature, practiced one. This is what Kant means when he says, and repeats in the Anthropology, that judgment can only be exercised: it can only be improved by being exercised. Or rather, as I now want to suggest, this is part of what he means. The other part of what he means by that slogan is in fact the nerve of the whole passage. All of the arguments entwined within our Analytic of Principles passage hinge upon one fundamental premise: that there cannot be rules that determine or effect their own application automatically, as it were, or without the subject’s having to judge how they ought to be applied. There can be no self-determining or self-applying rules. This means that to apply a rule or, in Kant’s terms, to judge is necessarily to use one’s power of judgment – to exercise it. To judge is ipso facto to exercise one’s own judgment. There is no evading the need to exercise judgment in any act of judging or thinking. Following on the remark with which the Analytic of Principles passage as I have quoted it so far ends, the remark that “no school can compensate” for the lack of the power of judgment, Kant writes: [F]or although such a school can offer even a limited understanding a full provision of rules borrowed from the insight of others, and as it were graft these onto it, nevertheless the faculty for making use of them rightly must belong to the learner himself; and in the absence of such a natural gift no rule that one might want to prescribe [vorschreiben] to him for this aim can ensure against misuse. A physician, therefore, a judge, or a statesman, can have many fine pathological, juridical, or political rules in his head, even to the degree that he can become a thorough teacher of them, and yet he can easily stumble in their application, either because he is lacking in natural power of judgment (although not in understanding), and to be sure understands the universal in abstracto, but cannot distinguish whether a case in concreto belongs under it, or else because he has not been adequately trained for this judgment [zu diesem Urteil] through examples and actual practice [Geschäfte]. (A–/B–)

Plainly this continues the broader argument about the power of judgment, rather than the one concerning judgment in relation to general logic. Pathological, juridical, or political rules are not rules of general logic, which “abstracts from all content of cognition,” and the point could hardly 

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I prefer “judgment can only be exercised” to “judgment can only be practiced,” contra Guyer and Wood, because the former seems to better convey both registers I am identifying: judgment can only be improved through exercise; judgment is necessarily exercised (roughly: employed) in any act of judging. “Practiced” conveys the first register, but less distinctly the second. (However, some constructions built on “practice” convey the second distinctly and perhaps exclusively, e.g., “to put into practice” or “practicing lawyer.”)

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. Judgment in the Critique of Pure Reason



be that general logic cannot tell a doctor, judge, or statesman how to apply them: of course it can’t; nobody was in danger of thinking that it could, just as no one would imagine that what we now call formal or deductive logic might do so. In fact, as the examples indicate, Kant has his eye specifically on judgment about empirical matters. And he is elaborating or expanding on the conclusions previously drawn. Now he is thinking about the person whose power of judgment is poor or dull, rather than the individual somehow lacking the power of judgment altogether (which must, of course, be a limit case; such a being would be incapable of thinking, and by Kant’s lights could hardly be recognized as a person). The shift allows Kant himself to appeal to examples “in concreto.” If one gives someone with deficient judgment a rule to guide her judgment, she will have to exercise her judgment in using it, and if, as we’re assuming, her judgment is deficient, she may well apply the proffered rule badly. (In this person, the “natural gift” of judgment is “absent” in the sense that she lacks the gift for (good) judgment, or her judgment is not particularly gifted. If she lacked the power of judgment altogether, there would be no question of “misuse” here: she could neither use nor misuse any proffered rule.) The point holds equally in the case of someone whose judgment is simply inexperienced or immature (concerning the topic at issue, as with someone who has seen only a few competition-level dives, or in a more general way, as with the young). In short, no rules could take the place of good judgment. And that’s because no rules could supplant judgment. Let us suppose that a juridical judge needs to decide whether a particular sentence for a crime is fair. In Kant’s terms, her task is to decide whether it falls under the concept or rule “fair sentence.” She might be given, or draw upon, rules for this rule. For example: the sentence for a juvenile should show leniency reflecting the youth of the perpetrator; the sentence for a violent crime should take into account the likelihood that the perpetrator will continue 



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“[S]ince the mere form of cognition, however well it may agree with logical laws, is far from sufficing to constitute the material (objective) truth of the cognition, nobody can dare to judge about objects and to assert anything about them merely with logic, without having antecedently made a well-founded inquiry outside of logic” (A/B). In a footnote, Kant writes that deficient judgment “is really what one calls stupidity, and for such a failing there is no remedy. A dull or limited head lacking nothing but the needed degree of understanding and the concepts proper to it may well be equipped through learning, even to the point of becoming learned. But since he would commonly still lack the power of judgment (the secunda Petri), it is no uncommon thing to meet very learned men who in the use of their knowledge [Wissenschaft] frequently reveal that deficiency, which is never to be ameliorated” (A–/B–).

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The Art of Judgment

to pose a danger to others. These might indeed be helpful rules for applying the rule. To apply the guiding rules she will have to judge whether the crime is a violent one (for example). For this she might draw upon further rules. But no rule could settle for her how she is to judge, or free her from having to use her judgment: she must exercise her judgment. And she will be more or less adept at doing so. Nothing could take over the burden of judgment. In the end – and shifting now to the first person, for reasons that will emerge – whether or not I am following directions, I have to judge; it is up to me to render judgment. No teacher can judge for me, and no directions could take over my responsibility for my judgment. I have been focusing on the argument concerning the power of judgment generally in the Analytic of Principles passage as we have seen it unfold so far. After talking about the role of examples in sharpening judgment, Kant brings us back to the argument tethered to general logic: “But now although general logic can give no directions [Vorschriften] to the power of judgment, it is entirely different with transcendental” logic (A/ B). With this step, Kant is directly broaching the topic signaled in the Introduction’s title, the “transcendental” power of judgment. The very ideas of transcendental logic and of transcendental powers of the mind are of course Kant’s innovations, and as such they need, as he recognizes, to be explained and justified. Kant’s earlier mention of general logic, the basic idea of which he can assume to be familiar to his audience, was really meant to prepare the contrast he is now drawing. The point of the contrast, it emerges, is that transcendental logic provides “rules” for which “it can at the same time indicate a priori the case to which the rules ought to be applied” (A/B). Given what I have been saying so far, this is troubling. It sounds very much as though Kant is saying that transcendental logic provides judgment with self-determining or self-applying rules, hence denying precisely the claim I have been calling the nerve of his argument, the claim that there can be no such thing. I will contend that Kant is not (cannot be) denying that claim. I begin by articulating the significance of the nerve of Kant’s argument. What is at stake in the idea that judgment is necessarily exercised in any act of judging? 

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I italicize insistently for two reasons: because Kant does not, to my mind, admit these facts openly enough; and because Kant is sometimes taken to argue, in the very passages we are looking at, that there can be no rules for applying rules. (We will see Henry Allison saying this, for example.) But patently there can be and are. Asking you to pick the best apples, I might say: choose those that are fresh and firm.

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. Exercising Judgment



. Exercising Judgment The nerve of Kant’s argument is, to repeat, that there is no such thing as an act of applying a rule that is not an act of judgment, or that there can be no such thing as a self-determining or self-applying rule. It’s worth noting that this might seem hardly to require saying. That, indeed, is why Kant’s claim about transcendental logic is liable to seem counterintuitive or paradoxical, even before we know quite what it is supposed to mean. I am calling it the nerve of Kant’s argument because it appears as that argument’s deepest premise – something that the argument takes to be self-evident. However, many of Kant’s readers take him to argue that even the rules constituting ordinary empirical concepts are, ultimately, self-determining. In fact, the very passage that we have been looking at from the Analytic of Principles has been interpreted as making that case. The nerve of Kant’s argument thus turns out very much to bear saying. An instance of the interpretation I have in mind is to be found in an influential essay by David Bell. The argument that Bell understands Kant to propound in the Analytic of Principles passage – and that Bell endorses in its own right – is the following. [I]f thought and judgement are to be possible, then the relation in which we stand to what we think or mean must be immediate and direct. If we are to avoid the incoherence of a regressive infinity of acts of judgement, or identification, interpretation, understanding, or thought, then at some point we must judge immediately, spontaneously – and this means without having already judged, identified, understood, or grasped a thought on the basis of any prior such act.

If an act of judgment requires a prior act of judgment, an infinite regress (of acts of judgment requiring prior acts of judgment) threatens, which would mean the incoherence or impossibility of judgment. If judgment is to be coherent or possible, then something must block such a regress or stop it from arising. That is: every act of judgment must be, or be grounded in, an act of judgment that does not require a prior act of judgment, an “immediate” or “spontaneous” act of judgment. Or rather, this primitive act is, strictly speaking, only something like judgment, but not judgment proper, for since it is supposed to ground the possibility of judgment in a regress-blocking way it cannot itself be, or be the result of,



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Bell, “The Art of Judgement,” p. . Bell attributes the argument to Kant on p. .

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The Art of Judgment

judgment. It is, Bell says, “an awareness of ‘intrinsic,’ ‘intransitive,’ or ‘immediate’ significance or sense.” In sum: That the regressive infinity of judgements on judgements, of rules for the following of rules, can be stopped, without thereby making a mystery of my ability to judge at all, is due to the fact that at a certain point I am directly aware of an intrinsic coherence, or unity, or significance in my experience. It is because of this felt unity that the concept of an object in general can so much as find a foothold in experience. And the vicious regress is avoided because this feeling owes nothing to concepts, judgements, criteria, or rules.

Bell finds Ludwig Wittgenstein to record the same thought in his later work, and specifically in what are probably the most frequently cited passages of his Philosophical Investigations. The idea that the coherence or possibility of judgment depends on our being able to judge (or rather “judge”) “immediately” or “spontaneously” is, Bell writes, at least in part, not only what Kant intended by his doctrine of “the spontaneity of thought,” but is also what lies behind Wittgenstein’s claims that “If I have exhausted the justifications [i.e. for following a rule in the way that I do] I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’,” and that “When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly.” The disturbing conclusion to which Wittgenstein would force us, then, is that an inescapable blindness lies at the very centre of our rational and cognitive capacities.

Citing Kant’s reference to “a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever” (A/B, in Kemp Smith’s translation), Bell proposes that “the blindness that Kant refers to is precisely that which is invoked by Wittgenstein: a state or act is ‘blind’ in so far as it remains necessarily inaccessible to prior rational and objective justification.” Thus for Bell it is not only Wittgenstein but also Kant who would force us to the “disturbing conclusion” that our rational and cognitive capacities terminate, at bottom, in “inescapable blindness.” Henry Allison interprets Kant’s Analytic of Principles passage along similar lines, although without involving Wittgenstein.

  



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 Bell, “The Art of Judgement,” p. . Bell, “The Art of Judgement,” p. . Bell, “The Art of Judgement,” p. . Bell, “The Art of Judgement,” p. . The bracketed interpolation is Bell’s. Bell is quoting §§ and  of the  edition of Philosophical Investigations, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe, R. Rhees, and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell). Bell, “The Art of Judgement,” pp. –.

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[T]he stipulation of rules for the application of rules obviously leads to an infinite regress. Thus, at some level the very possibility of cognition (and practical deliberation as well) requires that one simply be able to see whether or not a datum or state of affairs instantiates a certain rule. The capacity for such nonmediated “seeing,” or, as we shall later see, “feeling,” apart from which rules could not be applied, is precisely what Kant understands by judgment, which he famously describes as a “peculiar talent which can be practiced only, and cannot be taught.”

Or, in slightly greater detail: Kant there defines judgment as the “faculty of subsuming under rules, that is, of distinguishing whether something does or does not stand under a given rule” (A/B); and he further claims that there can be no rules for judgment, so conceived. The latter is the case because the assumption that rules are necessary to determine whether something falls under a rule (and keep in mind that concepts are rules) leads to an infinite regress. But it follows from this that the subsumability of an intuition under a concept must be immediately seen, that is, “felt.” And this is why Kant insists that judgment (unlike understanding) is a “peculiar talent which can be practiced only, and cannot be taught.”

On pain of infinite regress, judgment is or depends on “immediate” acts of “seeing” or “feeling” the applicability of rules, that is, acts of “seeing” or “feeling” the applicability of rules that do not themselves appeal to or depend on rules. It is with respect to the relevance of Kant’s aesthetics to the first Critique’s Analytic of Principles argument that Bell and Allison part ways. As Bell construes it, Kantian aesthetic experience is itself a preconceptual awareness of “unity” and hence fits the profile of the regress-blocking act that must underlie an instance of judging. Aesthetic experience “models” 







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Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. . (In the sentences just preceding and immediately following, Allison says that the argument establishes that general logic cannot provide judgment with rules for applying its rules. But this is a conflation of Kant’s two arguments, the first tethered to general logic and the second free of that tether.) Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. . Something is going wrong with the remark that Kant “claims that there can be no rules for judgment.” It does not follow from what Allison presents as making it “the case.” Although Allison does not mention general logic in this gloss of the Analytic of Principles passage, perhaps the conflation of Kant’s two arguments mentioned in my previous footnote is intruding again. The point of saying that the primitive act is a “feeling” is, for both Bell and Allison, to distinguish it from a judgment or the application of a concept (without such a distinction there would, of course, be no hope of blocking the regress). Allison takes Kant to conclude that the act consists of a feeling via argument by elimination: with concepts out of bounds, feeling is the only option left (Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. ). The construal of the judgment of taste in terms of a preconceptual awareness of unity is quite widely shared. See Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory, pp. –; Paul Crowther, “The Significance of Kant’s Pure Aesthetic Judgment,” British Journal of Aesthetics  (), p. ; Guyer, Kant and

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The Art of Judgment

or provides an “analogy” for the basis of judgment or thought, so that the heart of Kant’s aesthetics bears directly on a prima facie separate issue that is crucial for his theory of cognition. Allison, by contrast, resists reading Kant’s aesthetics as purporting to solve an epistemological problem. There are connections between Kant’s aesthetics and his epistemology or his account of cognition, in Allison’s view, but they are much more indirect. Bell and Allison thus share an interpretation of Kant on which he argues that judgment is (must be) grounded on acts of applying rules, “feeling” their applicability, that are not themselves acts of judging and that do not depend on further acts of applying rules or acts of judging or feeling their applicability. As I have argued, however, the nerve of Kant’s argument is precisely that there can be no such act. It is an object of fantasy. There is no getting around the need to exercise judgment in the application of rules or concepts. Otherwise put: for Bell and Allison, the point of Kant’s argument is that judgment would be impossible unless there were selfdetermining rules. What I am proposing Kant’s argument to show is that the notion of self-determining rules is itself impossible. There is value in appealing to Wittgenstein, as Bell does, in thinking about Kant’s argument. But Wittgenstein does not, in my view, propound the kind of argument that Bell attributes to him. In fact, and like Kant, Wittgenstein contests just such an argument, and he does it, moreover, in the very passages to which Bell appeals. The specter of a regress of rules does indeed play an important role in the Investigations. In focusing on rules, Wittgenstein, again like Kant, has in mind more than just our practices of following explicit rules. For both Kant and Wittgenstein, rule-following bears on the meanings of words or of the concepts they express, however mundane these may be. The meanings of words or concepts seem to be, or to be like, rules; that is, their use seems to be rule-governed (since there are correct and incorrect ways to use them). At a





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the Claims of Taste, p. ; and Hannah Ginsborg, “Lawfulness without a Law: Kant on the Free Play of Imagination and Understanding,” Philosophical Topics , no.  (), pp.  and , n. . For “model,” see Bell, “The Art of Judgement,” pp. –; for “analogy,” see p. . In Bell’s view, the Analytic of Principles passage raises natural questions – How can there be such a thing as the act needed to block the regress? How can this “blindness” not reduce to “mindlessness” (p. )? – which the Schematism chapter, the first chapter of the Analytic of Principles, is designed to address. But Bell thinks that the answers the Schematism chapter offers are unsatisfactory at best, and that the Critique of Judgment’s account of aesthetic judgment (the judgment of taste) is meant to be its improved replacement. Bell goes so far as to say that “paradoxically,” the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” is “not primarily or fundamentally a work in aesthetics at all” (p. ). I discuss Allison’s position on the connection between Kant’s aesthetics and his theory of cognition in Chapter .

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certain point in Wittgenstein’s Investigations, a question is felt to arise: How do we know how to use a word, so to follow a rule? For that matter, what makes it the case that this counts as following a particular rule, but not that? Something must fix the content of the rule; otherwise nothing would count as following it either correctly or incorrectly. One is likely to light on “interpretation” as supplying the wanted something: what the rule involves, and what following it correctly depends on, is determined by the correct interpretation of it. But then the questions arise anew for the posited interpretation. What determines its meaning, and how do we know what that is? If we reach again for the notion of interpretation, we face an infinite regress of interpretations. Any interpretation of a rule is itself subject to interpretation, and so “every interpretation hangs in the air together with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support.” What are we to conclude? We might conclude that if a ruinous skepticism about meaning is to be avoided, something must stop the looming regress: so that what grounds a rule is a way of grasping it that requires no interpretation because it is self-interpreting. This conclusion finds expression in the remark that “there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which, from case to case of application, is exhibited in what we call ‘following the rule’ and ‘going against it’.” Readers like Bell suppose that Wittgenstein offers the remark in order to endorse it, and understand his talk of “agreement” or “attunement” (Übereinstimmung) in “form of life,” in “language,” or in “judgments” to refer to the ways in which the capacity to perform these immediate graspings of rules, or of proceeding “blindly,” is shared by us and ensures that we line up with one another. But while the Investigations seeks to make such conclusions feel inevitable, it does so in the name of uncovering and disarming their appeal. Consider Wittgenstein’s remark about following a rule “blindly” that Bell approvingly cites. Bell has plucked it out of its setting. Investigations § reads in full: “All the steps are really already taken” means: I no longer have any choice. The rule, once stamped with a particular meaning, traces the lines along which it is to be followed through the whole of space.——But if something of this sort really were the case, how would it help me?



 

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Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, eds. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, revised th edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, ), §. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §. See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§ and .

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

The Art of Judgment No; my description made sense only if it was to be understood symbolically.—I should say: This is how it strikes me. When I follow the rule, I do not choose. I follow the rule blindly.

Wittgenstein is calling rule-following blind, but not in full voice. Rather, he is voicing a way in which the very notion of a rule “strikes” him, or is apt to strike him (in certain moments or moods), and which crystallizes in that phrase. It is a signature gesture. Wittgenstein voices how something (here, rule-following) strikes him, in order to invite us to see whether we too find that we are so struck, whether the inclination he voices is one that we can find in ourselves. A rule seems to have a sort of inexorable power. It is not up to me to decide what counts as following it; I must simply submit to its decrees, extending as they do to cover all possibilities; there is nothing left for me but blind obedience. If I am so struck, Wittgenstein suggests, I too will find myself turning to certain “symbolic” or “mythological” expressions, for example casting rule-following as “blind.” (“My symbolical expression was really a mythological description of the use of a rule.”) Why does Wittgenstein bother with this sort of thing? After all, the Investigations suggests some straightforward ways in which the “solution” that Wittgenstein and Kant are read as offering, to the “problem” that the regress argument is understood to raise, is no solution at all. The notion of something that is not an act of judgment but functions exactly like an act of judgment, or of an interpretation that it not itself subject to interpretation, is mysterious, indeed paradoxical. Worse, it is empty. For it is identified entirely in terms of the role that it is supposed to play in stopping the regress. Allowing of no separate explanation or elaboration, it cannot itself bear the explanatory weight for which it is invoked. It is just the sort of thing that Wittgenstein calls an idle wheel. Merely stipulating 

  

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Stanley Cavell points this out in “The Argument of the Ordinary: Scenes of Instruction in Wittgenstein and in Kripke,” in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), p. . As its title indicates, Cavell’s essay is (in part) a response to Saul Kripke, who entertains a reading of Wittgenstein similar to Bell’s in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). This impression of rules makes it especially natural to inflect “following” a rule as “obeying” it, as in the earlier edition of the Investigations that Bell cites. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White (Oxford: Blackwell, ), §. (Wittgenstein likely took the term from Heinrich Hertz.) The move effectively says that the regress is stopped by a regress-stopper, which we access in a regress-stopping way. It might be put in terms that sound more respectable – the regress is stopped by an intrinsically

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. Exercising Judgment



that it is a “feeling” does not help. Nor, for that matter, does it succeed at warding off the regress. How does one know, or what makes it the case, that the “feeling” one has is the feeling of the applicability of this rule (plus), and not that of another (quus)? Here, of course, there is no appealing to a rule, since this would return us to the original looming regress: the whole point of the stipulated act is that it is supposed to neither need nor allow of determination by a rule. Another feeling? Then the regress reappears. Such considerations might seem impressive and decisive, real meat-andpotatoes philosophical work, but in Wittgenstein’s hands they are preliminaries at best. That is, Wittgenstein does not imagine that they have the power simply to dissolve the apparent regress argument, revealing it to be a red herring, or an empty philosophical construction, that poses no genuine danger to our ordinary practices (in which we carry on anyway without experiencing any sense of missing foundations) – although he is often so read. To put it another way, Wittgenstein recognizes that the person who finds that the regress must be blocked has not simply neglected to anticipate such obvious difficulties. To that person, the conclusion is a hard one that forces itself upon us as the only alternative to an unacceptable skepticism, despite its disconcerting weirdness (Bell calls it “disturbing”). From her point of view, to rest content with these straightforward objections is to blithely fail, or willfully refuse, to face the situation. Wittgenstein wants to take this point of view seriously, which means taking seriously the problem it finds to be gripping. But as with many things people find themselves gripped by, taking it seriously does not necessarily mean taking it at face value. It may mean taking seriously what it is for. Doing so begins by tracing the point of view back to a pivotal moment: the moment in which it seems that something “must” be the case – here: something must fix the meaning of a rule, or else it is unfixed and founders. Wittgenstein asks us to consider whether this moment draws its force from hidden, or half-hidden, sources it encodes. This would mean that uncovering those sources, so making it possible to acknowledge



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significant entity that we grasp immediately – but since those terms are not cashed out, they are only placeholders for the more obviously unenlightening ones. See Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, pp. –. As Kripke makes explicit, the regress argument generalizes readily. For whatever we might turn to as fixing the application of a rule – interpretation, or previous behavior (linguistic and nonlinguistic), or previous mental history, or dispositions, or something else – the regress will arise. She will likewise be unimpressed, and rightly so, by the reply (often advanced as Wittgensteinian) that the question of what constitutes the meaning of a rule is to be dismissed as bad, illegitimate, or unintelligible.

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them as sources, is meaningful philosophical work. The sources that Wittgenstein’s procedures propose to lay bare turn out to be anxieties and disappointments about our places in the world and our lives with others, or what we might call the human condition. Anxieties and disappointments that cannot be dispelled as soon as they are named are apt to produce fears and fantasies of evasion. They may be intellectualized: distorted into theoretical or abstract concerns. The burden of Wittgenstein’s reflections is to bring to light such paths of flight, and to show that philosophy in one guise may serve as deflective intellectualization (while what is needed to meet it is philosophy in another guise). It is of the greatest importance, for the reading of Wittgenstein I am advancing, that the wishes to evade the ordinary conditions of our lives with which he is concerned are not exotica confined to a disciplinary or institutional hothouse. That is, those wishes are not only responsive to our ordinary lives; they are also natural responses to our ordinary lives, and to that extent are a natural part, or possibility, of them. In order to feel their pull, one needs, in principle, only to be human. (Being susceptible to their pull, and so to philosophy (in both of its guises), might thus be said to be a mark of the human condition.) This means that the questions Wittgenstein would have us ask about the would-be regress argument of the Investigations are these: What is it about the conditions of our lives in judgment – or, better, our vision of those conditions – that it is natural to wish to cover over or deny? What anxiety does the would-be argument intellectualize? What is the truth that is being distorted in being intellectualized, the distortion of which is the very point of intellectualization? Stanley Cavell traces the notion of a private language, through which the Investigations develops the rule-following reflections, to anxieties and disappointments with ordinary expression that coalesce around the conditions of making oneself, or one’s meaning, known. The fantasy or fear of a private language is motivated by – is imagined to protect me from – the 

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This point, through which Austin’s appeal to the ordinary is made deeper and more radical, is one of Stanley Cavell’s most significant insights. Yet it is often missed or neglected, even among those most inspired by Cavell’s writing on Wittgenstein. It is absent, perhaps ruled out, in John McDowell’s use of Cavell, and the difference that makes is, I would argue, immense and irrecoverable. (McDowell cites Cavell in “Virtue and Reason,” Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), p. .) The interpretation I am offering of Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations diverges in some ways from Cavell’s, but this is not the place to pursue those differences. “The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know – to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §).

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fact that I (must) make myself known, that I might be misunderstood, or that I might be understood all too well. The fantasy of a private language is a fantasy of necessary inexpressiveness, which “would solve,” or rather is imagined to solve, a simultaneous set of metaphysical problems: It would relieve me of the responsibility for making myself known to others – as though if I were expressive that would mean continuously betraying my experiences, incessantly giving myself away; it would suggest that my responsibility for selfknowledge takes care of itself – as though the fact that others cannot know my (inner) life means that I cannot fail to. It would reassure my fears of being known, though it may not prevent my being under suspicion; it would reassure my fears of not being known, though it may not prevent my being under indictment.

The suggestion is that the fantasy of necessary inexpressiveness corresponds to a fear of necessary expressiveness, a sense that expressiveness would mean total exposure: that “what I express is beyond my control.” But of course necessary expressiveness can just as easily become an object of fantasy, something desired. Then what necessary expressiveness promises is that I might be transparent, that I do not need to make myself known (even to myself ) – there is nothing that I need do. And then the notion of a private language will be colored by a fear or horror of necessary inexpressiveness, of a world “in which I am not merely unknown, but in which I am powerless to make myself known.” Both the fantasy and the fear of a private language express a wish to cut myself out of the picture. Cavell makes a similar suggestion in connection with Wittgenstein’s rule-following reflections. Appreciating his point depends on noting that he returns those reflections to their original starting point in the Investigations, an imagined scene of encounter with another person whom I am trying to teach a rule. (In interpretations of the Bell variety, this dimension disappears.) What is at stake is therefore not (just) the intelligibility of one’s own rule-following, but the possibility of communication and attunement with others. I am to imagine that my pupil has not cottoned on despite my best efforts, and that I have run out of justifications that I can produce for following the rule the right way, my way. “I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned.” On Bell’s reading,

  

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 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. . Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. .  Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. . See Cavell, The Claim of Reason, pp. –. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §.

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The Art of Judgment

what justifies me is the regress-stopping act that grounds – is the bedrock of – my judgment. Cavell’s take is this: What justifies what I do and say is, I feel like saying, me – the fact that I can respond to an indefinite range of responses of the other, and that the other, for my spade not to be stopped, must respond to me, in which case my justification may be furthered by keeping still. The requirement of purity imposed by philosophy now looks like a wish to leave me out, I mean each of us, the self, with its arbitrary needs and unruly desires.

Here the wish to leave myself out expresses the desire for protection from the fact that it is up to me to judge when my justifications have run out, and what their running out means, and how to respond to the other, and where we then are. And, of course, the fact that it is up to the other to do so as well. Consider, again, the vision of a rule as intractably subjugating, commanding blind obedience. It might appear straightforwardly fearsome. But my sense is that it is more compelling as an object of fantasy, something desired (the fearsomeness functioning as a cover for its attractiveness). “I can do nothing but submit” means that I am relieved of responsibility, and that can be a relief, the lifting of what I experience as a burden. The “solution” of cutting myself out in any of these ways costs more than it is worth: as though the way to save myself were to eliminate myself. It must also be profoundly disappointing, in the first place because the attempt to cut myself out will obviously be impossible, paradoxical; but also because the fantasies offer only imaginary, not real, protection from the ordinary facts that motivated them: that it is not in my power to ensure that I am understood, or that I am not understood; that my expressiveness is neither totally up to me nor totally out of my hands; that attunement must be found; and that it is up to each of us to judge what its apparent absence means. The idea that there must be acts of applying rules that are not themselves acts of judging but that make judging possible, the idea at work in  

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Cavell, “The Argument of the Ordinary,” p. . Hence there is also an anxiety about dependence on (the responsiveness of ) the other at work in the scene of instruction. The fantasy or fear of a private language similarly turns upon the experience of a form of dependence on others as intolerable but indispensable: I want to be understood and known; I fear being understood and known. “If I accept the invitation blindly I fail to take into consideration certain more or less obvious risks (of status, awkwardness, misunderstanding) in doing so. If I obey someone’s order blindly I reluctantly or gladly give over responsibility for my actions. If I take blind assurance from a prophecy, I fail to see that it can be taken in another way” (Cavell, “The Argument of the Ordinary,” p. ). In acting blindly I may be blinding myself to what I am doing.

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Bell and Allison, is just what Wittgenstein, properly understood, wants us to feel the pull of and yet find profoundly disappointing. As I said, I agree with Bell that Wittgenstein’s thought bears instructively on Kant’s treatment of judgment, although I envision a rather different bearing. The regress that Bell and Allison read Kant as forestalling would, in fact, only arise, or threaten to arise, if Kant were committed to a certain premise, namely that in order to apply a rule judgment always needs another rule. But Kant makes no indication that he accepts that premise; just the contrary. Yet I would urge that interpreters of the Bell and Allison stripe are not simply misreading Kant or making some sort of simple error. They find that there must be a rule determining the application of a rule, and it is this “must” that produces the dilemma: either judgment is impossible or incoherent, or there is a regress-blocking act. This “must” is very like the one that Wittgenstein brings to light and traces to its sources. Here we come up against a fundamental difference between Kant and Wittgenstein. For Wittgenstein, it is crucial to show that, and how, it would be natural to feel that there must be something that fixes the meaning of rules. Kant says nothing of the kind. In my view, however, appreciating the nerve of the Analytic of Principles passage, that there can be no self-determining or selfapplying rules, so that (as I’m putting it) judgment is essentially exercised, depends on being able to feel the pull of the idea that it repudiates. And the idea it repudiates draws its power from anxieties that it distorts about the exercising of judgment, anxieties that are rooted in the ordinary. My proposal, then, is this. The idea that my judgment is, or is grounded in, an act that lies beyond justification and reason expresses a fantasy of evading the conditions of judgment: that the justification of my judgment hinges on my willingness and ability to justify it, and on my judging when my justifications have come to an end and what position that puts me in with others. More generally, it bespeaks a desire to cut the subject (me) out. A consequence of (or, better, another way of putting) the fact that judgment must be exercised is that I must judge for myself. Here this is not a piece of advice or counsel against unthinkingly following convention – the “Sapere aude!” of the “Enlightenment” essay. What it conveys besides is the expressive or first-personal nature of judgment: my judgment is 

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In the Anthropology passage, Kant writes that an infinite regress ensues “if there were to be doctrines for the power of judgment,” hence “general rules according to which one could decide whether something was an instance of the rule or not” (emphasis added). But Kant nowhere indicates that there must be such doctrines or general rules. He rejects that idea, and that is why he concludes that judgment therefore cannot be taught, and can only be exercised. “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” VIII:.

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The Art of Judgment

inevitably expressive of me, whether or not I wish to be revealed. The fact that is being avoided here is a fact that Kant is bringing to our attention, namely that my judgment is mine, that it is expressive of me. The reading of the Bell/Allison variety seeks to convert this fact into a metaphysical and epistemological problem, in supposed response to which it postulates a mysterious act that obscures this fact or denies it. I am suggesting that this may be the point: the conversion gives a kind of shelter to anxiety about the expressiveness of judgment that Kant exposes. Suppose someone tells me that a situation calls for the exercise of judgment: “You’re going to have to use your (own) judgment”; “That’s a (your) judgment call.” My determination of something is called for; I am to assess, hence characterize, some situation or state of affairs; I need to make some decision, or to arrive at some view of the matter at hand. It may be that the situation leaves something undetermined that it is up to me to determine. It is my opportunity, or my burden, and my responsibility. It may be that the case that I have to decide is unclear. But it needn’t be unclear; it may be indeterminate, or simply as yet undetermined. Or it may be something that no one can determine for me. It is in this spirit that the Critique of Pure Reason persistently calls on the reader to subject the work to her judgment, not merely its particular findings but also its methodology. I may need to engage in an imaginative consideration of something, finding my own way in thinking about it and following – perhaps testing, perhaps discovering – my own convictions and relying on my own sensibility. But Kant’s idea is that even when this is not the case, judging is determining something, and it requires, or expresses, the exercising of judgment. Judgment is exercised in every act of judging. “Judgment must be (is) exercised” is a logical or (borrowing Wittgenstein’s term) grammatical remark. The point is that the exercising of judgment is essential to judging. And every act of thinking is an act of judging. The figure of the physician, juridical judge, or statesman is thus supposed to dramatize the position of the subject in any instance of judging (thinking). In some ways, the comparison might be regarded (rightly, 



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Someone might protest: “My reason and my understanding are equally mine to employ, ‘grammatically.’ Why doesn’t Kant make parallel claims about reason and understanding? Why does he isolate judgment?” Here it is important to remember Kant’s idea that judgment is the (or a central) mode of the employment of the mind in general, and so of the employment of the understanding and reason. Kant is indeed claiming that my reason and my understanding are mine to employ in the relevant sense, but he is doing so through the more general claim about judgment. For example, at Axv and xxi.

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I think) as unhappy. The physician, juridical judge, or statesman is an official or quasi-official. His judgment is often based on deliberation, and is expressed in a publically entered verdict; whereas many, if not most, of our ordinary judgments – which, for Kant, means our ordinary thinking, since thinking is judging – are not. In other ways, however, the dramatization registers something important. The official’s verdict makes a difference, has a real impact (consider the judge’s issuing of a sentence, or the physician’s diagnosis). Our ordinary judgments do not usually determine the course of things in just the same way, but Kant’s insight – one that Wittgenstein shares – is that they may be no less fateful in determining the world. We do things with our words, we make our world, not only in talking but already in thinking. (Herein lies one dimension of the significance of the recurrence of juridical notions in Kant’s treatment of judgment.) Judgment involves adopting a stance, however provisional or fleeting, on the matter at hand, however plain or trivial. Specifically, to judge is to take the measure of something (an object, a creature, a person, a state of affairs), so to determine what it is. To judge is to open oneself to the question of whether one’s judgment is fair, or does justice to the thing it determines. This is why the greatest significance of a person’s judgment may lie in what it reveals about that person’s character. (Hence the importance of the possessive: I use “my judgment, even “my own judgment.”) We speak of trusting someone’s judgment, and this means trusting that person, at least with regard to the matter at hand. In short, in determining an object the exercise of judgment also serves (or may serve) to determine a subject. Judgment is revelatory of what the subject finds to 





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See also J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, eds. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, nd edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), p. , for the idea that to say something meaningful is to do something in saying it (illocutionary act), and possibly also by saying it (perlocutionary act). We saw, in addition to the example of the juridical judge, Kant’s parenthetical gloss of the power of judgment as iudicium in the Anthropology passage, and of its role of distinguishing whether something does or does not come under a given rule as casus datae legis in the Analytic of Principles passage, where, a bit later, he glosses “missteps in judgment,” again parenthetically, as lapsus judici (A/B). There are many more examples. I thus agree with Dieter Henrich that Kant’s invocations of the juridical in the Critique of Pure Reason are significant, although I see a different, perhaps complementary, significance that is specifically tied to the power of judgment. Henrich argues that Kant enlists legal terms and concepts of his day to do crucial metaphorical work, and, in particular, that the transcendental deduction of the first Critique must be understood in terms of legal Deduktionsschriften, which sought to establish claims to rightful possession of land or usage of a title. See “Kant’s Notion of a Deduction and the Methodological Background of the First Critique,” in Kant’s Transcendental Deductions: The Three ‘Critiques’ and the ‘Opus postumum,’ ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), p. . “By his manner of judging, the person discloses to an extent also himself, what kind of person he is” (Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, ), p. ).

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matter. Recall that Allison described the object of the regress-blocking feeling as “the subsumability of an intuition under a concept.” But registering the sheer applicability of a concept is not enough in order to come to judgment. After all, many – indefinitely many – concepts will be applicable to a given manifold of intuition. What is also required is a sense of what concept, hence what judgment, is apt here and now, and, relatedly but more generally, of what (if anything) bears judgment or even calls for judgment here and now. In her book on the trials following the Second World War, Hannah Arendt writes that “countless theories” have been invoked to explain the atrocities the trials were meant to address, theories trading on generality and emptiness. What these theories “have in common,” she remarks, is “that they make judgment superfluous and that to utter them is devoid of all risk.” As Arendt argues, however, the desire to avoid judgment is not manifested only in such acute situations of legal or political judgment. It is a feature of social life itself, at least in “the modern age.” In fact, all the traits that crowd psychology has meanwhile discovered in mass man: his loneliness – and loneliness is neither isolation nor solitude – regardless of his adaptability; his excitability and lack of standards; his capacity for consumption, accompanied by inability to judge, or even to distinguish; above all, his egocentricity and that fateful alienation from the world which since Rousseau is mistaken for self-alienation – All these traits first appeared in good society, where there was no question of masses, numerically speaking.

In a state of conformity, we lose the ability to judge. I take it that Arendt means not merely that we do not judge well, but also, and more fundamentally, that we are not capable of passing judgment at all. For the efforts of conformity are efforts to give up the risks and the responsibilities that accompany the self-expressive dimension of judgment. And yet this attempt can only be partially successful. If I let someone else be my guide – let someone else control or direct my judgment – then in one sense I am not using my own judgment; I’m failing to do so. But in a larger sense that is my way of directing my judgment. I direct it by giving it over to someone else. And that reveals the position that I am taking.  

 

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I pursue this in Chapters  and . Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, ), p. . For Arendt, the refusal to judge, which may be couched in condemnation (!) of “people who ‘dare sit in judgment’” (p. ), “touches upon one of the central moral questions of all time, namely upon the nature and function of human judgment” (p. ). Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” p. . Compare Kant’s idea that I cannot act otherwise than under the idea of my freedom in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals IV:. Kant’s point is not that I must believe that I am free, but that in

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. From the First Critique to the Third

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. From the First Critique to the Third This is the moment to pick up a loose thread. As we saw, Kant suggests that although general logic cannot give directions to judgment, transcendental logic does. In fact, he claims that the “peculiar thing about transcendental philosophy is this: that in addition to the rule (or rather the general condition for rules), which is given in the pure concept of the understanding, it can at the same time indicate a priori the case to which the rules ought to be applied” (A/B–). Does this contradict the claim I am attributing to Kant, that judgment must be exercised? The rules of transcendental logic are the principles of pure understanding, which are based on the pure concepts of the understanding or the categories. They articulate conditions of the possibility of experience: how we must judge objects (as governed by causal laws, for example), and – the other side of the coin that is transcendental idealism – what it is for something to be an object (to be governed by causal laws, for example). Through the transcendental schemata, the principles specify a priori conditions for applying the rules to instances. This is what Kant means by the claim that transcendental logic “can at the same time indicate a priori the case to which the rules ought to be applied.” Just what this comes to is a notoriously thorny matter that I cannot take up here. What is clear, however, is that it cannot entail that the principles specify how they are to apply in particular cases. The principles legislate to nature, but taking “into consideration only the conditions of the possibility of an experience in general as far as its form is concerned” (FI XX:). The “universal laws of nature yield . . . an interconnection among things with respect to their genera, as things of nature in general, but not specifically, as such and such particular beings in nature” (CJ V:). Consider, again, the principle of causality. The principle cannot tell us whether fire warms the stone, or instead cools it, or has no effect on it at all. Nor, of course, can it tell us

 

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any of my choices and actions, including my ostensible refusal to choose or act, I manifest – indeed cannot escape – my own commitment to my freedom. Although I cannot make the case here, this is, in my view, one of the ideas that Jean-Paul Sartre appropriates from Kant. He explores it under the rubric of anguish as the consciousness of freedom, and of the “bad faith” attempts at evasion that it may provoke, in Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, ), p. ff. “All alterations occur in accordance with the law of the connection of cause and effect” (B). I’m adapting an objection of Maimon’s in which he turns Kant’s example of a “judgment of experience,” in Prolegomena IV:, against him. See Gideon Freudenthal, “Maimon’s Subversion of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,” in Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic, ed. Gideon Freudenthal (New York: Springer, ), pp. –.

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what to count as an instance of fire or of stone, or warming, or cooling. Whatever the sense in which transcendental logic gives directions to judgment, those directions cannot be ones that tell judgment what particular empirical judgments to render in any given case. To make these determinations, one must exercise judgment. Nothing – not transcendental rules governing objects in general – can replace the need to exercise judgment in order to actually come to judgment about particulars. There is another way in which transcendental logic cannot circumvent the work of judgment in actually coming to judgment about particulars. The Analytic of Principles passage considers judgment as the capacity to distinguish whether or not something falls under a given rule, and, as we saw, Kant’s examples highlight the “rules” constituted by empirical concepts. This capacity presupposes the capacity to find empirical concepts for things. Something else is needed to arrive at empirical concepts for “given appearances” (FI XX:–). The Critique of Judgment addresses this presupposition and in this respect, among others, takes up where the Critique of Pure Reason leaves off. It introduces a new pair of terms articulating two dimensions of the power of judgment. The power of judgment in general is the capacity to think the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then the power of judgment, which subsumes the particular under it (even if, as the transcendental power of judgment, it provides the conditions a priori in accordance with which alone anything can be subsumed under that universal), is determinative. But if only the particular is given, for which it [viz., the power of judgment] is to find the universal, then the power of judgment is merely reflective. (CJ V:)

It is for the reflective power of judgment to discern what concept or rule to apply to a particular. As I will argue, reflective judgment is not just the power of judging what concept – or, rather, concepts – something falls under. It is also, and most importantly, the power of discerning what concept is most fitting (the need for which I mentioned toward the end of the previous section). In the first Critique, Kant says, as we saw, that the power of judgment is the essence of what is colloquially known as mother-wit (Mutterwitz). Witz, now, is an important topic for Kant’s Anthropology. The term has been translated as “intelligence,” perhaps due to the worry that “wit” 

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Wit is frequently mentioned in the Anthropology and in the corresponding sections of the Reflections on Anthropology, and receives sustained discussion at Anthropology VII:, , –, and Reflections on Anthropology XV:, , .

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. From the First Critique to the Third



would convey to contemporary ears a capacity to engage in clever banter, and so only a part of its full but somewhat antiquated sense. I would hazard that the real issue is that wit so construed is likely to seem rather frivolous, as if it were a seasoning of sorts that imparts an amusing but unnecessary piquancy. But the humor of wit and the pleasure it affords (and takes) are rooted in its aptness and acumen. Wit can be telling, incisive, or cutting. It has to do with a sharpness of mind manifesting discernment and insight, and a quickness or readiness to make illuminating connections. In the Anthropology, Kant characterizes wit as “the capacity to think up the universal for the particular.” He thus identifies wit in just the terms in which the Critique of Judgment identifies reflective judgment. And so one might wonder whether the first Critique’s association of Urteilskraft, the power of judgment, with wit (through the trope of mother-wit) suggests – in a roundabout way and through the Anthropology – an association of the power of judgment with reflective judgment. Is the Critique of Judgment picking up the first Critique’s conception of judgment in the shape of what it calls reflective judgment? But the idea seems quickly to unravel. Kant’s characterization of judgment in the Analytic of Principles (“the power of judgment is the faculty of subsuming under rules, i.e., of distinguishing whether something does or does not come under a given rule”) corresponds to what the third Critique calls determinative judgment, rather than reflective judgment. And what the Anthropology says, more fully, is this: “Just as the capacity to figure out the particular for the universal (the rule) is judgment [Urteilskraft], so the capacity to think up the universal for the particular is wit (ingenium).” Not only does wit correspond to reflective judgment, but it is contrasted with “judgment,” which is characterized in terms corresponding to determinative judgment and to what the Analytic of Principles calls judgment. I would like to suggest that there is nevertheless something to the roundabout associative leap. There is an interesting and important dimension of continuity between the power of judgment as that is developed in the first Critique and what the third Critique calls reflective judgment, and not only in the sense that the former turns out to presuppose the latter. It is specifically in the context of the point that judgment must be exercised that Kant speaks of it as “mother-wit.” Judgment as exercised is a responsiveness to the particular that no rule can replace (“Does this sentence take  

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Witz is rendered as “intelligence” in the edition translated by Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, ).  Anthropology VII:. Anthropology VII:.

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The Art of Judgment

account of the perpetrator’s situation?”). Think of the ineliminable role for experience with examples in the cultivation of judgment. Judgment as exercised, judgment as mother-wit, reveals the individual’s sense of what matters. Reflective judgment, the power of judging aptness (which, when exercised, is itself more or less apt), shares these features. To judge what conceptualization of a state of affairs does it justice is also to manifest a responsiveness to particulars that no rule can replace, and that is expressive of the individual’s power of judgment and her sense of what matters. Reflective judgment, in other words, is also a matter of exercising judgment. With its exploration of reflective judgment, then, the third Critique turns to another dimension of the essential exercising of judgment. Thus the reflective power of judgment as it appears in the third Critique represents a development of the notion of the power of judgment (as necessarily exercised) that Kant elaborates in the first. I am tempted to see a hint to this effect in the association, in the First Introduction, of the reflective power of judgment with the capacity for appraisal that marks the juridical judge: “The reflective power of judgment is the one that is also called the faculty for judging [Beurteilungsvermögen] (facultas diiudicandi)” (FI XX:). “Judgment deals with particulars, and when the thinking ego moving among generalities emerges from its withdrawal and returns to the world of particular appearances, it turns out that the mind needs a new ‘gift’ to deal with them,” Arendt writes. The “new” gift Arendt has in mind is what the third Critique calls “reflective judgment.” But the “gift” that it names is not entirely new. It names a first-personal responsiveness to given particulars that is continuous with the conception of the power of judgment as necessarily exercised that serves as the nerve of the Analytic of Principles passage from the Critique of Pure Reason. There is a final aspect of Kant’s remarks about judgment in the Analytic of Principles that I want to touch on, and that is their invocation of the natural. Kant speaks of judgment as a “natural power” and a “natural gift,” and he seems to get to these ideas from the consideration that judgment cannot be taught or replaced by a supply of instructions. What can cause disappointment here is the impression that Kant is invoking the natural – matters of empirical psychology – in a way that is contrary to the spirit of Kantian critical philosophy. It is just this sort of naturalizing reading, incidentally, to which one is driven when one takes the regress argument in the Analytic of Principles in the way suggested by Bell and Allison, as pointing to the need for some special mental act (of immediately “feeling” 

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Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, p. .

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. From the First Critique to the Third



significance) at the base of all judgment. Such talk of a natural power may also seem to threaten the possibility of genuine agency in judgment. Here, too, following the trail of associations from judgment as Mutterwitz to wit is suggestive. Notice that in the Anthropology passage that we saw a moment ago, Kant glossed wit parenthetically as ingenium. Kant offers the same parenthetical gloss when he introduces the notion of genius in the third Critique (CJ V:). Kant’s characterization of judgment in the Analytic of Principles is gently but intriguingly echoed by some aspects of his characterization of genius in the third Critique. Thus Kant argues that making a work of art depends on a preceding rule, and that the source of beautiful art must be “nature in the subject” or “genius” (CJ V:). Genius cannot be taught (provided wholesale through instruction), and can only be cultivated through experience and consideration of examples. But now the relation of genius to nature is complex. Kant’s formulations sometimes suggest that nature operates in and through the artist (“Genius is the inborn predisposition of the mind (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art” (CJ V:)): as if the artist were merely a conduit for nature’s doings, so that the resulting works seem not strictly to be a matter of his own agency. It can sound as if genius is not merely natural (as a trait or feature may be natural), but is itself, somehow, nature. But so far as genius is nature, it is, Kant says, the nature of the subject – that particular subject. (Kant traces the word, and so the concept, to the Latin “genius, in the sense of the particular spirit given to a person at birth, which protects and guides him” (CJ V:).) And the role of genius does not seem to undercut the artist’s claim to authorship, in Kant’s eyes. The “author of a product that he owes to his genius” is still its author. Beautiful art may spring from the subject’s nature, but it manifests her freedom: “genius is the exemplary originality of a subject’s natural gift [Naturgabe] in the free use of his cognitive faculties” (CJ V:; Kant’s emphasis). On Kant’s vision, as we will see, judgment is related in a similarly ambiguous, or doubled, way to nature. 



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That is not to say that an interpretation of Kant as adducing foundational claims about the nature of human beings evidences “naturalism,” at least in its now familiar (if difficult to pin down) sense. See, for example, Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp.  and . Kant uses the term schöne Kunst in two ways. Sometimes the term refers to art that is beautiful. Sometimes the term marks a distinction from other practices that Kant counts as “art,” including what we would call craft (see CJ V:), making it similar to beaux arts or “fine art,” although broader than both, since it encompasses poetry and literature. The two senses are internally related, since schöne Kunst in the latter sense aspires to beauty.

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 

Communication and Animation in the Judgment of Taste

Kant’s thinking about the judgment of taste – what we would call aesthetic judgment – keeps returning to the idea of the voice (Stimme). In fact, the idea is there from the very beginning of the Critique of Judgment. The body of the text opens by announcing its first task to be that of discovering “what is required for calling an object beautiful” (CJ V:). Kant invites us to consider what we say when we call something beautiful, and how this is like, but also different from, what we say when we call something pleasant or agreeable, or (in some way) good, or when we call it a thing of some kind. With Austin and Wittgenstein, Kant recognizes that reminding ourselves of how we ordinarily use our words is nothing less than reminding ourselves of what we mean by them and what we do with them – in particular, how we put ourselves into relation with others through them. Nothing less, that is, than reminding ourselves of what our words mean, what they do, and how they relate us to one another. It is in the course of articulating an aspect of this relation that Kant employs what is perhaps his most memorable invocation of the voice: “If one calls [an] object beautiful, one believes oneself to have a universal voice” (CJ V:). The idea of the voice is also woven through the text by way of Kant’s rather atypical engagement in a rich wordplay that is unfortunately lost in English translation. Kant casts crucial elements of his account in terms derived from Stimme or otherwise anchored in the voice, notably the notions of determinative judgment and determination (bestimmende Urteilskraft and Bestimmung), and of attunement, for which Kant deploys Stimmung, Zusammenstimmung, Übereinstimmung, Einstimmung, Beistimmung, and Einhelligkeit. Kant is playing with words and resonances 

Kant’s considerations come particularly close to Austinian or Wittgensteinian procedures of asking “what we should say when” as he has us imagine the circumstances under which ways of talking about the beautiful or the agreeable would be “ridiculous” or “folly” (in passages quoted below). See Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” which first explored the link between Kant’s treatment of the judgment of taste and ordinary language philosophy.

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(including the musical resonance of “attunement”), but that doesn’t mean he’s being frivolous. In this text, play turns out to be vital and significant (and indeed to concern vitality and significance) in life and for philosophy. The idea of the voice pervades Kant’s aesthetics: so it strikes me. But while any reader of Kant would acknowledge the bare features of Kant’s prose that I have mentioned, few seem to have found that there is all that much to be made of them. (In my remarks above, I might seem already to have made too much of some of them.) The predominant view seems to be that beyond indicating an underlying methodological commitment (to taking into account “ordinary practice” or the “phenomenology” of aesthetic judgment), Kant’s appeals to figures in the register of what I am calling “the voice” are not meant to do any real work. They should rather be counted among the text’s parerga, framing devices meant to direct our attention to something else: what really matters. My reading of Kant’s account of the judgment of taste is animated by the sense that something can be made of the voice-constellation in his text, and that making something of it is worthwhile. Consider the notoriously obscure passage that he tantalizingly proclaims to hold the “key” to the whole endeavor. The way through that passage and to grasping its key is, I suggest, to focus on and take seriously a member of that constellation that I have not yet mentioned: the notion of “universal communicability.” Kant’s interpreters tend to narrow this notion to the point of cutting its ties with that of communication. But we can understand Kant’s talk of communicability in full voice. Doing so helps us out of interpretive difficulties we otherwise face; what most speaks for doing so, however, is the way in which it enlivens the text. 

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Determinative judgment is fundamental for Kant’s account. Kant does not mention it only to set off, by way of contrast, what reflective judgment is (as Kant’s ways of introducing the terms might initially suggest). As I will argue, one of the reasons reflective judgment matters is that determinative judgment turns out to depend on it. Starting (in the body of the text) with the Second Moment of the Judgment of Taste, on which this chapter concentrates, Kant draws upon the family of words for attunement to characterize the “free play” of the cognitive powers underlying the judgment of taste (especially in §) and our agreement in aesthetic judgment (CJ V: and , for example). Stimmung also plays a key role in the Third Moment, specifically §, which I discuss in Chapter . The primary sense of einhellig has to do with the voice (as in einhellige Stimme, voices in unison); see Adelung’s dictionary as well as the dictionary of Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, –), woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB. Michel Chaouli also notes the proliferation of terms built on stimm- or otherwise relating to the voice, and includes among the latter Anspruch (claim) (Thinking with Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), pp. –). For another take, see Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), pp. –.

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Communication and Animation in the Judgment of Taste

. Puzzles and a Key As we saw in the Introduction and Chapter , the judgment of taste has a “strange and anomalous” character that, according to Kant, makes its study “essential” to the Critique of Judgment. The Analytic of the Beautiful works this character out. The First Moment of the Judgment of Taste begins with the claim that the judgment of taste is aesthetic judgment and not cognitive judgment, since it is based on a feeling of pleasure. But it is not to be conflated with a species of aesthetic judgment to which Kant gives the name “judgment of the agreeable.” The pleasure of the judgment of taste is free of “interest” (and this sets it apart not merely from pleasure in the agreeable but also from pleasure in the good). The Second Moment brings to light a further difference between the judgment of taste and the judgment of the agreeable. With regard to the agreeable, everyone is content that his judgment, which he grounds on a private feeling, and in which he says of an object that it pleases him, be restricted merely to his own person. Hence he is perfectly happy if, when he says that sparkling wine from the Canaries is agreeable, someone else should improve his expression and remind him that he should say “It is agreeable to me.” (CJ V:)

The ground of my judgment of the agreeable is a “private feeling,” and the judgment itself is “merely private” (CJ V:). Others might be pleased in the same way by the same thing, but this would not render my feeling any less “private.” It is “private” not because it cannot be shared, but because its being shared would be a matter of contingent congruence: how it is with you when you sip this wine is, it turns out, how it is with me too. So it “would be folly to dispute the judgment of another that is different from our own in such a matter, with the aim of condemning it as incorrect, as if it were logically opposed to our own” (CJ V:). By the same token,

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Here too Kant appeals to our ordinary ways with words. “If someone asks me whether I find the palace that I see before me beautiful,” there are various things that “I may well say,” such as that I abhor the excess and exploitation it represents, in response to which I will be reminded that I’m not answering the question I was asked (CJ V:–). It is clear from this example that Kant’s appeal is, like the ordinary language philosopher’s, to what (we find that) we should say in an imagined scenario, which might not be what, in the event, we would actually say. For the ordinary language philosopher, it is of primary importance to elicit our recognition of our inclinations to misspeak and the motivations they may belie. Kant does not suggest that the misspeaking in the scenario he sketches is motivated; but, as I argued in Chapter , his treatment of judgment makes room for regarding some misspeech, perhaps even in this scenario, as motivated and philosophically significant.

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another’s judgment of the object as agreeable would not “logically agree” with my own. The judgment of taste, on the other hand, is entered as “public” (CJ V:). It would be ridiculous if (the precise converse) someone who prided himself on his taste thought to justify himself thus: “This object (the building we are looking at, the clothing someone is wearing, the poem that is presented for judging) is beautiful for me.” For he must not call it beautiful if it merely pleases him. . . . [I]f he pronounces something to be beautiful, then he expects the very same liking of others; he judges not merely for himself, but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things. That is why he says, “The thing is beautiful,” and does not count on the agreement of others with his judgment of liking because he has frequently found them to be agreeable with his own, but rather demands it from them. (CJ V:–)

To speak with “a universal voice” in the judgment of taste is not to expect that others will share my pleasure, but to demand that they do so. (In fact “experience teaches” that this demand “is often enough rejected” (CJ V:).) Kant’s theoretical philosophy provides an explanation and legitimation of the demand for agreement expressed in the claim to universal validity internal to cognitive judgments, and his practical philosophy does the same for the demand for agreement internal to judgments of the good (which, like judgments of taste, involve a kind of pleasure). But since the judgment of taste is aesthetic judgment, since its pleasure neither is nor is tied to a concept, its demand is a different story, an apparent mystery. For it, neither explanation nor legitimation are ready to hand. This is its “peculiarity”: what is peculiar to (distinctive of ) the judgment of taste is precisely what is peculiar (“strange” (CJ V:), “remarkable” (CJ V:)) about it. It is more or less at this point that we arrive at §, the last section of the Second Moment. Headed “Investigation of the question whether in the judgment of taste the feeling of pleasure precedes the judging of the object or the latter [the judging] precedes the former [the pleasure],” its opening sentence, constituting its entire first paragraph, is this declaration: “The resolution of this problem [Auflösung dieser Aufgabe] is the key to the critique of taste and hence worthy of full attention” (CJ V:). Kant tells us that the promised “resolution” deserves our full attention, but it’s also worth attending to the puzzles that this heading and opening put before us. The first puzzle lies in the way – or rather, the nonexistence of the way – in which the “question” arises. Nothing Kant has so far said

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Communication and Animation in the Judgment of Taste

has prepared or motivated the reader to feel that there is some question that remains to be addressed concerning the ordering of “the feeling of pleasure” and “the judging of the object” in the judgment of taste. Actually, it is not clear that there is so much as a genuine question here at all, since the “answer” should, it seems, be perfectly obvious. For up to this point, the whole thrust of the Second Moment has been that the judgment of taste claims universal validity for the pleasure on which it is based. Whatever “precede” precisely entails, this would seem obviously to mean that the pleasure must already be “there” for the judgment to say something about it (viz., that it is universally valid). The second alternative that the question purports to entertain would thus seem simply to be ruled out from the start. And yet, as it turns out, it is the second, apparently paradoxical, alternative that Kant deems correct. But perhaps Kant is not unaware of these puzzles. For the heading’s naming of the task at hand hints that it involves something like a puzzle. The “question” calls for “investigation” (Untersuchung): evidently it is not the sort of question that allows of being straightforwardly grasped and answered. It is, rather, a “problem,” on the order of a task or exercise we are presented with or assigned (as Aufgabe suggests). To solve or resolve this problem will be akin to solving a puzzle or riddle, or untangling a knot (as Auflösung suggests). Getting anywhere with this sort of problem means working through it, trying to make sense of it, playing with possibilities, sometimes feeling one’s way, sometimes starting anew. It is not the correct answer to the question (“which comes first?”) that is the promised key. The key is to be grasped in entering into the problem and finding one’s way through. And indeed one notices, at second glance perhaps, that the heading frames its question in terms of “the judging of the object” rather than the “judgment” concerning it. So the heading hints that the sense and point of its question depend on observing a relevant distinction between a “judging” (Beurteilung) and a “judgment” (Urteil). For if the judging precedes the pleasure, but the pleasure in turns precedes the judgment that claims its universal validity, then the apparent paradoxicality of the correct answer (viz., the judging comes first) dissolves. Kant’s use of these terms hitherto has not indicated any such distinction, nor does he explicitly draw one in this section (or, for that matter, 

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It is tempting to think of the key of Hume’s Sancho Panza story, in “Of the Standard of Taste,” discussed in the Introduction. Is Kant reminding us of that key, and calling it – and the role it is supposed to, but cannot possibly, play – into question?

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elsewhere in the text). In fact, the term “judging” does not appear in the body of this section until its sixth paragraph, at roughly its midpoint, where Kant finally makes full contact again with the heading’s question and answers it: “this merely subjective (aesthetic) judging of the object, or of the representation through it is given, precedes the pleasure in it” (CJ V:). He is referring to what he has just characterized so very briefly and abstractly: a “state of mind” consisting of a “free play” of the cognitive powers, imagination and understanding, in which they are in some kind of “harmony” or “attunement” with one another, and “refer” the representation to “cognition in general.” There is widespread consensus that this “state of mind” is a crucial anchor of Kant’s account (its key?), and none about how to fill it in on Kant’s behalf. This is perhaps the most formidable, and vexing, of the puzzles that § presents. The interpretive issues I have mentioned thus far are well known to Kant’s readers. I turn now to focus on an issue that has been less appreciated. We encounter it as a further puzzle in the paragraph following the opening that tells us to pay attention. If the pleasure in the given object came first, and only its [viz., the pleasure’s] universal communicability [Mitteilbarkeit] were to be attributed, in the judgment of taste, to the representation of the object, then such a procedure would be self-contradictory. For such a pleasure would be none other than mere agreeableness in sensation, and hence by its very nature could have only private validity, since it would immediately depend on the representation through which the object is given. (CJ V:)

It is clear enough that the counterfactual argument is meant to rule out the first alternative, and that it has the following shape. If the pleasure “came first,” the “procedure” of the judgment of taste, or its way of conducting itself, would be self-contradictory. The would-be maker of a judgment of taste would get caught in a performative contradiction, we might say. What seems to be at stake is the universal validity of the pleasure, the topic around which this Moment is, of course, organized. If the pleasure came first, it “could have only private validity,” and not the universal validity that the judgment of taste claims for it. Since the claim for the universal validity of its pleasure is constitutive of the judgment of taste (as Kant has been saying), the upshot is that the pleasure cannot come first. 

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There is disagreement among scholars about whether such a distinction should be drawn on Kant’s behalf. Those in favor include Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory; Jens Kulenkampff, Kants Logik des ästhetischen Urteils (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, ); Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste; Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste; and Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology. Ginsborg makes a forceful case against; see, for example, The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition.

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Communication and Animation in the Judgment of Taste

What is by no means clear, however, is what work the universal communicability of the pleasure is supposed to do. This is the term’s first appearance in this text, and Kant neither explains nor comments upon it. How does the pleasure’s “universal communicability” come into the judgment of taste? What role does it play in the argument I just sketched? The paragraph does seem to link the pleasure’s “universal communicability” to its universal validity, insofar as it argues that in the counterfactual case (where the pleasure comes first) the pleasure “could have only private validity.” But how exactly are they related? In my view, this last and underappreciated puzzle opens up a way through the others. Following up “universal communicability” discloses the “judging” that § adduces as a “state of mind” in which one seeks to render something universally communicable – that is, to articulate it and to make it available, in words or otherwise, for oneself as much as for others. If this makes “judging” sound akin to the engagement of responsiveness and working-through that I have been presenting Kant’s text as asking of its reader, that is no accident. Perhaps this kinship is why § is written the way it is, rather than more “straightforwardly.” To appreciate and work through its puzzles is to perform or enact something of a piece with its central idea. We encounter its point in the act of reading, and not merely in its results.

. Communicability and Communication The puzzle of the passage we just glanced at turns upon the notion of the “universal communicability” of a pleasure. What is it to communicate a pleasure? When is it possible to communicate a pleasure, and when not? When is it possible to communicate it “universally”? These should be interesting questions to explore, yet Kant’s readers tend to close the door to them by supposing that what Kant is using the term for is not, despite appearances, intrinsically tied to communication. The dominant interpretive approach is also the most deflationary. It holds that we should treat “universal communicability” as effectively another way of saying “universal validity.” On this approach, “universal communicability” does not mark out importantly distinctive terrain at all. Either these are two names for one thing, or, while “universal communicability” does not have exactly the same meaning as “universal validity,” whatever differences there might be are, for Kant’s purposes, irrelevant. 

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For the former view, see Walter Cerf’s translation Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, ), p. ; Kulenkampff, Kants Logik des ästhetischen Urteils, p. , n. ; Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, p. , n.  and n. , and pp. –; and Allison, “Pleasure and

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We can – and probably should, in order to avoid unnecessary confusion – replace talk of the “universally communicable” with talk of the “universally valid.” Accordingly, the argument of the paragraph just quoted comes to this: if the pleasure came first, it would be pleasure of agreeableness, so only privately valid; hence it couldn’t have the universal communicability, which is to say the universal validity, that the judgment claims for it. Two issues arise for this “communicability as validity” approach. First, and most obviously, it seems odd that Kant should introduce – and (as we will see) continue to draw upon – a new word if it is not there to do new work. Second, treating “universal communicability” as a stand-in for “universal validity” seems to muddy or undermine basic tenets of Kantian critical methodology. The analytic of the beautiful is supposed to be limited to (Kantian) analysis. It can discover that the judgment of taste claims the universal validity of its pleasure, which is in the “state of mind” of the harmonious free play of the imagination and understanding (whatever that means), but it cannot provide the legitimation of that claim: that belongs to the purview of the deduction, which follows and builds upon the analytic. But § plainly argues that this “state of mind” (and so likewise the ensuing pleasure) “must be” universally communicable (CJ V:). If “communicable” means “valid,” then § has taken over and completed the deduction’s task. If, instead, Kant is introducing a new term to capture something that it is important to distinguish from (and, of course, also to relate to) universal validity, then the (partly implicit) argument of § has the following shape. () The judgment of taste claims the universal communicability of its pleasure. () If the pleasure came first, it would be pleasure in the agreeable, hence merely privately valid. But () a privately valid pleasure (pleasure in the agreeable) could not be universally communicable. () So – here’s how this “procedure” would be self-contradictory – if the pleasure came first, the judgment would be claiming universal communicability for a pleasure that could not be universally communicable. What would the distinction come to? A promising proposal invokes the principle, famously attributed to Kant, that “ought implies can” (see

 

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Harmony in Kant’s Theory of Taste,” Kants Ästhetik/Kant’s Aesthetics/L’esthétique de Kant, ed. Herman Parret (Berlin: de Gruyter, ), p. . For the latter view, see Ginsborg, The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition, p. , n. , and (perhaps) Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. . Kant also appeals to “universal communicability” in the Fourth Moment. I discuss this in Chapter . Of course, this “problem” can be recast as an opportunity. Since few interpreters are satisfied with Kant’s brief and bare (official) deduction, locating an unofficial deduction elsewhere in the text has the virtue of supplementing the lack. Both § and § (which I consider in Chapter ) have been read as playing this role.

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A/B). The claim that everyone ought to experience a pleasure (i.e., the claim to its universal validity) presupposes that everyone can experience it. This possibility is what “universal communicability” marks. A pleasure, or whatever else, is universally communicable insofar as it can be had by all. This allows for a tidy division of labor between the deduction and §: it is the concern of the deduction to establish that the pleasure of the judgment of taste ought to be had by all, while it is for § to establish that it can be had by all. The first thing to notice about this reading is that the meaning it ascribes to “communicability” is only a shadow, a sliver, of the word’s ordinary meaning. On this reading, for a pleasure to be “communicable” is for it to be possible for others to also experience it. But to call a pleasure (or whatever else) “communicable” is not merely to say that others can experience it too; it is to say something about a basis on which this can happen, namely that the pleasure can be communicated – perhaps, but not necessarily, through words. To communicate (mitteilen) something is to convey or impart it to someone. (A communicable disease is one that can be transmitted; rooms communicate with each other when it is possible to enter one from the other.) The entry for mitteilen in Adelung’s dictionary, which reflects usage that would have been current for Kant, foregrounds the idea of giving something – as a gift, for example – to another. The principal sense of mitteilen may have shifted somewhat since Kant’s day, so that it now applies most naturally to the linguistic transmission of information. But the core idea remains the same. Readers of “universally communicable” as “can be had by all” sometimes gloss it as “can be shared by all.” There is indeed a sense of “share” that corresponds to “also have.” You and I share a zip code: you have a certain zip code, and I have it too. But this sense of “share” is different from the sense in which it corresponds to “communicate.” I share a piece of news with you: I communicate it to you; I pass it on. The attractiveness of “share” as a gloss on “communicable” may be connected to its bringing to mind the second sense, but the “can be had by all” reader is only entitled to the first. The reading’s narrowing of “communicability” results in a difficulty with the argument. A point upon which the argument turns is that pleasure in the agreeable is not universally communicable (i.e., ()). But it is not clear why there could not be at least some pleasure in the agreeable  

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See Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology, pp. –. Adelung, Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch.

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

that could be had by all. At any rate, the issue seems to be empirical, not one that can be settled a priori. If we look more closely at the way in which () relates universal communicability and universal validity, we encounter another problem. According to (), if a pleasure is privately valid, then it is not universally communicable. By modus tollens, if a pleasure is universally communicable, then it is not privately valid. Now, for Kant, “not privately valid” means “universally valid.” In other words, there is no status – “validity for some,” as it were – lying between private validity and universal validity. (A pleasure in the agreeable, recall, is privately valid no matter how many of us do or can experience it.) So what () amounts to is that if a pleasure is universally communicable, then it is universally valid. The “ought implies can” reading, however, has the direction of entailment running only the other way, viz., from universal validity (“ought”) to universal communicability (“can”). It seems, then, that Kant’s notion of universal communicability must carry a stronger sense than the “can be had by all” take on “universally communicable” accommodates, so that what is universally communicable is universally valid (as well as the other way around: what is universally valid is universally communicable). And yet, as I hope to show, this does not throw us back upon the deflationary approach. We can understand Kant to be using a full-blooded sense of communicability (a sense, in other words, that merits the introduction of the new term and that preserves its ties to communication), and doing so in a way that makes a difference to his argument. It is certainly the case that Kant evinces considerable interest, in the Critique of Judgment and elsewhere, in communication itself, in our being able to communicate things to each other. In his discussion of “the empirical interest in the beautiful,” Kant says that we judge (beurteilen) as “refined” the person “who is inclined to communicate his pleasure to others and is skilled at it” – skilled, that is, at communicating his pleasure to others (CJ V:). Communication is also central to Kant’s understanding of (beautiful) art. Making a work of beautiful art depends on the “talent” for finding expression for ideas so that the work of art can communicate a state of mind. Genius really consists of the happy relation, which no science can teach and no diligence learn, of finding ideas for a given concept on the one hand, 

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In both senses of schöne Kunst (“fine art” and (fine) art that is beautiful); see Chapter , n. .

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Communication and Animation in the Judgment of Taste and, on the other, hitting upon the expression for them whereby the subjective attunement of the mind that is thereby produced, as an accompaniment of a concept, can be communicated to others. (CJ V:)

Although Kant here casts this talent as a dimension of the “genius” of the artist, one that he goes on to say is what we call “spirit,” just a short while earlier he described something similar, perhaps meant to be the same thing, but this time identified it with taste. “[T]he beautiful representation of an object . . . is really only the form of the presentation of a concept by means of which the latter is universally communicated. – To give this form to the product of beautiful art, however, requires merely taste” (CJ V:). This form, which is to be “suited to the thought,” is “the vehicle of communication” (CJ V:). And Kant explains that the propaedeutic for all beautiful art lies in the “culture of the powers of the mind through the humaniora [the humanities],” which are presumably so called “because humanity means on the one hand the universal feeling of taking-part [Teilnehmungsgefu¨hl] and on the other hand the capacity for being able to communicate oneself intimately and universally” (CJ V:). The Anthropology entwines thinking and communicating in the second of three maxims Kant offers as “conducive to wisdom”: “To think oneself (in communication with people) into the position of every other person.” Kant also accords considerable importance to communication in his political writings, including the essays “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’” and “What Is Orientation in Thinking?” In the latter, we find Kant quite moved: But how much and how accurately would we think if we did not think, so to speak, in community with others to whom we communicate our thoughts and who communicate their thoughts to us! We may therefore conclude that the same external constraint which deprives people of the freedom to communicate their thoughts in public also removes their freedom of thought, the one treasure which remains to us amidst all the burdens of civil life.

In all of these passages, communication is, plainly, conversation. At this juncture it will be helpful to disambiguate between two senses of communication. In the thin sense, to communicate my feeling or my thought (for example) is to communicate to you the fact that I have that feeling or thought. In the rich sense, what I communicate is the feeling or thought itself. It is communication in the rich sense that is at issue in Kant’s notion of “communicability.” As we saw in the § passage 

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Anthropology VII:; see also VII:.

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

“Orientation” VIII:; Kant’s emphases.

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introducing the notion, pleasure in the agreeable is not universally communicable. This does not mean that I cannot communicate to you the fact that I am enjoying my glass of Sancerre (thin sense). Of course I can, and reporting that fact is just what my voicing of my judgment of the agreeable does. It is in the rich sense that I cannot communicate that pleasure of mine to you: I cannot communicate the pleasure itself. Likewise for the “Orientation” passage. If the communication of thought is to have the kind of vital power Kant attributes to it, he must be envisioning something more than the public reporting of propositions held to be true. Kant must have in mind the rich sense of communication. I communicate a thought (in the rich sense) when I get it across to you: now you have it. But what does that mean? You have it too when you think it too, of course. But that is the limit case, and there is room for a less total sort of transfer. I have conveyed my thought (the thought itself ) to you, you have it too, when you grasp it, when you see what it comes to and how I could think it here and now: when, in other words, you can appreciate it. There is a parallel range with regard to the rich communication of pleasure. If I have communicated my pleasure to you in the rich sense, you now feel that pleasure too. Or you now “get” what the pleasure is all about, and how one could feel it. You can appreciate it. Communicating a feeling or thought in this rich sense is bringing it to life. This requires making it communicable. I make my feeling or thought communicable by articulating and giving expression to its contours, which means making communicable – articulating and giving expression to – its bases. (Expression here need not be in words; it may involve gesturing or pointing, for example.) The two don’t really come apart: working out what my feeling or thought really is is bound up with working out what sustains it. This is how I make it available to others, and also how I make it newly available to myself, for it is through articulating  

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I have not found these nuances in Kant’s own writing, but (I’m arguing that) his thought calls for them. In one sense of “communicable,” of course, it must already be communicable if I am to communicate it: it must allow of being communicated. But if I am to communicate my feeling or thought, its being a candidate for communication is generally not enough. To actually communicate it I must prepare it for communication by tapping the potential it has for being communicated. Making communicable is “rendering” communicable in the sense of “render” pertinent to cooking: bringing out and making available the fats, for example, in meat. Mary McCloskey uses the phrase “render universally communicable” in, I believe, a similar way, although in a context limited to the topic of aesthetic ideas. See Kant’s Aesthetic (Albany: SUNY Press, ), pp.  and .

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Communication and Animation in the Judgment of Taste

and expressing it that I first grasp the feeling or thought I have. So I may well come to understand what I feel or think at the same time, and in the same way, that I convey it to you. (My feelings and thoughts are mine, certainly, but I do not have magical access to them. I do not know them just by virtue of having them.) It is not all up to me, of course. If I am to communicate my feeling or thought to you, you have to be capable of, and up for, entering into it or letting it enter into you. Let me pause to highlight an idea operating in the background. The adjective in the phrase “universal communicability” is not doing much work. Kant himself occasionally drops it, for example when he discusses the “communicability” – or rather the lack thereof – of sensation (CJ V:). “Universal” serves to emphasize rather than to qualify. It does not pick out a kind or range of communicability. For Kant, something can no more be communicable only to one or to some than it can be beautiful only to one or to some. That which is communicable is communicable to anyone, in other words to everyone (in principle). We are now in a position to appreciate Kant’s point that pleasure in the agreeable, “that which pleases the senses in sensation” (CJ V:), is not communicable. A sensation of pleasure (in summer weather) or of displeasure (a toothache) is not something that I could intelligibly pass on to someone. I can walk someone into the sunshine, or ask her to imagine basking in its gentle rays; I might then be enabling her to have a pleasure, but not by communicating mine. If I find the sunshine delightful and she finds it oppressive, it is not my “articulating” and “giving expression to” my delight that will give her access to pleasure, but a parasol or retreat to the shade. The pleasure that is involved in the judgment of taste is, by contrast, something that one can pass on by giving expression to it: so Kant is claiming. Pleasure in the agreeable is (mere) “sensation” insofar as it does not allow for non-private – i.e., for Kant, public or universal – grounds for, or ways of, having it. As there are no non-private grounds for and ways of having it, pleasure in the agreeable is not communicable and does not allow of being rendered communicable. This, I suggest, is what Kant should be understood to mean when he says that pleasure in the agreeable “comes into the mind through the senses” so that “we are therefore passive with regard to it” (CJ V:), or implies that it “immediately depend[s] on



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The link between universal communicability and the availability of non-private bases is also why universal communicability entails universal validity.

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the representation through which the object is given” (CJ V:). It is not the involvement of the senses but the mode of their involvement that is crucial to the distinction between the pleasures of the judgment of taste and the judgment of the agreeable. Where there is room for non-private grounds for or ways of taking pleasure, there and to that extent we shift away from the agreeable toward taste. It is in terms of the absence of such room that we should understand the significance of the “passivity” and the “immediate” dependence on the given to which Kant consigns the agreeable. The point is not that I don’t have to do anything to partake of pleasure in the agreeable. Few pleasures simply work upon us like magic spells. If I don’t pay attention, if I don’t get into it, if I cannot sufficiently let go, pleasure will elude me. It might seem odd, or indeed problematic, to read Kant as countenancing the idea of communicating pleasure (even in the case of the pleasure proper to the judgment of taste). Some of Kant’s most fundamental claims could appear to stand in the way, beginning with his denial that pleasure is a concept and his rejection of the possibility of any rules for beauty. Particularly with the remarks that may be gathered together under the thematic of the “autonomy of taste,” it might even sound as though the judgment of taste does not rest on bases (either for it or for its pleasure) at all. Thus Kant declares useless for producing aesthetic conviction not merely would-be rules for beauty, but even “grounds”: “Whether a garment, a house, a flower is beautiful: no one allows himself to be talked into his judgment about that by means of any grounds or fundamental principles” (CJ V:). “If someone reads me his poem or takes me to a play that in the end fails to please my taste,” then appeal as she may to the authority of vaunted critics or to “rules of beauty,” I will not be moved, “I stop my ears, won’t listen to reasons and rationalizations” (CJ V:). Conversely, a “young poet does not let himself be dissuaded from his conviction that his poem is beautiful by the judgment of the public nor that of his friends”; if he is to change his mind, he must “depart from his previous judgment of his own free will” (CJ V:).    

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Similarly: “the word [‘agreeable’] always signifies something that pleases immediately” (CJ V:; emphasis added). The subject making a judgment of taste “must believe himself to have grounds for demanding a similar pleasure of everyone” (CJ V:). The example below of the “young poet” leads Kant to his declaration that “[t]aste makes claim merely to autonomy” (CJ V:). Such remarks raise a question about how taste might be acquired or cultivated. Kant says of the “young poet” that he is in a position to change his view “of his own free will” only once “his power

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Communication and Animation in the Judgment of Taste

But these remarks need not be understood to indicate that the judgment of taste is simply ungrounded or groundless, that there is no true place for “conviction” here. Kant includes certain vivid and seemingly extraneous or prejudicial narrative details: it is the person who has taken me to the play, the author of the poem, who wants me to find it beautiful; it is a “young” poet who remains steadfast in the face of rejection by the public and his friends alike. Personal or egoistic stakes are, of course, likely to make one’s aesthetic attachments particularly resistant to critique. The point is not that aesthetic attachments are personal or egoistic. What the details help bring out, rather, is that aesthetic judgment is itself a matter of attachment, which is why it is vulnerable to tricky entwinement with other attachments. The objects of our aesthetic judgments matter to us; we care about them. (Otherwise how could it be that “[t]he beautiful prepares us to love something, even nature, without interest” (CJ V:)?) What these examples show is not that the judgment of taste is removed from the realm of conversation or conviction, but that in the realm of taste, conversation and conviction take certain characteristic shapes and run certain characteristic risks. Kant is appealing, again, to our knowledge of how to do things with words. Such ways of wielding words, in such contexts, are not meant to spark conversation, let alone to bring somebody around. When we resort to them, as when we resort to badgering or pontificating, we are not (that is, should not be) surprised in the end to find that they have produced intransigence and silence. Together with his views on the autonomy of taste, Kant’s insistence on separating its pleasure from concepts, and hence from rules, is best understood as pointing to the nature of aesthetic grounds and of aesthetic normativity. The specification of these larger claims must wait for the following chapters. Already in the reading of Kant’s “key” to which I am about to return, however, a dimension of the point emerges. When I demand my pleasure of everyone in my judgment of taste, what I am demanding of others (including my future selves) is not the specific pleasure that I take in the object, though that is of course the pleasure that I undertake to render communicable. I demand of others that kind of pleasure; I demand that they too find themselves to be animated by the object, that they too care about it.



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of judgment has been made more acute by practice” (CJ V:), but Kant does not explain how “practice” should make the difference. These are topics of Chapters  and .

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. Aesthetic Encounter The puzzle of what the “judging” in the judgment of taste comes to has to do with Kant’s characterization of it as a “state of mind” in which the cognitive powers of imagination and understanding are mutually engaged in a “free play,” wherein they “refer a given representation to cognition in general.” Kant does very little to flesh out this characterization, yet it is clearly of the greatest importance for his project, because it is supposed to be by virtue of the fact that this state of free play corresponds to a “subjective condition” of cognition that the judgment of taste earns its right to demand agreement (CJ V:). I proposed earlier that we make headway with the puzzle of “judging” by taking more seriously the notion of “communicability.” The “judging” in the judgment of taste, I suggested, turns out to be a “state of mind” in which one seeks to render something universally communicable. This is what I will argue for as I pick up the thread of §. First, however, let us not overlook the rich resonances of the word beurteilen itself, quite apart from Kant’s enigmatic glosses in terms of a state of mind of free play (etc.). It suggests “judging” something in the sense of sizing or weighing it up, taking its measure; evaluating, appraising, assessing, or appreciating it. The terms of the first set emphasize the dimension of identifying (what something amounts to), those of the second the dimension of gauging worth (what its value is). We are already not far from the sort of thing I have just been elaborating as involved in rendering some aspect of one’s experience (one’s feeling or thought) communicable. To want to grasp my feeling or thought is to want to make it communicable (whether or not I want, in addition, to communicate it to others). I make it communicable by articulating it, and (hence) its bases. But this is also what I do if I want to assess it. That is why it is often in trying to articulate my feeling or thought that I gain or lose conviction in it. Equally, however, we should not lose sight of the fact that the judging at work in the judgment of taste is “merely subjective (aesthetic) judging” (CJ V:). The interpretive challenge is to make sense of the special (“merely subjective (aesthetic)”) character of this 

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Such resonances are clearly at work when Kant speaks of judging the conduct of others at CJ V:. In the first edition of Meredith’s translation, a Beurteilung is an “estimating.” Not an “estimation”: Meredith’s choice registers the important respect in which a Beurteilung is an activity or undertaking, not some verdict or conclusion in which it might issue. See The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). (The  edition, revised and edited by Nicholas Walker, renders Beurteilung as “judging.”)

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judging, while also making sense of it as something that still merits being called judging. Let me preface my return to § by sketching a broad outline of the reading I have in mind. I take Kant to be working out a vision of what I call the “aesthetic encounter.” In the aesthetic encounter, I feel as though there is “something else” in my experience of the object, something other than what I believe or know about it. This “something else” seems to invite or call upon me for exploration and articulation – for rendering universally communicable. It is as though the object is inviting me into a kind of conversation, “saying” or “doing” something, undertaking a communicative act, that I wish to take up and to which I would like to respond. It might sound as though the “something else” in question must be the object’s beauty, or its aesthetic character, and in a sense this is right, as we will see. Kant’s eventual name for what I am calling this “something else” is the object’s purposive form. In §, it emerges as a certain significance or “unity.” We saw, though only very briefly, that Kant connects the work of art to communication. Importantly, the idea is not that the artist communicates or tries to communicate through the work. The work is not her missive. It is the object itself, the work of art, which is experienced as communicative, as undertaking to say or do something. Thus we experience the work as akin to a subject, not a “mere” object: an as-if subject. The work of art is as-if animate, and it seems to animate me, to bring me to life, by inviting me into an engagement with it that seems further to enliven it. *  





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The aesthetic encounter is ineluctably first-personal, as should become clear, which is why I characterize it in first-personal terms. “For the judgment of taste consists precisely in the fact that it calls a thing beautiful only after its character whereby it conforms to our way of receiving it” (CJ V:). See also CJ V:: the judgment of taste “merely holds [the object’s] character together with the feeling of pleasure and displeasure.” What makes this possible is the “genius” of the artist, which is not an instrument of her control, although it is, and its achievements are, hers. Kant seems to assign the artwork’s communicative powers in particular to the “spirit” of the artist but also, in some tension with this, to her taste. The most relevant passages are those cited in Section .. Thus Kant, as I read him, would be sympathetic to W. J. T. Mitchell’s urging us to “see the picture not just as an object of description nor ekphrasis that comes alive in our perceptual/verbal/ conceptual play around it, but as a thing that is always already addressing us (potentially) as a subject that has to be seen as ‘its own’ in order for our descriptions to engage the picture’s life as well as our own as beholders.” Mitchell continues: “This means the question is not just what did the picture mean (to its first historical beholders) or what does it mean to us now, but what did (and does) the picture want from its beholders then and now” (What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), p. , n. ).

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

So far in § we have seen Kant to be arguing that if the pleasure “came first,” if, in other words, it were “immediately” in my perceptual experience of the object, it would be only privately valid, and not universally communicable. I cannot (it makes no sense to) demand of all a pleasure that is only available to those who happen to be susceptible to it. The implication is that if the pleasure is to be entitled to the universal communicability the judgment attributes to it, it must depend on some mediating activity, an engagement with the object, that can be enjoined upon all. This engagement with the object, the appreciation of its beauty, is what Kant will call the “judging” of the object. Kant has left us poised to hear how he will elaborate it. But that is not obviously what we get with Kant’s next step. A new paragraph begins with a sentence that one commentator, Henry Allison, has deemed “undoubtedly among the most puzzling statements of the Critique of Judgment.” This is how Allison renders the “notorious” passage: Hence it must be the capacity for being universally communicated of the mental state, in the given representation, which underlies the judgment of taste as its subjective condition, and the pleasure in the object must be its consequence.

The main difficulty that Allison and others cite lies in the idea that the source of the pleasure of the judgment of taste is the capacity for being universally communicated, or (equivalently) the universal communicability, of “the mental state.” Paul Guyer concludes that Kant might be slipping back into his former and precritical view about taste, according to which the pleasure of taste is to be understood in terms of the empirical anthropological-psychological fact about us that we enjoy being able to communicate our mental states. Allison offers the most attractive proposal for saving Kant, but it requires some rewriting of the text: Kant should have said that there must be “a universally communicable mental state” that underlies the judgment and has pleasure as its consequence.   

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Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. . Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. . This corresponds to CJ V:. Allison calls it “notorious” on p. . Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, pp. –. (This is one of Guyer’s suggestions; he also mentions some other ways in which Kant might be thought to have gotten muddled about his own account.) As Allison points out, Kant would be making quite the slip, not merely because it would occur in just the section he has highlighted as the “key” to his critique of taste, but also because he goes on explicitly to point out that a pleasure of just this sort is quite other than, and quite irrelevant to, the pleasure of the judgment of taste. See CJ V:. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. .

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There is another, more interesting and more compelling, way to read the sentence, I suggest. It will help, as it turns out, with the puzzle just mentioned, although it does not render reconstruction completely unnecessary. But that is not the main thing it has going for it; it has its own merits. Here is the sentence as I translate it. Thus it is the capacity for universal communication of the state of mind [allgemeine Mitteilungsfähigkeit des Gemu¨tszustandes] in the given representation which, as the subjective condition of the judgment of taste, must serve as its ground and have the pleasure in the object as a consequence. (CJ V:)

There are various differences from Allison’s translation, but the relevant ones correspond to the German reproduced in brackets: Kant is talking about a “state of mind” and is shining the spotlight on its “capacity for universal communication.” I will explain why “state of mind” is preferable to “mental state,” but the really crucial emendation turns upon the term Mitteilungsfähigkeit. With respect to it, Allison’s treatment accords with the consensus view, so my departure is unusual and requires explanation. Like Mitteilbarkeit, the term we saw Kant introduce two sentences earlier, Mitteilungsfähigkeit can mean “capacity for being communicated” or “communicability.” Unlike Mitteilbarkeit, however, it can also mean “capacity for communication.” (This active sense is arguably the more natural one, since a Fähigkeit is, in the first instance, a capacity to do something.) Strikingly, this is the only occurrence of Mitteilungsfähigkeit in this section and indeed in the text as whole. Otherwise we find Kant using Mitteilbarkeit and its adjectival form, together with the verbal phrase sich mitteilen lassen. It seems worthwhile to consider whether Kant might be turning to this word for the sake of the meaning it (unlike the other) makes available. So let us suppose that Kant is adducing a capacity for communication. 

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I adjust the Guyer and Matthews translation with regard to what “universal” modifies. Grammatically there are two possibilities: “capacity” or “communication.” I opt for the latter. Guyer and Matthews choose the former, rendering the relevant phrase as “the universal capacity for the communication of the state of mind.” (Their second “the” also differentiates their translation from mine; I discuss its force below.) The “universal capacity” translation seems to me to introduce unnecessary complication. Kant sometimes uses the construction sich allgemein mitteilen lassen, as when he says that the state of mind of free play muss sich allgemein mitteilen lassen (CJ V:), and Guyer and Matthews render this in terms of universal communication rather than a universal capacity (“must be able to be universally communicated”). If the capacity for communication were also to be understood as “universal,” this would mean an awkward and unexplained doubling-up: Kant would be adducing a universal capacity for universal communication. In rejecting the reading of “universal” as modifying “capacity,” I concur with Allison (Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. , n. ).

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

But now we face an ambiguity in the genitive form des following Mitteilungsfähigkeit, mirrored by an ambiguity in its English correlate “of.” Is the state of mind the object of the capacity for communication (objective genitive), or its bearer (subjective genitive)? Which, in other words, is Kant referring to: the capacity for universally communicating the state of mind, or the state of mind’s capacity for universally communicating (something)? In the former case, the upshot would be that the sentence effectively speaks of the universal communicability of the state of mind after all. Although we started with the supposition that Mitteilungsfähigkeit is not (here) an alternative way of saying Mitteilbarkeit, in the end the supposition would have made no real difference. Certainly there are good reasons for reading this sentence as adducing the universal communicability of a state of mind, whether one arrives there by the short or by the circuitous route. For one thing, whatever else Kant might say about the “state of mind” he has in view, he does claim that it is universally communicable (it “must be able to be universally communicated” (CJ V:)). But we don’t have to deny that in order to read this sentence the way I propose, as adducing the capacity that a state of mind has for universal communication. In fact, my reading turns out to yield a good explanation of why the state of mind is universally communicable. On the rich conception of communication that I encouraged us not to block out of Kant’s text, the capacity for universal communication – or, simply, for communication – is, at its heart, the capacity for rendering (something) communicable: for articulating and expressing it. The state of mind Kant is introducing should be understood as characterized (at least in part) by such a capacity and, most importantly, by the exercising of it. (Kant is about to describe its exercising of its capacity through the notion of the “free play” of the cognitive powers.) The engagement with the object that Kant showed us to be required as “ground” of the judgment of taste is, then, the state of mind in which I exercise my capacity for articulating and expressing, and what I seek to articulate and express is the “representation through which the object is given” or “the given representation” – or, more precisely, “something” that presents itself to 

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Among the published English translations, only that of Guyer and Matthews reflects the active sense of Mitteilungsfähigkeit. It seems to adopt the objective genitive reading: “the universal capacity for the communication of the state of mind” (p. ; emphasis added). Christian Wenzel notes the ambiguities of the construction Mitteilungsfähigkeit des, and likewise chooses the objective genitive reading (An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics: Core Concepts and Problems (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, ), p. ). See Section . on why “universal” serves to emphasize rather than to qualify.

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Communication and Animation in the Judgment of Taste

me as “in” that representation and as calling for being made sense of and appreciated. To see this, notice that in short order Kant invokes, within a complicated sentence, “the judgment on this universal communicability of the representation” (CJ V:). This is an important phrase, although it tends to be left unremarked upon. What is “the representation”? Kant could be read as referring to the pleasure or to the state of mind, since it is their universal communicability with which this section is principally concerned. But the more natural supposition is that he means “the representation” he has been talking about all along, “the representation” that the state of mind is “in,” that is, the “given representation” or, in a somewhat more atypical locution, “the representation through which the object is given.” This is Kant’s name for the way in which the object is given to the particular subject. The locution is deliberately open: it is not restricted to intuition or to manifolds of intuition. It does not exclude concepts. This emerges when Kant considers, in the last paragraph of §, how things would be “[i]f the given representation that occasions the judgment of taste were a concept” (CJ V:). Something does block this possibility, but it is not the very notion of “the given representation.” It is, rather, the kind of “judging” that would be entailed. Kant is talking about how I encounter the object that I look at or listen to (or otherwise perceive). I perceive the object, I cognize it, but there is “something else” there in my experience of it that I find I want to articulate. I want to make this aspect of my “given representation” communicable. To want this, to feel moved to it, is to “have” the given representation in a certain state of mind. This is why “state of mind” is a more illuminating rendition of Gemu¨tszustand than “mental state,” especially as the latter seems to indicate some sort of technical philosophical notion at a remove from the term’s ordinary sense, in the German as in the English, of a mood, attitude, or frame of mind. The judgment of taste thus makes two, related, claims to universal communicability. Recall that Kant said that the counterfactual case in 

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Gemu¨tszustand is thus not all that far from one sense of Stimmung (roughly, “mood”). Stimmung appears in §, as I’ve mentioned, where I’ve counted it among the terms conveying “attunement.” (On the relationship between these senses of Stimmung, and on its oft-cited “untranslatability,” see David Wellberry, “Stimmung,” trans. Rebecca Pohl, in New Formations, no.  ().) Stimmung reappears prominently in §, which calls § to mind in a number of ways. The argument of § echoes that of §, especially in foregrounding universal communicability and the relationship of the powers of understanding and imagination. I discuss § and its relation to §, and the relation of the Third Moment to the Second, in Chapter .

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which the pleasure “came first” would be impossible because then “only its universal communicability” – i.e., and not also the universal communicability of something else – would be “attributed in the judgment of taste to the representation of the object” (CJ V:; emphasis added). Through the judgment of taste I claim the universal communicability of my pleasure as well as the universal communicability of (“something in”) my encounter with the object. Just possibly we can understand the “this” in “the judgment on this universal communicability of the representation” as suggesting that it is an aspect of the representation, or even an aspect of its universal communicability – viz., with respect to this “something else” – that is at issue. Be that as it may, with “this” Kant clearly signals that he is talking about something he has already been talking about. He is pointing back to the start of the paragraph, where he introduced the state of mind that is so important to this section, the state of mind in which one undertakes the work of rendering an aspect of the given representation universally communicable. Of course, this cannot mean that the state of mind renders the “something else” communicable by cognizing it. That is part of the point of “else”: apart from what there is to believe and know about this object, there is something else there that I want to make sense of. But rendering something communicable without cognizing it does, in Kant’s view, involve relating it to cognition. This is because rendering something communicable involves tracing and bringing out its (non-private) grounds. To the extent that something has any such grounds, allows of genuine “conviction,” it belongs to the sphere of cognition – even if it is not, in fact, cognition. In Kant’s words, “Nothing . . . can be universally communicated except cognition and representation so far as it belongs to cognition” (CJ V:). Thus there are two possible ways of rendering something universally communicable: either by making cognition of it, or by making it “belong to” cognition without at the same time being cognition (CJ V:). The 

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Compare Guyer’s construal of the free play of the cognitive powers as a feeling of another “degree or kind of unity” beyond that required for cognition (“The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited,” in Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Kukla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. ; see also p. ). Guyer does not offer much of an elaboration of what this comes to, apart from noting that in some cases it might consist of a flitting among suggested images and thoughts (p. ). He says that “it should be implied precisely by the fact that the harmony of the faculties must be a free play that there can be no single, concrete description of this state” (p. ), but I think that the truth in the observation leaves room for saying more (as I have tried to do) about what it might mean to feel another “unity.” The former is what we do when we convert (mere) “perception” to a “judgment of experience” (CJ V:–). “The perception of an object can be immediately combined with the concept of an object in general, for which the former contains the empirical predicates, for a judgment of

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Communication and Animation in the Judgment of Taste

latter is what we do when we are in the state of mind particular to the judgment of taste, which Kant goes on to gloss in terms of a “free play” of the powers of representation, imagination and understanding, in which they “refer a given representation to cognition in general” (CJ V:). Kant mentions the roles of the cognitive powers in the case of cognitive judgment – Now there belongs to a representation through which an object is given, so that there should come to be from it cognition in general, imagination for the composition of the manifold of intuition and understanding for the unity of the concept that unifies the representations (CJ V:)

– because some aspects carry over: their free play involves the “composition” or holding-together of diverse (“manifold”) features as well as the sense of their “unity.”

. Animation It is helpful to situate the free play of the cognitive powers, and its relation to cognitive judgment, in the context of the notion of reflective judgment, which we saw in Chapter  to serve as one of the major framing elements of the whole Critique of Judgment. That the free play is to be understood as a mode of reflective judgment is made explicit in the Introduction, where Kant says that its pleasure “expresse[s] nothing other than the object’s suitability to the cognitive faculties which are (and insofar as they are) in play in the reflective power of judgment” (CJ V:–). In determinative judgment, recall, the particular is subsumed under a given universal (a rule or concept). In reflective judgment, on the other hand, “only the particular is given, for which the universal is to be found” (CJ V:). Empirical cognitive judgment is determinative judgment, but it depends on reflective judgment (in three ways). In the judgment of taste, by contrast, the power of judgment is merely reflective (not at the same time determinative). Kant puts the contrast in terms of two kinds of

 

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cognition, and a judgment of experience can thereby be produced. . . . However, a perception can also be immediately combined with a feeling of pleasure (or displeasure) and a liking that accompanies the representation of the object and serves it instead of a predicate, and an aesthetic judgment, which is not a cognitive judgment, can thus arise” (CJ V:–). See also the discussion of judgments of perception and judgments of experience at Prolegomena IV:–. See also CJ V:, , , and . The idea that determination depends on reflection is also to be found in Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, pp. –, and (following Longuenesse) Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, pp. –. My construal of the idea and its role in Kant’s thinking is very different from both.

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comparison involved in reflection. “To reflect (to consider) . . . is to compare and to hold together given representations either with others or with one’s faculty of cognition, in relation to a concept thereby made possible” (FI XX:). Empirical concept formation depends on comparison of given representations “with others.” This is the topic of the brief, well-known passage of the Jäsche Logic in which Kant describes the formation of the concept “tree” through the comparison of features of a willow, a spruce, and a linden. In another way, any occasion of empirical cognition, so empirical determinative judgment (determination of empirical objects), presupposes a “moment” of reflective judgment. Here the “question” reflective judgment asks is: What empirical concept does the given particular call for? The question is actually twofold: Which of my empirical concepts apply to it? And which is most apt or fitting? In order for an empirical concept to be “chosen” for the given representations (the manifold of intuition, or already conceptualized intuitions), they must be checked against – compared to – the “marks,” the criteria governing the application, of candidate empirical concepts. As a result of such comparison, the given representations are found to have unity as the instantiation of some concept (“cat” rather than “duck” or “fox,” say). It is a unity we recognize as shareable and shared with other objects (cats) by virtue of certain characterizing features (whiskers, tail, coat, suitability to be a pet, and so on). The object is thus recognized as an instance of the sort of thing it is the point of that concept to pick out. We could also say that the object is compared with other objects, since it is identified as like other (actual or possible) objects in the relevant respects, that is, as satisfying by its features the “rule” (CJ V:) governing the application of the concept. Comparison is also required for the “aptness” question. “[M]any different kinds of determination [Arten der Bestimmung] of the concept at hand and [of] the apparent solution to the problem [Auflösung der Aufgabe] present themselves: which is the single one that is exactly appropriate to it [dieser angemessen ist] (for example, in lawsuits, or at the outset of certain plans of action having the same end)?” Here reflective judgment compares the given representation to the many possible ways of determining it, to (that is) the many possible determinative judgments of it. All are true, but which 

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Jäsche Logic IX:–. It is not obvious just how Kant is to be understood or whether a convincing interpretation or reconstruction is available. See Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, for a sustained exploration of the topic. Anthropology VII:–.

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is (most) apt? What the power of judgment is really asking is, “What is of importance [Worauf kommts an]?” What matters here; what is relevant, what is to the point? It is rare, Kant remarks, to answer this question aptly (treffend). For this there is a talent for selecting what is exactly appropriate in a given case (iudicium discretivum), which is much desired but also very rare. The lawyer who arrives with many principles that are supposed to prove his assertion makes the judge’s sentence very difficult, because he himself is only fumbling around. But if he . . . knows how to hit upon the point regarding what matters (for there is only one) [Weiß er aber . . . was er will, den Punkt zu treffen (denn der ist nur ein einziger), worauf es ankommt], then the issue is quickly settled.

Kant is saying that the talent for discerning what is really to the point is rare. That is, the capacity for answering the question especially well (with talent) is rare. That is perfectly compatible with the fact I take Kant to be presenting: that everyone must, in any act of arriving at a judgment or thought, confront the question of what matters (here and now). Most of us tend not to answer the question very adroitly. This may be (although Kant does not quite say so) because the question is usually difficult. Aesthetic “merely reflective judgment about a given singular object” considers it, by contrast, “before its comparison with others is seen” (FI XX:). That is, the given representation is reflected upon in its singularity, “as [als] singular and without comparison to others” (CJ V:; emphasis added). The given representation is compared (not with others, but) “with one’s faculty of cognition” (the alternative adduced in the explanation of reflection quoted above from FI XX:). This comparison is expressed in the free play of the cognitive powers. As with the cognitive 

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 

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The phrase “determination [Bestimmung] of the concept” (cp. Dowdell’s translation, on which Kant refers to “ways to analyze the concept”) shows that Kant is talking about conditions of determinative judgment (bestimmende Urteilskraft), and the second parenthetical example shows that they are also conditions of practical (determinative) judgment (and not just of cognitive (determinative) judgment). What I am suggesting is that the conditions he identifies in this passage correspond to the contribution of reflective judgment. Notice that Kant once again turns to the juridical to illustrate a claim about judgment generally. Anthropology VII:. It is with this question that the power of judgment really comes into its own. The question is the second of three that Kant identifies as proper to the three cognitive faculties (understanding, judgment, and reason) respectively. Each captures the demand that reason makes on the faculty. Kant connects the question of truth to the understanding. “‘What do I want?’ (asks understanding).” A footnote clarifies: “‘Wanting’ is understood here in a purely theoretical sense: What do I want to assert as true?”  Anthropology VII:. Anthropology VII:. The First Introduction notion of “comparing a given representation with one’s faculty of cognition” corresponds to the § notions of “relating a given representation to cognition in general” (CJ V:;

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case, the given particular is found to have a unity. It is not the unity of a concept, because it is not a unity we recognize as shareable with other objects by virtue of certain shareable characterizing features. It is a unity, a way of holding-together, of adding up to something, that the object has in and of itself, in its singularity – a singular unity. The free play of the cognitive powers articulates the features by virtue of which it holds together and thus renders its singular unity communicable. The “reflection” here is reflection on what makes it the unity that it is. Such reflection consists of acts of “composition” and even of provisional “unification.” Contemplating a work of art, thinking about what it is “doing,” one picks out and considers various particular features, at first, perhaps, in some isolation from others, but then as they work together, or play off each other. One goes back and forth between identifying aspects or features (looking and noticing), finding and tracing connections between them, considering certain connections in the light of other features, and seeing how newly focused-upon features suggest different connections. Why the term “free play”; what does it capture? It is a most evocative figure. Kant does give us a bit of a gloss. The “freedom” has to do with the absence of constraint by empirical concepts: “no determinate concept restricts [the powers of cognition] to a particular rule of cognition” (CJ V:). When we are deciding whether an animal in the park is a large cat or a small fox, or are trying to spot the cat that is being pointed out to us, only certain features are relevant. The imagination’s composition of the manifold and the understanding’s unification of that manifold are each guided by the concept(s) involved, and, of course, by the overall goal of conceptualization. The issue is not whether there is something to cognize at all – that can be taken for granted; the issue is how to cognize it (cat or fox), or whether I can cognize it as a cat. With regard to the aesthetic singular unity of the judgment of taste, on the other hand, no feature is ruled either in or out of consideration as relevant or important to, or constitutive of, that unity. To call it a singular unity is to say that there

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emphasis removed) and of a relation of the powers of representation “to a faculty of cognition in general” (CJ V:). With Rachel Zuckert, I emphasize that Kant is talking about “individual form” in a positive sense (Zuckert, “The Purposiveness of Form,” Journal of the History of Philosophy  (), p. ). On Zuckert’s interpretation of Kant, however, this “individual form” is the object’s haeccitas. What we appreciate in the judgment of taste is the interrelatedness of all of the object’s sensory properties (p. ). On my view, by contrast, what we appreciate is another unity in the representation, to which some sensory properties, though not necessarily all, contribute; moreover, there is no specifying in advance how they are to be “interrelated” (for example as “complementing and contrasting” (p. )).

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is no conceptualizing it as a unity. It is also to say that whether there “really” is this “something else” there in my experience calling for articulation can never be taken for granted: Is the object “doing something” that matters, that has “importance” (as Kant puts it)? Does it all add up to something? There is no settling this apart from, or in advance of, the free play itself. This is a crucial point of the hinge in Kant’s careful and recurring locution: “the state of mind in the given representation.” Consider how Kant does not phrase it. He does not say that the state of mind is “caused by” or, more vaguely, “occasioned by” or “elicited by” the given representation. He is generally paraphrased in one or the other way, because “in” seems imprecise and possibly problematic (to the extent that it suggests that the state of mind is also “given”). I have suggested that Kant is talking about the attitude or frame of mind or “mood” in which I have the given representation, my way of representing the object. To be in that state of mind is to feel that my encounter with the object merits being articulated, or calls for rendering communicable. But now that state of mind is not just directed toward my encounter with the object; it is also part of that encounter, the spirit in which it is had. Part of what I want to make sense of is my very feeling that there is “something there” to make sense of. My state of mind, in other words, is part of what it is to make sense of. This is where its universal communicability (which I have noted Kant’s § to adduce but have left unaddressed until now) comes in. To render my aesthetic encounter universally communicable is at the same time to render universally communicable the sense that there is something there to render universally communicable. The two stand or fall together. Thus the judgment of taste is marked by a certain self-reflexivity. If the state of mind is universally communicable, it is because it makes itself universally communicable. 

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Commentators very frequently use the term “elicit” to cover the mode in which the “given representation” or object connects up with the “state of mind,” no doubt because it seems neutral enough to serve as an unobjectionable placeholder that leaves room for further, diverging, specifications. Hannah Ginsborg also holds that Kant’s judgment of taste is importantly self-reflexive. I discuss Ginsborg’s interpretation in Chapter . This may help us with what is often cited as the second stumbling block of §, together with the “notorious” sentence we saw introducing the judgment of taste’s state of mind: “The subjective universal communicability of the way of representing [Vorstellungsart] in a judgment of taste, since it is supposed to occur without presupposing a determinate concept, can be nothing other than the state of mind in the free play of the imagination and the understanding” (CJ V:–). There is a grammatical difficulty here that seems to indicate a basic category mistake. Kant seems to be identifying a property (“subjective universal communicability”) with a thing (“the state of mind”).

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I’d like to suggest that these dimensions of freedom shed some light on why the “free play” is play. Suppose I am in the church of Santa Felicità in Florence looking at Pontormo’s Deposition with a friend. How will I explain what I find compelling about it? (It is not necessary for aesthetic judging that I verbalize and voice my experience; that is one reason I have been using the verb “articulate”: I can articulate with words, but also with my fingers, or a knife (as in carving). But words are not undistinguished tools. I know that I am not alone, in fact, in finding that it is by talking with a friend about an artwork we are looking at together that I can sometimes get furthest in making sense of it and of my experience of it. Here, of course, it is not the words alone that make a difference, but also saying them to someone else. The someone else will have to be a “goodenough” interlocutor (adapting D. W. Winnicott’s phrase): someone with whom I can talk freely enough, without too much interference from (for example) wishes to impress or to entertain or from anxiety about silence or confusion.) Here is one way my thinking out loud could take shape. I begin by remarking that a first impression it gives is of a chaotic group of figures, their bodies mostly disguised under billowing or gathered and puffed draperies in soft pastel blues and pinks. Those colors are pretty, but then there are sharper notes: more localized citrusy reds and oranges and murky, even bilious greens. Interestingly, it takes a while to sink in that a central figure, the dead Jesus, is mostly naked; this seems to have to do with the color of the skin and especially the body’s lack of definition. But once one notices this body, one also notices that some of the figures around the outer edges of the picture are actually wearing draperies that are anything but billowing or puffed: three figures tracing roughly a triangle between

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Worse, it seems to be the “subjective universal communicability” of the state of mind that he is identifying with the state of mind itself. (Comparing it to the earlier sentence, Guyer says that Kant seems to be making “a category mistake just as absurd as that earlier incoherence” and concludes that Kant has to be read as, again, led astray by his own pre-critical view (Kant and the Claims of Taste, p. ).) But perhaps we can read Kant as thinking of the self-reflexivity just described. “The way of representing” is a phrase that allows Kant to capture both the state of mind and the given representation that it is in. They are, as we just saw, made universally communicable together. Both must be made universally communicable without being cognized (“without presupposing a determinate concept”), “subjectively” universally communicable, and this happens through the state of mind’s exercising of its capacity to render communicable, the free play of the cognitive powers. What is “supposed to occur [stattfinden soll]” or come into being is the subjective universal communicability of the way of representing, and its “occurring” is the state of mind, insofar as it exercises its capacity for communication. For D. W. Winnicott’s first use of the term “good-enough,” in connection with the “good-enough mother,” see “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, ), p. .

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Communication and Animation in the Judgment of Taste

them seem clad in strange skintight diaphanous quasi-leotards, blue in the upper left, green in the upper right, and pink at the bottom middle. They look oddly like acrobats. But then that bottom middle figure, who is crouching, is depicted as balancing on the tips of two splayed toes of his unflexed right foot – it is an impossible foot, and impossible to ignore; it even has an emphatic little shadow. It shows that the weight of Christ’s body is not physical, but spiritual, weight; or something like that – but that doesn’t really account for the sheer awkwardness of this foot. Does it pull me out of the picture, or give me a further way in? I’m not sure. Is it meant to be a kind of provocation, this foot, to force that question? Actually, now that I say that, it seems relevant somehow that the whole picture has a theatrical or artificial air. Not just with the pseudo-acrobats: there is no visible setting or background – just one dramatic lone cloud, and a vague swampy brown that could be earth just as well as it could be a stage floor. At the same time, the facial expression of the impossibly-footed figure, for example, is anything but artificial; its grief is natural and quietly moving. It is because this kind of exploratory engagement has a certain structure or internal logic that it deserves the name of play. Play – or at least the sort of play to which Kant’s “free play” is akin – is improvisational and guided by feeling. It is characterized by pleasure, not in the sense that every moment of it is pleasurable, much less uniformly pleasurable, but in the sense that it is, as a whole, (successful) play only to the extent that it sustains itself through pleasure. What carries play forward is pleasure. When pleasure wanes sufficiently or ceases altogether, play stalls or breaks down. The putting together and building up (“composition” and “unification”) of the Kantian free play is, likewise, improvisational and guided by feeling. It is neither arbitrary nor rudderless. I find or feel my way. I drop a line when (I feel that) it has grown cold, or petered out, or run itself aground. Another line might feel “live” – I (feel that I) am on to something, and so I keep going with it. This is what Kant is pointing to when he says, in the opening of the fourth paragraph of §, that the state of mind proper to the judgment of taste is a feeling of the free play of the powers of the mind. 

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Thinking of the free play as exemplified by such forms of reflection means that I face a reasonable worry. Does this not conflict with Kant’s insistence that the judgment of taste is not based on concepts? I address this worry in Chapter . It strikes me that Kantian free play bears certain fascinating similarities with play in Winnicott’s work (see, for example, “Playing: A Theoretical Statement” and “Playing: Creative Activity and the Search for the Self,” in Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, )).

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The powers of cognition, which are put into play through this [viz., the given] representation, are hereby in a free play, since no determinate concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition. Thus the state of mind in this representation must be that of a feeling of the free play of the powers of representation in a given representation for [zu] a cognition in general. (CJ V:)

The absence of a determinate concept or rule means two things: feeling directs free play, and being put into free play is a matter of feeling moved to free play. For Kant (as for Winnicott), pleasure is the name for the condition under which play sustains itself. This pleasure . . . has a causality in itself, namely that of sustaining the state of the representation itself and the occupation of the cognitive powers without further intention. We stay with the consideration of the beautiful because this consideration strengthens and reproduces itself [sich selbst stärkt und reproduziert]. (CJ V:)

I feel the productiveness of my aesthetic reflection or consideration as pleasure; and it is so far as it feels productive, so far as it affords pleasure, that I stay with it. A doubled reflexivity in the second sentence is a bit difficult to register concisely in English. It arises from the addition of selbst (“itself”) to the already reflexive verbs conjugated in sich stärkt und reproduziert. The effect is: this pleasurable reflection sustains itself by itself. It draws its life from itself and from nowhere else. We are back to the topic of the judgment of taste’s feeling of pleasure, the topic that set § in motion. The sentence introducing the state of mind proper to the judgment of taste is “notorious,” recall, because as it is usually read it has Kant saying something very confused about the pleasure of the judgment of taste, namely that it is a consequence of the universal communicability of the state of mind. If we read the sentence as I have suggested, as introducing the state of mind (not as object, but) as bearer of the capacity for universal communication, an alternative opens up. The pleasure I feel in a judgment of taste results from my state of mind’s capacity for universal communication, for, that is, making universally communicable. What Kant is trying to say is that the pleasure comes from, is felt as a result of, the exercising of that capacity.  

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Guyer and Matthews translate Betrachtung as “contemplation,” but since Kant also uses Contemplation, I prefer “consideration.” “The state of mind of a will determined by something . . . is in itself already a feeling of pleasure and is identical with it, thus does not follow from it as an effect. . . . Now it is similar with the pleasure in the aesthetic judgment, except that here it is merely contemplative and does not produce an interest in the object” (CJ V:).

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Communication and Animation in the Judgment of Taste

Why does the exercising of this capacity result in pleasure? Kant’s answer has to do with what he calls animation or enlivenment (Belebung). In the free play of the cognitive powers, the mind is animated, and this animation is pleasurable. There are two dimensions to this animation – it is animation to (something), and also animation by (something). Kant brings out both dimensions when he says: The animation of both faculties (the imagination and the understanding) to an indeterminate activity, in which they are nonetheless, by means of the prompt of [vermittelst des Anlasses] the given representation, of one voice [einhellig], namely that which belongs to a cognition in general, is the sensation whose universal communicability the judgment of taste puts forward. (CJ V:)

What the mind is animated to is the activity of rendering universally communicable the aesthetic encounter with the object. What the mind is animated by is the object as it is encountered. So far, I have focused on the “to” dimension, the animation to rendering communicable. I touched upon the latter – being animated by – when I described the state of mind of the aesthetic encounter in terms having to do with feeling and desire. The state of mind is the way or mood in which I have the representation, that of feeling that there is “something else” there that I want to articulate. To feel this is to feel – to be – animated by the object. This is where the “subjective relation” (CJ V:) of the cognitive powers comes in. They are in a relation of mutual “attunement” (or “agreement”). As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Kant draws upon a raft of terms meaning “attunement,” most frequently Zusammenstimmung and Übereinstimmung, that are based on the word for “voice” (Stimme). Kant also puts the relation as being “of one voice [einhellig]” (CJ V:) and in “harmony” (CJ V:). In German as in English, all of these terms can have, may well suggest, a musical significance. If Kant wishes them to suggest music, then he wishes us to associate the crux of the judgment of beauty with an art (of the sort that itself aspires to beauty). Crucially, their mutual relation of attunement or harmony is at the same time a relation of attunement to, or harmony with, the world. They agree, are attuned, in finding the given object to call for aesthetic reflection upon it. I become “conscious” of this attunement only “through sensation of the effect that consists of the facilitated play of both powers of 

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Translating postulieren as “put forward” rather than “postulate.” Adelung’s dictionary relates the verb to the practice of unanimously electing a bishop. I thank Dieter Schönecker for pointing out that postulieren can diverge from “postulate.”

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the mind (imagination and understanding), animated through mutual attunement” (CJ V:). That is, I become conscious of my mind’s attunement with itself, and so with the world, by feeling animated by the object to a free play with it. It is by giving full weight to the “animated by” aspect of the aesthetic encounter with the object that we can begin to appreciate the heart of Kant’s thought about the source of the pleasure of the judgment of taste. The pleasure is in the relation of my state of mind with the object it is in. It is not pleasure in a quality of my state of mind or “mental state” in or by itself. In other words, it is pleasure in my mind’s being animated or enlivened (by an object), not pleasure in my mind’s being “alive.” It is to flag this point, this directedness to or intentionality of pleasure toward the object and not (only) the state of mind, that Kant frequently, carefully, writes “the pleasure in the object” where “the pleasure” might seem clear enough and indeed preferable for its brevity – for example, in the “notorious” sentence of the third paragraph. The object doesn’t figure in my experience merely as a fortuitous springboard for a pleasurable experience of mental life. My pleasure is pleasure in the object as animating. I take pleasure in finding myself to be animated, brought to life, by the object, its inviting me to reflect upon it and, in particular, upon the way in which it brings me to life. A characterizing feature of Kant’s discussion of the judgment of taste, which no section of the book manifests quite as vividly as §, is the delicate play between (on the one hand) distinguishing the judgment of taste from cognition, and (on the other hand) revealing their deep kinship, a kinship that is of the highest importance because it is by virtue of it that the judgment of taste earns the right to demand agreement. The kinship emerges in § in terms of the “subjective relation” of attunement of the powers of cognition in the judgment of taste. “[E]ach determinate cognition does always rest upon that relation as its subjective condition” (CJ V:), Kant says. § ends this way: 

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There is, I think, a widespread impression that Kant does regard the judgment of taste as selfinvolved in some such way: one enjoys the play of one’s mind that an object somehow makes possible, but otherwise the object itself drops away. The object is at best the opportunity or site for a pleasure that it does not itself enter into. Understandably, this idea is found to be unappealing: “The [Kantian] suggestion that I’m just enjoying the harmonious working of my faculties strikes me as a non-starter!” (Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Art and the Aesthetic: The Religious Dimension,” The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy (Oxford: Blackwell, ), p. ). I agree with the sentiment, but the suggestion is not Kant’s. The reflection of the judgment of taste is also “the reflection of the subject on his own state (of pleasure or displeasure)” (CJ V:–).

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Communication and Animation in the Judgment of Taste A representation that, as singular and without comparison to others, nevertheless has an attunement [Zusammenstimmung] with the conditions of universality, which constitutes the business of the understanding in general, brings the faculties of cognition into the proportionate attunement [Stimmung] that we require for all cognition. (CJ V:)

We can already see the kinship Kant is pointing to in his characterization of reflective judgment. What aesthetic judgment (the judgment of taste) and cognitive reflective judgment have in common, what makes both forms of reflective judgment, is that in its reflection judgment finds itself “called upon” to find a universal for a given particular. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then the power of judgment, which subsumes the particular under it . . ., is determinative. But if only the particular is given, for which it [viz., the power of judgment] is to find the universal [wozu sie das Allgemeine finden soll], then the power of judgment is merely reflective. (CJ V:)

As reflective, the power of judgment “is to” find a universal for the given particular. In the case of empirical cognition, this means finding an empirical concept; in the case of the judgment of taste, it means rendering universally communicable the “other” unity of the given representation. In both cases, it means finding that what I am given calls upon me to render it universally communicable. We saw earlier that cognition requires reflection to settle the question of what conceptualization of the object is apt, or matters. The underlying need of judgment is the need for the world to matter – for it to permit our finding certain ways of conceiving it to matter (here and now) more, to be more apt, than others. The pleasure in being animated by the object in the judgment of taste is connected with its showing or suggesting that the world answers to this need. 

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Determinative judgment is not simply the same thing in reverse – as though there the universal were given and judgment were to find the particular for it. In reflective judgment, by contrast with determinative judgment, “only the particular is given,” Kant says: this means that in determinative judgment both universal and particular are given; the task of judgment here is not to “find” anything, but to subsume a given particular under a given universal.

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 

Subjectivity and Recognition in the Judgment of Taste

The guiding issue of Kant’s critique of taste is, as we have seen, the judgment of taste’s pairing of subjectivity with normativity: its twofold peculiarity. In the Introduction, I sought to make the general idea of such a peculiarity – something odd and distinctive that calls for investigation – intuitively vivid without (yet) getting into the details of Kant’s ways of working it out. I focused there on the sheer idea of treating pleasure as something one might demand of others, setting aside the question of why, or indeed whether, its basis in pleasure should make it reasonable to regard the judgment of taste as “subjective.” That is the question to which I now turn. So far as I can tell, Kant never calls the judgment of taste, or any form of judgment, “subjective.” But he does accept talk of a judgment’s being objective, as when he remarks that the judgment of taste behaves “as if” it were objective (CJ V:). This remark also indicates that (in Kant’s view) the judgment of taste isn’t objective. And it does seem clear that the alternative to objectivity is subjectivity, for Kant, although there is room for nuance: the judgment of taste is not “merely subjective,” Kant says (CJ V:; emphasis altered). As Kant tends to wield the term, it is some essential aspect of the judgment of taste – its determining ground, its universality, or its purposiveness (for example) – that he calls “subjective.” For the sake of brevity, and because I think it does not distort Kant’s thought, I will continue to put the point in terms of the nonobjectivity, or the subjectivity, of the judgment of taste. Exactly what Kant has in mind by “objectivity” and “subjectivity” in such contexts is not obvious. He moves between the claim that the judgment of taste is not objective and other claims or formulations – the judgment of taste is not cognition (not cognitive judgment); the judgment of taste is not based on concepts; the 

As will emerge, Kant should be understood to mean that in certain respects (but not in others) the judgment of taste behaves “as if” it were objective.

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judgment of taste is not the attribution of a property (viz., “beauty”) to an object – without making clear just how they are related to one another. What is clearer is that Kant ties the subjectivity of the judgment of taste to the nature of the judgment of taste’s basis in pleasure. In this chapter, I want to pursue the question of what such claims should be understood to mean. As we’ll see, it has been argued that Kant’s denials of objectivity and the rest to the judgment of taste turn out to be unwarranted, and should therefore be given up on his behalf. Revising Kant along these lines would have drastic repercussions, for it would effectively mean giving up the guiding idea of Kant’s critique of taste: that the judgment of taste poses a special problem. I hope to provide an alternative to such revisionism, to show, in other words, that with these claims Kant registers genuine, and significant, features of the judgment of taste. This means explaining how the reading I offered in Chapter  accommodates them – explaining, for example, why the “articulating” I interpreted aesthetic judging as amounting to does not flout Kant’s idea that the judgment of taste is not based on concepts. It is not the sheer fact of involving pleasure that makes a judgment subjective, for Kant. There are objective judgments that involve pleasure. In the judgment of the good, one conceptualizes the object as good, and this conceptualization yields or (in the case of the morally good) is at once pleasure. If the pleasure of the judgment of taste were likewise based on a concept, then the judgment would be objective. There would be no special question about its claim to normativity, in Kant’s view, because there is no problem about understanding the claim to normativity of an objective judgment. Thus it is true that pleasure itself “can never become a concept of an object” (FI XX:), and that by means of pleasure alone “I cognize nothing in the object of the representation” (CJ V:). But pleasure can be, as it is in the judgment of the good, anchored in conceptualization. The subjectivity of the judgment of taste has to do with the fact that in its case the feeling of pleasure has no such anchor in conceptualization. The feeling of pleasure in the judgment of the agreeable is likewise not anchored in conceptualization. Correspondingly, Kant grants the status of “subjectivity” to it as well. Of course, the judgment of taste and the  

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The first two are frequent; for the third, see, for example, CJ V:, , and . See CJ V:; see CJ V: and  on pleasure in the morally good or the good in itself. There are also cognitive (objective) judgments that involve sensation. When I judge the meadows to be green on the basis of seeing their greenness, I am making a cognitive judgment about the color of the meadows into which my sensation of greenness is integrated. Kant insists that such “objective sensation” be distinguished from feeling or “subjective sensation” (CJ V:).

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judgment of the agreeable are otherwise quite different. The judgment of taste is marked by the disinterestedness of its pleasure in or liking for the object, and by its demand for agreement, its claim to universal validity (its claim to speak with a “universal voice” (CJ V:)), which the judgment of the agreeable, marked by the interestedness of its pleasure or liking, does not make. In deeming the judgment of taste to be (subjective but) not “merely subjective” (CJ V:), Kant implies that the judgment of the agreeable is, by contrast, merely subjective. For Kant, therefore, the subjectivity or nonobjectivity of the judgment of taste does not boil down to what is at stake in a remark like “Who’s to say whether X is Y; it’s all subjective.” It’s not hard to see why it comes naturally to speak of “subjectivity” in a remark of this familiar sort: it has to do with a certain conception of judgments of Y-ness as tethered – indexed or relativized – to a particular subject. That conception seems indeed to fit Kant’s vision of the agreeable and the “mere subjectivity” of its judgment. If Kant’s nomenclature is not to be infelicitous, the “subjectivity” of the judgment of taste must, for its own part, signal something beyond the way in which the object is not involved (it is not cognized, no would-be property “beauty” is attributed to it, etc.); it must have something to do with the way in which the subject is involved. A couple of Kant’s remarks in the opening paragraph of the Critique of Judgment hint at such a connection. “In order to decide whether or not something is beautiful,” Kant says in the very first sentence, we do not relate the representation by means of the understanding to the object for cognition, but rather relate it by means of the imagination (perhaps combined with the understanding) to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure. The judgment of taste is therefore not a cognitive judgment, hence not a logical one, but is rather aesthetic, by which is understood one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective. (CJ V:)

If we want to know whether the painting we are looking at was done in oils, we inspect its surface (or consult the museum label, the catalog, the art history book). The question is whether the concept “oil painting” applies to it, and we turn to the world for our answer. But if the question is whether the painting is beautiful or has aesthetic merit, we see whether we can find it to invite and sustain aesthetic judging. That is, we see whether we can find ourselves animated by it. In this case, we turn back toward ourselves (“the subject”) in a movement of self-inquiry. Through this “relation” of the representation – to “the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure” – “nothing at all in the object is designated; rather, in it the

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subject feels itself [sich selbst], [feels] how it is affected [affiziert] by the representation” (CJ V:). Although Kant’s language might suggest that this turn back toward the subject is by the same token a retreat from the object itself, I have argued that this is not the case. The self-exploration of the aesthetic judging of the painting is at once an exploration of the painting. Insofar as it (rightly) demands agreement, the judgment of taste is “similar” to objective judgments (CJ V:). That’s what Kant means when he says that we treat the judgment of taste as if it were objective (CJ V:), and as if beauty were a property of the object (CJ V:). More exactly, the judgment of taste is like empirical (rather than pure) cognitive judgments in making “a claim to be valid for everyone” that is not a claim to a priori validity (CJ V:). Yet we don’t treat the judgment of taste as if it were empirical cognitive judgment, and beauty as if it were an empirical property, in every respect. The judgment of taste is (necessarily or essentially) based on the judge’s own, first-personal, feeling of pleasure. We don’t accept a judgment of taste that would base itself on the feelings of others. Nor do we allow that a judgment of taste could be arrived at through the application of principles. The judgment of taste is (necessarily or essentially) singular, a judgment about an individual object rather than all or some objects of a kind. In these respects, we treat the judgment as if it were “merely subjective.” It is easy to see why Kant compares the judgment of taste to a “singular judgment of experience, e.g., one made by someone who perceives a mobile droplet of water in a rock crystal,” which “rightly demands that anyone else must also find it so” (CJ V:) and which is, by definition, made about an individual object on the basis of one’s own perception of it. But the differences remain. For example, testimony could allow someone who is not in a position to perceive the rock crystal to believe it to contain a mobile droplet of water, and someone who does perceive it but who doesn’t see it the same way can 

 

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“[L]ike all empirical judgments,” the judgment of taste “cannot promise any objective necessity and make a claim to a priori validity. . . . [T]he judgment of taste, like every other empirical judgment, also only makes a claim to be valid for everyone, which, in spite of its intrinsic contingency, is always possible” (CJ V:). Kant is not saying or implying that the judgment of taste’s claim to validity takes the same form as that of an empirical cognitive judgment. His point is merely that their claims to validity are alike in not being claims to a priori validity, by contrast with pure cognitive judgment (e.g., “Every event has a cause”). These are further features of the grammar of aesthetic judgment, which the analytic is charged with bringing out. I will return to their meaning and force; just now precision is not important. The example strikes me as aesthetically apt given Kant’s vision of aesthetic judgment. The scene of aesthetic encounter is a scene of finding there to be something moving, as-if animate, in an object.

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

ignore what her eyes tell her (or don’t tell her), and defer instead to the observations of others. And no doubt there are useful principles one could rely on, such as that under such-and-such circumstances mobile water droplets usually develop within rock crystals. Kant does not spell out the nature of the “demand” issued in an empirical cognitive judgment, but the point is presumably that to make the judgment that the rock crystal contains a mobile droplet of water (for example) is to make a truth claim, and specifically a claim about an empirical, factual matter. To demand the agreement of anyone else is to claim that anyone else ought to agree on the facts. Various conditions will come into play, of course. It is anyone who undertakes to know about the constitution of this rock crystal, or about whether it contains a droplet, who ought to believe that it contains a droplet. Anyone who observes the rock crystal, or who observes it and takes up the question of its constitution or the question of whether it contains a droplet, ought to see (“find”) it to contain a droplet. In any case, to fail to meet the demand (when the conditions for its pertinence are met) is either to be wrong about the facts, to believe incorrectly, or to fail fully to grasp one or more of the concepts (“rock crystal” or “mobile droplet of water”). Kant’s idea seems to be that in the judgment of taste pleasure somehow “takes the place” of a concept in empirical cognitive judgment; but, as mentioned a moment ago, pleasure is not a concept, so it cannot work in the way a concept does. Is Kant suggesting that the judgment of taste makes the same kind of demand for agreement as an empirical cognitive judgment, but that the demand cannot be met in the same way as it can in the case of empirical cognitive judgment, since it cannot be met by applying the concept “beauty” or some other would-be aesthetic concept? Or is Kant suggesting that the judgment of taste makes a different, perhaps distinctive, kind of demand for agreement? In that event, what is the nature of its demand for 





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Kant says that the judgment rightly demands agreement because the judge has made it “in accordance with the general conditions of the determinative power of judgment, under the laws of a possible experience in general” (CJ V:). Strictly speaking, these laws justify the judgment’s claim to having a truth value, having “objective validity” in the first Critique’s sense. The further claim, the claim to truth, is justified by whatever it is that makes the judgment true. “What is strange and anomalous is only this: that it is not an empirical concept, but rather a feeling of pleasure (consequently not a concept at all) which, through the judgment of taste, is nevertheless demanded of everyone and combined with its representation, just as if it were a predicate connected with the cognition of the object” (CJ V:). According to Hannah Ginsborg, Kant says that a person making a judgment of taste “lays claim to everyone’s assent ‘in the same way’ as” the one who judges the rock crystal to contain a droplet, and this shows that the “ought” of the judgment of taste “is not supposed to be different in kind from that implicit in any empirical cognitive judgement” (“The Pleasure of Judgement: Kant and the

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agreement? And what sort of thing, what kind of “judgment,” is the judgment of taste?

. The Case for Revisionism But perhaps such questions are moot. They will be if, on closer inspection, it turns out that Kant does not succeed in establishing that the judgment of taste has the distinctive character he claims for it, or, specifically, that it is not objective. Karl Ameriks develops an impressive case for this position. In Ameriks’s view, the considerations that Kant adduces in support of denying objectivity to the judgment of taste fall short: in no substantive sense of the term does he give us reason to withhold the status of objectivity from the judgment of taste. Consider, first, the claim that the judgment of taste does not proceed by applying a concept. Ameriks argues that it is at most in a merely stipulative sense of “concept” that the judgment of taste can be construed as distinct from concept application, much less as devoid of concepts at all. At best, what Kant shows is just that certain kinds or uses of concepts are not involved, or that beauty cannot be determined from concepts alone but also requires particular sensory input. But such features are hardly restricted to the judgment of taste: the latter is true of empirical cognitive judgments, which, of course, Kant grants to be objective. Kant also appeals, or might be read as appealing, to the claim that pleasure “cannot have an objective reference,” that (in other words) it cannot constitute a mode of awareness of a feature belonging to an object. Ameriks objects that the claim is simply a warrantless assumption. (As I mentioned, it is Kant’s own position that pleasure in the good is in the goodness (for something else, or in itself ) that acts or states of affairs genuinely possess.) While, further, we can grant that pleasure is “subjective” if this is taken to mean that it “exists in us,” the concession is harmless, since on the Kantian view all empirical judgments involve



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Possibility of Taste,” in The Normativity of Nature, p. , n. ). But this misreads Kant. What the person making the judgment of taste does “in just the same way [ebenso]” as the one judging the rock crystal is to “rightly make claim to the assent of everyone else, even though this judgment is empirical and singular” (CJ V:). Kant does not say, and it does not follow, that the nature of the claim to assent is “just the same.” See Karl Ameriks, “How to Save Kant’s Deduction of Taste as Objective,” in Interpreting Kant’s Critiques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –, and “New Views on Kant’s Judgment of Taste,” in Interpreting Kant’s Critiques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –. Ameriks, “How to Save Kant’s Deduction,” p. .

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elements that are “subjective” in this sense. Ameriks rejects two further kinds of considerations on the grounds that they too are not unique to the judgment of taste. Kant notes that we don’t make aesthetic judgments by surveying and comparing the opinions of others, but “one could argue similarly that there are some non-aesthetic judgments (e.g. immediate observation reports) where non-reliance on a comparison of others’ reports is also guaranteed as a matter of meaning.” And the apparent nonmeasurability of beauty and absence of laws of beauty that Kant cites attach to so-called secondary qualities as well. For all that Kant says (or that one could say on his behalf ), Ameriks concludes, beauty – and aesthetic qualities more generally – can be taken to be “objective” and “conceptual.” Indeed, Ameriks calls for a “mild revisionism” in our reading of Kant, which involves conceding that “precisely for Kant’s own purposes it would ultimately be better to say that taste is conceptual and objective,” despite Kant’s frequent remarks to the contrary. While this approach foregoes taking the text at its letter, according to Ameriks it is nevertheless more faithful than its main alternatives can be to some of Kant’s own deepest commitments. Thus mild revisionism straightforwardly upholds the basic tenet of the first Critique that judgment requires concepts, unlike the “orthodox” approach, which “holds on to the language of non-conceptuality and non-objectivity, but at the price of making the nature of Kantian taste unduly mysterious.” And by contrast with a “strong” revisionism that begins by abandoning Kant’s idea of the judgment of taste as laying claim to universal validity and hence forfeits the motivation for the deduction of the judgment of taste, mild revisionism preserves both. Because the term “objective” is not self-explanatory, it is not immediately obvious what we commit ourselves to if we heed Ameriks’s call.    

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Ameriks, “How to Save Kant’s Deduction,” pp. –. Ameriks, “How to Save Kant’s Deduction,” pp. –. Ameriks, “New Views,” p. . See also “How to Save Kant’s Deduction,” pp.  and . Ameriks, “New Views,” p. . Citing (Ginsborg’s translation of ) Kant’s remark at CJ V: that “judgments must . . . allow of being universally communicated, for otherwise they would not be entitled to any agreement with the object,” Ameriks contends that “[s]uch ‘agreement’ is precisely what one ordinarily understands by objectivity, and Kant’s statement here is meant explicitly as both a general claim about judgment as such and a specific claim about aesthetic judgment” (p. ). Mild revisionism has the advantage, Ameriks argues, of upholding both claims. Ameriks, “New Views,” pp. –. Ameriks says that “Kant is best understood as presenting what ‘we’ – that is, current theoreticians using the standard terminology of our own era – should rather term an objective account of taste” (“Taste, Conceptuality, and Objectivity,” in Interpreting Kant’s Critiques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. ), but the term is used less univocally than this remark suggests.

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Subjectivity and Recognition in the Judgment of Taste

Some of Ameriks’s own glosses are compatible with understanding the judgment of taste’s objectivity to consist in its being subject to a standard of appropriateness of some sort (other than that of truth). Other remarks – for example, that “a Kantian ought to acknowledge the objectivity of taste (which, in this context, means that it rests on objectively beautiful and immediately perceivable natural forms)” – suggest that what Ameriks has in mind is conceding the judgment of taste to have a truth value and beauty to be “part of the fabric of the world,” available to be encountered by us.

. A Problem for Objectivism? Hannah Ginsborg has challenged Ameriks’s assessment as failing to appreciate the “powerful reasons” for denying the objectivity of beauty that flow from the autonomy of the judgment of taste. It is a central insight of Kant’s that autonomy is a condition of the judgment of taste, Ginsborg argues, but “objectivism” or “realism” about beauty – the contention that beauty resides in the world – cannot explain this condition, and so Kant has (and gives us) serious grounds for rejecting it. The condition of autonomy received brief mention above. It is the requirement that one make one’s judgment of taste on the basis of one’s own pleasure in the object and not on the basis of what others say or feel about it. Take someone who does not find “a building, a view, or a poem beautiful,” although “a hundred voices . . . all praise it highly” (CJ V:). He can, of course, pretend to like the object. He “can even begin to doubt whether he has adequately formed his taste by acquaintance with a sufficient number of objects of a certain kind (just as one who 

   

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See Ameriks’s remark that the need for a deduction “is lost if the relevant judgments are not even thought of as valid, as ‘holding for all’ in the proper context, and as being in this core sense objective and not merely subjective” (“Taste, Conceptuality, and Objectivity,” p. ). Ameriks, “Taste, Conceptuality, and Objectivity,” p. . The phrase is J. L. Mackie’s (Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), p. ). Ginsborg, “Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste,” Kants Ästhetik/Kant’s Aesthetics/L’esthétique de Kant, ed. Herman Parret (Berlin: de Gruyter, ), p. . As Ginsborg uses the term, an “objectivism” about beauty holds that beauty is in the world, there to be encountered by us – the basic commitment of what goes by the name of “realism” about beauty. I will therefore speak of “objectivism” and “realism” interchangeably in describing her argument (although Ginsborg does not use the latter term). Just what “objectivism” or “realism” entails – and what Ginsborg in particular takes it to entail – will shortly become my main focus. Kant discusses the condition of autonomy under that name in CJ §, but the line of thought opened with this example (from §) is clearly connected.

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believes himself to recognize something in the distance as a forest, which everyone else regards as a town, doubts the judgment of his own eyes)” (CJ V:). But the person seeking to identify what lies in the distance can rationally take the fact that everyone – or many others – see a town as grounds for adopting their judgment and abandoning “the judgment of his own eyes” (CJ V:). He can discount his own experience. This is what the person judging of beauty cannot do. [W]hat he does see clearly is this: that the approval of others provides no valid proof for the judging of beauty, that others may perhaps see and observe for him, and that what many have seen in one way that he believes himself to have seen otherwise may serve him as a sufficient ground of proof for a theoretical, hence a logical judgment, but that what has pleased others can never serve as the ground of an aesthetic judgment. (CJ V:)

When judging of beauty, we are bound to our own experience. Ginsborg reads Ameriks as arguing not merely for objectivism about beauty but also for a particular substantive account of beauty. Pairing a construal of secondary qualities as “simply a particular complex of primary qualities” with the thought that beauty can be understood on analogy with secondary qualities, this account takes beauty to be a complex of primary qualities that causes us to experience “impressions of beauty, that is, feelings of pleasure of a certain kind.” But this account, Ginsborg argues, cannot uphold the condition of autonomy. For it must allow that “the feelings of other people would provide reasons for me to judge one way or the other on the question of an object’s beauty. This is because they would serve as evidence for the presence or absence of the pleasure-causing property.” The fact that so many others find the building before us, for example, to be beautiful would give me reason to accede to their judgment, just as would the fact that they all see it as red (rather than golden), or as a church (rather than a library). 

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Ameriks, “How to Save Kant’s Deduction,” p. . As Ameriks points out, Kant’s texts do not present an unequivocal view of secondary qualities. Some remarks in the first Critique indicate that colors (for example) “cannot rightly be regarded as properties of things”: see A–/B. But in the third Critique Kant speaks of color in terms of “objective sensation,” through which an object is represented (CJ V:). This is Ginsborg’s gloss in “Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste,” p. . Ameriks objects that his proposal was advanced not in full voice but rather as part of a “dialectical strategy” aimed at establishing that “aesthetic features can still be said to be at least as objective as typical secondary ones, for all that Kant’s arguments show” (“New Views,” p. ). Ginsborg, “Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste,” p. . For Ameriks’s reply, see “New Views,” pp. –: Ameriks effectively calls for revisionism regarding the condition of autonomy as well (“How could it be in principle impossible to say that if a certain ‘objective environment’ is there then a certain aesthetic judgment is appropriate?”).

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Subjectivity and Recognition in the Judgment of Taste

For a version of objectivism that looks better suited to deal with the autonomy challenge, Ginsborg turns to the account of value elaborated (without explicit reference to Kant’s aesthetics) in the work of John McDowell and David Wiggins. For the sake of concision, I will follow the practice of referring to this account as “sensibility theory.” Like Ameriks, the sensibility theorist appeals to an analogy with secondary qualities in thinking about beauty – and values more generally – as part of the fabric of the world. But sensibility theory denies something that the identification of beauty with a complex of primary qualities entails: that secondary qualities and values “can in principle be characterized in a way that makes no reference to sensation or feeling.” On the contrary, for secondary qualities as for values “no adequate conception of what it is for a thing to possess it is available except in terms of how the thing would, in suitable circumstances, affect a subject – a sentient being.” For example, what it is for an object to be red – an object’s being red – is understood in terms of its being such as to look red in certain circumstances. Values and secondary qualities thus stand in an essential or internal relation to our sensibility. Sensibility theory argues that values and secondary qualities may also be granted to belong to the fabric of the world. The argument for this claim takes a “therapeutic” form. The phenomenology of value experience is, according to sensibility theory, realist: values present themselves as part of the fabric of the world. If the position that accepts that phenomenology at face value seems to be on the back foot, at an obvious explanatory disadvantage by comparison with antirealism, this is due to the influence of a picture of reality that takes primary qualities as its model for the mindindependence that characterizes reality. This picture has it that for something to be real, it would have to be “like a primary quality in being simply there, independently of human sensibility” or “brutely and absolutely there.” On this picture, taking a realist view of values means accepting a heavy burden (if the view is to amount to more than a stipulative intuitionism), that of explaining how sensibility-internal qualities could 

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See John McDowell, “Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World” and “Values and Secondary Qualities,” both in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), and David Wiggins, “A Sensible Subjectivism,” in Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). In what follows I focus on McDowell’s texts. Ginsborg, “Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste,” p. . McDowell, “Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World,” p. . McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” pp.  and .

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possibly have the sensibility-independence modeled by a primary quality. Sensibility theory seeks to expose the primary quality model for reality as the unexamined shared ground of both sides of the traditional antirealist/ realist debate about values, and to show that it is not compulsory, that it can (and indeed should) be given up. The spirit of the enterprise is to recover the richer conception of reality that is revealed, once the unnecessary and impoverishing model is abandoned, to have been available all along. Nothing stands in the way of taking the status of values to be as the phenomenology has it. The upshot, for our purposes, can be specified by drawing a distinction between two senses of “subjectivity” and hence of “objectivity.” The first has already been mentioned: a quality is subjective in the first sense insofar as it is internally related to our sensibility, as described above, and objective otherwise. A quality is objective in the second sense insofar as it is “there” independently of any particular apparent experience of it or “there to be experienced, as opposed to being a mere figment of the subjective state that purports to be an experience of it.” For example, “[a]n object’s being such as to look red is independent of its actually looking red to anyone on any particular occasion,” and so redness is objective in this second sense. Objectivity in the first sense is not a condition of objectivity in the second. In other words, the subjectivity in the first sense of secondary qualities and values (= they are sensibility-internal) is perfectly compatible with their objectivity in the second sense (= they are individual-independent). And the crucial claim is that objectivity in the second sense captures all that we genuinely need or should want – all that bears wanting – in a notion of reality. There is no philosophical obstacle to granting that an experience is “of an objective reality,” is there to be encountered, when its object is independent of any particular purported experience of it. Recall that the point of Ginsborg’s introduction of the thought of McDowell and Wiggins was to develop an aesthetic objectivism or realism that is not vulnerable, as the version that Ginsborg attributes to Ameriks is, to allowing a preponderance of disagreement to give me reason to discount my own experience. The proposal as sketched thus far will not accomplish 

  

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As should the idea that keeps it in place, that the question of the relation to reality of an area of our thought and language (in this case, the evaluative aspects of our lives) would have to be addressed from an “external standpoint,” outside of our evaluative and other standpoints. McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” p. . McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” p. . McDowell, “Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World,” p. , n. . See also “Values and Secondary Qualities,” pp.  and .

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Subjectivity and Recognition in the Judgment of Taste

this end. After all, like that earlier version, it has pressed the idea of construing beauty on analogy with secondary qualities, and no one would deny that others can judge for me in the case of secondary qualities. The viability of this proposal as an advance over the version Ginsborg attributes to Ameriks depends on locating a relevant disanalogy between secondary qualities and values. And McDowell highlights a disanalogy that appears to fit the bill. To make a secondary quality judgment is to judge the object to be such as to elicit a certain experience, but a value judgment represents its object as meriting a certain response. (McDowell suggests that this disanalogy reflects a disanalogy concerning the “possibility of criticism” in the two cases. I think it would be better to say that it reflects a difference concerning the meaning of criticism in each case. If someone doesn’t see a stoplight as red, then certainly something is going wrong. The person is not having the color experience that the stoplight normally elicits, or that it should elicit in her if all were in order with her vision and the viewing conditions in which she find herself. But we do not regard the stoplight as meriting being seen as red; we do not fault her for failing to meet it with a response it merits – the kind of criticism that is fully at home in the domain of values.) The disanalogy blocks the challenge to which the account that Ginsborg attributes to Ameriks is vulnerable. To judge something to be beautiful is to judge it to be such as to merit a certain response. And it is not irrational for me to remain unmoved by the fact that many or even all others do not find beautiful what I find beautiful: I might believe that they are all failing to give the object the response that it merits. But while Ginsborg points out that this revised objectivism is an improvement over its predecessor, her real aim is to show that even so it – and indeed any objectivism – cannot contend with an implication of the condition of autonomy that Kant does not mention explicitly: that I am barred from judging to be beautiful (or not beautiful) something that I do not myself experience. Suppose I am told by many maximally reliable sources that an object I have not seen is beautiful. In terms of the approach we are now considering, what I am being told is that the object merits a certain kind of pleasure. Why should this not constitute rational grounds for me to judge that it does indeed merit that pleasure, even though I have not seen it myself? The route to discounting the responses of others that  

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McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” p. . McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” p. .

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was available in the case in which I met with disagreement is no longer available, for now I do not have a countervailing response of my own on which to rely. So I “would seem to have no reason not to concur – at least provisionally – with the general verdict.” In Ginsborg’s view, this condition – that I must have firsthand experience of the object in order to judge of its beauty – poses a serious problem for objectivism about beauty in general. If the quality of beauty were independent of each apparent experience of it, “there would be no reason, at least in principle, why someone should not assert the presence of the quality itself without herself having had the experience.” Kant denies that beauty meets this requirement of independence, according to Ginsborg, and that is why he denies objectivity to beauty and its judgment. While the experience of beauty presents itself to us “as awareness of some quality in the object that is independent of the experience,” the matter is not as the phenomenology would have it: “the quality apparently perceived in the experience is not in fact independent of it.” Strictly speaking, to deny that beauty is independent of each apparent experience of it is to say that an object’s being beautiful depends on some experience through which it is apparently perceived. Ginsborg advances an even stronger claim: that beauty – an object’s being beautiful – is dependent on each apparent experience of it. The proposal is startling. Taking a quality to be dependent on each apparent experience of it would seem to preclude understanding its judgment to be subject to any kind of standard (be it “universal validity” or something else). Consider Kant’s construal of the agreeable. The agreeable is dependent on each particular experience of it. This is reflected in the fact that it is always, properly speaking, indexed to the subject having the experience. An object is agreeable (to me) insofar as I experience it to be

    

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Ginsborg, “Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste,” p. . Ginsborg, “Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste,” p. . Ginsborg, “Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste,” pp. –. Ginsborg, “Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste,” p. . “[B]eauty is subjective not only in [the sense in which McDowell and Wiggins grant that it is subjective, viz. internality to sensibility], but also in a deeper sense. It is subjective because its ascription to an object in any particular case depends on the sentiments of the particular human being making the ascription. Thus the subjectivity of beauty is a matter, not only of its relation to human sensibility in general, but also of its relation to the sensibility of each particular individual who makes a judgment of beauty” (Ginsborg, “Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste,” p. ). Since Ginsborg holds that someone who makes a judgment of beauty thereby actually and not merely “apparently” perceives beauty, she drops the qualifier: “The beauty perceived in an object is not independent of the experience through which it is perceived” (p. , n. ). See Section ..

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Subjectivity and Recognition in the Judgment of Taste

agreeable. If I don’t find an object to be agreeable, it isn’t; my finding it agreeable makes it agreeable (to me). As we saw a moment ago, McDowell sets the independence from individual experience that he accords to values against the status of the “mere figment” of which a hallucination (for example) purports to be an experience. Insofar as a hallucination purports to be an experience of a feature of the world, it is unlike pleasure in the agreeable. But the “mere figment” of the hallucination is like the agreeable in being dependent on each experience of it. Regarding beauty as dependent on each apparent experience of it thus threatens to fold the judgment of taste in with the judgment of the agreeable or the experience of a hallucination. As I discuss in the next section, Ginsborg evidently thinks that this threat is averted, for she maintains that the judgment of taste retains the claim to universal validity. But Ginsborg does not explain how this is compatible with the claim that beauty is dependent on each apparent experience of it. I will offer a reconstruction of what I think is her account’s best case. I will also argue that the account ends up being committed to the objectivism it is supposed to contest. First, however, let’s revisit the autonomy condition and Ginsborg’s claim that objectivism cannot justify it. What is it that one cannot do except on the basis of one’s own experience of the object? As Ginsborg puts it, the point is that apart from one’s own experience one cannot “assert,” or (I suppose Ginsborg would also allow) hold or believe, something about the object, namely that it is beautiful. I suspect that Ginsborg is right that an objectivist cannot explain why it should not be possible to assert or believe that an object is beautiful, or possesses an aesthetic quality, apart from one’s own experience of it. But I think that an important response is available to 

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I presuppose here a narrow construal of the agreeable, on which the judgment is always of an individual object on a particular occasion. Kant sometimes also seems to consider a wider version of the judgment of the agreeable, where it is a kind of thing (wine from the Canaries, for example) that I enjoy and for which I express my liking. On the wider construal, an object’s agreeableness to me is a matter of its being such as to be experienced by me as agreeable, which is independent of any particular experience of it as agreeable (as a bottle of wine I haven’t yet sampled may be of just the sort I’d like). On neither the narrow nor the wide construal do I judge with a universal voice (that is, lay claim – on the object’s behalf – to the pleasure of others). McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” p. . See, for example, Ginsborg, “Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste,” p. . See Robert Hopkins, “Kant, Quasi-Realism, and the Autonomy of Aesthetic Judgement,” European Journal of Philosophy  () for a compelling case against epistemic critiques of aesthetic testimony (i.e., against arguments for the claim that testimony cannot be a basis for aesthetic knowledge or belief ).

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objectivism: namely, that Ginsborg’s formulation of the autonomy condition misses Kant’s insight. What the autonomy condition rules out is making a judgment of taste apart from one’s own experience of the object. And the judgment of taste is not a belief or assertion about what is the case. It is a different kind of act. Thus the following argument is open to the objectivist. Aesthetic judgment, what Kant calls the judgment of taste, is an (aesthetic) evaluation of the object. Kant signals this in two ways. The first we have already seen: he casts the state of free play of the cognitive faculties on which the judgment of taste is based as a “judging” of the object. He also consistently characterizes what we do by uttering a judgment of taste as declaring or proclaiming something to be beautiful. The (uttered) judgment of taste thus belongs among what J. L. Austin calls verdictive illocutionary acts (which include evaluations of fact as well as of value). To perform a verdictive illocutionary act is not just to grant an object a certain status but to vouch for the assessment, so to speak, or to take a stand about the object. In order to be in a position to do this – so our objectivist might continue – one must have reasons for one’s evaluation. If I do not have reasons for finding a bird to be a goldfinch, a speech to be chilling, or a painting to be beautiful, then I am not in a position to take a stand in evaluating the bird as a goldfinch, the speech as chilling, or the painting as beautiful. This rules out evaluation on the basis of sheer testimony (viz., someone’s telling me, “It’s a goldfinch/chilling speech/beautiful painting”). In order to aesthetically judge an object, then, one must have aesthetic reasons for one’s judgment, and sheer testimony does not transmit reasons for finding the thing to be beautiful. Then might someone not offer me a description of the object – one that does not invoke beauty (or other qualities that I cannot judge on the basis of testimony) – that provides me with reasons on the basis of which I could evaluate it as beautiful without experiencing it myself? What rules this out, our objectivist could reply, is that one cannot understand any such description apart from experience of 

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For example: the judgment of taste is “a judgment through which we declare something to be beautiful [fu¨r schön erklären]” (CJ V:); “through a judgment of taste I declare the rose that I am gazing at to be beautiful. By contrast, the judgment that arises from the comparison of many singular ones, that roses in general are beautiful, is no longer uttered merely as aesthetic judgment, but rather as an aesthetically grounded logical judgment” (CJ V:). Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. ff. Robert Hopkins makes a similar suggestion; see his remarks on “the requirement” in “How to Be a Pessimist about Aesthetic Testimony,” Journal of Philosophy , no.  (), p. . Fleshing this out would require addressing whether I need to be able to articulate my reasons (and if so, how fully) in order to count as “possessing” them.

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Subjectivity and Recognition in the Judgment of Taste

the object; apart from experience of the object one does not know what the description means. There is a sequence in The General in which a rebuffed Buster Keaton sits on a nearby standing train’s driverod to give himself over to a state of sorrowful absorption so deep that he then fails to notice the sharp rise and fall of his perch as the train is set in motion. I would call this a beautiful sequence. But if I try to imagine that I’ve not seen the film, and that someone describes the sequence to me in great detail – adducing (say) Keaton’s forlorn unseeing gaze, or the toy-likeness with which he is hoisted – I feel that apart from having seen it for myself I can’t know what she means by “the forlornness of his gaze,” “the toy-like motion,” and so on. I don’t know what those words pick out unless I’ve seen Keaton’s forlornness myself. I would, of course, understand the words. I know what toy-likeness and expressions of forlornness are. To possess such understanding is not to understand the description I’m offered, although it is a condition of that. Our objectivist could draw upon Arnold Isenberg’s work to flesh this point out. By contrast with “ordinary” communication, critical description, the description the critic proffers in support of her judgment, does not designate the quality it communicates (or is meant to communicate). Its point, rather, is to get us to see – to give us directions for perceiving – a quality. We do see the quality by means of understanding the quality that the words designate, but the two are not the same; one may grasp what the words designate (what a forlorn face is) and perhaps even see that they fit the object (see that this is a forlorn face) without grasping the quality the critic seeks to communicate. “[T]he critic’s meaning is ‘filled in,’ ‘rounded out,’ or ‘completed’ by the act of perception, which is performed not to judge the truth of the description but, in a certain sense, to understand it.” Her words need to be filled in not because critical language is (either contingently or inherently) inadequate to the task of meaning and so of communication, but because this is what meaning and communication are in this realm; this is how the critical (“aesthetic”) meaning of words is determined. The critical meaning of the words is a matter of “experienced contents” or “sensory contents.” On this view, if 

 

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Arnold Isenberg, “Critical Communication,” in Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism: Selected Essays of Arnold Isenberg, eds. W. Callaghan, Leigh Cauman, Carl Hempel, et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), p. . Isenberg, “Critical Communication,” p. . Isenberg, “Critical Communication,” pp.  and . Isenberg draws a particularist consequence: there can be no general norms of the form “any work that has such-and-such quality is pro tanto good” (p. ).

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I do not have experience of an object at all, then in an important sense I cannot understand the reasons someone might advance for judging it to be beautiful; in an important sense I cannot understand what she means or what she is saying in calling it beautiful. My aim in sketching this objectivist defense of the condition of autonomy is not to attribute it to Kant, nor to suggest that Kant is an objectivist of this or some other stripe. Rather, I hope to have prepared the ground for a possibility to come into view: the possibility that Kant’s commitment to the condition of autonomy is likewise tied to a conception of the judgment of taste as not a belief or assertion, but as an act of a different kind. There is a related way in which tracing this objectivist path to defending autonomy is helpful. It shows that there is room to deny that the judgment of taste is a belief or assertion without necessarily espousing expressivism or some other form of antirealist projectivism. By the same token, it shows that the point need not be a meta-aesthetic one. The idea is not that the judgment of taste presents itself as a belief or assertion, while the theorist reveals it, at the meta-aesthetic level, to be something else. The idea is that even at the level of “phenomenology,” the judgment of taste does not present itself as a belief or assertion to begin with. As I mentioned, I suspect that Ginsborg is right that if one holds both that aesthetic values are part of the fabric of the world and that the judgment of taste constitutes a belief or assertion, one will have to give up the autonomy condition. The objectivist, I suggested, can save the autonomy condition by denying that the judgment of taste is a belief or assertion. Ginsborg, I think, takes the mirror-image approach to saving the autonomy condition: seeking to deny that aesthetic value is part of the fabric of the world while maintaining that the judgment of taste is a belief or assertion.

.

Questioning Ginsborg’s Account

At first glance, Ginsborg’s interpretation sounds decidedly objectivist. In fact, it shares features with sensibility theory that one might have thought 

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The most straightforward version of Isenberg-inspired objectivism would argue that what the critic “gets us to see” or “gives us directions for perceiving” are full-blown aesthetic properties and evaluations. Isenberg himself, however, holds that even when critical description succeeds in communicating (in the way that it does, not by designating), so that “a sameness of vision, of experienced content” is induced, “it may or may not be followed by agreement, or what is called ‘communion’ – a community of feeling which expresses itself in identical value judgments” (“Critical Communication,” p. ).

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available exclusively to objectivism. Like the sensibility theorist, Ginsborg holds that to experience an object as beautiful is to be aware of something about it, where this awareness takes the form of a feeling of pleasure. What I am aware of through the feeling of pleasure is that the object merits that feeling of pleasure (or, equivalently, that the pleasure is appropriate to the object). Ginsborg even says that the experience of an object as beautiful “qualif[ies] as a perception” of the object. But the construal of the experience of beauty as awareness or perception seems impossible to square with the denial that beauty is a feature of objects (much less with the denial that it is independent of the individual’s experience): Surely it entails that the object’s beauty is there to be perceived? To locate the central differences between Ginsborg’s account and sensibility theory, we need to consider the “self-referential character” of the awareness that constitutes the experience of beauty on Ginsborg’s account. The state of mind of free play of the cognitive powers is, according to Ginsborg, a self-referential state of mind wherein one is “aware that one’s present state of awareness is appropriate given one’s current objective environment” (or, simply, “appropriate to the object”). Phenomenologically, this state of mind consists of a feeling of pleasure in the object. The identification of the state with pleasure, together with the fact that it is awareness of its own appropriateness, allows us to put it this way: pleasure in the beautiful “consists in a reflective awareness of its own appropriateness or legitimacy with respect to the object.” The claim of appropriateness (or legitimacy) is meant to capture what Kant figures as the judgment of taste’s claim to universal validity: when I feel pleasure in the beautiful with respect to an object, what I am aware of is that anyone who perceives the object “ought to experience the same pleasure as I do.” Now the self-referentiality of the awareness constituting the experience of beauty does not in itself distinguish Ginsborg’s account from sensibility  

 

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See Ginsborg, “Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste,” p. . Ginsborg, “Lawfulness without a Law,” p. . See also n. : the experience of beauty is “the perception of the object as appropriate to . . . my present imaginative activity. This perception, as in the cognitive case, is at the same time a judgment.” Ginsborg, “Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste,” p. . Ginsborg, “Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste,” p.  and “Lawfulness without a Law,” p. . “[T]his self-referential act of judging is the same activity which Kant describes as the free and harmonious play of imagination and understanding” (“On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , no.  (), p. ). See also “Lawfulness without a Law,” pp. –, n. . Ginsborg, “On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste,” p. . Ginsborg, “On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste,” p. . Ginsborg, “Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste,” p. .

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theory; that is a feature common to both. What does set Ginsborg’s account apart is its construal of that awareness as “purely” self-referential. The state of mind does not simply involve or constitute awareness of its own appropriateness: it consists of this awareness. We are not to imagine a state of mind directed to an object that represents that object in some particular way or that manifests some particular feeling of pleasure in addition to making a claim to its own appropriateness to the object. There is nothing more to the state of mind – or the pleasure that it is experienced as – than the claim to its own legitimacy: “I take my mental state in perceiving an object to be universally [valid], where my mental state is nothing more than the mental state of performing that very act of judgment, that is, of taking my mental state in the object to be universally [valid].” The experience of beauty, or the judgment of taste – for Ginsborg these are one and the same – is “a judgment which, in effect, claims nothing but its own universal validity.” In “Lawfulness without a Law,” Ginsborg varies the formulation, but her fundamental position remains the same. I make a judgment of taste insofar as I take my imaginative activity not to conform to any antecedent standard, but “to set a standard for how my or anyone else’s imagination ought to function with respect to the object which elicits it,” to be, that is, as it ought to be in what Ginsborg calls “the primitive sense.” On this formulation too the experience or judgment is purely self-referential. It consists of the claim to nothing but its own legitimacy. The purely self-referential character of the judgment of taste is supposed to have important implications. According to Ginsborg, when I take the imaginative activity an object elicits in me to be as it ought to be in the primitive sense, I don’t have a concept of how my imaginative activity ought to be, I don’t perceive the object as having “any determinate property,” and my experience “can yield no objective cognition” of the

 

  

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Ginsborg, “Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste,” p. . Ginsborg, “On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste,” p. . Pleasure in the beautiful “consists in the awareness of one’s present state of mind (with respect to a given object) as one which anyone else perceiving that object ought to share, and hence as one which is universally [valid]: where one’s present state of mind is, of course, that very awareness mentioned earlier in the sentence” (The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition, p. ). In both quotations I have substituted “valid” for “communicable,” as Ginsborg treats the terms as synonymous (in this context): see “On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste,” p. , n.  and The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition, p. , n. . Ginsborg, “On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste,” p. ; emphasis added. Ginsborg, “Lawfulness without a Law,” p. . See Ginsborg, “Lawfulness without a Law,” p. , n. .

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object. It’s not that I don’t have any conception at all of how my imaginative activity ought to be; the point, rather, is that I have merely an “indeterminate conception”: “I have no conception of how it ought to be except that afforded by the example of my activity itself: namely, the indeterminate conception that it ought to be this way.” What makes this conception “indeterminate”? The key seems to be that it is wholly dependent on my “pointing” to my instance of it. I have no grasp of how my imaginative activity ought to be – no grasp of the appropriate kind of imaginative activity – that is independent of my pointing to my instance of it. This is not because the content to be picked out is too rich, or too singular, to be otherwise conveyed. Something like the contrary: there is no determinate content to the standard I am invoking because there is no determinate content to the way my imaginative activity ought to be. The absence of any determinate content stems from the purely self-referential nature of the claim. Perhaps the point could be put this way: there is no determinate content to how my imaginative activity ought to be because there is no determinate content to how it is, inasmuch as it consists in the purely self-referential claim. The argument turns upon the idea that the content of my claim would have to be specifiable or graspable otherwise than self-referentially in order to count as “determinate” or as the use of a concept. But the justification for this idea is missing. And even if we admit that Ginsborg has captured a sense of “concept” in which the judgment of taste lacks a concept, it is not obvious that it is the sense that is relevant to settling the question of whether or not the experience of beauty ascribes a property to the object. It is, of course, a fundamental Kantian tenet that a quality’s being part of the fabric of the world – its being objective in that sense – requires that it be 

 

 

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Ginsborg, “Lawfulness without a Law,” p. . Although pleasure in the beautiful consists in awareness, it “does not constitute awareness of any feature of the object”; this pleasure “does not consist for Kant in the awareness of an objective feature” (“Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste,” p. ). Ginsborg, “Lawfulness without a Law,” p. . Compare arguments for nonconceptual perceptual content from considerations like “fineness of grain.” See Christopher Peacocke, “Nonconceptual Content Defended,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , no.  (). See Ginsborg, “On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste,” pp. –. Ameriks contests the idea, I think. See “New Views,” p. : “To employ such a ‘certain way’ is precisely what is commonly called using a concept.” Another worry worth mentioning (although I do not pursue it) is that the “way” one’s imaginative activity ought to be appears to be (at least in some sense) specifiable otherwise than purely self-referentially, namely as Ginsborg and I have both been specifying it – viz., as the self-referential act of imagination consisting of the claim to its own appropriateness.

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ascribed by way of a concept. But it is not self-evident that the sense of “concept” on which this tenet rests corresponds to Ginsborg’s. Ginsborg’s sense might well be more stringent than Kant’s tenet requires. Ginsborg sometimes says something stronger about the claim I make in the judgment of taste: not just that it lacks determinate content, but that it lacks content altogether. This, however, seems misleading. After all, it does say something about the object and about the kind of feeling it merits, and so (at least in this sense) has content. Content that is grasped or specified self-referentially is not the same as sheer lack of content: only in the former case is a claim – a judgment – made at all. For our purposes, however, the main issue with the features that we have so far seen Ginsborg to ascribe to the judgment of taste is that they don’t support the claim that beauty is not independent of each apparent experience of it. Suppose that I cannot grasp or specify the imaginative activity the object merits except by pointing purely self-referentially to my instance of it: it does not follow that its being the merited activity is dependent on my, or any, particular experience. And it remains unclear how the latter claim could be advanced without abandoning the judgment of taste’s claim to universal validity. Ginsborg does, I think, have an argument for this claim, but it is not made entirely explicit and so needs to be reconstructed. Its lynchpin is her construal of the conditions for the legitimacy of a judgment of taste. Ginsborg ascribes to Kant the view that there is a fundamental principle of judgment, the principle that we are licensed to take our imaginative activity in general to set a normative standard, and that to make a  



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“[T]he act of judging lacks content, in that it does not bring the object under a specific concept” (Ginsborg, “Lawfulness without a Law,” p. , n. ). Denying content altogether might yield the conclusion that beauty is not a feature of objects, but at a cost that seems prohibitively high. In her earlier work Ginsborg appears to regard Kant as saddled with the cost. “[I]t seems as though I cannot be making any claim about the object at all. Accordingly, it seems as though the object is irrelevant to the act of judging: any object is equally suitable as a candidate for such a judgment, since the judgment does not say anything about the object which might turn out to be false [or, it should be added, true – KM]. What, then, is to prevent me from engaging in this ‘empty act’ of judgment with respect to every object, and hence judging that every object is beautiful? While this might be the basis of a legitimate complaint against Kant’s aesthetic theory, it is not an objection to my interpretation of that theory. . . . It follows, then, that from an objective standpoint, there is indeed nothing to prevent me from judging each and every object to be beautiful. If judgments of taste are not based on objective grounds, then there can be no fact about any object which rules it out as a candidate for being regarded as beautiful” (“On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste,” pp. –). Puzzlingly, Ginsborg suggests that the latter does follow from the former: “What we take the object to call for is not a response of this or that kind, but rather, irreducibly, just this response, and this is what secures the subjectivity of the judgment of taste” (“The Pleasure of Judgement,” p. , n. ).

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judgment of taste is to realize an activity of judgment that is such as to constitute an “application” of that principle. For reasons related to a worry I discuss in a moment, I don’t know how to fill in the details, but the general idea is, I believe, that the principle of judgment confers validity on the activity that corresponds to the (to any) experience or judgment of beauty. That is, thanks to the fundamental principle, the very having of the experience, the very making or performance of the judgment, makes it correct, makes it the case, that is, that the object is beautiful. This means that every apparent experience or judgment of beauty is ipso facto correct. There is no such thing as incorrectly perceiving or judging something to be beautiful. If something is apparently perceived as beautiful, then it is genuinely beautiful, which is to say that there is no such thing as only “apparently” perceiving something to be beautiful. Crucially, the correctness that is invoked here is full-blown. If someone finds an object to be beautiful, then the judgment that it is beautiful is correct in the full-blown sense; it is beautiful (not “for” that particular judge but) tout court. It is therefore a sufficient condition of an object’s being beautiful that it be apparently (hence genuinely) experienced as beautiful. I speculate that Ginsborg wants to say that it is also a necessary condition of an object’s being beautiful – where, again, this means beautiful tout court – that it be apparently (hence genuinely) experienced as beautiful. For this would be equivalent to the denial of the independence claim we are after, namely that an object’s being beautiful is not independent of each apparent experience of it as beautiful. Notice, however, that this would not be enough to establish the stronger subjectivity claim that, as we’ve seen, Ginsborg enters: that beauty is dependent on each apparent experience of it. Suppose that you experience something as beautiful. On this picture, it then is beautiful. Suppose that I, in turn, also find it to be beautiful. It is hard to see why its being beautiful would depend on my particular experience as well as yours. After all,   



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See Ginsborg, “Lawfulness without a Law,” p. ff. and especially . The judgment of taste is “an activity whose ‘performance’ ensures that” it is valid or correct (Ginsborg, The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition, p. ). One might worry that unless a synthetic a posteriori judgment can be incorrect, it cannot be correct, or that unless there can be merely apparent perception of beauty, there cannot be genuine perception of it. Ginsborg remarks that there room for a different sort of error: I can misidentify my pleasure as pleasure constitutive of a judgment of taste when in fact it is pleasure in the good or in the agreeable. In either case I fail to make a judgment of taste at all (The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition, p. , n. ). Then an object that is not judged beautiful is, by these lights, not beautiful. (There is no such thing as an object that is beautiful although its beauty has yet to be appreciated.)

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I might not have found it beautiful; I might not even have had a chance to experience it – yet for all that, it is beautiful. The most that can be said is that an object’s being beautiful depends on an experience of it as beautiful, specifically that of the first person to experience it as beautiful. But we can set this discrepancy aside, because there is a larger problem to consider. Clearly it won’t suit Ginsborg’s purposes if a condition of the possibility of performing a judgment of taste is a prior fact of the object’s being beautiful: that would short-circuit the attempt to ground the object’s being beautiful on the making of the judgment, and it would convert the account into a representative of the “objectivism” it is intended to oppose. The problem I now want to establish is that such short-circuiting seems unavoidable. Whether I make a judgment of taste about a given object is not just up to me. I cannot make the judgment of taste about whatever object I choose. As Ginsborg allows, if I am to find an object to be beautiful, it must in fact elicit in me the self-reflective imaginative activity – the imaginative activity that constitutes the judgment of taste. But if that is so, then, furthermore, its eliciting that imaginative activity in me has to reflect its being such as to (or disposed to) elicit it in me, and in any perceiver, given the right conditions. For it is not enough that my judging something to be beautiful be (at least in part) out of my hands; what’s also needed is that it be (in part) up to the object and not, say, a matter of chance. After all, my judgment of taste demands of any perceiver of that object that she respond with my imaginative activity. Unless the object plays its part in allowing the perceiver to satisfy that demand, neither the demand nor the judgment will be well grounded. The judgment must be arbitrary neither on my end nor on the world’s. The “right conditions” just mentioned include the obvious conditions of perception: adequate lighting, and so on. But they must also include the perceiver’s doing her part. The perceiver must have a “part” of her own to carry out, some work to do beyond getting in the line of fire. Otherwise there won’t be any sense in which her imaginative activity is a response that reflects the exercise of her powers of discernment (“taste”), as opposed to a reaction merely wrested from her. Putting all of this together: if I am to judge an object to be beautiful, it must be such as to elicit that imaginative activity in any perceiver who does her part, who observes it 

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“[W]hether I make a judgment of this kind about a given object is not just up to me, but depends on the imaginative activity which – as a matter of empirical fact – the object elicits. I cannot arbitrarily choose to engage in this kind of judgment with respect to a given object, any more than I can arbitrarily choose to perceive a given object as a dog” (Ginsborg, “Lawfulness without a Law,” p. , n. ).

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discerningly (and in conditions adequate to perception; I leave this sort of qualifier implicit from now on). Now that place for the perceiver’s part is precisely what “merits” records: the object’s being such as to elicit that imaginative activity in an observer who does her part is its meriting it. And (on Ginsborg’s account) an object’s meriting that imaginative activity is its being beautiful. The possibility of judging something to be beautiful has thus turned out to depend on the object’s being beautiful, so the object’s being beautiful cannot be grounded on the performance of the judgment of taste. Furthermore, since it is (in Ginsborg’s words) “as a matter of empirical fact” that the object elicits the relevant imaginative activity, if it does, its being such as to elicit the activity – that is, its meriting it – is an empirical feature. So beauty emerges as “objective” in Ginsborg’s terms, a feature in the world and independent of individual experience. The judgment of taste, which on Ginsborg’s construal is the claim that the object merits the relevant imaginative activity, is then in Ginsborg’s own terms an objective judgment, a judgment that ascribes an empirical feature to an object.

. Aesthetic Recognition I’ve argued that Ginsborg’s interpretation does not succeed in making the judgment of taste out to be subjective in the respect in which sensibility theory grants it to be objective. More generally, I am pessimistic about the prospects of the tack it takes, that of denying beauty, or aesthetic value, to be independent of individual experience. My hunch is that this condition of independence is simply too minimal, that forfeiting it means forfeiting the space for normativity. Some support for this hunch may be derived from consideration of the way that the main antirealist critic of sensibility theory, “quasi-realism,” structures its critique. Quasi-realism is a 



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In the judgment of taste “we regard our imaginative activity with respect to some particular object in the same way that we must regard it with respect to objects in general if cognition is to be possible. Thus we may take it, as we may [= are entitled to] take our imaginative activity in general, to exemplify a normative standard and hence to be universally valid” (Ginsborg, “Lawfulness without a Law,” p. ). The “thus” in this last sentence (which closes the paper) has yet to be secured: Ginsborg explains that what we do in a particular judgment of taste is what we are entitled to do in general, but not why we are entitled to do it in that particular case. For the general entitlement Ginsborg has in view does not translate into entitlement with respect to particular cases, even where judgment is – as the judgment of taste is supposed to be – “indeterminate” or (as Ginsborg also puts it) “general.” The worry is that my being entitled to make a particular judgment of taste will turn out to require the fact that the object merits my imaginative activity – the fact that it is beautiful. Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ) and Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).

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powerful challenger to sensibility theory because it purports to constitute an antirealism about values (moral values in particular) that nevertheless accommodates the possibility of genuine disagreement and the other “trappings” of realist talk. The quasi-realist does not contest the claim that values meet the independence condition. What he balks at, rather, is the idea that meeting that condition is enough to secure values a place in the fabric of the world. If my hunch is right, where does this leave us? What are the prospects for resisting revisionism, for, that is, giving substantive and plausible sense to Kant’s claims that the judgment of taste is “subjective” (and so on)? Quasi-realism is one possibility, in principle, but there are reasons to doubt that it will work. Now that we know that objectivism can meet the autonomy challenge, we could try to read Kant as espousing a version of objectivism, for example partly or fully along the lines that I sketched at the end of Section ., adopting sensibility theory’s distinction between two senses of “subjectivity” (and, correlatively, “objectivity”). I will not pursue this possibility either, but I will hang on to an idea that I suggested in connection with it: that not meta-aesthetically but at the level of phenomenology, so as it presents itself, the judgment of taste is a distinctive kind of act, different from belief or assertion. The subjectivity of the judgment of taste is a matter of its essentially first-personal character: so I will be proposing. Furthermore, what Kant means in this context by “objectivity” and, correlatively, “subjectivity” is orthogonal to the realism/antirealist debate. While sensibility theory says as much, its identification of an independent notion of subjectivity is in the service of a larger aim that has precisely to do with that debate; it is part of the project of clearing the way to accepting that values are part of the fabric of the world. My proposal, by contrast, remains agnostic on the question of whether Kant is an aesthetic realist or antirealist. Another important difference is that the subjectivity that sensibility theory ascribes to beauty or aesthetic value is not peculiar to it; it is shared with secondary qualities and other values, moral values in particular. This means that 

 

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Together with realist critics of sensibility theory, quasi-realism rejects its claim that the conception of reality that resists the straightforward accommodation of values can simply be dropped. In their view, sensibility theory neglects the metaphysical work required of a genuine alternative to antirealism about values. I do not have the space to pursue the point. For an argument against reading Kant as an aesthetic quasi-realist, see Hopkins, “Kant, Quasi-Realism, and the Autonomy of Aesthetic Judgment.” Thus I agree with Ginsborg that the subjectivity of aesthetic judgment is closely tied to the condition of autonomy. But I think it is a mistake to try to explain the condition of autonomy in terms of a denial of realism.

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Subjectivity and Recognition in the Judgment of Taste

reading Kant as a sensibility theorist is itself a kind of revisionism, since, as we’ve seen, Kant regards aesthetic judgment as distinctively subjective. My proposal aims to avoid this element of revisionism as well. But it might be objected that there can be no question about the basic meaning of Kant’s denial of objectivity to the judgment of taste. As we saw, Kant glosses that denial in terms that are characteristic of noncognitivist antirealism. He cites the objectivity of empirical judgments, and the objectivity that the first Critique claims for empirical judgments is of a piece with Kant’s (“empirical”) realism. Kant never indicates that he is introducing a new sense of objectivity in the Critique of Judgment. Just the contrary, apparently: he seems to think that the judgment of taste’s lack of objectivity follows from its lack of a basis in a concept, which suggests that he is relying on the tenet, mentioned earlier, that a claim about the world requires the use of (empirical and pure) concepts. In my view, Kant’s idea that “beauty is not a concept of the object” (CJ V:) articulates a dimension of what he calls the essential “singularity” of the judgment of taste, an upshot of which is that (in a sense to be specified) one object’s beauty has nothing in common with that of another – except, of course, for the bare fact of exemplifying beauty. The antirealist declares that beauty is not a property of the object; the thought I am drawing from Kant might, instead, be put this way: although beauty may be “of” the object – part of the world – it is not a property of the object. The thought has to be drawn from Kant because he does not explicitly carve out the notion of a property on which it relies. So there is an element of reconstruction and critique in my proposal: appreciating the force of Kant’s insight requires separating strands that he takes as one. To get further with this, it will be useful to recall, and to appreciate the force of, some of the motivations for revisionism. Can it really be denied, except in some merely stipulative, hence uninteresting, sense, that the judgment of taste is a matter of deploying the concept “beauty” and ascribing the property of beauty? The attempt might appear to be hopeless, on the following grounds. To accept the bare possibility of multiple beautiful things – things that may all legitimately be counted as beautiful – just is to admit the property of beauty (what they have in common) and the concept “beauty” (what the judgments of them as beautiful share). Surely one could hardly withhold this minimal concession, which does not entail taking a stand on either the metaphysical status of the property or the nature of the commitment the judgment consists in. And, it might 

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See Ameriks, “Taste, Conceptuality, and Objectivity,” p. .

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perhaps be added, Kant’s analysis of the judgment of taste in terms of a free play of the cognitive powers offers an unpacking of this concept, rather than a demonstration of its absence: thus beauty amounts to “meriting pleasure in the free play of the cognitive faculties,” for example (or something along such lines). The view I’m suggesting on Kant’s behalf grants such minimal “repeatability” as a condition of concepthood but denies that this is all that concepts require. What more is needed? What might come to mind is the familiar thought that a concept, for Kant, is or entails a rule. This thought needs unpacking and interpretation. It is sometimes supposed that Kant thinks of the rule that a concept involves as a decision procedure or formula. That, however, yields a most implausible view of concepts. Virtually nothing we would want to count as a concept would pass muster. If Kant were resting the claim that “beauty” is not a concept on this idea of rules, he would be attacking a straw man. Furthermore, nothing peculiar to the aesthetic case would have been isolated. For a more plausible take on the denial of rules for “beauty,” we might look to so-called particularism (or the denial of generalism), a view sometimes attributed, in fact, to sensibility theory. The moral particularist, for example, disavows would-be moral rules. Her target is not would-be moral decision procedures or formulas. Rather, she disavows moral principles or generalizations. There is disagreement with regard to how this disavowal is to be specified, but a characteristic central claim concerns the holism of reasons. A strong moral particularism takes the moral significance of nonmoral features to be context-dependent, even with regard to their valence: “whether a given such feature counts as any moral reason at all – and if so, in which direction – is itself dependent on the background context.” Moral knowledge, therefore, does not rest on 

  

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In Allison’s view, Kant’s is “a natural understanding of what is meant by a concept, namely, a determinate set of marks that provides a rule or decision procedure for the recognition of what falls under it” (Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. ). I take Allison to mean not just that this picture of a concept is natural for Kant, but that we should find it natural (and plausible?). I agree with Ameriks in rejecting such a reading of Kant on concepts as rules (see “New Views,” pp. – and “Taste, Conceptuality, and Objectivity,” p. ). Contra Ameriks, however, I think that sense can profitably be made of Kant’s claim that the judging of beauty is undetermined by a concept (or rule). Arnold Isenberg’s “Critical Communication,” mentioned above, is often credited with first formulating particularism. When Kant is invoked by particularists, he is typically cast as a moral generalist; his third Critique tends to be ignored by defenders of particularism, rather than recognized as a potential ally. Margaret Little, “Moral Generalities Revisited,” in Moral Particularism, eds. B. Hooker and M. Little (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), pp. –.

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the inference of moral conclusions from generalizations (however complicated), and the grasp of moral concepts does not reduce to the grasp of such generalizations. Instead of inferring moral conclusions from the details of the particular to which we attend, we manifest moral knowledge by “seeing what moral properties such details together ground.” Mutatis mutandis for the aesthetic particularist. While this is a more plausible sense of rule in which to deny rules, and while Kant’s own claims to the effect that the judgment of taste does not admit of proofs, that there are no rules of beauty, sound congenial to particularism, it won’t suit our purposes. For, recall, we were looking for a notion of rule on which Kant might hold, with some plausibility, that a concept entails such a rule, so that the absence of a rule means the absence of a concept (viz., the case of “beauty”). But although the moral particularist wants to say that there are no moral principles or generalizations, he doesn’t, and shouldn’t, want to say that there are no moral concepts. In fact, as we will see in moment, particularism accords a crucial role to concepts. Let’s shift our focus to what, in the previous chapter, we saw Kant to be saying about concepts and “comparison” with other objects in reflective judgment. Judgment’s move from the particular to the universal can take two forms, recall, involving two modes of comparison: “To reflect (to consider) . . . is to compare and to hold together given representations either with others or with one’s faculty of cognition, in relation to a concept thereby made possible” (FI XX:; Kant’s emphasis). In empirical cognition, the manifold of intuition is found to have unity as an instantiation of some empirical concept. The reflective moment asks the question: What empirical concept does the particular call for? Answering the question depends on being able to compare the object with other (actual or possible) objects, since it means identifying the object as like some and unlike others in the relevant respects. I suggest that we think of the role of such comparison in the following sort of way. Even the strictest proponent of moral particularism concedes – or (I would argue) should concede – that moral competence requires a certain capacity for the comparison of cases. What I have in mind is an essential component of ordinary moral thinking, often explicit when one wonders whether the attitude or feeling with which one is responding to a person or act is well placed. Finding myself angered by something someone has done, it might be in order for me to ask myself how I would feel – and 

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Little, “Moral Generalities Revisited,” p. .

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what feeling the situation would merit – if it had been different in some specific and relevant respect: If she had asked my permission in advance; if she had gone through with it more discreetly; if I hadn’t been so tired to begin with – would I still be angry? Would there be something to be angry about? Considering such questions allows me to see more clearly what it was that she did (what to call the act) and so what attitude it calls for. By no means is this all that moral thinking requires; but it is an important aspect of reflecting on what response a situation gives me reason to have, so of shaping how I see it and the people it involves, myself included. In short: in the moral realm, competence requires the ability to think about what moral difference, if any, specific moral and nonmoral differences might make. Part of Kant’s idea, I suggest, is that there is no analogue of this in the aesthetic case. In the judgment of taste, the given representations are not compared with other representations, which is to say that the given object is not compared with other objects. The judgment of taste “about a given singular object” considers it “before its comparison with others is seen” (FI XX:). There could be no aesthetic analogue, because in this case nonaesthetic parts cannot be separated from the whole so as to make it possible to identify the part of one whole as the same as that of another (much less to isolate its aesthetic contribution to the whole). This suggestion does not ignore the practices of comparison that are indispensable to our contemplation of aesthetic matters: we compare different photographs and notice how the lack of contrast “works” in one case but is insignificant, or is a weakness, in the other; we imagine how the poem could be improved by making it leaner and more terse. Kant is denying not the fact that we make such comparisons, but rather a certain understanding of what making such comparisons involves. When we make aesthetic comparisons (between one object and another, real or imagined), we are not considering variations against a shared context, or shared parts against varying contexts. We are comparing, rather, two wholes that (in the nature of the case) share no parts – two “worlds.”  

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According to the particularist, this ability does not depend on the ability to make ceteris paribus (“all else equal”) judgments. The “meaning of a word like ‘assonance’ – the quality which it leads our perception to discriminate in one poem or another – is in critical usage never twice the same,” Isenberg writes (“Critical Communication,” p. ). With the notion of a “world,” I am thinking in part of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “And yet a piece of music comes very close to being no more than a medley of sound sensations: from among these sounds we discern the appearance of a phrase and, as phrase follows phrase, a whole and, finally, as Proust put it, a world” (The World of Perception (London:

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The difference stems from a more general difference, in connection with which we can bring into view the moral particularist’s commitment to the existence and availability of moral concepts. A capacity to project imaginatively into other possibilities is internal to moral knowledge and, I want to suggest, internal to the grasp of concepts it involves. The moral particularist allows – indeed insists – that if my saying of an act that it was kind or cruel is to constitute a genuine judgment or assessment of kindness or cruelty, it must flow from my capacity to reliably detect and appreciate, as kind or cruel, instances of kindness or cruelty. If I lack such a capacity, it is not merely that my words will have hit their mark only accidentally, so to speak (supposing that the case is one of kindness or cruelty): they will not be regarded as amounting to an assessment of kindness or cruelty at all. In that sense, my words will be empty. For my words will fail to reflect an understanding of kindness or cruelty – a grasp of the concept – which would be required for them to express an understanding of this as kindness or cruelty. But it is an interesting upshot of Kant’s aesthetic account, if one that remains implicit in his development of it, that there is no corresponding requirement in the aesthetic realm. My failure to appreciate beauty, in a range of cases, however vast or varied, does not stand in the way of allowing this instance of finding something to be beautiful to be, fully, what it claims to be: an appreciation of beauty. I needn’t be attributed the capacity to reliably discern beauty in order to count as genuinely and fully appreciating beauty in some given instance. The judgment of taste does not stand to taste as moral perception stands to virtue. Consideration of this feature brings to life Kant’s remark that one puts one’s judgment of taste forward as “an example of a universal rule that one cannot state [angeben]” (CJ V:). When this remark is discussed, it is generally the thought that the rule cannot be “stated” (or cited or adduced) that is emphasized (leaving room for the thought that the judgment of taste depends on following a rule even if one cannot adduce it). What also deserves notice is that it is as an example of the rule – not an instance or case of it – that, according to Kant, I present my judgment: as though underscoring the point that particular judgments of taste neither express nor yield any grasp of a rule that would guide me in projecting into further judgments of taste. The Kantian picture excludes any such mastery or expertise in aesthetic judgment.

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Routledge, ), p. ). Cases like Leonardo’s two versions of the Madonna of the Rocks are the rare exceptions, if they are exceptions at all. Thus the aesthetic power of judgment is indeed “a special faculty for judging things in accordance with a rule but not in accordance with concepts” (CJ V:). See Little, “Moral Generalities Revisited,” p. , as well as p. , n. , where Little cites the work of Hubert L. Dreyfus and

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This, I propose, is what Kant wants to capture by saying that appreciating something as beautiful does not depend on the grasp of a would-be concept of, and rule for, “beauty.” Notice that there remains a point to saying that beauty is recognized – a point that does not depend on realist ambitions. Judging something new to be beautiful is finding that “here too is beauty” (recall the minimal criterion of repeatability). And “recognition” records the bringing to bear of an exercise of sensitivity or discernment on a matter that is independent of the individual’s experience (as, I’ve suggested, seems to be required for judgment to be open to criticism and subject to a standard of appropriateness or correctness). But since these linked requirements are not enough for concept application, there is also a point to saying that in the case of beauty, recognition takes place without a concept. By now I might appear to have wandered far from Kant’s thinking. I am claiming that Kant’s construal of concepts allows him to say, and plausibly, that the judgment of taste is free of a would-be concept “beauty,” while leaving room for – and indeed requiring – something that deserves to be called the recognition of beauty. One might grant that the distinction between cognition and recognition, the former as requiring concepts and the latter as not requiring them, is in principle available, but doubt that Kant would avail himself of it. After all, it is a commonplace that Kantian cognition is recognition: to cognize S as P is to recognize S as P. I also want to claim, however, that there is evidence that Kant does make the distinction, although he does not use different terms to mark it, in line with normal German usage (where erkennen can mean both cognition and recognition). In fact, it is necessary to attribute such a distinction to Kant in order to make sense of what would otherwise be a glaring inconsistency in his text. Each Moment of the Judgment of Taste culminates in a Definition or Explanation (Erklärung) of the Beautiful. The Definition formulated in the fourth and final Moment runs: Schön ist, was ohne Begriff als Gegenstand eines notwendigen Wohlgefallens erkannt wird (CJ V:).

 

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Stuart E. Dreyfus on the “moral expert” (“What Is Moral Maturity? Towards a Phenomenology of Ethical Expertise,” in Revisioning Philosophy, ed. James Ogilvy (Albany: SUNY Press, )). I don’t mean to deny the importance that Kant places on the development or cultivation of taste (see, e.g., CJ V:–). On the contrary: my claim is about what, for Kant, the cultivation of taste involves (and excludes). See the “synthesis of recognition [Rekognition] in the concept” of the Critique of Pure Reason A deduction at A. Kant’s emphases in bold.

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Reading erkannt as “cognized,” as the published English translations do, yields something like this: “That is beautiful which is cognized without a concept as the object of a necessary liking.” But it is worth registering how bizarre it would be if Kant were indeed speaking of (defining, in fact) our relation to the beautiful as one of cognizing without a concept. As we’ve seen, Kant does not tire of flatly denying the judgment of taste to be a matter of cognition. And Kant’s contention that cognition without a concept is not a possibility for us could not be clearer or more uncompromising. Kant would be advancing a claim that undercuts both of these basic commitments, and doing so blithely – without explanation or so much as the acknowledgment that explanation of some kind might be expected. Moreover, each Definition is presented, typographically as well as rhetorically, as the distillation of the Moment it caps off. This is the last place in which Kant might be imagined to have made a slip or to have allowed himself misleading shorthand. But the absurdity disappears if we attribute to Kant the suggested distinction and read erkannt as “recognized,” which the construction employing als makes especially natural. Then Kant’s idea is that to judge something to be beautiful is to recognize it (and not cognize it) “without a concept as the object of a necessary liking.” My proposal raises many questions. For one thing, whether particularism (moral or otherwise) can be made out is already a contested matter; it must be even less obvious that the more radical approach I am offering on Kant’s behalf survives scrutiny. In any case, revisionist scruples resurface. Doesn’t it distort our ordinary concept of a concept to say that “beauty” isn’t one? What is it, if not a concept? What is it to recognize something as beautiful, if not to apply the concept of beauty? Clearly Kant wants to point to something distinctive about the judgment of taste. Couldn’t (shouldn’t) we grant its distinctiveness without putting it in such awkward terms? Wouldn’t it be more natural and clearer to say that “beauty” is a concept, but a special one, and that beauty is a property, 

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The English-language commentary on this Definition with which I am familiar likewise employs “cognized.” Translators and commentators alike pass over in silence the problems raised by this choice, which I discuss below. My suggestion accords with the standard French translations of the third Critique, which render erkannt in this Definition as reconnu (recognized) rather than connu (cognized). See Critique de la faculté de juger, trans. A. Philonenko (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, ) and Critique de la faculté de juger, trans. Alain Renaut (Paris: Flammarion, ). For similar reasons, I think that at CJ V: Kant should be read as saying that the judgment of taste’s pleasure “can never be understood through concepts to be necessarily combined with the representation of an object, but must always be recognized [erkannt] to be connected with this only through reflected perception.”

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but a special kind of property? Isn’t it better to drop this cognition/ recognition distinction? For all that I have said so far, we could, I agree, drop these formulations that seem to strain. I would caution that it is not clear in advance how much of an advantage would be won thereby: once we specify the way in which the concept (kind of property) is “special,” it might seem as unnatural to count it as a concept (kind of property) as it seemed to say that here we are not dealing with a concept (property). But there is a deeper point at stake, to which I now turn. So far I have implicitly been going along with thinking of recognition as identification: recognizing something is identifying what it is. It is when it is thought of in this way that the idea of recognition without a concept seems forced, because for Kant such recognition is, as I just mentioned, cognition. But there is another way of thinking of recognition, which I now want to suggest is at work in Kant’s remark. This is recognition of something in the sense that involves attributing normative status to it: recognition as (something like) acknowledgment. It has become a commonplace to say that in German only anerkennen (and not erkennen) functions in this latter way, but that systematic differentiation of the terms postdates Kant, or, at any rate, the Critique of Judgment. Having said that, Kant does use anerkennen in the sense of “acknowledge” that I am focusing on, where acknowledging something is according it a normative status. There could “be no rule in accordance with which someone could be compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful [fu¨r schön anzuerkennen]” (CJ V:). The example is particularly noteworthy because the context suggests that Kant means not just that no rule could make me admit (to someone else) that an object is beautiful, but also that no rule could make me find it beautiful. Kant’s Definition says that the beautiful is what one recognizes (without a concept) as the object of a necessary liking. I have discussed the force of  

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It also seems forced because of the construction of the English terms: “recognize” sounds like “cognize again.” The distinctively normative use of Anerkennung is attributed to Fichte’s Grundlage des Naturrechts, the first part of which was published in . For the history of the term, see Risto Saarinen, Recognition and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). The first () edition of Adelung’s dictionary was the first German dictionary to include an entry for anerkennen. In the  edition, Adelung glosses anerkennen as erkennen and indicates two senses they can carry. The first is the epistemic sense now reserved for erkennen and the second the sense now reserved for anerkennen (Adelung’s examples: “to recognize someone’s good deeds; honor is external recognition of our merits”). As does the construction fu¨r schön (rather than als schön).

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“without a concept”; let me now set it aside and focus on the rest of this remark. I propose that what Kant is getting at is not just that the beautiful is what one believes or asserts (identifies) to be the object of a necessary liking, but that it is what one acknowledges (recognizes in that sense) to be the object of a necessary liking. In fact, I think Kant’s point is that the beautiful is what one recognizes, or acknowledges, to necessitate one’s own liking (and that of anyone else), or to deserve or call for it. Through my liking I recognize the object to have a claim on my liking. Kant himself puts it this way: “To say ‘This flower is beautiful’ amounts to no more than simply repeating its own claim to everyone’s liking. By dint of the agreeableness of its smell it has no claims at all” (CJ V:-; emphases added). Think of what is involved when I recognize someone as my soul mate, or recognize a divine presence. Here I identify an object. I make out – discern or comprehend, appreciate, take the measure of – the proper identity of something or someone. It is natural to gloss this in terms of seeing or perceiving (how matters stand or how things (really) are). There is the possibility of misidentification: I may come to feel that I was wrong, or, alternatively, that I had failed to identify what had been right before me. In such cases, recognition is also recognition in the sense of according a normative status, that proper to a soul mate or god. The failure that such recognition courts is more like the failure to give something its due. It is also plausible to say that in such cases recognition happens without a concept. It is not a condition of my genuinely recognizing this person as my soul mate, or this entity as my god, that I be able to make relevant comparisons or that I be able to project into future contexts. Notice that when the judgment of taste is understood to turn upon an act of recognition as acknowledgment, the condition of autonomy is unexceptional. For no one can acknowledge something or someone for me; that is something I must do for myself. Further, a form of answer suggests itself to the question I have raised of the kind of act that the judgment of taste constitutes (if not that of assertion or belief ): namely, that the judgment of taste is or expresses an act of appreciation, even of praise, or of (praising) criticism. 

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This perhaps illuminates Kant’s description of the recognition of beauty as perception. See, for example, the Definition concluding the Third Moment.

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The judgment of taste involves recognition of an object as possessing a kind of authority or lawfulness for oneself and anyone else: recognition as acknowledgment rather than recognition as identification. So I have just been arguing in Chapter , having enlisted toward this end the Definition of the Beautiful concluding the Fourth Moment of the Judgment of Taste. The body of the Fourth Moment is the central topic of this chapter. At the same time this chapter also picks up an important thread from the discussion of the Second Moment in Chapter . It is in several ways natural to connect the Second and the Fourth Moments. Most obviously, both concern what I’ve been calling the normativity of the judgment of taste. The notion of universal communicability, which we saw Kant introduce in the Second Moment’s §, where it is closely tied to the judgment of taste’s claim to universal validity, reappears in only one other place in the Analytic of the Beautiful: the Fourth Moment’s §. § echoes § through its use of other terms as well: once again the universal communicability of a state of mind is front and center, together with the relation, indeed the “animation,” of the cognitive powers of imagination and understanding. Moreover, both sections point to a positive relationship between the judgment of taste and cognition that seems clearly to be vital to the judgment of taste’s legitimation, the task of the deduction. In fact, both sections have been read as providing more substantive materials for the deduction than the section officially bearing the title, hence as providing unofficial deductions in their own right (unofficial because such a task lies outside the purview of the analytic of the beautiful). Thus we heard Kant say in § that in the judgment of taste’s free play of the cognitive powers, the imagination and understanding are in a “subjective relation” of attunement or harmony, a relation he connects with the “subjective condition” of cognition in two intriguing remarks. “[E]ach determinate cognition does always rest upon that relation as its subjective 

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condition” (CJ V:), Kant tells us in roughly the middle of the section. He ends the section with the claim that in the judgment of taste the powers of cognition are brought “into the proportionate attunement [proportionierte Stimmung] that we require for all cognitions and hence also regard as valid for everyone who is determined to judge by means of understanding and sense in combination (for every human being)” (CJ V:). It is very tempting to take the point to be that the judgment of taste’s free play of the cognitive powers turns out (somehow) to be a condition of cognition, and that this fact is supposed to provide the route to the legitimation of the judgment of taste’s claim to universal validity – so that, in a nutshell, cognition requires taste, and this is why the judgment of taste is normative. It is tempting, too, to read § as deepening that point. I will be arguing for a rather different reading of the positive connection between the judgment of taste and cognition, or between the “subjective relation” underlying the judgment of taste and the “subjective condition” of cognition. As I suggested in Chapter , the subjective relation of harmony of the cognitive powers in the judgment of taste is expressed or instantiated in the subject’s feeling moved by the object to aesthetic reflection upon it. The cognitive powers “harmonize” with each other in finding something in the given representation to call for and sustain their mutual free play. The harmony between the cognitive powers is therefore at the same time a harmony between the subject and the world. The point of § is to show that cognition too depends on a form – its own form – of harmony or attunement of the cognitive powers with each other and thereby with the world. As we’ll see, cognition depends on the subject’s feeling that a particular cognitive judgment is called for. Kant’s idea, then, is not that cognition has a basis in taste, but that cognition and taste each have a basis in reflective judgment, in a capacity for being moved by and responsive to the world.

. Aesthetic Necessity Although its central section is only indirectly about taste, as I will argue, the Fourth Moment opens in the usual way, the way we expect of a Moment of the Judgment of Taste. It singles out for scrutiny a “moment,” 

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See also: “it is on that universality of the subjective conditions of the judging of objects alone that is grounded this universal subjective validity of the liking that we combine with the representation of the object that we call beautiful” (CJ V:).

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a characteristic dimension, of the judgment of taste. The judgment of taste’s fourth moment is its “modality,” which is that of necessity. With many other readers of Kant, I have been saying that the Second and Fourth Moments both deal with the normativity of the judgment of taste. What this anachronistic jargon is meant to capture is the fact that both Moments turn upon the idea that the judgment of taste expresses a demand for agreement and not, for example, a report or prediction of agreement. Thus we find Kant repeating in the Fourth Moment the (by now familiar) idea that the judgment of taste does not say that “everyone will feel this liking in the object that I call beautiful,” that instead it “demands assent of everyone” (CJ V:) – just the points we saw him to make in characterizing the judgment’s claim to universal validity. But then how does the claim to necessity differ from the claim to universal validity? Or does it not, so that to the extent that Kant’s presentation leads us to expect otherwise, that is an artifact of the ad hoc structure governing the Analytic of the Beautiful, which is supposed to be modeled on the fourfold “logical functions for judging” worked out in the Critique of Pure Reason (CJ V:)? In fact, Kant scholars tend to treat the claim to universal validity and the claim to necessity as effectively the same thing, even if they make an effort to differentiate them in principle, and locate the real advance of the Fourth Moment over the Second elsewhere. In my view, the Second Moment tells us that the judgment of taste makes a demand for agreement in liking. But it does not tell us what the content or meaning of the demand is; that is not part of its purview. In other words, the Second Moment makes it possible to ask, but does not yet allow us to answer, the questions that I posed at the beginning of Chapter , spurred by Kant’s comparison of the judgment of taste with empirical cognitive judgment. What kind of demand is expressed in the judgment of taste? Is it the same demand as in the case of cognition, a demand for correctness or truth, or a different kind of demand (and a correspondingly different kind of judgment)? It is the Fourth Moment that speaks to these questions. (§ points ahead to its role: “When we make a judgment of taste, the pleasure we feel is something we require from everyone else as necessary” (CJ V:).) As I have suggested, the judgment of taste demands liking as deserved or called for by the object, as something to which the object lays claim. This constitutes a difference in kind 

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This is also the case for a reader like Guyer, who (as noted earlier) interprets the “demand” as a prediction. See Kant and the Claims of Taste, p. . Some commentators do stress the difference between the two claims; see, for example, Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste.

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from cognitive judgment. In judging a rock crystal to contain a mobile droplet of water (to return to Kant’s example from his Introduction), I demand that anyone else also see it that way, insofar as I hold that that is the correct way to see it, or that it is true that the rock crystal contains a mobile droplet. I do not, however, imagine that seeing it so is something that the rock crystal deserves or to which it lays claim. It is this difference that I have hoped to point to by distinguishing recognition as identification from recognition as acknowledgment, that is, as the attribution of a kind of authority or normative status to the object. This is why there is a fundamental asymmetry in the ways the Second and Fourth Moments unfold and, more generally, in Kant’s explications of the judgment of taste’s claim to universal validity and of its claim to necessity. As we saw, Kant compares and contrasts the judgment of taste’s claim to universal validity with the claim to universal validity of a cognitive judgment. Any cognitive judgment, qua cognitive judgment, makes a claim to universal validity, and the judgment of taste is like cognitive judgment insofar as it too makes a claim to universal validity. Their claims to validity are in other ways different, which Kant gathers together under the rubric that what is claimed is objective validity in the case of cognition while it is subjective validity in the case of taste. Kant does not make the parallel gesture in his treatment of the claim to necessity in the Fourth Moment (or elsewhere): he does not say that the judgment of taste and cognitive judgment alike make a claim to necessity, with the claim being for objective necessity in the case of cognition and for subjective necessity in the case of taste. From the standpoint of the issue of universal validity, theoretical and practical judgments can be considered together as logical judgments; the differences between them can be ignored. Those differences become visible in the Fourth Moment. The claim to necessity of a pure practical judgment is a claim about how anyone ought to act, and is thus fundamentally 

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In fact, Kant says that neither empirical cognitive judgment nor the judgment of taste claims “objective necessity”: “like all empirical judgments,” the judgment of taste “cannot promise any objective necessity and make a claim to a priori validity. . . . [T]he judgment of taste, like every other empirical judgment, also only makes a claim to be valid for everyone, which, in spite of its intrinsic contingency, is always possible” (CJ V:). Both differ in this regard from pure cognitive judgments, which do “promise” objective necessity and claim a priori validity. (In the Prolegomena, Kant suggests that the claim to objective universal validity of a judgment of experience is equivalent to its claim that agreement is necessary (see especially Prolegomena IV:–). I cannot pursue the point here, but I conjecture that Kant’s thinking about the claim implicit in cognitive judgment evolved after publication of the Prolegomena. Thus Kant does not yet speak in the Prolegomena of cognitive judgment as making a demand for agreement.)

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different in kind from a claim of theoretical necessity, a claim about what is or will be the case. The judgment of taste’s claim to necessity is also an “ought,” a point Kant makes sure to stress: “The judgment of taste demands assent [Beistimmung] from everyone, and whoever declares something to be beautiful wants [will] that everyone ought to approve of the object at hand and likewise declare it to be beautiful” (CJ V:; Kant’s emphasis). (This also happens to be one of the places where Kant indicates that to express a judgment of taste is to make a declaration, meaning – as I’ve suggested – that the judgment of taste involves taking a stand, rather than (merely) having a belief.) In this regard the judgment of taste’s claim to necessity is like the claim to practical necessity. This, I take it, is what Kant has in mind when he later says that “the feeling in the judgment of taste is demanded of everyone as if it were a duty” (CJ V:). The kinship between aesthetic and practical necessity goes further. It is through a feeling or liking, that of respect, that one recognizes the authority of the moral “ought” enshrined in the moral law, or, more fundamentally, of humanity in oneself and in others. This is a point that Kant develops elsewhere; here it is present – if somewhat hidden – in Kant’s compressed remark that in the case of practical necessity, “through concepts of a pure will, which serve as a rule for freely acting beings, . . . liking is the necessary consequence of an objective law and means nothing other than that one ought absolutely (without a further aim) to act in a certain way” (CJ V:). Necessity comes up in two ways, and only one is flagged with the word “necessary.” The first is what we are currently considering. It is contained in the point that pure practical liking, or respect, “means nothing other than that one ought absolutely (without a further aim) to act in a certain way”: to feel respect is (and is nothing other than) to recognize the absolute necessity (“ought”) of acting in a certain way. The second dimension of necessity is contained in the point that respect is the “necessary consequence” of an objective law. Kant is not saying that the feeling of respect is a necessary causal effect of (the thought of ) the moral law. Rather, one cannot think of the moral law without at the same time recognizing its objective authority as legislating over our conduct. The judgment of taste involves a dimension of necessity similar 

 

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“This common sense . . . wants [will] to entitle judgments that contain an ‘ought’: it does not say that everyone will agree [u¨bereinstimmen] with our judgment but that everyone ought to agree [zusammenstimmen] with it” (CJ V:). See Groundwork, especially IV:–. The moral law is thus unlike any other imperative. With any other imperative, I can step back from the impulse or desire to grant it authority and ask myself whether I have reason to do so. There is no

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to the first. One recognizes the authority of beauty through the feeling of pleasure. There is no aesthetic parallel to the second; aesthetic necessity does not flow from an aesthetic law, simply because there is no aesthetic law to think or cognize. The necessity of the judgment of taste is that of the particular. To make any claim to normativity is, for Kant, to presuppose a norm or “principle.” The norm of the judgment of taste – the principle of taste, as Kant also calls it – would determine what merits the judgment of taste. As we saw, the norm of taste, if there is one, cannot be stated or adduced. The point is not that we (human beings, say) cannot, as it happens, grasp and state it, while in theory, at least, some less limited kind of being might be able to do so. Rather, the norm of taste is not the kind of thing that lends itself to statement at all; it does not take the form of an adducible law. (Similarly: we cannot cognize our freedom of will, not because we are not up to the task, but because freedom is not the kind of fact that shows up in that way.) Instead, the norm or principle of taste takes the form of the idea of a “common sense” (CJ V:). Consider the senses of perception, to which, by calling it a “sense,” Kant is likening the common sense that would ground taste. The senses of perception are modes of receiving the world affectively. We do not sense through concepts or on the basis of applying concepts; sensing is “from the ground up” and is always particular. Likewise for the norm of taste, although in its case the datum of sensing is “the effect of the free play of our cognitive powers,” rather than (for example) the impressions of redness, dryness, smokiness, and so on, that we receive from objects. Kant refers to the perceptual senses as “external senses,” but the contrast he has in view is not that the common sense of taste is an internal or inner sense rather than an external one, but that it is not only external. In taste, what I “sense” is not how objects appear to be, but how they work on and appeal to me. As for the respect in which the common sense of such space in the case of the moral law; it does not present itself to me as awaiting endorsement that I could withhold. This is why liking for the morally good, or respect, is not “free” but “compelled” (CJ V:).  “Would,” because the structure of the overall argument is the following. The judgment of taste lays claim to normativity, and thus presupposes its own grounding in a norm. The Fourth Moment explores the nature of such a norm, remaining agnostic on the question of whether there really is one, since that question – which is equivalent to the question of whether the judgment of taste is entitled to its claim of normativity – is not for it to address.  Groundwork IV:. As Christine Korsgaard writes, “The freedom discovered in reflection is not a theoretical property which can also be seen by scientists considering the agent’s deliberations thirdpersonally and from outside. It is from within the deliberative perspective that we see our desires as providing suggestions which we may take or leave. You will say that this means that our freedom is not ‘real’ only if you have defined the ‘real’ as what can be identified by scientists looking at things third-personally and from outside” (The Sources of Normativity, p. ).  Kant’s “common sense” or sensus communis appropriates terms with long histories.

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taste is “common,” this seems to have to do with the fact that it determines what merits the judgment of taste with universal validity (CJ V:). It is, in the first place, a sense for what is or should be common to us (as opposed to private). Kant puts all this together in the closing sentence of §: “only under the presupposition of such a common sense, I say, can the judgment of taste be rendered [gefällt werden]” (CJ V:). Headed “Whether one could, with reason, presuppose a common sense,” § seems to pick up right where § left off. Since it is complex but short – six sentences, which I number for ease of reference – and since I will be looking at it in some detail, I quote it in full: [] Cognitions and judgments must, together with the conviction that accompanies them, be universally communicable, for otherwise they would not be due any agreement with the object: they would all be a merely subjective play of the powers of representation, just as skepticism insists. [] But if cognitions are to be universally communicable, then the state of mind, i.e., the attunement of the cognitive powers for a cognition in general [u¨berhaupt], and indeed that proportion which is fitting for a representation (through which an object is given to us), in order to make cognition out of it, must also be universally communicable; for without this, as the subjective condition of cognizing, cognition, as an effect, could not arise. [] And this [viz., cognition arising] really occurs whenever a given object, by means of the senses, brings the imagination into activity for the composition of the manifold, while the imagination brings the understanding into activity for the unity of the manifold in concepts. [] But this attunement of the cognitive powers has a different proportion according to the difference of the objects that are given. [] Nevertheless, there must be one in which this inner relation is most conducive, for both powers of the mind, to the animation of the one through the other with respect to cognition (of given objects) in general [u¨berhaupt]; and this attunement cannot be determined except through feeling (not by concepts). [] Now since this attunement itself must be universally communicable, hence also the feeling of it (in the case of a given representation), while the universal communicability of a feeling presupposes a common sense, the latter must be able to be assumed with good reason, and indeed without appeal to psychological observations, but rather as the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our cognition, which is assumed in every logic and every principle of cognitions that is not skeptical. (CJ V:–)

§ wound up with the thought that the judgment of taste is entitled to make its claim to exemplary necessity only if a common sense – the 

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I follow the standard practice of translating u¨berhaupt as “in general.” But it seems to me that here the sense is closer to “at all.”

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principle of taste, that is – may be presupposed. § seems to take a natural next step of inquiring whether such a common sense may, in fact, be presupposed, and, judging by its concluding sentence (knotty though it may be), seems to find that it may. A unified train of thought seems to have unfolded, and one that goes to the heart of the larger project. Let’s block in the argument that § would accordingly be making. A cognition “arises” from an underlying state of mind consisting of an “attunement” of the cognitive powers of imagination and understanding. Cognitions must be universally communicable, and so their underlying attunements must be universally communicable as well. Among these attunements of the cognitive powers, one must be singled out as possessing a “proportion” that is “most conducive” to their mutual animation “with respect to cognition of given objects in general.” This “most conducive” attunement must be universally communicable, and likewise the feeling of it. The universal communicability of this feeling presupposes the common sense that § has presented as the norm of taste. The norm of taste can thus be presupposed as a necessary condition of the universal communicability of cognition (an assumption the denial of which entails skepticism and which Kant for that reason evidently considers uncontroversial). Just what this all means requires working out, of course. Still, what seems clear is that the feeling that the argument isolates in the fifth sentence must be the feeling of pleasure that is involved in the judgment of taste. How otherwise could that feeling’s universal communicability presuppose the common sense, that is, a norm of taste? Kant’s formulations encourage the supposition, since they are so reminiscent of §. According to § (as well as the early sections of the Third Moment), recall, the judgment of taste’s feeling of pleasure is “of” something, namely the free play of the cognitive powers, in which those powers are in a relation of attunement or agreement (Übereinstimmung, Zusammenstimmung), or of “animation” to the activity that “belongs to a cognition in general” (CJ V:). Even in advance of unpacking it, again, one can hear a resemblance between that description of the free play, what the pleasure of the judgment of taste is “of,” and what the feeling of § is said, in this fifth sentence, to be “of” – viz., the relation of attunement (Stimmung) of the same cognitive powers that is “most conducive to their mutual animation with respect to cognition of given objects in general.” And in both sections, Kant says that this relation of the cognitive powers can be disclosed only through feeling, and not by way of a concept. I will call the approach that I’ve just sketched the “aesthetic” reading of §, although it is (as I hope to have shown) so natural and apparently

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modest – and for that reason, no doubt, so widely agreed upon – as to make “reading” seem an overblown honorific. Anchored in the thought that it is the aesthetic common sense (as I will call it, for reasons soon to emerge) that § establishes, as a condition of cognition, the aesthetic reading identifies the feeling of the “most conducive” attunement with the feeling of pleasure involved in the judgment of taste, and (correspondingly) identifies the “most conducive” attunement with the “free play” of the cognitive powers. Since the aesthetic reading of § takes it to (purport to) establish the norm of taste, it is obvious why it is commonly supposed to transgress the limits of the analytic by addressing the task of the deduction avant la lettre. While § is also sometimes construed along such lines, there is something particularly awkward about such a view of §. Reading § as a deduction that establishes taste as a condition of cognition makes the question Kant poses in the very next section – whether the aesthetic common sense is “a constitutive principle of the possibility of experience” or, rather, a “regulative principle” – puzzlingly otiose. Nevertheless, as with §, some of Kant’s interpreters have seen an opportunity here rather than an obstacle. For § may be found to provide more material – and material of just the sort that § apparently says to be required – for reconstructing a plausible deduction than does the overly brief “official” deduction. Various (other) problems for the aesthetic reading of § have been adduced, generally as problems for Kant rather than for his interpreter, but these tend to depend on further, optional, interpretive commitments. A point of identifying the aesthetic reading in its most neutral or barest form, as I have done, is to allow fundamental difficulties to come into focus. Let me briefly specify them. If Kant holds that the feeling of the “most conducive” attunement of the cognitive powers is the feeling of pleasure in their free play, it is hard to see why he should stop short of actually saying so, especially since this identification is the crucial step of the aesthetic reading. In fact, he does not even say that the feeling of the “most conducive” attunement is a feeling of pleasure. Nor does Kant provide any justification for the





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This is the main form of the aesthetic reading. There are small variations upon it (see, for example, Allison’s rendition (Kant’s Theory of Taste, pp. –)), but they do not affect the analysis that follows. Allison also points this out (Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. ).

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identification, so for the supposed crux of his argument. Why should any of the attunements of the cognitive powers yielding cognition be the slightest bit “conducive” to their free play? It seems, in any case, unlikely that such justification could be forthcoming. For the “most conducive” attunement is, according to the aesthetic reading, a cognitive attunement: an attunement of the cognitive powers from which cognition “arises.” (In the sixth sentence, Kant says that the “most conducive” attunement is universally communicable; this is presumably supposed to follow by modus ponens from the earlier claim that cognitive attunements are universally communicable.) To identify the free play with this attunement is thus to identify it as a cognitive attunement, as, in other words, an attunement that we have or make (simply) by virtue of cognizing or perceiving certain objects. The consequence is that the aesthetic reading threatens to leave no room for a conception of taste as a capacity distinct from the capacity for ordinary perception or cognition – a capacity with its own modes and conditions of expression and cultivation. This consequence should give pause not only in its own terms but also as a take on Kant. For it seems to run directly counter to Kant’s oftrepeated and apparently fundamental claim that taste is not cognition. Much of the Analytic is devoted to articulating this point. In particular, § arrived at the idea of the free play of the cognitive powers as what is needed to maintain that distinction while at the same time allowing the judgment to lay claim to normativity. It is supposed to be because the free play of the cognitive powers is distinct from what happens in cognition that the judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment, but because the free play is nevertheless intimately connected with cognition that the judgment may nevertheless lay claim to universal validity. One might of course undertake to argue that this, or any other, apparent problem with the aesthetic reading is only apparent. Or one might argue that it points to the need for a revisionist reading of Kant, one that abandons the idea that the judgment of taste is not cognition, in order to “save the deduction” (and, more generally, make the best of his project). But the problems can be set aside altogether only if a genuine alternative to the aesthetic reading presents itself.



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Karl Ameriks recognizes the difficulty and manages it by arguing that we can and should abandon this claim on Kant’s behalf. Thus for Ameriks the states of this “most conducive” attunement are experienced whenever “the particular object (or one like it) that produced them in an ordinary perception is again perceived in a normal way” (“How to Save Kant’s Deduction,” p. ; emphasis added).

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. A Cognitive Common Sense?



. A Cognitive Common Sense? The aesthetic reading is launched, as we’ve seen, on the assumption that the “common sense” its conclusion establishes is an aesthetic common sense – a natural enough step, since that’s the only kind of common sense Kant has been talking about; or, rather, since he has not so much as raised the possibility that there might be other kinds. But § itself gives us reason to question this assumption, and precisely by widening the scope of “common sense,” or so I now wish to argue. The aesthetic reading takes Kant to claim that it is the feeling of the “most conducive” attunement the universal communicability of which presupposes an aesthetic common sense. The corresponding line in the text (around the middle of the sixth sentence) does not quite fit this, however. The line reads, “the universal communicability of a feeling presupposes a common sense,” and not (as would much better support the aesthetic reading) “the universal communicability of this feeling presupposes a common sense.” And Kant could hardly be understood to hold that the universal communicability of any feeling whatsoever (regardless of which) presupposes an aesthetic common sense. The line is better read as employing “common sense” in a broad or “generic” sense: here it names a species of which an aesthetic common sense – what Kant later calls a “sensus communis aestheticus” (CJ V:) – is just an instance. What Kant is saying is that the universal communicability of a feeling f presupposes a corresponding common sense (call it CSf), which will be an instance of the species “common sense.” This suggests a new possibility, just the possibility that we need to avoid the central difficulties of the aesthetic reading that I mentioned above. Namely: the argument as a whole is not meant to establish that we have grounds to presuppose the aesthetic common sense. What § purports to show to be presupposable is a common sense (which it does not identify with the “aesthetic” common sense) having to do with the feeling of the attunement of the cognitive powers that is “most conducive” (which it does not identify with pleasure in their free play). Accordingly, § does not attempt a deduction of the judgment of taste; it is, rather, in the business of doing something else. Just what else remains, of course, to be specified. Its specification will have, in particular, to address the questions of how the section contributes to the aims of the Fourth Moment and to those of the text as a whole – including, of course, the task of the deduction. To begin with, it will have to explain what the special attunement of the cognitive powers is (if not the free play of the cognitive powers) and what the corresponding common sense is.

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I am aware of only one other attempt to develop an alternative to the aesthetic reading of §, that of Henry Allison. Allison argues that the common sense at issue in § is (not the aesthetic common sense but rather) a “cognitive” or “epistemic” common sense. It is this cognitive common sense which it is the point of § to argue to be a condition of cognition. This cognitive common sense has no direct relation to any aesthetic common sense; nor does the argument for it depend on anything concerning taste or the judgment of taste. In fact, § makes no reference at all to anything specifically aesthetic. With respect to the Fourth Moment, and indeed with respect to the project as a whole, § is a “digression” or “interruption,” according to Allison, though it does make some indirect contributions. First, by grounding a cognitive common sense, it helps show that the very idea of a common sense is not incoherent, which one might otherwise have doubted, given the apparent paradoxicality of its aesthetic counterpart. Second, it provides reasons for presupposing a capacity that taste requires, since, according to Allison, the cognitive common sense is “a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition of the possibility of taste.” Just how Allison wants to understand this cognitive common sense is somewhat unclear, however. Allison’s first declaration of his view is straightforward enough: “the common sense appealed to in § as a condition of cognition is to be identified with the ‘peculiar talent’ referred to in the first Critique.” Allison is pointing to the Analytic of Principles discussion of judgment that issues in the characterization of it as – in the Kemp Smith translation, which Allison uses – “a peculiar talent, which can be practiced only and     



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Allison notes that he is following a suggestion by Christel Fricke (Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. , n. ). Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, pp.  and . Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, pp.  and . Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, pp. , , , and . Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, pp.  and . Allison explains on p. : “without the ‘peculiar talent’ to recognize a fit between imagination and understanding under the conditions of cognition, a capacity to do so when the faculties are in free play would remain a completely inexplicable mystery. Otherwise expressed, if one could not sense the accord of an intuited manifold with a particular concept, it is difficult to see how one could sense its accord with the conditions of the exhibition of concepts in general, though no concept in particular, which is supposedly what occurs in a judgment of taste.” But it is hard to see how the free play of the imagination and understanding, as Allison understands it (where the imagination “exhibits a pattern or order (form), which suggests an indeterminate number of possible schematizations (or conceptualizations), none of which is fully adequate, thereby occasioning further reflection or engagement with the object” (p. )) really amounts to the “accord” of an intuitive manifold “with the conditions of the exhibition of concepts in general.” Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. .

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cannot be taught” (A/B), a discussion that he has just finished glossing as advancing the following argument. Judgment is the faculty of subsuming under rules. There can be no rules for judgment, on pain of regress: for any would-be rule would require a further rule governing its application. The principal case Kant has in view is that of cognition, where the manifold of intuition apprehended by the imagination is subsumed under the concept, which constitutes a rule, provided by the faculty of understanding. No rule, then, can determine whether an intuition is subsumable under a concept. Since it cannot be determined by a rule, “the subsumability of an intuition under a concept must be immediately seen, that is, ‘felt.’” It is as the capacity to feel (or “feel”) the subsumability of an intuition under a concept, this “peculiar talent,” that Allison is suggesting we understand the cognitive common sense of §, which recasts it in the third Critique’s language of “attunement” of the cognitive powers. The cognitive powers are in “attunement” when there is such “fit” – subsumability – between the products of their activity. Something, however, appears to have gone wrong. This proposal seems to have avoided the difficulties associated with the aesthetic reading’s construal of the notion of the “most conducive” attunement only by taking the drastic measure of dropping that notion altogether. For although Allison does have his own construal of the “optimal” attunement, as he terms it – I will discuss this construal in a moment – it plays no role in the explication just sketched. What the bare subsumability of intuition under concept corresponds to, by the lights of Allison’s own account, is not the “optimal” (or “maximal” or “ideal”) attunement of the cognitive powers. It corresponds, rather, to their “minimal” attunement, the minimal degree of attunement of the powers that cognition requires, which resides at the opposite end of the spectrum. Call this conception of the cognitive common sense, namely the capacity to feel minimal attunement, the first conception. One might wonder whether Allison’s thought is that the notion of the “most conducive” attunement must be dropped in order to best make sense of Kant. Then the idea would be that § requires a corrective or revisionist reading: it should not be read at face value, as linking the   

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I examine the Critique of Pure Reason discussion and Allison’s interpretation of it in Chapter . Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. . See also p.  and pp. –. “Harmony, minimally construed, occurs whenever there is any cognitive fit between concept and intuitive representation, that is, whenever the intuition is subsumable under the concept. In that sense, harmony [viz., minimal harmony – KM] is a necessary condition of cognition” (Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. ).

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common sense that it grounds to this “most conducive” attunement, but should, rather, be read as arguing for a common sense oriented toward attunement simpliciter. The claim about attunements varying in their “proportions,” the claim that one of these must be “most conducive”: neither of these would then contribute directly to its central argument. In principle, this would be a coherent approach, but I see no reason to attribute it to Allison. On the contrary, he seems to grant that what the cognitive reading must provide is an account of the “most conducive” attunement that is recognizable only by feeling, and this precisely because the common sense is to be made out as a capacity for this feeling. In spite of this, and without further explanation of the shift, it is the argument sketched above that he then offers – the argument that, as we’ve seen, concerns only the bare attunement of powers involved in sheer subsumability of intuition under concept. It might be a sign of Allison’s awareness of the problem that later on, during a discussion of the relationship between the deduction and §, he does (for the first time) describe the cognitive common sense as the capacity to feel the “most conducive” attunement, and not just minimal attunement or sheer subsumability. (Call this the second conception of the cognitive common sense.) Specifically, he recalls that his reading of § identified its common sense with the first Critique’s “peculiar talent,” which, however, he now characterizes in terms of the capacity for feeling the “most conducive” attunement of the cognitive powers “required for cognition in general.” The real difficulties with this conception of common sense stem, as I will argue, from the understanding of different 



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“This brings us to the claim . . . that this optimal attunement can be determined only by feeling. As we have seen, this is the real basis for the turn to taste on the standard reading, and the reason adduced for it in the text is that this attunement [viz., the optimal attunement – KM] cannot be determined by concepts (which, by elimination, supposedly leaves feeling). But if one keeps in mind that the appeal to feeling is made on the basis of the impossibility of appealing to concepts, this does not invalidate the purely epistemological reading, since it can be readily understood in terms of the account of judgment offered in the first Critique” (Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. ). These words lead us to expect a “purely epistemological reading” of the claim identified as pivotal, the claim “that this optimal attunement can be determined only by feeling.” Yet the “account of judgment” Allison goes on to gloss – the infinite regress argument sketched above – does not of itself yield such a reading. “As we have seen, that argument [viz., the argument of §] begins with the assumption of the universal communicability of cognition and of the attunement of the cognitive powers that it requires. From there it moves to the necessity of presupposing a common sense, construed as a shared capacity for recognizing (without rules and therefore through ‘feeling’) the optimal attunement of the cognitive powers required for cognition in general. As I claimed in my analysis of §, this shared capacity is best understood as the faculty of judgment, as characterized in the first Critique, and therefore has nothing directly to do with taste” (Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. ).

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degrees of attunement on which it depends. But we can note that no further basis for the second conception has been provided, beyond the argument about the “peculiar talent” of “feeling” the subsumability of intuition under concept that Allison finds in the Analytic of Principles. That argument, however, does not by itself establish that we must be able to tell by feeling which are the “optimal” attunements (whatever those might come to), much less that the latter sort of feeling must be universally communicable and that a corresponding common sense must be presupposed as a condition of cognition; nor is it obvious how the Analytic of Principles passage could be so construed. The third conception of the cognitive common sense that Allison suggests comes up against the same issues. Puzzlingly, it appears in the sentence immediately following the one that I cited above as his first declaration of his view, which, recall, turned out to yield the first conception of the common sense, namely as the “peculiar talent” or capacity to feel the subsumability of an intuition under a concept. “In other words,” the sentence runs, “by ‘common sense’ in [§], we must understand not taste per se, but rather the faculty for immediately seeing (without appeal to rules, and therefore through ‘feeling’) whether, and how fully, a given intuited manifold accords with a particular concept, that is, judgment.” Despite the reassurance of “[i]n other words,” this “and how fully” adds something quite new, without a corresponding argument for the stronger claim it involves. (The capacity to recognize optimal attunement does not entail the more elaborate capacity to recognize degrees of attunement. There is the additional problem, of course, that § itself does not mention such a capacity.) The first conception of common sense throws the “most conducive attunement” baby out with the bathwater. The second and third conceptions seek to preserve it, but they would need more support than is supplied by the first Critique passage on which Allison relies. It is not clear, moreover, that the very idea of degrees of subsumability can be attributed to Kant. On the contrary, it would seem that for Kant an intuited content either fits or does not fit under a concept, with no room for the idea of a better or worse “fit.” But I turn now to the deeper issue that is at stake, consideration of which will show the way forward. Allison takes Kant to suggest the possibility of a range of cognitive “attunements,” running from “minimal” to “maximal” or “ideal.” In empirical cognition, the powers must work together: the imagination 

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Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, pp. – (emphasis added).

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apprehends the manifold of intuition for which the understanding then produces an empirical concept, and in this shared endeavor they are interdependent. But their mutual work may be more or less harmonious. What makes a less-than-ideal fit possible – or, indeed, usual – is the fact that the cognitive powers are constitutionally inclined to opposition, for the understanding tends toward generality while the imagination tends toward specificity. This doesn’t mean simply that the understanding produces a concept, which (for Kant) is intrinsically “general,” and that the imagination apprehends a specific manifold of intuition. It means, rather, that the understanding tends toward increasingly general concepts, and the imagination tends toward increasingly specific images or exhibitions of intuition. In cognition the intuition is subsumed under the concept – the intuition displays what the concept conceptualizes – and to that extent the powers producing them stand in “minimal” mutual attunement. But the understanding’s concept may still be more “general” than the intuition requires, or the imagination’s intuition may still be more “specific” than the concept requires, and to the extent that either is the case the corresponding attunement is less than “ideal.” Allison glosses the former case as arising “when the understanding in its endemic quest for universality produces a concept that is too general and indeterminate to be represented adequately in concreto by any particular instance, for example, the concept of a living thing.” In this example, I take it, some living thing is conceptualized as a “living thing” and not as one of the more particular kinds of living thing to which it could presumably be counted as belonging. The latter case occurs “when the particular imaginatively apprehended is too idiosyncratic or atypical to represent adequately what is thought in



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“[T]he understanding requires the imagination to exhibit intuitively what is thought in its concept, and the imagination presumably needs the understanding to give it direction so that it can know what to exhibit” (Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. ). Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. . Allison relies on a passage from the Dohna-Wundlacken Logic: “Imagination and understanding are two friends who cannot do without one another but cannot stand one another either, for one always harms the other. The more universal the understanding is in its rules, the more perfect it is, but if it wants to consider things in concreto then [it] absolutely cannot do without the imagination” (XXIV:). Note that for Allison the powers “work at cross purposes (and therefore ‘harm’ one another)” (p. ) “often” (p. ) or “usually” (p. ). What Kant says is that “one always harms the other” (emphasis added), but in Allison’s terms this would mean that better-than-minimal attunement never occurs. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. . Possibly what Allison has in mind here is, instead, a situation in which someone thinks of a living thing without any corresponding intuition; this would be an instance where not even minimal attunement is achieved.

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the concept, for example, the image of a three-legged dog.” Here, I think, a three-legged dog is being conceptualized as (say) a dog, or an animal or living thing, and not (as would be “ideal”) as a three-legged dog. In their “maximal” or “optimal” attunement there is no such distance between intuition and concept: the intuition is no more specific than the concept, the concept no more general than the intuition. This is the case when the intuition or image displays only the features that are “essential” to the concept while the concept captures its features as finely as possible. Where this occurs, “intuitive content and conceptual rule seem, as it were, particularly made for each other.” The idea depends on construing “intuition” in what Allison calls the “weak” sense. Here Allison cites Béatrice Longuenesse’s reading of a passage in Kant’s Jäsche Logic that draws a contrast between “a savage” who “sees a house from a distance, whose use he does not know” and “someone else who knows it determinately as a dwelling established for human beings.” Kant attributes cognition of “one and the same object” to the “savage” and his counterpart. The difference is a function of the “form” of cognition in each case: “in the former [the savage] it is mere intuition, in the latter it is simultaneously intuition and concept.” On Allison’s (and Longuenesse’s) take, the “savage” and his counterpart – and, presumably, anyone who is capable of cognition and is likewise gazing upon the house – have the same intuitive content. The difference lies in whether – and if so, how – the intuition is schematized and subsumed under an empirical concept. Kant’s “savage” lacks the concept “house” and its corresponding schema, which the other has and brings to bear. The same distinction could be marked with two senses of “see.” It is only in the weak sense that the “savage” “sees” a house, whereas his counterpart “sees” it in the strong sense as well. It is this weak sense of intuition that makes it possible to speak of variance in attunement of the cognitive powers. For if we think of intuition in the strong sense, such that it makes no sense to speak of a subject’s having an intuition without her having the corresponding concept, then in cognition intuition and concept will always fit closely – or  

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Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. . What Allison actually says is that “the understanding’s concept is not too indeterminate for the imagination and, conversely, the latter’s image exhibits all of the essential features thought in the concept” (Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. ), but surely if there is to be attunement at all the image must exhibit all of the essential features thought in the concept. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. . Jäsche Logic IX:, as quoted in Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. .

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rather, there won’t be room for the possibility of their fitting more or less closely. The “savage” will have whatever strong intuition corresponds to his concept (if any): if his concept is that of “human construction,” then his manifold of intuition is of a human construction. Only someone who conceptualizes it as a house will have the strong intuition of a house. By contrast, the weak intuition occasioned by an object does not depend on the way in which a subject does or can conceptualize it. The content of a weak intuition seems to be a function entirely of the object, and so in this respect talk of the manifold of (weak) intuition is interchangeable with talk of the object itself. The implication is that a better attunement of the cognitive powers – a closer approximation to their “optimal” attunement – is a matter of subsuming the object in question (the weak intuition) under a concept that more fully captures that object’s features. In other words, what seems to be at issue is precision or specificity in the classification of objects. If we bear in mind that the “optimal” attunement of the cognitive powers is (presumably) optimal with respect to cognition, then the upshot is that a better attunement, and so a better cognition, is one that recognizes its object under a more specific concept. Whether or not an object can occasion a “better” attunement is a matter of whether the object can be brought under an empirical concept that is more precisely tailored to what it is. This depends, as we’ve seen, on the judging subject’s conceptual resources. But Allison remarks that it also depends on the “nature” of the object. (Clearly he wants here to account for Kant’s specifying differences between occasioning objects (rather than between subjects), in the fourth sentence of §, as making for differently proportioned attunements.) Though he does not elaborate, from what we’ve seen I think that the idea must be that some objects lend themselves more than do others to more precise conceptualization, that it is “in their nature” to do so. A later remark provides some confirmation of this: 

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It is not entirely clear to me which Allison wants to say: that the “savage” does not bring the intuited manifold under any empirical concept at all, or that the “savage” does not bring it under the concept “house” but under some much more general concept (such as “human construction”). In the former case I don’t think it makes Kantian sense to say that he then “sees” the house at all, even in the weak sense corresponding to the weak sense of intuition. Better attunement would therefore seem always to involve reigning in the understanding’s compulsion toward generality. It’s a consequence of construing intuition as weak in this context that no room is left for any corresponding reigning in of the imagination’s compulsion for specificity: the imagination will ipso facto apprehend the object in all of its specificity; the only variable is the extent to which that specificity is registered in a concept. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. .

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Allison speaks of the experience of a “good cognitive fit” when the object “provides a particularly apt illustration of what it is to be an object of a certain kind.” We are finally in a position to appreciate the difficulties raised by Allison’s construal of the sense in which the attunement of the cognitive powers allows of degrees. To begin with, an “optimal” attunement would seem to involve recognizing a given object as the “most specific” thing that it is, under the “most precise” of applicable empirical concepts. Just what this could mean is quite unclear. The most precise applicable concept that is already in use? Surely not. The most precise applicable concept possible? What could that mean? In any case, it would seem that every object (intuitive manifold in the weak sense) is particularly representative or paradigmatic of some concept: the concept that picks out as specifically as possible that particular object, taking into account such things as its location in space and time, for example, and that is thus “particularly made for” it. The very notion of a “most precise” concept seems, anyway, to court absurdity. To reach for maximal, absolute precision would be effectively to seek to move beyond concepts – which are, after all, inherently “general” – in favor of recognizing each object as its own kind. (Note that this is just how Allison describes the beautiful object, on Kant’s view: as its own kind.) The peak of cognition, in other words, would involve grasping objects wholly and only as individuals. This vision of cognition would seem to embrace the possibility that Kant presents in the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment as troubling, as requiring to be staved off by way of a transcendental principle of judgment: the possibility that the actual world might be so “chaotic,” its material so “infinitely manifold,” as to render impossible the formation of empirical concepts that are answerable to it. At this limit, would-be empirical concepts would be concepts in name only; effectively they would be singularly referential descriptions of individuals.



 

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Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. . This especially brings out the similarity between the feeling of “optimal” attunement on Allison’s second and third conceptions and judgments of “quantitative perfection” or “qualitative perfection,” respectively, where the former concerns “the agreement of the manifold in the thing with” the “concept of what sort of thing it is supposed to be,” while the latter concerns whether it has “everything that is requisite” for the sort of thing it is supposed to be (CJ V:; Kant’s emphases). Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. . See CJ IV:. It would also seem to conflict with his claim that there is no “lowest” concept, as at Jäsche Logic IX:. (I owe this point to Rachel Zuckert.)

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The implication that the more precise classification of an object is always cognitively better is strange quite apart from its pull away from discursivity. It seems clearly false: we do not always find the (“absolutely”) more precise classification of an object to be the “better” way of judging it. More generally, Allison’s account seems to take it that how an object is to be conceptualized is something that is settled apart from the point of the judgment concerning it, rather than, on the contrary, depending on (or, better, being codependent with) the point of judgment. (“Living thing” might be exactly the way to conceptualize what a science fiction movie lead would hope to find signs of as she stumbles through the aftermath of an alien attack.) Correctness (or precision) is but one norm of (cognitive) judgment, in other words, and the problem with Allison’s account is its exclusive focus on this norm. Or the point is perhaps better put this way: the application of a norm of judgment, including that of correctness, is not fixed apart from the scene of that particular judgment. What counts as increased correctness or greater precision itself depends on what we’re talking about and why. It might be thought that the problem really lies with Kant, with his adherence to a narrow conception of cognition that turns upon a narrow, or rigid, sense of its norms. I turn now to arguing that this is not the case. §, I will claim, concerns a norm of cognitive judgment beyond that of precision or correctness. Indeed § is about the fact that cognitive judgment depends on a further norm.

. The Subjective Condition of Cognition My reading of § takes the approach I sketched in Section .: I distinguish the common sense of § from the aesthetic common sense. Let us revisit its second sentence: But if cognitions are to be communicable, then the state of mind, i.e., the attunement of the cognitive powers for a cognition in general, and indeed that proportion which is fitting for a representation (through which an object is given to us), in order to make cognition out of it, must also be universally communicable; for without this, as the subjective condition of cognizing, cognition, as an effect, could not arise.

It is important to avoid a (nevertheless pervasive) conflation. Kant is saying, first, that cognition depends on a “subjective condition,” which is 

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This is a point of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s consideration of “precision” (conceptual and otherwise) in Philosophical Investigations.

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a state of mind comprised of an attunement of the cognitive powers for a cognition in general. That is, cognition requires that there be some such attunement. But Kant is also, second, identifying a particular attunement among such attunements, namely “that proportion which is fitting for a representation (through which an object is given to us) in order to make cognition out of it.” That is made clear by the words “and indeed [und zwar].” The implication is that not every attunement that allows for cognition of an object has a further feature, a feature only one, privileged attunement has: that of having or being a “proportion” that “befits” the representation through which an object is given to us “in order to make cognition out of it.” If the distinction Kant is after is to be preserved, then we need a sense of what it is for a “proportion” to befit the representation of a given object “in order to make cognition out of it” that amounts to more than its being capable of cognizing it. This is what Kant goes on to provide. Kant’s argument thus does not wait until the fifth sentence to adduce a privileged attunement of the cognitive powers. It does so already in the second sentence, and indeed – so I now argue – it is the same privileged attunement in both places. The next three sentences of § are, then, a kind of working out of a thought that is already in play in the second sentence. The third sentence specifies what is required for (basic) attunement. This is just the picture of the mutual workings of imagination and understanding familiar from the first Critique: cognition of a given object “arises” when the apprehended manifold of intuition is brought under a concept. This brings us to the fourth sentence, where Kant invokes the variability of proportions of attunement according to variety among given objects. As I read Kant, the claim does not depend on a prior or independent understanding of what a “proportion” of an attunement is and of what would be meant by saying that it may vary (an understanding that Kant has not, in any event, supplied). On the contrary, the claim is meant to explain what variation of attunement-proportion amounts to in the first place. The claim is a constitutive one: different proportions of attunement constitute the cognition of (correspondingly) different objects. What it is for an attunement to have a certain “proportion” is for it to be cognition of a certain (corresponding) object – or, more exactly, to be the “state of mind” of cognizing the given object in a certain way. Think of a musical notion of 

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I agree with Guyer and Matthews in translating und zwar here as “and indeed” rather than “namely.”

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proportions, where different proportions or ratios correspond to different tones or pitches. In support of this suggestion, let me point out that the word translated as “object” in this fourth sentence is Objekt. Kant also uses Objekt in the first sentence, while the remaining occurrences of “object” render Gegenstand. The varying use of the two terms in this section is systematic, I think, and lines up with a distinction between two senses of object that Kant sometimes (but not everywhere) draws upon. Objekt designates an object as the subject of a possible judgment, while Gegenstand designates an object as a locus of “objective reality,” an object as that which stands over and against us, as that which is “out there” for us to come up against or encounter. It is the “judgmental” sense of object that Kant invokes in the fourth sentence, which comes down to the claim that different proportions of attunement of the cognitive powers constitute different (cognitive) judgments. Why, now, does Kant begin the fifth sentence as he does: “Nevertheless, there must be one” attunement that stands out in a certain way? Why “must” there be such a one? The phrasing suggests that an issue or a question has been raised, to which the claim that there “must” be a special attunement serves as a response. And a question has been implicitly raised. It has to do with a fact I touched on in Section ., the fact that there is no single way of cognizing a given situation. That is, any occasion permits of a range of (indefinitely many) different true or correct judgments about what is the case. In the light of the fourth sentence, we can put it this way: on any given occasion, there are a variety of different possible objects of judgment that could render what one is actually confronted with. But then if we are ever to come to judgment at all, some particular judgment must distinguish itself as (not merely true, but also as) appropriate or apt. Among the available or possible ways of “making cognition out of” a representation through which an object (in the “real” sense, a Gegenstand) is given to us, which most befits it? This is the issue. With this way of putting things I mean to show how Kant is pointing back to the second sentence and its naming of the privileged attunement. The German I rendered there as “is fitting” or “befits” conjugates sich gebu¨hren, which carries the sense of giving something its due, what it merits (which is also at work in the first sentence: unless cognitions and judgments were 

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Allison drew such a distinction in his interpretation of Kant’s theoretical philosophy, aligning Objekt with a “logical or judgmental” sense of object and Gegenstand with “a ‘real’ sense of object” (Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), p. ).

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universally communicable, “they would not be due any agreement with the object [käme ihnen keine Übereinstimmung mit dem Objekt zu]”). The “most conducive” attunement, or judgment, is that which is found to do justice to the situation, the case, what I am given to perceive. So far as actually rendering empirical judgment depends on answering this question, it depends on reflective judgment. That’s what I argued in Chapter , where I said that it is for reflective judgment to compare the given representation to the many possible determinations of it and to ask: Which is fitting? In the Anthropology, where Kant most concretely characterizes it, Kant calls the power of (reflective) judgment “a talent for selecting what is exactly appropriate in a given case” and says that it is manifested in the lawyer who “knows how to hit upon the point regarding what matters (for there is only one).” Of course, we do not conduct ourselves like lawyers in every instance of cognition. Kant should grant that much of the time we do not approach the question of “what calls for judging” with the deliberation and effort that the lawyer’s discourse requires, just as we do not regularly formulate for ourselves the maxims of our actions. Kant’s way of putting things in § is designed to accommodate this. For what it adds to the Anthropology passage is the thought that I “select” or “find” this “most fitting” judgment by feeling it to be most conducive for the animation of my cognitive powers for a cognition in general. That is, I feel most animated, in my capacity as a cognizer, by this judgment. It is what I feel to matter here and now, whether or not I make it explicit to myself. § thus tells the following sort of story, crystallizing around three central points. First, there is a role for feeling in cognition. Cognition depends on a feeling for what (beyond being merely true) calls for judging. The question of what calls for judging is not itself a matter for cognition; that’s why it is determined by feeling. Following Kant’s Anthropology discussion of judgment as characteristically asking, “What is of importance?” – Worauf kommts an?, the phrase one would use, for example, in talking about what really matters in life (Worauf es im Leben ankommt) – I will dub it the feeling “for what matters.” If, second, our cognitions are to allow of being universally communicated, the feeling for what matters must also be presupposed to be communicable. This is because to communicate a cognitive judgment is to impart it to someone, so that either it is now their judgment as well or (at least) they can appreciate why one 

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Anthropology VII:.

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would judge it. If I am to impart a belief to others, they must be able to appreciate the reasons for taking the judgment to be true, for believing it, but they must also be able to appreciate why just this should be the judgment to make (and not some other true judgment). Since universal communicability is a normative notion (that which is universally communicable is universally valid and transmissible), to presuppose the universal communicability of the feeling for what matters is to presuppose a norm for such a feeling. Thus, third, we presuppose the idea of a common sense, a norm, for the feeling of what matters, on pain of a skepticism about cognition. The possibility of communication depends, for us (human beings), on being able to feel that something matters, and on our presupposing that we can speak for others – with a universal voice – with regard to what matters. There is, therefore, a deep and internal connection between the common sense of § and the issue of communicability that structures the argument. Its common sense is the idea of the discernment (not of what is true or of what corresponds to the facts, but) of what calls for judgment, and this is closely tied to the discernment of what bears or is worth saying or voicing. I don’t mean to suggest that the requirement of judging – discerning – what calls for judgment is pertinent only where one addresses others in judgment, only that it is particularly clear when we consider what, beyond truth, conditions communication, with respect to which we must be attuned with one another. The “subjective condition of cognizing” to which Kant refers in the second sentence is the state of mind in which the cognitive powers are in the relation that is most conducive to their animation toward cognition, the state of mind of the most “fitting” judgment. Kant indicates that without it cognition, as an “effect” (or activity; the German is Wirkung), could not arise. The idea is not that this state of mind is the cause of cognition. It is, rather, that actually cognizing or actually coming to judgment depends on being able to find some particular way of judging to be most apt. It depends on the state of mind that identifies what matters, a state of mind that manifests itself through feeling. We are now in a position to return to the question of the connection Kant points to, for example in §, between the “subjective relation” of agreement or harmony of the cognitive powers in the judgment of taste and the “subjective condition” of cognition. In the judgment of taste the 

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See Chapter  for an explanation and defense of this construal of what is involved in “universal communicability.”

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cognitive powers are in harmony, in that they agree in finding something to call for judging. Cognition too depends on such harmony, on finding something to call for judging. In each case, the harmony Kant is talking about is a harmony between the imagination and the understanding but also of both with the world. What is in question is being discerningly attuned to the world. Harmony is experienced as the feeling of being animated by the world. But it is not the same kind of harmony in both cases. In the judgment of taste the mind finds something to call for mere or aesthetic judging, whereas for cognition one has to find the object to call for judging by way of a determinate cognition. § thus shows (not that cognition requires taste, or vice versa, but) that there is a deep parallel between cognition and taste. Cognition and taste each presuppose reflective judgment and a corresponding norm of common sense, a norm of openness and responsiveness to the world that does not itself presuppose a ground in cognition. In each case, interestingly, Kant indicates that he is talking about conditions of judgment specifically for human beings. We regard our cognitive attunements “as valid for everyone who is determined to judge by means of understanding and sense in combination (for every human being)” (CJ V:). We share the experience of agreeableness with nonrational animals and we are bound by the good just as any rational being is; it is beauty that belongs specifically to the human domain. Beauty has meaning only for human beings, who are both animal and rational, and Kant stresses that taste depends on both of those dimensions of ours, our animality and our rationality together. Beauty is not for nonrational animals or for “spirits,” but for embodied and desiring minds, beings who combine receptivity or passivity with activity or spontaneity. Kant’s talk of a state of mind or Stimmung (“attunement”) in § echoes § in a couple of ways. Stimmung also means “mood,” akin to the ordinary sense of “state of mind” I encouraged us to hear in §. It belongs to a wider network of concepts that the two sections share, including those etymologically related to Stimme (voice) – Übereinstimmung, Zusammenstimmung, Beistimmung, bestimmen – as well as Harmonie. (Stimme is also the word one uses for voice in the musical sense.) In both sections, moreover, three dimensions of attunement or harmony are at issue: attunement between the cognitive powers; attunement between judgment and object; and attunement between human subjects. In each case, the idea is of an agreement that is not so much intellectual or the result of a “proof” as it is felt and found. 

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See CJ V:.

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It was the claim to necessity that brought us to the thought that the judgment of taste presupposes, as its norm, the idea of an aesthetic common sense. This is a norm that would determine where liking is necessary, owed to the object or due to it, as recognition (acknowledgment) of its claims upon us. At the outset of this chapter, I presented Kant as pressing a related difference between cognitive judgments on the one hand and judgments of taste and of the morally good on the other: in demanding agreement with my judgment that the rock crystal I am inspecting contains a mobile droplet of water, I am making a claim to truth; but in demanding agreement with my judgment of taste or of the morally good, I am presenting the object as having a claim upon us. But now it turns out that cognition too depends on a claim to something more than truth, a claim, in fact, to something like doing justice to the world. The common sense on which cognition depends determines, in a similar way, what calls for (cognitive, rather than aesthetic) judging. We might say that cognition has also turned out to depend on a response akin to recognition as acknowledgment, of, namely, what kind of recognition-asidentification the given situation calls for. Does this mean that (for example) the rock crystal is, after all, experienced as having a claim upon us, as being owed a certain way of cognizing it? I think Kant’s idea is better captured by saying – as I have been saying – that it is the world or the situation that is given that has a claim upon us for cognizing in a certain way. That is why Kant characterizes the most conducive proportion as fitting for making cognition out of the representation through which an object is given to us, and not as (simply) befitting the object or representation. Taste and cognition each rest upon a common orientation to the world that is felt as the experience of being brought to life. It is neither entirely passive nor entirely the expression of activity or spontaneity. Reflective judgment lies at a point of mysterious balance between our receptivity (the world moves us to judgment) and our activity (we take or undertake judgment, and our judgment is expressive of a position we take). It is the work of judgment to discern what calls for judgment. The formulation of the privileged attunement in the fifth sentence captures this balance: there must be one judgment of the world through which the object is most felt to animate the mind toward cognition.



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This is, of course, a questionable claim. The Groundwork’s (implicit) claim that there is one maxim for every action is comparably questionable.

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An important dimension of Kant’s distinction between the agreeable and the beautiful has to do with the role for agency and activity in the experience of the latter, by contrast with the experience of the former. I manifest my agency in the experience of beauty, whereas I am “passive” with respect to the experience of the agreeable. That is why we say, according to Kant, that pleasure in the agreeable is a mere sensation, while pleasure in the beautiful is a feeling in a richer sense that genuinely warrants the term (viz., Gefu¨hl). The feeling of pleasure in the beautiful is a kind of achievement on my part with respect to which I am subject to assessment, praise or (when I fail to feel this pleasure where I ought, or feel it where I ought not) criticism. To experience the beautiful, there is something I must do (beyond setting interest aside). It is to this activity or agency that Kant is pointing when he remarks that to say that something is beautiful – to so much as be in a position to call it beautiful – “what matters is what I make of this representation in myself [es auf das, was ich aus dieser Vorstellung in mir selbst mache, . . . ankomme]” (CJ V:; machen aus, like its English counterpart “make of,” carries both the sense of creating something out of something and the sense of interpreting or understanding it). But I want to suggest that Kant is showing the relevant notion of activity to be complicated, even paradoxical, for it encompasses a kind of receptivity. Kant characterizes the mutual activity of the cognitive powers in the free play as their being “animated.” In their free play the cognitive powers are mutually animating, but I have been urging us to keep in view the larger point that the free play itself is a matter of the mind’s being animated, or brought to life, by the object (or its representation). Kant puts this most plainly in the Anthropology, where, for example, he says that “[a] good poem is the most compelling means of animating the mind.” I now want to draw attention to the awkwardly “passive” cast this characterization and, especially, Kant’s further glosses on it give to aesthetic response. In §, for example, Kant says that the object “prompts” or “occasions” the animation of the cognitive powers (CJ V:), and even that it “sets” those powers 

 

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Pace the construal of Kant as an “aesthetic attitude” theorist for whom adopting the aesthetic attitude consists of bracketing interest. For example: “To judge the object in terms of its pure beauty, we try to apprehend the object disinterestedly, and if successful, the object’s purposive form will then generate a harmony of the cognitive faculties to a degree that radiates a satisfaction associated with cognition in general” (Robert Wicks, Kant on Judgment (London: Routledge, ), p. ). On the “passivity” of pleasure in the agreeable, see Chapter . Thus the first edition of Meredith’s translation has “the meaning I give to it” (p. ). Anthropology VII:.

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

into free play (CJ V:). The latter is especially striking. Usually the kind of play that Kant’s talk of free play brings to mind is the activity of playing: play as creativity, as encompassing games, as part of the world of children, and so on. But the phrase “set into play” summons up another sense of play: that of the triggering of a predetermined mechanical or procedural movement. These formulations seem to cut out just the role for activity and agency that the section’s opening suggests the experience of the beautiful must accommodate, if its pleasure is not to collapse into sensation that is entitled only to private validity. We could try to ignore such formulations, although they recur frequently throughout the text. I suggest, instead, that we read them not as threatening the register of aesthetic agency that Kant needs to carve out, but as elaborating it. The experience of beauty involves a moment of passivity: being acted upon, being brought to life, by the world. Kant’s deep insight (it is perhaps one he has not fully mastered) is that this passivity is not opposed to activity, but is rather an expression of it. Beautiful objects do not animate everyone. Unless I can be, or can open myself to being, animated by the prompt of the object – unless I can be affected, moved, by the object in the relevant sense – I will have no experience of beauty. Exercising my taste involves, then, being able to be animated by the beautiful object, letting it play that role, granting it that power. Part of the achievement that constitutes the judgment of taste, making the subject worthy of praise (or criticism), lies in allowing oneself to be moved or aroused by that which merits it. “[T]he speaking arts, rhetoric and poetry, . . . are aimed at an attunement [Stimmung] of the mind whereby they directly arouse it to activity.” (“Aim at” is more abstract than the German phrase, anlegen auf, which has an idiomatic meaning of taking a bead on something, as with a weapon). The beautiful object is “worthy of being intuited” (CJ V:), and it is part of the expression of taste to be able to acknowledge that worthiness by intuiting it, that is, by taking it up in the first place. This, I think, is an important reason for the centrality of the power of imagination in Kant’s aesthetics. Already in Kant’s theoretical philosophy, the power of imagination serves to mediate, to bridge the divide between, the passivity of the reception of intuition and the activity of its conceptualization. There, however, Kant is thinking of determinative judgment, and the mediation of the imagination in the Schematism is “top-down”: the schemata allow for applying (given) concepts to manifolds of intuition, 

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Anthropology VII:.

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or for identifying particulars as instances of (given) concepts. In the Critique of Judgment the focus is on reflective judgment, and here imagination is the mode of sensibility that the beautiful object “sets into play” and that in turn “arouses” the understanding (e.g., CJ V:). That is, in the Critique of Judgment Kant presents the imagination as the mode of responsiveness to the world, even of receptivity, as well as the mode of creative form-giving: “if in the judgment of taste the imagination must be considered in its freedom, then it is in the first instance understood not as reproductive, as subjected to the laws of association, but as productive and self-active (as the authoress of voluntary forms of possible intuitions)” (CJ V:). Martin Heidegger is, of course, famous for reading or appropriating the Critique of Pure Reason by (re)centering it on the power of imagination. I’d like to end this chapter by pointing to a related passage in Heidegger on the receptive side of Kantian cognition that is meant to gloss or rework the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason, but that strikes me rather as registering Kant’s own development or reworking of the conditions of cognition in the Critique of Judgment. Heidegger is talking about Kant’s picture of the “passive” ground of knowledge in sensibility: [T]he finitude of human knowing does not lie in humans’ knowing quantitatively less than God. Rather it consists in the fact that what is intuited must be given to the intuition from somewhere else – what is intuited is not produced by intuition. . . . Accordingly our intuiting as letting beings be encountered in their way of being involves a beingreferred-to beings which are already on hand. [. . . T]his intuitable being must announce itself by itself, i.e., this being must concern the knowing being, must touch this being, must do something to it, as it were, and must make itself noticeable – this being must affect the knowing being. That the knowing being must be affected by the being which is to be encountered and that this being matters to the knowing being – this is what makes human intuition finite. To matter to the knowing being on the part of beings themselves can take place in manifold ways.

I take it that Heidegger wishes to indicate that Kant’s term for the relation of the “intuitable being” to the subject, affizieren, captures much more than it is usually granted (and perhaps more than it was strictly meant to 



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The “apprehension of forms in the imagination can never take place without the reflective power of judgment, even if unintentionally, at least comparing them to its faculty for referring intuition to concepts” (CJ V:). Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), p. . Heidegger’s emphases.

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capture). In other words, affizieren is not just a philosophical term of art, a name or placeholder for the mysterious relation whereby we receive intuition. The ordinary German word, in concert with the English correlate “affect,” communicates the idea of being touched or moved (as we might speak of being deeply “affected” by the performance of a piece of music), and this idea, Heidegger is claiming, is very much to Kant’s point, or to what his point should be. In fact, Kant uses affizieren this way at the start of the Critique of Judgment, when he says that in the referring of representations to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure “the subject feels itself, [feels] how it is affected by the representation” (CJ V:). Kant articulates the finitude of human knowledge in terms of the respect in which the subject does not make the world but rather must be given it, so must receive it. On Heidegger’s reading, this being-given involves being touched by something, finding something to matter. But if this is a matter of “passivity” (as Kant puts it), Heidegger’s passage suggests that such “passivity” is not without a certain dimension of activity, insofar as intuiting is “letting beings be encountered in their way of being” (emphasis added). It may be that such mattering “can take place in manifold ways,” as Heidegger says at the end of the quoted passage, but it appears that for such mattering to “take place” at all, the knower must allow what matters to matter. Not coincidentally, in my view, Heidegger uses very similar language to render Kant’s sense of the subject’s relation to the beautiful object. In the Nietzsche lectures, Heidegger presents Kant’s aesthetics in a remarkably favorable light. He defends Kant’s aesthetics against Nietzsche’s misconstrual, and even presents Kant as anticipating his own thought. Thus he reads Kant as showing that “in order to find something beautiful, we 



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I am suggesting that the third Critique is more clearly oriented toward the issue Heidegger has in mind than is the first, but that is not to say that the first Critique offers no support for Heidegger’s take. Heidegger is reading the following passage: “All intuitions are nothing for us and do not in the least concern us [gehen uns nicht im mindesten etwas an] if they cannot be taken up into consciousness, whether they influence it directly or indirectly, and through this alone is cognition possible” (A/B). For the argument that Heidegger is not just imposing something external upon Kant’s text, but rather noticing something that is already there, see Daniel Dahlstrom, “The Critique of Pure Reason and Continental Philosophy: Heidegger’s Interpretation of Transcendental Imagination,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. . Heidegger, Nietzsche I, Gesamtausgabe, div. I, vol. . (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, ). Kant emerges as the neglected hero, and this is all the more remarkable given that Heidegger’s own diagnosis of the sources of the decline of aesthetics would seem to make Kant the villain. For further discussion, see Ingvild Torsen, “On Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant’s Aesthetics,” British Journal of Aesthetics , no.  ().

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must let the encountered [das Begegnende] itself come before us, purely as itself, in its own standing and worth”; we must “release the encountered, as such, into what it is,” which means that we must “grant it what belongs to it and what it brings to us.” It is in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that Heidegger first uses such language, presenting the audience of a work of art as “preservers” of it, where preserving is, properly, letting the work be (a work, the work that it is). Letting the work be means not appropriating the artwork, but it also means letting it work on oneself and letting it shape one’s world. Heidegger’s language is undeniably different from Kant’s, but (as I hope to have suggested) the picture it conveys reflects an important, and surprising, affinity with Kant’s vision of aesthetic encounter.  

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Heidegger, Nietzsche I, p. . Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, ), p. ff.

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Aesthetic Liking

As I have set up the issue of the judgment of taste’s twofold peculiarity, the heart of the problem concerns the presumptuousness of its claim upon others. It is natural to suppose that Kant’s response to the problem consists – must consist – of showing that the appearance of presumptuousness, of excess, turns out to be mere appearance. Two interpretive approaches then present themselves, variants of which we have encountered. The first approach is deflationary in spirit. It aims to show that there is no real problem to begin with, that the sense of a tension between the subjectivity and the normativity of the judgment of taste draws its force only from an unnecessary, and indeed obstructive, picture of the nature of reality (or of what a quality would have to be like if it were to count as belonging to the fabric of the world). The second approach concedes that Kant is identifying a genuine problem, one requiring a new intervention, which is part of what the third Critique is for. It holds that the resolution of the problem involves discovering a legitimation of the judgment of taste’s claim, either in the requirements of cognition, in those of morality, or in a source of normativity proper to the aesthetic. Vindicating the judgment of taste’s demand for pleasure means demonstrating that this demand is not presumptuous after all: this is the shared background supposition. It draws its naturalness from the sense that there  

See my Introduction. The main representatives of this approach are Karl Ameriks (offering a reconstruction of Kant) and John McDowell and David Wiggins (arguing independently of Kant). See Chapter  for further discussion. Jay Bernstein also takes this approach in “Aesthetics, Modernism, Literature: Cavell’s Transformations of Philosophy,” in Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Eldridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Bernstein is there offering and endorsing a reading of passages of Stanley Cavell that I will also draw upon below; my discussion will (implicitly) contest Bernstein’s proposal in its own right and as a construal of Cavell. See also Michael Fried on the critic’s task as that of “objectifying” his critical intuitions – a view he has more recently rejected (“Three American Painters,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), p. , and “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” the opening essay of the same volume, p. ).

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is no alternative, the tacit conviction that there could be no space for maintaining that the judgment of taste is marked by a characteristic presumptuousness except by giving up on the idea that it can be entitled to its claim. One of my aims in this chapter is to open up such space on Kant’s behalf. Together with the second approach, and against the first, I take Kant to locate a real problem, to ask a real question. By contrast with the second approach, however, I take Kant’s view to be that the problem is not resolved by defeating the judgment of taste’s air of presumptuousness once and for all. Rather, Kant’s insight is that in this, the aesthetic, region of our lives, we must make, and so must be entitled to make, “excessive” claims upon one another. We have a general entitlement to do so, but it must be worked out in every case. Thus in a sense the problem remains, only it is relocated, and refigured, as a problem to be negotiated between particular individuals in a particular case.

. Aesthetic Communication When I discussed the notion of “universal communicability” in Chapter , I argued that it is to be understood in relation to communication in the full, ordinary sense. In speaking of the “universal communicability” of a certain state of mind (or whatever else), Kant means not only that anyone can have it (“universal haveability,” so to speak), but also that it can be communicated to anyone. Since Kant does not, however, actually treat of communication in the passages that were then my focus, I mostly followed him in setting the topic aside. I want now to shift my attention back to the larger topic of communication. More specifically, I want to consider Kant’s picture of aesthetic communication and its relation to cognitive communication. A difficulty, of course, is that there is very little explicit engagement with communication, aesthetic or otherwise, anywhere in the Critique of Judgment. In fact, some moments might seem to suggest that Kant does not think there really is or can be any such thing. If “I stop my ears, won’t listen to reasons and rationalizations” that might be adduced in favor of something that “fails to please my taste” (CJ V:), then is there anything really to talk about? The most promising resource for considering Kant’s views on the topic is probably the Dialectic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment, near the end of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” which addresses the “antinomy of taste” (CJ V:–). Here Kant reframes the judgment of taste’s twofold peculiarity. There is no disputing about judgments of taste, and this sets them apart from cognitive judgments.

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Kant regards this as a “commonplace,” and elaborates the point by connecting disputing to proving. Disputing presupposes the possibility of proof, and there is no proving a judgment of taste, while cognition allows of proof, and hence allows of disputing. Nevertheless, a judgment of taste can “perfectly well and rightly be argued about [gar wohl und mit Recht gestritten werden kann]” (CJ V:; Kant’s emphasis). This proposition, “which everyone has a sense of” even if it is not “a proverb in general circulation” (CJ V:), clearly separates the judgment of taste from the judgment of the agreeable. The antinomy is the apparent conflict between the pair of maxims generated when proving and arguing are each traced back to a dependence on concepts. According to the thesis, the judgment of taste “is not based on concepts, for otherwise it would be possible to dispute about it (adjudicate by means of proofs)”; according to the antithesis, the judgment of taste “is based on concepts, for otherwise, despite its variety, it would not even be possible to argue about it (to lay claim to the necessary assent of others to this judgment)” (CJ V:–). The resolution of the antinomy takes the following shape. Once it is recognized that the maxims trade on different senses of “concept,” the apparent conflict disappears and the truth of, or (in the case of the thesis) the truth in, each maxim is revealed. The judgment of taste is not based on determinate concepts, which is what the possibility of disputing would require, but it is based on an indeterminate and indeterminable concept, and so allows of arguing. Kant goes on to identify this indeterminate and indeterminable concept with a “supersensible substratum” variously specified, and as a result it is easy to suspect that these final pages of the text indulge in a regrettable “flight into metaphysics,” fueled by architectonic obsession, that we would do best to ignore. But let us stay for a moment with the way in which the antinomy is set up. The antithesis makes it clear that the idea that it is possible to argue about judgments of taste is closely connected to the (by now very familiar) idea that the judgment of taste makes a legitimate claim to the agreement of others. The parenthetical in the antithesis can be read reductively, so that the connection is one of identity: “arguing” just means “demanding agreement.” But it need not be so read; it can also be read as expressing the (nonreductive) dependence of the possibility of arguing on the possibility of legitimately laying claim to the agreement of others. Thus: if the judgment of taste were not based on a concept, it could not legitimately 

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Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, p. .

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lay claim to agreement, and hence it would not be possible to argue about it. Correspondingly with the parenthetical in the thesis: if the judgment of taste were based on determinate concepts, it would be open to being adjudicated by proofs, and hence it would be open to being disputed. The nonreductive reading allows us to name the difference between a mode of communication (including discourse as well as gesture) and the assumption that underwrites its intelligibility. The fact that we sometimes engage in argument about judgments of taste shows that we take it to be possible (coherent and legitimate) to lay claim to the agreement of others. The fact that we sometimes engage in disputes about cognitive judgments shows that we take it to be possible (coherent and legitimate) to prove them decisively. What, then, does each of these modes of communication look like? What are we doing when “arguing” with others, and how is it different from “proving” something to them or having something proved to oneself? These are the questions I now propose to address, although Kant does not do so himself. To begin with, I want to press the point that there is a substantive issue at stake that bears addressing. Kant is saying that it is not the case that a realm of communication is either governed by a “logic” or rational structure (“proof”) or not governed by anything at all (as with the judgment of the agreeable). There is room for something that counts as supporting one’s judgment that is not “proving” it, and it is this room that “arguing” occupies. Is there such room? And if so, what does it – what does “arguing” – look like? There’s a slightly different way to effectively wind up with the reductive reading, and that is to suppose Kant to hold that there is nothing that one can do or say that would count as supporting one’s judgment of taste. We are fated to inexpressiveness in this arena, and can only claim to be right without being able to say or show why. Then, of course, “arguing” would hardly merit the name: it could amount to no more than empty insistence. As I’ve mentioned, occasional remarks of Kant’s can suggest something of this sort. I think that such a reading is implied when Kant is glossed as holding that although “there is something like a fact of the matter” grounding the judgment of taste, we have no access, epistemic or 

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The difference remains, of course, even if one adopts the reductive reading, only then one needs to supply (on Kant’s behalf ) terms for the modes of communication, as opposed to the assumptions underwriting their intelligibility. For the sake of simplicity, I will use “arguing” and “disputing” for the former, rather than introducing terminology that remains neutral between the reductive and nonreductive readings. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. .

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otherwise, to that (quasi-)fact; there is, even in principle, simply no appealing to it. This strikes me as a strained view. As Philippa Foot puts it, if we are prepared to judge a work of art to be sentimental (for example), “we expect to be able to show that this is so. . . . If there were genuinely nothing to say and nothing to show, . . . we would be most unlikely to insist that somehow, nevertheless, we must be right.” Fortunately, Kant gives us compelling reason to read him otherwise. Arguing and disputing, he says, “are just the same in that they try to engender [hervorbringen] unanimity in judgments” (CJ V:). Surely, then, neither arguing nor disputing consists of stubbornly repeating one’s judgment or flatly contradicting that of someone else (“Yes, it is (beautiful)” or “No, it is not”). For this sort of sheer opposition could not count as “trying” to make agreement possible any more than it could be imagined to actually bring it about. Together with disputing, arguing could credibly be said to “try to engender” agreement only if it involves doing something – in words and perhaps also in other ways, such as with gestures, including pointing – by virtue of which agreement might arise. In other words, arguing, like disputing, can lay claim to trying to engender agreement only if it purports to do so through what one offers in support of one’s judgment, and only if what one offers in support is part of the arguing itself. I am not arguing with you at all, in Kant’s sense of the term, if I am not arguing for my judgment, or against yours. Note that this must be “arguing for” or “arguing against” in a fullblooded sense, and not just the sort of thing sometimes gathered under the rubric of “mere persuasion,” such as undertaking to cajole or manipulate someone into affirming a view. The latter would be, of course, most unattractive to Kant. It is impossible to imagine Kant to hold that one has the “right” to engage in such tactics, whatever the context. If we look back to the poet who won’t listen to the public or to his friends, we find more specific textual evidence that Kant leaves this door as firmly closed as we would expect. Kant’s conclusion is that if the poet is to change his judgment of taste, he must do so “of his own free will” (CJ V:).  

 

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“[W]e are not in a position to appeal to” justifying grounds (Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. ). Philippa Foot, “Morality and Art,” Moral Dilemmas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. . My ellisions set aside the larger context of Foot’s remarks, a discussion of the comparative prospects of relativism with regard to art and morals. I am aware, of course, that streiten can’t be used in this “arguing for/against” construction. See CJ V:, where, in an attack on rhetoric, Kant describes it as “the art of persuasion, i.e., of deceiving by means of beautiful illusion,” which aims to “win minds over to the advantage of the speaker before they can judge and to rob them of their freedom.”

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Whatever is involved in doing so, it is surely, for Kant, incompatible with submitting to manipulation or bullying. The appeal to “free will” is not, I think, merely a figure of speech. Kant shows that he means it by saying that what is at issue is the “autonomy” of taste (CJ V:), invoking the notion in terms of which Kant conceptualizes freedom of the will in his writings on practical reason. Autonomy can be characterized negatively: I act autonomously when I do not act heteronomously, that is, when I do not let an “alien cause,” whether it be within or without me, determine my will. But if that is to say something substantive, we need a positive characterization: What is actually involved in exercising my autonomy? It cannot require simply deciding to will something. It requires, rather, that I choose to act for reasons that I can endorse. Likewise, what we might call the autonomy of my theoretical judgment does not require me to elect to believe something: we would hardly count that as believing at all, and while a cognitive judgment “demands” the agreement of anyone else, one cannot meet that demand – share the belief that the judgment expresses – “at will.” Autonomy does not have to do with that kind of would-be control. It has to do, rather, with believing what I do on grounds that I can endorse. If the parallel with the judgment of taste holds, then we have further reason to suppose that Kant’s view is that the judgment of taste involves responsiveness to (something like) grounds and so that what we offer in aesthetic arguing is (something like) grounds. How, then, is arguing distinguished from disputing, if both stand in some sort of relation to something like reasons or grounds? Let us hesitate to be satisfied with a response that, picking up on Kant’s talk of “proof,” says that the judgment of taste does not allow of “logical proof” or of being settled by “decision procedure.” This is no doubt true, but it cannot capture what Kant is getting at. Kant’s claim has two sides. He denies proof to judgments of taste by the same token that he holds that cognitive judgments, including ordinary empirical judgments, are provable. But ordinary empirical judgments are obviously not to be reached solely via logic (general or transcendental), or as outputs of decision  

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 Groundwork IV:. Robert Wicks, Kant on Judgment, p. . Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. . In these paragraphs I am recasting from the point of view of the “no proof” claim a train of thought in Chapter , Section .. My discussion there was oriented around Kant’s (closely related) claims that cognitive judgment is based on concepts and depends on rules, while judgments of taste are and do not. As I urged, we should avoid construing such claims through a picture of the rule-boundedness of concepts that makes a caricature of cognition, for example by thinking of a concept in terms of a decision procedure or recipe.

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procedures. The cost of this sort of response, then, is that it makes a caricature of cognition. The claim about aesthetic communication is bought at the expense of the claim about cognitive communication. The same difficulty arises, in my view, for a more nuanced construal of the “proof” that Kant withholds from the judgment of taste, according to which Kant’s point is that we cannot arbitrate aesthetic disagreement “on the basis of principle.” This amounts to what I have called aesthetic particularism. If the denial of proof to the judgment of taste is understood along particularist lines, then the “other side” of the Kantian claim is that cognitive judgments are (not just governed by, but also) adjudicable by appeal to principles. Taken in its own terms, this “other side” is by no means clearly true, particularly in the case of ordinary empirical judgments, even when the principles are qualified as applying pro tanto. Indeed John McDowell and Arnold Isenberg are, as we saw in Chapter , central proponents of aesthetic particularism (independently of Kant’s aesthetic account), but they hardly espouse generalism about cognition. Although I have not come across an argument to this effect, I suspect that Kant is frequently assumed to hold that cognitive judgments are indeed adjudicable through principles. The assumption would, I imagine, draw some or even all of its plausibility from the idea that Kant thinks of the “marks” of a concept as necessary and sufficient criteria. Interpretively, at least, the reading on which provability is adjudicability by principles might therefore seem to be on firmer ground. Yet the underlying assumption is mistaken, although I can only gesture at why we should think so. Namely: Kant makes clear that no concept can be defined. In particular, no empirical concept can be defined, since it “never remains within secure boundaries”; an empirical concept can only be “explicated,” and any explication will be fitted to the context at hand and hence provisional. Principles fixed enough to be drawn upon for decisively settling matters of empirical fact would presumably trade upon or enshrine definitions of the concepts (empirical and pure) involved. If concepts resist definition, it is hard to

   

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 Hughes, Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, p. . See Chapter . McDowell’s approving interpretation of Wittgenstein’s rule-following remarks commits him, in fact, to particularism across the board. A–/B–. A–/B–. The empirical concept “gold,” to take one of Kant’s own examples, is characterized by the marks “yellow,” “malleable,” “soluble in aqua regia,” etc. The “etc.” is ineliminable. I thus concur with Brent Kalar: the list of marks “must be open-ended – marks are neither necessary nor sufficient criteria for the application of a concept” (The Demands of Taste in Kant’s Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, ), p. , n. ).

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see how they would not by the same token resist determination by principles. Let me then propose an alternative understanding of Kant’s idea that cognitive judgments allow of proof while judgments of taste do not, one that is more faithful both to Kant and to our ordinary ways of going on in the cognitive and aesthetic dimensions of our lives. Consider the following exchanges: (A) (B) (A) (B)

There’s a goldfinch in the garden. How do you know? From the red head. But goldcrests have red heads too.

(A) (B) (A) (B)

It’s a wonderful song, isn’t it? Wonderful? This? Don’t you find that it really captures the feeling of being in love? But the lyrics are nothing more than trite clichés.

What I want to compare here is what the conversation requires of the interlocutors in each case: or, as we might also put it, what the interlocutors require of each other and owe each other on pain of counting as either unintelligible or incompetent in the corresponding mode of assessment, cognitive or aesthetic (respectively). One line of difference can be put in terms of the significance or force of relevance. In the cognitive case, the sheer relevance of the doubt raised by B is enough to impugn A’s opening claim – the claim to know that what’s in the garden is a goldfinch. That is to say, if the doubt that B raises (“But goldcrests have red heads too”) is relevant, then A grants, must grant, that her claim that there’s a goldfinch in the garden is insufficiently supported, and hence that it has as yet no claim on B. Any competent speaker knows what sorts of considerations count as relevant doubts. Knowing this is part of what it is to be a competent speaker. What the relevance of B’s doubt requires from A, then, is either that she impugn B’s doubt (“But the shape of a goldfinch’s head is different”) or that she offer a new basis (“I know not just from the head but also from the eye markings”). And the cost of failing to do either is that her claim will fall. 

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The first exchange is taken from Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” p. , which alludes to J. L. Austin, “Other Minds,” Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. ff. See also Cavell, The Claim of Reason, pp. –, for a comparison of cognitive judgment with moral judgment. I am following the form, and also drawing on some of the substance, of its brief but rich treatment.

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In the aesthetic case, on the other hand, there is not presupposed a shared understanding of what considerations are even so much as relevant. The relevance of the considerations that the speaker brings to bear is something that she may have to establish in the conversation. Further, it is not enough merely to establish the relevance of the considerations she brings to bear. For in the aesthetic case relevance is not decisive, as it is in the cognitive case. In the goldfinch scenario, A cannot respond to B’s relevant doubt (“But that’s not enough – goldcrests have red heads too”) by saying, “For me it’s enough.” She “cannot” do this in the sense that if she did, she would be discounted as unintelligible or incompetent at epistemological assessment. But in the aesthetic case one can grant the relevance of the other’s considerations against one’s claim without granting their decisiveness – “Sure, the lyrics are hackneyed, but forget about that, it’s not what’s important.” Even when relevance is agreed upon, there is not presupposed a shared understanding of what the significance of a relevant consideration is. It is the speakers who must assign a significance to their considerations. It is the speakers who must establish not just the relevance but also the weight, the force, of their considerations, and, in particular, who must establish when relevant considerations are decisive, when and how they settle the question. In the aesthetic case, furthermore, one can deny the relevance of the other’s doubt without automatically being dismissed as unintelligible or incompetent, or indeed as dogmatic or highhanded. B said: “But the lyrics are mere clichés.” A can, of course, impugn B’s claim as false. But, alternatively, she might grant it while denying its relevance as a doubt, as a counter to her claim. For example: “But that’s just it. The song is about the difficulty of expressing passion without falling into banality. The music and the way it’s sung show how these words, by themselves so insipid, can be wholeheartedly meant. So the sentimentality of the lyrics is crucial to its very point and power.” Or in response to the doubt about the lyrics she

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The song I had in mind here, incidentally, is “Silly Love Songs,” written by Paul McCartney and Linda McCartney. Or rather two versions of it: the original  recording by Wings (on Wings at the Speed of Sound), and the  Red House Painters cover (on Songs for a Blue Guitar). The original version is playful and easy, while the guitar-heavy cover extends to eleven minutes and features intense, even plangent, vocals. I once felt the original to be itself a fairly silly pop song lazily recycling the commonest of love song tropes, and admired the cover for showing how the same words could be meant and for showing that meaning them involves running the risk of mawkishness. I now feel something like the reverse: that the beauty of the original lies in its refusing to be embarrassed by the playfulness of love, while the cover mistakes the solemn for the heartfelt.

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can even say: “So what? That’s not the point!” That is, A can deny the relevance of B’s doubt altogether. Though, one might add, if she takes that path she is not left without any obligation at all: she owes an explanation of how this denial of relevance can be made good. That is, she has to show why it doesn’t matter that the lyrics are clichés. And yet if she does not actually offer such an explanation, her claim will not automatically fall (as failing to offer another basis would mean that the claim to know that it’s a goldfinch has fallen). She might have grounds for admiring the song anyway, ones that would make a difference to B, that she is unwilling or unable at the moment to articulate. This may offer a sense of what “proving” is in the cognitive case, and why it is not available in the aesthetic case, but it does not yet tell us what aesthetic arguing is, nor does it tell us how aesthetic arguing counts as a form of justification. To broach those questions is, clearly enough, to come back to the basic question of what a judgment of taste is, and how it is related to a cognitive judgment. The features I have just mentioned by way of fleshing out the “proof” of which cognitive judgment allows partly characterize the kind of claim it constitutes and the point of such exchanges. It is a claim to knowledge, and specifically a claim to recognition in the sense of identification: a claim to knowledge about what sort of thing something is. What is at issue, at bottom, is whether A is in a position to identify a goldfinch, whether she knows what a goldfinch is – whether, that is, she possesses the concept “goldfinch.” And to possess the concept “goldfinch” is to know what difference various differences – real and imagined comparison cases – would make to the claim that there is one in the garden. As I have urged, Kant’s judgment of taste is best thought of as involving a difference in kind from cognitive judgment. The judgment of taste turns upon an aesthetic encounter with the object, in which I feel animated by the object, which is to say that I feel there is something in my experience of it, beyond what there is to know about it, that deserves to be articulated. Through the judgment of taste I accord a normative status to the object. I find it to deserve my liking (Wohlgefallen). This is recognition of the object in the sense of (or akin to) the forms of acknowledgment that we hold people to deserve. Here acknowledgment takes place apart from a concept. My capacity to respond to the aesthetic value of the object before me does not depend on a capacity to do so elsewhere in the company of something else; nor does it depend on doing so again in the company of this same object at some other time. Taste is a capacity that I bring to bear, but it is not structured like virtue.

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“Arguing,” correspondingly, belongs to a mode of communication that is fundamentally different from “disputing.” It is not, in other words, a diminished or stunted version of disputing, but marks out a different register of “trying to engender” agreement. To say that the judgment of taste does not allow of proof is not to point to something it lacks by comparison with cognitive judgment, but to point to the different kind of thing that it is. This is the deeper reason for moving beyond the construal of Kant as an aesthetic particularist. That construal keeps in place the idea that the key difference between arguing and disputing is that arguing is “less than” disputing. It blocks the idea that arguing and disputing are different modes of communication. When we argue about judgments of taste, we are not failing to prove. We are doing something else. Is there textual evidence for reading Kant this way? Let us briefly revisit his resolution of the antinomy. The concept on which the judgment of taste is based is that of “the supersensible that grounds the object (and also the judging subject) as object of sense, thus as appearance,” or “the supersensible substratum of humanity” (CJ V:) or of “all our faculties” (CJ V:), or “a general ground of the subjective purposiveness of nature for the power of judgment” (CJ V:). However this is made out, it is plainly a different sort of thing from the “concept” that allows for a cognitive judgment to be adjudicated. The latter is an epistemological ground (it makes sense to speak of “having” such a concept), while the former is more like a metaphysical or transcendental source of normativity (not something to be “had” but something that is). This disparity could seem to undermine the force or interest of the (so-called) resolution. Alternatively, it could be Kant’s point – as I propose. The resolution depends on noticing that the maxims trade on different senses of “concept,” and not merely on different kinds (determinate vs. indeterminable) of concept. “There is no possibility of lifting the conflict between” the thesis and antithesis “except by showing that the concept to which one relates the object in this sort of judgment [viz., the judgment of taste] is not taken in the same sense in both maxims.” Kant goes on to say that “this twofold sense or point of view of judging [Beurteilung] is necessary for our transcendental power of judgment” (CJ V:). That 

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Allison notes that the antithesis initially appears to, but does not really, “appeal to the same conception of a ‘concept’ as the thesis. [. . . I]nsofar as it claims merely that there is something like a fact of the matter regarding beauty, and not that it is decidable (even in principle) in any given case, . . . ‘concept’ for the antithesis position serves merely as a placeholder for whatever it is that grounds the validity (or lack thereof ) of particular judgments of taste” (Kant’s Theory of Taste, p. ).

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is, the differing senses of “concept” are tied to correspondingly differing “points of view” taken in judging. We adopt one point of view when we undertake to know, and another when we undertake to aesthetically admire. We must distinguish between these points of view, and so between these modes of judging, if we are to do justice to the differences between cognition and aesthetic judgment. We “must” adopt the point of view corresponding to each form of judging insofar as doing so is constitutive of that form of judging. Thus when Kant says that the concept on which the judgment of taste is based is “indeterminable” – it “cannot be further determined theoretically” (CJ V:), it “cannot be determined by intuition” (CJ V:; Kant’s emphasis) and from it “nothing can be cognized and proved with regard to the object” (CJ V:) – he means that it does not allow of determination in principle, for it is not that sort of thing at all. It is not an epistemological ground, but the idea of a norm; in the Fourth Moment, Kant called it the “idea” of an aesthetic common sense. There is thus an interesting parallel with the ways in which Kant sets the theoretical against the practical or moral. Moral faith is not a variant of knowledge; that is why it makes sense to say that the limits on our knowledge “make room for [moral] faith.” The idea of my freedom under which I must act does not yield or reflect knowledge that I am free. The peculiar responsibilities and vulnerabilities of knowing and willing mean that what is at stake in confusing the two standpoints is not a simple, and simply resolvable, mistake of interest only to the philosopher. Nothing is more natural to us than the inextinguishable desire to know beyond the limits of knowledge, so the feeling that the limits on knowledge deny us something precious. Nothing is more natural to us than the sense that to concede freedom of the will to be indemonstrable theoretically is to capitulate to a disappointing skepticism. We are similarly inclined to distort the unavailability of proof for the judgment of taste into a lack or loss: “the semblance involved in the confusion of the one [sense of 

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When Kant says, “Namely, we take the concept, on which the universal validity of a judgment must be based, in the same sense in both conflicting propositions, and yet we assert two opposed predicates of it” (CJ V:), I understand him to mean that the appearance of conflict between thesis and antithesis arises because we construe “concept” univocally across both while predicating conflicting things of it (“does not ground the judgment of taste” and “grounds the judgment of taste,” respectively), and not that the resolution of the antinomy depends on construing “concept” identically in both while predicating “determinability” of it in the thesis and “indeterminability” of it in the antithesis. (With his opening “namely,” Kant is referring back to the previous sentence, in which he said that we can make comprehensible why the appearance of conflict is “natural and unavoidable for human reason, and why it is and remains so, even if after the resolution of the apparent conflict it no longer deceives” (CJ V:).) Bxxx.

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“concept” or point of view] with the other is, as a natural illusion, unavoidable” (CJ V:).

. Aesthetic Care and Subjectivity Revisited In aesthetic arguing and in cognitive proving alike, one is trying to bring about the other’s agreement, Kant remarked. It is clear enough what counts as agreement in the cognitive case. You agree with my judgment about the goldfinch if you make the same judgment, so if you too hold that there is a goldfinch in the garden. When I am trying to convince you about the truth of the claim, I am trying to get you to conceptualize what you perceive as a goldfinch. I am trying to induce in you a relationship of the faculties of imagination and understanding that is plausibly called “the same” in form as well as content. What about agreement in judgment of taste? What counts as making “the same” judgment? Kant’s view opens up an appealing answer to this question. A judgment of taste is based on pleasure in a free play of the cognitive faculties. Animated by the object, I am moved to articulate my aesthetic encounter, and I feel sustained in doing so. I need not expect or require the other to have just the same aesthetic encounter, or to find just the same aspects of it to bear articulating in just the same ways. When you can’t see what there is to admire in the film I love, we will have overcome our disagreement if the film starts to animate you too. In short: we both make “the same” judgment of taste when we are both animated by the object to a free play; we do not have to have “the same” free play. This is why it may be animating to communicate about our judgments of taste even when we agree and there is nothing to argue about. What this means for aesthetic arguing is that it is undertaken with the aim, or in the hope, of opening the way for the other person’s animation: helping the object bring the other person to life, or helping bring her to life for it. That is what I am doing with the considerations I offer. I am not trying to convince you that for these reasons you ought to like the object too. Nor am I giving “directions for perceiving” aesthetic qualities that language is powerless to reach directly. Through my expression of my 



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Cp.: “[T]he critic is . . . encouraging us to recognize the beauty of a particular thing. [. . . E]liciting such recognition centrally depends upon the critic’s heightened or refined capacity to identify the features of the object that are determining her aesthetic responses and to convince us that those features ought to call forth a similar response in us” (Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), pp. –). Isenberg, “Critical Communication,” p. .

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animation by the object I am trying to attract you to your own aesthetic encounter with it. It is in this respect that I undertake to “represent” or “speak for” the object. It may happen that what animates you is not the object itself but what I have to say about it and my experience of it. To the extent that the judgment of taste is itself animating, it acts less like a surrogate and more like its own work of art. Thus a risk that is run is that of confusing one’s stake in what the other has said with a stake in the object itself. An interesting analogy seems to be at work in Kant’s thought, one between the expression of the judgment of taste and the creation of art. As Kant says about creating art, to be influenced by a predecessor without giving up one’s autonomy is to “emulate” (rather than to “imitate”) his example, “which means no more than to create from the same sources from which the latter himself created, and to learn from one’s predecessor only the manner of conducting oneself in so doing” (CJ V:). We could say, using Kant’s language of “genius,” that such autonomy-preserving emulation involves learning from the genius of another how to tap one’s own genius. Likewise, it is through aesthetic arguing or communication that one may learn how to be interested in one’s own experience of an object or, more generally, to tap one’s own capacity for taste. That is why neither arguing nor communication is an intrinsic threat to the autonomy of taste. Perhaps it is some perception of this analogy that explains an unperturbed slippage in this section of the text: Kant starts out talking about autonomy with respect to the judging of art; next, noting that there are works of art (such as those “of the ancients”) that “are rightly extolled as models” (CJ V:), he acknowledges that drawing on such models in the acquisition or development of taste seems to conflict with the precept of the autonomy of taste; yet he immediately shifts to explaining how (what we might call) autonomy in the making of art need not be undermined by learning from other artists. We are now in a position to unpack a bit further the Kantian aesthetic encounter. In the aesthetic encounter, I feel animated by the object, which is to say that I feel that there is something “else” in my experience of it that merits articulating. To feel this way is to accord the object a normative status, which I acknowledge through my judgment of taste. To express my judgment of taste is to praise the object as deserving of liking. Can we say 

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Of course, the example he started with was already doubled (an example of making as well as judging), since the poet Kant considers is the author of the very works with respect to which the autonomy of his taste is at issue.

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something more about this feeling and this normative status? What sort of value is this, and what does acknowledgment of it consist of? What sort of liking is this? It will be helpful to cast a glance back at the sort of view I followed Hannah Ginsborg in considering in Chapter : the approach to aesthetic value taken by John McDowell and David Wiggins (“sensibility theory”). Neither Ginsborg nor I considered this approach as a reading of Kant. But if Kant is to be read as an objectivist about aesthetic value, it is a promising model for the job. As I argued (contra Ginsborg), sensibility theory can accommodate the Kantian claim that making a judgment of taste requires having firsthand experience of the object in question. It seems to be the form of objectivism most likely to respect Kant’s insistence on the ineliminable and central place for pleasure in the judgment of taste. That’s because it is based on the contention that objectivism may (without lapsing into an arid “platonism”) respect the status that we accord, pre-theoretically, to feelings like moral emotions or some aesthetic pleasures: that of disclosing reality. Finally, it emphasizes a normative (non-naturalist) construal of values. This appears to be the point of McDowell’s noting that the mode of feeling that discloses a value presents it as meriting (and not merely causing) the feeling through which it is disclosed. Suppose, then, that we were to read Kant through the lens of sensibility theory. An obvious issue arises: What are we to make of the free play of the cognitive faculties? It may appear a Kantian oddity with no obvious McDowellian role to play. From what we have seen so far, the sensibility theory story can be told without invoking anything of the kind, without invoking, in fact, anything beyond the pleasure through which beauty (or aesthetic value) is disclosed. Pressing on, however, we notice that sensibility theory invites us to say that the feeling of pleasure that discloses aesthetic value is rationally grounded in awareness of beauty-making features of the object. And so a possibility presents itself: that of construing the free play of the cognitive faculties as precisely such awareness. We will have to translate the special features of the free play of the cognitive faculties (its taking place apart from a governing concept, and so on). One plausible proposal casts the free play as the recognition of an object’s singular and holistic beauty-making features.

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See McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” p. . See Keren Gorodeisky, “Schematizing without a Concept? Imagine that!,” Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics  (). Gorodeisky does not mention McDowell (or Wiggins), but her interpretation of Kant’s judgment of taste shares the spirit of sensibility theory. In another essay coauthored with Eric Marcus, Gorodeisky offers an account of aesthetic judgment “inspired

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My point in imagining a sensibility theory approach to interpreting Kant’s account of taste is to allow to come into view something crucial that it misses about the free play of the cognitive faculties, namely the significance of its essential temporality. The free play is essentially temporal in two ways. First, it is an “activity” (CJ V:, ), which means that it unfolds over time. Second, it envisions no endpoint. Kant puts it this way: “the state of the powers of the mind reciprocally promoting each other in a representation” or, in other words, the free play of the cognitive faculties, “sustains itself” (FI XX:–). The pleasure “has a causality in itself, namely that of sustaining . . . the occupation of the cognitive powers without a further aim. We stay with [weilen bei] the contemplation of the beautiful because this contemplation strengthens and reproduces itself” (CJ V:; Kant’s emphasis). It is sometimes suggested that Kant’s thought requires mild qualification. The clause “other things being equal” should be appended, since Kant obviously cannot mean that pleasure sustains itself endlessly, or that to take pleasure in something entails wanting to continue to do so endlessly, or even for long. The point is true enough, so far as it goes, but it neglects a deeper idea that is worth bringing more clearly into the light. The free play of the cognitive faculties expresses or constitutes a caring for the object. To care for or about something or someone is to commit to ongoing engagement with it and to the furthering of one’s care itself. Caring projects an open-ended commitment, and thus it is intrinsic to caring that it looks to the future. The free play of the cognitive faculties does, in this sense, seek its own indefinite perpetuation, and not just provided that some ground for cessation does not crop up. (We do not care ceteris paribus.) Kant marks the difference between the caring that

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by” Kant’s account while also clearly guided by McDowell’s thought (“Aesthetic Rationality,” Journal of Philosophy , no.  (), p. , n. ). Guyer, “The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited,” p. , n. . Kant indicates that pleasure in general, including pleasure in the agreeable and pleasure in the good, is “the consciousness of the causality of a representation in regard to the state of the subject, for sustaining it in that state” (CJ V:). I was persuaded by Rebecca M. Groves, “On Performance and the Dramaturgy of Caring,” in Inter Views in Performance Philosophy: Crossings and Conversations, eds. Anna Street, Julien Alliot, and Magnolia Pauker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, ), to gloss the “liking” for the object expressed in the judgment of taste as a “caring.” I am indebted to Groves’s insightful analysis. Following Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), Groves takes Kant’s aesthetics to be antithetical to an aesthetics of care, whereas I am arguing that Kant sheds light on what an aesthetics of care might be. For a different account of the free play of the cognitive faculties as future-directed and projective, see Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology.

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aesthetic value inspires and the way and extent to which we like the agreeable by a difference in terms. We “stay with” the consideration of the beautiful, while “we linger when a charm in the representation of the object repeatedly attracts attention” (CJ V:). Caring develops and deepens itself. (The contemplation of the beautiful “strengthens and reproduces itself” (CJ V:; emphasis added).) Charm continues to please only so far as it can once again make an impression, a power that depends on novelty and so must naturally wane. The very modes of attachment are merely “analogous.” The sensibility theory approach treats the feeling through which a quality is recognized as a “response” in a narrow “cognitive” sense. It is the mode in which one registers the presence of the quality that merits it. What I am suggesting is that treating the pleasurable free play of the cognitive faculties in this way blocks us from understanding it as a response in a wider sense. Through a free play of the cognitive faculties, I do not just take the object to merit that very free play; rather I seek to articulate, to explore, and to celebrate that in virtue of which I take it to merit the free play (its aesthetic value). The aesthetic encounter begins in feeling that there is something in my experience of the object that deserves to be traced or articulated. Thus the aesthetic encounter begins in feeling a kind of care for the work. I discover myself to care about this something, and so the object. When I follow it out, when I articulate and trace its contours, I am engaging in what Kant calls the free play. My free play is at once an articulation of (and furthering of ) my experience itself, that of feeling animated by the object, and an articulation of what it is in or about the object that animates me. We could say that it both expresses my care and furthers it, but I think it is more to the point to say that it constitutes, or that it enacts, my care, because there is nothing more to my caring about the object than this engagement with it. The free play is, works out, and sustains my caring. My free play does not point to some state of caring lying behind it, with some source or basis apart from my free play itself. On my reading, then, Kant concurs with Alexander Nehamas’s objection to a pervasive picture of criticism, on which an interpretation precedes evaluation – as though we begin by asking, “What does the work say?” and

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CJ V:. Weilen bei, no longer much used, can encompass a sense of commitment (it could also be rendered as “dwelling with”). Verweilen can be used in that sense as well as in the sense of “tarrying.”

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then, having established its “point,” go on to consider its merits. Nehamas’s own countering view is, I think, that interpretation is always already infused with evaluation. I think Kant is pointing to something stronger still: not just that any understanding of what the work says or does will always already be evaluative, but that unless I can find a way to care about the work, I will not be in a position to appreciate, or even take up the question of, its point. Before interpretation, in other words, there must be caring for the object, finding it to matter that it “says” or “does” anything at all. This is a caring that does not yet know what it cares about or why. Interpretation, in fact, comes much further down the line. My free play with the object is not interpretation. My free play enacts my caring, while interpretation is retrospective and gives a new order to my caring. The role of interpretation is to make intelligible, in words, reasons or grounds that support my care and my valuing. Interpretation articulates what makes the object worthy of the care it has awakened in me. In the judgment of taste, I am enjoining you to bring your sensibility and your judgment to bear on this particular object, and to share my pleasure in it: At what cost, on pain of what? Kant is right to hold that the cost envisioned is not (say) one of missing an opportunity for knowledge, nor, for that matter, one of missing an opportunity for pleasure. Opportunities for knowledge and for pleasure abound, and we don’t enjoin them all upon one another. (To be sure, knowledge and pleasure are good things. But in calling for you to give this object your attention and your caring, I’m not just appealing to that generalization, claiming that this particular object is a source of knowledge or pleasure, and then applying modus ponens.) Rather, as I have argued, my liking for the object is my acknowledgment of a claim it seems to have upon me. In my judgment of taste I am representing the object, speaking on its behalf, in saying that it has a claim on you and on your acknowledgment. When I say through my judgment that you ought to take pleasure here in this particular object, I am presenting the source of the normativity as lying in, or constituted by, the object itself, and not as depending on finding the object to serve as the means to some independently valuable end   

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Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness, pp. –. Nehamas attributes this picture to Kant (p. ). See Nehamas’s discussion of a passage by Rosalind Krauss in Only a Promise of Happiness, p. . A work of criticism involves the elaboration of an interpretation, so conceived. In the undertaking, “[t]he problem of the critic, as of the artist, is not to discount his subjectivity, but to include it; not to overcome it in agreement, but to master it in exemplary ways. Then his work outlasts the fashions and arguments of a particular age. That is the beauty of it” (Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” p. ).

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(knowledge, pleasure). That is, I present the object’s claim on your pleasure as intrinsic to it; I present the object as an end in itself. In aesthetic caring I care for the object for its own sake. In his specification of the claim that it is the form of the object that pleases in the experience of beauty, Kant says that colors “can of course enliven the object in itself for sensation, but they cannot make it worthy of being intuited and beautiful” (CJ V:). The implication is that the beautiful object is worthy of being intuited. It is worthy of being intuited because it is beautiful; or perhaps Kant is reaching for something even stronger, that for something to be beautiful is for it to be worthy of being intuited. One’s response is “merited” by the object in a stronger sense than Ginsborg or McDowell (I think) envision: it is not just “appropriate to the circumstances,” not just “correct” or “right” given what is true about the object. It is deserved by the object, so that failure to give the object its due amounts to something like doing wrong by it. The object is worthy of (aesthetic) care. In many respects, aesthetic care for objects is like care for people (or other entities). When I care about a person, my caring is not founded on some (independent) value I find her to have. It is the caring that is primordial, and that either constitutes valuing or gives rise to it. To care about a person is to make her ends my ends, to find her to be an end in itself. And it is to cede a form of power to her: “I willingly give [her] power over myself emotionally, ethically, and intellectually, trusting [her] not to exploit it.” In caring about a person, I don’t merely expect that her influence and her place in my life will alter me in ways I cannot now predict or perhaps even imagine; I want it to do so. Caring involves the willingness to allow the person I care about to help shape my sense of what matters. Aesthetic experience is based on a very similar form of caring. In saying that the object is worthy of your care, I’m enjoining you to allow it to direct and lead your attention and your   

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This is Ginsborg’s phrase; see Chapter . Although McDowell places great weight on the term “merits,” he does not unpack it very far, so just what it entails is unclear. “Objects of art [do] not merely interest and absorb. They move us; we are not merely involved with them, but concerned with them, and [we] care about them; . . . we invest them with a value which normal people otherwise reserve only for other people . . . . They mean something to us, not just the way statements do, but the way people do” (Stanley Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays, updated edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. This is a theme of the essays in Harry Frankfurt’s The Importance of What We Care About and Necessity, Volition, and Love. Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness, p. . Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness, pp. –.

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interest. I enjoin on you an openness to the object as something it deserves, and I offer specific modes of attending and taking an interest as opening the way to finding that you care about it. Returning to the scene of aesthetic arguing, what this means is that if “agreement” is to be reached, my own caring about the object and the considerations I’m focused on has to count for you – it has to matter to you. But nothing can force you to care about my caring. You will come to care about it only if you find my expression of my care or my interest to be worth caring about, to be compelling or to matter, insofar as they open up the object for caring about. In other words, I have to attract your interest in the object. Kant uses tropes of courtship or wooing in characterizing the relation that I take to others in the judgment of taste. He speaks of presenting oneself as a suitor for the agreement of the other: “One courts everyone else’s assent because one has a ground for it that is common to all” (CJ V:). What Kant means is that I stake my judgment, my claim, on our occupying a common ground. The ground that I offer in courting your assent is that we have a common basis or ground for it. I court your assent, offering my ground as ours, as a common basis for everyone’s assent. That is, the claim to a common basis is part of what the judgment itself is putting forward, or part of what I am putting forward in making the judgment. And that means that I open myself to your rejection in the form of a denial that we have a common basis here. I am presenting myself and my judgment as representative of a shared basis, asking others to recognize what I offer as coming from that basis, so to recognize themselves in it. You may not recognize yourself in my claim to representativeness and may reject my claim on that account. This leads us to what is “subjective” about aesthetic judgment. Subjectivity comes into aesthetic judgment by way of the ineliminable place in aesthetic judgment for particular subjects, for their particular feelings and for their willingness and capacities for self-expression in entering their judgments, in responding to questioning, in undertaking to communicate their feelings. Subjectivity comes into aesthetic judgment, in short, because subjects come into aesthetic judgment. In aesthetic judgment I present to you my experience of the object, my pleasure in it and my understanding of that pleasure – its sources, its shape, its quality, its extent. In other words, I present my subjectivity or my subjective 

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In Chapter , I suggested the cases of acknowledging your god, or acknowledging your soul mate, as examples of acknowledgment without a concept. Their plausibility as examples stems from the fact that such acknowledgment is inseparable from liking or loving a person or entity.

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response, let’s say: and I enjoin you to share it. This is why it is apt to cast the claim upon others that is made in the judgment of taste as a kind of presumption, and essentially (“logically”) so. The upshot is that the “problem of presumptuousness” – how can I take myself to have any kind of say about what another should like, if all I’m going on is my own pleasure? – must be recognized not as a worry that Kant dispatches once and for all by showing that there’s nothing presumptuous about it, but as standing for a question to which the subject taking up the stance of normative aesthetic judgment thereby exposes herself. It represents, we might say, the challenge with which I am faced in entering aesthetic judgment: the challenge of earning my right to speak for you. We might say, then, that like courtship, the judgment of taste is ineluctably presumptuous. But that does not mean it is illegitimate. The judgment of taste, is, like wooing, always presumptuous, not because it is necessarily out of line (though it may in fact be), but because it is necessarily in excess of where we stand: one is inviting the other and oneself toward an unknown and untested state. The authorization of its claims on the other is a matter to be worked out within and as part of a mutual engagement of subjects. One might be reluctant to allow that aesthetic judgment, so understood, may lay claim to authority, as opposed to the power of something akin to seduction. I’d like to suggest that it is not as obvious as this makes it sound that getting someone to see (to feel) what is there may not call for speech in 

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Notice that in one sense this pushes back against the widely held idea that what I must do in entering the judgment of taste, according to Kant, is to judge impersonally, or by abstracting away from my particularities as a subject. For the dimension of subjectivity that I’m talking about means that in aesthetic judgment what I do, and must do, in explaining and defending my claim – or in questioning yours – is expose my own particular sense of what is of interest, what matters. Though it may not be quite right to say that this means that aesthetic judgment is “personal,” I think it does mean that it is no more right to say that aesthetic judgment is (or must be) “impersonal.” In explaining why its deduction is “so easy” (or simple), Kant notes that the judgment of taste “asserts only that we are justified in presupposing universally in every human being the same subjective conditions of the power of judgment that we find in ourselves; and then only if we have correctly subsumed the given object under these conditions. Now although this latter has unavoidable difficulties that do not pertain to the logical power of judgment . . . nothing is thereby taken away from the legitimacy of the claim of the power of judgment in counting on universal assent, which only comes down to this: the correctness of the principle of validly judging for everyone on subjective grounds” (CJ V:–). “If we say that the hope of agreement motivates our engaging in these various patterns of support [viz., the patterns of support characteristic of aesthetic judgment], then we must also say, what I take Kant to have seen, that even were agreement in fact to emerge, our judgments, so far as aesthetic, would remain as essentially subjective, in his sense, as they ever were. Otherwise, art and the criticism of art would not have their special importance nor elicit their own forms of distrust and gratitude” (Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” p. ).

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the arena of seduction. Here is a picture of aesthetic judgment that strikes me as close to Kant’s: the critic’s offering is like an ode, a paen, a love poem dedicated to the object he admires. (This is one sense in which it is itself a work of art). A point of this offering is certainly to get us to see the thing in a certain light (as McDowell and Isenberg might say). Another point, now one characteristic of this region of our lives, is to perform an animating role: to bring the object to life for us, by bringing us (our experience of it) alive. For it is a characteristic, ineliminable feature of aesthetic experience that things can go dead or flat for us (and then it is not obvious whether or not the dulling is temporary). Thus I take Kant to be elaborating a form of appeal to another that constitutes an alternative to the choices of proof or persuasion. There are some things of which one cannot be convinced – which one might not be able to see at all – except by being attracted to them. Compare this remark of Stanley Cavell’s: “since we cannot know the world exists, its presentness to us cannot be a function of knowing. The world is to be accepted; as the presentness of other minds is not to be known, but acknowledged.” To say that acceptance of the world is not a matter of knowing it is not to say that it might not require the intervention of another, that I might not require another to find myself in a position to accept the world. The block between me and an object deserving my appreciation or admiration might be a matter not of an absence of knowledge, nor of a kind of withholding of acknowledgment, but of an absence of another sense – if a related one – of presentness: what I need is for the object to be made present to me, which means that I need a way into being able to be present to it (to my experience of it). The work of art is like a world in this way.

. Work as World What I am really demanding, in the judgment of taste, is that you too allow yourself to be animated by the object, or, in other words, that you too find that you care about it for its own sake. I am not, therefore, demanding that you or anyone else have exactly the same free play of the cognitive powers as I do (whatever that would mean). It is a free play, an  

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This is what Cavell’s notion of the “good encounter” (with a film) records. See Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), p. . Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love,” Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays, updated edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .

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animation, a caring, that I call for. What it consists of may be quite different in your case than in mine. Thus it is not the specific response that I have to the object – the specific free play of my cognitive faculties – that I demand of others; what I demand, rather, is a “form” of response – one might say that I demand responsiveness as such – where the specific content is for you to fill in. This means that within the agreement that Kant is envisioning, there is room for difference and disagreement. The agreement is that which holds the two of us before the painting or listening to the piece of music, finding it worth contemplating. As I mentioned, this is not a demand that you or anyone could meet “at will.” And being animated by the object requires allowing it to animate you, and hence requires a kind of surrender or passivity. Such surrender does itself express a kind of activity, a kind of achievement; it is not simply something that either happens or does not. But whatever activity one must exert, it involves a foregoing of control. That is itself a reason why the judgment of taste, with its demand, on the object’s behalf, for the pleasure of all, is not just apparently presumptuous but, as I have been suggesting, ineluctably so. And yet, Kant certainly undertakes to provide a legitimation of its demand. If this legitimation does not take the form of lifting away the charge of presumptuousness, what form could it take? Is there any sense in speaking of an entitlement to presumptuousness? It is here that my reading is most reconstructive. What I offer on Kant’s behalf reaches farther than he would be willing to go, but I think that it takes up seeds of thought in his writing, writing that sometimes seems to be thinking one step ahead of itself. Kant’s deduction turns upon what he calls the principle of judgment. “The principle of taste,” the norm underwriting the judgment of taste, “is the subjective principle of the power of judgment in general” (CJ V:): so runs the heading of §. The notion of the principle of judgment is one of a set of notions that tie the body of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” to the larger project of the Critique of Judgment, especially as that is pursued in its Introductions and Preface. The Introductions treat of a certain problem, a possibility that remains open even after all the business of the theoretical philosophy is over and done with. Although the first Critique has shown that the pure concepts of the understanding and the corresponding principles apply (must apply) to nature, nothing in its reach rules out the possibility that at the level of empirical laws, and the particular empirical concepts associated with them, the order of nature, such as it is, might be so complex and heterogeneous that it would be to us nothing more than a “raw chaotic aggregate without

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the slightest trace of a system” (FI XX:). For example, we know a priori that every event has some cause, but for all that there might be an “infinite manifold” of particular causal laws and so of correspondingly diverse natural forms. In that case, nature would be, to us, a “labyrinth” (FI XX:) in which we could not find our way about. The principle of the purposiveness of nature is supposed to protect against this possibility, by establishing, although only “subjectively,” that we may take nature to be hospitable to our power of judgment, to allow us to make ourselves at home in it in this respect. Yet such considerations about the principle of nature’s (subjective) purposiveness for our judgment “could always have been appended to the theoretical part of philosophy” (CJ V:). Kant adduces another principle of judgment, or another way of conceiving the principle of judgment, and it is this, I think, that he regards as genuinely meriting a separate critique. It can . . . easily be inferred from the nature of the power of judgment (the correct use of which is so necessary and generally required that by the name “sound understanding” nothing other than this faculty is meant) that great difficulties must be involved in discovering a peculiar principle for it (which it must contain in itself a priori, for otherwise it would not, as a special faculty of cognition, be exposed to even the most common critique), which nevertheless must not be derived from concepts a priori, for they belong to the understanding, and the power of judgment is concerned only with their application. It therefore has to provide a concept itself, through which no thing is actually cognized, but which only serves as a rule for itself, but not as an objective rule to which it can conform its judgment, since for that yet another power of judgment would be required in order to be able to decide whether it is a case of the rule or not. (CJ V:)

Judgment must have a “principle” because it is “exposed to even the most common critique.” That is, we treat each other’s judgments as open to critique as better or worse, more or less apt, discerning, or judicious. In short, we treat each other’s judgments, as well as the underlying power of judgment that particular judgments express, as subject to judgment. If this ordinary (“most common”) practice is to be legitimate, it must, for Kant, be underwritten by an a priori principle. This principle will be “peculiar” (eigentu¨mlich) in both senses Kant is drawing upon when he invokes the peculiarity (Eigentu¨mlichkeit) of the judgment of taste: the principle of judgment will be proper to it (it will be judgment’s own principle, not the principle of any other cognitive power), and it will be strange. The “difficulties” involved in discovering this principle are surely connected to its strangeness.

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In fact, it is quite difficult to find in Kant’s text an explicit statement of the principle of judgment, or an explanation of the form it takes or of how it is supposed to do its work. Perhaps, however, it is a mistake to expect a statement of the principle of judgment. There is a hint that this might be the case in the argument concluding the long passage just quoted. Kant is arguing that the power of judgment has to provide the concept of the principle governing it, rather than take its concept from the understanding, on pain of infinite regress. But the understanding is the seat of concepts; there is no clear sense in which judgment could be said to produce a concept on its own. Perhaps, then, the “concept” of the power of judgment is not (as concepts normally are) the sort of thing one can name or spell out. Correspondingly, perhaps the principle of judgment is not a principle that allows of being stated. We can only state its upshot: that judgment is (in fact) exercised well or less well. We could call this the fact of judgment. This upshot is not just an entitlement – i.e., we can (legitimately) treat judgment, our own or that of others, as more or less apt – but also a requirement: we must treat judgment, our own or that of others, this way. We are committed to so doing. The fact of judgment presupposes the value of good judgment. It is predicated on the value of doing justice in our judgment to things, the world, whatever comes our way. It presupposes the value of judging the world – or the corner of it that we meet at some given place and time – judiciously, insightfully, and discerningly. It is good to judge well, in other words. And as we are committed to the fact of judgment, so are we committed to caring about judging well. As with the commitment to the fact of judgment, this commitment is a condition of the employment of our power of judgment at all. It is not that it is impossible for us to decide that aptness is overrated. But to take that point of view is itself to exercise judgment (about the value of aptness of judgment), and to display a stake in judging aptly (in this case, judging aptly about the value of judging aptly).







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I borrow the phrase from Juliet Floyd. See “The Fact of Judgment: The Kantian Response to the Humean Condition,” in From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental, ed. Jeff Malpas (London: Routledge, ), especially p. . In Floyd’s view, the “fact of judgment” is what the principle of judgment states, since the principle of judgment can only be “a self-applicable or self-interpreting rule which, like a self-caused cause, terminates the regress” (p. ). This is where I see the deepest connection with Kant’s “fact of reason” (Critique of Practical Reason V: and V:), on which Floyd models the term “fact of judgment” (“The Fact of Judgment,” p. , n. ). I am necessarily committed to my own freedom, and this is a commitment I express in all my deliberation and action; but I do not believe or know that I am free, for it is not that kind of fact. I make a similar argument about the inescapability of the exercise of judgment, which is related to a Kantian argument about the inescapability of freedom, in Chapter .

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. Work as World



I think Kant can say, further, that good judgment is (or can be) good in itself, and not merely as a means to some other end. The fact of judgment means that judgment is (in principle) always assessable as better or worse, even where there is no practical or other consequence at stake. There are often instrumental reasons for caring about judging the world well – there are obviously all sorts of ways in which judging it well is advantageous, and judging it inaptly may be downright hazardous – but they do not exhaust the measures by which judgment can be good. A judgment may allow of being good simply insofar as it does justice to its object. This means that we are committed to caring about judging the world well for the sake of doing it justice, and not only for the sake of the benefits that judiciousness of judgment may afford us or the protection it may provide from disadvantages. Now, caring about judging the world well for the sake of doing it justice depends, I think, on caring about the world for its own sake. It is because the world matters (must matter) to us that doing it justice in judgment matters (must matter) to us. If that is right, then the fact of judgment has led us to a kind of imperative to care about the world for its own sake. Does it make sense to speak of such an imperative? Is it possible, for example, not to care about the world for its own sake? Here we encounter, again, a parallel to a Kantian line of thinking about freedom or autonomy. In one sense, my freedom is a “fact” that I encounter, in any moment of reflection or deliberation, as unavoidable and undeniable. I cannot but take myself to be the author of my decisions about how to act or what to think. To seek to forsake my freedom of the will is to enact my commitment to it. In a higher sense, I express my full freedom, my “proper self” or “real self,” when I make the moral law my fundamental principle of volition. And this I might well fail to do. Similarly: I cannot help but care about the world for its own sake, for what we might want to call a withdrawal of my care for it is really an expression of a kind of care for it. At another level, however, it makes sense to speak of the world as going dead for me (or me for it); of its seeming to turn grey or cold, no longer (if it ever was) a source or site of attachment and meaning. This is perhaps one of the states that the notion of “melancholy” is for. Here is a profitable place for thinking about the judgment of taste’s basis in a caring for the object for its own sake. It offers an analogy or model for our caring for the world for its own sake. That is, the beautiful object is the  

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I use scare quotes to signal that it is not a fact of the kind that reveals itself to theoretical reason. Groundwork IV:.

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Aesthetic Liking



analogy or model for the (or a) world. When we demand of another that she care about the object that we find beautiful, we present it as deserving her being alive to it. A world must be accepted on its own terms; the very notion entails that there is nothing outside, no external vantage point and no independent touchstone, to draw upon. Care for the world is “the subjective condition of the use of the power of judgment in general, and thus that subjective element that one can presuppose in all human beings (as requisite for possible cognitions in general)” (CJ V:). Care for the world is the subjective condition for being able to cognize at all. The aesthetic common sense – the legitimacy of the demand for pleasure in the judgment of taste – derives from this care. The common sense that I discussed in Chapter , the common sense that Kant argues for in § as a condition of the possibility of the communicability of cognition, might also derive from this care. But they are distinct. In order to arrive at cognition and “conviction” (CJ V:) – taking Kant to mean “conviction” in a broad sense that includes conviction about what is true (which is the force of Überzeugung in the first Critique) as well as conviction about what matters – I have to find some particular judgment to matter. Caring about the world at all is a condition of cognizing it at all. From this perspective, Kant’s account bears a kinship to the vision of beauty that is more often put forward as its antithesis: the conception of beauty as the object or site of Eros, which has one of its homes in Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus. As against the Kantian conception, the erotic conception of beauty presents beauty as intertwined with desire and attachment. My reading of Kant has, I hope, suggested that they are less starkly opposed than they might at first seem. If the comparison seems outlandish nevertheless, consider that Kant himself brings the allure of beauty into the orbit of Eros. [T]he beautiful contains in itself the concept of the invitation to the most intimate union with the object, that is, to immediate enjoyment. With the expression of a “beautiful soul” one says all that can be said [about] making 



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There is a rich tradition of thinking of the (aesthetically excellent) artwork as a world. For an overview and an interpretation of its historical and conceptual origins, see M. H. Abrams, “Kant and the Theology of Art,” Notre Dame English Journal , no.  () and “Art-as-Such: The Sociology of Modern Aesthetics,” in Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Fischer (New York: W. W. Norton, ). See Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness, especially the first chapter. Nehamas regards Schopenhauer as taking Kant’s approach to its furthest pole from Plato, and thus entitles the first part of that chapter as the question of a choice: “Plato or Schopenhauer?”

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. Work as World

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it the purpose of the innermost union with the beautiful. Greatness of soul and strength of soul concern the matter (the tools for certain purposes); but goodness of soul, the pure form under which all purposes must allow of being united, is therefore, wherever it is encountered, similar to Eros in the world of myth, archetypically creative and also supernatural.

Kant is saying that one experiences the beautiful object as inviting one to “the most intimate union with” it. Even before he adduces Eros, the language clearly suggests an erotic encounter. Kant’s invocation of “goodness of soul” might be taken to suggest that he is thinking about the sorts of connections with morality for which, in the later sections of the Critique of Judgment, he singles out the beauty of nature. But the context of the passage makes clear that this is not the case. It is, in fact, the beauty of artworks that he has squarely in view. There is a related way in which Plato and Kant meet at an unexpected crossing. In various passages of the Symposium, and of course in the speech of Socrates/Diotima, the love of beauty leads the lover to praise it, and in a particular way: by producing poetry about it. This means that the praise of beauty is itself beautiful. The response to beauty is another form of beauty, a little work of art, and it may inspire others to make their own. Both authors present, not coincidentally, a charged vision of the relationship between poetry and philosophy. Officially philosophy is protected from the seductive dangers of poetry, yet in their writing philosophy seems to flourish when it finds its poetic voice.  



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Anthropology VII:–. Thus it is the object, or its beauty, which “invites” the subject to appreciate its beauty. Guyer’s reading, on which it is the subject making the judgment of taste who extends an invitation to others, misses the point: “Kant describes the judgment of beauty as an invitation (Einladung) to others to experience the pleasure one has felt in an object” (CJ editor’s note on p. , n. ). Kant has just been focusing on beautiful art, and has said that “[e]ven the presentation of the evil or ugly (for example, the figure of the personified Death in Milton) can and must be beautiful if an object is to be aesthetically represented” (Anthropology VII:).

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Index

Abrams, M. H. n Adelung, Johann Christoph n, n, n, , n, n “aesthetic”, use of term n aesthetic experience see experience, aesthetic aesthetic reading of CJ §  objections to – agreeable, the , –, n see also judgment of the agreeable; pleasure: in the agreeable Allison, Henry n, n, n, –, –, , –, n, n, –, n, n, n, –, n, n Ameriks, Karl –, n, n, n see also “objectivism”, aesthetic analytic of the beautiful, purview of  “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’” (Kant) ,  animation , –, , ,  aesthetic –, –, , , , –, , , , , , –, ,  see also free play; judgment of taste: and aesthetic encounter; judgment of taste: as animating; life; state of mind in the judgment of taste cognitive  Anthropology Collins (Kant) , n Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant) , n, –, , , –, , –, – antinomy of taste see taste: antinomy of Arendt, Hannah , ,  arguing aesthetic –,  and attracting  compared with disputing/proving  see also judgment of taste: and argument; taste: antinomy of art “beautiful”, Kant’s two senses of term n place in Kant’s aesthetics , 

relevance of Kant’s aesthetics for contemporary  see also work of art attunement aesthetic –, , –, , – see also free play appearance in CJ §  cognitive , –, – see also animation Austin, J. L. , n, ,  see also ordinary language philosophy beauty and aesthetic encounter  and eros – see also Plato and human beings  breadth of Kant’s notion of – Hume on rules/principles of – Kant on rules/principles of –,  not a property , – “beauty”  not a concept , – see also judgment of taste: not based on concepts Bell, David n, n, –, –, – Bernstein, Jay n Blackburn, Simon – capacity to judge reason as a –, –, n relation to judgment (Urteilskraft) – the understanding as a –, –, n see also judgment (Urteilskraft) Cavell, Stanley n, n, –, n, n, –, n, n, n, n, n, n,  see also ordinary language philosophy Cerf, Walter n Cervantes, Miguel de ,  Chaouli, Michel n



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Index cognition , , –, ,  and feeling – and taste  presupposes reflective judgment , –, , ,  subjective condition of , –, –, – see also cognitive judgment; common sense (sensus communis): cognitive cognitive judgment , – as determinative judgment  as provable , – see also arguing claim to universal validity of , , , , –,  demand for agreement see cognitive judgment: claim to universal validity of see also cognition common sense (sensus communis) aesthetic –, ,  cognitive ,  kinds of ,  see also aesthetic reading of CJ § communicability, universal and cognition  connected to communication , , ,  in second and fourth Moments  meaning of ,  of pleasure of taste see pleasure of taste (in the beautiful): universal communicability of relation to universal validity – see also communication; judgment of taste: and universal communicability; state of mind in the judgment of taste communication , , , –, , –, –,  aesthetic , –,  aesthetic and cognitive compared – two senses of – see also communicability, universal concept and comparison –,  and rule , –, – see also cognitive judgment: as provable as general ,  see also “beauty”: not a concept; judgment of taste: not based on concepts conviction –, , ,  Costello, Diarmuid n courtship (wooing) – see also beauty: and eros; judgment of taste: and courtship; judgment of taste: presumptuousness of Crawford, Donald n, n criticism, art –

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Critique of Judgment (Kant) “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” as essential to –,  place in Kant’s critical project  reception of – relation to Critique of Pure Reason , – unity of ,  Critique of Practical Reason (Kant) , n Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) –, , , –, , –,  Analytic of Principles –, , –, – on judgment – Dahlstrom, Daniel n Dante, Alighieri  Danto, Arthur n de Man, Paul n deduction of the judgment of taste see judgment of taste: deduction of Deleuze, Gilles n determinative judgment and Critique of Pure Reason – and frame of CJ  Kant’s characterization of ,  presupposes reflective judgment , n, –, , ,  see also reflective judgment dialectic of aesthetic judgment, compared with dialectic of reason – disinterestedness , ,  Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Stuart E. Dreyfus n Duchamp, Marcel  Elliott, R. K. n encounter, aesthetic see judgment of taste: and aesthetic encounter experience, aesthetic –,  construed as achievement of understanding – meaning and mattering in – “False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures” (Kant)  Fleischacker, Samuel n Floyd, Juliet n, n Foot, Philippa  form, purposive  formalism about art  Frankfurt, Harry n, n free play , , , , , –, , – and aesthetic common sense  and comparison –

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Index

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free play (cont.) and experience of meaningfulness  and interpretation  as care – as harmony or attunement –, – as judging ,  as reflective judgment – hallmark figure of CJ  interpreted through sensibility theory – Kant’s characterization of , – on aesthetic reading of CJ §  temporality of – see also animation: aesthetic; attunement: aesthetic; judgment of taste; state of mind in the judgment of taste freedom of the will n, , ,  Freudenthal, Gideon n Fried, Michael n Gardner, Sebastian n Gasché, Rodolphe n genius , , n,  Ginsborg, Hannah n, n, n, n, n, n, n, –, ,  Gorodeisky, Keren n Gracyk, Theodore n Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant) n, , n, ,  Groves, Rebecca M. n Guyer, Paul n, n, n, , n, n, n Hanna, Robert n harmony see attunement: aesthetic; free play Heidegger, Martin – Henrich, Dieter n, n Hopkins, Robert n, n, n Hughes, Fiona n, n Hume, David “Of the Standard of Taste” – on delicacy of taste , , – see also key: of the Sancho Panza story, for Hume ideas, aesthetic  ideas, rational – imagination – interpretation  Isenberg, Arnold –, n, n, ,  Janaway, Christopher n Jäsche Logic (Kant) , , n judging (Beurteilung) –, , –, , 

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“mere”/merely subjective (aesthetic) , –, , – see also free play: as judging; state of mind in the judgment of taste judgment (Urteilskraft) and Kant’s appeals to the juridical/legal –,  apt or judicious see judgment (Urteilskraft): norms of; judgment (Urteilskraft): value of apt or judicious as exercised , , –, , –,  as expressive/first personal , –, –,  as natural power or gift – as subject to ordinary critique  as topic of Critique of Judgment  determinative see determinative judgment norms of –, –, –, , ,  ordinary notion of –,  principle of , , –, – reflective see reflective judgment value of apt or judicious – see also capacity to judge; cognitive judgment; judging (Beurteilung); judgment of taste; judgment of the agreeable; judgment of the good/practical judgment judgment of taste  activity or agency in , –, , –,  agreement in , ,  and aesthetic encounter –, , , , –, , – and argument  see also arguing and attachment ,  and attraction ,  and autonomy , –, –, –, ,  and care , , –, – and courtship – and desire ,  and expression ,  and openness , , , ,  and universal communicability  see also communicability, universal as (merely) reflective judgment , , –,  as animating , ,  as example of a rule  as work of art , ,  claim to necessity of , –, –,  see also recognition: as acknowledgment claim to universal validity of , –, , , , , –, – compared with aesthetically grounded logical judgment n

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Index compared with cognitive judgment –, –, , –, , –, –,  compared with judgment of the agreeable –, –, , – compared with pure practical judgment – deduction of , , , , – demand for agreement in pleasure of –,  see also claim to universal validity of dependence on experience  see also judgment of taste: and autonomy first-personal character of n, ,  kind of act , , , ,  normativity of –, , , , , –, –, , , – not based on concepts , , , , –, ,  see also “beauty”: not a concept peculiarity of –, , –, , –,  presumptuousness of , –, ,  relation to art criticism – relation to cognition , –, – self-reflexivity of  singularity of , , ,  state of mind in see state of mind in the judgment of taste subjectivity of –, , –, , – see also free play; pleasure of taste (in the beautiful); taste judgment of the agreeable , , –, ,  see also agreeable, the; pleasure: in the agreeable judgment of the good/practical judgment , , – judgment, cognitive see cognitive judgment Kalar, Brent n Keaton, Buster  key of the Sancho Panza story, for Hume –, n to the critique of taste, Kant’s , – Korsgaard, Christine n Kripke, Saul n, n Kukla, Rebecca n Kulenkampff, Jens n, n, n, n life  as theme of Critique of Judgment – see also animation liking (Wohlgefallen) , – Little, Margaret n, , n

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Longuenesse, Béatrice –, n,  love , , ,  Makkreel, Rudolf n Marcus, Eric n McCloskey, Mary n McDowell, John n, , , n, n,  see also sensibility theory (McDowell/Wiggins) melancholy  Meredith, James Creed n Merleau-Ponty, Maurice n Metaphysics Volckmann (Kant) – Mitchell, W. J. T. n Moran, Richard n,  Mothersill, Mary – Mulhall, Stephen n nature, principle of the purposiveness of – Nehamas, Alexander n, –, n Noë, Alva – “objectivism”, aesthetic as aesthetic realism  Ginsborg’s objection to – Kant’s aesthetics interpreted as – see also Ameriks, Karl; sensibility theory (McDowell/Wiggins) ordinary language philosophy , n see also Austin, J. L.; Cavell, Stanley; Wittgenstein, Ludwig parergon n,  particularism n, –, , ,  persuasion ,  Philonenko, A. n Pippin, Robert n Plato , – see also beauty: and eros play , –,  in Hume  word-, Kant’s – see also free play; Winnicott, D. W. pleasure ,  as feeling of life ,  in the agreeable , –, , –, –, –,  in the good , , , , – kinds of  not a concept , , ,  of taste see pleasure of taste (in the beautiful) pleasure of taste (in the beautiful) , , –,  and aesthetic interpretation of CJ § –

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Index



pleasure of taste (in the beautiful) (cont.) and demand –, , ,  and subjectivity – disinterested  in state of mind of free play , – in the object as animating – see also animation, aesthetic object’s claim to – see also judgment of taste: claim to necessity of; recognition: as acknowledgment relation to judging – universal communicability of –, , , ,  universal validity of ,  see also judgment of taste poetry –, ,  Pontormo (Jacopo Carucci)  praise , , , ,  principle of judgment see judgment (Urteilskraft): principle of of taste see taste: principle of of the purposiveness of nature see nature, principle of the purposiveness of see also rules Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Kant) n, n quasi-realism see Blackburn, Simon realism, aesthetic see “objectivism”, aesthetic reason see capacity to judge: reason as a recognition – as acknowledgment –, , , , – see also judgment of taste: claim to necessity of as identification –, , ,  senses of  Reflections on Anthropology (Kant) n reflective judgment , ,  and Critique of Pure Reason on judgment as exercised – and frame of CJ –,  and free play – and ordinary notion of judgment  as condition of determinative judgment/ cognition , n, –, , ,  comparison in –, – in cognition and taste  Kant’s characterization of , –,  see also determinative judgment; judgment of taste: as (merely) reflective judgment Renaut, Alain n Rogerson, Kenneth F. n

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rules Analytic of Principles on see Critique of Pure Reason (Kant): Analytic of Principles of beauty see beauty: Hume on rules/principles of; beauty: Kant on rules/principles of see also concept: and rule Sartre, Jean-Paul n sensibility theory (McDowell/Wiggins) –, –, –, – Kant’s aesthetics interpreted through – see also McDowell, John; Wiggins, David Smith, Zadie –,  spirit , , , n state of mind in the judgment of taste , , , –,  as (capacity for) rendering communicable , , –, –, –,  as judging ,  as source of pleasure , – as universally communicable , , , , ,  of free play see free play see also communicability, universal; judging; pleasure of taste (in the beautiful) taste , ,  and cognition ,  antinomy of –, – see also arguing autonomy of –, ,  compared with virtue ,  contrasted with expertise and connoisseurship , ,  principle of  see also judgment of taste Titian (Tiziano Vecellio)  Torsen, Ingvild n understanding, the  see also capacity to judge: the understanding as a unity aesthetic singular , , –,  of manifold of intuition in cognition , ,  validity, universal see cognitive judgment: claim to universal validity of; judgment of taste: claim to universal validity of Vasari, Giorgio n, n voice (Stimme) –, , , ,  Wellberry, David n Wenzel, Christian n “What Is Orientation in Thinking?” (Kant) –

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Index Wicks, Robert n, n Wiggins, David , n see also sensibility theory (McDowell/Wiggins) Winnicott, D. W. , n,  wit –,  Wittgenstein, Ludwig , –, , n see also ordinary language philosophy Wolterstorff, Nicholas n work of art akin to a subject  and meaning and mattering –, –

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as analogy for the world – as world , ,  judgment of taste as , ,  see also art world, the , , ,  care for as condition of cognition – work of art as analogy for – Zerilli, Linda M. G. n Zuckert, Rachel n, n, n, n, n, n

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