Thinking with Kant’s <i>Critique of Judgment</i> 9780674973077

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Thinking with Kant’s Critique of Judgment

MICHEL CHAOULI

Thinking with Kant’s Critique of Judgment

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

2017

Copyright © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Chaouli, Michel, 1959– author. Title: Thinking with Kant’s Critique of judgment / Michel Chaouli. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016016041 | ISBN 9780674971363 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. | Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. Kritik der Urteilskraft—Criticism, Textual. | Judgment (Aesthetics) | Teleology. Classification: LCC B2784 .C43 2017 | DDC 121—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016016041

To Max and Felix

Contents

Note on Citation Preface xiii

ix

PA R T I : B E A U T Y

1

1 Pleasure 3 2 Community 42 3 Goodness 76 PA R T I I : A R T

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4 Making 113 5 Genius 149 6 Aesthetic Ideas PA R T I I I : N AT U R E

173 199

7 Organisms 203 8 Mind 227 9 Life 242 Notes 269 Acknowledgments Index 303

301

Note on Citation

All works by Kant are cited according to the pagination of Kants gesammelte Schriften, commonly known as the Akademie edition (it was published under the auspices of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences). Scholarly editions of Kant’s writings, in both German and English, generally provide this pagination. The volume number is followed by a colon and page number; if items on a page are numbered, that number too is given. Thus “16: 127, R 1820a” refers to note R 1820a on page 127 of volume 16 of the Akademie edition. There are two exceptions. Because I cite the Critique of Judgment on virtually every page, it would have been irksome to list the Akademie edition volume number every time, so I decided to leave it out (it is in volume 5); I supply instead the section number or section title to help orient the reader in the text. Thus “§49, 314” refers to page 314 of volume 5 of the Akademie edition; however, the reader also knows that the quoted text is taken from section 49 of the Critique of Judgment. The second exception concerns the Critique of Pure Reason, which, following common practice, is cited using the pagination of the first and second editions that Kant published, abbreviated as A and B. *

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N O T E O N C I TAT I O N

I cite English translations where available, which I silently amended from time to time. Where no translation was at hand, I provided my own. These are the editions I used: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, translated by Robert Louden, in Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, edited by Günter Zöller and Robert Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 227–429. Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 133–271. Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). I also consulted Kant’s Critique of Judgement, translated by J. H. Bernard, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1914); Critique of Judgement, translated by James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952); and Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Illustrated by Dreams of Metaphysics, translated by Emanuel F. Goerwitz (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1900). “First Introduction” to the Critique of Judgment, in Critique of the Power of Judgment, 1–51. “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim,” translated by Allen Wood, in Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, edited by Günter Zöller and Robert Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 107–120. Lectures on Logic, translated and edited by J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, translated and edited by Michael Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 353–603. The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God, in Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, translated and edited by

N O T E O N C I TAT I O N

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David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 107–201. “Perpetual Peace,” in Political Writings, translated by H. B. Nisbet, edited by H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 93–130. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science, translated by Gary Hatfield, in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, edited by Henry Allison and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29–169. Religion within the Bounds of Reason, translated by George di Giovanni, in Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, edited by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 39–215. GERM A N EDIT ION S

Kants gesammelte Schriften, edited by the German (formerly Royal Prussian) Academy of Sciences (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1902–); used for all works except Kritik der Urteilskraft and “Erste Einleitung.” Kritik der Urteilskraft (includes “Erste Einleitung”), edited by Heiner F. Klemme (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2006).

Preface

We—you and I— are setting out to think with the Critique of Judgment. If asked why we have settled on that book, we might answer, truthfully, that it is a classic, a “landmark of aesthetic theory” (as encyclopedias like to put it), and feel released from the burden of having to justify our choice. Like all classics, this daunting text will richly repay the effort we put into understanding it. It will teach us the concepts that account for aesthetic experience and help us link them to one another. It will reveal to us the very core of what it means to encounter the world aesthetically. That is more than most books can offer. Yet in turning to the Critique of Judgment, there is something else still, something not easy to name. I feel it first as discontent. Reading Kant, I often find myself working out the strange and elaborate propositions bit by bit, as though using a reference book to decode their sense. The process can be euphoric, like solving a puzzle, yet it is hard to shake the feeling that one has read something in an alien language whose use requires constant vigilance. (I speak for myself, yet I suspect you share the discontent; it may even have brought you to this book.) And delving into the many interpretations of the third Critique does not often help. There is a lot to learn from them, but they also teach a fear of the text; the more I listen to their guarded tone, the more I realize just how many errors I am in danger of committing. Now

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P R E FA C E

a cloud of anxiety settles over Kant’s text, and in my effort at mastering its complicated machinery, I lose sight of what it can give me. What can it give me? We think of a philosophical treatise as giving us insight, knowledge, maybe even wisdom, but it can give us still more. Listen to what the book did for—what it did to— Goethe: “Then the Critique of Judgment fell into my hands, and to this book I owe a most happy period in my life.” It is a delicious, an electrifying thought that a book—that this book—may become the cause of happiness, that reading it need not lead to unease, but can allow us to breathe more freely as we think about the experience of beauty. *

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Many paths lead to happiness. The one we hope to take is to think with the Critique of Judgment. What does it mean to think with this text? When I strive to think with a work of philosophy, I must first learn to think how it thinks. So I study it closely, but not the way a student studies a textbook to pass an exam. Rather, I submit myself to the movement of its thinking, let it carry me along even when I cannot see how it moves or where to, the way I trust an experienced dancer in whose hands I have placed myself. That is the first phase of becoming familiar. But soon I am studying it the way a mimic studies its subject. I inhabit the text until I know its tics and flourishes, until I can feel its mood change. Now I think with it in a different way, for I have picked up the melody in its thinking, which I can hum even when I fail to understand all the words. There is still another phase. For mimicking a way of thinking is significant finally for the ways it can lead me to myself—toward a self I do not yet fully know, a self that is changing as it learns a new way of handling reflection. Now thinking with the text entails using its resources as steppingstones and guidelines, as means of propelling myself into an unexplored space. When I feel the force of the work, I look for ways of using it for movements that, for whatever reason, the work itself declined to explore. Now I am in a position to see its shortcomings without feeling superior to it. I feel that it has taught me how to learn from it, and I am glad to remain in its debt, while at the same time I feel released from it. *

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In thinking with the third Critique (published in 1790 and so called because it comes on the heels of the other two Kantian Critiques, those of Pure and

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Practical Reason), we aim to know the text from inside, but not because we wish to remain in its grip. We start with conspicuous concepts—pleasure, taste, beauty, art, genius, and a few others— and let them take us as far as they will go, because in understanding what the text says we hope to develop an intimacy with the world in which what it says makes sense. It is only then that we become aware that what sustains and motivates the elaborate contraption of Kant’s aesthetic theory is a single insight, an intuition really, that is of such force that inhabiting it feels reckless. Aesthetic experience, we learn, is “singular and without comparison to others” (§9, 219). Nothing in my biological life, in my culture, in my dispositions, and in my history—nothing— can fully prepare me for this encounter with beauty. I come to know something in myself, a singular form of pleasure, that surpasses my familiarity with myself, and this something that is not wholly mine opens the experience to a public dimension and makes it available to others—to all others, Kant says. The singularity reveals itself as a strange form of universality. This is a line of thinking so audacious that it remains unsurpassed to our own day. In attempting to account for this singularity of aesthetic experience, Kant exposes the concepts that he marshals to a risk of failure. That should not surprise us, for how are concepts to grapple with what comes serendipitously when they are meant to bring regularity to experience? What others may have conceived of as a failure—an experience surpassing the horizon of its own occurrence and a subject outstripped by this experience—Kant describes as a form of freedom. It is not the same freedom of the will we know from moral action, but rather a “freedom to make anything into an object of pleasure for ourselves” (§5, 210). The freedom in aesthetic experience is not one I choose the way I choose a fork in the road, but one in which I give myself over to something for which I remain unprepared. I open myself to a way of making—“making anything into an object of pleasure”—that I do not know even as I find myself in its midst. It is the freedom to live poetically, to risk living poetically. In aesthetic experience the human being risks living poetically. It is a blissful idea with the power of launching a most happy period in our lives.

Thinking with Kant’s Critique of Judgment

PA R T I

BEAUTY

ONE

Pleasure

the Critique of Judgment to deepen our understanding of aesthetic experience. Being dutiful, we start at the beginning, making our way through the preface, then the introduction of the book; perhaps we even soldier through the first introduction (the one Kant scrapped in favor of another, shorter one). We are prepared for not being able to make heads or tails of much of what we read; this is Kant after all. But we are not prepared for how little this text, hailed as a landmark in aesthetic theory, seems to say about aesthetic experience in its long introductory passages; we are confused, and now we start getting impatient. So it is with a keen sense of relief when, the ground finally cleared, we come upon section 1, “The Judgment of Taste Is Aesthetic.” And with the very first sentence of this first section, we realize that Kant intends to take us to the heart of the matter. It reads: WE COME TO

In order to decide whether or not something is beautiful, we do not relate the representation by means of 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 plea sure or displea sure. (§1, 203)

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Although we are not in a position yet to make sense of the way the concepts are put in relation to one another here, we do recognize one thing: one of the features of aesthetic experience—the feature given the honor of being mentioned first— consists of the way my apprehension of an object (what Kant calls its “representation”) relates to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure. “In order to decide whether or not something is beautiful” what counts is whether or not what I apprehend in an object relates to this feeling. It is true that every time I engage with an aesthetic object my feeling of pleasure is somehow in play, but that in itself does not suffice to mark it as aesthetic. I may feel pleasure (or displeasure) every time I solve a problem in geometry or bake a loaf of bread, but by Kant’s way of thinking, my pleasure or displeasure does not “decide whether or not” the proof is correct or the loaf a success. In aesthetic experience, pleasure—a relationship to pleasure—is not incidental but essential. It is a simple thought, something we feel we can hold on to. It is also a powerful thought, for if Kant is right, then aesthetic theory is really a theory of pleasure, and discourse about aesthetic matters— all of it—must be alive to this feeling, else it risks losing its way. But do I know how to speak about my aesthetic experience in a way that testifies to the way it links to my pleasure? Do I know even this pleasure? Often it is elusive; sometimes, even in my most vivid encounters with an artwork, it may not be in evidence at all. If pleasure is to make up the core of the theory, then it would seem to matter to know its texture and range. Will any pleasure do, or must it feel a certain way? Do I feel what I ordinarily feel—fear, pity, wonder—but in scare quotes, that is, in the mode of unreality? Or do I feel my ordinary feelings plus something else, something that floats in parallel to my feelings and somehow transforms them into aesthetic pleasure? Or, another option, does aesthetic feeling perhaps have no content at all, but consist of sheer stimulation, so that what gives me pleasure is not a pleasant feeling, but the very fact of having been brought to feel, quite apart from the tonality or intensity of the feeling itself? When we turn to the third Critique for orientation in thinking about these questions, we come away disappointed. The text says little about actual pleasures or even the general character of aesthetic plea sure. All we learn about it in section 1 is that, when responding to beauty, the subject relates the representation of an object to “its feeling of life, under the name of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure” (§1, 204). (Again, “representation” does not refer to an object’s external representation in a picture or a description,

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for example, but to its apprehension by the subject.) When we feel pleasure, we feel life itself, it seems. An interesting idea, but does it help us understand what sort of pleasure is at stake in aesthetic experience? The text goes on to say that the “feeling of life” is in fact “a feeling of the promotion of life” that beauty “directly brings with it” (§23, 244), which makes the matter only slightly clearer. After all, “a feeling of the promotion of life” may be felt anywhere on the spectrum stretching from the contentment that signals the mere absence of illness to the ravishing joy of sexual pleasure. We are left to wonder if aesthetic pleasure takes up its own region on this spectrum or if in fact it can occur anywhere along it. Pursuing the issue into Kant’s anthropological writings clarifies some things and muddies others. Thus in a section devoted to “The Feeling of Pleasure and Displeasure” in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, published in 1798, almost a decade after the third Critique, we learn first that “what drives me to maintain my state (to remain in it) is agreeable to me” (7: 231). Yet Kant abruptly abandons this even-keeled conception, in which pleasure is understood as homeostatic maintenance, and turns to the dynamic view we know from his aesthetic theory, namely, that “enjoyment is the feeling of promotion of life; pain is that of a hindrance of life” (ibid.). And it is this dynamic picture of pleasure that he introduces into a discussion of the response to artworks. “By what means are plays (whether tragedies or comedies) so alluring?” he wonders. “Because in all of them certain difficulties enter in—anxiety and confusion between hope and joy—and so the play of opposing affects by the conclusion of the piece advances the life of the spectator, since it has stirred up motion within him” (7: 232). It seems as though Kant here aligns himself with one of the ideas of aesthetic feeling that we mentioned at the outset, according to which this feeling consists not of this or that emotion (fear, pity, and the rest) or this or that intensity or quality of feeling, but rather of sheer emotional upheaval, for emotion is finally a kind of “motion within” the percipient. But in drawing such a conclusion, we would have taken the wrong fork in the road. For the entire discussion of pleasure and pain, including Kant’s speculation about the spectators’ emotional responses to plays, turns out to have no bearing on aesthetic pleasure. The first falls under section A, “On the Feeling for the Agreeable, or Sensuous Plea sure in the Sensation of an Object” (7: 230), which Kant takes pains to distinguish from section B, “On the Feeling for the Beautiful,” which is glossed as “The Partly Sensuous,

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Partly Intellectual Pleasure in Reflective Intuition or Taste” (7: 239). So the “feeling of life” that the Critique of Judgment right off the bat highlights as an essential feature of aesthetic experience does not seem to be the same thing as the “feeling for the promotion of life” that characterizes “enjoyment” in the Anthropology. It remains unclear where the difference might lie between the two feelings of “the promotion of life,” yet it is clear that the distinction between “the Feeling for the Agreeable” and “the Feeling for the Beautiful,” still hazy to us, seems to be axiomatic for Kant. He does not derive it, but uses it to structure his account of pleasure. It is the theme of the first few sections of the third Critique, and understanding it from inside will be our aim in the pages to come. Kant draws the distinction between the two—the agreeable and the beautiful— along many axes, at least once specifically in relation to life, its promotion, and its felt well-being. Thus when he claims that “enjoyment (even if its cause may lie in ideas) always seems to consist in a feeling of the promotion of the total life of the human being, consequently also of bodily well-being, i.e., of health,” his point is precisely to distinguish that feeling from “that which pleases merely in the act of judging [was bloß in der Beurteilung gefällt]” (“Remark” [§54], 330–331), that is, from aesthetic feeling. We need not conclude that aesthetic feeling therefore does not consist of the feeling of life (and hence that the proposition in section 1 with which we began is mistaken or misleading). Rather, it seems that this feeling of life is not exactly the same as the organism’s feeling of well-being. Aesthetic experience, then, is unrelated to the organism’s feeling of health. It may make me feel better (or worse) in my physical and emotional life, but that, according to Kant, is not essential to the experience. THE TURN TO PLEA SURE

It is telling that Kant opens the “Analytic of the Beautiful” not, in fact, with an analysis of beauty, but with an analysis of the feeling we have when encountering beauty. He shifts the ground of philosophy: rather than wondering what features make something beautiful or in what the essence of beauty might lie, as Western philosophy has asked since its beginnings, Kant trains our attention on the subject: under what conditions will someone come to say, “This is beautiful”? What does the utterance say about the person making it? And what sort of claim does such a statement have on others?

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Th is turn is in keeping with Kant’s overall project of critical philosophy, which examines not objects but the ways we come to know them, not actions but the ways we come to take them. Similarly in the case of beauty: he forgoes any analysis, empirical or speculative, of what makes beautiful things beautiful in favor of an investigation of the conditions under which something comes to be beautiful for us. Kant is not the first theorist to go down that road, yet he travels it in a singular manner. Compare his method with that of David Hume, for example, who in his essay “Of the Standard of Taste” also considers beauty to exist “merely in the mind which contemplates” it. When Hume goes on to specify what goes into this contemplation of beauty—a good critic needs to be sound of mind, unprejudiced, knowledgeable, and so on—he enumerates empirical features (and programmatically so, since anything else would be suspect to him as the smoke and mirrors of metaphysics). Yet Kant seeks to find out if there are conditions apart from the empirical that need to be in place for the experience of beauty to occur in the first place. Should that be the case (which he believes it is), then those would be, in Kant’s terminology, transcendental conditions. The philosophical force of the difference between empirical and transcendental conditions will only become apparent as we delve into the argument. The language of “conditions” (Kant’s word is Bedingungen) can be misleading. It may lead us to think of what must be in place before I have an aesthetic experience (or make an aesthetic judgment) as a list of prerequisites that I must have under my belt before I can go on to feel beauty. Insisting, as Kantians routinely do, that “before” is not meant temporally but strictly logically does not tend to help, since in an experience that is as singular as aesthetic experience it is not obvious if there is in fact a way of disentangling the temporal from the logical. We can think of other experiences—doing an addition, for example, or riding my bicycle to work— in a generalized way that removes them from their implication in the specificity of lived time and thus makes them available for an analysis that would reveal their logical conditions of possibility, even while acknowledging that any given instance must of course occur at a certain time. But as we shall see in a moment, it is one of Kant’s key insights that aesthetic experience is always in a specific time and place, that there cannot be an aesthetic experience “in general.” Because its embedment in time is absolute, every logical condition will also seem like a temporal condition. Giving the description a

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slight twist yields both a better understanding of Kant’s project and a richer account of aesthetic experience: rather than asking what must be in place before aesthetic experience, we want to know— and I think Kant wants to know—what is in play in aesthetic experience. When I say, “This is beautiful,” what is the force and resonance of that utterance? How does it gain that force and resonance? What kind of capacities does it activate and develop? Judgment, a sensitivity to pleasure, and an ear for the claims others make on me (among others) are not conditions of aesthetic judgment in the sense of being resources I hold in reserve, only to draw on them when I come face-to-face with something beautiful; rather they are capacities that a conceptual analysis reveals to be fully operative when we do experience things aesthetically. Saying that Kant sets out to understand what makes something beautiful for us bears a resemblance to the truism that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” As with all truisms, it too holds something true. But Kant’s analytic focus on the subject of experience does not mean that the object of experience is rendered irrelevant or vanishes altogether, as the truism suggests; on the contrary, Kant seeks to understand and describe precisely the experience that we do have in the world. It may thus be more accurate to describe his turn not as a move away from objects and toward subjects, as it is often taken, but as understanding objects in terms of and with relation to the subjects beholding, using, and judging them. The world he gives us is a world that invariably includes the dimension of observation from somewhere and involvement by someone. This dimension is not something that has been merely added to the world and that may thus be subtracted at some point to give us the world pure and simple; rather it constitutes the world. Without it the world would be not pure and simple but naked and unintelligible. Thus when earlier we said that Kant analyzes the feeling I have when encountering something beautiful, the idea of the encounter, while not Kant’s, gives us the right phenomenology. Although what gives rise to my judgment of beauty is, in some sense, “inside” me, this inside is not my individual domain, particular to myself and closed off from the world. It is not a psychological or physiological inside. The very fabric of the “inside” at stake here consists of being oriented toward the world, toward both the objects that hold my aesthetic attention and the other human beings who are the addressees of my judgment. This too will emerge as we unfold the experience of beauty.

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MAKING PLEA SURE POETICALLY

Have we made headway? We began by noting how Kant conceives of aesthetic experience as an experience marked by a relation to the feeling of pleasure. We thought we knew what to make of this idea, since we know the feeling of pleasure without needing to consult a dictionary, let alone a philosopher. But now, with the distinction between pleasures related to the agreeable and the beautiful, we are confounded. Are we to think that two different kinds of feelings are in play, one for agreeable things, the other for the beautiful? All the talk about the feeling of life, about health and bodily well-being, prompts us to draw up a map of pleasure in the hope of determining the region, populated perhaps by certain objects (say, artworks or appealing faces) or by a certain depth and ardor of feeling or—if you are of a scientific disposition— certain regions of the brain that would permit us to identify aesthetic pleasure. Quite a bit in the text encourages us in this quest. Kant notes that the beautiful and the agreeable each seem to have their own language: while the beautiful is said to please, “one says of the agreeable not merely that it pleases [gefällt] but that it gratifies [vergnügt]” (§3, 207). If Vergnügen and Genuss (“enjoyment”) denote the pleasure of the agreeable and Lust and Wohlgefallen (“pleasure,” “liking,” “delight”) that of the beautiful, are we then not right to suspect that different pleasures lurk behind these different terms? Then there is the fact that some objects are invariably associated with one or the other form of pleasure; thus by Kant’s reckoning, eating and drinking seem to lead to nothing but agreeableness, hence to the promotion or hindrance of well-being, while the flower invariably exemplifies beauty (more about this later). Perhaps, then, there is something in the objects themselves that triggers specific pleasures; yet another reason to map the geography of pleasure. But such a project misapprehends the issue. The task Kant has set himself in the third Critique—the core ambition of the entire project—lies in showing that the aesthetic is a genuinely distinct mode of experience, not reducible to other modes. For that reason, the distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable (just as the one between the beautiful and the good, as we shall see) is not negotiable; give it up, and you give up aesthetic experience itself. If there were no difference between the agreeable and the beautiful, then aesthetic pleasure would be just another kind of preference, like those we encounter in cuisine, in the best-seller list (or the worst-seller list),

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in fashion, in erotic photography, and in every other domain in which preferences make a difference. Yet Kant’s wager is that beauty names a different mode of taking pleasure, a mode not reducible to what I like because of my bodily dispositions or my embedment in a culture and a history. We find ourselves nodding in vague assent, since it rings true to say that aesthetic experience is distinct from ordinary preference, yet we also want to say, “What else is there besides my body and its life in culture and history that would serve as the site for such an experience?” Much of this chapter, indeed much of this book, attempts to understand the distinction of beauty, a distinction at once self-evident and mysterious. How might we put the difference of beauty in terms of the language of pleasure that we have been trying to follow? If the difference does not lie in the quality or intensity of pleasure nor in the objects that give us pleasure, then where do we find it? A passage from the Anthropology suggests a way. “In taste,” Kant writes, “that is, in aesthetic power of judgment, it is not the sensation directly (the material of the representation of the object), but rather how the free (productive) power of imagination joins it together through invention, that is, the form, which produces pleasure in the object” (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 7: 240). Here, then, is a first pass at acquainting ourselves with the difference of beauty: in aesthetic experience, it is not the sensation itself—the patches of blue that Lucian Freud speckles into a cheek or a forehead—that produces pleasure in me, but what my imagination, in its freedom, makes of the blue of the skin: how it joins it together with other sensations, with memories, images, words, and ideas. In this sense, aesthetic pleasure is not the pleasure the object gives me, but the pleasure I take in it. We recognize right away that “taking” pleasure is not a simple act but involves a play of activity and passivity, for this taking involves both a form of receptivity and a kind of making. Kant insists that the “free imagination” that performs the act of joining is “productive” (rather than merely reproductive, as it is more commonly characterized in eighteenth-century theories of the imagination), a productivity that the peculiar verb “join together” emphasizes: zusammenpaaren (literally “pair together”) carries echoes of sexual reproduction, the primal scene of productivity. We are struck by another choice of words: when “the free (productive) power of imagination pairs [sensation] together,” it does so, Kant writes, by means of “invention”; his word is Dichtung: poetry—making up, but also just making. Dichtung can mean many things, but because it occurs here in close proximity to both aes-

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thetic judgment and the productive imagination, the word cannot help but reach into the realm of art. We expect to find poetry—in the wide sense of free, imaginative making—on the side of the objects of aesthetic experience, but we are surprised to find it on the side of the apprehending subject as well. Now we see that saying aesthetic experience involves pleasure means that it involves poetry. I feel aesthetic pleasure thanks to my poetic imagination— a startling thought whose range and depth we cannot yet gauge. So this is what we have. Aesthetic experience involves my feeling of plea sure or displeasure, and essentially so. Pleasure is key to this experience. But surely not every pleasure. In trying to zero in on the right sort of pleasure, we found Kant oddly unforthcoming, but then it dawned on us that rather than being vague in responding to our questions, he was urging us to see their irrelevance. His insight, one that allows him to part ways with the empiricist aesthetic tradition that came before him, lies in discarding the idea that aesthetic pleasure is characterized by the content of the feeling (the way sweet differs from sour, or pity from fear), its quality (say, its delicacy, intensity, or fictionality), by the object that evoked it, or by some other feature. Rather, what matters is the way I put the object I apprehend in relation to the feeling of plea sure, whatever it may be. In aesthetic pleasure, “what matters is what I make of [a] representation [of an object] in myself” (§2, 205), specifically how my free and productive—my poetic— imagination joins together what I perceive and know and feel. That is what taste in Kant’s conception amounts to: the productive use of the poetic imagination. One way of characterizing the difference between the pleasure in the agreeable and the beautiful lies in the fact that I understand the former to come about thanks to the objects I encounter, while the latter arises thanks to my imaginative work—the difference between something giving me pleasure and my taking pleasure in it. And because this taking is a form of making, carrying it out requires learning. Everyone has the ability to take pleasure aesthetically (at least we approach others with that sense), but using my poetic imagination well comes about through training and practice. Taste needs developing. IN BEAUTY, I EXCEED MYSELF

Pleasure, taste, beauty—we have been using these terms as though they had been smuggled into our hands directly from another, more innocent age,

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unblemished by decades of critique. Are we not guilty of naïveté, or worse, of deluding ourselves into believing that these concepts continue to have a grip on our experience? Have artists, critics, and theorists not exposed them as falsehoods, handsome masks that disguise the true face of social violence? Pleasure, we are reminded from every side, communicates a merely decorous liking that serves as an index of how the modern subject has learned to arrange itself with the brutal conditions it inhabits. To really shake things up, you need stronger stuff, so writers reach for enjoyment and juissance and affect; they reach for the supposedly untamed sublime. Taste, for its part, has been revealed as a technique for creating and maintaining social difference, and so “having taste” in fact comes to signify above all an embrace of social and commercial norms. Beauty, our third term, has suffered the greatest loss of prestige. It now finds few advocates among thoughtful writers and artists. The most ambitious among these—those intent on making and thinking in new ways—have not only found no use for it but have directed their efforts at disparaging it. The last thing a serious artist wants is to be caught in the company of an entity that is now unashamedly at home only in places like beauty contests and beauty parlors. Indeed, not only the terms used to analyze and describe aesthetic experience, but the experience itself has been under general suspicion for some time. “The aesthetic,” Paul de Man has written, “still concerns us as one of the most powerful ideological devices to act upon the reality of history.” The aesthetic is not irrelevant; it does concern us, he concedes, but be on your guard as you approach it. Kant’s aesthetic theory often serves as exhibit A for critiques of aesthetic ideology, and not without reason; many passages in the third Critique lend themselves to suspicious readings. If we do not follow these readings here, it is not because they have always misunderstood or misinterpreted the text, nor is it a question of defending Kant against unfair or unfaithful readings; he can well defend himself. No, the more serious risk is that we harm ourselves by getting in our own way as we try to describe and understand a fundamental mode of experience. The pages and chapters that follow do not then set out to engage in a battle of interpretations, which rarely proves fruitful. Rather they seek to find in the text what opens the way to understanding and perhaps deepening an experience we know intimately yet find elusive to our grasp. We have not said much, but the little we have said about the way Kant conceives of aesthetic pleasure permits us to see that apprehending it as a form of ideological self-delusion occludes what is significant about it. If the

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pleasure we take in beauty—the pleasure beauty, and beauty alone, gives— is a pleasure involving resources that differ from those at work in agreeable pleasures, then beauty is not a kind of attractiveness or prettiness. It does not appeal to me by stroking my dispositions or the “pleasure centers” of my body or my brain; my engagement with it is not just another preference. Rather feeling the pleasure in beauty entails the use of a “freedom to make for ourselves an object of pleasure out of something” (§5, 210). Although we do not yet know how precisely to make sense of this freedom and the way of making that it enables, we recognize that, understood this way, beauty fails to serve as the target for efforts meant to overthrow it. Let us say that Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, emblem of all anti-art meant to lay bare the vapidity of “aesthetic” consumption, succeeds in dislodging the expectation that art should be “beautiful” in producing conventionally decorous forms of response. Yet if there is a poetic dimension to anti-art (as there is in many of Duchamp’s ready-mades), then the conception of beauty that we have been trying to develop, far from being upended by such a work, captures precisely what is at stake in encountering it. For beauty does not look for what is pretty or reassuring in the sideways urinal. The pleasure activated in the experience of beauty is not a form of enjoyment I know well enough that I may seek it, bringing it about by known means. It is rather a strange form of pleasure that arises—I don’t know how or when—as I relate this new object to myself in creative ways, which is to say in ways that I fail to master fully. It can happen—it can happen, for example, in the presence of the porcelaneous whiteness of an ordinary object that I see as though for the first time—that my imagination takes me beyond what I know how to feel. Beauty charts not the safety of familiar psychic territory but opens an arena on which I forge—but according to no technique I could lay down—new experiences of feeling, experiences occasioned by and related to the object that Duchamp has chosen to display. In this way, I am both explorer and terra incognita, for what I encounter in the ready-made is what is new and strange in myself. Beauty delivers a jolt no less sharp than the one many readers of Kant believe they can find only in the sublime, and taste, this worn-out piece of furniture that smells as musty as the European aristocracy itself, now captures something urgent and fresh in my relation to the world of objects. Rather than describing a technique for keeping things where they belong, it names a way of becoming alive to the poetic force of the imagination.

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We have said why conceiving of aesthetic experience as what de Man calls an “ideological device” is unfruitful for our purposes. But the line of thinking we have been following allows us to say that, if Kant is right, another kind of inquiry about the aesthetic— one that conceives of it as a fully “naturalistic” phenomenon— also barks up the wrong tree. If the pleasure we take in beauty were in fact a preference, then it would be a legitimate object of scientific investigation, whether this plea sure were understood as a fully bodily phenomenon (to be studied by psychology, physiology, neuroscience, and so on), as a formation shaped by history and culture (to be studied by literary or art history, sociology, anthropology, and so on), or as a mixture of the two. Yet Kant’s theory urges us to think of aesthetic plea sure in a different way, one not amenable to being measured by sensors, MRI machines, surveys, or big data. We said that the difference between aesthetic and nonaesthetic pleasure that Kant is working to reveal does not lie in the content of the feeling, nor in the object that evokes each, nor again in its intensity, duration, or relation to other feelings. Aesthetic pleasure is not just another kind of feeling occupying just another location on the map of feelings. Rather, it describes the relation that the subject establishes between an object and the feeling of pleasure (or, in the text’s more precise terms, the “relation of representations to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure” [§5, 209]). It entails a form of experience not reducible to the sort of behavior whose regularities the natural and human sciences strive to capture. That does not make it into an occult phenomenon, just one that demands a different kind of description. SERENDIPITY

The first sentence of section 1 launched us on this inquiry into the pleasure felt in aesthetic experience. What more can it teach us? Let us refresh our memory: In order to decide whether or not something is beautiful, we do not relate the representation by means of 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 plea sure or displea sure. (§1, 203)

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The first insight we gleaned—that what characterizes aesthetic experience is that my apprehension of an object is geared toward feeling pleasure or displeasure— entails other ideas. One is the subjectivity of the experience. Because I alone can feel my pleasure or displeasure, my experience—and any judgment I make as part of it—is anchored in me. Aesthetic experience is subjective not because it involves the senses (as the etymology of aesthetic that goes back to sensation might suggest), but because it entails the feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Sensation, though it occurs “in me,” is objective if it refers to something real; it informs me about a feature of an object. The pleasure that this sensation may bring about in me, however, tells me nothing about the object. “The green color of the meadows,” Kant explains, “belongs to objective sensation, as perception of an object of sense; but its agreeableness belongs to subjective sensation, through which no object is represented” (ibid.). In this respect, aesthetic judgment is like a judgment born of agreeableness, for both are judgments about pleasure or displeasure. When Kant says—right off the bat, in sentence 1—that it is not the understanding that is in the driver’s seat in aesthetic experience but the imagination (“perhaps combined with the understanding”), he puts forward the idea that concepts, the common currency of the shared world of objects, do not guide aesthetic experience, nor therefore do they control aesthetic judgments. This insight simply reveals what is on the other side of the pleasure coin: when I apprehend something in aesthetic experience, I do not relate what I am beholding to concepts, which may result in cognition, but to my feeling of pleasure, which may result in aesthetic feeling. For that reason, aesthetic judgment “contributes nothing to cognition” (§1, 204). This claim is often taken as a disparagement of the aesthetic, as though it were blind on one eye and offered a view of the world lacking a dimension. At least, it is sometimes said, some of Kant’s rationalist forerunners (such as Alexander Baumgarten) left the door between aesthetic experience and cognition a crack open, though what in their account filters through is a “confused,” degraded kind of cognition; in Kant, by contrast, there is no door at all, so there is nothing to crack or throw open. But that is just the point: what makes aesthetic experience a genuinely distinct way of engaging the world is that it is not a version of another form of engagement; it does not offer yet another kind of cognition nor, as we have seen, yet another kind of bodily or cultural preference, nor, as we shall

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see, yet another kind of moral behavior. It may harness cognition and bear on it in some fashion, yet it is distinct at its core. (But we see in Chapter 2 that it is also not, as commentators often say, “nonconceptual.”) The idea that aesthetic experience, in Kant’s words, “is not grounded on any available concept of the object and does not furnish one” (Introduction VII, 190), has consequences that we may not have seen coming. For example, it alerts us to the serendipity of this experience. If my aesthetic experience does not run on conceptual tracks, then I cannot know where and when I might encounter it, and once I have had the luck of running into it, I cannot be sure of finding it again if only I retrace my steps. When I return to a short story, a painting, or a film and discover beauty in it again and again (beauty in the sense Kant has taught us to think), do I do so knowing what I will find? Were that so, then I would be treating the work like a depository where I go to replenish supplies I have used up. But the wonder and pleasure in such an experience lies precisely in the fact that there is no promise that the object may again give me pleasure, for what yesterday struck me in the way only an artwork can, may leave me indifferent today. And the wonder and pleasure lies not just in being rewarded once again, but in being rewarded differently, for my pleasure never seems to be exactly the same as the one I felt during previous encounters; what I take from the object—what it gives me—is not a feeling or a piece of knowledge I know beforehand, but one I make anew for myself. “There can . . . be no rule in accordance with which someone could be compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful” (§8, 215), Kant writes. It is a strong statement: I will not find something beautiful just because it was painted by Caravaggio or because it is a sonata or because a friend has praised it. Nor because it accords with some supposedly universal rule of beauty. Since “one cannot determine a priori which object will or will not suit taste, one must try it out” (Introduction VII, 191). One must try it out—man muß ihn versuchen: Versuch is an attempt, an essay, an experiment. Discovering the beauty in something is an experiment, and experiments can go awry (other wise they would not be experiments). Significantly, this is a two-way experiment, for I am not testing the object for properties that I suspect it holds. Aesthetic judgment is not a question of gathering beautiful things and setting them off from the rest. Rather I test my own imagination as I come face-to-face with an object; by “trying it out” I experiment with myself. In this encounter, I do not order the world from my perch as a

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“man of taste” (the way the cliché of taste would lead us to believe), but my taste is the way I risk myself, for I never know if I can come upon the poetic resources to relate the object before me to my pleasure in the right way. Serendipity, while not Kant’s term, is the right word for the strangely passive activity— and the pleasurable feeling—of finding something that I was not looking for. It captures the happy coincidence of coming face-to-face with beauty that stands at the core of Kant’s meditation. I do not come upon something I need or crave or even long for without being aware it, but find what I did not know I was seeking. (Horace Walpole, who coined the term, tells us that the characters in his tale The Three Princes of Serendip “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”) Serendipity, then, is doubled: it is by a happy chance that I come upon something that opens me to a dimension that I happen to find in myself— which is to say, beyond the self with which I maintain a quotidian familiarity. For these reasons, the subject of the phrase “one must try it out” is apt to lead us astray, for in aesthetic experience the pronoun that is truly in play is I: I must try it out, and I alone. This I is often drowned out by the abstractions of philosophical reasoning, but then it suddenly emerges in places we would not have suspected. Take, for example, a passage in which Kant speculates about why the “faculty of aesthetic judging has been given the very name of ‘taste’ ”: Someone may list all the ingredients of a dish for me, and remark about each one that it is other wise agreeable to me, and moreover even rightly praise the healthiness of this food; yet I am deaf to all these grounds, I try the dish with my tongue and my palate, and on that basis (not on the basis of general principles) do I make my judgment. (§33, 285)

The quality of the ingredients, the excellence of their composition, the way others have judged it—to all this “I am deaf,” for in this experiment I am solely alert to “my tongue.” As I “try” the morsel in my mouth, I also test my own tongue. Being unencumbered by “general principles” comes to be understood by Kant as a kind of freedom. Perhaps that accounts for the fact that his prose, usually composed to the point of inertness, gets agitated when it comes to this issue, so much so that he can talk himself into a minor tantrum:

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If someone does not fi nd a building, a view, or a poem beautiful, then, first, he does not allow approval to be internally imposed upon himself by a hundred voices who all praise it highly. [ . . . ] Second, an a priori proof in accordance with determinate rules can determine the judgment on beauty even less. If someone reads me his poem or takes me to a play that in the end fails to please my taste, then he can adduce Batteux or Lessing, or even older and more famous critics of taste, and adduce all the rules they established as proofs that his poem is beautiful . . . I will stop my ears, listen to no reasons and arguments, and would rather believe that those rules of the critics are false . . . than allow that my judgment should be determined by means of a priori grounds of proof. (§33, 284)

Remaining deaf to rules—to both the rules of conduct imposed by the “hundred voices” of the crowd and the rules of composition imposed by the expert—is not a deprivation but by Kant’s thinking a form of freedom. Since no one “could be compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful,” my feeling of pleasure in beauty is free. Yet this freedom is not sovereign and serene, the way we might imagine freedom in its picture-book variety. If my experience lurches back and forth guided by nothing firmer than serendipity, then this freedom is volatile. Because no rule (which is to say no concept) directs me in the way I relate my apprehension of an object to my feeling of pleasure, this freedom to feel aesthetically is not a freedom I can deploy freely, at will. Rather, it is an experimental freedom, a freedom to experiment with myself. I achieve it “unintentionally,” Kant writes and repeats the idea, if not the exact term, twice more within the next few lines (Introduction VII, 190). If I achieve it “without any intention” (ibid.), then I might as well say that it achieves me. Not only is the freedom in aesthetic experience volatile, then, it consists of the freedom to experience freedom as volatility. Which throws fresh light on the idea that in encountering the world aesthetically I make use of my “freedom to make for [myself ] an object of pleasure out of something” (§5, 210), for now we see that the freedom in the making that we considered earlier is just the freedom to and as volatility that has shown itself to us here. Making poetically is making unintentionally, even when all that is made is a certain form of experience. Th is thought will find a powerful echo and elaboration in the sections on art (sections 43 to 49), which occupy us in later chapters.

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EXPRESSIONS OF BEAUTY

We are now in a position to turn the idea that aesthetic experience “contributes nothing to cognition” (§1, 204) on its feet. For this failure to contribute is in fact an achievement. Aesthetic experience does not provide me with the sort of knowledge that my ordinary, nonaesthetic engagement with things can produce, knowledge that ends in conceptual determination and propositional statements, knowledge that can be systematized into science. I do not go to aesthetic experience to learn that meadows are green, nor, conversely, will an analysis of the concepts “meadow” and “green” (or of the chemical composition of the chlorophyll) yield insight into the aesthetic pleasure I may take in them. If I end up making an aesthetic judgment about the green of the meadow, I will not add to the storehouse of information about it. That is true also of aesthetic experiences that lead me into terrain that is far closer to conceptual knowledge than the color of a surface may be said to be. I would not be able to make my way through even a sentence in a novel without relying on concepts, but if I came away from reading Madame Bovary with propositions about marital fidelity or living conditions in a small town in France, I would have missed what it means to read a novel, not because the novel provides me with only indistinct knowledge, but rather because the sort of thinking and knowing entailed in reading it is of a different kind. But of what kind? We find only hints to an answer in Kant, but these lead deep into territory that confounds for its lack of firm orientation and, at the same time, exhilarates for the adventures in thinking it opens, territory that we will explore in the chapters on art. We may also have found a better way of handling a statement that condenses into a few words the entirety of aesthetic experience: “Th is flower (face, poem, gesture . . .) is beautiful.” It is perhaps the most canonical utterance in Kant’s aesthetic vocabulary, yet it remains deeply enigmatic. What does it communicate? Is it a proposition conveying a fact or a piece of conceptual knowledge about myself or the object before me? It arrives in the classical form of a judgment, predicating something about an object. But being beautiful does not appear to be a fact about the flower in the same way that being green is a fact about the meadow; like many other aesthetic theorists of the eighteenth century, Kant parts ways with the Platonist project of finding the essence of beauty in the things themselves. Does the judg-

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ment then assert a fact about me? In a way it does, since it is the case that I feel the pleasure of beauty when I utter the sentence, yet that is not where its force lies. The statement does not simply report a feeling I have, the way “I am hungry” or “I am in love” does; the specificity of aesthetic feeling, we said, does not lie in its content, object, or quality, but in the way my imagination poetically puts objects in relation with the feeling of pleasure. There are no facts to report, and this sentence too fails to add to the information I have about the world. Which reveals to us that it performs its work in another way. The utterance makes a claim on others; by saying it, “one solicits assent from everyone” (§19, 237). The universal dimension of aesthetic judgment is not lodged in a separate speech act but is embedded in the seemingly constative utterance, “This X is beautiful.” Kant insists that “this claim to universal validity so essentially belongs to a judgment by which we declare something to be beautiful that without thinking this it would never occur to anyone to use this expression” (§8, 214). That is just what the word means, and thus the judgment is not a statement containing a piece of information about the world, but an act: it is a demand, a solicitation. “The aesthetic judgment,” Eli Friedlander has remarked, “is to be understood over and above the assertion.” It says hardly anything at all, and what it means to convey “must be shown” rather than said (32). When I hear or read someone voicing the utterance, I look to what it shows, listen for what it makes audible, expose myself to its force. At one point, Kant writes that someone wishing to communicate an aesthetic judgment “announces [it] through the expression of beauty” (§8, 216). “Expression of beauty,” Ausdruck der Schönheit, is a wonderfully ambiguous way of pointing to the multiple ways in which aesthetic judgment signifies. It opens our view to the idea that giving expression to the experience of beauty—“This is beautiful”—is itself an expression of beauty. Recalling how the poetic imagination brings about the aesthetic experience to which my judgment is meant to testify, might we not say that “this is beautiful” asks to be heard like a line of poetry? The thought makes us hesitate. Is there not an incalculable gulf separating poetry from the prosaic utterance, “This is beautiful”? Do we not risk losing faith in the integrity of the words we use if we mingle the one with the other? Perhaps, but the greater risk lies in putting too great a stock in conventional notions of genre. Note that what Wittgenstein says about poetry, namely, “that a poem, even though it is written

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in the language of communication, is not used in the language game of communication,” also holds for the judgment testifying to the experience of having read a poem. The experience of beauty, we have said, results from the work of the poetic imagination; it is a creative act, and it is to this creativity that the utterance about the beauty of an object testifies, not by reporting on it or by conveying information about it, but by showing what cannot be told. It relies on the poetic dimension of language. To say that the poetic work of the imagination is given voice in “an expression of beauty” is to say that the aesthetic judgment is a poetic judgment. We need time to gain some intimacy with this idea. It runs counter to the way we are accustomed to thinking of aesthetic experience. In that picture, I find myself in a scene in which I and poetry, the “subject” and “object” of aesthetic experience, face each other: the poetry lies before me, and I “respond” and “react” to it, “interpret” and “judge” it—modes of behavior that we do not usually describe as poetic. Yet we have now come to see that the poetry in poetry (or the beauty in beauty) will not reveal itself to me if I myself do not imagine and think poetically, and if my “expression” of this experience is not also poetic. And we see right away that this line of thinking holds not merely for the terse phrase “this is beautiful,” but for every account meant to give expression to aesthetic experience; it holds for all criticism. While propositions and arguments are not irrelevant to criticism (just as they are not in a novel or a drama), its truth lies in its poetic melody, in the ways it shows the shape of an experience. Though this too flies in the face of our common conception, it does not diminish its claim on us. SUBJECTIVITY AND IMPERSONALITY

Aesthetic judgment, our first sentence taught, is not determined by concepts and therefore remains subjective. But that is only the beginning of the story, for Kant insists that it is not therefore personal, but rather lays claim to being universally valid. An intriguing proposition, yet one that does not immediately reveal its meaning. What could it mean for an experience to be subjective yet not personal? Kant explains the difference between subjective and personal by relying on a distinction we have come to know, namely, the one between the agreeable and the beautiful. To illustrate it, he sketches two scenes in which differing claims grounded in the two kinds of taste are played

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out. In the first, someone proclaims “sparkling wine from the Canaries” to be agreeable (apparently a common enough occurrence in Kant’s world). This person would hardly object, Kant maintains, were we to correct him to say “it is agreeable to me,” for in such cases “everyone is content that his judgment . . . be restricted merely to his own person” (§7, 212). This, then, is a case of judgment that is subjective and personal. The second case offers the opposite scenario. Here Kant contends that “it would be ridiculous if someone who prided himself on his taste thought to justify himself thus: ‘Th is object . . . is beautiful for me.’ For he must not call it beautiful if it pleases merely him . . . if he describes something as beautiful, then he expects the very same pleasure of others” (ibid.). Thus subjective and impersonal. In Kant’s account, the impersonality of aesthetic judgment has a structure that endows it with a claim to universal assent, for reasons that we turn to in Chapter 2. But the key point is that the utter subjectivity of my aesthetic experience does not mean that the experience is trapped within my person— quite the contrary. Judging something to be beautiful, then, simultaneously belongs to two orders that seem to be mutually exclusive: the act cannot help but be subjective, since to experience beauty we need the same feeling of pleasure and displeasure required for enjoying the agreeable taste of the sparkling wine from the Canaries. Yet, according to Kant, the judgment of beauty is just as undeniably endowed with an intersubjective dimension; it would disqualify itself were it to apply to me alone. It cannot but occur in the confines of myself, yet it radiates out to make a claim on others—in fact, all other human beings, as Kant will argue. Yes, it is my feeling, but not only and not fully. There is always something that is not mine— something foreign to myself, something impersonal and public—that characterizes and constitutes my subjective feeling of experiencing beauty. Of what nature is this foreign, this public, this impersonal dimension of my subjective feeling? The first response Kant offers is “disinterestedness,” not what we would have expected. PRIVATE INTEREST

The idea that the pleasure we take in beautiful things is— and must be— “without any interest” (§5, 211), as Kant stresses, is of such significance to him that it stands at the center of the very first of the four “moments” in the

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analysis of judgments of beauty in the Critique of Judgment. “Everyone must admit,” he declares in a passage replete with musts: that a judgment about beauty in which the least interest is mixed is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste. One must not be in the least biased in favor of the existence of the thing, but must be entirely indifferent in this respect in order to play the judge in matters of taste. (§2, 205)

Must one? Must “everyone” “admit” this? Must I remain “entirely indifferent” to “the existence” of Lucian Freud’s portraits or of a magnificent dead tree I discovered on a recent walk to find them beautiful? What does it even mean to remain indifferent to the existence of something, if that something gives me the occasion for feeling pleasure? It is not clear if the idea is intelligible. Nor is it clear whether for us, today, the language of interest enriches the account we give of aesthetic experience. Even if we refrain from approaching the idea with suspicion (for does disinterestedness not always mask some real, hidden interest?), we may be at a loss at what to do with it. When I reach for a description of the experience of being flooded by the kind of joy that beauty alone proffers, I do not tend to dwell on the quantity of “interest” that I have kept at bay, nor do I assure myself of my indifference to the existence of the object to which I owe this joy. And it is not just interest that seems out of place; the judicial language that pervades the passage—partiality, admission, bias, playing the judge—seems maladroit. It makes one wonder about Kant’s decision to opt for judgment as the weight-bearing concept of the edifice. At the same time, even as the appearance of the question of interest jars, we take note of the fact that Kant is by no means alone in raising it and that a whole range of thinkers before him found reason to reach for this concept to account for the specificity of aesthetic experience; it might therefore reveal a dimension of this experience that we have learned to neglect. As the commentaries on the third Critique inform us, the relationship of interest to aesthetic experience preoccupies many eighteenth-century British theorists of taste. “When the Eye or Appetite is eagerly fix’d on Treasure, and the money’ d Bliss of Bags and Coff ers . . . the Sight is instantly diverted from all other Views of Excellence or Worth,” the third Earl of Shaftesbury writes; “even the Vulgar,” he contends, “acknowledg the Narrowness of such a Mind.” Roughly a decade later, Francis Hutcheson, in his 1725 Inquiry

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Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, picks up the motif when he detects a conflict between “any Prospect of Advantage or Disadvantage” and “the Beauty or Deformity of an Object.” Interest here motivates those whom Shaftesbury had denounced as “selfish Computers of Happiness and private Good”; it is, at bottom, self-interest. And so, by this way of thinking, disinterestedness names an absence of self-interest: the true appreciation of beauty occurs only when I have mastered (or at least sated) my self-interest and encounter a thing without hunger for possessing it or, conversely, fear of being harmed by it. Hume generalizes this attitude and demands that his man of taste “must preserve his mind free from all prejudice, and allow nothing to enter into his consideration, but the very object, which is submitted to his examination.” Keeping the mind “ free from all prejudice” turns out to mean “considering myself as a man in general, forget[ting], if possible, my individual being and my peculiar circumstances” (225). Kant echoes this thought most audibly when he distinguishes the beautiful from the agreeable. Earlier we said that unlike the pleasure afforded by the beautiful, the agreeable comes with no built-in public dimension; it is personal in its very structure, for in pursuing it, I act as Shaftesbury’s selfish Computer calculating my Happiness and my private Good. If I am drawn to a body or an artwork driven by a desire to use it to increase my happiness, then I am in a poor position to experience its beauty. “Everyone says that hunger is the best cook,” Kant writes: and people with a healthy appetite relish every thing that is at all edible; thus such a pleasure demonstrates no choice in accordance with taste. Only when the need is satisfied can one distinguish who among the many has taste or does not. (§5, 210)

The idea, then, is that hunger, like any desire that prompts me to make use of the world for my own satisfaction, denies me the elbow room I need to find something of beauty in it. We might expect that once hunger has been sated, the limitation imposed on the agreeable would lift, and we would find ourselves primed for aesthetic experience. Yet no path seems to lead from the feeling of the agreeable to the feeling of the beautiful; the two forms of plea sure, more precisely, the “different relations of representations to the feeling of pleasure” (§5, 209), remain sequestered. For in Kant’s conception, the agreeable “excites a desire for objects of the same sort” (§3, 207); far from

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guiding us toward beauty, it merely perpetuates itself. The very interest that leads me to my object of desire—the interest to consume it or to take sexual pleasure in it or to use it in some other way that gladdens me—is not stilled by the pleasure I take, but in fact aroused anew. The agreeable pleasures, then, follow a circular, self-sustaining path: they are brought forth by a desire in an object and, in turn, bring forth a desire “for objects of the same sort.” Kant calls this kind of pleasure interested because it “presupposes not the mere judgment about [the object] but the relation of its existence to my state insofar as it is affected by such an object” (ibid.). To be able to enjoy it, I need the object; I depend on it. Saying that hungering for something gets in the way of finding it beautiful sounds like a modest proposition, but Kant takes it quite far, in fact all the way to the idea of the universality of aesthetic pleasure. Because when feeling beauty, he writes, “the person making the judgment feels himself completely free with regard to the pleasure that he devotes to the object, he cannot discover as grounds of the pleasure any private conditions, pertaining to the subject alone, and must therefore regard it as grounded in those that he can also presuppose in everyone else” (§6, 211). The universality of my pleasure— the fact that I can “presuppose [its conditions] in everyone else” and hence impute my judgment to them—follows from this freedom I feel. Both of these concepts—universality and freedom— are daunting under the best of circumstances, but here in the third Critique they are especially difficult to grasp. What, after all, does it mean to say that I feel myself “completely free” of interests? We know it means I refrain from acting as one of those “selfish Computers of Happiness and private Good.” Readers usually take this to mean that Kant’s aesthetic pleasure is thin and pale, a leftover after all the muscular pleasures connected with desire have been subtracted. (Theodor Adorno has bitingly called it a “pleasure without pleasure,” the outgrowth of “castrated hedonism.”) Kant has a way of furthering this impression when he writes of the “separation of every thing that belongs to the agreeable” (§8, 216). But disinterestedness is not simply an absence, nor the consciousness of an absence, but is itself a rich way of relating to objects in the world. And it is an idea stranger than we may have supposed. For what does it mean to act without calculating my happiness when I move in the aesthetic sphere? It means that when an object fills me with the pleasure that only beauty can bring about, this plea sure is not aimed at making me

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happy. It means that, as I feel beauty, happiness is not my concern. It means that in their essential movements beauty and happiness are not aligned. The thought startles. We come to the idea of beauty with the widely held understanding that it is an experience firmly embedded in a yearning for gratification, so much so that we are not surprised to see it rebuked for what is taken to be its false promise of fulfilling this yearning. That is the evidence that critics turn to when they charge aesthetic experience with dealing in ideological deceit. So it baffles us to think of aesthetic pleasure as a feeling that may not be oriented toward happiness. Can this be what Kant means? He does not spell it out, though it does follow from the sharp distinction he makes between the beautiful and the agreeable. Yet more than wishing to know what he means and how to understand his text, we would like to know if this idea allows us to see something in aesthetic experience that may be occluded when we take the link to happiness for granted (no matter whether we celebrate or denounce it). At first, it is difficult to see how aesthetic experience may be dissociated from our general feeling of well-being; it seems only modernist mandarins, those who have pulled their brow as high as it might go, would wish to sever the two. Perhaps the issue will seem less alien if we approach it differently. While aesthetic experience may not be aligned with my happiness, it is also not aimed at making me unhappy. Rather it moves in a different dimension. It is a dimension that Kafka reaches for in his often-quoted letter to his friend Oskar Pollack from January 27, 1904. There he dismisses books that “make us happy” and instead seeks— craves—“books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide.” The gloomy language may lead us to think that Kafka simply prefers unhappiness to happiness, but in fact the real space of reading he opens lies nowhere on this continuum; it is where a book can act as “the axe for the frozen sea within us” (ibid.). I do not mean to suggest that the mode of reading Kafka enjoins his friend to adopt is identical with Kant’s conception of the beautiful; the difference in mood that prevails in the two— harmony and attunement in one, violent discord in the other—militates against pressing them together. But both allow us to see that a significant aesthetic experience touches us in ways that the calculus of happiness and unhappiness fails to capture.

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We are now able to see, tentatively, that disinterestedness, though negative in form and meaning, in fact has a positive orientation. For the unconcern for happiness entailed by disinterested pleasure is, Kant maintains, a kind of freedom. What sort of freedom is a freedom from the wish to be happy? It is not the same freedom we know from the practical use of reason, in which some idea— a moral idea like justice or a useful idea like making a meal—may come to trump my pursuit of happiness, for in that case I am being guided by a clear goal, a concept. But in aesthetic experience I do not give up the calculus of happiness for the sake of the higher demands of a concept, since concepts do not guide that experience. So the freedom in play here is of a different kind, one that involves declining to follow the rewards of happiness and the directives of reason— a freedom with no ulterior motive, but one that enjoys itself: a freedom to take plea sure in having this freedom. It is an exquisite form of freedom, the freedom to be unmolested by the world, even when its charms gratify me, and to be left to my own imaginative resources. But it is also an odd form of freedom; it is not clear right away if it is an insubstantial, perhaps even illusory freedom, or else a deep and significant freedom. We will return to this enigmatic idea, although it is not clear if its strangeness will wane. One result of feeling this freedom is that possessing it reveals to me the universal dimension of aesthetic experience. The passage we looked at earlier spells it out: “the person making the judgment feels himself completely free with regard to the pleasure that he devotes to the object, he cannot discover as grounds of the pleasure any private conditions, pertaining to the subject alone, and must therefore regard it as grounded in those that he can also presuppose in everyone else” (§6, 211). The notion of universality causes a lot of unease, because it suggests that something of the solidity and implacable force of the Mosaic law or the Pythagorean theorem may come to crush the particular and contingent. But the “subjective universality” of aesthetic experience is not of that kind, since it does determine anything in any one way. There are no laws or theorems governing beauty and aesthetic feeling; nothing controls the particular from above. It is entirely serendipitous. But then how might we understand universality as a dimension of aesthetic experience? This is where what we have said about interest and its lack may help. When I take pleasure in something with no regard to my own interests, then my plea sure does not speak to my idiosyncrasies, nor does it ratify

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preferences that I have acquired by living in a certain region or among certain people. It is true that I do not suddenly find myself entirely released from the constraints that my history holds in store for me, but saying that aesthetic judgment is “disinterested” does mean that my behavior is not fully determined by those constraints. This is a powerful insight that we should not pass over too quickly. It says that when I feel the intensive beauty of an object, my feeling is not quite of this body or this world, nor is the object that occasions it. Beautiful things activate something in me that cannot be captured entirely by the network of historical and social lines meant to identify me, as they do when I fill out a form (my nationality, gender, age, and so on). I feel, rather, an intensification of what is in me but what also exceeds me: the impersonal in me. In fact, the pleasure I feel, though occasioned by something, is the pleasure of being able to feel what, in me, is not the self with which I live every day. Because the experience of beauty exceeds the web of historical and social bonds that pin me down, there is always something ecstatic, something transgressive about the experience. That is one way of understanding its freedom, as opening a space beyond the horizon given by my world. In this context, universality consists of nothing more than this impersonality. The disinterested feeling of plea sure opens me to the aesthetic sphere in which what I feel (rather than what I know by marshaling concepts) participates in a universal dimension. When I am “completely free” of “any private conditions” governing this pleasure, what becomes acutely palpable to me is this release from myself. Kant often uses the coercive language of “demanding” assent for aesthetic judgments, language that stems from a muscular notion of universality arrived at in other philosophical settings, and he thereby rouses our particularist misgivings about the bullying power of universality. But this way of speaking has no place in the aesthetic setting, for as Kant himself has taught there is nothing in aesthetic judgment that can compel assent—no concepts, no anthropological common ground, not even historical and cultural signposts I can rely on. There is only an exposure to beauty that takes me beyond myself, and it is this exposure to impersonality that feels universal. Like the notion of freedom, the notion of universality is intransitive; it has no object other than itself. I feel how I take part in it, without thereby acquiring power or authority over others.

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PUBLIC INTEREST

Self-interest is only one kind of interest to which one “must be entirely indifferent . . . in order to play the judge in matters of taste.” The other consists of a form of interest born not of selfish but of unselfish commitments, which, for Kant, pose as grave a threat to aesthetic pleasure as the selfish kind. What might an unselfish interest look like? The very first example he provides to explain why we must remain indifferent to a thing’s existence when judging its beauty gives us a sense: If someone asks me whether I find the palace that I see before me beautiful, I may well say that I don’t like that sort of thing, which is made merely to be gaped at, or, like the Iroquois sachem, that nothing in Paris pleased him better than the eating houses; in true Rousseauesque style I might even vilify the vanity of the great who waste the sweat of the people on such superfluous things; finally I could even easily convince myself that if I were to find myself on an uninhabited island, without any hope of ever coming upon human beings again, and could conjure up such a magnificent structure through my mere wish, I would not even take the trouble of doing so if I already had a hut that was comfortable enough for me. All of this might be conceded to me and approved; but that is not what is at issue here. (§2, 204–205)

A strange little story, which, like so many of the examples Kant adduces, seems to say more than he intends. Yet the broad strokes are clear enough: the texture of the pleasure I feel for an object may change depending on other ways I have of relating to it. Indeed, something that I may turn away from in one mode may well please me in another. And what Kant calls interest plays the key role in altering the way I relate to this feeling, both the very presence of interest and of the kind of interest it may be. Right away we recognize the first sort of interest the moment that the Iroquois sachem with a weakness for Parisian restaurants walks into the story about the palace and the desert island; for Kant, anything linked to alimentation is a reliable indicator of self-interest and hence of the pleasure of the agreeable. We know this goes back to the hierarchy of senses Kant develops elsewhere, in which (gustatory) taste and smell make up the “more subjective than objective” senses, capable more of “enjoyment than of cognition” (Anthropology from a

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Pragmatic Point of View, 7: 154), yet we also know that his imagination fails him here, for there is no reason in principle why these senses cannot be involved in aesthetic experience. But that is not all of “what is not at issue here.” In fact, the main point of the story—that denouncing the palace for the injustices that went into its making misses what is at stake in aesthetic experience—takes us toward a different kind of interest. For “vilify[ing] the vanity of the great who waste the sweat of the people on such superfluous things” is not the sort of thing I would do out of self-interest; it is, at best, a far-fetched example of such an interest. (I would have to be objecting to that part of the waste that corresponds exactly to my share in the sweat of the people.) It is, however, a good example of moral disapproval. But where is the interest in moral disapproval? Does moral action not rest on suppressing selfish interests and thus on the absence of interest? Yes and no, Kant says. The requirement he develops in his moral theory that any guideline of action must, in principle, lend itself to being applied universally works to limit self-interest. But the theory also makes room for a new interest, for when reason establishes principles of action, it brings forth, Kant claims, an interest that those principles should be applied in reality. This is an interest quite unlike what interests us in the agreeable; while the latter is bodily, the former “is a pure sense-free interest,” for “in a morally good will the law itself must be the prod” (Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 79). It is a conception of an interest that is entirely disembodied and nonpersonal, and because it is compelled by reason itself, the pleasure we derive from its attainment—the pleasure in the good—must also hold for all. We now see why the interested pleasure in the good too is “not at issue” in aesthetic experience. It is guided by concepts and can therefore be brought about through the application of concepts. But a key feature of aesthetic experience, we have said repeatedly, is its serendipity, the fact that no rule, no custom, no history can guarantee that it will come about. There is, by contrast, nothing serendipitous in the pleasure we take in the good. If we glance back, we recognize two broad movements of thought. Beauty is distinguished from other forms of taking pleasure on two sides: the agreeable and the good. That means that it also shares something with these two forms of relating to pleasure; other wise, why bother distinguishing them? Like the agreeable, it is corporeal and therefore subjective, but unlike the agreeable it involves no interests and can thus go beyond the privacy of a feeling geared to happiness into a form of universally impersonal form of

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pleasure. Like the good, the beautiful is in its structure a universal feeling, but unlike the good this universality is not enforced through concepts devised by reason, but enjoys the freedom of serendipity. FREEDOM, FAVOR, FALLING

Kant keeps circling back to this freedom. Evidently it belongs to the core of aesthetic experience, yet it is not featured as such (by being given its own section, for example), as though it could only be approached obliquely. Earlier we said that it is a freedom not to be led by inclinations that we believe augment our happiness. We can now add that it is a freedom not to act according to purposes laid down by reason, which is itself a form of freedom (it is in fact the canonical form of freedom in most of Kant’s writings). The freedom we feel in aesthetic experience, we might say, is a freedom not to act on the freedom we have to act in the world. This is as confounding an idea as is the freedom to remain untroubled by the wish for happiness. Putting it in the form of a paradox gives us the sense that we have given adequate expression to its bizarreness, and to a small extent we have. Yet can we say more about this freedom? It is certainly not a question of a freedom to surrender the freedom to act freely (like the self-canceling freedom to be enslaved). We might describe this freedom as a way of taking plea sure in forms of behavior not reducible to fulfilling my appetites or the rationally given goals of the will. My purposeful lines of attachment to the world are slackened, and I gain room for new ways of seeing and feeling and thinking. The pleasure I take in these new ways of relating to the world cannot be untangled from the pleasure I take in the very fact of the slackening of those lines. This account of freedom may seem too lopsidedly negative, as a mere absence of what Kant calls the faculty of desire. Yet we find hints in the text that allow us to give the idea of freedom in aesthetic experience more texture. Return for a moment to the agreeable and the good. It is striking that one would, as Kant does, put taking pleasure in relation to freedom, and more striking still to assert, as he also does, that the pleasure we take in the agreeable and the good is utterly unfree. “One can say,” he writes, “that among all these three kinds of pleasure”—the agreeable, the good, and the beautiful—“only that of the taste for the beautiful is a disinterested and free pleasure; for no interest, neither that of the senses nor that of reason, extorts

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approval” (§5, 210). Th is is strong language: interest extorts my approval, it forces it out of me (“zwingt Beifall ab”). I do feel genuine pleasure in the agreeable and the good, yet upon reflection I realize that I also must feel this pleasure. We already know that the pleasure I take when driven by hunger “demonstrates no choice in accordance with taste”; I respond as the organism that I am. As for the good, “where the moral law speaks there is, objectively, no longer any free choice with regard to what is to be done” (ibid.), hence also no free choice about the feeling I attach to such an action. In both of these modes, my pleasure is coerced. It is imposed on me by exigencies of physiology or habit or cultural predisposition or else by the force of the concepts of reason. I suffer pleasure. This is a remarkable way of thinking about pleasure. It opens our view to the difference beauty makes. When I feel beauty, approval is not pressed out of me, but “I give” “approval” (§3, 207). Since my approval consists in the pleasure I feel (it is not, after all, a two-step process, involving first approval or judgment and then pleasure), when I give approval, I also give pleasure. This marks a surprising turn, for primed by Kant’s way of characterizing aesthetic plea sure as “contemplative” and “lingering,” we may be inclined to think of it in passive terms, while the pleasures associated with desire, which seeks out its object, come with an active vector. But here the picture is turned on its head: the pleasures that accompany desire—hence interest— are imposed on me, while aesthetic plea sure involves my action, although what shape this action takes still remains hazy. The freedom in my feeling, we now see, lies in just this action, for aesthetic plea sure is free not because it indicates an absence nor because it becomes the occasion for languor, but because it is freely given— the only kind of plea sure I give freely. We have been thinking of pleasure as something I “take” (indeed as something I take “in” something), but here Kant urges us to think of it as something I give. Is pleasure something I can truly give? And if so, what sort of giving is it, and to whom or to what do I give? Or must we say that I “give” approval and “take” pleasure? But again, how to think about such give-and-take (and how to pry apart approval and pleasure)? This line of thinking is no more than sketched in the third Critique, and so we are unlikely to get full answers. Yet there are hints. There is, for example, the tripartite taxonomy that Kant develops to characterize the three forms of pleasure we have been considering:

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Hence it could be said of pleasure that it is related in the three cases mentioned to inclination, to favor, or to respect. For favor is the only free pleasure. An object of inclination and one that is imposed upon us, as something to be desired, by a law of reason leave us no freedom to make for ourselves an object of pleasure out of something. (§5, 210)

The passage provides us with a strikingly different, because strikingly active, language of describing aesthetic experience, an experience that involves the “freedom to make for ourselves an object of pleasure out of something”—to make it out of anything at all, as Kant’s words irgend woraus suggest. This reference to making echoes a passage quoted early in this chapter, where Kant, trying to shed light on the freedom from interest, claims that in feeling the beauty of something “what matters is what I make of this representation in myself, not how I depend on the existence of the object” (§2, 205). The pleasure, then, turns not on its furthering another interest or end but is rather its own end; it is what I make of it in myself, with no regard for happiness or the moral good. This pleasure is not a response or an obligation, but a kind of free making, what Kant will later call play (for example, §43, 304), and what, relying on language drawn from the Anthropology, we characterized as the work of the poetic imagination. What I make is what I make of something in myself and for myself. As the discussion of play reveals in future chapters, this making does not have as its end point the manufacture of “an object of plea sure,” but the making and the freedom it entails are themselves what gives pleasure. In this sense, I give the pleasure that I take in the experience. We now see that by Kant’s way of thinking making is essential to the aesthetic pleasure I feel. This opens new ways of thinking of aesthetic experience, ways that are more congenial to the phenomenology of engaging with artworks or beautiful forms in nature than a model of passive contemplation. But there is also a risk in thinking of this way of making along the lines of practical production, perhaps leading to the idea that I merely need to crank up the aesthetic engine to make for myself an aesthetic experience. The idea that Kant puts into circulation that helps us avoid going down that path is that of favor. “Favor,” he says, “is the only free pleasure”; the freedom in aesthetic pleasure is a kind of favor. But do we know what favor is? It is not a concept Kant develops. When favor, or Gunst, does come up in his other writings, it is often negatively charged; time and again he finds fault

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with the ways people “curry favor” with God. Favor smacks of seeking an underhanded advantage. In fact, Kant often uses the term in the form of zu Gunsten (“for the benefit”) and thereby implicates favor in the very network of interest from which he exempts it in our passage. In the third Critique, the term shifts shape and largely appears in a positive light. Here it seems to capture a mode of behavior—or perhaps just a mood—that takes up a middle position between activity and passivity. Favor here is not an act I perform for the sake of another nor something I seek from another, but a “free pleasure,” an activity that exhausts itself neither in giving nor in taking, while somehow involving both. Genius, Kant says, is a “favorite of nature [Günstling der Natur]” (§47, 309 and §49, 318), someone who both receives and gives freely and abundantly. Another passage, late in the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” speaks more directly to our discussion. There, while considering the favorable way the beauty of nature appears to us, Kant observes that “it is a favor with which we take nature in and not a favor that it shows to us” (§58, 350; again §67, 380n)—an insight that acknowledges how, in aesthetic experience, even something as seemingly passive as “tak[ing] nature in” does not simply happen to me, but requires me to do something, an act that in turn allows the experience to happen. Favor is the only free pleasure: Gunst ist das einzige freie Wohlgefallen. Does Kant’s usage of Wohlgefallen not register the curious ambivalence of aesthetic pleasure between activity and passivity—an activity to achieve a certain kind of passivity? Kant himself guides our attention when he points out that among the three forms of Wohlgefallen he has been considering, only one, namely, beauty, gefällt (“pleases,” §5, 210). The agreeable, by contrast, “gratifies [vergnügt]” and the good “is esteemed, approved [geschätzt, gebilligt]” (ibid). Since Wohlgefallen is an intensified form of the noun Gefallen and gefällt the participle of the verb gefallen, the two represent the same lexeme, Gefallen/gefallen (“plea sure”/“to please,” “to be pleased”), distinguished only by upper- and lowercase spelling. When we read that only one kind of pleasure literally pleases (hence that there are forms of pleasure that do not literally please), we feel encouraged to look at the letters more closely. And here Gefallen/gefallen offer fertile ground for speculation, as a glance at their tangled entries in the Grimms’ historical dictionary attests. The very first thing the dictionary tells us is that gefallen initially means nothing more than “an intensified fallen.” If we follow the path shown by the words themselves, we arrive at the conclusion that taking pleasure is an intensification of falling.

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And does falling not capture a dimension of aesthetic experience? Does it not describe the feeling that, no matter how much favor I might show, the experience itself does not come reliably but is something that befalls me? While the idea of “mak[ing] for ourselves an object of pleasure out of something” rightly foregrounds the active dimension of aesthetic experience, it risks suggesting that I can make for myself aesthetic pleasure the way I make myself a sandwich. The sense of falling that resonates in Gefallen can help provide us with a more aptly ambiguous sense of making, a making that sets the stage for a possible falling. We admit to qualms about leaning on etymology, which is often the last refuge of the textual scoundrel. If we proceed, it is because the line of thinking we have been following emerges from the total movement of thought we find in the text and depends not on any single word choice. In a way, we look on Gefallen/gefallen not with interest but with favor, pleased at how felicitously they happen to occur here, but we find ourselves not in need of any “support” they may lend. And we note another happy coincidence (yes, Zufall) that happens to favor our reading. Favor itself is implicated in Gefallen; in fact, one of the meanings of the word simply is “favor.” It is true that Gefallen in the sense of “favor” is masculine in modern German, while Gefallen in the sense of “pleasure” (or “liking,” “delight”) is neuter, but the lexicographers remind us that the gender of the word was confused well into the eighteenth century. And even with the difference in gender, we cannot help be struck by how tightly Gefallen gathers the key elements of the description we have been trying to give of aesthetic experience: pleasure, favor, serendipity, falling, all of which fuse into a feeling of free-falling, itself also a feeling of freedom. BEING INDIFFERENT TO EXISTENCE

We have been working to understand the difference between private and public interests and how and why they do not guide authentic aesthetic experience, but has this work helped us dispel our initial perplexity about the place of interest in the vocabulary of aesthetics and its odd link to the question of the existence of a thing that we encountered earlier? If the key difference between the agreeable and the good, on the one hand, and the beautiful, on the other, is that the first two are interested forms of pleasure while the third is not, and if interest boils down to being the “pleasure that

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we combine with the representation of the existence of an object” (§2, 204), then we wonder if we have made headway in understanding why I must be “entirely indifferent” to “the existence of the thing” when I judge it to be beautiful. It seems counterintuitive to claim that I would or should remain unmoved if something that occasions the intensive bliss of beauty ceases to be. Kant himself appears to encourage this intuition when he emphasizes that the structure of aesthetic pleasure prods it to perpetuate itself, quite apart from how fleeting any given instance of it might be. The pleasure we take in beauty, he writes, “has a causality in itself, namely, that of maintaining the state of the representation of the mind” (§12, 222). Does this not also suggest that we are pleased at maintaining the existence of the beautiful object, that its loss pains us? “We linger over the contemplation of the beautiful,” he continues, “because this contemplation strengthens and reproduces itself” (ibid.). If I find myself contemplating Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew, my pleasure deepening as I linger, does this lingering not also hold within it a contentment at the continued existence of the painting? Kant’s clear, stinging reply is that it does not. Lingering over the painting in aesthetic pleasure does not entail taking pleasure in its existence. Just as my aesthetic feeling is not motivated by interest (because “hunger is the best cook,” and so forth), it also “does not in itself even ground any interest” (§2, 205n). Aesthetic pleasure has the same circular, self-reproducing structure as the agreeable, yet with this key difference: while the latter is fed by interest and feeds interest, the former is removed from the nexus of interests, “maintaining the state of the representation of the mind” alone. No part of this feeling includes the “pleasure that we combine with the representation of the existence of an object.” Thinking of aesthetic pleasure this way is likely to bewilder us; if we have been shocked when someone has taken a knife to a painting or a grenade to a Buddha statue, it may even shock. We are, of course, within our rights to dismiss the idea, for nothing obliges us to follow the philosopher down every dark path he decides to walk. Yet it may be worth having a better grasp of what it is, exactly, that we are dismissing. After all, one of the rewards of thinking with a great mind is that mistakes we encounter may be as illuminating as are the insights. What, then, do we make of the business that there must be no bias “in favor of the existence of the thing” we find beautiful? Commentators on

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the third Critique have shown that the way the concept of existence figures in Kant’s account does not pass philosophical muster; thus he uses the term inconsistently, and it is not always clear if it manages to perform the conceptual work that he claims for it. Still, it is not a hollow term. Kant’s intuition is that the relation to interest—hence also to the plea sure we take in the existence of a thing— sheds light on aesthetic experience, and he takes care to say that his is an intuition he shares with the common understanding around him (“everyone must admit that a judgment about beauty in which the least interest is mixed,” “everyone says hunger is the best cook”). We know what this intuition about an indifference to a thing’s existence does not amount to: it does not amount to the idea that it is of no consequence for aesthetic experience whether an object exists. If I am to have a chance of finding it beautiful, the object must exist (using the most ordinary sense of the term exist); this much Kant has made evident. Imagining The Calling of St. Matthew gives me pleasure, but it is a pleasure distinct from the aesthetic kind as Kant conceives of it. This experience— thus this pleasure—is occasioned by and stands in relation to the world. It stands not merely in relation to the object I call beautiful, but also to humanity whose presence I feel in the universal dimension of the feeling of beauty. Without a real object to behold (if, say, I fantasized or dreamed about it), there is a feeling, but it is not this feeling, with its structure of serendipity and impersonality that we have been trying to grasp. Earlier in this chapter we saw that the agreeable blocks the way to the impersonality of aesthetic experience. I have agreeable feelings when, urged on by my private advantages, I add to my happiness; the feeling of beauty, by contrast, opens up once I am detached from my inclinations and my longing for happiness— once I lose the self with which I am so familiar and feel in me what is impersonal. Now we see that what may be imperiled by an attachment to the existence of a thing is the serendipity of aesthetic experience. We know that there is nothing serendipitous about the pleasure attached to the good, since it is fully controlled—Kant says “extorted”—by concepts. That also appears to be true of the agreeable. Recall that among the first things Kant says in characterizing the agreeable is that it “excites a desire for objects of the same sort”; it is this feature of the agreeable that, in Kant’s reasoning, links my pleasure to the whole complex of existence and the bias I feel for it (§3, 207). Something makes me happy, so I crave objects

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of the same sort. But in aesthetic experience, we have said, there are no “objects of the same sort”—there are no patterns, no categories, no rules that predict whether I end up finding something beautiful. Yes, my pleasure in the painting, like all pleasure, strives to maintain itself; I linger and contemplate, “because this contemplation strengthens and reproduces itself.” But in aesthetic experience, my contemplation feeds itself. The moment it veers into arousing an appetite for objects of the same sort, it risks disappointment. This can happen even when the category of “the same sort” includes only exquisite things, for example, paintings by Caravaggio. I am struck by The Calling of St. Matthew, and, craving more of “the same sort,” I turn to look at the opposite wall of the same small chapel of the church in Rome, where another Caravaggio painting hangs, also about Saint Matthew. In many ways, it is the “same sort” of painting, but does it occasion the same sort of experience? It is hard to tell, and the moment this uncertainty makes itself felt, disappointment follows, first at Caravaggio, then at myself for having sought more of the same. The way we have explained things to ourselves, the problem with taking an interest in an object and having “pleasure in its existence” (§4, 209) lies in the fact that interest mars the essential unpredictability of aesthetic experience. Put this way, the idea does not seem difficult to accept. But Kant is also saying something stronger and stranger, which may not be as easy to swallow. He says, repeatedly and in different ways, that aesthetic judgment “merely holds together [the object’s] makeup with the feeling of pleasure and displeasure” and is therefore “indifferent with regard to the existence of an object” (§5, 209), meaning not “objects of the same sort,” but the very object to which we are attending. We have already mentioned that commentators have faulted Kant for muddling the concept of existence; they have gone further and reasoned that, far from being indifferent to the existence of an object, aesthetic experience, as understood by Kant himself, can be taken to found a powerful interest in aesthetic objects—for example, an interest in the preservation of artworks. This may well be the case; the argument has the great advantage of validating the strenuous efforts at conservation, both archival and ecological, that our own society lavishes on things for the sole reason that they give pleasure, at least to some. Yet this reading shields us from the most unsettling way of understanding Kant’s convoluted thinking about interest, which also happens to be the most direct, namely, that my aesthetic pleasure remains unmoved if the very thing

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that occasions it were to vanish. Its existence does not interest me. It is difficult to grasp why this proposition is “of the utmost importance” for this inquiry (§2, 205). Yet in a way we have already encountered it, though from a different side. If, as we have said, I feel myself “completely free with regard to the plea sure that [I devote] to the object,” if my plea sure truly does remain untethered from desire, is it then not also free from the desire to maintain this object, to care for it, to protect it? When we said that my engagement with a beautiful thing indicates a favor I show it (rather than the other way around), we voiced the same idea, for in showing favor I do not “depend on the existence of the object,” for “what matters is what I make of [a] representation in myself.” I take the object as an occasion for this kind of making, yet other wise I let it be. I neither yearn for it nor do I grieve its demise. When I feel a certain plea sure (or perhaps displea sure) in relation to the “makeup” of the thing, I remain “indifferent with regard to [its] existence,” since rousing myself to protect it would take me into regions alien to this pleasure I feel. And I may linger with this pleasure even when I know that bringing it about injures the object. The chapel where the Caravaggios are mounted is dim, and to get a good look at The Calling of St. Matthew, I must insert a coin into a machine to switch on a timed spotlight. Supposedly the mechanism protects the paint on the canvas from fading by limiting its exposure to light. But the coin buys only a brief viewing, so I insert more coins, and then more, to prolong my exposure to the painting, aware that with every coin I damage it by a minute measure. Am I just someone feeding my greedy eyes? In some ways my behavior resembles that of Leontius who works to keep in check his desire to see the bodies of executed men, but then “with wide staring eyes he rushed up to the corpses and cried, There, ye wretches, take your fill of the fine spectacle!” (Republic, 440a). Yet there is also a difference, for my pleasure is linked neither to a hunger for a spectacle nor to the moral disgust meant to rein in that hunger. It heeds neither of these urges; it has something heedless about it. When I keep looking even while knowing that my looking helps to use up the object of my gaze, my pleasure does not derive from wishing the painting ill, nor from wishing it well. Its care is simply not my concern now. The fact that it steadily disappears as I look, like a Polaroid in reverse, is not the reason I look, but a material side effect of my looking, just as the damage suffered by a book to which I keep returning is not why I take pleasure in the novel it holds. In the days of vinyl,

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when the most scratched-up tracks were also the favorite, you could see this logic with your own eyes. It is true that this is a willfully narrow way of describing aesthetic pleasure, that to account for many, perhaps most, instances of this pleasure we routinely resort to a language that joins it with interest. It would feel forced to disentangle the pleasure I take in the continued existence of the cave paintings in Lascaux and Chauvet from the aesthetic pleasure in the paintings themselves. Trying to separate the two may be more difficult still when aesthetic pleasure is twinned not with conservation and continued existence but with their opposite. Is there a way of describing the aesthetic charge of the ruin without relying on the idea of loss, hence of existence? Can we give an adequate account of the beauty of the Disintegration Loops without saying that they document the erosion of reel-to-reel tapes as they are played and as they lose, steadily and hauntingly, the metal compound affixed to the tape and thus the sound that was recorded on it decades earlier? We admit that such accounts would lack a dimension, mainly because the experience itself would lack a dimension without this knowledge. Yet if we still find value in Kant’s insistence on remaining “free” of interest, it is because it reminds us that all aesthetic experience must finally rest on the “makeup” of the object, rather than on the mere fact of its existence. Which helps us realize: the reason I am drawn to the paintings in Chauvet is that many have a beauty that exceeds their age, for I do not see the same beauty in all ancient cave markings. And we realize that the Disintegration Loops are a work of art because of the way William Basinski, the composer, has crafted the loss of music into a music of loss; it becomes clear that the sheer fact of hearing how sound fades from tape does not suffice to make it into an aesthetic experience. We realize, then, that an account of aesthetic experience cannot be exhausted by a description of the way the beautiful object has come to be and of the sort of object that it is, because these facts alone do not move me to have the feeling of pleasure I have. Is this the sort of “indifference” to the existence of a thing Kant has in mind? It is difficult to know exactly. We may have misread him. But his account does allow us to bring to the fore a dimension of aesthetic experience that euphoric accounts of the aesthetic tend to overlook. We confidently nodded assent to Kant’s idea that remaining disinterested meant that aesthetic pleasure is not guided by desires to possess or to consume. But now that we see that remaining disinterested also means that aesthetic pleasure

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is unconcerned with care, that it is heedless and irresponsible in not being responsive to the claims of interest, we hesitate to embrace this proposition too. Yet it follows from the same premises. It is entailed by the idea of the autonomy of aesthetic judgment, by its failure to be reduced to other forms of behavior. As we shall see in the pages that follow, Kant shrinks back from the stark implications of this line of thought when he discovers (or just invents) a moral interest in the disinterest of the beautiful itself, giving him reason to suppose a kinship between the aesthetic and the moral. But here, in these early sections on interest, we are made aware of the utter unconcern that my feeling of beauty has for any way of thinking or acting driven by desire, even a desire to safeguard the beautiful things.

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is roughly this: beauty demands a different mode of standing in relation to the world than the modes Kant had already analyzed, namely, the cognitive and the moral. The way I take pleasure in beauty differs from the pleasures I can ascribe either to my person alone, what he calls the agreeable, or to moral concepts, the good. It is a third mode of experience. Judging something to be beautiful is a particular act performed by a particular person— always by me—in a situation in which I feel pleasure in a particular way. Unlike moral claims or cognitive judgments, the judgments about beauty appeal to no authority outside of themselves, be it a rule book, an expert, or the opinion of my friends. They are, and cannot but be, serendipitous and embodied acts, for they happen here, now, to me. Yet there is another side to the experience, for Kant insists that this way of judging, while through and through subjective, is not personal; the judgments that emerge are “public” (§8, 214), and the feeling itself is “a communal one” (§21, 239). At first, this may not seem like a remarkable thought. Because of the multiple networks of fi liation in which I am enmeshed— evolutionary, familial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, national, social, and so on—any thought, sentiment, or bodily response of mine is likely to be linked to the behavior of some others. But that is not what Kant says. His idea is not that my aesthetic experience is somehow “shared” with a group, how-

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ever small or large, because we hold in common a biological makeup, an anthropological heritage, a cultural behavior, or a form of schooling. He asserts something more confounding. Aesthetic experience, he claims, partakes of nothing less than universality. It is, he maintains, part of the very grammar of “beautiful” to make a claim to universality: “this claim to universal validity so essentially belongs to a judgment by which we declare something to be beautiful that without thinking this it would never occur to anyone to use this expression” (§8, 214). What is more, it is also part of the grammar of the beautiful that it “has a necessary relation to plea sure” (§18, 236). So the feeling of plea sure in the face of beauty—the singular and serendipitous feeling that takes me beyond myself—now finds itself strapped into the straitjackets of universality and necessity. It is an idea so strange, so extreme, so patently at odds with our own experience that it leaves us bewildered. Can he really mean it, or is this some sort of philosophical contrivance? In Chapter 1, we tried wiping the dust off concepts such as pleasure, taste, and beauty to feel once again their power in aiding us give an account that is adequate to the force and depth of aesthetic experience. This will not do for the concept of universality, for this idea has attracted not dust but hostility. In much of the humanities and social sciences, the idea of universality is very much alive, but as a bad object, emblem of an Enlightenment hubris that bullies particularity and difference into submission by invoking allegedly universal rational norms. And no sphere of experience would seem to be less accommodating to the presence of the universal than the beautiful. If insisting on linking the two is a Kantian aberration, then we need to look for a way of removing the malignancy of the universal from the tissue of the beautiful; otherwise we may have to give up on our patient. Or else we pursue another option, for it may be we who err. Perhaps we misapprehend the notion of universality and its articulation with the beautiful. Perhaps a new dimension of aesthetic experience reveals itself to us if we stay our strong reaction against universality and linger with the idea. FROM HUME . . .

If the idea of universality seems as ill-suited to the aesthetic sphere as our intuition tells us it is, what purpose could its introduction serve? Which question is it meant to answer? If we zoom out of Kant’s sphere of thinking, we

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recognize a configuration that may point us in the right direction. We note that modern aesthetic theories inevitably find themselves facing a seeming paradox: they insist on the particularity and subjectivity of the experience itself (as does Kant), yet they also note, or simply assume, a dimension to the experience that takes it beyond the particular subject. This second dimension is no mere add-on, but “essentially belongs to a judgment by which we declare something to be beautiful” or aesthetically significant. Every piece of criticism exemplifies this apparent paradox, for while I, the critic, can vouch only for my own thoughts and feelings in the face of an artwork, I speak about them as though it went without saying that my readers and listeners will share them. Th is is not a case of bad faith nor a sleight of hand, but simply belongs to the mysterious logic of aesthetic experience, which for that reason often goes unnoticed. One reason we go to philosophers for orientation is that they do notice the logical knots with which we live. We do not expect them to untie those knots (our lives might unravel), but to give us a sharper sense of their shape. If Kant’s way of doing so has only deepened the mystery for us, it may be useful to begin where he himself began, with David Hume, whom Kant admired for articulating with utmost lucidity the very views Kant himself set out to refute in his philosophy, above all in his theory of knowledge. Hume’s name hardly comes up in the third Critique, yet the problem he gives voice to makes itself felt throughout the sections of the book devoted to aesthetics; it is the background against which Kant performs his own thinking. Hume’s account of the paradox of aesthetic experience, set forth in his 1757 essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” bears both a striking resemblance to Kant’s thought on universality in the third Critique and is at once separated from it by an immense gap. It is both unusually perspicuous and, from Kant’s point view, entirely wrongheaded. In short, it is a perfect foil for Kant. What, then, is the paradox that Hume identifies in “Of the Standard of Taste”? The title of the essay names the two sides of the paradox, “standard” and “taste,” for how can something as inconstant as taste be said to have, or even to aspire to, a standard? The fluidity of aesthetic judgments is the more striking phenomenon, so that is where Hume begins. “The great variety of Taste, as well as of opinion, which prevails in the world, is too obvious not to have fallen under every one’s observation,” his opening lines read. People take note of this variety even “in the narrow circle of their acquaintance,” and how much more so when they “can enlarge their view to contemplate

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distant nations and remote ages.” The reason for the variability lies in the source of the feeling of beauty, which, Hume conjectures, has something to do with the way “particular forms or qualities” excite “the original structure of the internal fabric,” leading some things “to please, and others to displease” (214). Because tastes are as variable as bodies and their “internal fabric,” “every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others” (209). Fair enough. Yet Hume recognizes that his entirely reasonable demand goes unheeded, for the obvious variability of taste meets another obviousness, namely, its remarkable consistency: Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance betwixt Ogilby [John Ogilby, a seventeenth-century printer, cartographer, and much ridiculed poet] and Milton, or Bunyan and Addison, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as Teneriffe, or a pond as extensive as the ocean. Though there may be found persons, who give the preference to the former authors; no one pays attention to such a taste; and we pronounce, without scruple, the sentiment of these pretended critics to be absurd and ridiculous. (209–210)

Variability produces difference, but difference does not amount to an equality or relativity of taste. When we come face-to-face with someone claiming Ogilby to be as great as Milton or a molehill to be as high as a mountain, “the principle of the natural equality of tastes is . . . totally forgot . . . it appears an extravagant paradox, or rather a palpable absurdity, where objects so disproportioned are compared together” (210). It is to Hume’s credit to have recognized that what looks like a mere inconsistency or capriciousness— all tastes are equal but some tastes are more equal than others— conceals a deep philosophical problem. A seemingly minor grammatical choice alerts us to his commitments: with few exceptions he speaks of the variability of taste rather than that of tastes. The choice signals that, despite all differences, a singular cognitive and social capacity is at work and that the assertion of preference for one expression of taste over another results not necessarily from blindness or stupidity, but can rest on the structure of the singularity of taste. Governing the welter of differences there finally is a standard of taste, he believes, which entitles us to make distinctions between a preference for Milton and for Ogilby.

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Wherein could such a standard of beauty, discoverable by taste, possibly consist? If my response to beauty depends on my bodily dispositions, and if these vary from body to body, the standard of taste could not be a bodily standard. Yet where else but in bodies might a standard of what is a bodily response lie? This is where Hume introduces the idea that the failure of taste—the instances of preferring Ogilby to Milton—may result “from some apparent defect or imperfection in the organ.” He elaborates: A man in a fever would not insist on his palate as able to decide concerning flavours; nor would one, affected with the jaundice, pretend to give a verdict with regard to colours. In each creature, there is a sound and a defective state; and the former alone can be supposed to afford us a true standard of taste and sentiment. (215)

We are zeroing in on the location of the standard, for true taste does not consist of just any response of the organism, but one in which the organ finds itself in a “sound” state. How are we to understand this soundness? It may be possible to know the “defect or imperfection in the organ” when it comes to fever or jaundice, but do we know the constitution of the organ that responds with pleasure when it experiences an object that is “calculated to please” in a way that we can distinguish its sound state from its defective state? Does Hume perhaps have in mind the average body or organ, some segment of a statistical distribution of organs that would fall under the rubric of “sound” as opposed to “defective”? It seems not. The sort of organ Hume has in mind is not a normal organ (as one might find in a sample of the population) but a normative organ, the organ as it ought to be if an object “calculated to please” actually is to please. Soundness, then, is a norm, as is the idea of a standard of taste. This is a decisive move, for the normative conception of taste profoundly changes the texture of the paradox of taste with which we began. At first, it seemed that what stood in need of explanation was that taste did not turn out to be as capricious as expected, that it clustered around certain islands of praise (Milton, Homer, and so on). But now we see that this clustering results not from happenstance but reveals the contours of a norm. Hume is, of course, a Humean. His norms do not lie outside of experience, but are very much its distillations. Thus he brings back messy empirical reality, where no one person could be relied upon to embody the ideal

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state of taste perfectly. Because “the organs of internal sensation are seldom so perfect as to allow the general principles their full play,” “few are qualified to give judgment on any work of art, or establish their own sentiment as the standard of beauty” (228). Embodying the standard of beauty cannot be the task of any one individual. Only “if, in the sound state of the organ, there be an entire or a considerable uniformity of sentiment among men, we may thence derive an idea of the perfect beauty” (215). The standard of taste and the idea of perfect beauty is, then, the result of a judgment formed collectively over time. Even where critics impose on themselves the requirements of good taste, it is only “the joint verdict of such” that “is the true standard of taste and beauty” (229). This joint verdict needs to be validated over time, when the endurance of certain objects of admiration assures us of the legitimacy of taste. Much of Hume’s analysis will seem ad hoc and unsatisfying. To name but one of many obscurities, it is not clear right away how a joint verdict (joined by whom and where and over what stretch of time?) can give rise to the very principles of taste that should guide that verdict in the first place. But our aim here is neither to give a full picture of Hume’s account of taste nor to criticize it. Rather it is to observe how he assembles in compressed form the particular twists that empiricism has given an ancient philosophical question, namely, the question of beauty, and how this newly configured thought gives rise to a fresh paradox worthy of investigation. By orienting thinking about beauty to thinking about taste, Hume’s argument shifts its center of gravity from the being of beauty—that is, from an ontological analysis—to how beauty is recognized and experienced, to an epistemology. Thus the analysis of beauty becomes immediately implicated in the sensing, feeling body of the subject, something that Hume acknowledges with his self-aware usage of the concept of “taste” as something that operates both in the mouth and in the mind. And though he does not use the term aesthetic, it too draws attention to precisely this dimension of sensation, for the Greek aisthesis simply denotes sensory perception. What is more, Hume works out with some precision the strange tension in this notion of taste, for its physical—indeed, as Edmund Burke insists, physiological—implication would seem to doom it to a realm of utter privacy. But that is evidently not so. Hume notes that normative claims are made for taste all the time, and even when the narrowness and vanity of such claims are taken into account, something remains that is not reducible to

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fashion or randomness. This is the nub of the problem: How are we to think of a mode of behavior mediated only by the responsiveness of the body—by the ways “the organ” registers pleasure in the face of an object— that is also responsive to the demands of a standard that must lie outside this body? Hume attempts to conjoin what appears irreconcilably separate by differentiating among the variety of taste and highlighting those instances as models that fulfill certain conditions, conditions such as delicacy, experience, knowledge, and lack of prejudice, and that endure over time. The standard, in other words, is not incarnated in any one body, but in bodies specially trained and synchronized in their responses over time. Th is sort of mutual psycho-physiological reinforcement and training suffices for him to claim that, though the bodies holding and enacting them may be frail and particular, “the principles of taste be universal” (228). . . . TO KANT

Kant too shifts his focus from the work to the beholder of the work; he too is interested in this strange eighteenth-century concept called taste (at one point, while composing it, he had planned to call the Critique of Judgment the Critique of Taste); he too is deeply interested in the relationship between taste and morality, between the beautiful and the good. We find some of the same constraints Hume imposed on the subject of taste— chief among them, lack of prejudice, which Kant calls disinterestedness— and the notion of the exemplar plays a principal role for him too, as we shall see. What is most crucial, Kant takes on board the central paradox animating Hume’s inquiry: how can something fundamentally oriented toward the sensate body— toward the senses and the feeling of pleasure— and thus profoundly subjective, nonetheless remain responsive to a norm, which has intersubjective validity? That, after all, is what a norm demands. If taste has a standard, what shape would this standard have to take? These were Hume’s questions, and they become Kant’s. Yet Kant forges this material into an entirely new shape. In his hands, it becomes an altogether different philosophical problem with dimensions one could not possibly find or have foreseen from the tradition that came before him. Thus aesthetic taste is wholly different from the notion of taste that Hume assumes it to be, a taste alembicated through the rigorous practice of model critics over long stretches of time. Kant’s concept of taste has little to

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do with expertise (though he insists that taste can and must be developed), and its force has nothing to do with history or the traditional practices of a particular community. In Kant’s aesthetic world, when I try to decide whether I find the Homeric epics beautiful or not, it means nothing to me that men recognized to have had good taste have settled on those writings as exemplary cases of the beautiful. In fact, I must remain deaf to such judgments and such reasons, and if I am not naturally deaf, then he recommends that I render myself deaf (“I will stop my ears, listen to no reasons and arguments” [§33, 284]). And even when we do note a “unanimity, so far as possible, of all times and peoples” in some aesthetic judgments, Kant regards it as “weak and hardly sufficient for conjecture,” no more than “the empirical criterion of the derivation of a taste,” whose ground must be sought elsewhere than in the empirical realm (§17, 231–232). It is characteristic of Kant not to refute Hume’s empiricism by opposing it and asserting its obverse. Rather, he moves in into a different logic. If beauty does not, as Hume claimed, “exist[] merely in the mind which contemplates” it, it does not therefore reside in the object either. Rather, in Kant’s account, the experience of beauty is an effect of a triangular relationship: it describes a complex commerce between subject and object that in its very essence is both open to and responsive to the relationship other subjects do or could have with the object. Indeed, the relations to the beautiful thing, to oneself, and to others are so tightly interwoven in Kant’s account of aesthetic experience that disentangling them for the purposes of analysis may be the main task of his book. THE “STRANGE AND ANOMALOUS” GRAMMAR OF CLAIMING UNIVERSAL ASSENT

We have spoken of the normative force of beauty and of the intersubjective hold it exerts. These do point us in the direction of universality, yet it is not clear that they get us there all the way. Norms need not be universal, and neither does intersubjectivity. So we need to go further and dig deeper. It comforts us to learn that Kant himself struggles as he attempts to find a place in the aesthetic arena for universality. It is “strange and anomalous,” he admits, that nothing more substantial than a feeling of pleasure licenses a claim being made on all others (Introduction VII, 191). This is a strangeness that never quite goes away. A bit later, we come upon it once again. “It is

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nevertheless strange,” he writes, that no claim is made for the universal validity of the agreeable, even though there is often wide agreement, yet such a claim is made for the beautiful, “which, as experience teaches, is often enough rejected in its claim to the universal validity of its judgment” (§8, 214). Strange indeed that where experience encourages generalization, I shy away from doing so, and where it shows mainly discord, or at least variance, I insist on demanding the assent of others, all others. Stranger still, this free, serendipitous aesthetic experience has “a necessary relation to pleasure,” a necessity that, unsurprisingly, “is of a special kind” (§18, 236). All of which leads Kant to concede that the subjective universality of aesthetic judgment “is an oddity [eine Merkwürdigkeit]” (§8, 213), based on a “common ground, deeply hidden in all human beings” (§17, 232). In it we face a mystery. Perhaps grammar will point us the way. Here, as elsewhere in the third Critique, Kant is alert to what people say when they speak about beauty, not to expose their naïveté, but to allow their way of speaking to guide his own philosophical investigations. If “this claim to universal validity . . . essentially belongs to a judgment by which we declare something to be beautiful,” then it may be worth looking more closely at the grammar of this belonging. What shape does the tissue linking the two take in Kant’s account? We have already come across the language of the demand. Of someone “who prided himself on his taste” Kant writes: “he . . . does not count on the agreement of others with his judgment of pleasure because he has frequently found them to be agreeable with his own, but rather demands it from them” (§7, 212–213; my emphasis). Once this demand has been issued, the tone hardens: “He rebukes them if they judge otherwise, and denies that they have taste, though he nevertheless requires that they ought to have it” (§7, 213). “Demands,” “rebukes,” “denies,” “requires”— our worst fears about the coercive force of universality seem be born out. Yet when we look more closely, we hear tones of a wider range. Thus there is the act of making a claim (einen Anspruch machen), which is related to, yet also distinct from, issuing a demand; we came across it in the proposition about the “claim to universal validity” (see also §6, 212). There is, too, the language of expectation (though zumuten may also be translated as “demanding,” “desiring,” or even “imposing”): for example: The person making an aesthetic judgment of beauty “must believe himself to have grounds for expecting a similar pleasure of everyone” (§6, 211).

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“If he pronounces that something is beautiful, then he expects the very same satisfaction of others” (§7, 212). Aesthetic taste can “represent judgments that could demand such assent universally, and does in fact expect it of everyone for each of its judgments” (§8, 214; my emphases, here and through the remainder of this paragraph, except where noted). Sometimes Kant sets aside the language of coercion and opts instead for that of seduction: thus, “one solicits [wirbt um] assent from everyone” (§19, 237). The communicative act that may be most frequently invoked by Kant is ansinnen, translated with “to impute” (by Meredith and Bernard) or “to ascribe” (Guyer and Matthews): “One must be fully convinced that through the judgment of taste . . . one ascribes the satisfaction in an object to everyone [Kant’s emphasis], yet without grounding it on a concept” (§8, 213–4). “The judgment of taste . . . only imputes this agreement to every one” (§8, 216, Kant’s emphasis). “The judgment of taste ascribes assent to everyone, and whoever declares something to be beautiful wishes that everyone should approve of the object in question and similarly declare it to be beautiful” (§19, 237; Kant emphasizes “should”). In contemporary German, ansinnen is used mainly in its nominalized form (das Ansinnen) and ranges in meaning from the neutral senses of “proposal” and “request” to charged ones such as “an unacceptable demand” and “an imposition.”  Historical dictionaries record some of the same flavors in the verb form of the word current in the late eighteenth century: “to demand,” “to require”; Adelung’s dictionary, published soon after the third Critique, adds the qualification: “especially if the things one demands are illicit or indecent.” For the moment, we will resist the temptation of chasing the idea—an intriguing idea—of whether in uttering the sentence, “This is beautiful” I have issued a demand for something illicit or indecent. It distracts us from the more fundamental issue that in judging something to be beautiful, I have issued a demand, made a request, offered a proposal, tendered a solicitation. As we saw in Chapter 1, the utterance, “This is beautiful” is not an ordinary

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proposition about an object, though it takes that form, but rather an act— an act of speaking. Kant’s word for “claim” holds this speech act within itself: before Anspruch can come to carry the weight of a demand or a request, the word informs us that it is an act of address: it derives from an-sprechen, “to speak to,” “to address.” Aesthetic experience, then, consists—or at least has as part of its essential structure—the act of speaking to another, not necessarily an actual speech act directed at a specific other, but the very idea of a speech act addressed to a generic other. Thus while this experience must unfold in the particular life that is mine, it is never mine alone, a secret only I can know, for in its very bearing it faces others. And so it is that the concept of “subjective universality” (§8, 215) morphs into that of “universal communicability” (§9, 217); the noun becomes an adjective modifying what now stands in the focus of attention, namely, the very possibility of communication. This is another way of reaching what we called the public dimension of plea sure: it has communicability—the ability of addressing others or, to lean a bit on Mit-teilbarkeit, of “sharing with others”—built into it. COMMUNICABILITY

Not only do we know that this possibility of communication has a certain direction—it is aimed at a generic other—but we also know that it has a certain force, namely, that of a demand (a request) for universal assent. This is the normative dimension we identified earlier. It is, Kant asserts, part of the grammar of calling something beautiful: “whoever declares something to be beautiful wishes that everyone should approve of the object in question.” In judging this painting to be beautiful, I do not make an assertion about a matter of fact or a norm, the way I would in making an assertion about something I perceive or a scientific law I believe to be true or a moral principle I hold to be valid. Nor am I led by social and cultural standards. It is true, Kant concedes, that we say of someone “who knows how to entertain his guests with agreeable things . . . so that they are all pleased, that he has taste”; in such cases, one relies on a “unanimity in judging [that] may be encountered among people” (§7, 213). This is the sort of unanimity of judgment that Hume tries to account for, and it is precisely not what Kant is after. We know that “if someone does not find a building, a view, or a poem

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beautiful, then . . . he does not allow approval to be internally imposed upon himself by a hundred voices who all praise it highly” (§33, 284). The universality involved in aesthetic experience is not a game of numbers; it has no truck with statistics or regularities or historical trends, for this experience, we have said, is in its very structure singular and serendipitous, not available for being averaged. The distinction between the empirical and the normative is fundamental, so let us dwell on it for a moment. My expectation of concord when judging aesthetically is not based on the fact that in the past my judgments may have been concordant with those of others. Rather, I expect the concord in the way I tell friends that I expect them at seven thirty, not because it happens to be the time when, based on past experience, their journey is likely to end at my doorstep, but because they have been invited for that time, because they ought to appear then. The subjective yet nonpersonal feeling I have in aesthetic experience, Kant contends, “does not say that everyone will be in accord with our judgment but that everyone should be in accord with it” (§22, 239). Expectation, then, is not a prediction but a demand, one that finds its basis in no statistical distribution we could locate in a social or historical space and no associative habituation we might ascribe to the human organism. The empiricist project of discovering the standard of taste in history or sociology or physiology or natural history runs aground, for such regularities may end up explaining why someone prefers the sparkling wine from the Canaries to the one from Italy, yet in Kant’s view they do nothing to get closer to the mystery of aesthetic experience. The usual alternative to finding regularities in the immanent world is to look for them in transcendence, and there is no shortage of attempts at proposing invariant schemas to explain the logic of beauty, be they grouped around ideas of perfection, of symmetry, of geometric relation, or some other conceptual arrangement. This is the source that nourishes the countless neoclassical rulebooks that set out to codify the production of the arts. But Kant dismisses this project too, and we know why. If the aesthetic is a genuinely distinct way of relating to the world, different both from ways of knowing and from ways of doing, then it cannot be governed by concepts, for in that case it would be reducible to a form of reason, either theoretical or practical, and therefore not constitute a distinct domain. But its irreducibility and hence distinctness is just what Kant wishes to demonstrate.

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In speaking, then, of my aesthetic pleasure—better yet: in speaking my aesthetic pleasure—I report no fact about the state of the world, but issue a demand or offer a solicitation, and I do so with no argument to back it up, no concept or precept or rule to compel the assent of others. I am thrown back on myself, not guided by “Batteux or Lessing, or even older and more famous critics of taste,” nor by the “hundred voices” who praise or blame the object of my pleasure. In demanding assent, I risk myself. I open myself to being rebuffed, for communicability is not communication; just because something entitles me to make a claim on others (and we are still not clear whence this entitlement derives), others needn’t acknowledge nor yield to this claim. Recall that what renders the universal communicability of aesthetic judgment “strange” is precisely the fact that “as experience teaches, [this judgment] is often enough rejected in its claim to the universal validity of its judgment” (§8, 214). The claim issues from a judgment grounded in feeling; it comes unfortified by concepts. Often enough, it falls flat. And yet, strangely, the universal reach in the way the judgment may be communicated is not thereby voided. In fact, Kant thinks that the claim can only be said to fail because there is a chance it could have succeeded. The confl ict in aesthetic judgments, he reasons, centers not “over the possibility of such a claim”; it merely concerns “the correct application of this faculty in par ticu lar cases” (ibid.). The universality of communicability does not annul differences; quite the contrary. Had we been more attentive to the language of demanding, we would have noted earlier that the possibility of universal assent and the actuality of dissent go hand in hand in aesthetic experience. Why else demand assent? I do not demand your assent when I speak of the green of the meadow or the distance to the moon, not unless I feel you are being willfully contrary. But the demand lodged in my judgment of beauty signals that I expect assent even though I have no assurance that I will, in fact, obtain it. Recall that the one issuing an aesthetic judgment “does not count on the agreement of others with his judgment of pleasure because he has frequently found them to be agreeable with his own, but rather demands it from them.” Or again: The judgment of taste does not itself postulate the accord of everyone (only a logically universal judgment can do that, since it can adduce grounds); it only ascribes this agreement to everyone [sinnt nur jedermann diese Einstimmung

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an], as a case of the rule with regard to which it expects confirmation not from concepts but only from the consent of others. (§8, 216)

As Eli Friedlander has put it: “To pronounce a judgment on what is essentially singular is thus not to speak of what we in fact agree upon, but to speak for an idea of universal agreement.” Kant devises a remarkable name for the voice I use when I speak for myself alone yet at the same time make a claim on all others; he calls it the “universal voice,” a voice that is both mine and not mine, lodged in the specificity and singularity of my experience, yet reaching out to all: It can be seen that in the judgment of taste nothing is postulated except such a universal voice with regard to pleasure without the mediation of concepts, hence the possibility of an aesthetic judgment that could at the same time be considered valid for everyone. (§8, 216)

In aesthetic judgment “nothing is postulated” but this strange voice: no communication, no agreement, no community I might point to—nothing. There is only something in me and issuing from me that exceeds me in that it addresses all and therefore partakes of all, a voice that is mine and yet that I borrow from universality, signifying above and beyond of what it says. This is a notion of universality in whose physiognomy we cannot quite recognize that tyrant of standardization and regularization that many thinkers have rightly censured. *

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What have we managed to say? The aesthetic is a form of experience that constitutively eludes the reach of concepts, yet one that at the same time lays claim to a peculiar form of communicability that addresses all. It is not easy to hold these thoughts in one’s head at the same time. Here is how Kant puts them in relation to one another: If one judges objects merely in accordance with concepts, then all representation of beauty is lost. Thus there can also be no rule in accordance with which someone could be compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful. 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

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principles. One wants to submit the object to one’s own eyes, just as if one’s pleasure depended on sensation; and yet, if one then calls the object beautiful, one believes oneself to have a universal voice, and lays claim to the consent of everyone. (§8, 215–216)

The passage presses together the seemingly divergent vectors in aesthetic experience: its incompatibility with rules and concepts; the need for aesthetic experience to be instantiated in the particular person, its mineness; its access to universality; and the way this access gives rise to a claim that is uttered by a voice that is both personal and impersonal, a haunting voice in that it is mine and at the same time comes from elsewhere. The nub of the issue, then, is that something I feel, something I alone feel, can come to make a claim on you. In the thin air of Kantian abstractions, it may appear to be nothing but a constructed problem, entirely implausible when held next to everyday experience, even everyday aesthetic experience. Yet it describes the core dilemma of all speech about aesthetic experience, thus of all criticism. What drives criticism is the desire to convey something complex and apparently paradoxical. While my experience of an aesthetic object is irreducibly mine and hence not available for replacement, it is not bereft of public life. If it does not offer a third-person view of the world, it is also not an entirely first-person account. Rather, it is responsive to the presence of others and occurs only within a field of intersubjective relations. If I am responsive to the aesthetic claims of others, it is in that I recognize a claim or a call in their account of their experience with the text or the artwork that extends beyond them and is directed at me, a claim that what held for them should also hold for me. THE PRIORITY OF UNIVERSALITY

We have taken on faith the idea that someone making an aesthetic judgment lays claim to universal assent. But why not do what we are inclined to do, namely, dismiss such an act as a sign of grandiosity? Or as an ideological aberration, or even just as an honest error? What enables the communicability of aesthetic judgment to acquire its supposedly universal reach (in contrast with the more or less local reach of the Humean standard of taste)? Our first brush with the question of universality came in the context of the discussion of interest (in Chapter 1). Our main concern there was to find

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in the negatively charged notion of disinterestedness a positive mode of behavior, yet we also saw that, for Kant, the negation of interest itself plays a crucial role, for he believes it opens a path to the elusive region of subjective universality. Here is his attempt at getting from the one to the other—from disinterestedness to universality: One cannot judge that about which he is aware that the plea sure in it is without any interest in his own case in any way except that it must contain a ground of pleasure for everyone. For since it is not grounded in any inclination of the subject . . . but rather the person making the judgment feels himself completely free with regard to the pleasure that he devotes to the object, he cannot discover as grounds of the pleasure any private conditions, pertaining to his subject alone, and must therefore regard it as grounded in those that he can also presuppose in everyone else; consequently he must believe himself to have grounds for expecting a similar pleasure of everyone. (§6, 211)

The line of reasoning seems to take roughly this shape: I become aware of the fact that the pleasure I feel is “without any interest” and therefore not based in anything specific to me, such as my idiosyncrasies and appetites. It must therefore derive from some conditions that I “can also presuppose in everyone else.” Hence my expectation that everyone should also feel “a similar pleasure.” It is difficult not to feel that there is something shady going on here. The argument seems straightforward—if the pleasure does not derive from private conditions, then surely it must derive from public ones, mustn’t it?—yet it somehow feels implausible. Does the absence of the private really entail the presence of the public? Perhaps it does, though Kant does not explain how or why. What is more, the phenomenology suggested here seems farfetched: Do I experience pleasure like the man who, in Kant’s telling, confidently demands the assent of others “through the mere consciousness of separation of every thing that belongs to the agreeable and the good from the pleasure that is left over to him” (§8, 216)? When I feel beauty, do I go about subtracting from my pleasure every thing motivated by interest and then reckon up what “is left over”? Perhaps I do, though it is far from obvious how to connect the thought to the experience. If we end up submitting to the force of Kant’s reasoning, we silently remain wary.

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As it turns out, we are not alone in harboring doubts. Some pages on, Kant himself, perhaps dissatisfied with his own line of reasoning, offers another path to the idea of universality, now imagined as universal communicability. The pivotal section 9 promises to tackle “the question: whether in the judgment of taste the feeling of pleasure precedes the judging of the object or the latter precedes the former” (§9, 216), an investigation he deems momentous enough that, like a teacher in front of his dozing class, he gives a clap of the hands before delving in: “The solution to this problem is the key to the critique of taste,” he announces, “and hence worthy of full attention” (ibid.). The promise that the key to unfasten the final, most intractable lock is about to be produced does jolt us from our slumber. Right away Kant spells out how this question of precedence—pleasure before judgment or judgment before pleasure?—relates to the issue of universality: “If the pleasure in the given object came first, and only its universal communicability were to be attributed in the judgment of taste to the representation of the object, then such a procedure would be self-contradictory” (§9, 216–217). Why? Because in that case the source of the pleasure would not lie in what makes universal communicability possible (whatever that may be); rather the pleasure “would immediately depend on the representation through which the object is given” (§9, 217). Rather than making something into an object of pleasure for myself, I would be its passive recipient. In short, this would not be the pleasure I experience in beauty, but “would be none other than mere agreeableness in sensation, and hence by its very nature could have only private validity” (ibid.). Things must therefore be the other way around: “it is the universal communicability of the state of mind 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” (ibid.). It is revealing to say about an experience that something in it “must” be the case. For it tells us that the claim (be it plausible or not, true or not) does not derive from introspection or phenomenological insight, but depends rather on an analysis of the very structure of the experience. If the experience is to have a certain structure—in this case, the structure of making a claim on all others—then it must have a certain shape, not because it feels that way, but because it could not be other wise. Which allows us to understand the idea of precedence—the question of whether pleasure comes “first” or judgment—in a way that does not jar. Since this is not an account of what

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aesthetic experience feels like “from the inside,” we would go astray were we to understand the logic of precedence temporally; Kant’s analysis does not suggest that I must first arrive at the recognition that I am able to communicate universally, only then, in a second step, to feel the pleasure of beauty. Rather what allows me to feel pleasure in this particular way—“its ground”—must be what opens the way to universal communication. The two are not successive moments but internally linked features of an experience: the pleasure I feel is the pleasure of feeling my ability to speak to all. THE DEMAND OF HUMANITY

How can something take on a form in which it may be communicated universally? It cannot consist of a feeling immediately brought about through sensation, Kant reasons, for that would be something available to me alone; like the pleasure in the agreeableness of the sparkling wine, “by its very nature [it] could have only private validity.” The only thing amenable to nonprivate, public communication is “cognition and representation so far as it belongs to cognition” (§9, 217). Only when I come out of my self and find an orientation toward the world that everyone can, in principle, share, have I put myself in a position to communicate universally (which is not to say that I have, in fact, performed such a speech act, nor that it has been taken up by others). For only then, when I say something about the green of the meadow, do I rely on “a universal point of reference with which everyone’s faculty of representation is compelled to agree” (ibid.) (though, again, I may be mistaken about its color or that it is a meadow). If an orientation toward the world is to have this quality, it must be conceptually organized; you and I must have (or must come to) a common understanding of what we mean by “green” and by “meadow.” But has Kant not led us to see the opposite of what he set out to show? Throughout, he has insisted that in aesthetic experience representations are related “to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure” (§1, 203); that there is therefore no objective “universal point of reference” to anchor the judgment, since we are speaking of the feeling in a subject; that this experience is precisely not controlled by concepts. Yet if the only avenue to universal communicability must pass through concepts, would aesthetic judgments then not lead to a dead end? This is where he makes the move meant to bring us within reach of “the key to the critique of taste,” so our

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full attention snaps back into place. Imagine a state of mind, Kant suggests, akin to the one that prevails when I achieve cognition of something, except I never arrive at that cognition. The mental capacities I possess that enable me to have cognition of things—and hence that put me in a position to speak about it to all those also capable of cognition— are fully engaged in my experience, yet I find no concept that allows me to gather the work of my imagination under its umbrella. There are many such states that would amount to nothing but confusion or madness or idiosyncratic nonsense, none of which could legitimately make a claim to being universally communicable (which does not mean that I may not find myself empathizing with or even understanding someone’s confusion or madness). Yet there is also “the state of mind that is encountered in the relation of the powers of representation to each other insofar as they relate a given representation to cognition as such” (§9, 217). It is a remarkable thought. If my mind is constituted in a way that it can yield objective cognition, then there must be a subjective state that prepares the ground for all this cognizing—for Erkenntnis überhaupt, cognition in and of itself. The capacities of my mind that give rise to cognition—“imagination for the composition of the manifold of intuition and understanding for the unity of the concept that unifies the representations” (ibid.)— are fully engaged, and purposefully so, yet they are engaged in a way that does not achieve the purpose of arriving at a particular act of cognition, say, the determination of the green of the meadow. Note how easy, indeed how likely, it is to think of this activity as a failure, and thus of aesthetic judgment as an aborted (or other wise defective) form of cognition: after all, what I do has all the trappings of reaching a certain end, yet I fail to reach that end. But Kant declines this option, for reasons we know: aesthetic experience is a distinct mode of experience that consists in a form of feeling and thinking not reducible to the sort of propositions we know from cognition. It does both less and more; it speaks in a different register. To characterize this form of experience, Kant introduces a term here that has inspired important thinking on aesthetics and art, from Friedrich Schiller to Hans-Georg Gadamer. He calls the way that the capacities of the mind involved in cognition (the imagination and the understanding) are engaged in aesthetic experience “play,” or more usually “free play.” When I come faceto-face with a beautiful object, “the powers of cognition that are set into play by this representation are hereby in a free play, since no determinate

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concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition” (ibid.). In cognition, there is no freedom; in cognition, “the imagination is under the coercion of the understanding and is subjected to the limitation of being adequate to its concepts” (§49, 316). In madness or confusion, in turn, there is no purpose, for when the imagination remains utterly unconstrained by the harness of the understanding, it “produces, in its lawless freedom, nothing but nonsense” (§50, 319). Yet there is a region of experience between nonsense and conceptual determination, between “lawless freedom” and the utter absence of freedom. Play is neither devoid of purpose (as is nonsense) nor is it geared to a nameable purpose (as is cognition). Its purpose lies in itself, for the purpose of playing is nothing but playing. Kant’s mysterious, unwieldy formula of a “purposiveness without purpose” (developed in §10) describes just this logic of play: a purposeful way of doing whose purpose can be found nowhere but in itself and that consequently “strengthens and reproduces itself” (§12, 222). It is a conception that returns more fully developed when Kant attempts to understand the specific mode of making in art (which we discuss in Chapter 4); as we shall see, play is one way of understanding the basic homology in modes of aesthetic perception and aesthetic production. In aesthetic experience, then, “the powers of cognition” (also called “the faculties of cognition”) engage in an activity that, because of the structure that it has, holds within itself a license to be communicated universally. The experience emerging from this playful activity is as universally communicable “as any determinate cognition is,” for the latter “always rests on that relation as its subjective condition” (§9, 218). In still more explicit terms: If cognitions are to be able to be communicated, then the mental state, i.e., the disposition of the cognitive powers for a cognition as such, namely, that proportion which is suitable for making cognition out of a representation (whereby an object is given to us) must also be capable of being universally communicated; for without this, as the subjective condition of cognizing, the cognition, as an effect, could not arise. (§21, 238)

Far from appearing as a degraded version of cognition, aesthetic experience reveals itself as the “subjective condition” of cognition, that which must be in place if cognition is to get off the ground, “as an effect.” If the effect is universally communicable, then its condition must be as well.

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The line of thinking we have been following allows us to avoid a common misconception about Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgment. Because it yields no cognitive results, the experience is often thought to be “nonconceptual.” It is in general difficult to know how something occurring within the ambit of human experience and which exceeds the pure physicality of a reflex could be entirely fenced off from concepts. Yet in our context the claim is more perplexing than usual. For we have seen that aesthetic experience, while forgoing conceptual determination, does involve conceptual capacities, and crucially so; concepts do not run the show, but they are and must be in play. How does this line of thinking bear on the question that launched Kant on this inquiry, namely, the question of the logical priority of feeling and universal communicability? If I apprehend an object by reaching for its inner structure while refraining from imposing upon it a specific label; if this way of apprehending it “precedes the pleasure in it”; if, in other words, the dance of the imagination and the understanding serves as “the ground of this pleasure,” then my feeling arises not in opposition to or in isolation from my rational capacities, but rather from a state of mind that is laced with conceptuality. My pleasure has no content that depends immediately on the material being of the object. It is rather a pleasure I derive from finding myself in a felicitous mood; in Kant’s terms, it is a reflective pleasure. If that is so, then the pleasure I take in the object—or as we said in the previous chapter, the plea sure I make for myself on occasion of encountering the object— is the pleasure of being in “the well-proportioned disposition that we require for all cognition 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)” (§9, 219). It is the pleasure of feeling (rather than merely of knowing) my link “to every human being,” not by way of biological or cultural affiliation or even of a fellow feeling, but by feeling my own readiness to address other human beings, no matter their particulars. These are members not of a community imagined to have been already given by virtue of history or geography or race or whatever other features, but of a community that comes into being with the singular and momentary experience of beauty itself, with no warrant of enduring beyond it. Humanity appears not as an anthropological or biological or political entity to which I may pledge allegiance or from which I may turn; rather it flares up as something to be claimed in a nameless pleasure. In aesthetic pleasure, I demand humanity.

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STIMME/STIMMUNG

Following Kant’s lead, we have reasoned our way to this point. Yet there is also a way in which the text of the third Critique, like an aesthetic judgment, exceeds its own semantic content. We have already said that the notion of universality at stake in the aesthetic realm is really a question of the capacity to communicate, that the entire apparatus of norms centers on acts of speech: An-spruch (“claim”), we said, is a speaking to. Now we see that speech works its way into the texture of the text itself, for the “voice” in aesthetic judgment can be said to hold together the entire fragile construction of the universality of something utterly subjective, which Kant has time and again found “strange.” It is not “voice” but, more precisely, Stimme that stands at the center, the concept of voice and the German word for voice. Many of the major nodes of the network of ideas we have been examining— harmony, disposition, agreement, accord, attunement, determination—belong in Kant’s usage to the same lexical and metaphorical network: Stimme, Stimmung, Übereinstimmung, Beistimmung, Zusammenstimmung, bestimmen. It is true that words built around the stem stimm- are not the only ones Kant employs to denote the par ticu lar sort of accord he has in mind; einhellig (literally “in unison”) is another, and occasionally he uses Harmonie. But these are distinctly in the minority. Stimme crops up all over the third Critique. Large parts of Kant’s text work like a resonance chamber for this voice, and once we take note of it, passages we know already gain a new and interesting texture. Our feeling of pleasure in aesthetic judgments is aroused when the imagination and the understanding are “unintentionally brought into accord [Einstimmung]” (Introduction VII, 190). When this happens, we “rightly make claim to the assent [Beistimmung] of everyone else” (Introduction VII, 191). Why are we justified in issuing such a demand? Because “the ground for this pleasure is to be found in . . . the purposive correspondence [Übereinstimmung] of an object . . . with the relationship of the cognitive faculties among themselves” (ibid.). And this relationship of the cognitive powers among themselves is, as Kant repeatedly says, a Stimmung, what our translation renders as a “disposition” (for example, §21, 238) but what may simply be called a “mood.” Once we think of the relationship of the cognitive powers as a mood, we are not tempted to ask for measurements of their proportionality or the external conditions under which their play is likely to happen, but we see that “this

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mood [Stimmung] cannot be determined except through feeling (not by concepts)” (§21, 239). The mood we find ourselves in when we feel the Übereinstimmung of our capacities for cognition leads us to utter an aesthetic judgment. But this judgment itself entails a synchronization— a harmonization—of two voices that we can hold apart analytically but not experientially. We have said that the voice of aesthetic judgment—the “universal voice”—is a voice that is at once mine and not mine, at once subjective and universal. I give voice to a voice reverberating, I assume, in all heads. Only under this condition can I make an Anspruch to the Einstimmung or Beistimmung (“assent,” “consent”) of everyone. There are, then, two Stimmungen, two moods or attunements. One is the harmony—variously called Einstimmung, Übereinstimmung, Zusammenstimmung, and proportionierte Stimmung—of the mental faculties of imagination and understanding in their free play that stands at the core of the experience of beauty. But Kant articulates a second model of harmony to complement the first, for the harmony of the faculties prompts the allgemeine Stimme in me to demand everyone’s Einstimmung, prompts me, in other words, to speak in harmony with humanity. These two distinct harmonies come into harmony with each other in an overarching aesthetic Stimmung through the human voice. To be truly universal, this voice must have specificity as my voice, particular and embodied as it is, yet at the same time partake of impersonal universality. Every human voice can move in these two dimensions: on the one hand, it is mine alone, my audible signature, announcing not only my person but also my moods, often against my will; on the other hand, it can propel me beyond myself into what Kant calls universal communicability, where the particular tonality of my voice recedes in favor of a communicative dimension shared in principle by all human beings. To be sure, this universality is never simply given as an empirical fact, but, as Kant emphasizes, it takes the form of a demand: our judgment “does not say that everyone will concur [übereinstimmen] with our judgment but that everyone should agree [zusammenstimmen] with it” (§22, 239). Thus universal humanity is not given as a substantial entity with particular features before I have made my judgment, but is claimed when I give voice to an attunement I feel in myself. FORCE WITHOUT ENFORCEMENT

In speaking about mood and attunement, we discover the way in which the passage from a mere feeling to something as grand as a universal claim—

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from out-and-out subjectivity to an intersubjectivity that holds all within itself— occurs without the sort of social, psychic, or conceptual violence for which normative claims deriving from reason have been faulted. My normative claim—“that everyone should agree”— cannot be enforced by any agency above and beyond myself to which I might appeal, for the same reason that it is not governed by a purpose external to itself; no Batteux or Lessing can come to my aid, nor any sort of normal distribution of preferences, nor the “hundred voices” that urge conformity. I do not submit my experience to the demands of all, but rather bring forth the all through my experience, not as an actuality, but as a normative idea. This gives us another description of the peculiar—Kant might say the strange—texture of freedom in aesthetic experience. If my productive imagination, at work in giving shape to aesthetic experience obeys a “ free lawfulness,” it is because it is “a lawfulness without law” (“General Remark,” 240), an idea that appears paradoxical when pressed into the language of concepts, yet one which anyone who has played in a jam session will recognize right away. It describes the freedom that is specific to playing. Yet just because there is no external enforcement does not mean that the claim of beauty lacks force; were that the case, then the idea that an aesthetic judgment makes a demand on others would amount to no more than empty talk. Where might we locate this force? By weighing our reading of Kant’s account toward ideas revolving around Stimme and Stimmung, we are apt to think of the passage from the subjective to the universal— enfolded in the act of making the demand for assent—as a scene with two actors: the “subject” and “every human being,” as though an attunement within the subject somehow arrogated to itself the power of tuning the social body to the right sort of frequency. That, in effect, is the model of social formation through sympathy, in which social bonds are thought to form via the lateral transmission of feeling from one person to another. It is a model embraced by many of Kant’s contemporaries (and theorists to our own day), and it sustains influential accounts of aesthetic experience, for example, Lessing’s. Yet this model cannot help but presuppose that certain feelings (say, grief or pain) are likely to bring about sympathy, while certain others (say, anger or disgust) will not. It therefore cannot help but presuppose an idea of the human being as a being disposed to feeling and acting in certain predictable ways. There is a norm that prescribes what it means to act humanly before I act. But recall that by Kant’s account, my action—making for myself an object of pleasure that is also a claim on others—is guided by no prior

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norm, by no concept and external purpose; on the contrary: the claim brings about the very norm meant to enforce the claim. There is therefore neither an external norm to which my act conforms (or fails to conform), nor does my internal attunement (the free play of the imagination and the understanding) somehow result in the attunement of “every human being.” Rather the play of the cognitive powers feels pleasurable because it has built into it the dimension of universal communicability, not as something already achieved, but as an ideal to be achieved. Thinking about the force of aesthetic experience gains a dimension when we remind ourselves that the scene includes not two poles—myself and every human being—but three. For the play of the cognitive powers, the pleasure in aesthetic experience, the claim addressed to all others— all this occurs because an object has occasioned the experience. True, it is I who feels beauty and makes a claim on you, but it is the object that is beautiful. We find Kant reminding us of the presence of this third pole even when its work seems marginal. Thus when speaking about “that proportion which is suitable for making cognition out of a representation” he adds parenthetically, lest we forget, “(whereby an object is given to us)” (§21, 238). We may be able to “make anything into an object of pleasure ourselves” (§5, 210), yet we cannot do without this “anything”; the object may not cause our pleasure (as the Canary wine does), yet it does serve as its occasion. The community that aesthetic experience brings forth is thus built around the beautiful object. And having followed the line of thinking about the ground of universal communicability, we see why. If the capacities of the mind for cognition, the imagination and the understanding, are to be put into a free play geared to “cognition as such,” this play must be put in motion by the same process by which cognitive determinations come to happen: there is an object to be apprehended, whose representation now occasions not a cognition, specific and final, but the open-ended mood of cognition as such. To be sure, the object is not the same “universal point of reference” (§9, 217) that anchors cognitive judgments (of the green meadow kind), yet it is the external occasion for setting into play the very powers that lead to cognition, hence activating the claim to found a universal community. BABY WALKERS OF JUDGMENT

Does the presence of an object help us make sense of the normative dimension of aesthetic experience? The object of aesthetic pleasure—in Kant’s

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terms, its representation in our mind—is “singular and without comparison to others” (§9, 219). This is a way of saying what we dwelled on in Chapter 1, namely that aesthetic experience is serendipitous; nothing about the object, its history, its context helps to predict whether it will, in fact, become an occasion for a feeling of aesthetic pleasure arising in me. Being transported by The Calling of St. Matthew does not tell me that I will respond similarly to The Martyrdom hanging on the opposite wall, or any other painting by Caravaggio, or Baroque art, or . . . But if the object is, in my experience, “singular and without comparison,” then how can it lend weight to the claim I make on others? We are back to the “strange” quality of aesthetic judgment in which something altogether singular, for which no precedent has prepared us and that prepares for nothing similar, becomes the occasion for a universal claim. We have been circling this logic of normativity, approaching it here, losing sight of it there, yet we admit we have not made full sense of how it unfolds its force. More and more we feel that it may never lose its strangeness entirely. Yet even with a stranger one can find ways of developing intimacy. Let us, then, stay for a bit longer with the singular and incomparable object of my aesthetic attention. When I find it beautiful and thus issue an implicit demand on others to use that object for their own imaginative work and their own aesthetic pleasure (though I would never know if it was the same pleasure as mine), we have seen that this demand of mine carries no substantial content. There are no rules to which I may appeal, no touchstones. The way Kant puts things it to say that the normative claim—the “should” lodged in such an experience— depends on the idea that the pleasure associated with it is not merely possible nor merely actual, but necessary, which is just his way of saying that the pleasure belongs to the experience, is part and parcel of it, whenever it occurs. It is this necessary co-occurrence of pleasure and aesthetic experience that motivates a second necessity, namely, “a necessity of the assent of all to a judgment that is regarded as an example of a universal rule that one cannot produce” (§18, 237). This is indeed a strange situation, since we can say as little about this necessity as we can about the normativity that it underwrites; here too we “cannot produce” reasons for why it is operative. I ask for—I demand—your assent about the beauty of this object as necessary without being able to name the rule that would compel this assent, not because I am ignorant of the rule, nor because it is occult or too complex, but because it does not yield to being named. This is a necessity that carries force, like all necessity, but no mechanism of enforcement. It is, Kant admits, a necessity “of a special kind” (§18, 236).

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In this situation, where we find the usual philosophical paths blocked, the notion of exemplarity enters the text. The “special” necessity we encounter in aesthetic experience, Kant maintains, “can only be called exemplary” (§18, 237). We might think we know what “exemplary” means, but it is worth reminding ourselves of the conceptual work it is being asked to do here: a judgment that is regarded as an example of a universal rule that one cannot produce is an exemplary judgment, and the necessity it carries is also exemplary. We do not know what to make of the perplexing idea of an example whose general concept remains unavailable, since in such a case we cannot answer the simple question what the example is an example of and whether it therefore even qualifies as an example. What is this beautiful face (painting, landscape, film, . . .) an example of? Not of faces (paintings, . . .). Then of what? Of beautiful things? If we affirm the question, we do not seem to have said anything meaningful, since we have no access to criteria that would constituted the class of all beautiful things. There is, in my experience, only ever one beautiful thing. We understand that exemplarity is the idea meant to find the universal in this singularity, without turning the singular into an example. But do we know what an example is, one we might call “ordinary,” at least nonaesthetic? The Critique of Pure Reason credits examples with, as Kant puts it, “the sole and great utility” of “sharpen[ing] the power of judgment” (A 134 / B 173). Making the example into an instructional tool is usually taken to be a backhanded compliment, and indeed this is the way Kant continues: For as far as the correctness and precision of the insight of the understanding is concerned, examples more usually do some damage, since they only seldom adequately fulfill the condition of the rule . . . and beyond this often weaken the effort of the understanding to gain sufficient insight into rules generally and independently of the particular circumstances of experience, and thus in the end accustom us to use those rules more like formulas than like principles. Thus examples are the leading-strings [or the baby walker, Gängelwagen] of the power of judgment, which he who lacks the natural talent for judgment can never do without. (A 134 / B 173–174)

Even in this seemingly innocuous passage, where there are no actual examples, the very idea of the example causes some trouble. To begin with, the last, much-quoted phrase of the passage puzzles, since “he who lacks the

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natural talent for judgment” would seem to be the last who “can never do without” examples. Even the minimal achievement of recognizing an example as an example of something, let alone being led by it, requires the capacity for judgment to be in place. Judgment, after all, is the capacity for “determining whether something stands under a given rule . . . or not” (A 132 / B 171), and its lack, Kant insists, cannot be compensated by the use of rules. Suppose to determine whether Example A is an instance of Rule 1, we would seek the help of Rule 2. But then we would find ourselves in need of another rule, Rule 3, to determine whether Rule 2 applies in the case of the relationship of example A and Rule 1. And to see if Rule 3 applies . . . and off to the races we are. So judgment is, as it were, a stop-rule for the manic application of rules, a stop-rule that itself cannot be a rule. Lacking judgment is not ignorance but, in Kant’s blunt words, “that which is properly called stupidity,” a failing that “is not to be helped” (A 133 / B 172 note). To be led by the leading strings, then, to use the baby walker, to enjoy the pedagogical benefit of examples, “the natural talent for judgment” is in fact indispensable, since without it I would not know an example if it smacked me on the head. If we look at the larger section from which this discussion of examples is drawn, we see that Kant is more ambivalent than the passage we looked at suggests. The damage Kant sees the example doing to the understanding of rules in their universality by getting us enmeshed in particulars is of concern to those who traffic in pure abstractions. Yet for others—Kant names physicians, judges, and statesmen—being able to move from the abstract to the concrete and back again is an essential skill, one that can be developed, he says, “through examples or actual business” (A 134 / B 173). Note that only because examples “seldom adequately fulfill the condition of the rule” do they require judgment. Only because case and law remain incommensurate does thinking them together sharpen the power of judgment. What earlier seemed like a bug in the example, now reveals itself to be a feature, indeed its essential feature. Whether we take Kant to be disparaging the example or applauding it, what in either case governs its understanding is the way the example stands in relation to the rule. Because our attention is drawn to how loosely or tightly the example is bound to the rule, we are apt to overlook that the bond must be operative in the first place. It guarantees that in the end the example will yield to the rule, whether it fulfills it adequately or not. For

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even the inadequacy of example—or, in more neutral terms, even the play between its idiosyncratic particularity and the generality of the rule— makes itself felt because we hold up the example to the rule. This bond permits examples to be translated into rules, making them into allegories of the rule. The conception of exemplarity in aesthetics severs just this essential bond linking example and rule. The result is not that we end up with examples and rules drifting apart into independent existences—it is unclear if such a thing is even intelligible—but rather that the terms we have been working with mutate into things new and strange. When Kant uses the concept of exemplarity in contexts other than the aesthetic, it continues to follow an intact logic. Thus moral exemplarity, a more prominent idea in Kant’s writings than its aesthetic counterpart, remains straightforward. When I come across a degree of rectitude in someone else that I do not see in myself, even if it is a common man below my station, writes Kant, then “my spirit bows, whether I wish it or not.” “Why?” he asks and provides this answer: “His example holds before me a law that strikes down my self-conceit when I compare it with my conduct” (Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 77). Exemplarity here works according to a familiar logic: the example so thoroughly stands in for the law that it dissolves into it. Thus the man, in all his specificity as a commoner whose low rank I attempt to rub in “by hold[ing] my head ever so high,” this man becomes a law, a law I recognize and name. So when I bend down, it is before the law that I do so, not before the man. EXEMPLARITY, SINGULARITY, PEDAGOGY

In the aesthetic domain, this familiar logic of exemplarity breaks down in all of its social and cognitive dimensions—as a device that reliably leads us from particulars to universals, hence as a pedagogical tool, and as a technique for negotiating social conflict. Th is breakdown is occasioned not because Kant abandons the logic of exemplarity but because he adheres to it with utmost rigor, by formalizing it through and through. If this reading has merit, then exemplarity breaks down just as it appears in its most nakedly formal guise. Aesthetic exemplarity reverses the order we know from other forms of exemplarity. There is, first, the way the temporal order is turned on its head.

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No rule is available before we encounter the example, and no exemplar points toward a rule we have known all along. Instead rule and example come into being at once, and they disappear the same way. Then there is a logical or epistemological reversal at work. Not only does the rule appear together with the example in our aesthetic experience but it has no consistency as a rule— as a conceptual construct with intersubjective validity— apart from this appearance. That means that the rule, while partaking of universality and necessity, depends for its existence on an entirely contingent event, namely, the flash of beauty in the course of my experience. The universality and necessity of the judgment of taste thus cannot be derived from principle, but can be claimed only once there is an experience. Besides the temporal and the logical reversals, we also note a conceptual reversal, which upends the usual order. An entity, namely, the rule, whose intelligibility depends on being determined by concepts, suffers a shattering loss when such determination remains unavailable. We have been using the term rule because Kant does, but is there a rule to speak of here? We observe instead a rule-boundness without rules, just as there is a normativity without norms (§18), a purposiveness with purpose (§10), and a “lawfulness without law” (“General Remark,” 240). In the experience of beauty, we encounter the form of rule, the form of norm, the form of purpose, and the form of law, without any further determination, just as aesthetic experience opens us to cognition überhaupt without cognition. If aesthetic experience is structured by a rule-boundness without rules, then it is also marked by an exemplarity without examples. It is, we have said, a singular experience—serendipitous and beyond comparison. Its failure to submit to conceptual regularity prevents it from being repeated systematically or predictably. By the same token, it cannot be reliably repeated when it transfers from one subject to the other; it is thus not an experience I can have vicariously. “One wants to submit the object to one’s own eyes, just as if one’s pleasure depended on sensation,” Kant admits (§8, 216). The thought can also return in the dismissive tone of an admonition. Someone with taste must “judge for himself, without having to grope about . . . among the judgments of others and first inform himself about their pleasure or displeasure in the same object” (§32, 282). Nothing guarantees the vicariousness of aesthetic experience even within the same person. It can happen—it happens all the time—that a piece of music or a landscape that in the past struck me with the force of its beauty now leaves me cold.

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Yet if this is so, if no continuity we could name reliably shows the path from one aesthetic experience to the next, if even I am caught off guard by my own experience for the ways it outstrips what I have known and felt in the past, am I then completely thrown back on myself, bereft of all orientation that my social world would provide me? Have we just said that the work of those systems meant to guide our aesthetic experience— criticism or curation, for example, and aesthetic pedagogy in general—must come to naught? It seems we have. Yet in Chapter 1 we noted that taste as the capacity for the creative use of the imagination in taking plea sure requires learning and practice, for the same reason that all creativity requires practice. Kant insists more than once that the “power of judgment [is] made more acute by practice” (§32, 282), a precept that ultimately derives from his commitment to the idea that “in the human being . . . those predispositions whose goal is the use of his reason were to develop completely only in the species, but not in the individual” (“Idea for a Universal History,” 8: 18). Seen individually, the human being, “as the only rational creature on earth” (ibid.), remains constitutively incomplete. It is therefore part of the vocation of this being to develop his or her reason by means of “attempts, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one stage of insight to another” (ibid., 8: 19). The idea is picked up in the third Critique, when Kant grants: There is no use of our powers at all, however free it might be, and even of reason . . . which, if every subject always had to begin entirely from the raw predisposition of his own nature, would not fall into mistaken attempts if others had not preceded him with their own. (§32, 283)

If this is true of “our powers” generally, it must also be true of the power of judgment. Yet in that case, we are at a loss how to reconcile the idea that the human being stands in essential need of pedagogical attention with the earlier line of thought that seemed to doubt just this possibility in aesthetic experience. It is the question of aesthetic pedagogy—not of its form or content, but of its very possibility—that prompts Kant to take the detour through philosophical anthropology we just witnessed. The passage occurs shortly after he has admitted the efficacy of “practice” for judgment, yet also insisted:

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“Taste makes claim merely to autonomy. To make the judgments of others into the determining ground of one’s own would be heteronomy” (§32, 282). It seems we are turning in circles: as a human being, I require “attempts, practice, and instruction” to develop all of my specifically human capacities, yet as a being engaged in aesthetic experience I must insist on the unblemished autonomy of my judgment. Kant gives voice to this bind in terms that would have powerfully resonated with his contemporaries, namely, by calling forth the example of the ancients: That the works of the ancients are rightly praised as models, and their authors called classical, like a sort of nobility among writers, who give laws to the people through their precedence, seems to indicate a posteriori sources of taste and to contradict the autonomy of taste in every subject. (ibid.)

Without a doubt a nobility legislating the laws of taste to the people—a Humean idea, in spirit if not in tone—“seems to indicate” a contradiction with the notion of taste that Kant puts forward. What leads out of this apparent impasse is the concept we have been considering, for exemplarity offers a novel way of understanding what it means to learn and to follow a rule. If I follow a rule by making “the judgments of others into the determining ground of” my own, I forfeit my autonomy and give up the “free lawfulness” that my imagination requires to bring forth the free play of my cognitive powers and thus aesthetic pleasure. But that is not the only way I have of learning. In fact, it seems inadequate to the example of the ancients, who offer their own efforts, Kant writes, “not in order to make their successors into mere imitators, but rather, by the way they proceed, to put others on the right path for seeking out the principles in themselves and thus for following their own, often better, course” (§32, 283). Coming after the ancients, I can be an imitator—a “mere” imitator—or I can be a successor, in which case I do not set out to duplicate their works, but allow them rather to put me on “the right path.” Path may be too definite a term for where the exemplar guides me; Kant’s word is Spur: track, trace, hint. The “models” I am given by those preceding me provide me with hints and traces of where I might head to find within me the “the principles” of my own conduct. The idea of the “successor,” der Nachfolgende, gives rise to a distinct mode of following the example of the predecessor:

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Succession, related to a precedent, not imitation, is the correct expression for any influence that the products of an exemplary author can have on others, which means no more than to draw from the same sources from which the latter drew, and to learn from one’s predecessor only the way of conducting oneself in so doing. (ibid.)

“Succession” as distinct from “imitation,” Nachfolge rather than Nachahmung, can also be rendered as “emulation”; it is in that guise that we shall encounter it when the logic of exemplarity enters once again to account for the mystery of artistic creativity (discussed in Chapter 5), one of the many ways that the deep link between the logic of reception and the logic of production reveals itself. What is at stake in our present context is a different, and more oblique, form of creativity, namely, the creativity involved in making aesthetic experience. Kant’s words themselves pay tribute to this creativity: when he says that to follow an exemplary author “means no more than to draw from the same sources from which the latter drew,” he uses the verb schöpfen, which, besides meaning “to draw (from a well or source),” also signifies the act of creating. Learning to draw from the same source as other creators is learning to create. Yet this process is more uncertain than it may at first appear. For we know by now that in aesthetic judgment there are no “principles” that my predecessors may teach me. There is “only the way of conducting oneself” that I may hope to learn from them. If this is to be understood as a pedagogical model, it is one in which all work has been shifted to me, the student, the successor, the emulator. For by drawing on the same sources, I make for myself a way of being in which I can make for myself an object of pleasure out of whatever (§5, 210); I learn to become creative in the ways needed to take aesthetic pleasure in things. This model of learning is at a considerable remove from the model of aesthetic education put forward by Friedrich Schiller a few years after the appearance of the third Critique, in whose tradition we continue to find ourselves. While the latter model tightly couples aesthetic with moral and political education and attempts to enforce this coupling through institutional practices of schooling, no such linkage is available in the Kantian model (if we may even call it that). Pedagogy cannot serve as the tool for bringing about an aesthetic community endowed with certain features (liberality, empathy, tolerance, and so on), let alone an aesthetic state, which

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was Schiller’s goal. Although aesthetic experience as we have been trying to understand it must, as all human practices, occur within a social and historical situation crisscrossed by vectors of power and mediated by institutions, it is at its core not determined by them. Because the aesthetic exemplar is a singular occurrence and not an example of something of which other examples could be adduced, it cannot be folded into the sort of iterative system, whether symbolic or allegorical or other wise, that would give rise to a field of controllable meanings, for whose sake pedagogical systems are established. It is precisely its singularity that cuts through the force of social practices to open up to the strange universality lodged in speech about aesthetic experience.

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between aesthetic experience and moral behavior? Is there a path leading from the beautiful to the good, from one meaning of “fair” to another? These are naive questions, so naive that shrewd college freshmen soon learn not to pose them. Yet there is, I think, no serious engagement with aesthetics, in the term’s most capacious sense, that does not find itself facing them. Most often these questions lead straightaway to a quarrel between those who warn of the corrupting power of objects of aesthetic pleasure—it can be the human body, a novel, or a video game— and those who see in aesthetic experience a way of developing moral skills or new spaces of freedom. The entire discussion of the politics of aesthetics—whether aesthetic experience is “recuperative,” “transgressive,” “disciplining,” “emancipatory,” “ideological,” and so on—takes place on this arena, framed by these questions. The stakes are high and the arguments fierce. This fierceness often conceals the fact that the quarrelling parties come to the fight assuming that aesthetic and moral behaviors are closely linked and that all that needs to be settled is whether the link is benign or malignant. Yet reading the third Critique teaches how vexed, and at the same time how inevitable, the idea of an alignment of the beautiful and the good is. We learn to see that by taking for granted the moral import of aesthetic exWHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP

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perience we have, perhaps without realizing it, surrendered the very core of this experience. Yet we also see why insisting on a strict division of the aesthetic and moral, come what may, dissipates some of the force of the aesthetic. Aesthetic and moral judgments are not extensions (or even versions) of one another, nor do they remain strangers. Kant’s text plays the motif of their relationship in several keys. In Chapter 1, we came to know the sharp distinction the text makes between the way the good and the beautiful give pleasure, a distinction that has been taken to authorize an austere formalism that insists on washing its hands of all moral, and hence political, matters. Yet there are currents in Kant’s thought powerfully pushing in the opposite direction. Early on, Kant opens the prospect of an aesthetic “transition” leading across an “incalculable gulf ” dividing natural necessity from freedom (Introduction II, 176, 175). Later in the third Critique, we find that an “intellectual interest” in the disinterest that characterizes the beautiful adumbrates a view of nature as being amenable to moral demands. And finally, in the last sections of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” we come across the idea of beauty as a “symbol” of the good, an idea as intriguing as it is enigmatic. We will have to see if these motifs merely follow one upon the other, in a discontinuous string, or if they somehow join to bring forth the moral melody of aesthetic experience that no line would be able to make audible on its own. DISINTERESTED, YET STILL VERY IN TER EST ING

The distinction between the beautiful and the good is among the first that Kant draws in the “Analytic of the Beautiful.” We recall how, faced with a lavish palace, “I may well say that I don’t like that sort of thing . . . in true Rousseauesque style I might even vilify the vanity of the great who waste the sweat of the people on such superfluous things . . . but that is not what is at issue here” (§2, 204–205). What is at issue is aesthetic experience, which means that what is also and especially at issue is the distinctness of aesthetic judgment from moral judgment. Distinctness is itself distinct from the antagonism between the beautiful and the good that Rousseau bemoans. In one fell swoop the concept of taste loses the moral import that it has carried for a century and a half. The touchstone that Kant uses to authenticate the difference between aesthetics and morality is, as we have seen, the concept of interest. “The good is the object of the will,” and therefore “to will something

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and to take plea sure in its existence, i.e., to take an interest in it, are identical,” he reasons (§4, 209). Since the plea sure in beauty remains aloof from desires of all kinds, because it is “without any interest,” it remains “indifferent . . . with regard to the existence of the object” that occasion this plea sure (§2, 204). What Kant calls the freedom of this plea sure consists in its remaining unconcerned with the protection or possession of the object. It is indifferent to happiness and, what is more relevant to us here, indifferent too to moral ends. We have attempted to make sense of all this before. But the claims of interest are not easily kept at bay. Hardly has Kant asserted the utter detachment from interest in aesthetic judgment than he appends a note that, in the small print at the bottom of the page, introduces the odd notion that disinterestedness itself might rouse our interest: A judgment on an object of pleasure can be entirely disinterested yet still very interesting, i.e., it is not grounded on any interest but it produces an interest; all pure moral judgments are like this. But the pure judgment of taste does not in itself even ground any interest. Only in society does it become interesting to have taste, the reason for which will be indicated in the sequel. (§2, 205n)

How rich the ironies running through this passage are. Finding what “can be entirely disinterested . . . still very interesting” is only the most evident. The deeper irony lies in the idea that “only in society does it become interesting to have taste.” Taste is, of course, always a social phenomenon, as Kant himself attests. Still, we understand that for Kant “in society” has a merely empirical force; his eyes are fi xed on a transcendental analysis, where taste is not “in” society in this sense. Yet we also know that society in a different sense, namely, as the arena that affords the very possibility of a communication between subjects, is no mere empirical addendum to aesthetic judgment, but built into the experience itself. At the same time, it turns out that the most significantly interesting moments of having and displaying taste for Kant are the ones that take place in utter solitude, where I am “in society” precisely by virtue of having turned my back to it. We can put this idea of something that is itself entirely disinterested gaining its own form of interest another way: only by relinquishing moral concerns—by remaining “free” of them— does aesthetic experience come to gain moral force.

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This puts us in the neighborhood of Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory, which discovers art’s true social commitment in the ways it stubbornly shuns social, moral, and political entanglements. But merely in the neighborhood, for much divides the two ways of thinking. Adorno quietly allows what is no more than a difference between the aesthetic and the moral to slide into a bona fide opposition between the artwork and what he likes to call “the False,” which encompasses all that is not well with the world. Then, urged on by his peerless sensitivity to art and by his fertile dialectical imagination, he finds the outlines of the True shining forth where one might least suspect it—in the deepest obscurity of Schönberg’s or Beckett’s works, for example. For Kant, however, the significance that the aesthetic may hold for the moral is, if anything, grander than it is for Adorno, yet his claims are less grandiose. They are, in fact, so profoundly equivocal that they leave us confounded; they leave us with the sense that whatever path may lead from the disinterested to the interested, from the aesthetic to the moral, is so fragile that it hardly encourages speculation about whether its destination is euphoric or gloomy. We can find our way into Kant’s way of thinking about the moral, and hence political, significance of aesthetic experience— and, implicitly, its difference with Adorno’s Hegelian theory—through an unlikely opening. It is the difference Kant makes between natural and artistic beauty. Throughout most of the third Critique, this difference remains far more ambivalent than most commentators claim (a point we elaborate in Chapter 4), yet at the point at which the interest in the disinterested comes into focus, Kant ratchets up the importance of the difference. Whatever moral interest we may have in beauty, he maintains, lies in the beauty of nature alone. Hegel famously dismisses natural beauty for its lack of philosophical import and pivots aesthetic theory toward art, and for good. (Adorno does make some allowances for natural beauty, since he sees in it a silent protest against the ravages the world suffers at the hands of technocratic power. But that is another story.) It is true that the line Kant draws between the beauty of nature and that of art is patent, but it is also more complex than it may at first seem. What emerges in Kant’s most significant thinking on the interest lodged in the disinterested is the recognition that the aesthetic experience of nature does not remain deaf to the question of how the beautiful object has come into being, that while this experience may not be “grounded” in the question of how nature is made, it does give rise to that question. Kant’s meditation on

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art, where the question of making—of production and creativity—moves into the foreground, is thus anticipated by the examination of the “intellectual interest in the beautiful” (§42, 298) that preoccupies him in this earlier section; once in the grip of this interest, I can no longer remain “indifferent . . . with regard to the existence of the object,” since I now attend to how this object has come to be. As we shall see, the conception of nature’s coming into being maintains a mysterious kinship with the way art must be understood to have been made. What complicates the relationship, and especially the hierarchy, of natural and artistic beauty is that it is the experience of art that supplies the model that allows me to take an interest in the beauty of nature and, in the process, value it more highly than art itself. I am able to hear the indistinct moral whisper in the beauty of nature when I have learned to listen to it as art; in Kant’s terms: “nature was beautiful, if at the same time it looked like art” (§45, 306). The meditation on the moral charge of what is indifferent to the moral charge opens our view to some of the deepest, most volatile strata of Kant’s aesthetic project. All this remains to be shown. *

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The question Kant raises is whether an aesthetic judgment, though unmotivated by an interest in an object, may still be “combined with” some kind of interest (§41, 296). Human beings can be moved by any number of interests, but Kant is finally interested in interest if it bears on moral interest. The answer he offers amounts to enforcing a distinction between natural and human-made objects, a distinction turning on the question of whether an aesthetic experience that has one or the other kind of object at its center “indicates a disposition of the mind that is favorable to the moral feeling” (§42, 299). Seen this way, the difference between the two could hardly be more sharply drawn. The “virtuosi of taste,” Kant declares (echoing Rousseau again), are seen, and “not without reason,” as being “usually vain, obstinate, and given to corrupting passions” (§42, 298). By contrast, “an immediate interest in the beauty of nature . . . is always a mark of a good soul” (ibid.). This thought is at once conventional and surprising; we feel we have come across it in a hundred moralizing tracts, but it startles us that we now encounter it in this book, since nothing we have read has prepared us for it. Perhaps Kant felt this too, since the tone he strikes here makes it evident that the distinction he has just made between the way the aesthetic percep-

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tion of artworks and that of natural beauties is (or is not) attuned to moral feeling is not merely yet another analytic move among others. There is real tenderness in the way he handles the interest in the beauty of nature, which lends his philosophical point a poetic undertow we do not often feel in his prose. Take, for instance, this passage: Someone who alone (and without any intention of wanting to communicate his observations to others) considers the beautiful shape of a wildflower, a bird, an insect, etc., in order to marvel at it, to love it, and to be unwilling for it to be entirely absent from nature, even though some harm might come to him from it rather than there being any prospect of advantage to him from it, takes an immediate and certainly intellectual interest in the beauty of nature. (§42, 299)

We find here the outlines of aesthetic environmentalism, the disposition in which nature is seen as worthy of protection for the simple but compelling reason that the observer holds it dear for its beauty and finds that its very “existence pleases” (ibid.). This, “even though some harm might come to him from it,” even though, that is, it poses a risk to his existence. This observer’s interest in nature is not motivated by “any prospect of advantage to him”; it is a disinterested interest, propelled by the wish to contemplate nature in its aesthetic dimension, “to marvel at it, to love it.” Because it forgoes gaining an advantage, this love is not a possessive love and the marvel not a spur to unveiling nature’s mysteries. At the same time, the aesthetic relation, disinterested in itself, harbors (or is “combined with”) an “immediate” interest, namely, “to be unwilling for [the beautiful shape] to be entirely absent from nature.” In Chapter 2, we said that aesthetic experience need not have a concern to care for the object of its attention, since it is not motivated by moral or sensory desires. Now we learn that disinterested beauty may lead to “an immediate and certainly intellectual interest” in preservation. The idea, developed early in the Critique of Judgment, that beauty involves a pleasure “without any interest” (§5, 211), one of the pillars of Kant’s aesthetic conception, is not so much withdrawn as given a twist. If in the earlier passage Kant had insisted that in aesthetic judgment “what matters is what I make of this representation [of the object] in myself, not how I depend on the existence of the object” (§2, 205), in our present context I am “unwilling for it to be entirely absent from nature.” Not just its form, but its

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existence affords pleasure. Does my pleasure therefore “depend” on the existence of the object? There seems to be no unequivocal answer. No doubt without the existence of the wildflower or the insect there would be nothing to love and to marvel at, yet love and marvel seem to arise in some sense “before” the immediate interest in nature’s existence takes hold, or at any rate in a dimension of feeling distinct from that interest. We find that the most charged contemplation of nature veers away from being an aesthetic experience conceivable as pure, as we will find in the following chapters that an intensive aesthetic engagement with art must fail the standards of purity that Kant struggles to maintain in the “Analytic of the Beautiful.” If Kant’s own thinking reveals this purity as untenable, that is due neither to a flaw in the thinking nor a defect in the aesthetic experience. The richest models of aesthetic experience the text offers eschew just the purity it itself champions. We could now declare the conception of aesthetic judgment to have “collapsed,” but what would we have achieved (other than having thumped our very critical chests)? Not only would we have failed in gaining a sharper understanding of this complex experience, we would have forsaken the tenuous grasp we have managed to gain by following Kant’s lead. We fare better acknowledging that pure aesthetic judgment is an analytic fiction, useful to think with when trying to describe and understand aesthetic experience in its richest instances. THE ECSTASY OF THINKING

Our passage holds still other mysteries. The wildflower is one. Flowers, though ubiquitous in the third Critique, are other wise not marked as “wild”; in fact, they belong to the domestic world. This flower alerts us to the distance that separates our scene from the garden and the flower-adorned dwelling, the more usual staging grounds for an experience of beauty Kant offers in the book, while “wild” nature has been mainly the province of the sublime. As we have said, this section is preoccupied with trying to come up with a firm distinction between beauty I find in nature and beauty I find in human-made things. But looking at the broader context from which the passage we cited is taken, we recognize how feeble the concept of “distinction” is in capturing what here drives apart natural and artificial beauty, how this dispassionate philosophical concept is sustained by a powerful affective force tugging at

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the human beings who are involved. Look, for example, at the peripeteia in the narrative: If a man who has enough taste to make judgments about products of beautiful art with the greatest correctness and refinement, gladly leaves the room in which are to be found those beauties . . . and turns to the beautiful in nature, in order as it were to find here an ecstasy for his spirit in a line of thought that he can never fully develop, then we would consider this choice of his with high respect and presuppose in him a beautiful soul. (§42, 299–300)

This is a story not of a clinical cut carried out by the philosopher but of a “turn” achieved by the anonymous man of taste in our scene, a turn fueled by the promise of “ecstasy” in “the beautiful in nature.” Kant did admire Jean-Jacques Rousseau (a portrait hung in his Königsberg study), yet in his writings he sentimentalizes neither nature nor solitude; he sees no alternative to the embedment of the human being in society, despite the violence to which it routinely gives rise. In fact, we know that he goes out of his way to note that, far from furthering the aesthetic, a withdrawal from the social world negates it. Time and again, we have seen how being social and being communicative are not optional features of Kant’s conception of aesthetic experience, but dimensions lending that experience depth and breadth. How, then, do we account for this apparently most un-Kantian turn away from society, replete as the social space is with “products of beautiful art,” and toward an encounter with nature, “alone (and without any intention of wanting to communicate)”? Often the most perplexing ideas offer the most promising points of entry, and here the perplexity is not difficult to make out. It lies in the “ecstasy” that awaits the man of taste once he turns to nature. How extraordinary to come across ecstasy just as we are on our way to moral feeling. The appearance of this idea, of the word itself—Wollust—jolts us, since in the writings Kant published it is usually meant to send the reader in the direction of sexual depravity, a place distant from where we take the “beautiful soul” to make its home. In the Metaphysics of Morals, for example, published seven years after the Critique of Judgment, “ öff entliche Wollust” is nothing but public prostitution, one of the indecencies, “as violations of moral feeling,” that Kant enjoins the police to control, together with “begging, noise on the

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streets, [and] stenches” (6: 325). This is admittedly an extreme example; more typically, Wollust means to Kant what it means to most late eighteenthcentury writers, namely, debauched sexual pleasure. How did wanton sexual lust make its way into our passage, eliciting “high respect” from us? Granted, the force of Wollust has been tempered here; the man of taste turns to nature “as it were to find here an ecstasy,” and it is an ecstasy not of the flesh but “for his spirit.” Still, there is no denying its presence. As the composition of the word suggests (it is said to derive from WohlLust, literally “well pleasure”), we have exceeded the Lust that in the third Critique designates aesthetic pleasure, exceeded it by a surplus of itself— a pleasure overflowing with pleasure. There is another perplexity. This pleasure glutted by wellness—this bliss— is not found in nature, as we might expect. Kant’s man of taste attains ecstasy not by embracing the voluptuous forms of nature themselves, in the way of so much second-rate nature poetry. His ecstasy is achieved in a more mysterious form, namely, “in a line of thought that he can never fully develop.” This puts us at a loss. What are we to make of the fact that the highest pitch of pleasure is realized not while beholding the flower, the bird, or the insect, but “in a line of thought”? And how, furthermore, to make sense of the deeper mystery of this line remaining forever undeveloped, of it failing to reach its end? If, as Kant claims earlier, “the attainment of every aim is combined with the feeling of pleasure” (Introduction VI, 187), we would confidently conclude that what is more than plea sure depends on the fullest consummation of aims, not on its frustration. The sexually charged meaning of Wollust certainly suggests as much. Stepping back from the passage, we recognize in this ecstasy of unconsummated thinking a kinship to what Kant, a few sections later, calls an “aesthetic idea,” which “occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible” (§49, 314). Activated most intensely by artworks, such aesthetic ideas (to which we turn in Chapter 6) are characterized by the same open-endedness of thinking that we encountered in our passage. In both cases, the failure to “fully attain” or “fully develop” an end—the failure to arrive at a thought or a word that would “be adequate to” this thinking— ought to lead to displeasure, yet in both cases the opposite happens. We do not yet know why, in large part

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because we do not yet have the measure of our own perplexity. Let us see if we can get closer to what eludes us. AN INCALCULABLE CHASM BETWEEN NATURE AND FREEDOM

To see how what might have been a source of vexation turns out to generate unsurpassed joy, it helps to recall the key issue in this section, the issue of an “intellectual interest in the beautiful” (§42, 298). Wherein lies this interest? Earlier we detected a protective, hence interested, attitude toward nature that is born of the aesthetic, and hence disinterested, contemplation of nature. But there is, for Kant, a still more fundamental intellectual interest, namely, “that nature should at least show some trace or give a hint that it contains in itself some sort of ground for assuming a lawful correspondence of its products with our pleasure that is independent of all interest” (§42, 300). The interest, then, lies in making out a “correspondence”— actually the mere “trace” or “hint” licensing the surmise of a correspondence— between the “products” of nature and a feeling of pleasure “that is independent of all interest.” It interests us that we feel disinterestedly, because when we feel disinterestedly, when, for example, we love and marvel at a wildflower or an insect, nature “show[s]” or “give[s]” us something: something not meant for our consumption or possession, but rather a trace or a hint: a sign. We take nature to show or give us a sign that there is “some sort of ground”— some reason (Grund )—for assuming a correspondence or accord (Übereinstimmung) between it and us, between its “products” and our feeling. The interest in such signs, indistinct and ambiguous though they may be, takes us back to the first pages of the introduction to the Critique of Judgment, where from a high perch Kant scans the sweep of his critical enterprise to fix the place for judgment and its critique. What is this place? Judgment, we learn, is a “means of combining [Verbindungsmittel ]” (Introduction III, 176); it effects a “combination [Verknüpfung],” a knotting or looping together (Introduction IX, 195); it is a “mediating concept [vermittelnde[r] Begriff ]” (Introduction IX, 196). Judgment is, then, a Mittel, a means and a medium: it is what is betwixt and between, what joins and binds. This gives us pause about the place of judgment as a philosophical concept, since it is not clear if what is constitutively in between can

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be said even to have a place. Which entities does judgment come between, and which does it join? “The power of judgment,” Kant writes, “provides the mediating concept between the concepts of nature and the concept of freedom” (ibid.). We understand the words and their arrangement, but not their significance. Given Kant’s metaphysical commitments, a mediation or combination between the concepts of nature and those of freedom is not at all easy to understand; it is uncertain if it is even possible, let alone how it might be brought about. Let us see why. One of the key propositions of Kant’s philosophy is that these two sets of concepts, those of nature and of freedom, rule distinct and nonoverlapping domains. The concepts of nature, also called the concepts of the understanding, provide the rules of how appearances appear to us. Thus mental categories (for example, causation) determine the way we can know the empirical world; other structures of the mind permit the objects in the world to appear to us only if they take up space and endure in time. This is the business of what Kant calls theoretical reason: the concepts of the understanding provide the frame for whatever knowledge (Kant’s word is cognition) we can have of nature, but our reason does not hold sway here. The concepts of freedom, by contrast, are guided by reason and remain entirely unconstrained by nature and its laws. They too provide rules (or “legislate,” as Kant likes to say), not in the theoretical domain of sensible nature, but in the practical domain that rests on what Kant calls a “supersensible principle” (Introduction IX, 196). (Thus our reason, in full freedom, lays down the laws of our moral action: it tells us to act toward the good.) The distinction between the sensible and the supersensible, key to the Critique of Pure Reason, serves to block any move that would reduce every thing, including all spontaneity, to nature and its workings. What is more, it licenses the claim that the realm of freedom is at least logically possible. This leads to a picture of two worlds, as it were, divided by an abyss: The domain of the concept of nature under the one legislation and that of the concept of freedom under the other are entirely barred from any mutual influence that they could have on each other by themselves (each in accordance with its fundamental laws) by the great chasm that separates the supersensible from the appearances. The concept of freedom determines nothing in regard to the theoretical cognition of nature; the concept of nature likewise determines nothing in regard to the practical laws of freedom: and it is

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to this extent not possible to throw a bridge from one domain to the other. (Introduction IX, 195)

Right in the middle of this most intricately assembled philosophical system a “great chasm,” in fact an “incalculable chasm” (Introduction II, 175), opens up. It is the chasm yawning between the laws of nature and the demands of morality, and it results from the doctrine, axiomatic for Kant, that the domain of objects is subject to laws whose source is distinct from that of human reason, “just as if there were so many different worlds” (Introduction II, 176). This rift is one consequence of leaving behind both rationalist and empiricist ways of thinking. In Kant’s approach, the point of convergence of the two systems of norms—the order of the law of nature and that of the law of rational action—may be found neither in transcendence nor in immanence. His is a world that neither emanates from a mind that weaves its rationality into every facet of the world (in the manner, for example, of the “preestablished harmony” supposed by Leibniz), nor is it built up from matter alone, with laws of nature holding sway all the way through (in the manner of empiricism and most contemporary natural sciences). It is one achievement of his philosophy to have shown that whether the world “really” falls under one or the other logic is not something human beings can know objectively and that, for us, neither one of the two orders of legislation can be reduced to the other. As far as we know, “it is . . . not possible to throw a bridge from one domain to the other.” So far, so good, but we know this cannot be the end of the story. If it were, there would be no in-between, no “mediating concept,” no “means of combination”; there would be no critique of judgment. Knowing this, we differ fundamentally from the first readers of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781; second edition in 1787) and even of those of the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), for nowhere in those works does Kant register the need for a “mediating concept” between the concepts of nature and the concepts of freedom, between the main preoccupations of his first and second Critiques. The depth and complexity of his system of thought at times suggest that it came into the world whole, with all moving parts fully formed; commentators intent on defending or attacking his critical enterprise often reinforce this impression. Yet the first Critique gives no hint of a need for a second, and the second does not call for a third, though a mere two years separates their appearance. This is not to say that Kant makes it up as he goes along,

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but it does mean that the very geography of his philosophy is altered by his meditations on aesthetic experience and teleological judgment, on artworks and organisms. The introduction, in which he surveys “the domain of philosophy in general” (Introduction II, 174) and proposes a way of “combining the two parts of philosophy into one whole” (Introduction III, 176), was written last and so emerges from a movement of thought that has engaged a vast range of issues, among them the singularity of the judgment of taste; the “negative pleasure” in the sublime (§23, 245); art and the difference it makes; the enigmatic idea of a “self-organizing being” (§65, 374); “the final end . . . of creation itself” (§84, 434); and, finally, the question of “the moral proof of the existence of God” (§87, 447). When this introduction offers a view of a landscape of majestic domains separated by an incalculable chasm at the edge of which a lone human being seeks to find his bearings—the sort of landscape Caspar David Friedrich begins to paint at around the same time—it no longer seems apt to say that Kant means to fix the place of judgment within his system. Rather, reflection on different forms of judgment has itself altered the philosophical terrain. As a result of this changed landscape, we read the claims to fragmentation not as the last word, but as the opening gambit of a drama leading, ideally, to “one whole.” We know that the unyielding assertions about the absolute noninterference of the two worlds must yield sooner or later to an insight that opens the way to a different line of thinking. Which is why the moment Kant tells us just how unübersehbar—how incalculable, how bottomless—the chasm is, we begin to feel the looming presence of a “yet.” This being a work written in German, the “yet” looms and looms as the sentence goes on and on, but it is well worth the wait: Now although there is an incalculable chasm fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, as the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible, so that from the former to the latter (thus by means of the theoretical use of reason) no transition is possible, just as if there were so many different worlds, the first of which can have no influence on the second: yet the latter should have an influence on the former, namely, the concept of freedom should make the end that is imposed by its laws real in the sensible world. (Introduction II, 175–176)

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We have reached the nub of the issue: while the two domains in which the two sets of concepts exert their force indeed do not overlap, and while the realm of nature “can have no influence” on the realm of freedom, the reverse should nonetheless be true: freedom, through the laws it devises, “should have an influence” on the realm of nature. Why this lopsidedness? Why introduce an asymmetry between nature and freedom, between is and ought? It is true that the laws devised by reason have prescriptive force only for what, in the human being, is not subject to the laws of nature. In that sense, there are indeed two distinct domains. And yet, “the concept of freedom should make the end that is imposed by its laws real in the sensible world.” It “should” because once reason has worked out its legislation, and done so in complete freedom from the pressures of nature, those laws become duties meant to guide our actions. It therefore interests reason, Kant notes, “that the ideas . . . have objective reality” (§42, 300). And since, despite there being two autonomous domains of philosophy, we inhabit one world, namely, the world of appearances, these ideas can only “have objective reality” in that world. The laws of reason legislate away in a region untouched by the constraints of nature, but it is part of the force of those laws that they demand actions (to promote justice, for example), and actions must face the music of reality. There is another step to take. We said that by Kant’s reckoning this reality obeys laws whose source differs radically from that of the laws of freedom. If that is so, then it is at least possible that reality has a structure that makes it inimical to the fulfillment of the purposes we set ourselves, to justice and goodness, for example; in its very form, the world could be at cross-purposes with our moral aims to such a degree that these aims would remain forever frustrated. Were this kind of preestablished discord to prevail, our actions would arise from freedom only to dissipate in futility. But if our aims are to have at least a chance of “hav[ing] objective reality,” then the world would need to be structured in a way that what is the case can accommodate what ought to be the case. In the more careful terms Kant chooses: nature must consequently also be able to be conceived in such a way that the lawfulness of its form is at least in agreement with the possibility of the ends that are to be realized in it according to laws of freedom. (Introduction II, 176)

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Although at this point in the text, Kant has yet to say a word about judgment and the role it may play in coordinating the two orders of lawfulness, we feel it stirring in the language of the sentence. Where our translation reads “is . . . in agreement with,” Kant writes “zusammenstimme”: “nature must . . . be conceived in such a way that the lawfulness of its form may at least zusammenstimme with the possibility of the ends that are to be realized in it according to laws of freedom.” The two systems of norms literally “voice” or “tune together.” Zusammenstimmen sets the tone for the many terms in the orbit of Stimmung (attunement, mood) that Kant will use to describe aesthetic judgment: stimmen (to fit, to tune, to be in accord), beistimmen and zustimmen (to agree), übereinstimmen (to correspond). As we noted in Chapter 2, all of these suggest forms of coordination that forgo the scenario in which one entity compels the assent of another in favor of what Kant calls free play, a sort of synchronized vibration in which harmony is neither imposed from above (by force of rules or reason) nor achieved from below (by virtue of a harmony woven into all facets of human existence), but rather by means of a fortuitous, improvised play that happens somewhere in between. THE KINSHIP OF FEELING

We credit that reason would be interested “that [its] ideas . . . have objective reality,” but we do not yet see why that interest would spur an interest in glimpsing the traces and hints of an accord between the structure of nature and the structure of our aesthetic pleasure. What does the one interest—the interest in moral actions having a grip on the world of objects—have to do with the other, the interest in nature revealing the “lawful correspondence” of the wildflower with the pleasure I take in it? The one interest is clearly moral, but the other? The key to the link between the two interests lies in the two kinds of feelings that are involved. The two feelings, aesthetic and moral, are linked by what Kant calls “Verwandtschaft” (§42, 300–301), which can be rendered as “kinship” or “affinity,” the latter keeping in play the chemical sense of an “elective affinity,” or Wahlverwandtschaft. This familial or chemical bond names the fact that both feelings are intertwined with disinterested judgments. Aesthetic pleasure is not the only kind of feeling implicated in a disinterested judgment; moral feeling, too, is “a satisfaction which

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we make into a law for everyone without our judgment being grounded in any interest” (§42, 300). Both feelings, then, accompany judgments not guided by interest, and both make a claim to universal assent. We are well familiar with the sort of universality that Kantian aesthetic judgment entails; it is born of a feeling of pleasure involved in a mental configuration aimed at “cognition as such” (§9, 217). The logic of Kantian moral feeling is different and attended by a host of complexities (which we will set aside), yet it is analogous to aesthetic feeling in a crucial way, namely, in its partaking of universality. Moral feeling— and for Kant there is finally only one authentic moral feeling, namely, respect— accompanies moral action, and it does so not contingently but necessarily. We need not survey people about their feelings to learn this, but know through an analysis of how the will prescribes the moral law—namely, by “strik[ing] down selfconceit”—that it brings about a feeling of “the greatest respect.” Because “this feeling . . . is . . . brought about solely by reason” (Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 76), it is a feeling “we make into a law for everyone.” This bond of kinship between aesthetic and moral feeling grounds the proposition Kant makes later in the third Critique that “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good” (§59, 353), where the bond is specified as an analogy and further unfolded (§59, 354). It also helps us make sense of the strange business of the “correspondence” or attunement (Übereinstimmung) between nature’s “products with our satisfaction that is independent of all interest,” for we now see that finding a “trace” or a “hint” of such correspondence in aesthetic feeling is linked, by force of structural analogy and family bond, to the possibility of a correspondence revealing itself in moral feeling. And if there is an attunement between the way the world is made and our moral feeling, then it is entirely possible that “the ideas [of reason] . . . have objective reality.” “Consequently,” Kant announces: the mind cannot reflect on the beauty of nature without finding itself at the same time to be interested in it. But this interest has a kinship to the moral, and he who takes such an interest in the beautiful in nature can do so only insofar as he has already firmly established his interest in the morally good. We thus have cause at least to suspect a predisposition to a good moral disposition in one who is immediately interested in the beauty of nature. (§42, 300–301)

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What interests us in aesthetic pleasure, then, is, in the words of the philosopher Gérard Lebrun, “the fact that nature seems to favor a disinterested pleasure,” that nature may accommodate a form of behavior not ruled by the necessity of nature’s laws. THE BEAUTIFUL AS THE SUBLIME

Almost surreptitiously, Kant effects a profound shift in the relationship between aesthetic experience and morality. Up to this point, if a “kinship” was to be found between the aesthetic and the moral, we would have been inclined to look for it not in the beautiful but in the overwhelming feeling of the sublime. It is true that Kant, in keeping with the tradition, locates the sublime above all in nature (and in a rather stagy version of nature), but this, he tells us, is due to a “subreption,” a sleight of mind, as it were, by means of which a feature of the subject is “subreptitiously” transferred to an object. For in the end, “the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation, which we show to an object in nature through a certain subreption (substitution of a respect for the object instead of a respect for the idea of humanity in our subject)” (§27, 257). In keeping with this logic, Kant finds the apex of sublimity in the very law itself, which is to say in the capacity of human beings to impose their will, guided by reason, on the world. (His two exemplars are the Mosaic prohibition against making graven images [“General Remark,” 274] and the inscription on the temple of Isis that declares: ‘‘I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and my veil no mortal has removed” [§49, 316n].) The two, the aesthetic feeling of sublimity and the moral feeling of “greatest respect,” are thus aligned to the point of identity (“the sublime . . . is respect for our own vocation”); we disentangle them at the risk of falling prey to a subreption. Yet in the section we have been considering, this tight coordination of moral feeling and sublimity gives way to a more complex arrangement in which it is beauty— and specifically the beauty of nature—that “indicates a disposition of the mind that is favorable to the moral feeling.” Indeed, once aesthetic experience finds itself in the magnetic field of moral interests, we become witness to a strange superimposition of the beautiful and the sublime the likes of which we have not come across in the book. The scene we know so well by now—the man of taste “turn[ing] to the beautiful of nature” in solitude, undaunted by the harm that may befall him from nature’s

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perils—this scene of aesthetic bliss turns out not to be so solitary after all, but itself serves as an occasion for a second-order observation that issues in a second-order judgment. And who performs this observing and judging? None other than “we.” “We,” Kant writes, “would consider this choice of his with high respect [Hochachtung].” High respect leads us, naturally, to think of this feeling in moral terms, but we just saw how moral feeling can also appear in the guise of, indeed become indistinguishable from, the sublime. If we follow this opening, the strange possibility suggests itself that beauty itself can become the occasion for a sublime experience. While in the sections devoted to the sublime (§§23–29), the feeling of sublimity is summoned in the direct confrontation with excessive size or power (volcanoes, storms, war, the law), here it is beauty that seizes us. Stranger still, it is not beauty I feel, not my own pleasure in the wildflower or insect, but a beauty I witness another enjoying, beauty once removed. It is not easy to understand how beauty felt by someone else can come to overwhelm me. One thing that hinders us is the orthodox understanding of Kant’s conception of beauty. According to this understanding, beauty always appears in the company of well-behaved ideas like harmony, play, and contemplation and promises a manageable form of pleasure—so manageable that Adorno called it “castrated hedonism.” This is a demure kind of beauty, a beauty fit for mixed company. It is also a caricature of Kant’s conception. Like every caricature, it does capture something true in its target, but it also misses what finally is most significant. We saw in Chapter 1 how Kant’s notion of the pleasure in the beautiful sits awkwardly with conventional notions of aesthetic pleasure. Now we realize that we have a vocabulary for naming this ill fit, for what characterizes beauty at the moment moral interests come into play is that it exceeds its own measure. At such moments, forms of experiencing beauty reveal themselves that surpass what the orthodox notion allows, forms so excessive that Kant resorts to the steamy notion of Wollust to name them. (He does not call in the police this time, since the situation involves only a man and a wildflower.) If seeing the ecstasy of natural beauty in the man of taste can move us toward the sublime, it is because the logic of the sublime—of a bliss derived from an experience that “can never [be] fully develop[ed],” that is therefore beyond measure and without culmination—is already lodged in the beautiful itself. It may be granted that this notion of beauty, voluptuous and expansive as it is, gives us rich access to the unruliness and depth of aesthetic experience,

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but is it really Kant’s? If it is, should we not move to dismiss the whole business of “disinterested plea sure” and “universal subjectivity” that most readers of Kant, even the charitable ones, regard as a kind Rube Goldberg device, fascinating in how it manages to connect this with that, but finally pointless? For these readers, among which I sometimes find myself, the notion of pure beauty developed in the “Analytic,” even when its painstaking construction has been appreciated, is among the hardest of the book’s ideas to swallow. Does he really mean it when he claims that a judgment of beauty makes a universal claim, that it is utterly unblemished by the particularities of the person judging, that it remains untouched by concepts? What actual judgment could ever conform to such strictures? Has anyone reported having had an aesthetic experience that checked off all Kantian boxes? If not, if the real world fails the theory every time, then surely the theory has failed to account for our experience of the world. In which case, why bother? These are power ful challenges, and my aim is not to blunt them. It is rather to suggest that the account Kant gives, despite its odd language and its improbable demands, provides us with compelling ways of thinking through aesthetic experience, of uncovering dimensions of this experience for which we ordinarily lack a language. Our reading of the ecstasy in the beauty of nature and the interest it occasions allows us to see that the various accounts of beauty need not be seen as excluding one another. Rather we realize that the archetypal scene of aesthetic judgment that we tend to conjure up when thinking about Kant’s theory— a subject “reflecting” on the quality of its own lofty feeling and “laying claim” to the assent of all, as though seized by a sudden wave of megalomania—provides us with no more than the skeleton of aesthetic experience, the transcendental structure. When reading Kant, most of us take the bones for the whole body, which in turn leads us to protest that the theory is bloodless and brittle. Aesthetic experience is sustained by the structure of pure judgments of beauty that Kant uncovers, just as grammar pervades every sentence of a novel, yet it would be a mistake to confuse the full experience with the logic of pure judgment, just as it would be a misreading to reduce the novel to its grammar. It is part of Kant’s procedure to screen out the complexity to reveal the essentials of the anatomy. But in the full arena of my engagement with the world, where interests are in play, the aesthetic experience of another does not leave me indifferent, not because the other issues a demand and asks my assent (recall that the man beholds the wildflower “without any intention of wanting

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to communicate his observations to others”), but because the experience itself has a power ful hold on me. What now becomes clear through the analysis of the “intellectual interest” is that this way of being moved by the aesthetic experience of another is not a case of beauty having gone awry, but rather beauty at its fiercest. The idea that Kant brings into ever sharper focus is that the notion of pure beauty he himself develops has, if taken for the whole, something inert about it, and that aesthetic experience gains in mobility and force when it opens itself to dimensions beyond itself, not by “combining” modes of experience but by revealing how any significant experience exceeds itself. The “wildflower,” which caught our attention and launched us on this inquiry, gives us a hint about this superimposition of the beautiful and the sublime, of the bounded and the unbounded. Its two components—being wild and being a flower—initially seemed to pull into opposite directions, but now we become aware of a single movement into a highly charged yet uncertain region of experience. The flower, the very emblem of beauty throughout the book, pushes—or is it pushed?—into the wilds of an ecstatic encounter, where its beauty is surpassed not by something else but by beauty itself. And since, to repeat, “the mind cannot reflect on the beauty of nature without finding itself at the same time to be interested,” this movement of beauty beyond itself and into the bliss of an infinite line of thinking is no aberration but rather a possibility coiled in every experience of beauty. True, Kant limits his assertion to “the beauty of nature” here, but in the chapters on art (Chapters 4–6) we will see that the concept of “aesthetic ideas,” while involving a different logic, also points to what in beauty exceeds the beauty of artworks. There is, then, something internal to beauty, in both that of nature and of art, that unsettles its contained form of contemplative pleasure and urges it into a rapturous, open-ended mobility. This does not happen in every case, to be sure, but every case affords such an opportunity, and I do not and cannot know when it might befall me. THE LEAP OF BEAUTY

There is good reason for the reader to pause in the face of all the traces and hints, the lines of thought that never fully develop, the asserted kinships and assumed correspondences. Have they finally shown us anything worth seeing? Kant seems beset by similar worries when he concedes, “It will be

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said that this interpretation of aesthetic judgments in terms of their kinship with moral feeling looks much too studied” (§42, 301). Yet after some halfhearted backpedaling, he presses on, for the heart of the matter—what finally is meant to satisfy the intellectual interest in the beautiful—has yet to be reached. And when he reaches it, we are not entirely surprised that it too partakes of something constitutively unreachable. What is finally at stake when, in the experience of beauty, I personify nature—when I take it to “give a hint” or “figuratively speak to us in its beautiful forms” (§42, 301)—is the idea that nature in its beautiful products shows itself as art, not merely by chance, but as it were intentionally, in accordance with a lawful arrangement and as purposiveness without a purpose, which latter, since we never encounter it externally, we naturally seek within ourselves, and indeed in that which constitutes the ultimate end of our existence, namely the moral vocation. (Ibid.)

In its beautiful products, nature “shows itself as art.” It reveals itself as something made, and made “as it were intentionally.” (In Chapters 4 and 5, we shall see the extent to which making “as it were intentionally” describes the making of art itself.) What does it mean for nature to show itself as art? What nature shows “in its beautiful products” is that it is not merely made, but made the way art is made in its beautiful products, which is to say according to a structure we know from purposes— a coherence governing the relationship of parts and wholes—yet without there being an actual, nameable purpose in play. The idea of nature as artifice is the theme of the second part of the Critique of Judgment, the “Critique of Teleological Judgment,” and though what we find there is strikingly similar to what we find here in the section on the moral interest in the beautiful, the two are not identical. The part devoted to teleology develops the idea that parts of the natural world, organisms, namely, become comprehensible to human beings only if they are thought to have been brought forth by what Kant calls a “technique of nature” (First Introduction, 20: 204). The details will emerge when we turn to teleology in the last chapters of this book, but the basic idea is easily grasped: in trying to make scientific sense of organisms, Kant reasons that purposes are “indispensable for us” (§75, 398); without positing them—without knowing what a heart is for—we cannot even take the first step in researching organ-

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isms. This act of positing a purpose has profound consequences, for the purpose of any given organism or even organ does not remain isolated like an island surrounded by a meaningless ocean. Kant demonstrates that once judgment embarks on devising a purpose to understand the heart, it finds itself urged by reason to link it to the purpose ascribed to the lung, the blood, the entire body of the animal, indeed its species; purposes are coordinated by judgment into a hierarchical system that invariably leads to the question of the final purpose of nature. It is for this reason that the passage we quoted is able to put such moral weight on the question of the purpose behind a single instance: “since we never encounter [this purpose] externally, we naturally seek within ourselves, and indeed in that which constitutes the ultimate end of our existence, namely the moral vocation.” This, then, is the point where the book’s first part lines up with its second. Standing on the very edge of aesthetic experience, engulfed by a nameless euphoria as I behold the wildflower and the insect, I find within grasp an understanding of “the world in general as a product of an intelligent cause (a God)” (§75, 400). In trying to fathom the source of the ecstasy in the open-ended “line of thought,” we have found ourselves following Kant into some of the deepest waters of the third Critique. In following the logic he develops in his account, it has become clear that aesthetic experience is not the “formalist” play for which it is often taken, but engages all the significant dimensions of human life. We come back to the idea, proposed early in the book, of judgment as a “means of combining” the two disparate parts of Kant’s philosophy (Introduction III, 176), the theoretical and the practical. IS THE BEAUTIFUL A BRIDGE FROM NATURE TO FREEDOM?

How are we to understand “combining,” and how the notion of a “means”? One option is to “go all the way” and say that in aesthetic pleasure we find the world to be a place hospitable to our moral ends, that all the worries about the commensurability of the order of freedom and that of nature are stilled in the face of the bliss that the beauty of nature affords us. In this version, saying that it is within grasp to understand the world as one that is arranged according to intelligent purposes amounts to saying that is has, in fact, been grasped. We are encouraged in such a reading by a note that seems to offer this idea in unguarded fashion: “The beautiful things show that the human

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being fits into the world,” Kant writes (16: 127, R 1820a). Does he not, in the Critique of Pure Reason, echo this sentiment when he extols “the splendid order, beauty, and providence shown forth everywhere in nature leading to the faith in a wise and great author of the world” (B xxxiii)? And have we not observed the third Critique promoting the same idea? Here, while respecting the letter of the prohibition against “throw[ing] a bridge” across the “great chasm” separating the domain of the sensible and that of freedom (Introduction IX, 195), Kant seems to jury-rig an intricate chain of structures, some shakier than others, linking the moral law first to moral feeling, then to aesthetic feeling, then to purposiveness without purpose, then to purposiveness showing a “trace” or a “hint” of a purpose, then finally to the technique of nature. He leaves the abyss between the order of freedom and that of nature yawning, yet he discovers—or perhaps he concocts— a detour through the rolling hills of the beautiful, where he traverses glens so obliging to human purposes that no bridge is needed to cross them. Thus he can close the circuit by claiming that “taste as it were makes possible the transition from sensible charm to the habitual moral interest without too violent a leap” (§59, 354). A skip is all it takes, it seems. That is what we want to say, for who does not like a happy ending? It may well be what Kant too wants to say, but it is not, I think, what he does say. At every turn, an “as-it-were” lies in wait to convert the claim to which it has been attached into an analogue of itself. We have come across some of them already: the man of taste “turns to the beautiful in nature, in order as it were to find here an ecstasy for his spirit”; when it is beautiful, nature shows itself “as it were intentionally”; “taste as it were makes possible the transition” from the sensible to the moral, which is why this “transition,” even while in its very name—Übergang—it evokes a “walk” (Gang), finally cannot do without a “leap [Sprung],” albeit one that is not “too violent.” The proposition from the Critique of Pure Reason linking the beauty “shown forth” in nature to “a wise and great author of the world” turns out to be hedged too. Order and beauty lead to a “faith” in such an author, and nothing more; it is the sort of faith not ascribed to the editorial “we” of the philosopher, but one “accessible to the great multitude” (which, Kant hastens to add, is “most worthy of our respect”) (ibid.). Even the apparently unguarded note about “the beautiful things show[ing] that the human being fits into the world,” often quoted by commentators wishing to undergird a reading for the integrative achievement of the aesthetic, is beset by uncertainties.

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The idea that there is a discernible path linking freedom and necessity and that this path leads through those aesthetic hills is not Kant’s. It is his admirer Friedrich Schiller who puts out the watchword that “it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.” We have lost the ability to hear the thunderclap in these words, in part because overuse has worn thin the two main terms, beauty and freedom. Substitute a contemporary pair for those threadbare terms—“the aesthetic and politics” or “culture and history”— and some of the pivotal power of the idea reemerges, an idea put forward a mere five years after the Critique of Judgment first appears and, what is more relevant, six years after 1789. In one stroke, it loads immense political weight (or, depending on your view, ideological baggage) onto the aesthetic and transforms it into a pedagogical enterprise of limitless ambition, one that continues to animate all liberal models of cultural education to our own day. The most varied critical and pedagogical projects, at loggerheads when it comes to values and goals, are united in relying on the Schillerian path that links the human animal to practical (therefore also political) action via the beautiful. They may praise aesthetic works (for promoting virtues such as good citizenship, empathy, and tolerance, say) or they may blame them (for disguising the violence of social exclusion behind the soft veil of aesthetic pleasure), yet in either case they assume that aesthetic experience is how one “makes one’s way” to the realm of action, and hence to history and politics. Kant’s approach will seem fastidious and timid by comparison, yet it reveals, I think, a way of thinking that in its austerity remains truer to what distinguishes aesthetic experience. Let us try to understand how. We have said that the most profound link emerging from the “free interest” that, in Kant’s view, we take in beauty lies in “the admiration of nature, which in its beautiful products shows itself as art, not merely by chance, but as it were intentionally, in accordance with a lawful arrangement” (§42, 301), an arrangement investigated in the “Critique of Teleological Judgment.” If we read Kant as saying that a bridge has been thrown between enjoying the beauty of nature and understanding the purposes operating in nature, then aesthetic judgments would no longer be distinguished from teleological judgments; in seeing beauty, we would also see purposes. Yet for Kant the distinction is fundamental. While both judgments are reflective rather than determining, teleological judgment must rely on a concept to do its work, on what Kant calls a natural purpose (or end). We need to have

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a hypothesis about what a flower is for to have any hope of being able to explain its parts, its relationship to the plant, its place in the world of insects, and so on. But this is precisely what we forgo in aesthetic judgment, since such a judgment does not lean on any particular concept for support; we do not find the flower beautiful because we take it to serve reproduction. “Even the botanist,” Kant remarks, “who recognizes in it the reproductive organ of the plant, pays no attention to this natural end if he judges the flower by means of taste” (§16, 229). The “lawful arrangement” we see in nature when it shows its beauty accords therefore with a “purposiveness without a purpose,” precisely the purpose the botanist finds “indispensable” for doing botanical work. There is another thing to glean from this analysis. If purposes (be they purposes of nature or of moral life) do not simply reveal themselves in aesthetic experience, it is not far-fetched to suppose that they are therefore entirely absent from this experience, that imagining a path leading to freedom through beauty is a delusion, a form of aesthetic ideology. This is a conclusion to which some of the most astute critics are drawn. Paul de Man, having established that teleology in fact does not guide the most significant forms of aesthetic experience in Kant’s account, goes on to assert that these experiences are therefore “completely detached from any purpose or interest that the mind may find in them.” It is a hallmark of aesthetic formalism to treat the idea that no specific purpose—or interest, meaning, intention— controls aesthetic experience as an open invitation to embrace the further idea that no purposes or meanings at all are involved. A thinker of de Man’s disposition will always angle for such an invitation, since it permits him to declare that the authentic, nondeluded way of seeing aesthetically is “purely formal, devoid of any semantic depth” (83). To his credit, he spells out what it means to say that aesthetic experience (which in the course of his analysis he tellingly reduces to perception, and that to vision) is bereft of semantic depth. It means that “no mind is involved in the Kantian vision” (82); it means that vision is “reducible to the formal mathematization or geometrization of pure optics” (83); it means that in order to see like this Kantian machine, “we must . . . disarticulate, mutilate the body” (88). The first move seems harmless enough: you start with the idea that Kant distinguishes between aesthetic and teleological judgment, but before long you find yourself taking a cleaver to the human subject—its body and soul—which operation, out of sheer modesty, you ascribe to Kant. Yet in truth this is nothing but reverse

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Schillerianism. While the Schillerian turns the analogy between aesthetic and moral feeling into an identity of the two, seeing it as evidence that the kingdom of freedom can be reached via the path of beauty (and only that way), the reverse-Schillerian takes the difference between aesthetic and teleological (hence also moral) judgment as absolute nonidentity and proceeds to find in aesthetic experience a world sliced into meaningless bits; any orientation toward sense can therefore be nothing but a delusion. The one spiritualizes the aesthetic, while the other sees in it, as de Man puts it, “the prosaic materiality of the letter” (90). In one, true aesthetic experience promises full meaning, while in the other it yields no meaning. THE LANGUAGE OF CIPHERS

I have set up the dichotomy between Schiller and de Man (these names standing in for dueling traditions of reading Kant as it relates to the relationship of meaning to aesthetic experience) not to split the difference and locate Kant somewhere in the middle, where the half meanings dwell. My sense is rather that he opens our view to a way of thinking about the ecstatic experience of the beauty in nature, the one that stirs our interest, that differs from both approaches. We can hold up the formula of “purposiveness without purpose” like a totem and insist that by its decree aesthetic experience does not fully partake of the order of purposes nor that of senseless materiality. Though correct, that would yield a mere paper gain. More than wishing to make sure that the various concepts fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, we would like to understand how and why aesthetic experience is significant to us. So rather than puzzling out the parts of that strange formula of “purposiveness without purpose,” we need to feel its force and see how it captures what is true about the relationship between aesthetic experience and the logic of sense. This new logic comes into view when we consider how the two competing readings of Kant, despite reaching diametrically opposed conclusions, in fact share a feature, one that distinguishes them from Kant’s own account. It lies in the very fact of reaching a conclusion—of concluding, literally and figuratively. Whether we follow Schiller on his path to the aesthetic state or prefer de Man’s roadblock and the dismemberments taking place there, we know where aesthetic experience ends, which also means that we know that it ends. (“Technically correct rhetorical readings may be boring, monotonous,

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predictable and unpleasant, but they are irrefutable,” de Man writes, allowing that being right all the time has its drawbacks.) And we know this as a matter of theoretical insight, before getting entangled with any particular experience. The way I read Kant, his version of aesthetic experience offers no such guarantees. We know that “one cannot determine a priori which object will or will not suit taste” (Introduction VII, 191), for even rules adduced by the most respected critics have no sway over aesthetic experience (§33, 284–285). This limitation holds also for judgments derived from experience (that is, a posteriori judgments); “if someone does not find a building, a view, or a poem beautiful,” Kant remarks, “then . . . he does not allow approval to be internally imposed upon himself by a hundred voices who all praise it highly” (§33, 284). There is, then, no assurance that a certain object will elicit my aesthetic pleasure, even if a critic or a friend I trust has recommended it, or even if just yesterday I took pleasure in it. In every case, I “must try it out” (Introduction VII, 191). And even when its “beautiful forms” have revealed themselves and I find nature “speaking” to me, I cannot be sure that it will speak comprehensibly and conclusively, be it in eloquent cadences that allow me to transfigure everyday existence into the realization of freedom, as the Schillerian would have it, be it in “material” letters drained of depth and signifying nothing, as the reverse-Schillerian would insist. Quite the contrary. We know that beautiful nature, at best, “show[s] some trace or give[s] a hint,” and nothing more; when it “figuratively speaks to us in its beautiful forms,” it employs an occult form of writing, what Kant calls a “cipher [Chiffreschrift]” (§42, 301). What nature in its beautiful forms shows is not a piece of knowledge about its structure or about our existence (whether positive knowledge about politics and history or a negative knowledge about the absence of meaning), but rather a mystery whose decipherment remains deferred. We can now begin to make sense of the surprising appearance of the concept of interpretation, whose dazzling career in modern criticism and philosophy has yet to be launched (it is usually dated to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s writings of the 1820s). Up to this point, the third Critique had found no use for this idea, and it is not clear if Kant’s canonical account of beauty in the “Analytic” is able to accommodate interpretation as an element of aesthetic experience. Yet here in section 42, thanks to the force exerted by intellectual interest, the experience of beauty is driven out of its self-containment

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and finds itself entangled with a communication so cryptic that it requires the intervention of interpretation. When I see a white lily, it “seems to dispose the mind to ideas of innocence,” just as “the song of the bird proclaims joyfulness and contentment with its existence.” Yet as the sentence that follows makes evident, such correspondences are by no means simply given; they are achieved: “At least this is how we interpret nature [so deuten wir die Natur aus], whether anything of the sort is its intention or not” (§42, 302). We also observe here one of the most powerful effects of interpretation: its uncontainability. Once it has been raised as an issue, interpretation fails to remain the mere topic of discussion and invades its frame, the philosophical presentation itself. Thus, as we have seen, Kant is led to worry that his own “interpretation [Deutung]” of the matter may seem “too studied to be taken as the true interpretation [wahre Auslegung] of the cipher by means of which nature figuratively speaks to us in its beautiful forms” (§42, 301). And this is just the beginning. Interpretation, this response to a world whose meaning is no longer simply given, ramifies throughout the sections on art and the arts, as we shall have occasion to observe. Interpretation is a broad term; how are we to understand it here? The notion of a “cipher” and the terms Deutung and Auslegung incline us to think of it along narrowly exegetical lines, as a process of recovering a coded message or of bringing to light a meaning concealed deep in an object— a process that comes to a close when the code is cracked or the secret laid bare. It is true that some of Kant’s language gravitates to the idea of interpretation as, in principle, conclusive (as does his philosophical temperament, no doubt), yet I think the passages we have been looking at suggest a conception of interpretation as essentially open. Interpretation is open not when it is free to offer up just any meaning (then it is arbitrary) nor when it endlessly adds new meanings to old ones, lining them up in a progression of meanings stretching into infinity. The idea of openness emerges most clearly around the concept of aesthetic ideas and entails, as we have seen, thinking about an object “without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains.” Kant develops the notion of aesthetic ideas when he comes to grapple with the pressure that the appearance of art exerts on his aesthetic account, yet it radiates back, as it were, to illuminate our current context. When in describing the turn the man of taste makes toward the beauty of nature, Kant has him revel “in a line of thought that he can never fully develop,” he

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discloses precisely the structure of the way of thinking not identical with—not “attain[ed]” by—language that is set in motion by aesthetic ideas. And here as there, the reason that thinking cannot close in upon itself, finding itself forever developing, lies in the fact that it takes place at the very cusp of meaning itself, on the indeterminate boundary between meaning and nonmeaning, sense and nonsense, a boundary we cannot grasp in thought but can experience in beauty (and perhaps also in ecstasy, dreams, or moments of exposure). When Kant says about the experience of beautiful forms that they “as it were contain a language that nature brings to us and that seems to have a higher meaning” (§42, 302), the uncertainty lies not in what this higher meaning may consist in, but in its very existence, indeed in the question of whether the language that “seems” to harbor it even is a language. It is not a question of retrieving the “semantic content” kept under the lid of words. The zone in which this form of interpretation is active lies elsewhere, for when I love and admire that beauty of nature, I cannot tell whether the sounds that speak to me consist of nature speaking or just of the wind blowing (or of a lad faking the song of the nightingale [“General Remark,” 243; §42, 302]). In such moments, “nature figuratively speaks to us,” or perhaps it “speaks to us in figures.” It remains open if in the phrase “figürlich zu uns spricht” the figure is an effect of the language or the language an effect of a figure. Thus meaning is neither given nor withheld, not because these figures are difficult to decode (which they may well be), but because there may be no figures—because language in which such figures would have to be contained may itself be no more than a figure (but in what language?). Are the beautiful forms I enjoy in fact traces and hints of a world replete with meaning or no more than accidental effects of a mindless mechanism, like the beautiful ice crystals that Kant adduces as a warning against leaping from the beauty of nature to its purposeful arrangement (§58, 350)? We are now in a position to make explicit how the reading of Kant we have been developing differs from approaches that indict the aesthetic for its alleged complicity in ideologies. And as with other such differences, this is not merely a matter of a local skirmish, a question of “getting right” this or that aspect of the text; the import for us, rather, lies in something much broader, namely, the value of Kant’s theory in launching us on a rich description of aesthetic experience. When Kant says, and when we repeat, that “nature figuratively speaks to us,” is he— are we— simply victims of a delu-

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sion? Is this not a patent case of a fantasy, a grandiose projection of our own feeble powers onto nature, an error of anthropomorphism pure and simple? If this is not aesthetic ideology, then it seems nothing is. But our line of thinking has taken us into a region where, rather than finding the need to counter such questions, we realize that they have lost their urgency. For what does it mean to say that aesthetic experience is entwined with the task of interpretation other than the fact that this experience is not fully transparent to myself? The need for interpretation would dissolve into nothing if the language of my experience were fully my own (which is another way of saying that there would be no language in this experience). When he belatedly links aesthetic experience to the process of interpretation, Kant alerts us to the fact that the subjective experience that has stood at the center of his analysis is not self-evident: it is not evident to the self. There is in this experience something opaque to the self. And since this experience always stands in relation to the world, this world too is not fully transparent. It is what it means to find beauty in the world: I face a world whose meaning I fail to grasp with a fully developed line of thought, a failing that occasions in me an ecstatic pleasure. We know that this is not the only way we have of accessing the world. I may find a flower beautiful that the botanist deems physiologically defective. Am I therefore in error? It seems I am if we are to follow the lead of those who condemn the aesthetic for its ideological complicity. When Kant writes that in sublime experience we see the heavens “as a broad, all-embracing vault” and the ocean “as a clear watery mirror bounded only by the heavens” (“General Remark,” 270), de Man retorts that “no mind is involved in the Kantian vision of ocean and heaven”; what is more, “to the extent that any mind, that any judgment, intervenes, it is in error.” And why is it in error? Because “it is not the case that heaven is a vault or that the horizon bounds the ocean like the walls of a building” (ibid). My aesthetic experience of seeing the heavens as a vault is delusional because “it is not the case” that heaven is a vault. But do I need to cede the question of what is the case to another jurisdiction—science, apparently—and allow its judgment to enable or derail my aesthetic judgment? (Set aside that the facts of science evolve and that there was a time when for many people it was the case that heaven was a vault.) Have I then not made science into an arbiter of what counts as a nonerroneous aesthetic judgment? The same goes for the other rote gesture of ideological critique, to mea sure the permissibility of the aesthetic by

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moral norms: it only goes without saying that the aesthetic should cede to the cognitive or the moral if it is understood as a species of these. But to say that the aesthetic access to the world is not simply reducible to or translatable into a scientific fact or a moral proposition means, again, that the relationship between these ways of relating to the world is not self-evident. The opacity of aesthetic experience, which spurs interpretation into action, also shows that the idea of interpretation that Kant puts in play here—not the only one, I admit, but the most far-reaching and the most significant for a description of an aesthetic encounter with the world—varies from the notion of interpretation we know through the hermeneutic tradition. In that tradition, what Hans-Georg Gadamer terms “this miracle of understanding” can only find its grounding in “sharing in a common meaning,” a sharing that, as Gadamer rightly argues, cannot itself be questioned (for where would one stand to do such questioning, and where one’s interlocutor?). But the scene that Kant sketches—the scene of ecstasy in the face of nature’s beauty—reveals that interpretation here is not a matter of questioning the given, the way a skeptic might proceed, or of piecing together a concealed meaning, in the manner of a code breaker. It is rather a matter of relishing a given that is not fully mine, of finding bliss in what eludes me rather than in what I possess. The ecstasy of which Kant speaks, the sexually charged ravishment, we now see, does not celebrate the communion in shared meaning nor the severance from meaning (the way a Dionysian eruption is often imagined). The lover of nature “as it were” finds in beautiful nature “an ecstasy for his spirit in a line of thought that he can never fully develop.” The surpassing plea sure that the aesthetic engagement with nature provokes lies in not coming to an end, in remaining within interpretation in the sense we have tried to give the term, as remaining on the razor’s edge between meaning and its absence, the region where meaning itself may come into being or may not. The entire argument about the intellectual interest in beauty has also been an argument for the “preeminence of the beauty of nature over the beauty of art” (§42, 299); Kant makes that explicit, and commentators, starting with Hegel, have followed suit and taken the supremacy of the one over the other as an essential (and, if you are of Hegel’s disposition, flawed) feature of Kant’s aesthetic theory. In Chapter 4, we will have occasion to see that the relationship between the two orders of beauty, viewed systematically as well as

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rhetorically (for instance, in the choice of examples), is far more ambiguous in Kant’s writing than the phrase about preeminence would lead one to believe. But here, in the context we have been considering, a different insight about the relationship of art and nature suggests itself, one deeper and more confounding that the issue of primacy. In an important sense, the section that has been at the center of our interest stands in the looming shadow of the one that follows it. Section 43, “On Art in General,” appears to shift gears abruptly, introducing a topic that by the lights of Kant’s commitments should not, certainly need not, be accorded its own philosophical inquiry. Its theme seems to have little bearing on what precedes it. Yet arguably the whole meditation on the beauty of nature we have been trying to follow here, on its moral important, its interpretive openness, and the ecstasy it occasions can be seen as an anticipatory response to the challenge posed by art. For with art, the question of making is posed for aesthetic theory, a question so powerful that it cannot be confined to human modes of production. Section 42 can thus be read as grappling, within the realm of nature, with something that will emerge fully only in the sections on art, namely, that the mystery lodged in the making of beauty—what we call creativity, as though we knew what we meant by it—is a core dimension of aesthetic experience: when I delight in the beauty of a flower, of an insect, of the song of a nightingale, I cannot help but take them as things made in a certain way, though I never come to know in what way. From the vantage of the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” focused as it is on the emotional and mental state of the subject, such a question is hardly intelligible; the doxa about the third Critique has it that it promulgates an “aesthetics of reception” on which the issue of production is, at best, parasitic. But if this were so, aesthetic experience would afford a shallow and solipsistic way to the world. We have seen that even the pleasure in the song of the nightingale can carry with it a call coming from a different quarter, one in which “nature figuratively speaks to us” and intimates to us, in traces and hints, that nature “in its beautiful products shows itself as art, not merely by chance, but as it were intentionally.” The ecstasy I feel at such moments responds to the suggestion that nature’s form of making parallels the purposefulness of art. Which is why the entire feeling collapses when the song of the nightingale reveals itself as a fraud perpetrated by human hand. A final, admittedly impressionistic note. Kant, I grant, is not a poet; his prose has the charm of gray packing paper, Heinrich Heine once noted. That

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may be harsh, but it is not far off the mark. Is it then not all the more remarkable to see him reach for a lyrical register—to invoke the wildflower and the insect, to offer wonder and ecstasy as key ways of relating to the world—in a passage that engages the question of the structure of the world and its relation to the human being as a free being? If these attempts are amateurish, then in the original sense of the word: as revealing love. I find myself powerfully moved by them, even though I recognize that in them sincerity outstrips poetic talent. Yet they also attest to the fact that this master builder of conceptual structures resorts to the poetic just when his own line of thinking pushes toward that which exceeds any given concept and which can therefore never be fully developed. Kant’s writing gestures, awkwardly, toward more accomplished poetic accounts giving voice to kindred insights. Among the most striking, to me, is the remarkable passage in Werther’s letter of May 10 that opens the Sorrows in earnest. In part it reads: I couldn’t draw now, not a line, but I have never been a greater painter than in these moments. When the dear valley mists around me and the high sun rests on the tops of the impenetrable darkness of my woods and only isolated rays steal into the inner sanctum as I lie in the high grass by the falling brook, and closer to the earth a thousand different blades of grass become astonishing to me; when I feel closer to my heart the teeming of the small world among the stems, the innumerable, unfathomable forms of the little worms, the tiny gnats, and feel the hovering presence of the Almighty who created us in His image, the breeze of the All-Loving One who hoveringly bears and preserves us in eternal bliss.

The difference between Werther’s vision and Kant’s is apparent: where the latter’s language remains within the bounds of immanence, the former does not hesitate to invoke the “Almighty” and the “All-Loving One.” Apart from this difference in vocabulary (which may or may not indicate a difference in intended meaning), the alignment between these sentences and the passages from Kant we have been returning to is striking. There is the opening trope of a turn from art to nature, the idea that even the smallest insect may open the eyes to the presence of a vast and encompassing order, and that the “eternal bliss” lies precisely in what remains “unfathomable.” The one sees the world as produced like art, “not merely by chance, but as it were inten-

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tionally,” while the other employs explicitly theological terms, yet both gesture toward the same purposeful arrangement of nature whose purpose remains elusive. And in both, despite the ostensible turn away from art, the model of aesthetic production stands at the heart of aesthetic experience itself. Goethe composed the passage many years before his intensive reading of the third Critique, yet it gives poetic expression to what years later most moved him in the book. His reflections on Kant’s work not only capture the essence of the Critique of Judgment but they provide a reading of the passage from The Sorrows we just quoted, published almost half a century earlier. In an essay composed in 1820, Goethe writes about Kant’s book: Here I found my most disparate interests brought together; products of art and nature were dealt with alike, aesthetic and teleological judgment illuminated one another. I did not always agree with the author’s way of thinking, and occasionally something seemed to be missing, but the main ideas in the book were completely analogous to my earlier work and thought. The inner life of nature and art, their respective effects as they work from within— all this came to clear expression in the book. The products of these two infinitely vast worlds were shown to exist for their own sake; things found together might be there for one another, but not because of one another (at least not intentionally).

PA R T I I

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FOUR

Making

that guides Kant’s reflections on art is this: What can we say about a human way of making that is geared toward the experience of beauty? This is not a question about the kinds of techniques likely to yield beauty, a question that preoccupied many of his predecessors; Kant does not consider which prosodic patterns or color compositions work best, nor where the point lies beyond which the sculpted face of a man in pain begins to repel the viewer. His question goes deeper. It asks how a thing must be constituted so that in its very essence it is made to engage our aesthetic sensibility. To us, art is so intimately linked to reflecting on aesthetic experience that our main question is likely to be why it took so long for art to move into the foreground. Not so for Kant. Given the development of his thought, we are in fact urged to raise the opposite question: Why ask about art at all? By the time art becomes an issue in the Critique of Judgment, we are deep into the book, and Kant has already asked, and answered, the question of how flowers, colors, palaces—how anything at all— can come to hold our aesthetic attention. If we know how beauty works in every case, is it then not strange that we should need a separate analysis of how it works in the particular case of art, requiring new concepts and new ways of seeing? What is more, if this is an aesthetic theory in the true sense, focused, as Kant

THE QUESTION

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insists in the book’s very first section, on how “the subject feels itself as it is affected” (§1, 204), need we say anything more about the object that occasions the subject’s self-affection than that it must be present to do the occasioning? Is an aesthetic theory, by virtue of its own ambitions, not obliged to remain mute about the entire realm of production, of poetics (carrying the sense of making in its Greek root)? Commentators have floundered in making sense of the way the sections on art fit—or fail to fit—the rest of the theory. One gets the impression that the account of art “only belongs to” aesthetic theory “externally as an addendum,” as Kant writes about ornaments (§14, 226), that, from the point of view of taste, it is superfluous. Yet this apparent superfluity merits our attention, not so that we can catch the philosopher in an inconsistency, nor to show how in the end every thing harmonizes after all, but to get a sense of the spaces opened by a movement of thought that is developed despite itself. What reveals itself in these newly opened spaces for thinking? We become witness to the emergence of a conception of the artwork that does not mirror, but rather profoundly alters the very idea of aesthetic experience, a conception whose force we can feel to our own day. It becomes clear that to be able to encounter the artwork aesthetically, we cannot see it as one thing among others that merely happens to have an added quality (call it beauty or aesthetic significance). Artworks need to be understood according to an altogether different logic. It is true that on one level of description artworks are just objects, available to us through the same cognitive process and answerable to the same practical criteria that Kant had laid bare in his previous works. We see surfaces covered with bits of paint, hear tones of different pitches, read words combined in a certain order. We can describe these objects in a conceptually bounded language; we can mea sure and classify them. We can say (and we say all the time): here is a painting of such-and-such dimensions; here is a painting of a pipe; here is a painting by René Magritte. Likewise it is not meaningless to ask what the painting is for. We can provide coherent responses: it is meant to decorate a room, to complete a collection, to serve as an investment, to advertise a smoke shop. Yet Kant shows that by speaking this way we miss precisely what makes artworks into artworks, for both the ways we come to “know” a work of art and the way we “use” it differ from the ways we engage with other objects. (The scare quotes are there to remind us of this difference until we can find

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a way of describing how knowing and using are in play in our encounters with art, without being reducible to the usual ways.) To understand the difference between artworks and ordinary objects, Kant shifts the terrain of analysis from experience, where his and our attention has rested all this while, to production. It is a shift we have not seen coming. It asks us to recognize that art is not simply a thing that pleases in a certain way, but a thing made in a certain way that results in giving aesthetic plea sure. Kant allows us to see that the way art pleases remains diminished, perhaps crippled, without an awareness of the structure of making. His analysis of this structure of making ranges widely—he dwells on the distinction between art and craft, the artist’s relationship to money, the difference between use and purpose, and the link between work and play—but it revolves finally around one core idea: making is essential to our experience of art. The sections on art reveal that the experience of art cannot be adequately understood if the subject is imagined in isolation from the world of objects, a subject indifferent to the way the objects that give it aesthetic pleasure have come about. The question of production is no addendum—no mere ornament—to the question of judgment. Rather, we learn that the aesthetic—the entire complex of perception, pleasure, and judgment that appears to be a privilege of the subject, and of it alone—in truth relies on this subject standing in relation to a certain kind of poesis. Judging and making, we learn, maintain a powerful and mysterious intimacy. They require one another, without one being reducible to the other. If aesthetic formalism names the idea that aesthetic experience remains blind to the ontology of the things it experiences—to the way they have come into being and to the sorts of things they are—then Kant’s account fails the test of formalism, for he shows how powerfully aesthetic experience is attuned to the things it experiences as things that have been made. This idea reaches far, for the sections on art exert their force beyond the experience of art and call on us to rethink all aesthetic experience, including that of nature, as an experience of making. Whether we look at a flower or at a painting of a flower, our experience does not, as the formalist caricature of Kantian aesthetics would have it, come to a halt on the facade of things, with no thought about their depth. If Kant had indeed proposed that ordinary objects must be turned into Potemkin objects if they are to engage our aesthetic attention, then his account would hold little interest for us. To find them beautiful, Kant shows, we must take things, both natural and

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human-made, as having been made according to a purposeful structure. He is careful to emphasize that taking things this way does not mean that they, in fact, are this way; for him, there is a red line between realism and idealism. Whether or not this line is as sharp as it seems, we can say that for aesthetic experience the world consists not merely of surfaces that provide us with sensory input. On the contrary, aesthetic experience consists of an attunement to a form of making. Kant’s analysis of art is at bottom a reflection on artistic creativity, on its force and its mystery: What does it mean to create, and to create artistically? His thinking is driven by the deep perplexity of how a new thing comes into the world that does not merely take its place next to the things that exist already, but that in its very structure asks us to change our comportment toward the world— change the way we see and hear and take plea sure, but also the way we stand in relation to sense. Artistic creativity unfolds its greatest power where it also holds its greatest mystery, namely, where it makes sense, and specifically where it makes a new kind of sense. Artworks stand in relation to sense—not this sense or that, but to the very question of sense, to sense as a question— because they bring forth new kinds of sense. And this sense has a peculiar form. The artwork, Kant writes, “occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible” (§49, 314). It is an audacious conception of sense—a kind of sense that holds a reserve of nonsense within itself. We return to it, here and in the following chapters, trying again and again to plumb its depths. In its most compact form, the insight to which Kant opens our view is this: artworks are things essential to human experience that remain unintelligible when we try to grasp them with concepts. There are, then, things in the world that prompt an experience that surpasses the realm circumscribed by concepts, surpasses the frame of the previous two Critiques, surpasses, in short, the ground on which philosophy makes its home. Yes, the experience of these things maintains a relation to concepts (it is not nonconceptual, whatever that would mean), but it fails to be controlled by concepts. When philosophy has taken cognizance of areas of experience ungoverned by concepts, it has tended to disparage them (take, for example, Socrates’s mockery of Ion and Kant’s of Swedenborg). But here in the third Critique, the conceptual unintelligibility of these objects does not condemn

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them to being taken as meaningless or mad or false. On the contrary, the fact that they elude the grasp of concepts—hence the grasp of philosophy and of science— defines the most profound way we have of experiencing them. If the experience of art surpasses determination by concepts, it can also never yield to a conceptual investigation of the kind the natural sciences undertake. This is an idea worth spelling out, especially in the face of efforts to anchor the aesthetic sphere—the whole spectrum of encounters with artworks—in neurological, evolutionary, or statistical models. What we discover when examining aesthetic phenomena with the methods of science— with surveys, big-data algorithms, cognitive maps, brain scans, and the rest—may be interesting, but its relevance for what makes artworks into artworks is exactly nil. Funneling thousands of novels through computer programs or observing oxygen flow through the brain cells of test subjects as they watch a movie clip may well be fruitful. Something of interest may emerge, yet whatever it is, it will be a result relevant to data analysis or neuroscience, not to aesthetics. Because works of art outstrip the economy of concepts, they demand a different kind of behavior from us than we display toward other objects. This difference testifies to the fact that the first two Critiques fall short of accounting for a full experience of the world, opening a space for a third. ART AS MAKING

It is customary to open a discussion of Kant’s conception of art with the caveat that much has happened to this idea since 1790, and that we better not confuse the meaning of the word Kunst in his writing with what “art” means to us today. Yes, everything has a history, and nothing stays exactly the same in translation. The trouble with these truisms is that, while warning against a false sense of identity, they can promote a false sense of difference. Are we certain that our understanding of Kant’s conception of art is helped significantly by studying the semantic landscape that surrounds it? Are we certain that it remains stable even within his own writing, from one section to the next, from one line to the next? Readers of the third Critique will notice that sections 43 and 44, which work to get to the bottom of the concept of art, cycle through multiple senses of Kunst within just a few pages, ranging from a technical product as such (art in the sense of artifice) to something

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many of us today would call art. What is more, if we are to heed the warning against unthinkingly absorbing Kant’s idea of art into our own, do we not need to know what we mean by art? And do we? If we did, our pursuit in trying to follow Kant’s thinking would satisfy little more than an antiquarian interest. We go to the writings of other thinkers precisely because we lack a settled idea of what a work of art is or how to speak about our encounter with it. Yet we also do not set out as blank slates. We come with certain ideas, albeit inchoate ones, about what art entails, which is why it puzzles us to learn that a discussion of art should mention wallpaper, table decoration, and landscape gardening, as it does in the third Critique. If we read to understand what Kant means, it is so that Kant can help us understand what we mean when we speak of art. In the Critique of Judgment, art comes into view as a result of three successive cuts that divide it from nature, from science, and from craft (§43, 303–304). In each case, we will be interested in the distinction between art and the other three entities, but we will also need to attend to the fact that these three cuts only make sense if art holds something significant in common with nature, science, and craft; other wise the difference would not have been worth making. What does the cut from nature permit us to see? “By rights,” Kant declares, “only production through freedom, i.e., through a capacity for choice that grounds its actions in reason, should be called art” (§43, 303). The sentence draws all our attention to freedom and the question of choice, yet what is of equal importance is the background against which this difference is foregrounded, namely, the very identity of art and nature that permits the distinction to be made in the first place. This identity of art and nature lies in the idea of making. Only because art and nature name varieties of making is it even possible to specify one as “production through freedom” and set it against the production through necessity. The kinship of the two comes to light in Kant’s word for “making,” Hervorbringung: while “production,” the word the published English translations use, tilts toward human forms of making (such as manufacture and fabrication), the German word also includes nature’s way of making; it signifies creation and generation. Art, then, is before all else a way of making. We take note of something else about the conception of art that emerges in the way Kant distinguishes it from nature. Art is here neither subordinated to nature nor derived from it, but rather put on a logically equal footing, species both of the genus Hervorbringung. This move signals not merely that

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their products, as Kant puts it, “would scarcely compete for preeminence over each other” (§42, 300) (in some respects art may even “show its superiority [Vorzüglichkeit]” over nature [§48, 312]); what comes to the fore, in other words, is not just or mainly a question of the status of art. Rather, putting art on a par with nature as two varieties of making opens the path to rethinking its very essence. The move permits Kant to uncouple the conception of art and artworks from their essential dependence on nature, a dependence that has been a feature of Western thinking about art since Plato and Aristotle, who, for all the differences in their assessment of art, both see it as a mimetic duplication of the world. Our passage prepares the ground for Kant turning away from the ancient conception of art as an imitation of nature, along with the corollary idea of the imagination as the capacity for recombining what is given to it by nature, and pivoting toward a conception of art as “an expression of aesthetic ideas” (§49, 317) with its corollary concept of the imagination “as a productive cognitive faculty,” a capacity whose “material can certainly be lent to us by nature,” but one that transforms this material “into something entirely different, namely into that which steps beyond nature” (§49, 314; my emphases). This shift from a mimetic to an expressive or productive conception of art creating an entirely new space of experience is performed haltingly, yet it is alive with the sharpest thinking about art, fresh enough to orient our own thinking. (It will be taken up in the next chapters.) Perhaps because of the pressure under which they are put, both the concept of mimesis that Kant discards and the concept of expression that he advances are stranger and more daring than what most forerunners and followers come up with. None of this would have been possible had art continued to be understood as fully subservient to nature. Art, we said, is a kind of making. But what kind of making? It is a way of making “through freedom.” Kant’s use of the term freedom is often weighed down by its association with his stern moral philosophy, but glossing freedom as “a capacity of choice that grounds its actions in reason” tells us that he has something more minimal in mind here. All that is required to distinguish nature’s way of making from that of art is this “capacity for choice” grounded in reason, what Kant calls Willkür. Today, the word suggests “caprice” and “arbitrariness” (as in the Willkür of the despot), yet here, as elsewhere in his work, Kant has in mind the nonpejorative sense of “free choice” common in his day. It is the sort of choice bees, for example, lack, since their “regularly constructed honeycombs” are, Kant tells us, “a product of their nature (of

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instinct),” even though “people are fond of describing [them] . . . as a work of art” (§43, 303). The appellation “work of art,” however, is reserved for “the work of human beings” (ibid.). The notion of freedom in play here may be thin, but it is muscular enough to draw the line between human and animal ways of making. The ways human beings make things when they act as human beings, that is, when employing their capacity of free choice, involves not just reason but also knowledge and skill. We need to know what is to be made—the end— and how this end is to be achieved—the technique of making. Art needs theory and practice, science and craft. Yet Kant goes out of his way to draw sharp lines between art, on the one hand, and science and craft, on the other. “Art . . . is distinguished from science,” he writes, “as technique is distinguished from theory” (§43, 303). Petrus Camper, the eminent anatomist, may have put forward a good theory of footwear in his 1781 Treatise on the Best Form of Shoes, “but he was certainly not able to make one” (§43, 304). But Kant insists that being able to make art is also distinct from being able to make shoes, or from any “handicraft”: “the first is called liberal, the second can also be called remunerative art” (§43, 304). Does distinguishing art from science and from craft mean that we must understand Kant’s notion of art as standing in opposition to the two? Is his art bereft of the knowledge that science yields and of the skill that craft teaches? If so, then his idea of art would stand in flat contradiction not only to our naive understanding of art, but also to what he writes about it only a few pages later. “It has been quite rightly noted,” he remarks there, “that for beautiful art in its full perfection much science is required, such as, e.g., acquaintance with ancient languages, wide reading of those authors considered to be classical, history, acquaintance with antiquities, etc.” (§44, 305). As for craft, he dismisses those who eschew “the academic constraint of all rules” in order to give proof of their genius as nothing but “shallow minds”; making art requires not just talent, he notes, but “a talent that has been academically trained” (§47, 310). If the artist cannot simply dispense with science and craft, why then go to the trouble of distinguishing between art and those domains? More broadly, what is the sense in opening a meditation on art with a triple negation? It lies not, I think, in telling us what art is not: not nature, not science, not craft (art is, after all, not an infinite many things). Rather, the point is to bring to light how art essentially participates in all three, but diff erently:

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how its creativity is distinct from that of nature, how the knowledge needed to bring it forth is distinct from that of science, and how the technique employed in its making is distinct from that of craft. In each case, then, the unity of what is being distinguished is as revealing as the distinction itself. Art discloses itself as a form of human behav ior that partakes of rational knowing and rational making—fundamental ways, both, of being human—without being reducible to either. Its way of knowing what is to be made does not make up yet another branch of science; its way of knowing how to make is not yet another craft like glassmaking or carpentry. It is a genuinely distinct mode of relating creatively to the world. What is more, this mode has the distinction of showing its difference. The artwork shows me how another human being’s purposeful engagement with some given matter exceeds nature, science, and craft by, literally, making sense that exceeds the bounds of a meaning I can grasp and hold. It shows me that my experience of it is not exhausted by ways I have of conceptualizing the object’s use or its process of making, nor by any meaning that might attach itself to it were it a mere thing. Part of what I encounter in an artwork, then, is what and how it is not, which is why the triple negation in fact belongs to the essence of “art in general” (§43, 303). We can see in the distinction from nature, science, and craft Kant’s attempt at carving out a new space for thinking about art, a thinking not available in the most consequential accounts the Western tradition knows. Nothing in what he says about making art orients this making toward imitation. The paradigm of artistic making as mimesis has lost its force in his account. But not just the goal, the process too of making is conceptualized differently here. It is clear that he has little use for the idea of artistic production that Plato offers in the Ion, where the poet, whom we can take as the quintessential artistic maker, lacks access to knowledge and practical rationality and is therefore “never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him” (534b, trans. Lane Cooper). Poetic making is understood as being devoid of rationality; it is finally indistinguishable from a force of nature. Indeed, in the same passage Plato compares poets to the very bees from which Kant distinguish them. Yet we are also at some distance from Aristotle’s counterproposal according to which poetry, like any other craft (horsemanship, piloting, statecraft), submits to a technique capable of rational analysis and description, which the Art of

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Poetry (more aptly translated as the Skill or the Craft of Poetry) and the countless poetics in its wake set out to provide. It is true that with Aristotle the work of the poet, far from being branded a form of inspired babbling, finds itself dignified as a pursuit meriting philosophical scrutiny. Kant by no means takes back the insight that art is not a form of nonsense, entirely withdrawn from rational access; for him too it is open to philosophical thinking. Yet it is not, for that reason, just another technique whose rules we can codify if we are just attentive enough. MAKING AS PLAY

How to characterize the difference between art and ordinary kinds of making? Kant has difficulty isolating it in one feature. As we will see in this chapter and Chapter 5, he keeps searching for new ways of locating the specificity of artistic making, now focusing on one idea, now on another, without finally settling on one account. Some of the blame must rest with his outmoded vocabulary. (Section 43, where art is introduced through the distinctions we have been considering, looks downright Scholastic in its language and procedure.) Yet the main reason for trying to say the same thing in different ways is that it is difficult to say. The fact that the relationship of art to other modes of human making is one neither of identity nor of mutual exclusion, but of a strange, overlapping difference emerges over and over, but it is not a relationship for which Kant has a name. Even today, our own critical idioms struggle to give conceptual shape to such a relation. The candidate Kant puts forward for grasping the difference between art and craft is play. We are no stranger to play; in the early sections of the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” Kant appealed to it to describe the way the understanding and the imagination relate to one another in the experience of beauty. When “no determinate concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition,” then Kant understands them to be “set into play” (§9, 217). Here, by contrast, as the mark distinguishing art from craft, play designates something else entirely. It names the difference between what makes art “liberal” and handicraft “remunerative.” Thus: the first [namely, art] is regarded as if it could turn out purposively (be successful) only as play, i.e., an occupation that is agreeable in itself; the second [namely, craft] is regarded as labor, i.e., an occupation that is disagreeable

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(burdensome) in itself and is attractive only because of its effect (e.g., remuneration), and hence as something that can be forcibly imposed. (§43, 304)

Though the concept of play designates strikingly different phenomena in the two contexts—in the one it describes a structure of feeling, in the other a structure of making—in both cases Kant reaches for play to name the same quality, namely, that of freedom. What is more, in both cases, far from being simply one feature among others, play—and the kind of freedom it entails— reveals itself as making the aesthetic difference. An ordinary phenomenon— an act of cognition or an instance of purposeful production—becomes aesthetic when it is “set into play”; we experience it “only as play.” Thus ordinary cognition gives way to aesthetic experience when the imagination, no longer held in check by concepts, “plays” with the understanding. When Kant resorts to the pleonasm “ free play” to describe the choreography of imagination and understanding in the feeling of beauty, and does so no fewer than four times in half a page (§9, 217), we know he means us to attend to freedom as the key aspect of this playing. Here, in the discussion of art, the term free play does not reappear but the deep link that play maintains with freedom is once again flagged in the language of the passage, especially in Kant’s original: while we hear the echo of freedom in the term liberal arts, we encounter it openly in freie Künste—the free arts. Once again an ordinary process of production becomes aesthetic the moment the mode of making shifts into play and thereby into freedom. We understand that for Kant freedom is a crucial—perhaps a decisive— feature of play, but we do not yet have a clear sense of what kind of freedom this freedom of play is exactly. Earlier we noted that he distinguishes art from nature by reserving the term art for “production through freedom.” Is that the same freedom that distinguishes the occupation of the artist from that of the craftsman? It seems not. The first involves the merest freedom of choice—of acting not just by instinct— common to all human making “that grounds its actions in reason.” Since the craftsman enjoys this freedom too, the freedom of play that distinguishes his “ labor” from artistic production must exceed the freedom of choice. We must look for another candidate, then. Our first intuition may be that art’s freedom consists in a freedom from rules binding the craftsman—in effect a freedom from craft. We are urged on in our surmise by the received idea that Kant’s work helps elevate the Romantic genius onto the aesthetic stage; is the genius, sovereign creator that

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he is, not absolved of the strictures to which ordinary makers are bound? Not according to Kant. We have already seen him brushing off this view as that of “shallow minds”; he gives robust expression to his impatience for “modern teachers [who] believe that they can best promote a liberal art [ freie Kunst] if they remove all compulsion from it and transform it from labor into mere play” (§43, 304). Art is play, but it is not mere play, not free of “ labor” or of craft. It requires “something compulsory . . . a mechanism” (ibid.), “something academically correct” (§47, 310). And it is free not despite these constraints but because of them, for the simple reason that other wise—without labor, without craft, without a “body”—the play and freedom in art “would entirely evaporate” (§43, 304). We find confirmed what we have said, namely, that Kant’s notion of art, far from eschewing craft, entails it. USE AND PURPOSE

When Kant does name the surplus in the freedom of play that sets art apart from craft (a surplus beyond the freedom of choice), we find ourselves surprised by the terms he chooses. Play, he tells us, requires no payment; it is “agreeable in itself” and hence its own reward. Craft, on the other hand, “is regarded as labor, i.e., an occupation that is disagreeable (burdensome) in itself and is attractive only because of its effect (e.g., the wage), and hence as something that can be forcibly imposed.” What to make of this talk of payment and wage, of the fact that the freedom of art seems to consist in a freedom from money? Though it is apt to confound us at first, the issue of money points us to a key feature in recent conceptualizations of art, one over which theorists differ sharply. For some, art’s very privilege lies precisely in being exempt, or in exempting itself, from ordinary channels of exchange. This is true of thinkers who could hardly be more different in temperament and worldview, thinkers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hannah Arendt, both whom insist on the artwork’s lack of utility in systems of circulation. In an earlier chapter, we came across Wittgenstein’s admonishment, “Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.” Arendt urges that the artwork “must be removed carefully from the whole context of ordinary use objects to attain its proper place in the world.” The philosopher and critic who has moved this feature of art into the center of his thinking

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is Theodor Adorno, who interprets the lack of utility not as a mere absence, but as a protest against the utilitarian logic of capitalism. It takes little effort to disparage such views as indulging in the mystifications of the Romantic notion of artistic production, a notion whose origin is commonly located in the very text that we are trying to think with. The idea of the freedom of the artist turns out to be nothing but an ideological tale, an expression merely of “the ethos of the dominant fraction of the dominant class,” as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu bluntly puts it. Even if we prefer not to follow the path of suspicious reading, does the whole idea of art’s lack of utility not fly in the face of our everyday experience? Surely it is not always true that poetry “is not used in the language-game of giving information” or that artworks must be kept apart “from the whole context of ordinary use objects.” Anyone who has engaged with the works of Homer or Balzac or Dickens, and not theirs alone, knows that we learn many things from them—including “information.” The list of uses to which art can and has been put is a long one, and not all the items we are likely to find on it testify to philistinism. Perhaps the idea of the “uselessness” of art is mistaken, then. Perhaps we need to see art and craft not as distinct phenomena, but as continuous forms of behavior. There are intelligent attempts, many inspired by the Marxist tradition, to ground artistic making in the same material practices that also govern what Kant counts as craft. Henry Staten, to cite but one example, offers that “we cannot properly conceive the work of the artist in all its sophistication if we do not have as a basis for this conception a fully articulated sense of the techne process in its elemental forms; for example, the skill of driving a nail into a two-by-four.” All techniques, Staten argues, including techniques employed by the artist, consist of the elaboration of humble skills, for they are all of “the same fundamental nature” (60–61). Only if we understand how a carpenter drives a nail into a board do we stand a chance of giving a good, nonmystifying description of the artist’s way of making “in all its sophistication,” since artistic making is essentially a technique like carpentry— except more sophisticated. But what is at issue in art is not “sophistication,” and Kant allows us to see this clearly. Following his line of thinking we recognize that we lose an important dimension of art if we conceive of it as craft plus complexity, subtlety, or innovation (or however else we may wish to conceive of sophistication). For one thing, craft may exceed art in sophistication; it does not thereby

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become art. There may be no object produced by human beings more sophisticated in design and fabrication than the microprocessor, yet we do not commonly treat it as an artwork (though we can imagine how an artist, playing with the processor in ways we cannot anticipate, might prompt us to do just that). If we compare Kafka’s fables with the legal briefs he crafted while holding his day job, is it evident which of the two trumps the other in sophistication? Nor can we solve this issue by thinking of sophistication mainly as innovation (as Staten seems to when he charges the moments when a techne “issue[s] in new forms” with artistic significance [59]). Again, the microchip and the many devices that have been constructed around it arguably trump the arts of the last half century in innovation. As we shall see when we turn to the concept of genius, artistic innovation needs to be conceived differently than merely as a way of awakening potential powers that had lain slumbering in a craft. It can and does on occasion happen that two objects are outwardly indistinguishable, yet that one belongs to the world of craft and commerce, the other to art. One of these may be a box of steel pads that we buy to use on pots and pans; the other may be a stack of Brillo boxes we encounter in a gallery. A purely technical account of art must throw up its hands if asked to describe the difference in our behavior toward these objects and why we do not “use” the second the way we do the first. What remains unclear is whether Kant’s theory can do better. Once we put things this way, the real stakes in the distinction Kant makes between art and craft begin to reveal themselves. What is not at stake, we now see, is an attempt at distinguishing art from craft by analyzing the techniques of making in their evolution or in the systematicity of their practices. Studying the history of forms of making or the intricacies of techniques employed in making to pinpoint the difference between art and craft is as likely to yield success as is peering at chips of paint through a microscope in the hope of discovering art. We have already seen Kant insist that every art relies on craft; we can sharpen this by allowing that the two may even remain indistinguishable, both outwardly (from the point of view of the observer) and inwardly (from that of the maker), without thereby erasing the line between the two. For the distinction between art and craft finally indicates that artworks are not of the order of ordinary things but belong rather to an essentially different order. The difference lies in the structure of expe-

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rience, which demands a different structure of behavior, which in turn calls for a different structure of making. ART AS FREEDOM FROM PAYMENT, MEA SURE, AND COERCION

There is, I feel, little chance of getting inside the logic of the artwork—its Hervorbringung, its objecthood, its reception—if we do not register how dumbfounding it is to find Kant bringing up money. It catches us unawares since nothing in the text seems to have prepared us for its appearance. Kant does return to it briefly, and there is always a chance that a second mention may help make sense of the first. Money comes up again when Kant distinguishes between “the orator” and “the poet.” The difference is not that one is paid for his ser vices and the other is not; it is more subtle than that. The orator, Kant tells us, “announces a matter of business and carries it out as if were merely a play with ideas,” while the poet “announces a mere play with ideas, but accomplishes something that is worthy of business” (§51, 321). It is while crossing from business to play and back to business that Kant returns to the idea of freedom and its enigmatic connection to “remuneration.” He writes: Beautiful art must be free art in a double sense: it must not be a matter of remuneration, as a kind of labor whose magnitude can be judged, enforced, or paid for in accordance with a determinate standard; but also, while the mind is certainly occupied, it must feel itself to be satisfied and stimulated without looking towards another purpose (independently of remuneration). (Ibid.)

The two senses of freedom correspond to the two instances of play we noted earlier, namely, the play involved in making and in experiencing art. We were able to see that what recommended play as an apt way of describing the structure of both production and reception, despite the differences between them, was the kind of freedom it “set into play,” but were stymied in giving a more textured account of this freedom. What does it mean for the artist to be free in the “free play” of making art, and what does it mean for the percipient to be free when experiencing art or any instance of beauty in the

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free play of the capacities of the mind? Learning that the artist’s freedom involves a freedom from money did not help us make sense of it; quite the contrary, it perplexed us further. At a first glance, the passage I just quoted does not seem to help, since “remuneration,” which must be declined to achieve freedom in the “double sense” operative in “free art” (that is, in production and reception), does not appear to mean the same thing in the two cases. The first sense, the one involved in production, insists that making art “must not be a matter of remuneration [Lohngeschäft],” that is, must not be a kind of labor that “can be . . . paid for.” The logic of his argument remains embedded in an economy of money. The second, by contrast, involved in judging (or experiencing) art, speaks of a mind that is “satisfied and stimulated . . . (independently of remuneration [vom Lohne]”), sending us into a realm that seems to have nothing to do with money. The mind is not compensated in the same currency the craftsman accepts for his labors. Indeed, does it make sense to say the mind is “remunerated” for doing what minds do? A distinction Kant makes elsewhere about the different logics of payment seems to obtain here. In the last pages of The Metaphysics of Morals, he distinguishes between “compensation” (Lohn) and “reward” (Belohnung) (6: 489), two phenomena that the single term remuneration (Lohn) appears to mingle. Does the “payoff ” in cognition not have more in common with reward than with the mercenary logic of compensation? It is difficult to say. We seem to have gotten no further in our quest to understand how and why making art involves (or just is) a kind of play, characterized by a form of freedom that remains aloof from payment, since the two senses of recompense that Kant offers here diverge so sharply that the term threatens to come apart, leaving us none the wiser for it. Perhaps it would help to look more closely at the connective tissue between the terms Lohngeschäft and Lohn, both rendered as “remuneration” in the translation we have been using. Free art, Kant tells us, “must not be” a Lohngeschäft. Fine, but what is Lohngeschäft? Given the plainness of its two parts—Lohn means “wage” and Geschäft “business” or “enterprise”—the compound term would seem to be straightforward, yet oddly it is not. Look, for example, at the published English translations: “a work like that of a tradesman” (Bernard), “contract work” (Meredith), “mercenary occupation” (Pluhar), “a matter of remuneration” (Guyer/Matthews). Kant himself glosses the term as “a kind of labor whose magnitude can be judged, enforced, or paid for in accordance with a determinate standard.” Enforced and paid for—

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right away, we recognize two features from our earlier passage, in section 43, in which Kant distinguishes art from craft: payment and coercion. The earlier passage links the two features, for it is through pay that the burden of the labor in craft can be imposed. Our present passage brings to light a third feature in Lohngeschäft, in addition to coercion and payment, namely, the idea that it characterizes “a kind of labor whose magnitude can be judged . . . in accordance with a determinate standard.” This, then, is labor we can measure, indeed quantify; since Kant’s word for “standard”—Maßstab—is borrowed from the craftsman’s toolbox, we might render it more aptly as a “yardstick” (or “measuring stick,” “ruler”). The craftsman’s labor is labor to which we apply a yardstick when we wish to pay him. It goes without saying (but ought to be said anyway) that to be applied to labor this yardstick may not itself be of labor; it must be distinct form labor, a stranger to it, other wise it will not be in a position to serve as its measure. This form of labor, then, the labor of craft, does not give the measure to itself but is measured from outside. It is this externally applied yardstick that comes to dominate it. Though Kant offers the three features of Lohngeschäft as alternatives (“can be judged, enforced, or paid for”), in fact they operate as successively more basic causes: labor can be enforced because it can be paid for, and it can be paid for because its magnitude can be measured. The rich poetic irony lodged in the figure of the “stick” is hard to miss (though Kant appears to have done just that): the very yardstick the craftsman wields in his workshop is wielded against him and his labor, and doubly so. It serves as the tool for measuring that labor and for pressing him into surrendering it. Once we realize that the possibility of remuneration rests not in money itself but rather in the availability of “a determinate standard,” a homology begins to reveal itself between the Lohngeschäft from which the artist must abstain and the Lohn that the mind must forgo while feeling “satisfied and stimulated” in experiencing an artwork—two terms that, despite their lexical affinity, earlier struck us as denoting sharply different things. Recall that the notion of Lohn is introduced by Kant to explain, or perhaps to amplify, that from which the mind taking pleasure in beauty must remain “independent,” namely, what he calls “another purpose”: “while the mind is certainly occupied, it must feel itself to be satisfied and stimulated without looking towards another purpose (independently of remuneration).” But what is this enigmatic other purpose whose achievement would amount to payment? The

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proper purpose of a mind engaged aesthetically is play, so following the logic that led us to this passage, the other purpose—the one to be avoided when engaged with art—is business, a purpose inevitably entangled with remuneration and coercion. We recall that to distinguish the orator from the poet, Kant invokes the difference between play and business, between Spiel and Geschäft. The business the orator announces is “a business of the understanding,” which his art—rhetoric—passes off “as a free play of the imagination” (§51, 321). The business of understanding is, of course, cognition, a form of knowledge spelled out in the language of concepts; it is a business in which concepts serve as the “determinate standard”—the Maßstab—by which to judge things. That is just what distinguishes business from play. In play, the imagination is free, but in business, the understanding and the imagination “cannot readily be united with each other without coercion [Zwang] and mutual harm” (ibid.). Coercion, then, is part of the cost of getting the business of cognition accomplished. And despite Kant’s evenhanded language here, which suggests that the two capacities somehow manage to constrain one another and exert “mutual harm,” the force of coercion is in fact onesided. When the mind’s activity is geared to the purpose of cognition, “the imagination is under the coercion [dem Zwange] of the understanding and is subjected to the limitation of being adequate to its concepts” (§49, 316). The generative, image-making power of the imagination meets its limit where the understanding draws a line, a line supplied by the determining power of concepts. The availability of this “determinate standard” makes the labor of the understanding into a business to the extent that its efforts yield a payoff—cognition— and thereby warrant the coercion of the imagination. The logic of the Geschäft of the understanding, we now recognize, parallels that of the Lohngeschäft of craft we examined earlier. They both coerce a creative capacity thanks to the promise of remuneration, itself made possible by the availability of a determinate standard external to what is being determined: here concepts, there the yardstick of labor. “ORIGINAL NONSENSE” AND THE PURPOSE OF PLAYING

In working to understand what sort of making the making of art is, we encountered the idea that it is a form of play, with the freedom that play entails, and distinct from craft and the nonfreedom it entails, a nonfreedom

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recompensed through pay. In looking more closely at the notions of remuneration, coercion, and business, we discovered that the freedom in making art is not a freedom from work or from craft or even from money. Rather, it is the freedom from being determined by an external standard. It is the freedom from having the purpose of the activity—making art—supplied by a measure that is itself not in this making. It is, in brief, a freedom from heteronomy. We observed how this freedom from heteronomy is operative not only in the making of art, but also in the reception—the enjoyment, the experience—of art, of beauty in general. All this characterizes the freedom in the making of art—the freedom of play—mainly by way of negation, as a freedom from being externally determined. Our description of this form of making would be impoverished were we to conceive of its autonomy merely as the absence of heteronomy and the absence of those practices that depend on it: business, pay, and coercion. How, then, would we go about providing a positive account of play? Alas, Kant is not much help here, and not because he does not say enough about play; in a way, he says too much. The idea of play comes up all over his writings, and the range of practices that fall under the term is so wide that we are left to grasp for a common thread. At times play signifies the mere change in sensations that is “not grounded in any intention,” a change that somehow “promotes the feeling of health” (“Remark” [§54], 331). We play in this way when listening to music or playing cards or exchanging jokes, activities that yield, as Kant puts it clinically, “gratification in which one discovers that one can get at the body even through the soul and use the latter as the doctor for the former” (ibid., 332). But play can also refer to the “games” our senses play on us to deceive our reason, to which the Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View devotes an entire section (§13), encouraged perhaps by the fact that the word for “play” and “game” is the same in German, Spiel. What is more (and Kant seems in equal measures exasperated and astonished when he gets to this point), there are ways of playing in which we are willing accomplices in self-deception and time wasting. It is a measure of how little he sentimentalizes art that he lists “play[ing] with fine arts” as an instance of such time-wasting (Anthropology, 7: 152). We find no full-scale theory of play in Kant nor a description meaty enough to allow us to glean the outlines of such a theory. For that, we need to wait for Friedrich Schiller’s deeply Kantian On the Aesthetic Education of Human Beings (published in 1795), which places play— and art as the

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exemplification of play—at the core of its ambitious philosophical anthropology. Nor does Kant— again unlike Schiller and the entire tradition of art-as-play—habitually celebrate play, as we just saw; quite the contrary, the things this Pietist admires are more often than not identified as play’s opposite number, Geschäft, very much including transcendental philosophy itself, which he calls “my whole critical enterprise,” “mein ganzes kritisches Geschäft” (“Preface,” 170). Still, the third Critique provides us with enough hints that we might be able to make sense of play—not play as such and in general, but play understood as the core activity of making art. Return for a moment to the difference between play and business, which lies in a certain freedom that play enjoys and business lacks. We might be led to think that, given the way freedom is charged with moral approbation, especially in Kant’s philosophy, any phenomenon thought to lack it would be seen as inferior to the free alternative. That, however, is not the case. Despite its unfreedom, business is not always or even usually understood to be a malignant activity, but rather necessary for the achievement of ends. To end up with cognition, the understanding must constraint the imagination. To end up with a product, instrumental reason must constrain the human being’s skillful capacities. Indeed, to end up with any outcome whose conception we have developed in advance, reason must curtail certain expressions of spontaneity. Without the unfreedom of business, these purposeful activities would come to naught. So art, as something that is not business, something not directed by a purpose provided ahead of time, courts the danger of failure. In fact, the wonder of it is that it does not always fail. How, we might ask, does art manage not to fail, even though there is no “determinate standard”—no particular concept, no premeditated purpose— to guide it? Kant’s answer, we know, is “only as play.” Cut loose from the purposeful directedness of business, art risks drifting off into the production of meaningless forms, of what Kant calls “original nonsense” (§46, 308). The idea of play is meant to foreclose this possibility and open a space for ways art may succeed. Recall the characterization we quoted earlier: art “is regarded as if it could turn out purposively (be successful) only as play.” If art is to be successful, then we must understand its making as having been a kind of play. Why? Because the sort of success Kant has in mind can only be achieved through play. Success does not mean that an artwork garners wide acclaim or fetches a high price; rather, the term evaluates whether the work has “turn[ed] out purposively,” that is, whether

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its internal structure coheres. A successful artwork, then, is a work that, while not made to be used, reveals itself as having a purpose. But this cannot be the sort of purpose that drives craft (and business more generally), since the entire burden of the distinction between the two forms of making has been to insist that art is not determined by a concept given in advance and handed down from elsewhere. The form of making that results in art must yield products that are structured purposefully, without, however, being directed by a “determinate standard.” This is where play comes in, for the purpose of playing is . . . playing. It is that form of behavior that is purposeful yet does not comply with an external standard of success. It is “an occupation that is agreeable in itself” (§43, 304), an occupation that—unlike business—has its purpose in itself. It tethers art to the idea of purpose without permitting any given purpose to dominate it. We again encounter the logic of “purposiveness without purpose” that Kant developed in the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” though here we reach it from the side of making. Once we understand its logic, we recognize that, for Kant, play and business ideally maintain a closer kinship than we at first surmised, since the best forms of play—when we do not play to deceive ourselves or to waste time—lead us to a businesslike employment of our mind. Thus the visual arts surpass music, Kant reasons, because music “merely plays with the sensations” while the visual arts involve a kind of “free play that is nevertheless also commensurate with the understanding”; as a result of this commensurability, the visual arts, while playing, “conduct a business by bringing about a product that serves the concepts of the understanding as an enduring vehicle, recommending itself to itself, for its unification with sensibility” (§53, 329). This, then, is a form of play that “at the same time” is a way of conducting business (ibid.); the visual arts “serve” the understanding by, as it were, playfully practicing the ways it is to be unified with the imagination. If the play is “commensurate” (angemessen) with the understanding, this agreement in measure has not been imposed by an external yardstick, but by an internally generated harmony, “recommending itself to itself.” To be sure, the understanding is not actually deployed; it yields no particular cognition, and hence exerts no coercive pressure on the imagination. Instead there is purposeful playing that prepares the mind for business, a preparation that itself qualifies as a kind of business. The mingling of play and business is more apparent yet in poetry, the art Kant holds in highest esteem. For what distinguishes poetry is that the

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“poet . . . promises little and announces a mere play with ideas, but accomplishes something that is worthy of business, namely providing nourishment to the understanding in play, and giving life to its concepts through the imagination” (§51, 321). Far from being antagonists, play and business encourage one another, for some forms of play, while not quite being business, “accomplish something that is worthy of” its name. Before pressing on, we should take note of the fact that, without us quite being aware of it, a new dimension of the artwork has opened itself to us that changes the very physiognomy of aesthetic experience. If we turn Kant’s anxiety about “original nonsense” around and place the idea on its feet, we realize that Kant is really saying that an artwork traffics in original sense. It dawns on us (and perhaps also on Kant, since he hasn’t said anything specific about this earlier) that partaking of sense is essential to the artwork. We begin to see that the difference that divides art from nature, science, and craft may lie precisely here: artworks stand in relation to sense the way other things do not. It is not easy to decide if natural or humanly made things stand in any relation with sense; it is unclear, for example, if a boulder or a bicycle can be called nonsensical without the utterance itself sliding into nonsense. But artworks risk straying into “original nonsense” only because they are things that are implicated in sense. Artworks make sense. This is new to us, even though looking back we like to think that we see it adumbrated: Does play not maintain an intimacy—an admittedly mysterious and shapeshifting intimacy—with meaning? And is the whole awkward apparatus of “purposefulness without purpose” not finally there to signal intelligibility? The presence of sense also confirms what Kant’s reflection on making had already revealed, namely, that a purely formalist account of aesthetic experience falls short of the power and depth of this experience. Formalism does capture something crucial about that experience, and there is no doubt that its austerity is beguiling; still, as the sole language of description it remains flat. It lacks dimensions we rely on to speak about art, among them the language of sense. If the aesthetic experience of a thing can be derailed by original nonsense, then it can be deepened by the sense it makes. Sense, it now seems, was from the very beginning of our inquiry, from the way in which art was distinguished from other ways of making, a latent power in artworks. But what kind of sense? We do not yet know. At this point in the development of the idea of art, sense has done little more than sneak into the discussion of aesthetic experience in the shadow of the threat

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of nonsense; no positive content has attached itself to it. Still, we can say this about it: the kind of making that yields—in fact, constitutes— art is a making geared toward sense. But this is not a sense available before and independently of the making of the artwork, a sense the artwork aims at and somehow attempts to capture (a sense lurking in the artist’s head or hand or heart, for example). Art makes sense not in the sense that it coheres into a circle of familiar meaning but in the sense that it brings forth new, “original,” sense. It makes sense, and therefore it makes new sense. And a second point. If we picture art as a workshop of meaning, where new semantic content is manufactured and packaged by the artist to be delivered into society’s hands, we would have missed what is most salient about the idea of original sense that the third Critique articulates, namely, that it provokes new thinking without coming to rest in a thought we could name and record. This is not a sense an artist makes by expressing thoughts, moods, or feelings, to be unpacked by the percipient in an act we commonly call interpretation. It is related to expression but also distinct from it, in that it surpasses both what can be expressed and what can be understood. Our discussion of genius and aesthetic ideas in the coming chapters will try to give texture to this strange and singular conception. What sort of status can a statement like “the artwork makes sense” (or “establishes its own standards” or “emerges from play”) claim for itself? It can hardly be said to be a description of the things that people from time to time call artworks, since there are countless instances to which Kant’s characterization would not apply. But the proposition is also not a prescription in the sense of rules an artist needs to follow to produce a successful artwork. Still, the force of “ought” comes with his way of understanding art, even though he has no use for the tradition of poetics that lays down the rules for making art. This is not a form of normativity that asks an empirically existing entity to shoulder certain demands, for example, that art ought to engage social reality, or ought to remain aloof from quotidian life, or ought to help educate citizens. Rather, it identifies what belongs to the very grammar of art if it is to yield the kind of experience that we find in art. Thus saying that art “is” a form of play means that play is part of authentic artistic making; hence modes of production that fail to play yield only defective works of art, or no art at all. But this does not mean that we can list the membership criteria for all artworks (or for any subset of artworks, such as visual or musical artworks). I speak of art when I have an artwork before me, and I

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know I face one when it engages me in an aesthetic experience. The notion of art, then, is circular in its normativity, as is the artwork itself, as is aesthetic experience. THE BUSINESS OF COPYING AND THE FAVOR OF ART

We are now in a better position to grasp the relationship that prevails between the autonomy of an artwork and its (lack of ) utility. To say that art is made autonomously (which is not Kant’s way of putting it, though it captures, I think, his meaning) is not to prohibit art from having uses; l’art pour l’art is not the only way of conceiving of autonomous art. As we have seen, Kant adduces several ways art may “conduct business,” and we can add others. It may, for example, serve to manage certain emotions (as Aristotle claims for tragedy), or “instruct and delight” (as Horace demands of poetry), or spread vice (as critics have warned), or encourage virtue (as the bien pensants promise). It can be, and often is, bought and sold, in which case it becomes a commodity, perhaps even an investment. Declaring that art is “useless” (Adorno) or “strictly without any utility” (Arendt) therefore merely disparages (or remains blind to) one of its dimensions; indeed, as we have seen, an art unable to “provid[e] nourishment to the understanding” has failed in Kant’s eyes. Yet the distinction he draws between art and craft allows us to see what is right about the idea of the nonutilitarian dimension of art, for whatever use we may discover in a successful artwork cannot have served as the principle— the concept, the “determinate standard”— that guided the artist’s hand in bringing that work into being, at least not that dimension in it that gives us the pleasure we take in art. Were we to suspect such a principle and to imagine an ulterior motive behind the work (in the true sense of “ulterior”), we would be right in feeling manipulated or in seeing the hand of a hack at work. This idea helps us make sense of a common yet baffling experience, the experience that it seems to make a palpable difference to our aesthetic pleasure whether we have an original artwork before us or its exact copy. We feel it most sharply when we have mistaken a replica for the original, when, for example, we have fallen for a forgery. But why should the difference between copy and original make a difference to the pleasure we take in the object? Have canonical readings not taught that the third Critique insists

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on bracketing all conceptual determination in aesthetic experience, in favor of the “pure formality” of the play of the mind with itself? If we follow the common reading of the “Analytic of the Beautiful”—that the feeling of beauty is confined to the way the subject is affected in its sensibility, and that this affection is in no way filtered through concepts—then there would indeed be no way of accounting for an aesthetic difference between viewing a Cézanne and seeing its identical copy, since presumably they affect our senses identically, differing only in what we know about them. Yet the difference in experience is patent, and with Kant’s help we may be able to put it into words. He does not address artistic forgery (or exact copying) head-on, but the issue of forging the beauties of nature gets his attention more than once, and it is plain that he is not amused by the practice. He feels especially protective of the “bewitchingly beautiful song of the nightingale,” apparently a favorite target of pranksters of his day. Thus he laments: There have been examples in which, where no such songbird was to be found, some jolly landlord has tricked the guests staying with him, to their complete satisfaction, by hiding in a bush a mischievous lad who knew how to imitate this song (with a reed or a pipe in his mouth) just like nature. But as soon as one becomes aware that it is a deception, no one would long endure listening to this song, previously taken to be so charming. (§42, 302)

Our first impulse would be to think that Kant’s scorn is motivated by art imitating life, that is, by the distinction of nature and art, rather than the difference between original and copy. By this way of understanding the passage, what disappoints is not that the song “is a deception,” but rather that it is not nature. And that is indeed the way to understand the passage in the context in which Kant tells the anecdote. He is in the midst of a discussion of the “intellectual interest” we may take in the beautiful, and as we saw in Chapter 3, to take an intellectual interest in beauty, Kant insists that “the thought that nature [rather than art] has produced that beauty must accompany the intuition and reflection” (§42, 299). Which is why he can claim “the preeminence of the beauty of nature over the beauty of art in alone awakening an immediate interest” (ibid.). Given this arrangement, not only does it not surprise that the real bird is preferred to the fake, but it seems clear that it is so because the bird is a bird and the fake is artifice.

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But the nightingale passage is more complex, and more interesting, than that, for what the lad’s mischief spoils is more than the intellectual interest a listener may have taken in the nightingale’s trill. When we become aware of it, Kant says, the deception makes the “previously . . . charming” song, a song that yielded no less than “complete satisfaction,” into something unendurable. “This interest, which we here take in beauty . . . disappears entirely as soon as one notices that one has been deceived and that it is only art,” Kant remarks, and “so much so that even taste can no longer find anything beautiful in it” (ibid.). In addition to all intellectual interests, then, the aesthetic pleasure in the song lies in ruins, and it does so because of a piece of conceptual knowledge. More pertinent to our discussion, the specific form this conceptual knowledge takes is that the song is a deception. Kant’s judgment about the song’s aesthetic effect is uttered so casually that we might have missed it were it not for an earlier passage, in a wholly different context, in which we come across the same move. Feeling called on to defend the authentic “song of the nightingale” against its humanly perpetrated forgery, Kant admits that the latter “strikes our ear as utterly tasteless” (“General Remark,” 243). The affront to taste lies not in the fact of art’s subservience to nature, for the simple reason that such a subservience is anything but a fact in Kant’s thinking. Despite the near unanimity with which the idea is repeated by commentators, Kant does not claim an aesthetic superiority of nature over art. Recall that “the preeminence of the beauty of nature over the beauty of art” lies “in alone awakening an immediate interest” in the percipient, and in nothing more. To underline the limitation, Kant immediately adds that his point remains valid “even if the former [the beauty of nature] were to be surpassed by the latter [the beauty of art] in respect of form” (ibid.). This mere possibility of art surpassing nature is actualized when Kant, echoing Aristotle, locates art’s privilege in its ability to render “beautifully things that in nature would be ugly or displeasing” (§48, 312). What, then, spoils our aesthetic enjoyment of the imitated song of the nightingale cannot be the fact that it is art, for art can, and at times does, surpass nature’s beauty. Standing in a long line of musicians and poets inspired by the melodies of nature, John Luther Adams composes music that is often more beautiful and more haunting than the birdsong it clearly evokes. The reason the song of the mischievous lad becomes unendurable is that it is a misguided form of imitation—it attempts to duplicate nature’s products rather than channeling its creativity.

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I return to the anxious distinction of nature and art that Kant keeps upholding only to undermine it time and again, but the issue of forgery, of the production of replicas more generally, is one we can address with the ideas we have been following. Does the difference between the original and the exact copy (whether made sincerely or deceptively) not rest on where we locate the “determinate standard” by which to judge the work? We treat the real Cézanne as though the purpose for the sake of which it exists is nothing but itself; no exterior purpose—moral instruction, payment, and so on— could be relied on to bring forth this painting. This is not something we can say about the copy. Its purpose lies outside itself; it may be a student’s way of practicing technique or a forger’s way of duping a client. Put in language we developed earlier, we might say that the way the copy comes about is not through play but through the application of craft, which is why it has a price that depends on the measurable skill of the craftsman. For the same reasons, the two maintain different relations to sense. Precisely because it is work propelled by its own logic and not answerable to existing and external yardsticks, art gives rise to new standards and hence new sense. It can be about something (including about nothing at all), a sense that surpasses all that lies in its technique of making (its mechanics of craftsmanship, its history, and so on) and its culture of use. It is true that a copy, even a forgery, may become aesthetically significant for us, but it would become so despite itself and not in its capacity as copy. What about the Brillo boxes? I do not pretend to have found the key to Warhol’s work, yet this line of thinking gives us purchase on one of its dimensions. His Brillo boxes transform an object ordinarily defined by rugged external purposes—it is made to be sold, and it is bought to be applied to dirt and grease—into one whose purpose is to be found nowhere if not in itself and which, therefore, signifies in ways we have not seen or heard before. It makes original sense, and thus performs a “transfiguration of the commonplace,” to use Arthur Danto’s locution. Here it does so especially ingeniously, for the transfiguration is effected by the very process of copying that ordinarily robs artworks of their art. Warhol copies things into art. The idea that the artist is not determined by an external yardstick may lead us to conclude, naturally enough, that it must be an internal measure that guides her work. That is one way that theorists have understood the idea of the autonomy of art—as the autonomy of the artist, the Romantic genius being its most flamboyant expression. In this picture, making art can come

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to represent the very paradigm of nonalienated work, standing in euphoric contrast with the heteronomous drudgery of labor. But that, I feel, is not quite right, for it remains blind to key aspects of Kant’s conception of art, and it remains blind to how we, in our own situation, might best think of art. If it is true that artworks are priceless or arbitrarily priced because the work of the artist is not susceptible to being measured by an external yardstick, then it is also true that payment cannot insure the creation of an artwork. As Kant puts it in his Anthropology, “one cannot expect that a poem be made to order and procured as a product for a good price” (7: 318n). If that is true, then it is also true that the artist herself cannot have this expectation. She cannot pay herself in any currency of reward to bring forth an artwork, for the reward, we said, is the making itself, rather than something distinct from it. So when Kant notes that art is the sort of thing that “no one can bring forth by himself when motivated by remuneration” (16: 201, R 2026), this “no one” includes the artist herself, and the remuneration need not be limited to money. It includes any other purpose motivating the making of the artwork that is not itself immanent to the artwork, such as entertainment or moral betterment or, for that matter, moral worsement. Which does not mean that the artist cannot or even should not be paid, but only that what is ostensibly paid for stands in no conceptually determinable relationship to the payment, including one determinable by the artist. The reward, in short, will not reliably bring forth what gives us the kind of plea sure offered by art, while it can reliably bring forth a loaf of bread or a pair of pants or a copy of a Cézanne, if the right conditions are in place (for example, materials, techniques, and craftsmen are available). In true art, Kant notes, “one cannot promise anything” (16: 114, R 1788). We have reached the heart of the matter: in making art, one cannot promise anything. I cannot promise you anything, no matter the reward you may offer me, because I cannot promise myself anything. In making art, I may not be alienated the way the craftsman or the factory worker is, but I am still a stranger to myself. It is a kind of making that succeeds just where I lose my grip on a way of doing guided by rules, on a practice for which I have a theory. The concept of genius enters to name this paradoxical state of things, but that is a matter for Chapter 5. We do not have a good way of describing a social mode of existence in which one cannot promise anything, and if one does, promises do not hold, though it is striking that I

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cannot promise anything about some of the most significant things in my life—not just art, but also love, trust, and faith. For art, and for Kant’s conception of it in particular, Jacques Derrida has proposed the idea of the gift as a way of getting hold of what exceeds the ordinary economy of exchange. The idea Kant himself puts forward to capture this overflow is more intriguing, I think. It is that of Gunst, or “favor.” He leaves it undeveloped, but it does crop up when he attempts to capture this logic of excess. If you think of it not transitively, as doing someone a favor, but as a favor you show or that is shown to you—which is how Kant understands it—then favor, unlike the gift, is not transactional. Its essence lies not in circulating, being passed from one hand to another. Favor characterizes both the way art is brought forth and the way aesthetic pleasure is taken. No amount of patronage can prompt the production of an artwork if the artist is not already a “favorite of nature [Günstling der Natur]” (§49, 318; again §47, 309). If here it is nature that shows favor in the form of genius, then in the aesthetic pleasure we take in the beauty of nature “it is a favor with which we take nature in and not a favor that it shows to us” (§58, 350). We are not thereby “returning the favor,” and thus entering into a system of exchange with nature, since the two ways of showing favor are not commensurate but in excess of any measure. When I receive the favor of beauty, I realize I cannot pay it adequate recompense. But that is not because my resources are depleted, nor because I am of subordinate rank. On the contrary, it is because the only way I have of accepting the favor of beauty is by receiving it favorably, by remaining open to it. That is the comportment that art calls for. But if this is so, we have to wonder whether the comportment applies to all art, everywhere and since the beginning of time. Yes, like every thing in the world, Kant’s theory too emerges from a situation we can attempt to describe, and the range of what it has to tell us is limited by the fact that it is implicated in history. Yet this limitation reveals things to which a historical view remains blind. It allows us to see that the artwork confronts the percipient with a kind of experience whose appearance no previous experience, or system of previous experiences, foresees and fully contains. The experience of art, and the artwork itself, exceeds its own history—its local history of making, its period, and its genre, but also the long arc of the tradition in which it said to stand. In this sense, a work of art will always have something unaccountable about it, as though it had fallen from the sky

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rather than emerging from the normal course of human affairs. (Does the knowingness with which we assure ourselves that of course Kafka’s writings could not have fallen from the sky not in fact testify to their otherworldliness?) We can keep telling histories of art and keep inserting the artwork into its “social context,” but we must realize that these efforts finally fail to tell us what makes that art significant to our experience. PRODUCTION AS A DIMENSION OF EXPERIENCE

We have merely made explicit what has been implicit in the third Critique all along, namely, that in the aesthetic realm the structure of making and the structure of experience are homologous. It no longer seems capricious or perplexing that on both ends of the aesthetic encounter we find at work a freedom from means-ends utility, a kind of work propelled by a selfperpetuating engine of reward that Kant calls play. It is a form of behavior not reducible to forms oriented toward business, forms such as cognition and practical action. Reading Kant’s segmented account and the commentaries relying on it, one gets the impression that the two entities lead separate existences, which from time to time happen to come into contact—here the artwork with its history of production, there the feeling of aesthetic pleasure with its own dynamic. In truth, they are dimensions of a single way human beings have of relating to the world, instances both of the freedom to be guided by something other than determinable purposes. The freedom to do work that cannot be measured by the standards of wage labor (not to be equated with either leisure activity or the blanket refusal of labor) finds its counterpart in the freedom of the pleasure we take in beauty, a pleasure that “could not rest on the representation of [the object’s] utility” (§15, 226). What Kant terms the “autonomy of the subject judging about the feeling of plea sure” (§31, 281) is echoed by an autonomy of the production of the object. We can take this insight a step further—actually three steps further, steps so tightly coordinated that it is difficult to take the one without the others. The first is that the question of Hervorbringung is not confined to the realm of art but turns out to be an essential element of all aesthetic experience, including that of nature. In Chapter 3 we tried to follow the complex line of thought prompted by the idea of an “intellectual interest” in the beauty of nature that Kant develops in section 42, the section just before the one that opens his analysis of art. There we recognized that an account of aes-

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thetic experience as “purely aesthetic,” an experience unmoved by the question of making and confined to reception, remains inadequate both to Kant’s analysis and to our own thinking about aesthetic experience. We saw why “the thought that nature has produced that beauty” (§42, 299; my emphasis) is essential not merely for awakening the intellectual interest in beauty but for experiencing this beauty. The revelation that we have been listening to a faux nightingale or admiring artificial flowers masquerading as real flowers damages more than the moral interest in the beautiful; it brings to ruin beauty itself. We said that the very presence of art and of the creativity that brings it forth prompts a rethinking of the structure of aesthetic experience. The sections on art are therefore far from parergonal or superfluous; they bring to our attention an entire dimension of aesthetic life that had, at best, remained bracketed in Kant’s analysis. By bringing to the fore the dimension of making, art reveals itself as being not a mere feature of the aesthetic world but integral to its structure. This helps us makes sense of Kant’s confounding proposition that “nature was beautiful, if at the same time it looked like art” (§45, 306). What does it mean for nature to “look like” art? Does it not suggest that nature seems to be one thing but really is another? This is, plausibly, how commentators tend to understand the passage, adding it to the list of relationships in the third Critique for which Kant uses the phrase as if. I look at beautiful nature as if it were art, thus engaging in a form of self-trickery: I know that in fact it is nothing like art, but for the purposes of aesthetic experience I suspend disbelief and treat it as if it were. But the experience of beauty does not seem to revolve around pretense or illusion (let alone delusion), and if Kant’s aesthetic theory were to account for it by taking recourse to the conceit of double consciousness (“I know very well, but nonetheless . . .”), then it would have a lesser claim on our attention. The sections on art show the way to a different understanding of Kant. If the unity of art and nature in aesthetic experience lies not just in a manner of experience, but also in a structure of making (this was the first step entailed by the conception of art), then experience and making—reception and production— can no longer be held apart. Instead— and this is the second step—we are urged to think of the experience as an experience of a certain kind of making. It helps us recognize that the idea of “looking like” cannot be exhausted by a logic of seeming. To say that a certain form of making sustains aesthetic experience simply means that nature in aesthetic experience is made according to a form of making that becomes known to us

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through art. This form of making is not parasitic on the form accessible to science, and therefore not achieved through self-deception. In aesthetic experience nature really is made like art, just as really as it is made according to natural laws in scientific experience (or, in an earlier order of explanation, according to divine law). When Kant remarks that “even the botanist, who recognizes in it the reproductive organ of the plant, pays no attention to this natural end if he judges the flower by means of taste” (§16, 229), I do not understand him to be claiming that the botanist, in enjoying the beauty of flowers, must disavow knowing the science of flowers. He simply “pays no attention” to it, for that knowledge has no hold on aesthetic experience. Were we to take something like disavowal to be at work, then we would silently assume that factual, scientific knowledge makes up the base on top of which aesthetic pleasure glides on a delicate coat of suspended disbelief. Yet aesthetic experience is not confined to the make-believe of fiction, even if some fictions can be aesthetically striking. Once again we return to the point from which all of Kant’s reflections on the subject depart, namely, that aesthetic experience is irreducible; it is no less fundamental than is the cognitive access to the world. This is true even when I admit that knowing something about the science of flowers may disclose to me forms of beauty to which I had been blind, since in the experience of beauty such knowledge does not operate as scientific knowledge (it is, for example, not mobilized for the sake of explanation or control). By saying that the aesthetic experiences of nature and of art rely on a unified structure, we are at odds with the claim that, in Kant’s theory, it is nature that supplies the key instances of the aesthetic, a claim advanced by some of the most sensitive readers of Kant. On the face of it, this claim is plausible, since Kant often reaches for examples drawn from nature to give us exemplary instances of aesthetic objects. “Many birds (the parrot, the hummingbird, the bird of paradise) and a host of marine crustaceans are beauties in themselves,” he writes, “which are not attached to a determinate object in accordance with concepts regarding its end, but are free and please for themselves” (§16, 229). And then there is the flower, sometimes generically, sometimes specifically (the rose, the tulip), which returns over and over, prompting us to believe that Kant takes the flower to be the very template of all things beautiful. But looking at the way flowers appear in the text, we must wonder in what sense they are to be taken as instances of “nature.” Consider these instances:

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Whether a garment, a house, a flower is beautiful . . . (§8, 215–216) An ideal of beautiful flowers, of beautiful furnishings, of a beautiful view [ . . . ], a beautiful residence, a beautiful tree, beautiful gardens, etc. (§17, 233) For himself alone a human being abandoned on a desert island would not adorn either his hut or himself, nor seek out or still less plant flowers in order to decorate himself. (§41, 297) [The art of plea sure gardens] is nothing other than the decoration of the ground with the same variety (grasses, flowers, bushes and trees, even water, hills and valleys) with which nature presents it to intuition, only arranged differently and suited to certain ideas. (§51, 323) For a terrace with all kinds of flowers, a room with all sorts of decorations (even including the finery of the ladies) constitute, at a splendid party, a kind of painting. (§51, 324)

These flowers serve multiple textual purposes, yet they have one thing in common: it is striking how tenuously they are rooted in nature, if by nature we understand a realm strictly separated from human forms of making. Kant’s flowers are in fact embedded in the technical practices of adornment, gardening, and painting, so much so that when he does wish to draw a line between nature and art, he finds it useful to turn the flower into “a wildflower [einer wilden Blume]” (§42, 299; my emphasis), which held our interest in Chapter 3. In fact, the most canonical instance of beauty unburdened by any determinable purpose may be not the flower tout court, but what Kant calls “foliage”: “Flowers, free designs, lines aimlessly intertwined in each other under the name of foliage, signify nothing, do not depend on any determinate concept, and yet please” (§4, 207). Or again: “Thus designs à la grecque, foliage for borders or on wallpaper, etc., signify nothing by themselves: they do not represent anything, no object under a determinate concept, and are free beauties” (§16, 229). Kant’s term for foliage, Laubwerk, joins the natural phenomenon of leaves (Laub) with human work (Werk). The meandering lines of “foliage for borders or on wallpaper” are themselves thus turned into an allegory of the braiding of the natural and the human-made in aesthetic experience. If this is so, then we need to address an objection that will have been gathering force in the readers’ mind by now. If in aesthetic experience nature is indeed made like art, is it then not odd that in trying to grasp the essence

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of art the diff erence to nature’s way of making is the first, most consequential distinction Kant makes? We know the passage well: “By rights, only production through freedom, i.e., through a capacity for choice that grounds its actions in reason, should be called art” (§43, 303). And freedom, Kant maintains, is precisely what nature lacks, even if “people are fond of describing the product of the bees . . . as a work of art” (ibid.). We seem to be moving in a confusing, self-contradictory circle: a defining characteristic of human making, and hence also of the making of art, is that it differs from nature’s way of making, yet “nature was beautiful, if at the same time it looked like art.” The feeling of turning in circles only intensifies when we consider the whole sentence from which the last phrase is taken: Nature was beautiful, if at the same time it looked like art; and art can only be called beautiful if we are aware that it is art and yet it looks to us like nature. (§45, 306)

We feel the pressure of reading the passage according to the specular logic of seeming, yet we also note how the logic of making that is unfolded in the sections we have been considering opens our way to an entirely different way of understanding aesthetic experience, one that is not obliged to think of it as an illusion or a delusion. If making applies not only to the way we take pleasure in art but to aesthetic pleasure wherever it occurs, and if furthermore the logic of making is not merely present in this experience but structures it, then what we know about this logic of making helps us makes sense of the logic of experience. And what do we know about the logic of making? As we just reminded ourselves, we know that it is founded in freedom, yet our discussion in this chapter has shown this to be a distinctive and strange kind of freedom, quite unlike the freedom that sustains craft and similar forms of making. We have little difficulty seeing the freedom of choice at work in craft: it is entailed everywhere in deciding on the desired end, in selecting the appropriate means, and in harnessing them to achieve the end. Yet in making art things are less clear. To be sure, we do not understand the artist to be acting bereft of choice, like those bees assembling their hives. No doubt there is choice involved. But of what kind? Since there is, in art, no end that may be distinguished from the means, since fashioning the means is the end, what is being chosen or intended? Making art? Many commentators, guided by a formalist

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account free of conceptual contamination that they believe Kant advances, either claim that the intentional work of the artist ruins the purity of aesthetic experience or make the case that all knowledge of intention, like all conceptual knowledge, must be bracketed to maintain that purity. But if the intention of the artist amounts to nothing more than bringing forth this artwork, then there are no concepts controlling its reception that the percipient needs to bracket. Taking the artwork “as if” it were nature is not a matter of giving into false appearances or of suspending disbelief about the intention that brought it forth. Besides, what have we said by saying that the artist intended to make this artwork? What kind of intention is involved? Earlier we said that while craft engages in the means-end rationality required of business, the work involved in making art is a form of play. While play is free—more free than anything else human beings do—we learned that it is not willful. I cannot set out to play aesthetically; I cannot just decide to make an artwork and reliably deliver one, for the artist, we recall, “cannot promise anything” (16: 114, R 1788). The freedom involved in making art, while undoubtedly operative, is not transparent to itself. There is choice, but we cannot meaningfully say who chooses and why. The burden of the idea of genius is to give a name to this seeming paradox. Where has this line of thinking taken us? We said, first, that the reflection on making, prompted by the phenomenon of art, folds back to envelop all aesthetic objects. This means that, second, there is an intimacy between the structure of aesthetic experience and the structure of making. Now a third step, entailed by the first two. If the form of making art reveals to us something significant about the form of aesthetic experience, it is this: just as the making of art is inevitably not fully transparent to itself, so too the experience of art in part remains opaque to the person having it. Although I may be taken by the impersonal joy that I feel for a painting or a gesture in a movie, I can no more direct myself to having that feeling than I can command myself—or let myself be commanded—to bring forth an artwork. This is an idea we do not find expressed by Kant. His way of putting things usually disposes us to think of the work of freedom in aesthetic experience as directed by a sort of will. For example, when he claims that the great privilege of the human capacity for beauty lies in having the “freedom to make anything into an object of pleasure” (§5, 210), we are inclined to think of having an aesthetic experience as being a matter of deciding to have that experience: I choose to put on my aesthetic glasses (or strike an “aesthetic attitude”), and voilà, I have made

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myself an object of pleasure. Kant calls this form of pleasure “favor,” “the only free pleasure” (ibid.), which only encourages us in our view that this is something bestowed in sovereign freedom, without expectation or duty. Yet in the context of trying to understand art, we came to recognize “favor” as something more complex, something that surpasses the economy of business. As a “favorite of nature,” the artist receives favors, but he also performs favors when he gives “more” than he promises (§51, 321). It is in the nature of favor, as understood here, that this give-and-take can neither be measured up against one another nor set in motion willfully. Is this not true also of the favor involved in aesthetic plea sure? When we enjoy the “freedom to make anything into an object of pleasure,” are we acting the way we are when we do someone a favor? It seems not, nor does it seem that this is what Kant means; it is at odds with one of the basic insights of the third Critique, namely, that aesthetic experience involves neither will nor inclinations (not what he calls “the faculty of desire”), but judgment. The capacity for judging aesthetically is not something I just decide to deploy; in such cases, “the imagination . . . is unintentionally brought into accord with the understanding” (Introduction VII, 190; my emphasis). Th is unintentional coming into being of an attunement may be why Kant thinks of judgment as a mysterious capacity “hidden to us even in its sources” (§57, 341). Aesthetic experience is not like moral action or like following my heart’s desire (which I can decide to follow or not to follow). It is something that takes hold of me as much as I can be said to guide it. It does require my being open to it, yet by itself that openness is not enough to bring it about. Like falling asleep or falling in love, I can put myself in a position of receiving it, but I cannot command myself into it. Only infrequently does Kant make room for the idea that aesthetic pleasure is best described as way of falling for beauty, of allowing oneself to be overcome or seized by it, and that this fall is not a forfeiture of freedom but an exemplary instance of it, though the way he develops his thinking allows us to put that idea into words. Here too the sections on art do more work to refashion the idea of aesthetic experience than they are usually given credit for, since they permit us to see how the freedom in aesthetic pleasure takes a complexion that is strikingly different from the one we know from the freedom to act. We shall see this in what Kant calls aesthetic ideas, which reveal the freedom in aesthetic experience as the strange freedom to be unmoored from meaning. But it becomes plainest in the idea of genius.

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to make of genius? Does it not belong to a more euphoric, less cynical time than our own? Most contemporary critics and theorists of art tend to keep their distance from the word, let alone the idea it denotes, and when we do use it, we tend to set it off with a pair of invisible scare quotes that telegraph our discomfort. Or we link it to a reliable term of disparagement and speak, for example, of the “cult of genius.” We thus manage to hold it at bay with the same knowing condescension with which devotees of science speak of, say, phlogiston. The scholar Jens Kulenkampff at least does Kant the honor of spelling out his misgivings. He writes, “A theory of production that makes use of the concept of genius hardly deserves the name, for by doing so it merely concedes its failure to explain how works of art come about.” The problem with genius, in other words, is not that it is a discredited explanation à la phlogiston. It is no explanation at all. Explaining the making of art with genius is like Molière’s doctors explaining the soporific effects of opium with the “dormative principle”; it replaces one mystery with another. Kulenkampff ’s assessment is correct, I think, but it is the kind of correctness that stymies our reflection more than inspiring it. It prompts us to cast aside the concept of genius, when we may learn more by asking what its failure reveals. It is true that genius fails “to explain how works of art come WHAT ARE WE

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about,” yet is it finally an explanation that Kant is aiming for? What would an explanation of artistic creativity look like? What conceptual conditions would have to be met for us to lean back, satisfied that what Kant calls the Hervorbringung—the bringing forth—of works of art had in fact been explained? It is difficult to say. The way the concept of genius makes its appearance in the third Critique draws attention to just this difficulty. Hardly has Kant uttered his first words about genius— defining it as “the talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art” (§46, 307)—than he pulls back: Whatever the case may be with this definition, and whether it is merely arbitrary or is adequate to the concept which is usually associated with the word genius or not . . . it can nevertheless already be proved at the outset that, according to the meaning of the word assumed here, beautiful arts must necessarily be considered as arts of genius. (Ibid.)

What begins by sounding like soft-pedaling (“whatever the case may be with this definition”) ends in a bold declaration. Beautiful arts— art in an emphatic sense—“must necessarily” have been brought forth by genius, Kant insists, regardless of whether “the meaning of the word assumed here” conforms or collides with the meaning “which is usually associated with the word.” Genius in Kant’s sense, then, is an idea that his conception of art demands. It is at this initial point of the investigation not understood to be an independent entity unfolding its own force, but, as a matter of conceptual necessity, part and parcel of art. It “explains” nothing. Still, the question is if this idea is just an infatuation of the eighteenth century, now washed out and a bit embarrassing, or if it has enough vitality to push our understanding of art and its experience. If it is not meant to explain, what work does the concept of genius then do in Kant’s thinking, and what work might it do for ours? Our first impulse will be to take the concept head-on and examine “the meaning of the word assumed here,” but we soon find ourselves thwarted. The definition of genius we have quoted, namely, the “talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art,” leaves us confused, and Kant’s gloss of the term as “the inborn predisposition of the mind (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art” (ibid.) opens more rabbit holes than it closes. What complicates the matter is that the word, no less than the concept, arrives weighed down by an immense semantic load (the entry Genie in the Grimms’ Deutsches Wörter-

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buch runs to nearly 40,000 words). So it may be more productive to do what Kant does at this point. Rather than approaching genius directly, attempting to grasp its essence by examining its parts and their functions, he considers it obliquely, indeed negatively. He turns to the conception of art he has already developed and traces the shape of the blank spot left in it, which genius, it turns out, is called on to fill. We are already familiar with the blank spot at the heart of the conception of art. We encountered it when we took the measure of the difference between art and craft along with the corollary difference between the freedom of play and the business of business. Favor is one term Kant proposes for the way the activity of play expresses the greatest freedom while at the same time eluding the player’s will. Here, while introducing the concept of genius, he articulates the same paradox in the language of rules. On the one hand, “every art presupposes rules which first lay the foundation by means of which a product that is to be called artistic is first represented as possible” (§46, 307). On the other, “the concept of beautiful art . . . does not allow the judgment concerning the beauty of its product to be derived from any sort of rule that has a concept for its determining ground, and thus has as its ground a concept of how it is possible” (ibid.). As the product of human beings, art is an instance of “production through freedom,” a result of the “capacity for choice that grounds its actions in reason” (§43, 303). Unlike the work of the bees, it is responsive to purposes; and because purposes are concepts, the work’s coming into being must therefore be guided by a concept. Yet, and here is the rub, if art were made under the direction of a concept, then that concept would also govern the way we experience and judge it. Under such conditions, we would be inclined to say that what we have before us is, for example, an excellent (or defective) instance of X. But then our experience would no longer be in the aesthetic orbit, which, as Kant has insisted from the outset, cannot be reduced to applying a concept (or set of concepts) to an object. It is this irreducibility to the application of a rule, this failure at being controlled by a concept, that makes aesthetic judgment reflective rather than determining. And because this is so: beautiful art cannot itself think up the rule in accordance with which it is to bring its product into being. Yet since without a preceding rule a product can never be called art, nature in the subject . . . must give the rule to art, i.e., beautiful art is possible only as a product of genius. (§46, 307)

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In making works of art, then, rules must be both present and somehow suspended. The insight has an intuitive plausibility. Is there not a moment of disappointment when I discover that a painting or a piece of music, indeed any work of art, was painted or composed by following a rule—that it was derived rather than made? This disappointment testifies to the gap in the process of making that Kant indicates here. Its counterpart is the deep pleasure of discovering that what seemed like an application of rules—rules, say, of the transposition of tones or of colors—in fact is exceeded in the work in ways that are entirely unpredictable. I understand that rules must have been in play to make this work of art—it did not arise by chance, even when aleatory elements are built into it—but I cannot make out how the rules by themselves bring about this work. It comforts us when a philosophical conception accords with our intuition, but in this case we must admit to doubts roused by Kant’s line of reasoning. In his argument, the structure of judging an object determines the structure of its production. But can the conditions of experiencing an object in fact tell us anything about the way it was made, or, conversely, its mode of making constrain our experience of it? Suppose a potter cata logued every step in the making of a bowl; would we then be barred from finding it beautiful? It seems Kant is saying so. And what if the vessel became the occasion for aesthetic experience after all? Would we then be obliged to conclude that it had, in fact, not been made according to those rules, that the potter had in fact been mistaken? These questions are apt to confound us. They become less vexing once we remind ourselves of the kind of analysis Kant is offering here. It is not an empirical analysis that means to describe— or to “explain”—what occurs in the minds and bodies of particular makers and particular percipients of art. Rather, it aims to clarify the conceptual ground (or in Kant’s terms, the conditions of possibility) that must be in place for something we call “art” to occur. This conceptual ground reveals itself through logical analysis and not through empirical observation nor through introspection, for the thoughts and feelings laid bare in introspection themselves belong to the empirical world. What the artist declares about her procedures or the percipient about his manner of experience does therefore not speak to transcendental analysis. This is not to say that the artist is “wrong” when she assures us that in making the bowl she had been following a formula. We can grant that her report fully accords with her observations of herself and still maintain that her analysis of artistic creativity is wanting.

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We now have a better sense of what it means when Kant says that our aesthetic experience reveals the artwork as something whose production cannot be fully accounted for by a series of steps that the artist (or anyone else) lays down. We also have a sense of what it does not mean. It does not mean that art can be made on the strength of genius alone; recall that it is a feature of “shallow minds” to forget that “there is no beautiful art in which something mechanical, which can be grasped and followed according to rules . . . does not constitute the essential condition of the art” (§47, 310). The way the bowl has come into being cannot help but be grounded in certain skills, materials, traditions, and so on. In this respect, it belongs to the world of science and of craft. But it does not fully belong to those world, where fully does not refer to a quantitative mea sure. It does not mean that while “most” of an artwork may be explained by means of science and craft, a certain quantum of a mysterious ingredient called genius must be mixed in to yield the right outcome. Once we take something to be an artwork (rather than a clay vessel or an arrangement of words), the whole object fails to be explicable through the external protocols of science and craft, even though we also know that they “constitute the essential condition[s] of art.” Art is a dimension of experience that makes a difference to the entire object, as it does to the entire subject. GENIUS, ORIGINALITY, EXEMPLARITY

We now see that in speaking about genius, we have also been speaking about art. The idea of genius helps us recognize that an artwork is most cogently thought of not as an object that differs from ordinary objects in some essential way (say, in its makeup or use), nor as an ordinary object plus some enigmatic entity (genius, beauty, sophistication). Rather Kant’s analysis urges us to think of it as an object just like the ones accounted for by science and craft but with a diff erence. A lot hinges on the way we understand this difference. One can underplay it and, like Henry Staten, think of art as a more sophisticated version of skill (we discussed this in Chapter 4). Or one can overplay it, which is the more common tendency among commentators. In that case, genius introduces not a difference but, as the philosopher JeanMarie Schaeffer would have it, a complete rupture that “cuts off [artistic products] from other human artefacta; romanticism will take off from precisely this radical separation.”  Neither of these readings guides us toward

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the most nuanced understanding of Kant or to the richest notion of the work of art. One way we found of giving expression to the difference of art, a way more congenial to Kant’s text and more productive for our own understanding of art, is that the object itself supplies the measure by which it is to be experienced; in contrast with craft, which is measurable by an external yardstick and can therefore be “paid for in accordance with a determinate standard” (§51, 321), the artwork, like judgment itself, is characterized by “heautonomy” (Introduction V, 185)—it is not merely law giving (which is a characteristic of autonomy), but law giving to itself. Genius, we now recognize, is another way of giving voice to the same logic. It too names a difference, a structural shift in experience. More specifically, it names the coming-into-being of this difference, and since this coming-into-being too eludes a full accounting by means of the protocols of science and of craft (if it did not, we could use science and craft to engineer the difference at will), genius too remains beyond the ken of science and craft. In speaking about genius, we have said fairly little about genius itself, which is apt, for neither does Kant, and that, I suggest, is just the distinction of his conception. If it names the coming-into-being of a difference, then genius, in this Kantian configuration, is a concept bereft of specific content. This formalism sets it apart from the many conceptions of genius developed in the hundred-odd years before the third Critique appeared. Because we find their vocabulary echoed in Kant’s text, we are inclined to see the same, or at least a similar, conception at work. But there is a striking difference, a symptom of which is the fact that Kant’s genius comes across as bloodless and abstract, while his precursors seem intent on topping one another with vivid portraits. Thus Dryden describes the genius of Ben Jonson as “sullen and saturnine”; Diderot suggests genius must be tortured, breathless, and agitated; and Rousseau’s genius “burns ceaselessly and never consumes himself.” These arresting images have had such staying power that they have calcified into clichés. Their vividness rests on the fact that the writers attempt to grasp genius in psychological rather than purely formal terms. What recommends Kant’s conception to our attention is also what renders his genius pale and thin by comparison, namely, that his account lingers with formal language. His genius is neither the supernatural spirit—the genie—that in antiquity was imagined as intervening into the life of the subject from without (in the sense of “the tutelary god or attendant spirit allotted to every person

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at birth to govern his or her fortunes,” as the OED puts it), nor is it naturalized into a psychological or physiological entity, with its own history and potentiality, imagined as inhabiting the subject (say, in her behavior or her body). Genius is also not naturalized in a different sense, namely, the sense assumed by those critics who aim to unmask it as an ideological ruse. The charge these critics level is roughly that the concept of genius provides Kant cover for smuggling into the aesthetic realm the notion of nature as purposefully organized, which he develops in the “Critique of Teleological Judgment.” But the notion of “nature” that Kant brings into play as what “gives the rule to art” lacks the thickness—the structure and substance—that it would need to have were it to be productive of rules. Nothing in the text suggests that this is the same nature that we encounter in part II of the book, let alone the nature of the Critique of Pure Reason or of Kant’s many writings on the philosophy of science. This nature has neither texture nor structure. And for good reason, for it names nothing but a difference. Even those precursors of Kant’s conception that do think of genius in formal terms—for example, the influential Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who defines ingenium as the “proportion” between cognitive faculties, a characterization Kant echoes at one point (§49, 316)— even these precursors still conceive of genius as the property of the subject. Yet Kant tweaks the idea enough to give it new life and significance. His genius certainly does not name a person (in the sense of saying someone is a genius), nor is it clear that one can even confidently say that someone has genius. In Kant’s conception, genius resides neither fully outside the subject nor fully inside it. It describes, rather, something occurring between the subject and the world. We might think of it as a structural and relational property, as what brings about an unforeseen change in the world, which in turn occasions a shift in the way we experience that part of the world. Although it has no content, we can say more about the way genius makes itself known. What characterizes the particular way that it brings about the structural shift leading to aesthetic experience? “Originality,” Kant writes, “must be its primary characteristic” (§46, 308). And we know why, for we have encountered the thought before, only in an inverted form. If the Hervorbringung that we ascribe to genius is of a kind that cannot be reduced to a recipe, if therefore it is a mode of production that remains unaccounted for by any procedure we know, then it must be genuinely new. Genius, then, is a new way of making, which is not the same thing as a way of making the

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new. The notion of originality Kant proposes here is not aimed at the novelty of products; that, at any rate, is not its most significant feature. Production itself is original. Genius brings forth new ways of bringing forth. But to establish, as Kant wishes to, that “genius is entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation” (§46, 308), this shift from product to production is not the decisive step. For the idea of imitation against which Kant takes aim already is a theory of the imitation of production, not of products. The theory of imitation from which ingenious making is distinguished names a mode of production through rules that can be codified, taught, and reproduced; the form of production is designed to be imitated, while genius closes that door. Genius, then, introduces a split in production and thereby in the conception of mimesis: there is, on the one hand, the idea of mimesis as the imitation of a rule-bound and thus, in principle, reproducible mode of production, and, on the other, mimesis as the imitation of an inimitable mode of production. The first form of imitation holds for the reproduction of science and of craft, the second for art, and art alone. Understood this way, the concept of originality right away raises two questions. We encountered the first when we came across what Kant calls “original nonsense” (§46, 308): would a mode of making released from the grip of concepts not give rise to meaningless products? In fact, since the works of genius are new and therefore singular, how can they submit to the orderly system of meaning, which relies on the controlled repeatability of its elements? In other words, if the work of genius is utterly new, neither a copy of past practice nor to be copied in the future, would it not have to be “original nonsense”? The other question is generated by the friction in the paradox of imitating the inimitable: how are we to imagine this process? At its core, it is a question of how one artist can learn from another, of how the making of art can be taught. The two questions, that of meaning and that of teaching, turn out to be deeply linked. Let us turn to the question of meaning first. In our earlier discussion, we learned that the looming threat of the outbreak of nonsense that inheres in a form of making not guided by an externally imposed rulebook or yardstick— a threat, in other words, inherent rather than incidental to making art—is controlled by the idea of play, a behavior that, while free to ignore the rulebook, veers toward being purposeful. Without such an orientation toward purposefulness (and thus toward sense, even if bereft of a definite meaning), we might not see play,

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but rather a behavioral malfunction or the automatism of the organic. Making art, we said as we tried to grasp the difference Kant asserts between art and craft, is neither algorithmic nor random, neither fully under the sway of concepts nor fully detached from their force, but occurs rather in zone of activity between an enforced meaning and the possibility of its absence—in a zone of play. Here, in the analysis of genius, the role played by play in the earlier context is performed by the concept of exemplarity. Besides being original, the genius’s “products must at the same time be models [Muster], i.e., exemplary,” Kant writes (§46, 308). And how do they come to be exemplary? “While not themselves the result of imitation, they must yet serve others in that way, i.e., as a standard or a rule for judgment” (ibid.). The creative energy of genius, then, lies in bringing forth not just any new form of making (for many of these yield nothing but “original nonsense”) but a new form of making that gives shape to new forms of experience. This giving shape to experience is achieved not through a cata logue of rules and procedures (which is how new forms of behavior are transmitted in religion, craft, bodily exercise, spiritual practice, and so on) but through a singular object, the exemplary artwork that holds up “a standard . . . for judgment.” The logic of exemplarity is familiar to us from another passage. Back in the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” in trying to explain how aesthetic judgments, which cannot help but be subjective, nonetheless carry the necessary force of universal validity, Kant put forward a strange notion of necessity, what he called “exemplary” necessity, “a necessity of the assent of all to a judgment that is regarded as an example of a universal rule that one cannot produce” (§18, 237). What at first may appear like a multiplication of exemplarities— here an exemplarity of making, there of judging—in fact grasps different aspects of the same logic. We have said that the reason my particular feeling of aesthetic pleasure dares to make a claim on your assent (whether it garners it, is another question) is that it is not mine alone. And it is not mine alone, because its structure partakes of something beyond myself. In Kant’s terms, it is a feeling of “the attunement of the cognitive powers for a cognition in general” (§21, 238), which is to say a feeling of the purposeful arrangement of the cognitive powers, even though no purpose I could name controls that arrangement. That is just what makes the feeling and the aesthetic judgment with which it is interlaced exemplary: in its particularity it reveals a general configuration that no concept can capture and that therefore

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cannot be brought forth according to a concept. Moreover, this feeling is not self-referential but “concerns a plea sure or displea sure in the form of the object” (§30, 279), for beauty, while being an attunement of the subject’s cognitive powers, always stands in relation to an object. It is not my feeling that is beautiful, but the garden or poem or movement. Only because the judgment that issues from my feeling is directed toward an object, rather than reporting on a state trapped within myself, does the question of how this object has come into being hold an urgent interest for me. And if the beautiful object has come into being through a human hand—that is, if the object is an artwork—then its mode of making is simply that which establishes “a standard . . . for judgment.” It has been made in a way that it generates the logic of exemplarity, and so exemplarity must be woven into the sort of making for which we hold genius responsible. Exemplarity names, then, the capacity of genius for producing original sense, something new that, despite being unlinked from earlier chains of signification, takes place within an arena of sense. This is noteworthy for at least two features. First, this taking place occurs not by accident, but by virtue of the fact that the singular work establishes the very arena of sense on which it appears. Kafka’s fables and Pollock’s drip paintings do not just happen to drift into the orbit of what strikes me as meaningful; rather they set the “standard” (to use Kant’s terms) by which I come to experience them. This is a notion of creativity that gives us the means to describe how the encounter with certain perceptual configurations— certain artworks, for example—can lead us to feel both shattered and renewed. What we recognize in them, and in ourselves as we experience them, is that the configuration both exceeds the established order of meaning and shows us a path toward a new one. We recognize sense, a way meaning is remade as it is unmade. The second notable feature of the conception of exemplarity we have been following lies in the texture of sense itself. It is a feature whose full force we will feel only later in this chapter and in Chapter 6, when we have had occasion to consider the idea of aesthetic ideas. For only then will we be prepared to see how the notion of exemplarity as a defense against “original nonsense” gives way to the far-reaching suggestion that genius “displays itself . . . in the exposition or the expression of aesthetic ideas” (§49, 317). The distance between the two, though fewer than a dozen pages, is immense. What separates them is the notion of aesthetic ideas, whose production is now seen as the true end of genius. Because an aesthetic idea “occasions much

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thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought . . . to be adequate to it” (§49, 314), exemplarity brings forth sense of a quality sharply different from what we know or might expect. True, Kant speaks of purposiveness, not sense or meaning. But purposiveness is not exhausted by inertly beholding the “formal” structure of a configuration, but harnesses conceptual resources that activate the question of meaning in aesthetic experience. Allowing us to see this is another achievement of Kant’s discussion of the artwork. The term sense signals that meaning, rather than being assured, is a question for this experience; it is in play. When genius sets forth “a standard or a rule for judgment,” we may be led to think that it has also delivered a meaning, which I, the reader (or viewer, listener, . . .), am called on to unpack. But understanding genius as the producer of meaning, and the artwork as its vehicle, is not what Kant’s conception entails. If the way I experience an artwork is not purely formalistic and hence drained of meaning (as the received idea about Kant’s aesthetics has it), it is also not flooded with a meaning that I can secure for myself. Rather, it is a significance “which . . . no language fully attains or can make intelligible” (ibid.). The reason an artwork speaks to me is because I recognize in it a solicitation to engage with meaning that exceeds its and my capacities. This solicitation lies not buried in a depth I distinguish from the sensory manifestation of the work’s surface, but characterizes the total experience of the work. A move, such as the one performed by Susan Sontag, that plays out the hermeneutic content of a work against the erotics of its formal elements, misses the conception of meaning that is at stake here. Just as there is no part of an artwork that is exempt from standing in some relation to meaning (I never come face-toface with a purely nonsignifying “presence”), there is also no meaning that I can take home with me. The exemplary originality of genius names what causes meaning to surpass itself in the artwork. We will become more familiar with this logic when we examine the aesthetic ideas, though we will never be truly at home with it. Consider how far from self-evident it is that exemplarity should define genius. Kant himself keeps forgetting it. When he declares that “genius can only provide rich material for products of art,” while “its elaboration and form require a talent that has been academically trained” (§47, 310), we can try to finesse the distinction between material and form, but then we downplay our bafflement at its appearance. It does sound as though academic training—hence rule following—has come to occupy the driver’s seat in

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artistic making. If genius is what “gives the rule to art,” which after all is the first thing we learned about it, must it then not be at least as deeply involved in forming art as it is in providing “rich material” for it? Kant is especially prone to lose sight of genius’s power to establish rules—its exemplarity—when he gets himself in a pique about those unnamed “shallow minds” who so ardently exalt genius and belittle training that they “believe that one parades around better on a horse with the staggers than one that is properly trained” (ibid.). So he ends up doing what polemicists tend to do: in contradicting his opponents, he ends up deploying their distinctions and concepts (or, more typically, a caricature of those concept). When he holds up the aesthetic worth of genius against that of taste and concludes that “if anything must be sacrificed in the conflict of the two properties in one product, it must rather be on the side of genius” (§50, 319), what puzzles is not the higher value he assigns to taste, but that it should be played out against genius in the first place. Or again, when he sets out gleefully to “clip its wings,” it is because genius “produces, in its lawless freedom, nothing but nonsense” (ibid.). Yet we know the opposite to be true: the freedom genius enjoys is not “lawless,” nor does it bring forth “nothing but nonsense,” precisely because its mode of production is exemplary and its mode of making is geared toward sense. It stands in no “conflict” with taste, because it is genius that gives rise to “a standard . . . of judgment” and hence forms taste. INGENIOUS PEDAGOGY

Almost imperceptibly, the range of the idea of genius has changed as we have worked to unfold it. We began by approaching it obliquely, via the unmarked spot in the conception of aesthetic experience. Genius was understood as that which brings forth what in aesthetic experience eludes conceptual determination. By this way of thinking, the structure of making art is homologous with that of experiencing art, and so genius can be seen as aesthetic experience, reverse engineered. Th is may suggest a homeostatic, even inert relationship between the two, in which making and judging keep one another in a state of balance. But we have seen (and shall see in greater detail) how the account of art upends the conception of aesthetic experience as a harmonious affair, for that experience involves an engagement with significance that cracks open meaning itself. This helps us get a sense of the

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dynamism in genius, for it makes not only new “products” and new ways of making but new forms of sense. Exemplarity acts not merely as the inhibitory force, steering genius away from committing “original nonsense.” It is also powerfully and unpredictably creative, so much so that it surpasses the old parameters of judgment and establishes new ones. William Wordsworth says much the same thing when he ascribes to the “author, as far as he is great and at the same time original” the power of “creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.” It is what Maurice Merleau-Ponty has termed an artwork’s “strange power of being self-teaching.” We now have a new way of understanding the homology between making and judging; they make a dynamic, intertwined system. There is another way exemplarity reveals its creative power, and that is in the ways it produces new geniuses. For the ingenious artist does not merely make a thing (the artwork) nor just a new way of experiencing the thing (the “standard . . . of judgment”), but it also makes another artist. And once again the fact that rules are operative and, at once, suspended is key to this process. We have seen that in making the artwork, genius also brings forth rules; Kant calls them Muster—patterns, models. These rules, Kant reminds us, may be abstracted from the model, codified, and turned into a body of teachable precepts “against which others may test their own talent” (§47, 309). Yet what has the student copied in following the rules? Not what is most essential in the artwork, namely, genius. Why? Because “then that which is genius in it . . . would be lost” (§49, 318). So genius gives rise to an urge to be copied, but the moment one gives into the urge, one has lost what one set out to capture. At one and the same time, the model encourages imitation and voids it. The originality of genius has, then, two values, as Kant puts it in a notebook: “Original is negative, what cannot be imitated, positive: what is worthy of imitation, that is exemplary” (15: 824, R 1509). “How this is possible”—how one genius activates the genius in other makers and motivates a mode of making that strives to imitate the inimitable—“is difficult to explain,” Kant admits (§49, 309). When he tries anyway, he reaches for a model of dissemination that seems to come out of the blue: The ideas of the artist arouse similar ideas in his apprentice if nature has equipped him with a similar proportion of mental powers. The models of beautiful art are thus the only means for transmitting these to posterity. (§49, 309–310)

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We understand that Kant is groping for a theory of how art may be “transmitt[ed] . . . to posterity,” that is, a theory of artistic pedagogy. Instead of a theory, though, he offers an allegory—a story of artworks begetting artworks through “arousal,” an idea akin to the “noble contagion” with which Edward Young attempts to capture the effect the works of genius have on others in his Conjectures on Original Composition (published in 1759, some thirty years before the third Critique appeared). This is sure to renew the charge we heard from Kulenkampff at the outset of the chapter that such a move “merely concedes [a] failure to explain how works of art come about.” And once again we see why the charge, while correct, misses its mark, for we recognize that any Kantian theory of artistic pedagogy will always leave a large hole at its very center, precisely at the spot where things get interesting, namely, where it would spell out how works of art are to be brought about. Saying it “is difficult to explain” “how this is possible” is, then, something of an understatement. At first glance, Kant merely repeats a move we know well from the long history of attempts at accounting for artistic creativity. The move consists in tracing the making of art back to two independent sources, often termed imitation and inspiration; the first is grouped with teachable, technical skills, while the second gestures toward what remains not teachable (and hence scientifically inexplicable) in the production of art. The relationship between imitation and inspiration is complex and often tense, nowhere more so than in Plato’s writings, in which the two conceptions of artistic making remain suspended in an unresolved standoff. Of the two conceptions, inspiration appears to be the more ancient. The very word conjures up a genius-spirit who enters and takes hold of the maker, now understood to be inspired or possessed. The initial verses of the Homeric epics, which can be said to open the entire Occidental poetic tradition, enjoin the Muse to speak “through” (or “into”) the poet-singer. We may be inclined to dismiss this call with the reminder that the Ancients invoked their deities where in our own accounts we rely on the forces of nature. Still, what must impress us is the longevity of the figure of inspiration. It retains its staying power long into an age of mechanical explanation; Nietzsche provides among the most eloquent firstperson accounts of being seized by the genius of creativity. And Kant himself, this titan of Enlightenment who takes such pleasure in mocking the “Dreams of the Spirit-Seers,” appears to be availing himself of the spirit here. We may have retired Zeus and Poseidon, but not, it seems, the Muse.

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It is clear that Kant’s distinction between genius and a form of making “which can be grasped and followed according to rules” owes a great deal to the difference between inspiration and imitation, which we have admittedly no more than sketched. Thus we recognize that the notion of “arousal,” while shifting into the register of physical stimulation, does little to give body to inspiration and move it into the sublunary world of explicable phenomena, just as little as calling genius a “natural gift” or an “inborn predisposition” suddenly makes out of the “tutelary god or attendant spirit” a lump of Newtonian matter. Changing the words does not by itself bring about changes in the things. At times, Kant does not even change the words; thus he speaks of “an inspiration [Eingebung] of which the poet himself cannot say how he came by it, that is, from an occasional disposition, whose source is unknown to him” (Anthropology, 7: 318 note). Still, what interests us are the differences, and these are significant, beginning with the relationship to rationality. At least since Plato, the notion of inspiration, like the notion of genius that arrives in its wake, has been defined by irrationality; imitation, by contrast, is understood to be responsive to rational control, hence also to instruction (hence Aristotle’s reliance on imitation in his discussion of poetic making). In Chapter 4, we quoted Plato’s characterization of the poet as not being able to compose “until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him” (Ion 534b), so much so that in this state he can be likened to the beasts. Elsewhere Plato allows that the madness of poets may have a divine source, yet even so it remains bereft of the rational technique that characterizes human craft. The fact that, according to Kant, genius produces in a manner “for which no determinate rule can be given” (§46, 307) may lead us to conclude that his genius too produces irrationally, but in that case we would be apt to miss the strange twist the notion is given in his thinking. For as we have seen, the way genius makes, while not controlled by rules, is not severed from the force of rules. In fact, genius appears on the scene precisely to manage a specific problem in the generation of rules. Since art would not be art “without a preceding rule,” genius is needed to “give the rule to art” (ibid.). So genius is not irrational in the way sensations or the passions are often said to be. Rather it maintains an intimacy with concepts. If we recall our earlier description of genius as that which brings about a certain shift in experience, a shift of experience into the aesthetic, it is not clear whether the choice between rational and irrational is adequate to the phenomenon. For genius is “originality in thinking” (Anthropology, 7:

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220; my emphasis). It names what remains irrational—beyond the reach of conceptual thought—within the domain of this thought, and thus opens a new dimension orthogonal to the axis that distinguishes thinking from the passions, logos from pathos. There is another way in which Kant’s conception of genius realigns the relationship of inspiration and imitation, and it has to do with the way arousal is imagined to unfold its force. The works of genius arouse not bodies but ideas, ideas “similar” to “the ideas of the artist,” and that only if another similarity is in place, namely, a similarity in the “proportion of mental powers” between master and apprentice, a proportion with which “nature has equipped” them both. To be effective as a mode of artistic pedagogy, ingenious arousal must assume a prior similarity in order to bring forth a similarity of a different kind. Through this form of doubly mimetic arousal, Kant joins inspiration and imitation in a short circuit; arousal accomplishes precisely what “mechanical imitation” fails to achieve, namely, an imitation of the mode of making the inimitable. So genius itself, though it is, as “everybody agrees,” “entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation” (§47, 308), becomes the engine of an imitation of a different kind, what Kant at one point calls “emulation” rather than “imitation,” Nachfolge rather than Nachahmung: In this way the product of a genius . . . is an example, not for imitation (for then that which is genius in it and constitutes the spirit of the work would be lost), but for emulation by another genius, who is thereby awakened to the feeling of his own originality, to exercise freedom from coercion in his art in such a way that the latter thereby itself acquires a new rule, by which the talent shows itself as exemplary. (§49, 318)

THE OPACITY OF GENIUS

Genius, then, names the coming into being of a difference. The artist deploys the same “academically correct” (§47, 310) methods as the craftsman, but differently. This difference, we said, lies in the novelty of the mode of making and in the novelty of the sense that is made, the latter characterizing the constraint put on the former. But the difference has another dimension too. While we can watch the work of a craftsman, we can never catch genius in the act of making. This difference may overlap (or even co-

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incide) with historical and sociological changes, for example, with the way capitalist institutions shields labor from public view, but it is fundamentally distinct from these. No matter where it takes place, craft is “a kind of labor whose magnitude can be judged, enforced, or paid for in accordance with a determinate standard” (§51, 321). It is essentially transparent, since the rules according to which it produces are known; they can be listed, taught, and learned. Genius, on the other hand, is opaque, and essentially so, not because it is mysterious or otherworldly, nor because the modern world confines its artists to the garret (and its laborers behind factory gates), but because genius brings about a difference that can be known only after the fact— after the thing is made and after the percipient (who may be the artist) has had a chance to “try it out” (Introduction VII, 191). For this reason, art, experienced as art, can never be produced now. We now have a better sense of why our discussion of genius has had to proceed obliquely. This is not a phenomenon that lends itself to being grasped head-on. The negative characterizations to which Kant resorts time and again—the way genius produces “cannot be couched in a formula” (§47, 309); its products “cannot be produced by any following of rules” (§49, 318); whatever purposive structure it brings forth is “unsought and unintentional” (§49, 317)—will not reveal a positive picture simply by being turned on their head. In other words, “not” and “un-” do not work as logical operators here, naming the opposite of the entity they negate. Rather they indicate a shift in the way we experience that entity into a different dimension, which can be described as a dimension of difference, in the sense that any attempt at accounting for it conceptually will have to contend with discontinuity. In this respect, genius has a kinship with the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious, which is not simply the inverse of what is conscious. In fact, it is best not of thought of as a positive thing (a region of the mind, a capacity, a reservoir of raw memories, and so on), but rather as a structural shift in experience that becomes apparent only retroactively and that does not yield to the usual logic of cause and effect. This analogy between the way genius and the unconscious work comes sharply into focus with the question of thinking and knowing. When Kant writes that genius “cannot itself describe or indicate scientifically how it brings its product into being,” or that “the author of a product that he owes to his genius does not know himself how the ideas for it come to him, and also does not have it in his power to think up such things at will or according

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to plan” (§46, 308), we understand that this is not the sort of not-knowing that can be remedied with information, introspection, therapy, or other techniques. It is an opacity endemic to the process of making art—not a region of ignorance beyond knowledge, but a blank spot within it. If art is made “unintentionally,” then it is not a mode simply opposed to the capacity for choice that is involved in all forms of human making, and artworks are therefore not simply severed from the world of human technical achievements. This form of making occurs through a process that maintains a complex and ambiguous relationship to thinking itself. For the process is rooted neither in the unthinking “instinct” that drives the bees to build their hives nor in the thoughtful planning of the capacity for choice that founds all human art in the widest sense. Kant makes clear that thinking is precisely the difference between instinct and choice. We call the activity of the bees instinctual because “they do not ground their work on any rational consideration of their own” (§43, 303), while choice is defined as “the capacity for doing or refraining from doing what one pleases” as long as “it is joined with one’s consciousness of the capacity to bring about its object by one’s action” (The Metaphysics of Morals, 6: 213). In the case of the bees, we might grant that “a representation” of the hive “must have preceded its reality,” but because this representation is not “thought [gedacht],” what results is not an artifact but a piece of nature (§43, 303). In human ways of making, by contrast, “the cause that brought it forth has thought of a purpose [hat sich einen Zweck gedacht]” (ibid.). The one form of making, then, is characterized by the absence of thinking, while the other assumes its full presence. Once we spread the concepts out before us, we recognize that what is unintentional in artistic creativity does not belong to the mute region of instinct in which thinking is wholly absent; in Kant’s conception (unlike what we learn in the Ion), the artist does not bring forth the way the bees do. Genius, again, is “originality in thinking” (Anthropology, 7: 220; my emphasis). Nor does its creativity, “unsought and unintentional” as it is, reduce to “the capacity for choice.” It requires the capacity to think and to know, yet that capacity does not deploy at will: the artist “does not have it in his power to think up such things at will,” just as “beautiful art cannot itself think up the rule in accordance with which it is to bring its product into being” (§47, 307). Genius seems to belong on neither side of the line of thinking. If neither thinking nor its absence, not-thinking, capture the relationship of making to thinking in the work of genius, we might make use of the prefi x un- that

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we have encountered in “unsought” and “unintentional” (and “unconscious”) and call this the region of unthinking. Unthinking indicates what, within the field of thinking, surpasses thought, surpasses it in the sense that it exceeds the full grasp of conceptual thought. The opacity of conceptual thinking to itself does not, despite all the negations harnessed to describe it, consist of a lack but rather of a surfeit of thinking. Encouraged by two insights, we recognized an analogy between the structure of unthinking in the making of art and the structure of the unconscious in psychoanalysis. One revealed the prefi x un- not as signaling a conventional logical negation, but rather as naming the generation of an inexhaustible surplus that remains out of the reach of the logic of concepts. The other insight concerns the temporality of this distinctive logic, which manifests itself only after the fact. If this analogy has merit, it brings to light a deep kinship between the making (and, as we shall see, the experience of art) and the notion of the unconscious. The philosopher Jacques Rancière goes a step further in claiming that “the Freudian thought of the unconscious is only possible on the basis of this regime of thinking about art, and the idea of thought that is immanent to it.” In his account, the analogy between aesthetics and psychoanalysis gives way to a genetic relationship. Though he goes out of his way to characterize “the revolution that moves the domain of the arts from the reign of poetics to that of aesthetics” (ibid.) as post-Kantian (6), holding up Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche as its masterminds, at a key point in establishing how aesthetics begets psychoanalysis, Rancière reaches back to Kant’s conception of genius, which holds together “unconditional creativity” and “an absolute passivity” (24) that, according to Rancière, characterizes the new “idea of thought that is immanent” to art and on which Freud will build his edifice. The genius embodies an “identity between knowing and not knowing, between activity and passivity” available in the notion of art that is essential to the development of the concept of the unconscious (ibid.). We are not concerned with assessing Rancière’s larger argument (his claim that psychoanalysis is “only possible” thanks to this conception of art seems either trivially true or gratuitously overstated), but his characterization of art as revealing a new form of thought is congenial to the reading we have been developing here. He prefers to think of art as compressing thought and nonthought, while we have emphasized the way a failure to think (or to “think up”) leads to an abundance of thinking not manageable by conceptual thought. And Rancière’s periodization helps

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us see how in the conception of genius, in the way thinking surpasses itself, Kant’s own thinking surpasses its own horizon and becomes post-Kantian. The upshot is that genius is the name we give to a way of making unthinkingly that brings forth an infinite stream of thinking. Thus far, we have understood this form of opacity to be a feature of production alone, which is apt to lead us to think of it as a feature of producers, which in turn will tempt us to think of it as a feature of their consciousness, at which point we would have arrived at the cliché of the genius as someone stricken by a mysterious form of incoherence when it comes to explaining the way he makes. Yet we can avoid this move toward locating genius in the psychic landscape of individual minds if we recall how deeply production and experience mesh in Kant’s conception, so much so that earlier we proposed conceiving of genius as the coming into being of a shift in experience, a coming into being recognized only after the fact. If at first it was the structure of experience that guided our thinking about genius, we recognize that through the entanglement of the two the structure of genius reveals to us new dimensions of aesthetic experience. As we have seen, genius alters the very essence of aesthetic experience itself. For genius is unthinking not only in how it brings forth, but also in what it brings forth. If genius “cannot itself describe or indicate scientifically how it brings its product into being,” then the percipients of these products— readers, viewers, listeners— find themselves in a similar bind. By now we know that, according to Kant, an authentic artwork “stimulates so much thinking that it can never be grasped in a determinate concept”; “it gives more to think about than can be grasped and made distinct in” reason (§49, 315); it generates thinking that “no language fully attains or can make intelligible.” This excess of thinking beyond any conceptual limit is what Kant terms “aesthetic ideas” (ibid.), a conception that, as we shall see in Chapter 6, enjoins us to rethink what aesthetic experience entails. Here we merely register that this dimension of unthinking in the experience of artworks has its origin in genius, and explicitly so. When Kant writes that genius “displays itself . . . in the exposition or the expression of aesthetic ideas,” he does more than merely to join production to reception; he also identifies unthinking— thinking in excess of conceptual thought—as a characteristic of the whole aesthetic realm. If that is so, then we cannot regard genius and taste as strictly opposed terms, the way commentators, and Kant himself, usually do. It cannot be

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quite right to understand the one as governing production alone and the other as the purely receptive capacity of discernment, for we now see that the two are deeply implicated in one another. Being receptive to an artwork entails allowing it to activate something in me that is not fully mine, something that is generative in its own right, bringing forth the inexhaustible thinking that my language fails to “make intelligible,” try as I might. Occasionally Kant does acknowledge the link between genius and taste. Thus he warns that failing to stimulate the imagination of the student can lead to “smothering the genius and together with it also the freedom of the imagination even in its lawfulness, without which no beautiful art nor even a correct personal taste for judging of it is possible” (§60, 355; my emphasis). Smothering genius squelches taste, for taste requires genius for its development. When, citing this passage, Hans-Georg Gadamer concludes that “the genius in creation finds its correspondence in the genius in understanding,” he points in the right direction, provided the way we understand “understanding” keeps pace with the logic of the artwork. In encountering an artwork, every act of understanding outstrips itself and thus remains opaque to itself. HAUNTED BY TALENT

The reading we have been developing here has revealed that the true force of Kant’s conception of genius lies in its devotion to formal austerity, which eschews the flamboyant characterizations of genius current in his day. It is time to conclude the analysis of genius by acknowledging the ways it fails to stay true to its formalism. And we can be quite specific in locating the failure: although it is meant to designate a purely formal operation, the word genius inevitably does more. Like every word, it comes with a murky past. It is haunted by its own ghosts. In the case of genius, the ghost by which it is haunted is ghost itself. Kant acknowledges as much when at one point aesthetic ideas are said to be presented not by genius, but by something called “spirit” (§49, 313–314). Once we take note of them, we see that the two terms keep close company with one another. This may not seem remarkable, since one does not have to dig deep in the etymology of genius to arrive at the Latin word for spirit (in fact, no digging is needed at all). Yet the relationship of the two—etymological, historical, crosslinguistic—brings to light something unsettling about the

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idea of genius that we had not seen before. This is something Kant appears to be sensitive to. In his lectures on anthropology, he surveys the semantic fields of esprit, Geist, and genius in French, German, and Latin and concludes by conjecturing why genius is in fact called genius. “The reason why exemplary originality of talent is designated by this mystical name,” he explains: is because the man who has genius cannot explain to himself its outbursts or even make himself understand how he arrived at an art which he could not have learned. For invisibility (of the cause of an effect) is an accessory concept of spirit [vom Geiste] (a genius [einem genius] which is already assigned to the gifted man at his birth), whose inspiration he only follows, so to speak. (Anthropology, 7: 225)

What we had characterized as a formal property of genius—the opacity of thought to itself in generating a superfluity of thinking—gains a metaphoric body (of sorts), and a “mystical” aura, the moment Kant identifies it with the invisibility of spirits. It is at this point that we can no longer avoid noticing the gothic complexion of genius. When we learned that genius makes “unintentionally,” this unintentionality sounded neutral, perhaps even blissful; but when Kant writes, “One does not know this singular spirit oneself and does not have its movement in one’s power,” the lack of transparency of the self to itself takes a disquieting turn (15: 413, R 932). Rather than thinking of the artist as possessing genius (toward which the metaphor of the “natural gift” or “inborn talent” urges us), we may now be inclined to think of her as being possessed by it. And we cannot comfort ourselves with the idea that the gothic elements are safely sequestered on the side of spirit, leaving genius free to do its purely philosophical, purely formal work. “Genius,” not spirit, we read at one point, “is a monstrous excrescence, as it were, of a talent” (15: 824, R 1509). The creativity that is nature’s gift can come to act like a malignant outgrowth. On more than one occasion, Kant identifies genius and spirit, at one point even advocating the term eigentümlicher Geist, singular spirit, in place of the French génie, betraying some of the resentment German intellectuals of the time harbored against the French language. In the end, he ignores his own proposal and uses Genie, the German form of génie. But this choice of words does not seem to indicate a clear conceptual separation of the terms,

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for even in the third Critique the bond connecting genius and spirit remains intact. When discussing the invisibility of genius to itself, Kant echoes ideas that we know from his anthropological lectures: “For that is also presumably how the word ‘genius’ [Genie] is derived from genius [the Latin word], in the sense of the singular spirit [eigentümlichen . . . Geist] given to a person at birth, which protects and guides him, and from whose inspiration those original ideas stem” (§46, 308). We have arrived at a concept of genius that is odder than we had recognized, an oddness that dwelled in the idea from the start, but one whose outlines we make out only now that we have gained some intimacy with it. We have begun to realize how shadowy—how ghostly—this entity called “genius” really is. It indicates something we know already, namely, that genius describes the way a person remains unknown to herself, the way she is not fully identical with herself. Yet it alerts us to something else too. We begin to realize that the “mystical name” and the failure to explain apply to the theoretical account of spirit just as they do to its experience, and for the same reasons. The “outbursts” that betoken the active presence of an entity alien to the self are just as incomprehensible to us observers as they are to the inspired subject. Both of us invoke it (or its doppelgänger “spirit”) in the same manner, namely, retroactively, when the coming into being of an object— a poem, say—perplexes us and the known forms of explanation run out of steam. When it comes to ideas like spirit and genius, the distinction between a view from inside and one from outside no longer holds, since genius is precisely that which behaves like an “outside” to the “inside.” When my actions are driven by what “seems to have no intention,” when I can no longer explain to myself my own outbursts or the monstrous excrescence within me, then I have become a stranger to myself and thus also an observer of myself. At the same time, the observer, even if this is a philosopher or a scientist, has no greater explanatory purchase on this alien presence than does the one inhabited by the monster. Thus the vague, shifting language to which Kant is drawn— originality, invisibility, animation, inspiration, outburst—may frustrate the philosopher’s wish to fix the concept’s exact coordinates, yet at the same time it testifies to— indeed, it reveals— the essential opacity in the idea of genius that it shares with the phenomenon of genius. It is true of philosophy too that it “does not know [it] . . . and does not have its movement in [its] power” when it seeks to account for the experience of art. In this sense, art changes the

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very language in which philosophy speaks. We witness how the conceptual language of philosophy, in aiming to capture the way the artist is haunted by an unknown power, finds itself haunted by something whose presence it acknowledges yet does not know— a specter that eludes the grasp of concepts, and that, like any good ghost, multiplies in form. Th is is the stage on which aesthetic ideas make their entrance.

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Aesthetic Ideas

stranger conceptions in Immanuel Kant’s writings about aesthetics, which, as we have observed, is rich in strange conceptions, is that of aesthetic ideas. Even by the standards of common sense, the idea of an idea being aesthetic is not immediately intelligible. We grant that ideas can bring forth feelings, perhaps also aesthetic feelings, but that still leaves us at a loss about what it would mean for them to be aesthetic. The perplexity only deepens when we try to find a place for this conception on Kant’s fastidious philosophical chart, where the word idea is expressly reserved for those concepts “whose object simply cannot be encountered in experience” (Lectures on Logic, 9: 92). For Kant, there are, on the one hand, the concepts of the understanding, which forge intuitions into experience, and, on the other, the pure concepts of reason—the ideas—that can never be melded with any intuitive elements and thus remain beyond the ken of experience. What are some examples? In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant develops the idea of the “unconditioned”; in his moral philosophy, the ideas of freedom, immortality, and God figure prominently. Each plays its part in the complicated machineries that drive the first and second Critiques, but that need not concern us here. What does interest us is the fact that the very essence of the Kantian idea prohibits its object from being “encountered in experience,” hence from being encountered in aesthetic experience. By the lights of Kant’s ONE OF THE

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writings on the topic before the Critique of Judgment, the idea of an “aesthetic idea” can be nothing but an oxymoronic monster. Yet here it is. The aesthetic ideas may well have been an afterthought (they make their first significant appearance only late in the half of the book that addresses aesthetics). If so, they are the kind of afterthought that occasions a rethinking of the beforethoughts. Kant seems to sense the import of this conception, since he introduces it with the flourish reserved for important terms (formal definition, conceptual map, typographic emphasis). Even so, we are not quite prepared for how thoroughly it alters the conceptual landscape into which it is placed. It refashions— surpasses even—the conception of beauty that earlier parts of the book had labored to develop; it introduces an idea (in the looser, non-Kantian sense) thus far absent in a work that means to account for aesthetic experience, namely, the idea of aesthetic value, and makes meaningfulness its measure; it stands at the core of the philosophy of art that Kant does no more than sketch here. And, what for our purpose is of greater significance still, it opens the way to thinking what it would mean to think poetically. Following his own earlier logic, Kant should treat the concept of aesthetic ideas as a monstrosity, yet he does not. An aesthetic idea, he writes matter-of-factly, is “that representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible.” He adds: “One easily sees that it is the counterpart (pendant) of an idea of reason, which is, conversely [umgekehrt], a concept to which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate” (§49, 314; emphasis omitted). Does one really see— easily see—that the two kinds of ideas are each other’s counterparts? When he delineates the contours of the idea in earlier writings, we noted how Kant does so by drawing a line between two kinds of concepts, distinguishing those that can have an object in experience, concepts of understanding, from those that cannot— concepts of reason, henceforth called simply ideas. The genus to which both belong, then, is concept, and their specific difference lies in whether or not our imagination can possibly muster an intuition to match them. So in that context the counterpart of an idea is another kind of concept, not another kind of idea. Which makes sense, since there the idea of another kind of idea, one that would be not intellectual, is not even intelligible. That is what an idea is through and through—intellectual.

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Yet here, in our aesthetic context, Kant inverts things, but not in the sense of flipping them along a known axis of distinction, the way the notion of “counterpart” comfortingly suggests. Rather, he wheels the terms around and upside down until they are thoroughly umgekehrt, that is, inverted, reversed, turned back and around. Concepts of understanding are no longer available to play the role of counterpart to the ideas, for as our passage tells us, when aesthetic ideas are in play, no concept manages adequately to capture what the imagination brings forth. Hence ideas of reason need to be distinguished not from concepts but from ideas set in motion by the imagination. If here we have two species of ideas, intellectual and aesthetic, what genus holds them both, and what principle specifies them? It is in fact not easy to see. What we can see, though admittedly without yet grasping it, is a structural homology in the way both kinds of ideas work as engines of inadequacy. That is how Kant attempts to yoke the two together when, later in the book, he returns to the question of the philosophical place of ideas. “Ideas in the most general meaning,” he writes, “are representations related to an object in accordance with a certain (subjective or objective) principle, insofar as they can nevertheless never become a cognition of that object” (Remark I, 342). The inadequacy that inheres, then, in the idea of idea is that it can never yield to cognition, for the felicitous “correspondence of the faculties of cognition with each other (of imagination and of understanding)” never occurs (ibid.). In the one case, reason generates representations— God, immortality—with which the imagination fails to keep up; in the other, the imagination generates representations that outstrip concepts. To be sure, these are immensely productive inadequacies whose significance we still need to understand. We will limit ourselves to the aesthetic side. THE SPIRIT RETURNS

What prompts Kant to reach for these inverted ideas that give rise to inadequacy? Another inadequacy. Apropos of nothing in particular, he opens section 49 of the Critique of Judgment by registering the pervasive absence of something whose presence we did not, until this moment, realize was required: One says of certain products, of which it is expected that they ought, at least in part, to reveal themselves as beautiful art, that they are without spirit, even

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though one finds nothing in them to criticize as far as taste is concerned. A poem can be quite pretty and elegant, but without spirit. A story is accurate and well organized, but without spirit. A solemn oration is thorough and at the same time delicate, but without spirit. Many a conversation is not without entertainment, but is still without spirit; even of a woman one may well say that she is pretty, talkative and charming, but without spirit. What is it then that is meant here by “spirit”? (§49, 313)

We struggled with just this question in the final pages of Chapter 5 as we sought to keep distinct “genius” from its strange twin “spirit”—in vain, as it turned out. We are therefore all the more eager to hear Kant’s response, which he offers straightaway: “Spirit, in an aesthetic significance, means the animating principle in the mind” (§49, 313). Well and good, we want to say, but what is it that is meant here by “animating principle of the mind”? A few lines on, Kant obliges with a further response, which turns out to mark the philosophical birthplace of the idea of aesthetic ideas, a passage we know in part already: Now I maintain that this principle [that is, the animating principle of the mind] is nothing other than the capacity for the presentation of aesthetic ideas; by an aesthetic idea, however, I mean that representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible.— One easily sees . . . (§49, 314)

The capacity for the presentation of aesthetic ideas is, then, another way of understanding—or trying to understand— spirit, which is the name Kant gives that mysterious lack in beautiful objects when “one” finds them wanting, “even though one finds nothing in them to criticize as far as taste is concerned.” What the poem, the story, the oration, and the woman lack, “pretty and elegant” as they are, is a capacity for setting in motion our thinking without it coming to rest in a specific concept that would capture our imaginative engagement with that object. This does not exactly explain “what is meant here by spirit,” but it does expand our vocabulary for describing this ghostly entity. It becomes evident how significantly the range of the concept of spirit widens thanks to the fresh turn it is given here in the third Critique, far

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beyond what we came across in Chapter 5. In the anthropological lectures and his extensive notebooks, there is much talk of spirit, but no word of it being the capacity for aesthetic ideas. Instead, we frequently come across the ancient notion of spirit as “animating principle,” though for Kant it is not a feature of the world—what breathes life into the lifeless—but of the mind, what he calls “the productive capacity of reason” (Anthropology, 7: 246). His notebooks make clear that he imagines this productive capacity somewhere along the spectrum between the life-lending breath of myth and the propulsive force of physics that sets a mechanism in motion. “Spirit: What is properly creative, what animates, in that it is the unity (momentum) from which all movement of the mind issues,” he notes (15: 826, R 1509). If spirit is the prime mover of the mind’s forces, then it must be distinguished not from its usual opposite number, matter, but from another of the mind’s capacities. Which mental capacity counters the creative and motive force of spirit? The answer—taste—takes us straight back to the conceptual world of aesthetic theory. Among the many notebook passages that address spirit and taste (or judgment), I will quote just one: “Sensation and spirit move. Judgment and taste conduct and temper. The former is the wind in flutes, the latter the fingers” (16: 135, R 1844). There are not many such arresting images in Kant’s notebooks devoted to logic. The capacities of the mind figuratively become the capacities of a body engaged in the very kind of playful yet purposeful activity—playing the flute—that those capacities of the mind are meant to enable in the first place. Since the fingers work to contain breath, but not vice versa, the image also reveals that spirit and taste maintain an asymmetrical relation to one another; the one generates the movements of the mind, the other hampers them. The image is apt for another reason too. It leads us, who still draw our aesthetic orientation from an unrestrained romanticism, out of the temptation of siding with the creativity of spirit and against the tempering force of taste, for we recognize that it is the skillful play of the fingers that fashions mere sound into melody. In his lectures on anthropology, Kant provides this compact summary of spirit and its counterpart, taste: Spirit and taste: the first to create ideas, the second to limit them to the form appropriate to the laws of the productive imagination, and so to form them . . . in an original way [ursprünglich] (not by imitation). A product composed with spirit and taste can in general be called poetry and is a work of beautiful art. (Anthropology, 7: 246)

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Besides the conceptual work the passage performs, it also draws a limit to our image of the fingers directing the flow of spirit through the flute, for it reminds us that in Kant’s hierarchy of arts music is finally trumped by poetry. Spirit, the question to which the idea of aesthetic ideas is meant to offer an answer, launched us on this excursus. Where has it taken us? Thanks to Kant’s characterizations, we can make out the general shape of spirit, yet as soon as we reach to grasp the idea, it recedes from us. Does it help to know that it is endowed with “exemplary originality” and “invisibility” to oneself, as the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View tells us (7: 225)? “Spirit,” we learn at another point, “seems to have no intention” (15: 413, R 931). One moment it is not distinguishable from genius (also a concept we think we understand until we try to get hold of it), the next the two appear side by side, as though denoting distinct entities. Then yet a third term is marshaled to capture it, the animating principle, about which we are tempted to say that it occasions much thinking without it being possible to decide what thought is adequate to it. If we were hoping to be able to point to a cog in the machine and exclaim, “That right there is spirit,” then we must admit we have not gotten far. But this apparent failure to assign spirit a precise location and an enduring conceptual identity is no reason for abandoning the term, for Kant’s account is no mere failure, not a mistake we would wish to correct. Rather, it serves as an index of how shadowy and spectral this entity called “spirit” really is. BEAUTY SLIDES INTO NAUSEA

If we return to the scene from which we set out, we can see more clearly that the haunting we have been describing— the disquieting presence of something that we can neither grasp nor ignore— emerges from the core of Kant’s aesthetic theory. Spirit is called forth in the third Critique in response to a lack felt in relation to beauty. This lack changes the texture of what we take aesthetic experience to be. For spirit is not meant to answer for a defect in beauty but a defect in spite of beauty: “One says of certain products, of which it is expected that they ought, at least in part, to reveal themselves as beautiful art, that they are without spirit, even though one finds nothing in them to criticize as far as taste is concerned.” When we encountered the passage at the outset of this chapter, we hurried past this last phrase. Yet it merits

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attention since, without fanfare, it discloses an entirely new dimension in Kant’s conception of beauty. Consider how unlikely, even unthinkable, it would be in the context of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” to find aesthetic fault with a “product” that has passed muster with taste. In those early sections of the book (§§1–22), taste and beauty always appear together, locked in the tightest of embraces. It is a simple matter of definition that taste “is the capacity for judging the beautiful” (§1, 203n1). In other words: an object that conforms with taste is one that has been judged beautiful. To avoid misunderstandings: this is not a two-step process, not an arrangement in which something could go awry between steps one and two, thus disengaging taste from beauty. Aesthetic judgment, according to Kant, does not consist, first, in verifying a conformity with taste (say, by checking something against a table holding the standards of taste) and then— step two—issuing in a judgment declaring something to be beautiful. No, judging something to be beautiful is its conformity with taste, since taste simply names the capacity we have for making such judgments. They make up different dimensions of one and the same experience, the experience of aesthetic plea sure. To say “one finds nothing in [certain products] to criticize as far as taste is concerned” is, logically, another way of saying that one finds them beautiful. Conversely, saying, as Kant does, that one finds these certain products aesthetically lacking, amounts to finding aesthetic experience itself aesthetically lacking. All of this follows snappily enough, but, as the rabbis put it in the Talmud, do the ears hear what the mouth has uttered? At a certain moment in the text, Kant finds the aesthetic experience of beauty aesthetically lacking. Does the mind grasp what the ears have heard? Not yet, for nothing in the third Critique has cleared the path for this development, since every key conceptual turn has taken place around and for the sake of beauty. In Kant’s account, beauty gives both content and form to aesthetic experience (with the content being a certain way of relating to form). The entire logic of reflective judgment is put in place to account for beauty. From the earliest sections of the book in which beauty occasions just the sort of “disinterested and free pleasure” (§5, 210) that prompts one to “believe oneself to have a universal voice and [to lay] claim to the consent of everyone” (§8, 216), to the end of “The Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” where Kant declares that “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good” (§59, 353), beauty— and not, say, the sublime—lends aesthetic experience the kind of structure that

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makes it irreducible to other forms of experience and loads it up with immense conceptual and systemic burdens. It is, finally, the reason a third Critique is needed to supplement the first two. Yet here, suddenly, we are faced with beautiful poems and orations and women that fail to please us aesthetically. We can detect Kant’s turn away from beauty in the rhetoric of the passage, before he picks out spirit as the entity he finds so lacking. Earlier I said that the negative claim—that we find “nothing . . . to criticize as far as taste is concerned”—amounts to the positive determination of finding something beautiful. By Kant’s logic that is correct, yet only a tin ear would not notice what a backhanded compliment is being paid those “products” for remaining beyond the reproach of taste. The jarring tone, we now note, is already present in the first words of the passage, where Kant speaks of “certain products, of which it is expected that they ought, at least in part, to reveal themselves as beautiful art.” One wonders if the awkwardness of the phrasing bespeaks of the stress under which thoughts find themselves here. What would it mean for something to reveal itself “in part” as art? Who is it that expects these products to reveal themselves this way? And why “ought” they do so? Whence the obligation? It remains unclear. What does become clear in the remainder of the sections dealing with aesthetic ideas is that beauty without spirit— that is, beauty without “the capacity for the presentation of aesthetic ideas”— comes to be seen not merely as deficient but finally as intolerable. Earlier in the book Kant had tenderly remarked that “we linger over the contemplation of the beautiful because this contemplation strengthens and reproduces itself” (§12, 222). Now he curls his lip at those “beautiful arts” that fail to “combine[] . . . with moral ideas;” “their ultimate fate” lies in “mak[ing] the spirit dull, the object by and by disgusting, and the mind . . . dissatisfied with itself and moody” (§52, 326). Where contemplative lingering once revealed how beauty gets better with time, gaining in momentum, here remaining in the company of simple, spiritless beauty “by and by” leads us to be nauseated by the object and by ourselves. We can hardly imagine a more drastic change of fortune for the concept of beauty, since what evokes disgust is, in Kant’s words, “the one kind of ugliness [that] cannot be represented in a way adequate to nature without destroying all aesthetic satisfaction, hence beauty in art” (§48, 312). What disgusts cannot even qualify as bad or ugly art; it is simply nonart. If, then, under certain conditions beauty comes to stir

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up disgust, it has not merely metamorphosed into flawed beauty nor even into ugliness; it has, rather, wholly vanished from the domain of the aesthetic. SURPASSING BEAUTY THROUGH ART

So beauty, as Kant sees it in these latter sections of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” requires spirit—requires the presentation of aesthetic ideas—to prevent its slide from the aesthetic into the anaesthetic—into boredom, moodiness, nausea. But aesthetic ideas do not restore beauty to some anterior intact state, for the simple reason that it had never become deficient and required repair. (The free play of the imagination and understanding had not gone off track, for example.) Instead, they add something that beauty never lacked. Or better yet (since addition is also not quite the right name for the operation), they put it in relation to something that was never part of it— something alien to it—which, however, becomes indispensable to it if it is not to degrade. One way of describing this relationship is spectral, for the ghost (or Geist) neither leaves the body it haunts nor becomes wholly assimilated to it. With the appearance of spirit and the no-less-ghostly aesthetic ideas in Kant’s text, the concept of beauty is accompanied by, as it were, a ghostly shadow that alters its texture. At the same time, it points and thus opens our view to a space beyond beauty. This is where Kant’s aesthetic thought surpasses beauty as its horizon. We know that it is a fool’s errand to try to get a firm grip on the entity (or nonentity) that is both surplus beyond beauty and a lack in it, but we may succeed in gathering circumstantial evidence about its appearance and its effects. The first thing we note is that it enters the scene the moment the third Critique turns its attention to art. This fact in itself ought to surprise us, since Kant has not provided us with the conceptual tools for making an aesthetic distinction between artifacts and natural objects. As we noted in Chapter 4, his official position has been that beauty remains agnostic about the ontological status of its objects, for other wise we would have to contend with essentially different kinds of beauty in art and nature (and possibly other domains), each with its corresponding taste, each requiring its own analysis and transcendental legitimation. As we know, this is not the case; however the object may have come about, by nature or by human hand, Kant’s analysis

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insists that the quality of the mood in which subjects finds themselves and the structure of the judgment that accompanies that mood remain unchanged—all are subjectively universal, disinterested, exemplary, universally communicable, and so on. This abbreviated account may suggest that because all of the action around beauty takes place on the side of the subject, the object has been black-boxed. And in fact those who understand Kant’s theory as an “aesthetics of reception” leave us with a picture in which nothing about the object finally matters and consequently any reflection on art, hence any reflection on the kind of object it is, will, in the words of one Kant scholar, “almost seem like a foreign body in Kant’s aesthetics.” But we saw in Chapter 5 that Kant’s subject of aesthetic experience is not quarantined; it unfolds its experience in relation to an object that, to be judged beautiful, needs to be apprehended as having a certain structure, namely, as being purposive without disclosing a definite purpose. Far from being unmindful of the kind of object it faces, the subject must know well what sort of thing it encounters, for only then can it take it as the sort of thing that is beautiful. Hence the deep aesthetic kinship of art and nature that is articulated in the enigmatic proposition that preoccupied us earlier: “Nature was beautiful, if at the same time it looked like art,” Kant remarks, “and art can only be called beautiful if we are aware that it is art and yet it looks to us like nature” (§45, 306). The introduction of aesthetic ideas puts into question just this bond between art and nature that the unitary conception of beauty has entailed. It is true that Kant, even at this point in the third Critique, occasionally attempts to hold fast to the unity by yoking it to the very aesthetic ideas that doom it. “Beauty,” he thus declares, “(whether it be beauty of nature or of art) can in general be called the expression of aesthetic ideas” (§51, 320). He seems to hark back here to an order that his own thinking has thrown into disarray. How can beauty be understood as expressing aesthetic ideas when it was beauty—beauty in which “one finds nothing . . . to criticize”—that revealed the absence of these ideas? As for the catholic gesture of remaining indifferent to “whether it be beauty of nature or of art,” it is undercut by Kant’s text. The entire larger context—the sections about genius, spirit, and aesthetic ideas that come before this statement and the sections about the division and value of the arts that follow it—have virtually nothing to say about nature. They document the dramatic shift in aesthetic theory prompted by Kant’s attempt to think through the presence of art.

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FROM JUDGMENT TO CRITICISM

Thinking through art yields one key insight for Kant, which is that art engenders thinking, and always more of it. Art, by expressing aesthetic ideas, “occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought . . . to be adequate to it” (§49, 314). It “stimulates so much thinking that it can never be grasped in a determinate concept” (§49, 315). It “gives more to think about than can be grasped and made distinct” in reason (ibid.). “Poetry and oratory,” like the visual arts, “give the imagination an impetus to think more, although in an undeveloped way, than can be comprehended in a concept” (ibid.). These characterizations are repeated in the space of a mere two pages, as though the text itself were acting out the very excess in aesthetic ideas it vainly attempts to capture. In any case, we recognize the spectral logic we encountered in our discussion of spirit, namely, that some forms of aesthetic experience—we now know it is the aesthetic experience of art—give rise to thinking that both surpasses conceptual thinking and, at the same time, falls short of it. There is, once again, an inadequacy in a domain dear to philosophy—that of concepts—that is not understood by philosophy as a mere deficiency (as a confusion, say, or as the contamination of thought by the material of the world) but rather as a superabundance of thinking. Yet it is not the sort of thinking philosophy can make its own, for it cannot “be comprehended in a concept.” If we remain attentive to Kant’s words, another perspective on the same logic opens to us. When he says the aesthetic idea “occasions much thinking” that eludes the full grasp of “any determinate thought,” note that the main action is on the side of the verb “thinking” (denken), and what disappoints is the noun “thought” (Gedanke), which is thinking in the past tense, thinking that has ceased to think. When our thinking comes to rest and hardens into a fixed shape, it fails to attain or even make intelligible our imaginative experience of art. To remain true to the experience, we need to keep thinking, it seems. This may sound like the sort of anodyne description that everyone would wish to support (for who comes out against more thinking?), but as we shall see in a moment it has unsettling implications for the daily bread of criticism, namely, for the work of interpretation. One result of thinking more, a result Kant does not spell out, is that the aesthetic experience of art entails saying more. In the aesthetic regime of the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” the canonical form aesthetic judgment takes is

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the terse utterance, “This . . . is beautiful”; anything more would actually be less, for not only would it be superfluous (since every thing relevant has already been said), but it would in fact taint the purity of judgment (with interest, with conceptual determinations, with charm, with emotion) and thus diminish it. How things change when we find ourselves in the presence of art. Here the remark that this—this poem, this painting, this drama—is beautiful at best marks the beginning of what we need to say to convey the stream of thinking it has occasioned in us. Art alters the very genre of our response, as it leads us from concision to loquaciousness, from judgment to criticism and interpretation. In fact, the judgment of beauty may not fulfill even the modest role of starting point, since, as we have seen, attesting to the beauty of an artwork that is unimpeachable “as far as taste is concerned” is a way of becoming alerted to its inability to bring forth aesthetic ideas in us. Strangely enough then, the naked judgment of beauty, deployed in all sincerity and without the hint of irony, can come to describe our encounter with unsuccessful art. What about the encounter with successful art? We have said something about the form of thinking such an encounter sets in motion, but can we also say something about its content? Not in general, since the content of thinking depends on the specific experience. Thus when Kant quotes a poem by “the great king,” Fredrick II of Prussia, to exemplify the production of aesthetic ideas, we need to know the poem to see (or not to see) how its author animates his idea of reason of a cosmopolitan disposition even at the end of life by means of an attribute that the imagination (in the recollection of everything agreeable in a beautiful summer day, drawn to a close, which a bright evening calls to mind) associates with that representation, and which arouses a multitude of sensations and supplementary representations for which no expression is found. (§49, 316)

Although there is much in this remarkable passage that invites us to linger, a general point urges us on. We came upon the passage when we asked about the content, as distinct from the form, of thinking aesthetic ideas, a distinction so seemingly unproblematic that we failed to notice the momentous shift it indicates in Kant’s theory. Recall that aesthetic experience as developed in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” has no variable content. We need not know

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anything about the aesthetic object to know that the pleasure we take in its beauty takes the form of “the free play of the powers of representation” of our mind (§9, 217), for there is no specific content to this free play; it is geared toward achieving not a particular, content-ful cognition but “cognition as such” (ibid.). It is no mere cleverness to say that the form is the content, for the pleasure we take in the contemplation of a beautiful thing consists in nothing but the self-perpetuating play of our mental powers (§12). THE BOUNDLESS ENLARGEMENT OF MEANING INTO SENSE

When the kind of thinking involved in aesthetic ideas prompts us to distinguish between form and content, we realize how far behind we have left the austere formalism of the “Analytic” and how deeply we find ourselves in the territory of criticism and interpretation, where the parameters of thinking are given not only by the interplay of the cognitive capacities of the mind, but also by the particular material configuration of the artwork. It does not go without saying that the abundance of thinking that a successful aesthetic experience engenders, “undeveloped” though it may be in relation to concepts, is not mere nonsense, nor is the abundance of speech to which it gives rise mere babble. Though concepts do not determine the shape of this thinking and this speech, both remain within the domain of sense. Kant’s interpretive comment on Fredrick’s poem makes that evident, whatever else one may think of it. It testifies to the fact that philosophy is able to—or compelled to— open its view to a region of sense that will forever remain out of its grasp. It is a moment in which philosophy documents its own essential incompleteness (and essential incompletability) by acknowledging a genuine rival in the project of sense making, without, however, finding it necessary to denounce this rival as incoherent, derivative, or mendacious, as it has so frequently done before and after Kant. Kant inaugurates here a line of thinking of stunning audacity. Much of the commentary on the third Critique fails to keep up with him as he pushes to the limits of philosophy and risks a look beyond, at “the prospect of an immeasurable field” opened by the presentation of aesthetic ideas (§49, 315). One symptom of this failure lies in the fact that commentators tend to subsume aesthetic ideas under the larger rubric of meaning, thus absorbing into the body of philosophy what, for Kant, finally remains an alien, indigestible entity. Some understand this meaning as being entirely oriented toward

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morality; others see a wider field of meaning. Either way, aesthetic ideas find their way into the register of meaning, even where it is understood to be infinitely suggestive or infinitely deferred. If in this picture the earlier model of aesthetic experience—the free play of the mind in apprehending the form of an object—left no space for meaning, the latter model is now taken to deal in nothing but meaning. Kant’s aesthetic object, the philosopher Andrea Kern thus contends, comes in two irreconcilable forms: “in one case it is beautiful, in the other infinitely meaningful. Its beauty has nothing to do with its meaning.” But one of the concepts to which aesthetic ideas are not “adequate” is precisely the concept of meaning. This is one of the things we know about the very form of these ideas for which we need no information about the particular poem or painting that we are considering. The idea Kant keeps repeating about never being able to “grasp” or “comprehend” by means of concepts the wealth of thinking that art occasions in us points in just this direction, for it asserts that this mode of thinking in principle eludes any effort at nailing it down to particular meanings. This wealth of thinking denotes not a greater quantity of the kind of thoughts we ordinarily have, thoughts that take the shape of meaningful concepts, which, because of their profusion, we now may have difficulty grasping at once. No, the wealth lies in the surfeit of thinking itself, a change in thinking that alters the very texture of meaningful thoughts. Artworks, Kant proposes, do not merely activate thoughts that we possess already (for instance, by combining them into new configurations). They add to and hence refashion our very capacity for thinking. When a significant work of art presents us with a material presentation related to ideas of reason, it gives the imagination cause to spread itself over a multitude of related representations, which let one think more than one can express in a concept determined by words; and they yield an aesthetic idea, which serves that idea of reason instead of logical presentation, although really only to animate the mind by opening up for it the prospect of an immeasurable field of related representations. (§49, 315)

We should not let ourselves be misled about the true stakes of the scene Kant describes here by his insertion of the word “only,” “only to animate the mind.” For what matters is that in the experience with art, the idea—whatever

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idea—is exposed to the “prospect of an immeasurable field of related representations” and thus no longer remains the same idea. A passage a few lines above the one we just quoted makes this point more directly: Now if we add to a concept a representation of the imagination that belongs to its presentation, but which by itself stimulates so much thinking that it can never be grasped in a determinate concept, hence which aesthetically enlarges the concept itself in an unbounded way, then in this case the imagination is creative. (§49, 314–315; my emphasis)

At first, it seems that the work of the imagination is merely additive (“if we add to a concept”), in keeping with Kant’s characterization of it as a combinatorial capacity of the mind. Yet it soon emerges that under some circumstances, namely, when the imagination presents us with configurations that “stimulate[] so much thinking that it can never be grasped in a determinate concept,” this addition results in an enlargement of the concept. And this enlargement amounts to a transformation, for it proceeds not by adding more meanings to the dictionary entry for the concept, but by enlarging it in an unbounded way. Art does not, then, supplement concepts we know already with further meanings; this, at least, is not the most significant way we have of responding to it. Rather art alters the very idea of a concept having a meaning. It presents us with concepts whose boundary of meaning has been blurred thanks to the “multitude of related representations” that the presentation suggests. If a reader is moved by Fredrick’s poem, if, in Kantian terms, his or her thinking is stimulated beyond the bounds of any particular concept, then the idea of the end of life, which is the theme of the poem, has been enlarged because our aesthetic experience—the feeling we have when we read it—has put the idea of approaching death in contact with moods, images, and ideas the poem has evoked in us that reshape the idea without becoming fully part of its meaning, a meaning we could put into words. Thinking of this merely as attaching more meanings to the concept shortchanges the experience Kant is reaching for. Oedipus Rex and Hamlet profoundly alter the conception of the family, each in its own way, yet not by giving us more meanings for the term family. They set in motion reflections on family relations that, while connected with certain concepts and meanings, can never be uncoupled from the particular arrangement of words and images in which they appear. They

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give us more to think about by interrupting our usual ways of speech, by introducing silence and stutters, by taking us to a place where we do not know exactly what to say or how to say it. We do not know and cannot say where the boundary of meanings linked to the concept of family now lies. The term sense, for which I have opted to describe the immeasurable field within which aesthetic ideas exert their force, means to acknowledge the fact that to be effective these ideas must touch on and relate to the sphere of meaning, yet leaves it open if a specific meaning attaches to the concept of an object, let alone what form it might take. Sense acknowledges the presence of the stutter, which is neither senseless nor sensible, in meaning. IMITATION YIELDS TO EXPRESSION

Where do we locate aesthetic ideas, which catapult us into the field of sense? The answer appears to be straightforward. The first thing we learned about the aesthetic idea is that it is a “representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible etc. etc.” If imagination and thinking are capacities of the mind, would aesthetic ideas then not also reside entirely in the head? It seems so, but in whose head? Here things begin to get complicated. The talk of aesthetic ideas being constructs of the imagination that “occasion” or “stimulate” thinking would put them in the percipient’s head; we read, we look at, we listen to the artwork, and, if things go well, our minds undergo certain changes: our imagination stretches and our thinking becomes more capacious. But Kant also puts forward another model in which the aesthetic idea is in the head of the artist (or in whatever part of the artist’s body that is inhabited by genius). For genius, we learn, is a talent that “displays itself . . . in the exposition or the expression of aesthetic ideas” (§49, 317). Kant comes back to this model in his discussion of the visual arts, where he declares that the “aesthetic idea (archetype, prototype) is the basis in the imagination of both [plastic arts and painting]” (§51, 322). Put another way, “both make shapes in space into expressions of ideas,” the same aesthetic ideas “the mere expression [of which] is the chief aim” of sculpture (ibid.). With the notion of art as an expression of aesthetic ideas, Kant accelerates the shift, haphazardly under way in the late eighteenth century, toward a conception of artistic production that supplants the model of art as mimesis. It is a remarkable achievement. It also comes out of the blue. It re-

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mains unclear what possessed Kant to advance the idea that art is essentially an expression of ideas lodged in the artist and no longer an activity devoted to copying nature, though we would not go amiss in suspecting the specter of spirit once again. Certainly the text suggests as much. Given that the cult of expression in which later theories of art revel is fueled by a cult of genius, we would expect “genius” to be the conception that leads Kant toward the model of art-as-expression. Far from it. The sections of the book that introduce and develop the notion of genius (§§46–48), just before the spirit makes its entrance (§49), say not a word about expression. On the contrary, they are mired in the very mimetic model of art that they struggle to leave behind. Every thing Kant says here about genius is meant to serve his core claim “that genius is entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation” (§47, 308). So thoroughly is his thinking preoccupied with imitation that the alternative he offers—the mode of making art opposed to the spirit of imitation—is . . . imitation. It stretches credulity, but there it is, black on white: the model to shun is “Nachmachung” (copying), the one to seek “Nachahmung” (imitation)— different by one letter, virtually identical in meaning (§47, 309). “How this is possible, is difficult to explain,” Kant deadpans (ibid.). A serious alternative to imitation emerges only with spirit and the aesthetic ideas that arrive in its wake. Before Kant takes note of aesthetic ideas, we are tempted to say, there is nothing for genius to express. It exists solely to serve nature as a conduit for “giv[ing] the rule to art” (§46, 307), part of Kant’s shrewd ploy to save the idea of mimesis by shifting imitation from products to production. But now the aesthetic sphere is replete with ideas, and these yearn to be expressed. Emboldened by these ideas, the imagination leaves behind its modest task of recombining bits of nature and now transforms them “into something entirely different, namely into that which surpasses nature” (§49, 314). The notion of expression comes to serve as a link between the two sites in which we found aesthetic ideas, namely, the inspired artist expressing them, on the one hand, and the percipient in whom they are stimulated, on the other. Kant appears so pleased with this picture that he builds an ingenious model of the arts and their mutual connections around the idea of expression: If we wish to divide the beautiful arts, we can, at least as an experiment, choose no easier principle than the analogy of art with the kind of expression

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that people use in speaking in order to communicate as perfectly as possible to each other, i.e., not merely their concepts, but also their sensations. — This consists in the word, the gesture, and the tone. . . . There are thus only three kinds of beautiful arts: the art of speech, pictorial art, and the art of the play of sensations. (§51, 320; emphasis omitted)

It is a lovely allegory: the arts personified not singly, as we are accustomed to seeing them, but jointly as the communicative capacities of human beings aiming for the most complete expression. The “principle” Kant proposes for forging the arts into a coherent system— expression—stands as a rejoinder to Charles Batteux’s canonical principle sustaining the arts, namely, the imitation of nature (developed in Batteux’s 1746 Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe). The image Kant conjures of people speaking lyrically, gesturing pictorially, and vocalizing melodically— conversing thus in perfect artistic harmony—has such poetic allure that we hesitate to raise a most prosaic question: What are these people busy “expressing”? It is a way of asking a more serious question: if “beautiful art is art of genius” (§46) and if genius shows itself in the “expression of aesthetic ideas,” then what does genius express in art? We want to say “aesthetic ideas,” and Kant gives us ample reason for doing so. Genius, he remarks: really consists in the happy relation, which no science can teach and no diligence learn, of finding ideas for a given concept on the one hand and on the other hitting upon the expression for these, through which the subjective disposition of the mind that is thereby produced, as an accompaniment of a concept, can be communicated to others. (§49, 317)

This talent, Kant adds, “is really that which is called spirit,” a capacity for “express[ing] what, in a certain representation, is unnameable in the mental state and to make it universally communicable” (ibid.). These passages suggest a model of artistic communication as consisting of a certain “mental state” or “subjective disposition” in the artist that finds expression “in language, or painting, or in plastic art” (ibid.) in such a way as to stimulate a like mental state in others. Here aesthetic ideas inhabit minds linked via the relay of art.

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But there are enough epicycles in this model of art as the expression of a communicative content to give us second thoughts. What, after all, can we say about the “unnameable in a mental state”? Is it coherent to speak of the mental state as having a “content” if the latter cannot be named, not even in principle? It may make more sense simply to say that the artist was in the sort of mental state that gives rise to the art he has produced. What have we said with such a circular formula? We have said that we find before us two phenomena that elude the full grasp of our ordinary conceptual language, the artwork and the mind of the artist. Since we have experiential access to only one of these, the artwork, we are led to say that it is the ungraspability of the artwork that prompts us to suppose—to presuppose—the unnameable mental state. The relationship we have described between the subjectivity of the artist and its expression in the work parallels a similar logic in genius and spirit we discussed earlier—which we would expect, since all of these terms are introduced by Kant to wrestle with the same conundrum. Genius and spirit, we saw, are retroactively posited capacities of the subject to explain the appearance of what “no language fully attains or can make intelligible.” Neither genius nor spirit can be understood as part of the artist’s subjectivity (not in a psychologically coherent sense anyway), for neither is accessible to consciousness. They name what is in the artist but not of the artist, what possesses him at least as much as what he possesses. The “subjective disposition” of which Kant speaks here follows the same path, as the passage we just examined reveals. Genius finds ideas “for a given concept” and then “hit[s] upon the expression for these, through which the subjective disposition of the mind that is thereby produced . . . can be communicated to others.” What is communicated to others, then, is a subjective disposition, and the means of this communication is an expression—the artwork. But note that this to-be-communicated subjective disposition of the mind arises as a consequence of the felicitous expression genius hits upon; it is not available beforehand. The temporal order has been jumbled, as has the logic of interiority and intention. Rather than a subject with access to its own interiority—what we usually simply call intention— setting out to express it in an artwork, we see an artist of ingenious talent “finding” ideas and “hitting upon” the right way of putting them. Only then something like an inner state emerges. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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approaches this thought in his own poetic manner. “Cézanne’s or Balzac’s artist is not satisfied to be a cultured animal but takes up culture from its inception and founds it anew,” he has written. “He speaks as the first human spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before. Expression cannot, therefore, be the translation of a thought that is already clear, since clear thoughts are those that have already been said within ourselves or by others. . . . Before expression, there is nothing but a vague fever, and only the work itself, completed and understood, will prove that there was something rather than nothing to be found there.” “Expression,” then, is not the externalization of the artist’s subjective disposition or intention, not the material document of feelings and moods for which it is taken in the wake of romanticism, nor certainly the receptacle for Words worth’s “spontaneous overflow of power ful feelings.” It names rather a feverish process in which the artwork brings about the very mental state it is said to express. One thing that follows is that Kant is not led to consider the artwork to be deficient in comparison with the rich inner life it is supposed to express, as advocates of the expression model routinely do (often leading them to voice the fervent wish that the artwork would disappear entirely to make way for a nonmaterial, telepathic transmission of that inner state). This in turn has consequences for the conception of interpretation, for now an interpreter need not feel obliged to divine the deep interiority assumed to be lurking behind the artwork that in comparison always appears impoverished. “SENSIBLE BEYOND THE LIMITS OF EXPERIENCE”

The answer to our question about the location of aesthetic ideas has taken an unexpected turn. Yes, they are in the heads of producers and percipients of art (where else are we likely to find ideas, after all?), but only to the extent that they inhabit the artwork itself. Without a material form—painting, tragedy, sculpture—in which to take shape, there can be no aesthetic ideas to think. Artworks, then, are no mere conveyances for the creative imagination, but are themselves sites of creativity. I admit Kant does not explicitly advance this claim, yet we have seen that at crucial points his statements prove equivocal, and for good reasons. It is these points of tension that urge us toward the reading we have been developing, namely, that aesthetic ideas are not purely “spiritual” entities, circulating to further the

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aims of “real” ideas, but rather irreducibly dependent on material manifestation and hence also irreducible to any other regime of ideas or of thinking. It is true that in Kant’s account concepts precede aesthetic ideas; we inevitably come knowing things when we encounter a work of art. Among the ideas Kant names that may be preoccupying the artist and may also be on our minds as we engage the work are “invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of hell,” but also more down-to-earth ideas like “death, envy, and all sorts of vices, as well as love, fame, etc.” (§49, 314). Yet something extraordinary occurs when the artist—here it is the poet— sets out “to make sensible” these rational ideas (ibid.). This poet does not merely illustrate them; the aesthetic representation he offers—for example, the final rays emanating from the setting sun—is not simply subservient to the idea evoked by the poem, for example, the end of a person’s life. Rather, the poet makes them “sensible beyond the limits of experience,” Kant writes suggestively (ibid.). “Sensible beyond the limits of experience” may as well serve as the slogan of aesthetic ideas, hence of art worthy of our attention. Aesthetic ideas take us on an unbounded journey of thinking uncontained by any given concept; hence they surpass the limits of our—indeed of any— experience. This we have known. But we can now add a corollary, namely, that they surpass the sensible in the sensible. It is the particular configuration and texture of the poem that puts us in a position to surpass the mere words on the page toward a boundless horizon of thinking. “The paradox in the presentation of aesthetic ideas consists in the fact that here sensibility is exceeded by the very means of sensibility,” the philosopher Brigitte Scheer remarks. It is an astute observation, which I would amend in just one respect: sensibility is exceeded not by means of the sensible, but in the sensible. The poem is neither a tool nor a relay station sending us elsewhere; whatever thinking we do in its company, we do in the sensible-supersensible world it offers us. Kant makes it plain that no idea commensurate with the poem is available independently from the poem (or artistic “expression” generally), for every concept and every idea remains deficient when compared to the full experience of reading the poem. The artwork, then, far from copying or mirroring or expressing what exists already, brings forth in its sensible, material form a kind of thinking that would not exist but for the artwork. It is in this sense that the artwork makes ideas “sensible beyond the limits of experience.” Aesthetic ideas name what in experience cannot be contained by experience.

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KANT VS. HEGEL

I know of no better way of putting into relief the stakes implied by our reading than by contrasting Kant’s conception of the artwork, the work of art as presentation of aesthetic ideas, with that offered by Hegel three decades later, the work of art as manifestation of spirit, a conception both more fully realized than Kant’s and, I think, less generative. Begin with a point of apparent convergence. Our reading of Kant has emphasized the importance of the material dimension of the artwork in bringing into being the aesthetic ideas. Hegel too insists that art is an externalization—or concretion—of what he calls the Idea, a concept that, as far as I understand, denotes the ever greater and more refined way in which reason comes to know and realize itself. The nadir of this development lies in brute matter and its zenith in pure spirit, that is, the moment the Idea comes to full conceptual clarity about itself in the ultimate form, which is philosophy (and which bears a striking resemblance to Hegel’s own). Now art is one of the external manifestations of the Idea on its climb toward its zenith, specifically of what Hegel calls “spirit” (Geist), the word for the selfconscious way human beings use language and reason to guide their own actions freely. In his view, the true purpose of art is beauty, and beauty in turn is a manifestation of human freedom in a material form that has itself been shaped by free human action. (We hear distinct echoes of Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetic writings here.) “The beautiful,” Hegel writes, “is characterized as the pure appearance of the Idea to sense.” At first, we think we recognize the same logic we observed in Kant, namely, that the very material configurations that make up the artwork open our view to an immeasurable vista of ideas. Though in our reading we emphasized the ways aesthetic ideas are irreducibly woven into the very fabric of the object (overdrawing the point, no doubt, in part because commentators underplay it), we did not deny the presence of ideas transcending the materiality of the artwork; and how could we have, given that our focus has been on aesthetic ideas and on the modes of thinking we engage in when in the presence of art? Yet the thrust of Hegel’s view lies elsewhere. While overtly acknowledging the external reality of the work of art—the artwork in the flesh, so to speak— everything in his account in fact strives to dissolve it into a pure immaterial soul. When early in his lectures on aesthetics he declares, “in comparison with the appearance of immediate existence and of histori-

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ography, the pure appearance of art has the advantage that it points through and beyond itself” (1:9), the propositional content makes explicit what we know already and find no reason to reject, namely, that artworks, unlike ordinary things, constitutively direct our attention to a realm that exceeds them. Yet the rhetorical force alerts us to the trajectory his thought keeps taking in the course of the lectures. At every turn he singles out the ways the artwork “points through and beyond itself,” making itself invisible so that “something spiritual of which it is to give us an idea” may shine forth (ibid.). Hegel’s account is staggeringly elaborate, but the momentum of his thinking drives him to make the same point over and again, namely, that the highest art offers the lowest resistance to the “pure appearance” of spirit. This line of thought culminates in the ideal of an art that lacks an “outside” entirely and consists instead of “inside” alone, an ideal in equal mea sures power ful and strange. It is just such a monster that Hegel offers up as the very model of art: “art makes every one of its productions into a thousand-eyed Argus, whereby the inner soul and spirit is seen at every point” (1: 153–154). We end up with a topsy-turvy picture. The same Hegel whose aesthetic theory impresses the reader with its stupendous knowledge of art, the entire history of which is accounted for in detail by his theory, ultimately sees in all the artworks populating his book nothing but “art,” an entity whose texture is reduced to the single dimension of transparency. Kant, on the other hand, about whose knowledge, let alone love, of art the third Critique provides scant evidence (his examples impress mainly by their banality), this same Kant registers the material particularity of the work even in the thinnest theoretical air. This crisscrossing movement also drives the fate of beauty into opposed directions. Hegel, the founder of the philosophy of art in the Western tradition, places the idea of beauty at the center of his theory, thus rendering art into nothing more than a vessel for beauty. Kant, by contrast, as we know sets out to develop a theory of beauty, which he all but abandons as he thinks through the enigmatic phenomenon of art, thus uncoupling beauty from art. *

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At one point in his Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno remarks that Hegel’s aesthetic philosophy “is the reflexive fulfillment of Kant’s thought” and that Kant himself implicitly acknowledges the idea of “the aesthetic as spiritual”

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in his formula of disinterested pleasure. If this observation has merit, then it serves to remind us of the distance separating the Kant of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” from the Kant of aesthetic ideas, and in turn of the distance of this latter Kant from Hegel. Kant’s characterization of art, as we have attempted to unfold it here—of its internal structure, its coming into being, and its reception—is far more congenial to Adorno’s own conception than to Hegel’s. It is one of Adorno’s core ideas that in our encounters with art we come across something genuinely new, not new information or new knowledge, but what he likes to call the “nonidentical.” I take the passages of the third Critique that have held our attention in this chapter to be wrestling with just this issue, and I find the avenues of reflection they open to be at least as far-reaching as what Adorno’s masterpiece offers us. Kant’s great theme in this part of the book is to find adequate means of thinking through the phenomenon of artistic creativity, whose strangeness lies in giving rise to something both old and new, familiar and unfamiliar. The artist somehow manages to begin with the familiar, “the material which [nature] gives” him, and then “transform[s]” it “into something entirely different,” into “as it were, another nature” (§49, 314). Kant recognizes what a profoundly mysterious process this is, since the unfamiliar is not simply the logical opposite of the familiar, and second nature not simply the obverse of the first. When we come across a work of art that touches us, we do not face something utterly new and never before seen. Rather, what calls to us is precisely what we have—or think we have— always known but that now confronts us with new urgency. Kant’s account does not explain the phenomenon of art, not because it is inadequate to the phenomenon, but because there is nothing to explain, not in the sense of laying bare the inner workings of a mechanism. He tries his hand instead at a series of descriptions and redescriptions, each of which fails by the standards of his philosophy, yet each of which provides us with a larger vocabulary to put into words an experience that finally resists being put into words, an experience at whose core stands what Kant calls “the unnameable” (§49, 316; 317), that which “no language fully attains” (§49, 314). As we have seen, this unnameable is not just a confusion, a riddle, or a mystification. Like the artwork itself, it is always both known and unknown. Kant proposes several different ways of observing this logic. Genius, we said, names what is “in” the artist yet what, in the process of making, remains alien to him. This unnameable is held responsible for bringing forth the artwork,

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which in turn occasions an infinite supply of unnameable thoughts in others. And again, Kant does not gesture vaguely at some indeterminate feeling we may have about an artwork, but unfolds a notion of thinking whose endlessness and open-endedness is internal to it. It is not ordinary thinking that just happens to go on and on, nor is it a form of non-thinking, but rather a form of thinking that “let[s] one think more than one can express in a concept determined by words” (§49, 315). All of these currents are tributaries of the conception of aesthetic ideas, Kant’s umgekehrt philosophical creation, that names— but does not finally grasp—the spectral logic of thinking with art.

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of the Critique of Judgment, the “Critique of Teleological Judgment,” is devoted almost entirely to what at the time of the publication of the book was not yet called biology (the term was coined a decade later, in about 1800). This is the half readers interested in aesthetics tend to skip. Now academic protocol requires that such behavior be denounced and offenders pilloried, yet the truth is that one can arrive at a nuanced understanding of Kant’s aesthetic argument without needing to rely on the teleological argument. The question of whether the third Critique presents anything like a unified line of thought is a matter of some dispute (like virtually every other feature of the book), but even among those scholars urging a systematic coherence, I have not come across an account of the teleological half that has made it seem indispensable for an understanding of the aesthetic half. I thus do not claim that knowing the teleological sections is “required” for understanding the aesthetic argument; skip it if you like. But I do think that engaging with Kant’s teleological thought pushes the boundaries of the aesthetic argument in several dimensions, making it deeper and broader and more textured. It becomes clearer just how ambitious the work of judgment, and thus the project of a critique of judgment, is in Kant’s conception. The notion of purpose, and the notion of purposiveness from which it derives

THE SECOND HALF

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and that plays such a large and puzzling role in aesthetic judgment, finds another pillar to rest on and consequently feels more solid. By extending purposiveness to organisms—to life (though Kant does not call it that)—he broadens the range of our encounters with the world in which meaning is at stake. Meaning is not guaranteed, nor accessible, nor even necessarily present in such a context, yet we do come to see that the encounter cannot help but occur in relation to meaning. We become acquainted with the idea that when I face an organism, just as when I face something beautiful, I find myself embroiled with meaning. Though the concept of purposiveness is the key link between the two parts of the third Critique, it is not the only one to play a consequential role in aesthetics and teleology. As I suggest in the last, speculative section of Chapter 9, the teleological argument opens our view to aspects of aesthetic thought in light of a new question— actually one that has been there all along, but now appears in a new light— a question provoked by the entanglement with biology, namely the question of life itself. All this still thinks of teleology in relation to aesthetics. Yet the main reason for learning about Kant’s teleological theory is for the intrinsic interest it holds. Kant’s key claim in the “Critique of Teleological Judgment” is that the only way for us to make sense of organisms—of what he prefers to call “organized products of nature”—is to regard them teleologically, as purposefully shaped, yet at the same time fully within the orbit of nature. Since most varieties of this claim are simplistic or foolish (or both), some care is needed in understanding Kant’s version. Here are some of the things Kant does not claim. He does not claim that because of the great complexity (or unlikeliness) of organisms the existence of a nonmechanistic force acting on them must be assumed (the sort of claim we encounter in arguments for “intelligent design”). Nor does he claim that the system of organized nature is an effect of a divine cause. He also does not claim that nature is organized in a hierarchy of purposes, with plants serving as means for herbivores and the latter as means for carnivores, and these finally as means for human beings. He does advance arguments that stand in fairly close proximity to these claims, yet differ from them in crucial respects (not all of which concern us here). Beyond par ticu lar positions, he develops a notion of teleology that is meant to be fundamentally natural, that is, uncoupled from theology. Retaining the idea of design, but not that of the designer, of the idea of pur-

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pose (which he calls purposiveness), but not of a knowable purpose, leads to a deep and demanding line of thinking about our cognitive relationship to organisms that is both historically and philosophically significant. It breaks new ground in the turbulent debates around the right ways of conceptualizing organisms taking place in eighteenth-century Europe. It attempts to offer an account of a world unguided by divine will and, at the same time, not reducible to the workings of a mechanical device. Its formidable philosophical power continues to be felt; judging by recent work in contemporary philosophy of biology, Kant’s writing on this topic, far from satisfying a merely antiquarian interest, still opens wide avenues of thought. In fact, its force may be felt even more acutely today than at the time of its first publication. Because the very idea of natural teleology now smacks of zealotry and school board disputes, advocates of science tend to be put on edge by arguments for teleology that, like Kant’s, are hard to dismiss. As I hope will emerge in the course of the following chapters, we are by no means beyond teleology.

SEVEN

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in relation to biology? In trying to understand some products of nature, Kant believes, we come up against a boundary if we insist on employing strictly mechanistic tools of explanation. We grant that physical processes must and do operate in a certain order if, say, a tree is to exist, processes that in his view finally take the form of attraction and repulsion, the simplest ways matter is set in motion. Physics and chemistry govern how nutrients are absorbed by roots, how they make their way through the trunk, how leaves form and wither, how seeds are scattered, and so on. We may not know all the details, but Kant’s— and I think our—picture of nature as subject to regular and discoverable rules commits him and us to thinking that, in principle, we can. But do we thereby know all there is to know about the tree? Do we know why the tree has leaves rather than, say, pine needles (or some other form of appendage or no appendages at all), or what accounts for the cycle of their appearance and disappearance, or why they have acquired this color and not that? Have we made sense of the tree, understood it, its parts, and its behavior? Kant thinks not, so much so that, as he writes in a much-quoted passage, it would “be absurd for humans . . . to hope that there may yet arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws that no intention has ordered” (§75, 400). WHAT IS KANT’S ARGUMENT

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This is surprising given his deep commitment to a scientific picture of the world. But things get more surprising still once we get a measure of the full scope of his claim, for he does not merely assert that we miss some features of the tree by proceeding mechanistically, that mechanistic accounts capture, say, ninety percent of what makes a tree a tree, leaving an unexplained tenth. No, we have missed the whole tree, if our aim has been to understand a tree rather than an aggregation of matter. Even if we managed to know everything about the working of the tree that a mechanistic mode of inquiry can reveal, we would know nothing about it as a tree. This seems like a position designed to inflict the maximum in cognitive dissonance on us. It asks us to hold in our head two thoughts that appear to resist peaceful coexistence. One is that the material world— organisms included—is entirely determined by natural laws and must therefore be entirely explicable via those laws. The other is that a part of this material world— organisms—is exempt from this rule, requiring for its comprehension something more and different, namely, teleological principles. The way Kant thinks his way out of this conundrum, which he calls an antinomy (§70), is the major theme of the “Critique of Teleological Judgment,” but what is equally instructive is the way he thinks his way into it. He begins with a simple thought experiment: What if I came across a regular hexagon etched in the sand in a region apparently unpopulated by people? How would I make sense of it? One possibility would be to suspect a purely mechanical, “nonrational cause,” such as “the sand, the nearby sea, the wind, the footprints of any known animals” (§64, 370). The other, of course, is to regard it as an expression that can accord only with a concept of reason and would thus place the cause outside nature’s mechanical workings. The choice between the two explanations seems clear to Kant, for the contingency of coinciding with such a concept, which is possible only in reason, would seem to [an observer] so infinitely great that it would be just as good as if there were no law of nature, consequently no cause in nature acting merely mechanically . . . thus as if only reason can contain the causality for such an effect, consequently that this object must be thoroughly regarded as an end, but not a natural end, i.e., as a product of art (vestigium hominis video [I see the trace of a human being]). (§64, 370)

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One way of grasping the point Kant is driving at is to ask under what conditions sand, water, wind, and the movements of animals, unguided by reason as they are (or we think they are), can bring about something apparently grounded in reason. One answer would be if I were able to show—at least to assume—that mindless mechanical forces have acted in such a way as to produce just this shape, the way the elliptical shape of a comet’s orbit, far from forming contingently, necessarily follows from the laws governing the motion of bodies. In this picture, while seemingly unlikely, the hexagon would in fact turn out to be the only possible outcome of the process. Yet I cannot make out the sort of forces that would of necessity—that is, under certain conditions, invariably—give rise to hexagons in the sand, so I look for the only other option the mechanistic view leaves me. Since necessity does not seem to account for the appearance of the shape before me, I am obliged to take chance as its cause, the way I explain to myself how a cloud morphs into the shape of a rabbit or the face of a cliff displays the outlines of a human face. If I take this second explanatory route, I rely for my explanation on a contingency of such fantastic improbability that “it would be just as good as if there were no law of nature.” Neither of the variants of the mechanistic model, then, proves helpful in offering an explanation for the appearance of the hexagon, which is unlike both the elliptical orbit in not resulting from a pure physical interaction of matter alone and the rabbit in the clouds in not consisting in a haphazard arrangement of matter. I recognize its coherence—what Kant calls the unity of its form—yet I fail to explain this coherence with a “cause in nature acting merely mechanically.” Hence I abandon the mechanical explanation in favor of a model that posits reason as the ultimate source of the shape. And because I know of only one creature that manifests the sort of reason capable of accommodating geometry, I cannot help but see in the hexagon the trace of a human being. TELEOLOGICAL VS. MECHANICAL CAUSATION

In keeping with a convention in place since Aristotle, Kant calls the type of causation employing concepts of reason teleological. In teleology, the end— what Kant terms the purpose and Aristotle the final cause— serves as the cause that motivates the coming into being of parts that cohere into a whole. This sounds more complicated than it is, for it claims no more than the idea

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that I need the concept of, for example, a house in order to be able to build a house. Of course I need other things as well—things like bricks, planks, tools, skill (actually, many skills), time, money, a piece of land, a reasonably fit body, most likely a permit, and so on—yet none of these will do much good if I lack the concept “house” that lends purposeful coherence to the individual elements. Similarly, the idea “hexagon” brings about the six individual lines in the sand that must align in just the right way to yield a hexagon. Two differences between the teleological logic and “ordinary,” physical, mechanistic causation emerge at once. One involves the way we conceptualize the relationship between parts and whole. In the mechanistic conception, the whole is simply understood as the sum total of its individual parts, which effectively means that the parts do not owe their raison d’être to the whole. If I think of the solar system as a mechanical assemblage of a star, planets, moons, and so on, I would not say that the moon is where it is in order to bring about the tides on Earth. But if I see the solar system as a purposeful whole, I might say exactly that, for in that mode of description, an element exists by virtue of being understood as a meaningful part of a whole. In this conception, an element is properly speaking no element at all, if by that we mean a fundamental part out of which the whole is constituted. Rather, an element becomes an element only retroactively, in an act of after-the-fact analysis. Independently from the whole, be it because it has been severed from it or because the whole has ceased to be, it no longer is the same thing, the way the eye of a dead body, as Aristotle remarks, is not “really” an eye (On the Parts of Animals, 641a). The idea of retroactively established elements opens the view to the second important difference between the two modes of conceptualization, namely, the dimension of time. Under the mechanistic regime, causes and effects, even long chains of them, move in only one temporal direction: a cause brings forth an effect, which in turn serves as cause of another effect, which in turns causes a third effect, and so on. Imagine the series as a long chain of dominoes falling from left to right, where every domino (except the first and last) is cause and effect: its fall is both the effect of the fall of its neighbor to the left and the cause of the fall of its neighbor to the right. In such an arrangement, the arrow of causation points in only one direction, what Kant calls “always descending” (§65, 372), which simply means that no domino could be said to cause the fall of dominoes to its left; were that to happen, we would say

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something had gone wrong in our setup. Yet this is precisely the logic of causality that we are required to assume in teleology, where “in accordance with a concept of reason,” a series “would carry with it descending as well as ascending dependency” (§65, 372). Elsewhere Kant concedes the difficulty in the idea of final ends, “because at first glance it appears to contain a contradiction” (21: 187) since it appears to act against the flow of time. But as we see with the hexagon, the contradiction is only apparent, for when we say its possibility can only be explained via teleology, we do not claim that the actual hexagon in the sand caused itself into existence, only that a concept “hexagon” had to precede the coming into being of this instance. We know that Kant’s aim here is not to give an account of our thinking when we bump into a geometric shape in the middle of a desert. The thought experiment with the hexagon serves to help us think about the world of organisms. And this is where biologists today become jittery. At first glance, biology would seem to be a science receptive to alternative concepts of causation, for unlike physics and chemistry, biology fi nds itself in need of multiple concepts of causality. Two are most prominent. Functional biology— basically any research project that seeks to know how a given feature in an organism’s anatomy or behavior works— searches for the proximate causes that bring about that feature and relies on explanations from sciences understood to be more basic, usually physics and chemistry. Thus the answer to the question of how the distinctive red in a cardinal’s plumage comes about will include a lot of chemical information. Evolutionary biology, by contrast, largely seeks to answer why questions: Why, out of all the possible forms that this organism (or this organ, this behavior, this mode of signaling, and so on) could have taken, has it taken this form? Here the biologist is interested in the ultimate cause. Any answer to why the cardinal’s plumage is red will need to go beyond the biochemistry of pigmentation and look for an account that explains the color’s selective advantages (unless it is deemed an accident, which would itself offer an interesting insight). We may be inclined to map the proximate and ultimate causes on Kant’s distinction of mechanical and teleological causes, but it soon becomes clear that such a move misunderstands both biology and Kant. Thus biologists, to mention only one point, aim to explain the ultimate cause, just as the proximate, mechanically; teleological causation does not—or at least is not meant to— enter the explanation at all. Both features of teleological thinking we have highlighted, the logical priority of the whole before its parts and the

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bidirectional temporal flow of causation, makes them uneasy, for it seems to them, not without justification, that a phenomenon understood along these lines is not testable by ordinary experimental techniques. Kant, for his part, does not offer teleology as a model of causation for a mere segment of biology, leaving the remainder to mechanical causation. In his conception, all study of organisms—whether it is oriented toward the natural history of an organism’s emergence or toward the structure of its physiology or behavior—requires teleology to get off the ground, for a feature can only call for a functional or evolutionary explanation if it is first understood to be a coherent part of a coherent whole. We will shortly consider this issue in greater detail, but first we should make sure we understand the hexagon example. Is what Kant says about it in fact right? What if he had started with a different example? I come across not a hexagon but, say, an ellipsis in a region apparently unpopulated by people, a region such as outer space, where, as it happens, one can in fact find a large number of ellipses. Would I, because “the contingency of coinciding” with the concept of ellipsis “would seem . . . so infinitely great,” have no choice but to see reason at work and conclude that I had seen the trace of a human (or humanoid) being? I might, depending on when and where I lived, whether I had ever heard of Kepler or Newton, and what ideas I held about the power of human (or humanoid) beings. Though some features of Kant’s story depend on such accidental circumstances (it assumes a knowledge of hexagons and what makes them regular, of the effects atmospheric conditions can possibly have on a sandy surface, of the idea that animal movements are nonrational), his ambition is that the heart of his answer, the part that fi nally matters to our understanding of the hexagon story, should hold true quite apart from empirical differences. And his claim is that spotting a regular hexagon in the sand is in fact essentially different from coming across an ellipsis in the sky. What might the difference consist in? We are tempted to say that the hexagon is obviously made by human hand guided by reason, while the elliptical orbit of the planets is not, but then we notice that we are assuming the very difference we set out to explain, and so we retract the thought. But is there a way not to assume this difference? Can we place ourselves at a point prior to the distinction of nature and art (in the sense of human making)? That would mean placing ourselves in a position where our capacity of using reason to practical ends is somehow obscured to us. It may be possible to

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attain such a place, but I cannot say what cognitive or emotional texture it may have. By using the hexagon as an example to start us thinking about biological nature (without at all claiming that organisms are basically like hexagons), Kant is suggesting that our capacity for reasoned action is irreducibly involved in our capacity for making sense of parts of the natural world. That does not necessarily mean that those parts of nature—the “organized products”—are therefore modeled by us on our ability for purposeful action, though we often speak that way (“The tree reaches for the light and casts a shadow on its neighbors”). Rather, Kant is, I think, pointing to a more profound region where the activities of making sense of human action and of organisms both rest on the same cognitive structure, namely, on our capacity for recognizing the structure of purposes (which is what he means by purposiveness), a capacity Kant calls judgment. He thus brings to the fore a dimension in our world that cuts across the distinction between nature and art, for it turns out that we can make sense of parts of nature only when we group them with products of human intention (which, as we shall see, does not make the two identical in essence or structure). It is this deeper region that Kant’s argument for teleology lays bare. Again, where might we locate the difference between the ways we judge the regular hexagon and the planetary orbit? Begin by considering how, according to Kant, a teleological account of something arises in the first place. “In order to see that a thing is possible only as an end,” he reasons, “it is necessary that its form not be possible in accordance with mere natural laws . . . alone” (§64, 369–370). The last word, alone, is key. Kant does not claim that products calling for a teleological account are not possible in accordance with natural laws; they are not miraculous. As material things, they must be and in fact are possible in accordance with natural laws, but their possibility is not exhaustively explained by those laws alone, but requires for its understanding another logic, that of teleology. Kant actually speaks not of things being possible according to natural laws but their “form,” a shape-shifting concept in his writings that is often difficult to pin down. Here I understand it to name not a thing’s shape but the conceptual structure underpinning it, which makes its apprehension and explanation possible. Thus a mountain and a cone may have the same basic shape, but they do not share a form, the difference being that the form of one is entirely possible “in accordance with mere natural laws . . . alone,” while that of the other is not. In order for something to be possible solely

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according to natural laws, we must be able to see, at least to assume, that all of its features necessarily result from those laws. When I look at the mountain and try to account for its “possibility”—how it has come to be what it is—I am able to think that natural laws such as gravity can be brought to bear to explain every one of its features, and if I knew enough about those laws and the empirical conditions under which they acted on the mountain, I would recognize that the mountain must be the way it is. That is simply the meaning of what it means to live in a fully determined mechanistic world. Similarly with the elliptical shape of planetary orbits: once I assume that certain fundamental laws apply, I realize that the orbits could take no other form. Kant calls this picture, in which fundamental laws govern the interactions of matter, the “mechanism of nature” (§64, 369) and the mode of explanation grounded in them “mechanical.”  Here the difference with the hexagon comes into view: given the laws of nature, the lines making the hexagon could have formed differently. In regard to those laws, the form the lines take remains contingent. Yet the contingency in relation to the laws of nature gives way to necessity once we see the hand of another human, equipped with the idea of “hexagon,” at work. It is worth pausing for a moment to notice how odd it is that Kant sets out on his quest to understand organisms by guiding us into “an apparently uninhabited land” (§64, 370), a wilderness bereft of human company and exposed to the elements. It is true that this is “just” a thought experiment, yet it betrays the sort of mental shift that Kant imposes on himself— and on us—to see the organic within an inorganic frame. This is certainly not a way of seeing that comes naturally to us, for our intimacy with the world of living things runs deep, at least as deep as our familiarity with the lifeless, and perhaps deeper. We know from the historical and the ethnographic record that mythopoetic accounts tend to regard life as a pervasive dimension of the world, saturating it completely. In these accounts, it is not life that presents itself as a mystery to be explained but death. Yet Kant, following in Bacon’s and Galileo’s footsteps, places us in a desolate world in which the lifeless is the norm, mechanism the mode of explanation, and life the question to be answered. Hans Jonas, who in his philosophical reflections on biology has untangled these issues with great intelligence, has pointed out that the question driving mechanistic investigations is finally whether “life [is] reducible to nonlife.”  “To reduce life to the lifeless is nothing else than

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to resolve the particular into the general, the complex into the simple, and the apparent exception into the accepted rule,” Jonas writes. “Precisely this is the task set to modern biological science by the goal of ‘science’ as such” (11). As we shall see in the chapters to come, Kant remains deeply conflicted about the demands of the methodological monism of the physical sciences, let alone the ontological monism that is often all too easily taken as its precondition. He will finally insist on a duality of “methods” (attitudes may be the better term) in the study of nature. Still, it is significant that the perplexity lies in organisms and purposiveness and not in “dead” matter.

THE LAWFULNESS OF THE CONTINGENT

Back to our train of thought. Necessity mandated by the fundamental laws— that is, mechanism— constitutes only one order of nature; the other is governed by contingency. While the mechanical order of nature produces an arrangement that could not have been other wise, Kant recognizes that not all products of nature fall under this category. “Human beings see, hear, smell, taste, and so on. But the properties that are the grounds of seeing are not the grounds of tasting as well,” Kant writes in an earlier work, 1763’s The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. “Man has to have other organs in order to hear, and likewise in order to taste. The union of such different faculties is contingent, and, because their union aims at perfection, their union is artificial in character. And then again, in the case of each organ individually, there is a unity that is artificial” (2: 106). Here Kant derives the idea of contingency in nature from the fact that the laws explaining one phenomenon—for example, seeing—do not rest on the same ground as the laws explaining a similar phenomenon—for example, hearing. In the third Critique, Kant generalizes this observation. If we set out to understand the structure we find in organic beings, e.g., the structure of a bird, the hollowness of its bones, the placement of its wings for movement and of its tails for steering, etc., one says that . . . without the help of a special kind of causality, namely that of ends . . . this is all in the highest degree contingent: i.e., that nature, considered as a mere mechanism, could have formed itself in a thousand different ways without hitting precisely upon the unity in accordance with such a rule. (§61, 360)

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Put in somewhat different terms: everything in the material world consists of matter fully under the sway of fundamental laws (ultimately attraction and repulsion), other wise we could not even conceive of it as being part of this material world. Yet some clusters of matter find arrangements that could have taken other forms without violating those fundamental laws; in this regard, their form is contingent. But is inorganic nature not also contingent in relation to fundamental laws? The contours of a pebble, the shape of a cloud, the bed a river carves for itself— are these not contingent too, in the sense that they cannot simply be derived from the laws of attraction and repulsion? They are, and this sort of contingency extends to many features of nature, including those we tend to explain by referring to mechanical laws. Thus we take the shapes clouds make to be explicable by a variety of laws of matter and motion, yet the fact that this cloud at this moment has taken on the shape of a rabbit remains contingent in relation to those laws; we cannot explain it without knowing far more than merely those laws. But Kant’s intuition is that there is a profound difference between the contingency of the cloud rabbit and the contingency of a real rabbit. About the first we say that it is a product of chance, by which we simply mean that we seek no explanation for the fact that it is thus and not other wise. But when it comes to the real rabbit, Kant thinks there is a way of accounting for the fact “that nature, considered as a mere mechanism, could have formed itself in a thousand different ways” yet did not and arranged itself in just this way. Its form is contingent but not haphazard. Although contingent, the organized forms exhibit a coherence that “aims for perfection,” which is to say, a unity of form that has its own form of necessity. It is to understand this necessity in the contingent that we rely on teleological thinking. In fact, in Kant’s lapidary formulation, “Purposiveness is a lawfulness of the contingent as such” (First Introduction, 20: 217). This helps to make sense of a densely argued passage in the section of the third Critique we have been considering (which is even more serpentine in the original): Since reason must be able to cognize the necessity in every form of a natural product if it would understand the conditions connected with its generation, the contingency of their form with respect to all empirical laws of nature in relation to reason is itself a ground for regarding their causality as if it were possible only through reason. (§64, 370)

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I take the passage to say roughly this: we recognize a systematic coherence in the tree, yet this coherence does not of necessity come into being under the pressure of the fundamental laws of nature; it is contingent. But to understand how the tree has come to be—“the conditions connected with its generation”—we need to understand the necessity in its systematic coherence: Why does it have just this sort of leaf or that kind of bark? And since the faculty of understanding alone cannot ground such necessity in its concepts, our judgment looks to reason, which furnishes the idea of purpose. Judgment, then, makes use of an idea of reason to orga nize an experience provided by our senses. All this talk of reason and necessity may give us a skewed idea of the picture Kant provides. It may lead us to think that we arrive at the need for a teleological explanation through reasoning, but we do not, for there are no rules—no reasons that could be made explicit—for how the idea of purpose is applied to experience. How, after all, do we know that we are faced with a configuration whose “form [is] not . . . possible in accordance with mere natural laws . . . alone”? We recognize the form to be contingent in relation to those natural laws, but we also see a lawfulness in the unity or coherence of its form. But how does this unity of form become apparent to us? It is not simply a feature of the world that an experiment might reveal to us (how would one test for unity or coherence?). Nor can we derive it a priori, merely by thinking about the conditions under which something can appear to us in experience, for the objects that interest us are available only in experience. It makes no sense to speak of deriving the notion of tree or of the species “cherry” or even of a species tout court before experience, nor does the experience of nature itself somehow provide us with these entities. (Ask yourself: why do we regard the blossoms as part of a tree but not the bees’ nest on one its branches, or even the bees themselves, on whose presence the tree may depend as much as it does on its blossoms? Are the reasons that persuade us given by nature?) In short, we have access to no criteria that would unfailingly distinguish a purposeful structure from a nonpurposeful one. In this sense, the very fork in the notion of explanation— explanation via mechanical laws on one side, explanation via teleology on the other—is not itself grounded in either experience or reason alone. Yes, it requires both experience and reason, but it requires something else as well, namely, judgment, a distinct capacity irreducible to other capacities of the mind. The question of when the idea of purpose is needed and when it is not, what

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qualifies as an organism and what does not, what exhibits lawful contingency and what does not— all these can only be dealt with by our capacity of making judgments. And since judgment thus employed cannot lean on either the understanding or on reason, it must lean on itself; it cannot help but ground itself in itself. THE TECHNIQUE OF NATURE

In the proposition from the Only Possible Argument I quoted earlier, Kant calls the unity we discover (if that is the right term) in the contingent forms of nature künstlich, which I have rendered as “artificial,” a translation that can doubly mislead, given the two main meanings we attach to the word. In Kant’s conception, the term does not entail the idea that the coherence we discern in contingent forms is contrived or false, nor does it single out those forms as somehow contrary to nature. Rather, the contingent forms in nature really are coherent in our estimation and they really are natural, yet they are also artificial in the sense that their form is accessible only through the logic of purpose we also know from human artifacts. “Artificial” alerts us to the deeper region of our understanding of the world we encountered earlier, where both the fact that we can make and recognize things according to concepts of reason (hexagons and watches, for example) and the fact that we can make sense of products of nature whose order is contingent and necessary (ears and trees, for example) rely on teleological reasoning performed by reflective judgment. The philosophical stakes in the idea of the “artificial” order of nature change considerably in the course of Kant’s writings. Not surprisingly, The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God takes the “artificiality” of some features of nature to indicate God’s agency, though in complex and mediated form. Nearly three decades later, in the third Critique, the theological argument has been attenuated, having been channeled through even more mediating steps. Thus in the long passage we considered earlier, Kant takes care to note that the order that brings forth organisms appears to us “as if it were possible only through reason” (§64, 370), a point to which we will need to return. Yet the basic structure that puts nature and the artist in a homologous position continues to serve as a point of orientation even in the later text. Thus in the First Introduction,

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which is more unequivocal on this issue than the introduction Kant ended up publishing, he asserts: With regard to its products as aggregates, nature proceeds mechanically, as mere nature; but with regard to its products as systems, e.g., crystal formations, various shapes of flowers, or the inner structure of plants and animals, it proceeds technically, i.e., at the same time as art. (First Introduction, 20: 217)

The “mechanism of nature” (§64, 369), in which the behavior of clusters of matter—nature’s “products as aggregates”—is wholly and necessarily controlled by the fundamental laws of matter, finds its counterpart in the “technique of nature” (First Introduction, 20: 219, and elsewhere), which governs those configurations—nature’s “products as systems”—that remain contingent with respect to the fundamental laws (for they could have formed other wise), yet whose perceived unity is subject to its own form of necessity, namely, the necessity of purposiveness. Th is is simply a way of acknowledging that there are things in nature that open up to us—that can become part of our experience— only when we recognize their kinship with things made by human beings. We apprehend them as having been made, and made in a manner we know from ourselves, namely, as technique. To this extent, we find something of ourselves in every organism. We are already familiar with the logic that lies at the heart of this technical mode of making; the hexagon example revealed its basic form. Organisms, Kant maintains, are understood by us to be structured according to the peculiar part-whole logic of things made under the guidance of a purpose, where the parts cause the whole just as much as the whole—or the idea of the whole—gives rise to the parts. We could attempt to describe the heart mechanically, as a network of muscles and veins or as a collection of cells (though it is not easy to conceive of muscles, veins, or cells as coherent units of description without recourse to teleological terms, that is, without the idea that they are for something), but we would miss the mark entirely. Lacking a conception of the whole body as an organism, we would be unable to bring the function of the heart as one of its parts into view, and without access to an idea of its function, its very structure would appear as an arbitrary arrangement of tissue. Thus the part-whole logic of purposes

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discloses the heart (or the liver, pancreas, nose, and so on) as an object of knowledge in the first place; only when we know what it is for can we begin to provide an account of its mechanics (be it on the level of muscles or of molecules) that has any chance of making sense. At this early stage of the argument, two important dimensions of Kant’s thinking emerge. One is epistemological: seeing the organism as a technical product discloses it as something we can recognize and thus study, analyze, perhaps explain. The other is normative: seeing the organism as a technical product discloses what it and its part ought to do, hence discloses when it or its organs deviate from the norm. The one comes into view with the other. Being able to apprehend the heart as a heart—as a purposeful part of a purposefully arranged whole—entails thinking of it as fulfilling a function. RECIPROCITY

The logic of human technical production is one part of it. Had Kant stopped here, he would have ended up with a familiar analogy: just as the hexagon must be explained by the human hand, organisms must be explained by the divine hand. Yet this is not where Kant is headed, for in his thinking the analogy with human technique ultimately breaks down. “One says far too little about nature and its capacity in organized products if one calls this an analogue of art,” he declares, “for in that case one conceives of the artist (a rational being) outside of it” (§65, 374). Explaining nature with something that resides “outside of it” is what Kant wishes to avoid. While organic nature in one sense produces “as art,” as the First Introduction asserts, Kant insists that nature’s technique cannot be fully put in analogy with human or humanlike technique. For “a product of nature” to be understood as “a natural end, something more is required” than the mere analogy with art (§64, 370). Wherein does this something more consist? We may be inclined to seek it in a quality or quantity added to mere beings that would somehow transform them into organic beings, an added quality such as the élan vital or an added quantity such as “greater complexity.” Thus if we thought of teleology as guided by a transcendent agent, as it has been in most such accounts, we would think of his work as analogous to a human artificer, except more perfect, more magnificent, more encompassing. Yet that is not how Kant thinks of teleology, for he means to offer us a teleology without theology, a natural teleology. In the third Critique, the

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“something more” amounts therefore to something diff erent, specifically a difference in the logic of causality. While human technical production operates according to the circular logic of an end being the cause of an effect that in turn brings about the end (recall the house: its concept precedes the materials that cause the existence of the house), natural technical production follows another logic: “I would say provisionally that a thing exists as a natural end if it is cause and effect of itself (although in a twofold sense)” (§64, 370). In the case of the house, the direction of causality we expect in a mechanistic world is upended by the idea that sometimes ends can cause effects. Causes and effects are clearly distinguished; the house is not the same as the materials needed to build it, nor the concept of house the same as the structure that is built. Yet in the case of the natural end, Kant tightens the circle and claims that cause and effect are the same thing (“although in a twofold sense”). This stands in need of greater elaboration. To illustrate the seemingly paradoxical idea of something being cause and effect of itself, Kant provides an example, not the blade of grass that he invokes on more than one occasion but its big brother, the tree. What distinguishes the tree’s way of being organized from that of an artifact? First, a tree “generates another tree in accordance with a known natural law” (§64, 371). In other words, “it generates itself as far as the species is concerned, in which it, on one side as effect, on the other as cause, unceasingly produces itself” (ibid.). Second, a tree grows not by increasing “in magnitude in accordance with mechanical laws,” but rather by transforming “the matter that it adds to itself with a quality peculiar to its own species,” a process “infinitely remote from all art” (ibid.). Third, a tree brings forth its parts “in such a way that the preservation of the one is reciprocally dependent on the preservation of the others” (ibid.). Here Kant makes strange what appears to be familiar, for having noted that leaves and branches of one plant may be grafted onto the stems of another, he suggests thinking of all plant appendages, even the plant’s “own” leaves and branches, as grafts. In principle, they can be seen as independent organisms parasitically living on one another, yet to do so successfully, they need to nourish their host. The key idea in this example is the concept of reciprocity, operative on every level of analysis of an organism’s coming into being. It allows Kant to refine his “provisional” understanding of the logic of causality, namely, the idea that a thing is a natural end “if it is cause and effect of itself.” With the concept of reciprocity in hand, Kant can now diminish the appearance of

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paradox and flesh out the idea: “In such a product of nature”—that is, in an organism—“each part is conceived as if it exists only through all the others, thus as if existing for the sake of the others and on account of the whole, i.e., as a tool (organ)” (§65, 373). Th is proposition helps us understand why reciprocal causality involves the same thing “in a twofold sense,” for applying the logic of reciprocity to an organism obliges us to divide in analysis what in reality is one. Thus one and the same organism is split into progenitor and offspring to explain the reproduction of the species; into child and adult to explain ontogenetic change; into the whole body and its parts to explain morphology. As Kant sums it up, for a thing to be seen as a natural end “it is required . . . that its parts be combined into a whole by being reciprocally the cause and effect of their form. For in this way alone is it possible in turn for the idea of the whole conversely (reciprocally) to determine the form and combination of all the parts” (ibid.). This idea of reciprocity, which allows us to make sense of organisms at every level of their existence (insofar as we take them to be organisms rather than lumps of disorganized matter), is the concept that is meant to divide artistic from natural teleology. But does it? Are we now able to discern the distinction between the two with clarity? Kant does not make it easy on us; his language keeps recalling art just when he ostensibly argues that art provides too limited a model for understanding organic nature. Thus his use of the term tool (Werkzeug) in this context as a gloss on “organ” (reactivating the original sense of the organon meaning “tool” or “instrument”), just like his repeated use of the phrase technique of nature to describe what human observers take to be the purposeful organization of some of its products, can lead us to think that the teleological mode of explanation consists of an analogical transfer to nature of our own capacity for technical making. Are we entirely mistaken in thinking that? After all, using human technique as a guideline for understanding nature’s technique would seem highly productive, if not indispensable. When I attempt to make sense of the anatomy of certain animals, I will be inclined to say, for example, that they depend on their hearts for the circulation of blood, that is, that the heart serves the purpose of promoting circulation the way a pump might. By having the function in view, I am in a position to ascertain how the heart accomplishes its task, how it may even surpass every human-made pump in elegance and efficiency, or where it may be defective. The reason the analogy works in such

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cases is that the reciprocal causality Kant develops in relation to organisms applies to artifacts as well. There seems to be no good reason not to say of the spring in a watch, just as of the heart in an animal’s body, that we conceive of it “as if existing for the sake of the others and on account of the whole.” Is there, then, a difference? Kant insists there is, that understanding the existence and structure of an organ or an organism in analogy with human art—that is, with a mode of production guided by concepts—is “not sufficient” (§65, 374). Not sufficient in what way? Kant has an answer, a powerful answer, but it takes a bit of sorting out to get to it. He approaches the question administratively, as it were, by considering the logical relationship of the two concepts of end that he means to distinguish here. Were we to conceive of organs according to the logic of tools of art, then the specificity of a natural teleology—just what we mean to understand—would dissolve, for then the kind of purpose that we employ to explain organisms would turn out to be “represented as possible only as an end as such” (§64, 374; my emphasis), rather than as the special kind of end that it is, namely, a natural end. Working through this worry about the tidiness of logical relations allows Kant to make his way into a more profound region in which the substantial difference between human and natural teleology reveals itself. If the tool-as-organ is to be sufficiently distinguished from the tool-as-artifact, he reasons, then: it must be thought of as an organ that produces the other parts (consequently each produces the other reciprocally), which cannot be a tool of art, but only of nature, which provides all the matter for tools (even those of art): only then and on that account can such a product, as an organized and self-organizing being, be called a natural end. (§65, 374)

The difference becomes more evident when we contrast this with the mode of organization we find in artifacts, say, a watch: Thus one wheel in the watch does not produce the other, and even less does one watch produce another . . . hence it also cannot by itself replace parts that have been taken from it, or make good defects in its original construction by the addition of other parts, or somehow repair itself when it has fallen into disorder. (Ibid.)

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Kant concludes by quietly rebutting Descartes, for whom all living beings but human beings are no more than elaborate machines: An organized being is thus not a mere machine, for that has only a motive power, while the organized being possesses in itself a formative power, and indeed one that it communicates to the matter, which does not have it (it organizes the latter): thus it has a self-propagating formative power, which cannot be explained through the capacity for movement alone (that is, mechanism). (Ibid.)

This, then, is where the distinction between the two kinds of technique is drawn. We can find our way to its motivating source more readily if we look closely at the language Kant employs. The verb he uses in the first passage I quoted to designate the work of one organ in relation to the others is hervorbringen—“ein die anderen Teile ( folglich jeder den anderen wechselseitig ) hervorbringendes Organ”—which can be rendered as “produce” (as in the translation I have used), or as “generate,” “develop,” “create,” “spawn,” “yield,” but its most literal meaning may be the most apt here: to bring forth. For what opens up in this passage is, in the most general way, the question of how “the organized products of nature” are brought forth into the world. It is the issue of production and generation, of poiesis broadly understood, without a commitment to any specific structure or mechanism involved in the process, without even a commitment to its medium; in the second passage, Kant applies the term to a watch and its wheels. It is true that Kant denies the idea that one watch might “bring forth” another watch, or one wheel another wheel, but we need not construe this as barring watches and wheels from all forms of bringing forth. It is simply not this way of bringing forth that characterizes them, the way organisms and their organs reciprocally bring forth each other. To be clear, by “bringing forth” Kant does not mean abiogenesis, the question of how organic beings developed out of inorganic material in a primordial past (an idea which, in any case, he considers “absurd,” since in any such account the source of purposiveness would remain obscure [§80, 419n]). Rather, to arrive at a satisfactory conception of the technique of nature, he develops a conceptual understanding of the mode of productivity specific to organic nature in all its manifestations; this includes ontogenesis, growth, maintenance, reproduction, and so on. As long as we consider nature’s tech-

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nique with reference to function—of what we take something to be for—the logic of teleology we employ to make sense of it will not be able to distinguish human ways of making from natural ways of making. Considered in relation to their design, the human body and the watch are machines whose moving parts must be understood as having been arranged purposefully, which is to say not by virtue of the sole application of fundamental forces of matter, in regard to which they remain contingent. But once we shift our perspective from function to generation, once we regard the leaf or the heart no longer as a contraption meant to solve a design problem but as something that has become a contraption for solving such a design problem, then the difference between the two conceptions of end comes into view. To see this difference, it is insufficient to say that some products of nature are “organized” (for artifacts are organized too). It is also insufficient to say that this organization is “reciprocal” (for this may be said of the parts of a watch as well). Only when Kant reorients the idea of reciprocity from a punctual mode of understanding, where all the parts of a whole are already in place, to a durative account, in which the process through which they reciprocally bring forth one another unfolds in time, does the difference between organisms and artifacts become apparent. This reorientation is indexed by the very grammar of his words: the participles he opts for—hervorbringend, organisierend (bringing forth, organizing)— call to our attention the processual dimension of generation more powerfully than either finite verbs designating the action (“produce,” “create”) or nouns naming the end point of making (“organized products of nature,” with the past tense sedimented in the adjective “organized” further occluding the time of bringing forth). SELF- ORGAN IZING BEINGS

Kant describes organisms not just as “bringing forth,” but as “reciprocally bringing forth,” not merely as “organizing,” but as “self-organizing.” By highlighting the dimension of self-reference, he allows us to see two ways in which nature’s technique differs from the technique we know from human production (and which we are apt to ascribe to other beings, supernatural ones included). First, the natural mode of bringing forth is understood by him to work “without the causality of the concepts of a rational being outside of it” (§65, 373), without, in other words, the intervention of a God. The notion that an artifact owes its existence to a force outside it while an

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organism does not, has ancient roots. Though Aristotle more often than not explains organisms by forging an analogy to artifacts (but, tellingly, hardly ever the other way around), when he does distinguish them, it is precisely along the lines of “outer” versus “inner” causation. This move to immanence reveals the second important consequence of conceiving of the process of bringing forth as being an organism’s self-bringing-forth, for it does not entail a simple transfer of the human mode of production to nature, or merely folding into a body what was understood as acting on it from outside. The very notion of production undergoes a change, and the key to the change lies in the notion of time, which already caught our notice in Kant’s usage of the present participle. Consider the temporality of the human process of intentional making: as long as the watchmaker is building a watch, there is no watch, merely a watch under construction; we have a watch only once the watchmaker is done with his work. But by thinking of organic production as a process of self-making in which an organism’s parts “combine into a whole by being reciprocally the cause and effect of their form” (§65, 373), the distinction between “bringing forth” and “what is brought forth,” between production and product, ceases to hold. Bringing forth comes to include the entire process of generation, metabolism, growth, regeneration, and reproduction that characterizes an organism throughout its existence. And as we saw in the example of the tree, Kant understands “self ” not merely as referring to the individual organism; it extends to include the whole species. In this sense, individual organisms and their parts are not understood as self-organizing, each on its own, but rather as taking part in a self-organizing process pervading all of organic nature. The watch, by contrast, is neither self-organizing nor self-organizing. To summarize: organisms share with artifacts the part-whole logic according to which their “parts (as far as their existence and their form are concerned) are possible only through their relation to the whole” (§65, 373); this is simply what it means for a being to be organized, that is, to be structured in relation to a purpose. But organisms crucially differ from artifacts by virtue of the fact that the structuring purpose is natural and not originating in “a rational being outside of it.” Hence the logic of part-whole causality in organisms differs from the one that obtains in humanly produced artifacts: while in human technical production the concept of the whole precedes the parts—first there is the concept of the watch, and only then the wheels and springs fall into place—in the technique of nature “it is required . . .

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that its parts be combined into a whole by being reciprocally the cause and effect of their form” (ibid.). We do not explain the heart by assuming a plan of the body that antecedes that of the heart; rather, thinking of it as an organ entails that its coming into being is both the cause of the whole body acquiring the structure it has as well as an effect of it. Kant is to my knowledge the first to have coined the terminology of selforganization. What is more important, his conception of the idea has an intricacy that both lends it vast range and yet circumscribes it with precision. I have touched on two aspects, namely, the immanence implied by selfreference (or reciprocity) and the pervasiveness of self-organization in an organism’s entire existence. We can fuse these by giving a formal description of the process. When an organism’s part is understood “as if it exists only through all the others, thus as if existing for the sake of the others and on account of the whole,” the idea of an end—purposiveness—governs not merely the manner of composition of the whole, but folds back to pervade its internal articulation. Seen teleologically, parts and whole are dynamically— in Kant’s word, reciprocally—linked in a feedback loop where each is understood to exist through the other. The idea of a self-organizing system as developed in the third Critique is thus not holistic, in the sense in which the whole determines the composition and arrangement of its parts and can for that reason lay claim to ontological priority. Rather, the whole comes into view only when we zoom out from the parts to focus on the location of the purpose for whose sake we take the parts to have been assembled, like focusing on the figure against a ground. At the same time, we know that focusing on this figure is contingent; we could have zoomed in or out and have found equally valid locations of purposes (stems, leaves, trunks, species, and so on). To some extent, our interests and habits will incline us toward some purposes and away from other. I admit that I have offered here a cleaner picture of Kant’s conception than we find in his writings, that I have airbrushed away passages that seem to undermine the concept of a self-organizing system when they assert the very priority of the whole that I believe the concept denies. Yet in some of his furthest-reaching formulations, Kant clears a path for the idea of self-organization on which we can continue, and if we do, we may recognize its close kinship to the notion of autopoiesis as it has been articulated for biology by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in the 1970s and transferred to other disciplines later (most consequentially to sociology by Niklas

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Luhmann). The most explicit instance I know occurs in the Opus postumum, following one of many passages in this collection of notes in which Kant gives voice to two conceptions of organism, one consonant with the concept of self-organization we have developed here, the other dissonant with it by virtue of insisting on the priority of the concept of a whole before its parts. Yet here, having advanced the second definition of an organism as a body “in which the inner form of the whole precedes the concept of the composition of all of its parts . . . with regard to all of its motive powers” (my emphasis), Kant does not let the duality of definitions stand: “But because an immaterial principle is still mixed in this definition (namely a willing [ein Wollen] of the effective cause), hence the concept would not be purely physical, it can therefore best be worded this way: an organic body is one, each part of which is the absolute unity of the principle of the existence and movement of all the remaining [parts] of its whole” (21: 210; punctuation added). It is difficult to have a firm grasp of what Kant is driving at here. The idea seems to be that rather than being posited as prior to its parts, the whole—more precisely, the principle that gives the whole its dynamic wholeness—is understood to imbue each of the parts. In this way, parts and whole are once again understood dynamically and differentially (rather than as ontologically stable), in keeping with the concept of a selforganizing system. The sentence immediately following the passage I just quoted appears to bear out this reading: “An organic (articulated) body is that body in which each part necessarily refers itself with its motive power to the whole, to each part in its composition” (21: 211; punctuation added). I take the true ambition of such a formulation to lie in the fact that it attempts to provide a description of the organized body without recourse to a formative drive (or force or power), without recourse even to the idea of an end. Here the directedness of parts and whole is not mediated through purpose, but through a mutual and reciprocal reference of motive forces. It shows us that the concept of self-organization need not be tied to that of teleology but can point beyond it. It is the formal rigor of Kant’s concept of self-organization that lends it its impressive mobility in the organic world. The language of organs and organisms may lead us to think that purposiveness limits the logic of selforganization to individual organisms in relation to their parts (leaves, hearts, ears, and so on). That is not so. Take the example of the tree where the logic of self-organization governs the behavior of entirely different systems—the

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species, the individual, and its parts— since the tightly coupled relationship of parts and whole obtains at every level of analysis. Even while the identity of parts and whole changes, the logic with which we describe and understand their interaction remains the same. The idea of a self-organizing system is thus robust enough to scale up and down, and there is no reason to stop at Kant’s three levels of description. We may detect self-organizing behavior between two of these levels, between, say, the level of the individual and the species in the social organization of individuals, such as in colonies built by social insects. We may see it above the level of species, for example, in the symbiotic behavior of multiple species, which itself can scale up to include all species, indeed all of organic nature on what Kant at one point rhapsodically calls “our self-organized Earth-globe, which had been chaotically dissolved and now gives birth anew” (21: 214). Or we may employ it to explain phenomena below the level of the organism’s organs (for example, the cell or the gene, whose operation—even when it is not anthropomorphized with adjectives like selfish— entails the use of teleological terms, in the sense that it is understood to be a gene for something). If Kant’s concept of self-organization must be distinguished from that of a natural holism (which would rely on an untroubled analogical transfer of human art to nature), it is also useful to point to its difference from another logic that is sometimes labeled self-organizing, namely, that of the “invisible hand.” As developed by Adam Smith and other thinkers, the idea entails that behavior that has one value on a local level (for example, individual gain) can yield behavior of a different value when aggregated in large numbers (for example, social good). The key point in such models is that the aggregate is not conceived as internally articulated; its parts are not understood to be “possible only through their relation to the whole.” This is precisely why we call it an aggregate rather than a system. Unlike the conception of the Kantian organism where parts and whole have no priority over one another but exist in a loop of mutual causation, and unlike too the conception of the human technical teleology where the whole has logical priority over the parts (the work of art being an important limit case), in this conception parts and whole are epistemologically disarticulated; we do not require the one to make sense of the other. In Smith’s conception, for example, the individual’s behavior for private gain is conceived as self-sufficient in the sense that to understand it we require no recourse to another level of description (neither the social nor, say, the molecular). Thus the behavior we observe on

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the social level is fundamentally discontinuous with that of the individual, which is why some prefer the term emergence to self-organization to describe such phenomena as the invisible hand. It is at bottom a statistical feature of an aggregate at large enough numbers. Kant’s notion of self-organization, by contrast, has no truck with statistics. It is an explanatory model in which every feature of a system depends on its relation to every other feature by virtue of its dependence on the whole. *

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The concept of the organism as self-organizing, which fleshes out what Kant has in mind with the idea of a technique of nature, certainly has richness and precision, but is it in fact an “explanatory model” as I just claimed? Or have we by relying on it, advertently or not, smuggled into our experience of organisms some occult property that amazingly enough turns out to exceed the accounting physicochemical laws can provide? Has he in effect put forward yet another candidate in the long list of “forces” to which vitalism in its many guises has resorted to mark the distinction of the living—forces such as Aristotelian entelechy, the vis essentialis supposed by the physician and anatomist Caspar Friedrich Wolff in 1759, the Bildungstrieb (or formative drive) suggested by Kant’s contemporary, the anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Henri Bergson’s élan vital, all of which have been dismissed by modern biology as little more than metaphysical hocus-pocus? The way Kant addresses this issue involves a surprising turn, for he does not propose what might seem obvious, namely, to conduct further research into organisms to identify the vital force. Instead, Kant turns away from them and toward the structure of the human mind. He discovers the logic of natural ends in what he terms the “peculiarity” of our minds (§77, 405).

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to the core problem of the “Critique of Teleological Judgment” and re-create in ourselves the experience of cognitive dissonance that Kant’s line of thinking evokes, namely, the idea, put in the roughest of terms, that while nature is fully determined by mechanical laws everywhere, some of its instances— organisms—require for their understanding the use of a different kind of causality, the causality of purposes. How to make sense of this apparent contradiction, of what Kant terms an antinomy? When we look at Kant’s own way of phrasing the antinomy in section 70, we note that he provides us with two versions. One is blunt:

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Thesis: All generation of material things is possible in accordance with merely mechanical laws. Antithesis: Some generation of such things is not possible in accordance with merely mechanical laws. (§70, 387)

The other version of the antinomy is subtly different, yet it is a difference that makes all the difference: Thesis: All generation of material things and their forms must be judged as possible in accordance with merely mechanical laws.

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Antithesis: Some products of material nature cannot be judged as possible according to merely mechanical laws (judging them requires an entirely different law of causality, namely that of final causes). (Ibid.)

We can see where this is headed. The first version of the antinomy makes two claims about how material things are structured—how they are “possible”—which, by virtue of being objective statements about the world, “would contradict one another, and hence one of the two propositions would necessarily be false” (ibid.). The second version of the antinomy (which in Kant’s account comes first) opens a path leading out of the impasse of contradiction, for the two opposing theses advance assertions not about the world but about the ways we form judgments about the world. In its first, objective version, the antinomy denotes “a conflict in the legislation of reason,” while the second, subjective version presents us with an antinomy of judgment. In this version, both sides of the antinomy are meant to offer no more than a “guideline” enabling our judgment to construct out of the “great diversity and dissimilarity” of the particular regularities in nature “an interconnected experiential cognition in accordance with a thorough-going lawfulness” (§70, 386). Seen this way, the two opposing propositions “do not in fact contain any contradiction” (§70, 387), because if I say I must judge the possibility of all events in material nature and hence all forms, as their products, in accordance with merely mechanical laws, I do not thereby say that they are possible only in accordance with such laws (to the exclusion of any other kind of causality); rather, that only indicates that I should always reflect on them in accordance with the principle of the mere mechanism of nature, and hence research the latter so far as I can, because if it is not made the basis for research then there can be no proper cognition of nature. Now this is not an obstacle to the second maxim for searching after a principle and reflecting upon it which is quite different from explanation in accordance with the mechanism of nature, namely the principle of final causes, on the proper occasions, namely in the case of some forms of nature (and, at their instance, even the whole of nature). For reflection in accordance with the first maxim is not thereby suspended, rather one is required to pursue it as far as one can; it is also not thereby said that those would not be possible in accordance with the mechanism of nature. It is only asserted that human reason, in the pursuit of this reflection and in this manner, can never discover the least basis for what is special in a natural end. (§70, 387–388)

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Here, then, we have the nub of the problem. It is a limitation of the human mind, its “idiosyncrasy” or “peculiarity” (Eigentümlichkeit), as Kant later puts it (§77, 405), that both brings forth the antinomy and enables its solution. By now we are no stranger to the topography of the mental landscape to which this peculiarity gives rise. Wide regions of our experience of the given material world, while contingent with regard to the fundamental laws of nature, have for us regularity and coherence. We cannot explain why they have the structure they have by referring merely to the fundamental laws, yet we feel compelled to find order in contingency. This is simply how our minds work. When described this way, we can come away with the impression that the “peculiarity” of the human mind is a special-purpose peculiarity, summoned by Kant to explain—without really explaining—the fact that our cognitive relationship to organisms requires the idea of purpose. “Why do we resort to teleology when facing ‘organized beings’?” “Well, we are peculiar that way.” There is a whiff of this in the passages addressing the antinomy, since Kant provides us with no reason for why the notion of purpose is “ineradicably attached to the human race” (§75, 401) when its members attempt to make sense of organisms. (But what kind of reason would we expect? What might satisfy us?) Yet this peculiarity or special constitution of the mind is not something Kant simply pulls out of a hat to account for natural purposes, an ad hoc plug for a local explanatory hole. It is rather a core feature of his conception of the mind and reaches into the deepest layers of his philosophy. This conception is demanding in the extreme, and while this is not the place to unfold it (not least because it would require greater expertise than I have), even a sketch will give us a sense of the multidimensionality of this peculiarity and the ways Kant’s thinking about natural ends is embedded in larger philosophical commitments. THE ACTUAL AND THE POS SI BLE

Despite the complexity to which it gives rise, the nature of the “peculiarity of human understanding” can be stated briefly, in fact in exactly one sentence: “two entirely heterogeneous elements [are] required for the exercise of [our cognitive] faculties, understanding for concepts and sensible intuition for objects corresponding to them” (§76, 401). Here, then, is the peculiarity: a sharply drawn line between a capacity for conceptual thought called

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understanding (Verstand ) and a capacity for apprehending objects given through sensation called intuition (Anschauung). (The term intuition can lead us astray if we think of it as a kind of unmediated knowledge or instinctive feeling, the way we now commonly do. In Kant’s usage, something like the opposite is in play, since roughly speaking intuitions present us with data gathered through the senses. We may find it helpful to think of intuition in our context as intimately linked with sensation, though the two are not identical.) This division between understanding and intuition may appear innocuous, yet it motivates the vast philosophical machinery Kant painstakingly assembles in the Critique of Pure Reason to account for the way a set of concepts he calls categories organizes perceptual material into cognition— motivates, that is, his key claim that experience is not simply given by the world but fashioned by the mind. Th is, then, is a peculiarity of some consequence. Of the many ideas entailed by the essential heterogeneity of conceptual and sensible capacities, one is especially relevant to our discussion. It is the gap between the possible and the actual, a gap opened by this very division in our cognitive capacities. The concepts of our understanding allow us to think all sorts of things, but to yield real cognition they must mesh with intuitions afforded by our senses. Because our cognition consists of “two entirely heterogeneous elements,” Kant concludes that “to think of an object and to cognize an object are . . . not the same thing” (B 146). Distinguishing between actual and possible things is thus not a capability we may or may not wish to deploy; thanks to the bipartite structure of our cognitive capacities, it “is absolutely necessary for the human understanding” (§76, 401). One effect of this peculiarity of our mind is that it expands our world immensely, since it adds to all the actual things the immeasurably larger realm of the possible, populated by creations that far outstrip what is given to us in sensation. The fact that we distinguish between the actual and the possible enlarges our world, but it also shows us its edges. To see how, apply the distinction to itself. Once we can distinguish actual from possible, we can also distinguish actual minds from possible minds. What is more, we can think of possible minds for whom the distinction between actual and possible fails to hold, for whom every thing possible is therefore also actual. One such possible mind is “a divine understanding, which would not represent given

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objects, but through whose representation the objects would themselves at the same time be given, or produced” (B 145). (So our actual minds think of a possible mind that can do no more than think the actual. But does this actuality in turn include the sort of mind that can think the possible?) Kant is not claiming that such a mind must actually exist, merely that we are able to think it possible (as we just did). But even the mere possibility of a mind for whom the division of understanding and intuition—hence the distinction of actual and possible— does not hold, bears on our conception of our own mind, for it demonstrates that “the distinction of possible from actual things is one that is merely subjectively valid for human understanding” (§76, 402). It is not a feature of the world nor of every possible mind, but, as far as we know, merely of our mind, the sort of mind whose understanding is not intuitive and whose intuition not conceptual. This gives sharper contour to the sense in which Kant means the term peculiarity: it is not (or not just) an oddity or an irregularity, but rather a feature particular to the human mind, its hallmark. In a few deft strokes, section 76 of the third Critique sketches the principal consequences of this cleft between the actual and the possible for the three main capacities of the human mind that interest Kant, namely, cognition, moral reasoning, and reflective judgment. We have already seen some of what it means for cognition. Because in a divine mind, unlike for us, concepts and intuitions are nourished by the same source, every thing possible is also actual; every thing that mind can think, it does think, and every thing it thinks thereby exists. By the same token, such a mind would have no room for “the possibility of some [objects] that did not exist”; “their contingency, if they did exist, thus also the necessity that is to be distinguished from it, would not enter into the representation of such a being at all” (§76, 403). Put bluntly, God has no conception of contingency, nor, therefore, of necessity. The implication for our own mode of thinking is profound. Because the difference between the actual and possible “is absolutely necessary for the human understanding,” it opens our view, by necessity, to contingency, which in turn gains contour through its distinction from necessity. The concept of necessity only has a grip on us because we are able to recognize the contingency of some objects. A similar logic holds in moral reasoning: for a being “in an intelligible world, corresponding completely with the moral law . . . there would be no

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distinction between what should be done and what is done” (§76, 403–404). In such a world, there would be neither freedom nor a moral commandment, for every thing that ought to be would in fact be. Yet “for ourselves and for every reasonable being standing in connection with the sensible world” (§76, 404), there exists a gap between what is possible in moral reasoning and what is actual in the world. Because of this gap, which renders the world contingent in relation to the way reason prescribes it should be, we are able to work to change the course of events in the world according to our ideas. That is simply what it means to act freely and purposefully. Similarly, finally, in reflective judgment: “we would find no distinction between a natural mechanism and a technique of nature . . . if our understanding were not of the sort that must go from the universal to the particu lar” (§76, 404). We said that, for us, there are certain particulars— organisms, for example—that are contingent in relation to the universal laws of nature that we recognize. Having access to the universal does not give us access to the particular. Yet if all particulars were given to us with the universals, the way they are to a differently constituted (though still possible) mind, there would be no need for reflective judgment making use of the idea of purpose, in fact no need for any sort of judgment at all. But since, for us the particular, as such, contains something contingent with regard to the universal, but reason nevertheless still requires unity . . . the concept of the purposiveness of nature in its products is a concept that is necessary for the human power of judgment in regard to nature . . . thus a subjective principle of reason for the power of judgment which, as regulative (not constitutive), is just as necessarily valid for our human power of judgment as if it were an objective principle. (§76, 404)

We come across particulars that for us remain “contingent with regard to the universal”; the particular way they exist is not derivable from the universal, at least not by us. Yet we find in us the urge—this too a peculiarity of our mind—that “this particular in the manifold of nature,” while contingent, “should agree with the universal” (§77, 406–407; my emphasis). We feel— something in us feels— obliged to make sense of the contingent. The way we make the contingent lawful is through the idea of purpose (for “the lawfulness of the contingent is called purposiveness,” §76, 404), an idea our reason makes available to judgment.

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CONTINGENCY AND LAWFULNESS

We can now see more clearly how several strands in the discussion around organisms come together as a result of the high-altitude metaphysical consideration about the actual and the possible. First, contingency. The distinction between the actual and the possible opens the door to contingency, which not only enters the human world but comes to pervade it in every dimension of its existence. Because we are able to think possibilities not afforded by the given world, we recognize that things could have been otherwise. For Kant, that simply means that every attempt that we make to account fully for the way the world is must fail, nor can we be sure that it has been ordered for our benefit by another mind (as “the best of all possible worlds,” for example). Yet— second point—this is not a pure loss. In Kant’s account, the recognition of contingency is not merely a disturbance, a moment of bewilderment or breakdown. Rather, the recognition gives shape to our cognitive, moral, and aesthetic relationship with the world. Only because we know there is contingency in our world, are there also forms of lawfulness such as free action, beauty, and the self-organizing structures we call organisms. Contingency, then, is not merely a bug but also a feature. Finally, the third strand in the braid: since for something to be contingent simply means that whatever form of lawfulness it may obey is beyond our ken, the lawfulness we recognize in the contingent is underwritten by a principle devised by our reason for its own benefit. To use Kant’s terms, the principle regulates our experience, but is not constitutive of it. This way of putting matters shows us how, for all the importance he accords contingency, Kant’s conception of it remains quite thin. The contingent lacks an efficacy of its own. It is accorded neither weight nor momentum in this conceptual space and therefore fails to present an occasion for sustained reflection. In the end, its task is to call forth its flip side, necessity. Here, in the company of necessity, Kant is clearly the happier thinker, for he moves on territory he knows and trusts. Here he can be responsive to the call of a reason described—and described appreciatively—in tyrannical terms, a reason that “requires unity” and that issues an “unremitting demand . . . to assume some sort of thing (the ur-ground) . . . in which possibility and actuality can no longer be distinguished at all” (§76, 402). As a result, the main thrust of his philosophical effort consists in describing and justifying various modes of imposing lawfulness on the contingent. True, this imposed

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lawfulness is duly flagged as a “subjective principle of reason” (§76, 404) exerting merely regulative force. But, as we saw, the passage goes on to tell us what meaning the term subjective acquires in Kant’s hands: for us, the subjective principle is “just as necessarily valid . . . as if it were an objective principle” (ibid.). For us, when it comes to the lawfulness of the contingent, subjective amounts to objective. Here we approach what might, anachronistically, be called an existential dimension in Kant’s writings. Even in our summary account, we have seen that the world Kant describes in his critical philosophy is no longer assumed to be governed by an order fundamentally in harmony with the structure of our reason, an order usually understood to be guaranteed by God. Yet Kant is careful not to jump to the opposite conclusion that this world is therefore anathema to or discontinuous with our ways of knowing and behaving, for such a conclusion too surpasses what we can know. This agnosticism follows from the premise of transcendental philosophy we have touched on (“there are two stems of human cognition . . . namely sensibility and understanding, through the first of which objects are given to us, but through the second of which they are thought” [Critique of Pure Reason, A 15 / B 29]) and constitutes one of its core insights. But we are human creatures and we find it hard making a life sitting on the fence, at least when it comes to an issue so basic. We generally fail at remaining indifferent to the question of whether the world can make a home for us; this is something that interests us intensely. One way I suggest reading the third Critique is to see in it Kant’s attempt at acknowledging this interest, not as a psychological need but as something more fundamental, something for which Kant lacks a developed philosophical language. From time to time, we fi nd him give rich and anguished expression to the need for making sense of a world that presents itself to us without transcendent anchorage. Thus in notes toward the essay “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy” of 1788, he writes: I have, as an experiment, occasionally navigated into the gulf of assuming the blind mechanism of nature as the ground here [that is, among organisms], and I believed to have discovered a passage to the concept of artless nature, except I kept getting stranded with reason, and I therefore preferred to venture onto the shoreless ocean of ideas, where I at least etc. (23: 75)

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When my reason runs aground trying to make its way to a concept of organic nature as “artless,” that is, without technique and purely mechanical, then I would sooner be at sea on the “shoreless ocean of ideas, where”—and here, fittingly, Kant’s sentence trails off—“where I at least . . .” For what more is there to say? At such moments of floating unanchored on a sea of ideas, without a shore in sight to orient us, it becomes clear that our reflective judgment does not perform its work in some neutral way, but that its efforts betoken our partiality toward the world having a kind of shape that makes it cognitively and affectively habitable to us. Thus when we judge certain objects in nature to be purposeful, we feel encouraged in so judging, Kant tells us, by “a certain inkling of our reason, or a hint as it were given to us by nature, that we could by means of that concept of final causes step beyond nature and even connect it to the highest point in the series of causes” (§72, 390). And when we find something beautiful in nature, we will—while our judgment itself remains disinterested— still take an interest in that beauty, because “it . . . interests reason . . . that nature should at least show some trace or give a hint that it contains in itself some sort of ground for assuming a lawful correspondence of its products with our pleasure that is independent of all interest” (§42, 300). The pleasure we take in the beauty of nature indicates nature’s “comprehensibility for the human power of judgment,” and its beautiful products appear to us “as if they had actually been designed for our power of judgment” (§61, 359). What Kant calls judgment, whether it reflects on a flower as the kind of purposefully articulated thing we term an organism or as a purposefully shaped thing that resonates with our mind in a special way we pronounce beautiful, is the name for a sensitivity or perhaps an urge not to heed the strictures laid down by reason, a physio-philosophical antenna for hints “as it were given to us by nature” that permit us to “connect it to the highest point in the series of causes” or for “assuming a lawful correspondence” between nature and ourselves. It is the capacity of our mind attuned to our specifically human needs. TELEOLOGICAL JUDGMENT IS REFLECTIVE JUDGMENT

Now that we have a clearer sense that the solution of the antinomy lies in a peculiarity of our mind, some of the passages we encountered in the previous chapter ask to be read with a different emphasis. “In such a product of

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nature each part is conceived as if it exists only through all the others, thus as if existing for the sake of the others and on account of the whole” (§65, 373); an organism’s part “must be thought of as an organ that produces the other parts” (§65, 374); “it would be absurd for humans . . . to hope that there may yet arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass” (§75, 400); and so on. All these qualifications, shifting the ground away from the world and toward us and the work of our judgment, follow from Kant’s insight that the purposes we believe ourselves to have discovered in nature are not in fact in nature. Thus he declares, “Since we do not actually observe ends in nature as intentional, but merely add this concept as a guideline for the power of judgment in reflection on the products of nature, they are not given to us through the object” (§75, 399). Kant’s phrase about “the power of judgment in reflection” identifies the main agent operating on this epistemological terrain, for it alerts us to the fact that reflective, rather than determining judgment does the heavy lifting here. The antinomy of organic nature in the guise we encountered first (“All generation of material things is possible in accordance . . . Some generation of such things is not possible”) would entail the work of determining judgment, because it makes opposing claims that refer to observable—that is, objective—features of the world (which is why it leads to a flat contradiction). Faced with features of this kind, our judgment finds itself with the comparatively simple task of determining particulars as cases of a given universal. When I see a ball drop or a planet orbit, my determining judgment subsumes—or, as Kant prefers to say, “merely subsumes” (§69, 385; my emphasis)—the particular under a known universal by identifying the ball and the planet as instances of fully explicable regularities. The “merely” says it all: Kant usually speaks about determining judgment as though it too behaved according to the very mechanistic principles it is called on to apply to particulars. But such determination is, Kant thinks, not possible when we encounter an organism, at least not for us. Our mechanistic accounts fail us, and we resort to the idea of purpose, an idea our reason devises for the sake of our practical orientation in the world: to build houses or watches or social institutions. Yet reason cannot also provide us with a priori rules for applying the concept of purpose in the natural world, since the objects to which we apply it—“organized beings”— only become available to us in experience. This is where reflective judgment enters the picture. Because it ascends “from

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the particular in nature to the universal” (Introduction IV, 180), and because this universal is not known to us (were it known, then judgment would merely have the task of determining matching particulars), reflective judgment “subsumes under a law that is not yet given and which is in fact only a principle for reflection on objects for which we are objectively entirely lacking a law” (§69, 385). Two things are worth noting here. One is the notion of law that is in play, a law that offers itself when “we are objectively entirely lacking a law.” What kind of law might that be? It cannot be purely subjective, for we would not speak of a law were it to hold for me alone. How then to think of it? We had a taste of its strangeness—neither objective nor entirely subjective—when we discussed Kant’s idea of the necessity of aesthetic judgment (in Chapter 2), where we learned that the necessity involved in aesthetics has a wholly different quality from the necessity of, say, a mathematical theorem or a law of physics or a Kantian moral law in that it appeals not, as the latter do, to a norm I could name, but to one that arises and vanishes with the aesthetic judgment itself, something Kant calls “exemplary” necessity (§18, 237). That the logic at work here is similar, though not identical, becomes evident in the way Kant himself puts the lawfulness— and hence the necessity—that holds in teleology in relation to the one in aesthetics. The law that reflective judgment offers for our teleological use, he tells us, yields a necessity “clearly distinguished from physical-mechanical necessity,” which “can no more be determined through merely physical (empirical) laws than the necessity of the aesthetic judgment can be determined through psychological ones” (First Introduction, 20: 240–241). We already know that the universal validity to which aesthetic judgment lays claim is indifferent to the favor it may or may not garner in any given case; it is not a matter of “collecting votes and asking around among other people about the sort of sensation they have” (§31, 281), nor is it a question of appealing to norms such as those established by the ancients or by prominent critics (§33). Teleological judgment establishes a similar lawfulness: it is not “determined through merely physical (empirical)” observation, nor does it seek validation through universal laws prescribed by reason. Rather, it “requires its own a priori principles in the capacity for judgment insofar as it is reflecting” (First Introduction, 20: 241). In other words, whatever lawfulness teleology manages to assert, is no more—but also no less—than the lawfulness of judgment. Thus any concept arising from the work of teleological judgment—the species dog, this dog, the dog’s behavior,

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and so on—is just that, a judgment call, rather something whose contours are determined physically or empirically. The second point worth noting about the way reflective judgment “subsumes under a law that is not yet given” is that, however perplexing that law may be, it is still a law under which judgment subsumes particulars. Kant’s idea that the concept of a natural purpose is no more than “a heuristic principle for researching the par ticu lar laws of nature” (§78, 411) (about which more in Chapter 9) combined with an idea we may have that judgments have a kind of fuzziness about them may lead us to think of this law as something akin to a rule of thumb. But I think Kant has something stronger in mind. “A teleological judgment compares the concept of a product of nature as it is with one of what it ought to be,” Kant declares. “Here the judging of its possibility is grounded in a concept (of an end) that precedes it a priori. There is no difficulty in representing the possibility of products of art in such a way. But to think of a product of nature that it ought to be and then to judge whether it really is so already presupposed a principle that could not be drawn from experience (which teaches only what things are)” (First Introduction, 20: 240). As we have seen, this is a strange sort of “ought,” one that relies neither on some sort of invariant ideal type of the organism, preserved in a space wholly independent of our minds, nor on a process of abstraction from what we observe. We do not simply average out our observations (just as we do not “ask around” when we try to respond to the force of an aesthetic claim) to arrive at a norm, nor do we have access to a fully formed norm of, say, a crocodile, available to us separately from any real crocodiles, with which we would compare the latter. What we do have is the ability of bringing to bear the idea of purpose, itself independent from any given experience, on particular experiences, and this bringing-to-bear, accomplished by our (reflective) judgment, carries the weight of an “ought” for us. To elucidate its normative force, consider the difference between the ways we make sense of two “products of nature,” a stone and an eye. Both of these, Kant admits, can be said to be used for something—the eye for seeing and the stone “to crush something upon it, or to build something upon it,” yet “I cannot on that account say that it ought to have served for building”: Only of the eye do I judge that it ought to have been suitable for seeing, and although its figure, the character of all of its parts and their composition,

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judged in accordance with merely mechanical laws of nature, is entirely contingent for my power of judgment, I nevertheless think in its form and in its construction a necessity for being formed in a certain way, namely in accordance with a concept that precedes the formative causes of this organ, without which the possibility of this product of nature is not comprehensible for me in accordance with any mechanical natural law (which is not the case of the stone). (First Introduction, 20: 240)

It is this legislative—or normative— dimension of the work of our judgment that leads us to say that a dog has four legs even if we are in the company of a lot of three-legged dogs, for what we mean by “has” in this context is that a dog ought to have four legs. One might object that most dogs do have four legs; surely that’s not irrelevant to the way the norm is articulated. But if I understand Kant correctly, he would say that in fact it is. We say that dogs have (which is to say, ought to have) four legs not because a significant majority of dogs trot about on four legs (and besides, who other than our judgment is to say when a majority has become “significant”?), but because the legs belong to a complex of interrelated physiological and behavioral features making up the notion of “dog” in which having four of them makes sense. In the organic world, statistical distributions and averages are an unreliable guide to the work of norm building. If we followed them, we would end up saying that sperm are supposed to swim about aimlessly in the vicinity of an egg before expiring. Instead we say that they are supposed to inseminate the egg, even though virtually all fail in this quest. We can be cleverer still and tell a story in which the vast majority of sperm are in fact supposed to fail at what, from “their point of view,” they are supposed to accomplish, but such a move works only if we recognize (or posit) another purpose, namely, the idea that the scattershot approach to insemination seems to be in place to achieve what the whole organism is supposed to do, namely, procreate. Kant’s insight is that the “ought” constitutes a necessary feature of the way we apprehend organic beings, no matter the zoom level of our analysis.

THE ANTINOMY REVISITED

What of the antinomy that started us on this path? Has it in fact been solved? In one important sense it has. We now recognize that judging material nature “in accordance with merely mechanical laws” and judging it according

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to “an entirely different law of causality, namely that of final causes” are mutually compatible procedures (§70, 387). What is more, we see that this solution offers itself only once the antinomy centers on the work of reflective judgment; were we to rephrase it in ways applicable to determining judgment, we would end up making claims about how nature is objectively structured and get ourselves entangled in the kinds of confusions we encounter in debates around “intelligent design.” Yet somehow the antinomy does not feel “solved,” let alone “dissolved” (to take literally Kant’s word, Auflösung). What finally does the solution consist in? The “peculiarity” of the human mind. And how do we manage this peculiarity? We take recourse to the idea of natural ends. But this idea, Kant admits, is itself “peculiar” (eigentümlich, §64, 369) like the human mind. It is in fact more than peculiar; it is “inexplicab[le]” (§74, 395). It is inexplicable because “as a concept of a natural product it includes natural necessity and yet at the same time a contingency of the form of the object . . . in one and the same thing as an end” (§74, 396), which is simply another way of putting the quandary expressed in our antinomy. So we have a perplexity (the antinomy) that is solved by means of an inexplicability necessitated by a peculiarity. Have we explained anything, or have we been going in circles? It is true that the antinomy is not solved, if by “solved” we mean that the problem to which it gives expression vanishes like salt in water. Nor is it “solved” in the manner of a mathematical or a logical solution, where a problem begins as an enclosure in which our mental efforts exhaust themselves, but changes into an open, airy space once we have figured it out. No key magically unlocks the antinomy, and no path leads out of it. In this sense, we do go in circles. Yet what would be the alternative for a mode of thinking that seeks its points of orientation not in transcendent absolutes but in the structure of the mind? The very logic of Kant’s idea of the “heautonomy” of judgment (Introduction V, 185; First Introduction, 20: 225), its capacity of giving a law to itself, entails a circular movement of self-positing and selfjustification. So dismissing such a line of thinking for being circular (or tautological) has something ungenerous and intellectually unsatisfying about it, a bit like Nietzsche’s way of dispatching the Critique of Pure Reason, which, he triumphantly declares, finally answers the question that stands at its core—how are synthetic judgments a priori possible?—with the three circular words vermöge eines Vermögens, “by means of a means” (Beyond Good and Evil, I, 11). The question, I think, is not whether we can spot circularity

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in the line of thought we have been following—how could we not?—but rather whether the circular motion reveals anything new or significant to us. Have we learned anything worth knowing along the way? I think we have. The antinomy, while not having vanished, does not remain unchanged; something does happen to our relationship to it as we follow Kant’s line of thinking. We learn that, like the antinomies in the other Critiques, the antinomy of teleological judgment expresses a real and ultimately indissoluble difficulty in our ways of understanding the world. The fact that there is an antinomy between describing a tree mechanistically and describing it teleologically is not the result of knots into which our thinking has entangled itself and from which it could be freed; the knots are, as Aristotle puts it, in the things themselves (Metaphysics, 995a), except in our case the knotted thing is not the tree but the way we try to make sense of it. Which is why we gain nothing by choosing sides (“really it’s all mechanism,” “finally there must be intentional design”) or by trying to find a middle ground (“up to here everything is mechanistic, but from this level of complexity on teleology is at work”). Kant teaches that a different movement of thought is required if we wish to avoid being whiplashed into confusion by the antinomy. If we open on to a new dimension, which is what critical philosophy is meant to do, then we can get a view of the antinomy in which the two sides are given their due without standing in contradiction. At that point we realize that the solution lies not in a dissolution of the antinomy, but in inhabiting it, in the recognition that both sides are fully true for us. In other words, rather than allowing it to plague us, which might urge us into finding “a way out,” we learn to live with it. It is no longer a problem awaiting a solution, but a description of the way we humans go about making sense of the world.

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in the way we make sense of organisms does not suffice for Kant; he wishes to flesh out this process of sense making. What exactly is entailed by inhabiting both sides of the antinomy of judgment we considered in Chapter 8? Let us quickly recall it: DISCOVERING THE KNOT

Thesis: All generation of material things and their forms must be judged as possible in accordance with merely mechanical laws. Antithesis: Some products of material nature cannot be judged as possible according to merely mechanical laws (judging them requires an entirely different law of causality, namely that of final causes). (§70, 387)

We know that despite the seeming evenhandedness of thesis and antithesis, despite the parallelism of their grammatical structure, an asymmetry characterizes the two sides. (We also know why this must logically be the case: if both sides are to be fully true, they cannot hold true in the same way, for then they would merely get in each other’s way.) Thus mechanism and teleology differ, among other aspects, in their logic of causality, in the kind of necessity they entail, in the mental capacities they harness (the former is grounded in the concepts of the understanding, the latter in an idea of reason). Because the announced aim of the “Critique of Teleological Judg-

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ment” lies in identifying and justifying the principles we use in “our research into nature” (§61, 360), Kant distills the multiple differences between the two modes of judging nature into a difference about the kinds knowledge each yields and in the process lays on the table some key philosophical commitments. The picture he means to project is that while the only road to a “proper cognition of nature” (§70, 387) is made of mechanistic explanations, for human researchers the use of teleology is inevitable. Therefore, it is our “obligation to give a mechanical explanation of all products and events in nature, even the most purposive, as far as it is in our capacity to do so” (§78, 415). I sketch the outlines of this picture and then point to some areas of ambiguity and doubt. We have already come across the passage in which Kant explains why the two maxims of reflective judgment expressed by the two sides of the antinomy do not in fact stand in contradiction. “If I say that I must judge the possibility of all events in nature . . . in accordance with merely mechanical laws,” he reasons, this is not because “they are possible only in accordance with such laws.” Rather it “only indicates that I should always reflect on them in accordance with the principle of the mere mechanism of nature, and hence research the latter so far as I can, because if it is not made the basis for research, then there can be no proper cognition of nature” (§70, 387). There are many things to sort through here, but let us focus on the last phrase: only when “the mere mechanism of nature” founds our research, Kant claims, can there be “proper cognition of nature”—in nontechnical terms, “real knowledge of nature” (eigentliche Naturerkenntnis). This idea is echoed multiple times, usually in negative form. Thus teleology seems to Kant not “to belong in natural science, which requires determining and not merely reflecting principles in order to provide objective grounds for natural effects” (§79, 417). For that reason, “nothing”—nothing—“is gained for the theory of nature or the mechanical explanation of its phenomena by its efficient causes when they are considered in light of the relation of ends to one another” (§79, 417). The best that teleology may accomplish in his eyes is the mere “description of nature” (§79, 417), in distinction to the “insight into nature” that explanations based on mechanism offer (§80, 418). “It is of infinite importance to reason,” Kant declares, “that it not allow the mechanism of nature in its productions to drop out of sight and be bypassed in its explanations; for without this, no insight into the nature of things can be attained” (§78, 410; my emphasis; similarly §80,

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418). These sound like the pronouncements of a hard-nosed biological reductionist. Kant’s commitment to the idea of mechanism as the only mode of doing proper science is absolute. It is also not supported by arguments; as far as I can see, he provides no reasons for why the mechanistic logic alone founds the “proper cognition of nature.” But we can say one thing: this commitment does not rest on the belief that the behavior of all natural phenomena actually derives from and therefore can ultimately be reduced to the fundamental laws governing matter. It does not rest on an ontological claim about the structure of the world, for faced with such a claim, Kant’s philosophy can do no more than give an agnostic shrug. Rather, the commitment to mechanism is a commitment to reductionism as a methodological norm of scientific investigation, namely, “that I should always reflect on [all events in material nature] in accordance with the principle of the mere mechanism of nature” (§70, 387). The reductionist program grounds itself, then, not in facts about the world (these, Kant thinks, exceed our possible knowledge), but in an “obligation to give a mechanical explanation of all products and events in nature, even the most purposive, as far as it is in our capacity to do so” (§78, 415; my emphasis). Kant imposes this obligation knowing full well that we will fail to fulfill it, for he has insisted that we are unequipped to provide a fully mechanistic account of the generation of even a blade of grass. We cannot help but rely on the concept of a natural purpose, which in his estimation nonetheless always remains “that stranger in natural science” (§72, 390). Yet things are not as clear-cut as they may seem, and this last locution gives rich expression to the fact that despite all the adamancy about the incompatibility of teleology with natural science, the notion of purpose is still a stranger “in natural science,” not to natural science. The logic here is paradoxical: something excluded is somehow included, not by being assimilated to it (and thus becoming truly of it), but by remaining a stranger in its midst. Kant never makes explicit the paradox (in general, he harbors a robust suspicion of paradoxes), yet my sense is that he acknowledges it by fully exploring its conceptual space from two sides, without however settling on one or the other, or without “solving” it in some other way. Instead, he offers two quite different ways of conceptualizing the place of teleology in relation to “proper science” (The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, 4: 468), each leading to distinct

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ways of understanding what it means for a purpose to be “in” natural science. He insists—first—that the idea of natural purpose is, for our peculiar minds, a mere “expedient”—literally an “emergency assistance” or “first aid” (Nothilfe, §72, 390)—and serves as no more than “a heuristic principle for researching the particular laws of nature” (§78, 411). The language of heuristics and expediency suggests to me that the idea of a natural end is one we can imagine jettisoning, the way we can imagine remaining on top of a wall without the assistance of the ladder that got us there. It suggests a world in which, though everything is “really” mechanistic, some things require a special contrivance to be explained by us. This is a world in which organisms, including human organisms, are understood to be mechanical contraptions that remain finally inaccessible to us but for an epistemological trick we play on ourselves. But there is also a second way Kant has of characterizing the use of teleology, namely, his frequent and, if anything, more insistent assertions of the inevitability—the utter, nonnegotiable necessity—of thinking teleologically if we wish to understand anything at all about organisms. Without the concept of purpose, he maintains, “we can never adequately come to know the organized beings and their internal possibility in accordance with merely mechanical principles of nature, let alone explain them” (§75, 400; my emphasis). In other words, simply holding before us the tree as a tree, without taking even a single step toward “researching” it, requires the use of the idea of purposes. It is simply “indispensable for us” (§75, 398). We came across a passage in Chapter 8 in which Kant further ratcheted up the language of necessity, claiming that the concept of the purposiveness of organisms “is just as necessarily valid for our human power of judgment as if it were an objective principle” (§76, 404). Here our teleological judgments seem less like instances of a mere “heuristic principle” and more like an enduring part of our world. Given how deep teleology goes, it may not surprise us that Kant, ordinarily the very model of scrupulousness, at times slips and ascribes teleological force to nature itself, blurring the official Kantian line on vitalism that we followed in Chapter 8. Take the passage in which he contrasts the different ways a tree and a watch exist, where he explicitly invokes Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb: “An organized being is thus not a mere machine, for that has only a motive power, while the organized being possesses in itself a formative power . . . thus it has a self-propagating formative

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power, which cannot be explained through the capacity for movement alone (that is, mechanism)” (§65, 374). “The organized being possesses in itself a formative power . . . it has a self-propagating formative power”—precisely when the opportunity arises to mark a diff erence from vitalism, Kant gives voice to what appears to be a full-throated version of it. It is true that there is another Kant in this book, a Kant who with fuller throat and steadier voice rejects any sort of ontological vitalism (not because we know it does not exist, but because we cannot know whether it does) and makes the case for what we might call epistemological vitalism. Yet it is also true that the philosophical mood pervading the earlier sections of the “Critique of Teleological Judgment” prods the reader toward the very belief the later sections repudiate, and one cannot help but come away with the impression that purposefulness in fact is an ontological feature of organic nature. This mood is so pervasive that we are hardly perturbed when Kant speaks of the concept of natural ends leading reason “into an entirely different order of things than that of a mechanism of nature” (§66, 377; my emphasis). This is not where a merely heuristic account would lead us. TWO VIEWS OF THE ORGANIC WORLD

We dwell on these passages not to catch Kant in the act of committing an inconsistency but because there is in his writing a genuine ambivalence about the ways we think and speak about organisms, an ambivalence more profound than any of the philosophical positions designed to dispel it. Two distinct conceptions of biology emerge in the text to align themselves with the two conceptions of the stranger in natural science I have outlined, opening our view to different kinds of natural worlds. (As I noted before, saying biology is anachronistic, since the term had not been coined at the time of the writing of the third Critique.) The claim about expediency and heuristics testifies to the mechanistic and, finally, reductionist commitment I have mentioned. Sustaining this commitment, we can at times get a glimpse of a picture of nature in which Kant’s injunction—“to give a mechanical explanation of all products and events in nature . . . as far as it is in our capacity to do so” (§78, 415)— can take us quite far, much further than one might at first think. Thus when he points out why, quite apart from the testimony of experience, reason itself recommends the theory of epigenesis, he highlights

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the fact that “it considers nature, at least as far as reproduction is concerned, as itself producing rather than merely developing those things that can initially be represented as possible only in accordance with the causality of ends” (§81, 424). The details in the debate between epigenesists and preformationists, which Kant rehearses here, are complex and exceed the bounds of our discussion, but it seems that Kant is gesturing toward a conception in which some things “ initially” must be understood according to the incomprehensible logic of natural ends, yet subsequently their working becomes fully natural and hence explicable according to natural laws. His comments in praise of the epigenesist Blumenbach, which follow immediately, appear to bear out this reading. Kant commends Blumenbach for “rightly declaring it contrary to reason that raw matter should originally have formed itself in accordance with mechanical laws . . . at the same time, however, he leaves natural mechanism an indeterminable but at the same time also unmistakable role under this inscrutable principle of an original organization” (§81, 424; my emphasis). One way of understanding this is to say that “this inscrutable principle”—what Kant earlier called the “inexplicability of a natural end” (§74, 395)— has now been restricted to an “original organization” whose further development is guided by “natural mechanism,” albeit in an “indeterminable” manner. So in this conception we would have one original point of incomprehensibility, followed by full explicability. But what does Kant mean when he speaks of things “initially” or “originally” standing under the sway of teleological principles? Does he have in mind the moment of conception of each organism? The origin of species? The very first organism “to have arisen from the nature of the lifeless” (§81, 424)? It is not entirely clear; good evidence can be adduced to make a case for all of these. I am drawn to the last option, the furthest reaching, and I am swayed by an extraordinary piece of philosophical speculation that Kant offers in section 80 and to which we return a bit later in this chapter. Having urged the researcher once more “to pursue the mechanism of nature, for the sake of an explanation of the products of nature, as far as can plausibly be done,” Kant writes: If, therefore, the researcher of nature is not to work entirely in vain, he must, in judging things whose concept as natural ends is indubitably established (organized beings), always base them on some original organization, which

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uses that mechanism itself in order to produce other organized forms or to develop its own into new configurations (which, however, always result from that end and in conformity with it). (§80, 418; my emphasis)

Again we encounter the mysterious “original organization” that provides the parameters within which “mechanism itself ” produces copies; here it is even understood as having the capacity of giving rise to “new configurations.” In the paragraph that follows, Kant offers us an audacious myth of origin in which this original organization is identified as “a common urmother” that gives birth to the totality of organisms, a mother “from which and from its forces, governed by mechanical laws . . . the entire technique of nature . . . seems to derive” (§80, 418–419). The entire world of organisms, then, not only “seems to derive” from this primal mother but seems to derive from her “governed by mechanical laws.” If this reading has any merit, then the region of incomprehensibility in need of the special principle of teleology has shrunken to consist of the lone mythic mother; every thing that follows can be made comprehensible by means of mechanical explanation. This is, as it were, the deistic version of teleology, managing to get by “with the least possible expenditure of the supernatural” (§81, 424). In this picture, teleology names not so much the ladder we kick away but rather the step stool, for all we need is that first step to get us started on the path of mechanical explanation. But then there is another picture, one in which a mechanical account of nature “could by no means make the latter [that is, the teleological principle] dispensable” (§77, 409). This picture emerges once we consider the two axes along which Kant consistently, if often murkily, distinguishes organisms against other phenomena in the world: on the one hand, being natural, they are understood to be unlike purposeful arrangements that have their cause outside of themselves (watches and houses), yet on the other, being purposeful, they are understood to be unlike plain “unorganized” matter (rocks, planets, rivers). This strange conjunction of the natural and the purposeful is the crux of the whole matter, the very thing that leads Kant to speak of the “inexplicability” of natural ends (§74). If we take its full measure, then it yields a wholly different account of research— and of the world being researched—than the “deistic” one I just sketched. Take the way organisms differ from artifacts: how does Kant distinguish organisms from “a mere machine,” and why can they not “be explained through the capacity for

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movement alone (that is, mechanism)” (§65, 374)? Not because parts and whole are purposefully and reciprocally arranged; that is true of artifacts just as much as it is of organisms. The decisive difference between the tree and the watch lies in the mode of self-reproduction and maintenance. Thus when Kant insists that “absolutely no human reason . . . can ever hope to understand the generation of even a little blade of grass from merely mechanical causes” (§77, 409), this failure of our reason is not merely an aftershock of the perplexity that the first organization, metaphysically lurking in every organism, evokes in us (the way all physics might be said to be haunted by the perplexity of the origin of matter); rather, it is alive and present anew for every blade of grass, every tree, every creature we encounter. This reading turns on understanding “generation” (Erzeugung) not merely as coming into existence, which through the chain of antecedent causes would eventually lead us back to the primordial mother, but as the complete process of “bringing forth” that the notion of the self-organizing being attempts to capture: conception, birth, growth, metabolism, regeneration. Thus, while our previous account suggested that every thing about organisms except the mysterious original organization in principle yields to a “proper”—that is, mechanistic and ultimately reductionist— explanation, now we arrive at an account in which everything that makes an organism into an organism is understood to be irreducible to “movement alone (that is mechanism),” demanding for its explanation something inexplicable. In this reading, the “stranger” can no longer be confined to the single mythic moment of the birth of life itself, but inhabits every part of the ways we make sense of organisms. Here biology remains pervasively nonreductionist. This picture emerges also if we follow the other axis of distinction, the one between organized and unorganized matter, which, we recall, Kant conceptualizes in terms of the difference between “system” and “aggregate.” Aggregates emerge through the unaided exertion of the fundamental laws of matter, while a system must be understood as having “an external shape as well as inner structure that are so constituted that their possibility must be grounded in an idea of them in our power of judgment” (First Introduction, 20: 217). Note that this goes beyond the argument from improbability that the hexagon example we encountered in Chapter 7 ultimately relied on and advances an epistemological absolute: if we proceeded nonteleologically, we would not even know what we are looking at when we look at an organism, for the very “possibility” of a system lies in an idea provided

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by judgment. This means that the very distinction between aggregate and system is ratified neither by the world (for purposes are not simply of the world) nor through ratiocination (for we cannot derive the existence of organisms by reasoning about them), but is an achievement of reflective judgment. If the very apprehension of organized beings stands in need of the idea of purpose, then the call to pursue mechanistic explanations “as far as it is in our capacity to do so” would not take the researcher into organisms very far at all; epistemological reasons alone would keep biology from getting off the ground without teleology. The researcher would simply not know what to study, since the bits of matter that become the focus of his or her attention have the kind of contingency-cum-regularity that comes into view only through the use of reflective judgment. So again we come to the realization that a moment of inscrutability—of nonunderstanding— pervades every form of biological understanding. What implications might this line of thinking have for biology? If the first picture I sketched has any force, then biology would find itself in a position not essentially unlike that of physics: it could concede the mystery of the “ur-mother” and then get on with the business of establishing mechanical regularities in the world of organisms. That appears to describe how most biologists today think about their work. But the second picture may be closer to how biology is actually practiced. In the second picture, the very object of biological inquiry relies on the work of reflective judgment. After all, how do we decide what is a system (rather than a mere aggregate) standing in need of a biological (rather than physicochemical) explanation? The answer is not provided by the world; it requires judgment. Since there is no way of adjudicating the question objectively, biology seems to have answered it institutionally by allowing various biologies to evolve in parallel, which distinguish themselves by what they take to be the essential systemic unit of study: protein, gene, DNA, cell, tissue, organ, individual organism, social structure (or “superorganism”), a system consisting of organism and parts of its environment, species, all the way to the totality of the biosphere taken as one system (and there are no doubt more ways of localizing the essential unit of “life”). None of these is simply and self-evidently out there, but needs to be constituted, an act that is contingent (since it could have been, and indeed often is, otherwise) yet not for that reason arbitrary. There are better and worse ways of constituting a system, which is to say that there are better and worse ways of employing one’s judgment.

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As far as I can see, Kant does not opt for one or the other conception of the organic, nor does he work to harmonize them into a third; in fact, he fails to acknowledge or name them as distinct conceptions. It is true that both involve the interplay of teleological and mechanical concepts, yet they do so in such different ways as to yield different worlds. In the one, “that stranger in natural science” has been sequestered in a mythic point of origin, while the other admits—indeed, requires—the presence of the stranger in every corner of its realm. This unresolved duality ramifies throughout the “Critique of Teleological Judgment” and puts under pressure other conceptual configurations. Earlier, we noticed it in the vacillating status of vitalism, which continues to exist in the folds of the text even while Kant exposes it as an epistemological error. Of yet greater import is another ambiguity, that of the organism itself. All along, we have pretended to know what an organism is, and in this we simply followed Kant. But do we? Does he? THE AMBIGUITY OF FORM (FOR EXAMPLE, CRYSTALS)

What is an “organized being”? Searching the “Critique of Teleological Judgment” for a definition will turn up nothing noncircular, which at the very least is worth noting, since the concept goes to the heart of Kant’s project. If teleology is “indispensable for us” when we “conduct research among [nature’s] organized products” (§75, 398), should we then not know an “organized product” when we have encountered one? If teleological judgment is, as Kant does not tire of insisting, a “guideline” we use to make sense of organisms (§71, 389; §75, 399; and many more), is there a guideline for when to make use of that guideline? There is not, and there cannot be, for in that case we could simply keep asking for a guideline for the application of the previous guideline, without end. In fact, as Kant makes clear in The Critique of Pure Reason, judgment is our way of putting a stop to the looming threat of such an infinite regress (A 133–135 / B 172–174). Thus we need judgment not only to guide our research into organisms, but to guide us into the research itself, for it is judgment that tells us when to use our judgment. We see again that in Kant’s conception judgment is a self-founding, self-legislating capacity of the mind; it rests on nothing but itself, which is merely another way of saying that it is irreducible to other capacities (such as reason, imagination, perception). And the text itself reveals, often against its own manifest meaning, how deeply beset with uncertainties this process is.

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Let us approach the issue via a passage from the First Introduction we have encountered more than once. It concerns the distinction we have been considering, between aggregates of matter in nature, as mere mechanical assemblages, and systems, which Kant calls “technical” and which are the very bits of matter for the sake of whose understanding the “Critique of Teleological Judgment” has been written. Kant writes there: “with regard to its products as systems, e.g., crystal formations, various shapes of flowers, or the inner structure of plants and animals, [nature] proceeds technically, i.e., at the same time as art” (20: 217). We are not surprised to find “various shapes of flowers, or the inner structure of plants and animals” on the list; after all, Kant had made the distinction of organic and inorganic nature along the lines of contingency versus necessity with respect to the fundamental laws of matter already back in his 1763 treatise The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (2: 107), so we are primed to think that the technique of nature will extend to organisms— and to them alone. Yet here we learn that “crystal formations” too are among systems demanding a teleological account for their proper understanding. How to make sense of this? Perhaps Kant thought of crystals as somehow organic. But this too cannot be quite right. Crystals appear elsewhere in the third Critique; in one prominent instance they are offered as exemplars not of purposiveness but of its opposite, mechanism. Toward the end of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” Kant sets out to dismiss the suggestion that “the beautiful formations in the realm of organized nature speak strongly in behalf of the realism of the aesthetic purposiveness of nature” (§58, 347), to dismiss, in other words, the idea that “subjective purposiveness is a real (intentional) end of nature” (§58, 347) rather than one we project onto nature, and he does so by pointing out that many purely mechanical formations in nature seem as if made for our aesthetic plea sure “without giving us the slightest ground to suspect that [nature] requires for this anything more than its mechanism” (§58, 348). The example that Kant adduces—not the only example but the most detailed and lovingly described—to show how something requiring nothing more than mechanism nonetheless seems to have been made for our aesthetic enjoyment involves the formation of crystals (§58, 348–349). We have a text, then, in which crystals serve as examples of nature’s mechanism one moment and of nature’s technique the next.

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Crystals do not come up again as examples of “systems” in the argument for teleology, which ends up focusing on “the inner structure of plants and animals,” as we would expect it to. But it is noteworthy that Kant is by no means alone in having registered their ambiguous place. Many of his contemporaries were enthralled by these formations, as their structure had revealed more and more of itself through new technologies of observation, such as the microscope. But even for writers closer to our own moment who are conversant with the language of modern biology, crystals frequently come to occupy a liminal place, the very place where the question of the line dividing organic from inorganic beings is at stake. Thus Erwin Schrödinger, in his landmark essay What Is Life? from 1944, defines “the most essential part of a living cell—the chromosome fibre” as “an aperiodic crystal.” In Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity (1970), the meditation on the structure of “living beings” (as he calls them), crystals are the first things that, because of the regularity of their structure, manage to fool an imaginary robot, which is tasked with distinguishing natural from artificial objects, into taking something natural for an artifact. And François Jacob, like Monod a biologist, finds in his Logic of Life (also 1970) the foundation of “the variety and beauty . . . of living beings” in “a phenomenon which has long been known: the formation of crystals.” While in each case the stakes differ, all three hold in common the fact that crystals suggest themselves when it comes to the deep and baffling question of the relationship that the organic maintains with the inorganic. Here crystals are clearly good to think with. We can take Kant too to be thinking with crystals when, late in the third Critique, he raises the possibility of discerning “something similar to a system” in the totality of organized beings “by means of a comparative anatomy” (§80, 418). Remarking on similarities in skeletal structures, he notes how “the agreement of so many genera of animals in a certain common scheme” encourages us in the surmise that they have been made “according to a common archetype” (§80, 418). Then, in a passage of stunning audacity that first drew our attention in the previous section, he suggests that the “analogy of forms” we find among animal genera strengthens the suspicion of a real kinship among them in their generation from a common ur-mother, through the gradual approach of one animal genus to the other, from that in which the principle of ends seems best

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confirmed, namely human beings, down to polyps, and from this even further to mosses and lichens, and finally to the lowest level of nature noticeable to us, that of raw matter: from which and from its forces, governed by mechanical laws (like those which are at work in its production of crystals), the entire technique of nature, which is so incomprehensible to us in organized beings that we believe ourselves compelled to conceive of another principle for them, seems to derive. (§80, 418–419)

The lines of thought opened by this speculative flight are numerous and farreaching. Most explicitly it adumbrates the notion of an adaptive evolution by suggesting not just the possibility of “the gradual approach of one animal genus to the other,” but also the idea raised in the paragraph that follows that “creatures of a less purposive form . . . bear others that are formed more suitably for their place of origin and their relationships to one another” (§80, 419). Then the passage invokes the notion of a common source of all organisms—or rather two starkly different notions in the space of no more than a few lines: there is the “archetype” and the “ur-mother”—Urbild and Urmutter— one activating a model of creation by a god imagined as craftsman (traditionally inflected as male), the other a model of generation by a goddess giving birth to all, what Kant in the same context calls “the maternal womb of the earth” (§80, 419). These models, one technical the other natural, capture the two sides of the paradoxical idea of a technique of nature that Kant dreams up to make comprehensible what “is so incomprehensible.” And— churning up yet another whirl of ideas—while he begins by seeking, or suggesting research into, the common paradigm among animals, he ends the sentence by encompassing not merely mosses and lichens in the “real kinship” that may exist between organisms but “raw matter” itself; he imagines, in other words, a kind of thinking that would dispense with the very distinction between organic and inorganic beings that has structured his entire line of reasoning. This is indeed, as he himself calls it, “a daring adventure of reason” (§80, 419n). Set aside most of the opportunities for speculation this adventure throws open in order to attend to a small detail, namely, the role our crystals play here. We notice at once that, as in section 58, here too they have been adduced as an example of a mode of production “governed by mechanical laws”; unlike in the First Introduction, they fall on the side of “aggregates” rather than of “systems.” But can we leave it at this neat taxonomy? Is it finally to

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exemplify the mechanism of nature that Kant mentions them here? I think not. He has already invoked “raw matter,” the very medium of mechanical laws, and crystals will certainly not top matter itself in exemplifying the efficacy of those laws. What is more, the point of the proposition is not to characterize mechanical laws nor to distinguish them from “the entire technique of nature,” but precisely to suggest that the latter may “derive” from the former. The entire speculative flight is motivated by Kant’s question of whether teleological thinking even has a place in natural science, “which requires determining and not merely reflecting principles in order to provide objective grounds for natural effects” (§79, 417). It is thus in the context of “pursu[ing] the mechanism of nature . . . as far as can plausibly be done” (§80, 418) that “the analogy of forms” is imagined here to extend from the highest level of nature, human beings, to the “lowest level”: that of raw matter: from which and from its forces, governed by mechanical laws (like those which are at work in its production of crystals), the entire technique of nature, which is so incomprehensible to us in organized beings that we believe ourselves compelled to conceive of another principle for them, seems to derive.

What Kant is getting at here hinges on the awkward phrase “from which and from its forces” (aus welcher und ihren Kräften). To what does it refer? Even though she lies half a dozen lines back, a lot speaks for “the common ur-mother,” who could be understood to supply both the locus (“from which”) and the structuring principle (“from its forces”) for the development of the “entire technique of nature.” This is a reading that coheres with what we have already said. But there is another option too, namely, “raw matter,” syntactically a far more plausible candidate than the ur-mother, since it immediately precedes our phrase. This raises philosophical eyebrows, since Kant insists more than once that it is “contrary to reason . . . that life should have arisen from the nature of the lifeless” (§81, 424; also §80, 419n). But recall that Kant is not speaking ex cathedra here, but has given himself over to “a daring adventure of reason,” in which he imagines “a real kinship” of beings comprising the entire spectrum from humans to raw matter, “allow[ing] the mind at least a weak ray of hope that something may be accomplished here with the principle of the mechanism of nature” (§80, 418). If we permit ourselves to be pulled into this adventure, we may notice that the syntax of the

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proposition describes a trajectory from “raw nature” through “mechanical laws” and the “entire technique of nature” to those “organized beings” that are so incomprehensible to us, replicating precisely the order that the weak ray of hope of a complete reduction to mechanism entails. My aim is not to determine what Kant “really” means. We are at sea here, and the usual Kantian order of concepts has been thrown into turmoil. My point rather is that once we embark on the adventure, we cannot tell with certainty whether it is the ur-mother or raw matter that makes a better candidate for the source that gives rise to organisms. In other words, we cannot decide with certainty whether Kant has rendered the line between mechanism and natural teleology permeable or not. And it is exactly in the midst of this uncertainty—literally in the middle, wedged parenthetically between “mechanical laws” and “the entire technique of nature”—that we encounter the crystals once again: “from which and from its forces, governed by mechanical laws (like those which are at work in its production of crystals), the entire technique of nature . . . seems to derive.” Is this not a clear-cut case of crystals exemplifying the mechanical production of nature? It is, yet the trouble is that the very status of those mechanical laws that the crystals are meant to exemplify seems anything but clear-cut. For those laws, using perhaps the ambiguous place of crystals as a mental bridge, can be understood to bring forth the technique of nature, an order that we took to be irreconcilable with mechanism. By virtue of their ambiguous status between “system” and “aggregate,” the crystals encourage Kant—at the very least encourage us—to attempt a leap where previously an incalculably wide gulf had yawned. What have the crystals allowed us to think? One thing their perplexing appearance suggests is that the slipperiness in the distinction between the organic and the inorganic calls our attention not merely to those two entities (how they are constituted, what characterizes them, and so on), but also to the distinction itself, to how we understand ourselves to be drawing it. Crystals are not ambiguous per se. As the two instances in the third Critique we discussed earlier show, in each they actually occupy an unequivocal status: in the first, the structure of crystals, judged by Kant to be evidently mechanistic, demonstrates how wrong it would be for us to take their beauty as a sign of the real purposiveness of nature, while in the other they testify to nature “proceed[ing] technically, i.e., at the same time as art.” The ambiguity arises when we attempt to think together the two mutually exclusive orders

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of understanding. But is there a place from which we would be able to think such a synthetic thought, a place on the side of neither the inorganic nor the organic from which to draw the distinction between the two? I do not see where such a place would be found. It seems that one must draw the distinction either from the side of the inorganic (as is apt for a physicist like Schrödinger), in which case “the essential part of a living cell” will look like a kind of lifeless crystal, or from the side of the organic (as is apt for a biologist like Jacob), in which case crystals gain the appearance of purposeful systems. In short, we must see them from the standpoint of nonlife or of life. The crystals perplex us if we insist on granting them a single location in the order of things independent from our own standpoint. The perplexity disappears, or at least weakens, when we realize that the distinction between the two realms is operational and not ontological. That crystals tend to find themselves in this ambiguous place is not arbitrary; their structure lends itself to radically different, indeed incompatible, logics of explanation. While not arbitrary, the place of crystals is contingent, since we know that once we set out on one or the other mode of inquiry—the mechanical or the teleological—there is no barrier internal to that mode that would urge us to cease its application. In a fully mechanistic world, every thing will look like an effect of lifeless moving parts; this includes the soul that Descartes had withdrawn from the realm of res extensa, which brain science avowedly attempts to reduce to electrochemical patterns. In a fully teleological world, by contrast, every thing will be seen as exhibiting life in some form, not only on this planet but in the whole cosmos. THIS INSCRUTABLE PROPERTY

We are gaining some intimacy with Kant’s basic point: in our world (but do we need to keep saying this? What other world could we mean?), organisms do not behave like bouncing billiard balls, nor do they act like watches; both the mechanistic principle and the logic of human technical production fail to account for the specific ways organisms behave. We knew the first half of this conclusion from our discussion of the hexagon in the sand in Chapter 7. Now we see that in closely examining a tree or an animal, we would be mistaken if we were led to say, “I see the trace of a human being (or a being that is rational like human beings though different from them).” What, then, can we say? Since the “Critique of Teleological Judgment” is about the very idea

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of making sense of organic nature—finally about the very possibility of biology—we must wonder according to what logic we are to understand the self-organizing process of organic generation. Kant’s answer, startlingly, is that we do not know. “One says far too little about nature and its capacity in organized products if one calls this an analogue of art,” Kant asserts. “Perhaps one comes closer to this inscrutable property [of self-organization] if one calls it an analogue of life” (§65, 374). But this too will not do, for one would either have to imbue matter itself with “a property (hylozoism) that contradicts its essence,” or one would have to endow matter with a soul, in which case either matter has to be assumed as already organized or organization becomes a property of the soul “and the product must be withdrawn from (corporeal) nature” (§65, 374–5). To Kant, the upshot of these deliberations is clear: Inner natural perfection, as is possessed by those things that are possible only as natural ends and hence as organized beings, is not thinkable or explicable in accordance with any analogy to any physical, i.e., natural capacity that is known to us; indeed, since we ourselves belong to nature in the widest sense, it is not thinkable and explicable even through analogy with human art. (§65, 375)

It is a powerful, far-reaching, and confounding claim: organic nature is not even thinkable to us if we attempt to understand or describe it in terms of “any physical . . . capacity that is known to us.” In our earlier discussion, it seemed as though it was only the Newtons of the future, committed to the program of mechanism and reductionism, that would fail to “come to know . . . let alone explain” organisms (§75, 400). But now it seems that nothing in the material world, not even the purposeful products of human design, prepares us for understanding the structure and development of organisms. We can get a measure of how deeply perplexed Kant is in the face of the organic world if we attend more closely to a claim that we passed over too quickly a moment ago, namely, the claim that the principle with which we may try to understand biological beings may be an “analogue of life.” What could possibly count as an analogue of life? After all, “life is what we think organism is already about,” John Zammito writes about this passage; “so what analogy could there be?” What Kant, using the tree, has described

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as a self-organizing process of organic generation, what he here calls “this inscrutable property,” is evidently not the same thing as life. If you construct an analogy to life, even one you ultimately reject, the assumption is that you know what to make of life, and it is not clear Kant does, or we do. Zammito adduces a number of passages, drawn from various parts of Kant’s work, that cohere into a picture of life as consisting, minimally, of the capacity for spontaneous action. “Life,” Kant writes in the Critique of Practical Reason, “is the power of a being to act in accordance with the laws of the faculty of desire.” The faculty of desire is understood as the capacity of a being “to be, through its representations, the cause of the actuality of the objects of these representations” (5: 9n). In other words, a representation— a Vorstellung, or mental determination—is the cause of the coming about—the “actuality”—of the object that the representation represents. (This is the way philosophers like to put the proposition: a desire for X spurs creatures to get their hands on X.) Based on this and other passages, Zammito concludes that, in Kant’s conception, life requires not only the capacity to act but to act based on a certain kind of mental representation, namely, desires. Life, then, in this understanding, involves enough psychology to accommodate representations and enough physiology to enable representations to direct the organism in its actions. Kant regards animals as being able to act on desires, but not plants, it seems, for they apparently lack a capacity for mental life. “Thus, plants epitomize Kant’s conceptual discrimination of life from organism,” Zammito argues. “Consequently, Kant’s notion of organism is broader than that of life, and the failure of these two terms to have the same extension expresses the insufficiency Kant acknowledged in his ‘analogy of life’ for natural purpose” (763). THE SUBLIME OF JUDGMENT

All this sounds plausible, yet I don’t believe it helps us understand organisms or life. Certainly the reason Kant gives for dropping his proposal for a way of “com[ing] closer to this inscrutable property” of organic self-organization by viewing it in analogy with life is not that the latter fails to include vegetation. He does seem to believe that plants ought not be regarded as partaking of “life” (though there are passages in his work that cast doubt on such a thesis), but that is not why life fails as an analogue of organic nature.

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Plainly put, the relation of set to subset is not the right relationship of two entities meant to be plausible candidates for an analogy. Life is not simply contained in organic self-organization, and the set of organisms is not simply larger than the set of living things. No, life is something to which we have a sort of access that allows us to get closer—“perhaps . . . closer”— to understanding the inscrutable property that subtends all organisms. This is not an argument Kant develops or even mentions explicitly here, but it is something the third Critique powerfully suggests, and the Opus postumum picks up in some of its gnomic passages. If the text of the third Critique, and its second part especially, has little to say about life, it may be because the text has run into an internal boundary beyond which its own conceptual resources begin to fail. The question of life marks a region that cannot be processed by the conceptual means that take us there. It is no longer something epistemology or even transcendental critique can handle without getting entangled in different modes of thought entirely. Kant pushes his inquiry as far as his concepts will take him and arrives at a limit, a limit he helps us specify. It is the limit of our power to make analogies. The text we have quoted is explicit on this point: the logic of self-organization “is not thinkable or explicable in accordance with any analogy to any physical, i.e., natural capacity that is known to us.” A confounding thought. It seems to propose that when faced with organisms, the very ability to build analogical bridges fails us. This is not just any failure, for as we have seen in previous chapters, the core achievement of reflective judgment consists in making analogies. If the general term under which we may subsume particulars is lacking, if all we have are particulars for which we seek general terms—precisely the situation in which we call upon our reflective judgment—then the sole conceptual tool available to us is the ability to discern patters of resemblance and dissimilarity between those particulars. It also means that figurative speech fails us (for how to attempt even the simplest figure without the ability of discerning that A stands in some analogical relation to B such as similarity or dissimilarity of sound, meaning, tone, and so on?). Our attempts at assimilating what is alien to what is known (through personification or anthropomorphism or other tropes) invariably founder when we apply them to organic beings. It has been the burden of the “Critique of Teleological Judgment” to demonstrate that without reflective judgment, equipped with the idea of purpose, “we can

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never adequately come to know the organized beings and their internal possibility” (§75, 400); so if judgment, indispensable as it is for the apprehension and exploration of organisms, fails us in the presence of these organisms, then it becomes acutely clear why they finally remain “inscrutable” to us. The proposition Kant articulates allows us to take another step, into territory that is more confounding still. We said that trying to understand organisms leads us to experience a breakdown in the work of judgment. But can we pronounce organic self-organization to be dissimilar from “any physical, i.e., natural capacity that is known to us” without using our ability of recognizing similarities? Put differently, does his proposition denying the possibility of analogy not at the same time affirm the fact that the capacity for making analogies—judgment—remains in place? I hold something before me and conclude that what makes it tick is unlike anything else I know; I fail to come up with even one analogue; ergo my capacity for making analogies has faltered. At the same time, this recognition itself cannot be but an insight I owe to my judgment, for it is not a feeling, nor have I derived it from a set of first principles. In order for the lack of possible analogies not to be a mere absence but rather something experienced as missing (as philosophers like to put it, an absence as absence), this failure must have a contour; it must appear against a background of possibility. That is to say, to see that no analogy offers itself to me when attempting to understand selforganizing beings, my capacity for making analogies must remain operative. Our encounter with organisms, then, opens us to something like an experience of the sublime of judgment, an experience in which the very failure of judgment is a supreme achievement of judgment itself. (“Something like” because it is not clear to me to what degree a feeling of pleasure or displeasure—or even of negative pleasure—may be involved, as it is in the case of an aesthetic experience.) LIFE, THE SOURCE OF ANALOGY

The sublime of judgment is only one of the moods that pervades this passage, a mood favored by the kind of thinking drawn to the absolute limits of concepts. But there is another mood, ushered in by the fact that Kant follows up his assertion about the utter impossibility of analogies for the logic

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of organisms by offering . . . an analogy: “Perhaps one comes closer to this inscrutable property if one calls it an analogue of life.” True, it is not an analogy that gets us all the way there, though it does take us “closer,” “perhaps . . . closer,” to the logic of organisms. It limps a bit, yet with its aid we move around the impasse generated by the absolute limit of analogizing and toward a space in which Kant’s philosophy opens to something beyond itself. It does so by bringing life itself into play. While at first “life” would seem to be just as familiar— and as mysterious—as “whatever-it-is-that-makesorganisms-into-organisms” and therefore no help at all in getting us “closer” to understanding the latter, Kant makes a move that creates unexpected space for thought. His declaration that “we ourselves belong to nature in the widest sense” (and that therefore the inscrutable property of organic organization “is not thinkable and explicable even through analogy with human art”) appears to do little more than spell out the obvious. But making explicit what has been hovering over a train of thought is not without consequences; it can change the tenor, even the direction of that thought. Here, for the first time, we recognize that the observer is embedded in the observed scene, the explanans in the explanandum, the philosopher in the world he sets out to understand. This is not a mere case of applying a distinction to itself, but involves a far deeper co-implication of the human being and the organismic world. Understanding the mind grappling with the natural world as itself part of that world can make the mind seem as perplexing as the world it means to understand. But it also opens another option, namely, to see in the world some of the familiarity that the mind has with itself. Seen this way, questions we raised earlier seem less mysterious. How are we to take Kant’s insistence that no physical capacity known to us gives us any sort of purchase on making sense of biological nature, that under the conditions available to us organisms are “not thinkable or explicable” to us? The passage could be read as saying that under other conditions the logic of biology would become fully thinkable and explicable, but those would not be human conditions; they would pertain to the “intuitive understanding,” proposed by Kant in section 77, for whom there is no distinction between the logic of mechanism and that of teleology. The reading to which I gravitate puts the emphasis elsewhere and understands Kant to propose that under conditions available to human beings the logic of organisms is never just thinkable and explicable.

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In order for us to understand organic nature well enough to be able to put it in relation to life, it must be more than merely thinkable and explicable to us. It must be palpable as well. It must be available to us not just cognitively, but also as feeling. Whether self-organization can ever become the subject of such an experience is uncertain, but life is something we know in precisely this way, that is, not as a merely cognitive (“thinkable and explicable”) entity available for definition, description, and explanation, but rather as something we know “from inside.” Putting things in such mutually exclusive terms falsifies the phenomenon: it would be better to say that because we know it from inside, we are also in a position to make life the subject of cognitive reflection. Some of Kant’s notes in what the twentieth-century editors of his works have called the Opus postumum, drafted a few years after the third Critique first went to press in 1790 (and at the time the second and third editions were revised and printed), offer tantalizing— and profoundly enigmatic— hints encouraging a reading that takes seriously the recognition that “we ourselves belong to nature.” For most of his career, Kant is devoted to the basically Cartesian idea that the human body is just another object in the world, subject to the same regularities that govern planets and billiard balls. “I know that will and understanding move my body, but I can never reduce by analysis this phenomenon, as a simple experience, to another, and can therefore indeed recognize it, but not understand it,” Kant writes in his Dreams of a Spirit-Seer of 1766. “That my will moves my arm is not more comprehensible to me than if someone said to me that it could stop the moon in its orbit” (2: 370). The idea that my own body remains essentially alien to me gives way, three decades later, to a view in which the comprehensibility of nature depends on the subject experiencing the movement of its own limbs. Thus in a fragmentary note attempting to ground the natural sciences anew, Kant seems to propose that “the counteracting motive forces of matter”—such as Newtonian action and reaction— are “anticipated” by the fact that “the subject perceives within itself its motive powers (to act)” and calls this perception of the relationship of its forces and the counterforces acting on it “a priori (not dependent on experience)” (22: 506). Another note reinforces the idea of this knowledge “from inside” for the research of organic nature: “We experience the organic forces in our own body and arrive by means of the analogy of the same with a part of this principle of theirs to a concept of

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its vegetation by leaving out the former, namely animality” (22: 373). Like many other passages in the Opus postumum, this too is baffling. By connecting it with the previous passage and a few others (22: 140; 22: 358), it becomes possible to make out the shape of a thought: the way my body appears to itself in its motions—its auto-affection—is not merely one appearance among others, but makes up one of the indispensable conditions of being able to comprehend the principle underlying physical forces and “organic forces.” Without understanding the movement of my own arm, not as observed from outside, the way I look at the motions of the moon, but as experienced from inside, no comprehension of forces operating elsewhere would be available to me. “The consciousness of our own organization as a motive force of matter,” Kant writes in another note that, again, mingles lucidity with obscurity, “makes possible for us the concept of organic matter and the tendency of physics as an organic system” (21: 190). Kant’s concern in these passages is not aesthetic (in the sense of the third Critique), and when, in the sections of the book devoted to aesthetic experience, he speaks of life, those passages do not seem to prepare us for an understanding of the natural world. Yet there is, I think, a parallel—an analogy—between the two that allows us to see why life can serve as an analogue that brings us “perhaps . . . closer” to the logic of organic organization. The core of the parallel rests in the philosophical significance of the lived body as both something felt here and now, with a particularity and idiosyncrasy that confines its force to this empirical moment, and as something experienced as a mere capacity of the human being, with a universality that radiates outward from the solitary subject. Because this lived body “belong[s] to nature in the widest sense,” it is the instrument that enables my multidimensional relationship with the world (cognitive, affective, ethical, technical, aesthetic, and so on) and, at the same time, itself remains part of that world, and no insignificant part of it. The lived body is not simply my “empirical” body that counts as a mere phenomenon among others, as the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason emphasized, though it is that too; the body as it feels itself move and enjoy aesthetic pleasure, also feels itself as the very condition of experiencing phenomena. Kant calls the sort of sense that the subject has in perceiving (or becoming aware of) its own forces “a priori,” yet the term seems only half-right here. I can know that in order to have experience—to sense, perceive, and act—I need to be endowed with certain bodily capacities, but this appears distinct from my awareness of the capaci-

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ties of my lived body, about which it would be odd to say that they are a priori. In fact, taken in the most powerful sense, my lived sense of my body is neither a priori nor a posteriori. It is the condition of all experience, but not the way the pure concepts of the understanding or the pure forms of intuition are; rather as lived, it grounds all I experience. In this sense, I know “life” not the way I know other things in the world, but rather by virtue of a logic that defies the clean separation of subject and object. It is this irreducible co-implication of the subject in the object world that gives us a special purchase on “understanding” life and, by analogy, the world of organisms with which we are entangled. FEELING LIFE AESTHETICALLY

This line of thinking may give us fresh purchase on the conception of life in aesthetic theory, a world more familiar to us than the strange world of the Opus postumum. It is a remarkable fact that the concept of life plays a more clearly defined role in the part of the Critique of Judgment devoted to aesthetics than it does in the part that addresses our cognitive relation to organisms. Aesthetic experience is put by Kant into a tight relation with the feeling of life; in fact, this feeling is constitutive of aesthetic experience, both in the beautiful and the sublime. In the very first section of the book, entitled “The Judgment of Taste is Aesthetic,” a judgment is defined as aesthetic when its “determining ground cannot be other than subjective” (§1, 203); subjective, in turn, simply means that the judgment refers not to an object, but to the subject itself, in particular to its feeling of pleasure and displeasure “by means of which nothing at all in the object is designated, but in which the subject feels itself as it is affected by the representation” (§1, 204; my emphasis). Kant calls this feeling in which the subject feels nothing but itself the subject’s “feeling of life” (ibid.), an idea that recurs in the book. When Kant declares, as he does here and elsewhere, that pleasure furthers life and pain hinders it, we must not understand those feelings as intermediary structures placed somehow between our mind and our life, as though life were something essentially separate that might be encouraged or discouraged by the feelings of pleasure and displeasure. In fact, the latter simply are ways of feeling life itself. We know this because Kant, as he introduces the concept of the “feeling of life” in the third Critique, glosses it “under the name of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure” (§1, 204). The two are names

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for one another. In one of his notebooks recording his Reflections on Metaphysics, he goes further and jots down the thought, essentially Romantic in spirit and letter, that “pleasure and displeasure alone constitute the absolute, for they are life itself” (18: 11, 4857). The feeling of pleasure and displeasure, hence the feeling of life, is not limited to aesthetic experience. As we have seen, every aesthetic experience awakens in us the feeling of life, but not every feeling of life betokens an aesthetic experience (in the narrow sense of an experience marked by taste and geared toward beauty; I am setting aside the sublime). In his writings on anthropology, Kant provides multiple examples of ways of promoting the feeling of life. Some of these find their way into the third Critique. Music and laughter, as key features of social gatherings, attract his attention because they “gratify” in a “lively fashion,” even though “in the end nothing is thought” (Remark, §54, 332). Kant concedes that the gratification they provide lies not in their beauty, but in “the promotion of the business of life in the body, [in] the affect which moves the viscera and the diaphragm, in a word [in] the feeling of health” (ibid.). Kant’s concept of aesthetic experience, taken broadly, allows us to understand differences in what it means to feel pleasure or displeasure, to feel life itself. To rehearse what we know from our discussion of beauty: There is, at one limit, a mode of feeling life that Kant calls agreeable and that is subjective, in the sense of just private. This is the visceral pleasure he has in mind, a kind of pleasure not susceptible to extending to any body beyond my own. But at the other limit, the experience of beauty is of an entirely different kind, for though it too is a feeling, and therefore subjective, it is a feeling that is not mine alone. As we have seen, what distinguishes beauty in Kant’s conception is precisely the fact that it arouses a pleasure that I would not confine to myself but extend to everyone else. It is, Kant says, a way of feeling universal humanity in ourselves. But it is also a way of feeling life. The aesthetic experience of beauty, then, is a way of feeling life, not my life alone, but life as it is shared by humanity. If this is right, then it has bearing on our previous discussion of the extension of the concept of life and its availability as a way of analogizing organic nature. In aesthetic experience life is not only felt—the way it is felt in the experiences of bodily pleasure Kant terms agreeable—but it is felt in a peculiar mix of affective and cognitive capacities that constitute this sort

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of pleasure and that index our readiness for what Kant calls “cognition as such” (§9, 218). This is a way of making objects “thinkable and explicable,” in the sense of opening them up to the possibility of being thought and explained. It is just this possibility of becoming thinkable that aesthetic experience offers us as we attempt to come to terms with our relationship to life.

Notes

PREFACE

1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Influence of Modern Philosophy,” in Scientific Studies, trans. Douglas Miller (New York: Suhrkamp, 1988), 29. 1. PLEA SURE

1. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Four Dissertations (London: A. Millar, 1757), reprinted in Four Dissertations and Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1992), 209. 2. Similarly in the third Critique: “if in the judgment of taste the imagination must be considered in its freedom, then it is in the first instance taken not as reproductive, as subjected to the laws of association, but as productive and self-active (as the author of voluntary forms of possible intuitions)” (“General Remark,” 240). 3. The range of meanings of Dichtung/Dichten and the verb dichten is vast in Kant. Poetry in the sense common in our day, namely, as the art of verbal invention, is not the most common among them. More often than not the words carry a negative connotation in his writings, since they tend to describe the dangers of an imagination run amok. That is clearly not the case in our quotation. Yet it is the case in a passage from the third Critique, where, describing the work of the productive imagination in aesthetic experience, he distinguishes it from Dichten: “although in the apprehension of a given object of the senses [the imagination] is of course bound to a determinate form of this object and to this extent has no free play (as in invention [wie im Dichten])”

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(“General Remark,” 240). It would seem as though there were a contradiction between the two passages, the Anthropology finding Dichtung in just the place where the third Critique denies its presence (or at least the presence of Dichten). Yet if we follow the passage, the appearance of a contradiction dissolves. For while the imagination is not free to do whatsoever it pleases (it is constrained by its apprehension of the object), Kant suggests that “it is still quite conceivable that the object can provide it with a form that contains precisely such a composition of the manifold as the imagination would design in harmony with the lawfulness of the understanding in general if it were left free by itself” (ibid., 240–241). The felicitousness of beauty, then, lies in providing just the forms of reflection to the mind that allow the imagination to work in freedom. As we shall see when we turn to the concept of genius and production in later chapters, the logic of a “ free lawfulness” (ibid., 240) lies also at the heart of the logic of “invention” in the making of art. 4. The point is made well by Eva Schaper in her instructive article “The Pleasures of Taste,” in Pleasure, Preference and Value, ed. Eva Schaper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 55. 5. The most prominent exposition of this view that I know occurs in Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 6. A notable exception is the philosopher Alexander Nehamas, especially his book Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in the World of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 7. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 264. 8. I have been speaking of aesthetic experience where Kant speaks of aesthetic judgment. But now I say that judgment may be “part of” this experience. Since what was meant to avoid confusion may achieve the opposite, it may be a good time to sort out some of the terms. In Kant’s terminology, experience is reserved for designating the baseline cognitive apprehension of the world, one of the main themes of his theoretical philosophy. It is the way external perceptions are given coherence by being related to concepts, which is why his concept of experience has universality built into it: “What experience teaches me under certain circumstances, it must teach me at every time and teach everyone else as well, and its validity is not limited to the subject or its state at that time. Therefore I express all such judgments as objectively valid” (Prolegomena, 4: 299). This is clearly not true of “aesthetic experience,” since what I find aesthetically pleasurable “under certain circumstances,” I cannot be sure to find so “at every time,” nor can I assume that “everyone else” will in fact find it so too; its coming about is serendipitous. The way I have been using the term here, aesthetic experience involves perceptions, feelings, behaviors, and mental capacities. One of these behav iors consists in pronouncing a judgment, in the narrow sense of a verdict, for example, in the form “this is beautiful.” In Kant’s text, this distinction between ex-

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perience and verdict is lodged in judgment itself, for the term refers to both the process of using one’s judgment (“What he did, showed poor judgment”) and the verdict that takes the logical form of a judgment (“This is beautiful”). We can make out a third dimension to the term judgment in Kant, for it also names the very capacity for making judgments (as in “he lacks judgment”). At least three layers of analysis, then, are in play in judgment: the capacity itself; employing this capacity in the process of judging in a particular case; and coming to a judgment. In German the difference between the capacity (or faculty) of judgment, Urteilskraft, and judgment, Urteil, is easier to discern than it is in English. The Guyer/Matthews translation that I have been relying on renders Urteilskraft as “power of judgment,” which is helpful if also awkward, since the English word judgment already names the power of judgment. The translation may also conceal the historical trajectory of the term. Alfred Baeumler surmises that Kant may have settled on the term Urteilskraft, rather than Beurteilungskraft, because Christian Garve uses that term to translate judgment in Alexander Gerrard’s Essay on Genius of 1774 (Irrationalitätsproblem in der Ästhetik und Logik des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur Kritik der Urteilskraft, 2nd ed. [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974], 162n1). If Baeumler is right, then “judgment” is not only the more idiomatic translation of Urteilskraft, but also takes the term back to its English sources. But the main failing in opting for “power of judgment” lies in promising more clarity than the text delivers, for Kant often resorts to words such as Beurteilung or urteilen and beurteilen and their nominalized forms (they all mean “judging”) to describe aesthetic judgment, terms no less ambiguous than the English word judgment. The key point is that in Kant’s account what I have been calling aesthetic experience is structured by the capacity for making judgments, specifically the capacity for reflective judgments. It entails the entire process of using one’s judgment, not merely the verdict that may be pronounced. But as I argue later in this chapter, these ambiguities and slippages are not defects to be mended with ever more fine-grained terminology, for the distinction between the experience of using one’s judgment, on the one hand, and coming to a judgment, on the other, is itself inadequate to both the experience and the judgment. As we shall see, far from being an end point of the experience, an aesthetic judgment like “this is beautiful” is not a verdict that closes the case, but testifies rather to the open-endedness of the experience that gives rise to it. 9. Eli Friedlander, Expressions of Judgment: An Essay on Kant’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 31. 10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie/Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, bilingual ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 1: 156 / 156e. 11. As so often in the third Critique, here too Kant grounds his philosophical intuitions in what people commonly say; transcendental critique links to grammatical analysis. While he does not perform any kind of empirical analysis of what people say, it is noteworthy that linguistic research into the ways evaluative predicates such

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as tasty and beautiful are used in some European languages bears out Kant’s intuition about the usage of agreeable and beautiful. See Carla Umbach, “Evaluative Propositions and Subjective Judgments,” in Subjective Meaning, ed. J. van Wijnbergen-Huitink and C. Meier (Berlin: de Guyter, forthcoming). 12. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Douglas den Uyl (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/813#Shaftesbury_5989_436. 13. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), treatise I, section I: XIV, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2462-Hutcheson_1458_125. 14. Shaftesbury, Characteristick, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/813#Shaftesbury _5989_431. 15. My cursory treatment suggests a greater continuity between the two thinkers than is warranted, but this is not the place to work out the nuances of British theories of taste. I will merely note one difference that bears on the prescriptive tone in Kant’s passage (“one must not be in the least biased”). Unlike Shaftesbury (and Kant), Hutcheson sees no need to hector his readers into surrendering their interests before being admitted into the realm of beauty, for in his account the perception of beauty is epistemologically prior to the negotiation of interests. “Our Sense of Pleasure is antecedent to Advantage or Interest, and is the Foundation of it,” he notes. “We do not perceive Plea sure in Objects, because it is our Interest to do so; but Objects or Actions are Advantageous, and are pursu’d or undertaken from Interest, because we receive Plea sure from them” (Hutcheson, Inquiry, treatise II, introduction). Thus by his way of thinking, we cannot help but perceive the beauty in something just as little as we can help in seeing its color or hearing its sound. 16. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 224. 17. The passage I just quoted leaves open the possibility that there may be a relationship to food not driven by hunger or a “healthy appetite,” one in which what I eat or drink could become an occasion for aesthetic experience. Yet I never find Kant willing to countenance uncoupling eating from feeding. When he does write about eating or drinking—and he does so remarkably often—it is always to affirm how impoverished these pleasures are in comparison with the pleasure of aesthetic experience. This holds even when sustenance is nowhere in the picture. Thus he reaches for the far-fetched example of drinking “sparkling wine from the Canaries” (§7, 212) to draw the line between the agreeable and the beautiful, when this example might well have served to make the opposite point, namely, that sometimes while eating or drinking—say, when having sparkling wine—the interest in preserving the self and maximizing happiness may be in evidence no more than when listening to a sonata. The issue of the diminished value given to the pleasures of eating is also intimately linked to Kant’s conception of the hierarchy of the senses, in which organic taste and smell rank at the bottom. See his discussion in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, §§15–23.

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Given all this, it remains puzzling why Kant time and again demonstrates the specificity of taste by distinguishing it from taste, Geschmack from Geschmack. Historical dictionaries teach that by 1790 the sense of aesthetic taste had firmly established itself as one of the meanings of Geschmack. Why then keep separating what has long been separated? Perhaps the rhetorical payoff was too seductive to pass up, for it is hard to imagine a more forceful way of putting the purely reflective, nonphysiological essence of aesthetic taste into relief than by displaying it against the background of its organic namesake. But I suspect an opposite movement may be at work too. In continuing to distinguish what requires no distinction, is Kant not also rubbing our noses in the bodily, fleshy reality from which he so carefully abstracts aesthetic taste? Is this not also a way of sabotaging our all-too-quick acceptance of the distinction between “taste” and “taste”? The moment we think we have grasped the alembicated nature of aesthetic taste, Kant presents us with yet another dish or beverage, which, even as they are meant to exhibit the unbridgeable gap between organic and aesthetic taste, serve to remind us of their common root. Nowhere do we feel this more flagrantly than in the passage where taste and disgust are conjoined (§48, 312). I have followed this speculative line of thinking in two places: “Devouring Metaphor: Disgust and Taste in Kleist’s Penthesilea,” German Quarterly 69 (1996): 125–143, esp. 126–129; “Disgust,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2: 417–221. 18. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997), 11. The published translation renders Adorno’s “Lust ohne Lust” as “desire without desire,” but as we have seen, and as Adorno knew, a key fact about Kantian aesthetic Lust is that it is a plea sure born not of desire. 19. Friedlander also develops the idea that the disinterested engagement with things is an active one, though he takes it in a different direction. See his Expressions of Judgment, 21. 20. Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1958), 16. 21. Friedlander insightfully remarks that while we may not find happiness in beauty, in Kant’s account beauty is (to speak with Stendhal) “only a promise of happiness,” for beauty encourages the belief that the world may be hospitable to moral ends and hence furthers the hope that human beings may “realize the highest good” (Expressions of Judgment, 8). To be sure, any happiness that may flow from such a realization is arrived at on a very different path from the happiness we pursue through gratification. We turn to the ambiguous link between the beautiful and the good in Chapter 3. 22. Once you begin to dwell on the small narrative and wrap your mind around even some of its parts— a palace; someone (a shipwreck?) on an uninhabited island; a palace on this uninhabited island, but then not; a hut on the same island with a person living in it comfortably enough; an Iroquois sachem, not on the island but in Paris; a restaurant in that city, the sachem its satisfied customer; the sweat of the people;

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau— once you try keeping these pieces in your head while somehow putting them in relation to one another, it is difficult to know which of the synaptic firings beckoning all over the brain to follow. (This tends to be true of many examples Kant proffers; they routinely fail to submit to the concepts they are meant to exemplify. That may be why he disparages them as “baby walkers of judgment” [Critique of Pure Reason, A 134 / B 174] and does his best to keep his distance from them.) The motif of the “uninhabited island” seems to be linked not with the question of interest but with the social dimension of aesthetic experience. We see in Chapter 2 that this social dimension is a transcendental, rather than an empirical, feature of aesthetic experience, for even in solitude aesthetic feeling orients itself toward other human beings through its “universal communicability.” The shipwreck “without any hope of ever coming upon human beings again” serves as an allegory of a condition in which aesthetic experience itself loses its grip. 23. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854–1961) (woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB), s.v. “Gefallen,” “gefallen.” 24. For example, Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 148–162; Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chap. 4. 25. It is telling that I had forgotten the title of the painting that hangs across from the Calling, nor did I even have a mental picture of it, even though I spent a long time looking at it when I visited the Church of St. Louis of the French in Rome years ago. It is the Martyrdom of St. Matthew, a painting so astonishing that it could just as well have served as my starting point. It makes clear that whatever disappointment I felt is not lodged in the work itself, but merely in my expectation of seeking “more of the same” plea sure and not finding it right away. 26. For example, Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 162 and 168. Or see Allison: “someone with taste can, without detriment to the disinterested nature of the judgment itself, and therefore its purity, take plea sure in the fact that beautiful objects exist, that there are institutions such as museums that provide ready access to these objects, and the like. What is precluded is merely that such interest serves as part of the determining ground of the liking itself” (Kant’s Theory of Taste, 96). 27. Several Disintegration Loops can be found on YouTube. 2. COMMUNITY

1. Thus, for example, Pierre Bourdieu: “Nothing in the content of this typically professorial aesthetic could stand in the way of its being recognized as universal by its sole ordinary readers, the professors of philosophy, who were too concerned with hunting down historicism and sociologism to see the historical and sociolog ical coincidence which, here as in so many cases, is the basis of their illusion of univer-

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sality” (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987], 493). 2. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Four Dissertations (London: A. Millar, 1757); reprinted in Four Dissertations and Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1992), 203. 3. On the few occasions that Hume does speak of tastes in the plural (I counted two), the word appears in a context of reasoning that is revealed to be mistaken. Thus the proverb Hume cites that it is “fruitless to dispute concerning tastes” (209) turns out to be incorrect, for Hume ends up arguing that there is a way of claiming the superiority of a preference for, say, Milton over Ogilby. That is also the point— second occurrence of the word—at which “the principle of the natural equality of tastes is . . . totally forgot” (210), for there is no such principle, just as there are finally no tastes, only taste. 4. Der Duden, duden.de, s.v. Ansinnen. 5. Johann Christoph Adelung, Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart (Vienna: Bauer, 1811), lexika.digitale-sammlungen.de/adelung, s.v. ansinnen; Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854–1961), woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB, s.v. ansinnen. 6. Eli Friedlander, Expressions of Judgment: An Essay on Kant’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 24–25. In a similar vein, though approaching the question with a wholly different philosophical temperament, Eva Schaper also points out that Kant brackets the question of whether there is such a thing as a consensus in matters aesthetic (something that Hume assumed); see her “The Pleasures of Taste,” in Pleasure, Preference and Value, ed. Eva Schaper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 39–56, 52. 7. A suggestive possibility: to what extent is the allgemeine Stimme of aesthetic judgment related to—a displacement or augmentation of—the allgemeines Stimmrecht, universal suffrage? It might aid a discussion of the political discourse embedded in the third Critique (1790) and the book’s relation to the French Revolution (1789) if one kept in mind the relationship of voice and vote (both Stimme) in Kant’s work. We have seen that the vote has no bearing on aesthetic judgment, for even “a hundred voices [Stimmen]” cannot prevail upon me to find something beautiful that I do not on my own accord. But even in the political arena, voting for Kant has something essentially illiberal: democracy, he writes, is “is necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power through which all the citizens may make decisions about (and indeed against) the single individual without his consent, so that decisions are made by all the people and yet not by all the people; and this means that the general will is in contradiction with itself, and thus also with freedom” (“Perpetual Peace,” 8: 352). 8. Paul Guyer, among others, has pointed out the pitfalls in Kant’s argument in his Kant and the Claims of Taste, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chap. 5, especially 149–150.

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9. The decisive difference, then, between this line of thinking and the argument in section 6 that derives universality from disinterestedness lies in the fact that the latter relies on the subject’s consciousness registering certain facts: only once “he is aware that the pleasure in it is without any interest,” does the person making the judgment proceed to the claim about universality. But the new argument makes no such stipulation, for the precedence of universal communicability is not a matter of the person’s awareness or consciousness. 10. Guyer and Matthews translate Erkenntnis überhaupt as “cognition in general,” which can lead one to think that in aesthetic experience we cognize mere generalities, when what is at stake is the very form of cognition itself. 11. The semantic network around Stimme and Stimmung has been noted by other readers as well. A few years after writing an early draft of these pages, I came across Rodolphe Gasché’s The Idea of Form (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), in which he discusses this network, yet his reading (51–53) points in a somewhat different direction. 12. In a detailed study of the concept of Stimmung, David Wellbery credits Kant with having introduced the term into aesthetic discourse, but gives the concept a narrower brief than our analysis suggests. Wellbery points out that while Adelung’s dictionary of the German language, which is contemporary with the third Critique, has no entry for Stimmung, it does provide two main definitions for the verb stimmen, an intransitive one meaning “to give voice to” and a transitive one meaning “to tune” (a musical instrument, for example). Wellbery then claims that only the second, transitive meaning is of relevance for the term Stimmung insofar as it plays a role in aesthetic discourse; see David Wellbery, “Stimmung,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriff e, ed. Karlheiz Barck, Martin Fontius, Dieter Schlenstedt, Burkhart Steinwachs, and Friedrich Wolfzettel (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000–2005), 5: 703–733, here 706, 708. By contrast, my argument about the connection of Stimme and Stimmung in the third Critique would insist that it is precisely the voice—in the registers of uttering an aesthetic judgment and speaking with a universal voice—that is meant to bring about the state of attunement. In other words, intransitive and transitive meanings of stimmen, rather than drifting apart, come into an unintentional harmony in the Kantian idea of Stimmung. 3. GOODNESS

1. At least since the writings of Baltasar Gracián; see on this point Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concise history of the concept of taste in Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), 31–37. 2. For example: “For himself alone a human being abandoned on a desert island would not adorn either his hut or himself, nor seek out or still less plant flowers in

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order to decorate himself; rather, only in society does it occur to him to be not merely a human being but also, in his own way, a refined human being (the beginning of civilization)” (§41, 297). 3. It is the opening move of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics: “But we may assert against this view, even at this stage, that the beauty of art is higher than nature. The beauty of art is beauty born of the spirit and born again, and the higher the spirit and its productions stand above nature and its phenomena, the higher too is the beauty of art above that of nature” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], 1: 2). He does not relent even when the beauty of nature prompts him into uncharacteristically soaring prose: “The variegated richly colored plumage of birds shines even when unseen, their song dies away unheard; the torch-thistle, which blooms for only one night, withers in the wilds of the southern forests without having been admired, and these forests, jungles themselves of the most beautiful and luxuriant vegetation, with the most sweet-smelling and aromatic perfumes, rot and decay equally unenjoyed. But the work of art is not so unselfconsciously for itself; it is essentially a question, an address to the responsive breast, a call to minds and spirits” (ibid., 71, trans. modified). 4. Here is part of the story, in Adornese: “For communication is the adaptation of spirit to what is useful, with the result that spirit is made one commodity among the rest; and what today is called meaning participates in this disaster. What in artworks is structured, gapless, resting in itself, is an after-image of the silence that is the single medium through which nature speaks. Vis-à-vis a ruling principle, vis-à-vis a merely diff use juxtaposition, the beauty of nature is an other; what is reconciled would resemble it” (Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor [London: Continuum, 1997], 74). 5. Kant’s famous locution of “unsocial sociability” renders the conflict in its most economic form. See his “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” (1784), 8: 20. 6. In Religion within the Bounds of Reason, for example, while no longer requiring the attention of the state, Wollust is a vice “grafted on” the disposition “to reproduction of one’s kind through the drive to sex” (6: 26–27). For the meaning of the word current at the time, see the entry “Wollust” in Johann Christoph Adelung’s Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart (Vienna: Bauer, 1811), lexika.digitale-sammlungen.de/adelung, a reliable guide to late eighteenth-century German usage. 7. Kant works out the basis for this argument in the third antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason (or “Third Conflict of the Transcendental Ideas”). Every antinomy has two sides, a thesis and an antithesis. In the third, the thesis states: “Causality in accordance with laws of nature is not the only one from which all the appearances of the world can be derived. It is also necessary to assume another causality through freedom in order to explain them” (A 444 / B 472). The antithesis counters: “There is no freedom,

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but every thing in the world happens solely in accordance with laws of nature” (A 445 / B 473). Here, as in the case of the other three antinomies, Kant’s procedure is to show how both sides can be proven correct, leading to a contradiction, unless one assumes the distinction of appearances and things in themselves. Only then does the apparent contradiction between thesis and antithesis dissolve. 8. The passage reads: “So the moral law strikes down self-conceit. But since this law is still something in itself positive . . . it is at the same time an object of respect . . . and inasmuch as it even strikes down self-conceit, that is, humiliates it, it is an object of the greatest respect and so too the ground of a positive feeling that is not of empirical origin and is cognized a priori. Consequently, respect for the moral law is a feeling that is produced by an intellectual ground, and this feeling is the only one that we can cognize completely a priori and the necessity of which we can have insight into” (Critique of Practical Reason, 5: 73). 9. Gérard Lebrun, Kant sans kantisme, ed. Paul Clavier and Francis Wolff (Paris: Fayard, 2009), 189. 10. “Thunder clouds towering up into the heavens, bringing with them flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder, volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall on a mighty river,” and so on (§28, 261). 11. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 11. 12. Kant’s phrase is far more mysterious than my translation allows; as written, it is in fact close to unintelligible. Part of the mystery may be attributed to the garbled spelling and truncated syntax typical of his notebooks. (Th is note was actually scribbled on the back of a letter Kant received from his friend and former student Marcus Herz, which the Akademie edition publishes as part of a notebook on logic.) But careless writing, I feel, does not account for the true perplexity here. In the crucial phrase that I have translated as “the human being fits into the world,” in German the object (“the world”) would need to take on the accusative case, yet Kant uses the dative: “Die Schöne Dinge zeigen an, daß der Mensch in der Welt passe” (rather than “in die Welt passe”). If we followed the letter of the text, the translation would read something like, “The beautiful things show [or indicate] that the human being in the world [in contrast, presumably, with the human being not in the world] passes,” possibly in the sense of forgoing something (as in passing in a game of cards). Or else, “The beautiful things show that the human being passes in the world.” One can contrive other options, yet it is not clear if any of them helps us make sense of the phrase as Kant wrote it. I have not come across another instance of passen in his writings as it is used here, and Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch lists no examples; the examples it does provide of the verb plus in all use the accusative. So it is plausible to think of this as an error born of haste. Still, it is remarkable that at the very point at which Kant seems to assert the happy idea of beautiful things showing that human beings fit into the world, his grammar keeps us in the dark about how to read this fitting; “fitting-into-

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the-world” does not itself fit into the sentence. It therefore seems apt that he opts for the subjunctive (passe) instead of the indicative, opening the door to “the human being would fit.” We can be fairly certain about the human being and the world, but everything else—if the one fits into the other, and how, and if fitting is in fact the right relation between the two—becomes more uncertain the more we look at the words. 13. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 9. 14. Some of the pedagogical implications of conceiving of the aesthetic along Schillerian lines are articulated by David Lloyd in his essay “Kant’s Examples,” Representations 28 (1989): 34–54. 15. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 80; my emphasis. De Man’s argument develops out of an analysis of the sublime, but extends its reach to the larger project that he takes the third Critique to be pursuing. 16. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 19. 17. De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 82. 18. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 292. 19. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. Burton Pike (New York: Modern Library, 2005), 9. 20. We should note that the “bliss” in which the scene culminates is not the Wollust we know from Kant’s passage, but Wonne, a word whose meaning includes, but is not limited to, sexual joy. 21. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Influence of Modern Philosophy (1820),” in Scientific Studies, trans. Douglas Miller (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988), 29. 4. MAKING

1. A few examples of the range of strategies commentators have employed in reading the sections on art. H. W. Cassirer asserts, “Kant’s theory of fine art is obviously entirely dependent on his theory of our judgments about the beautiful,” so we will not find anything new here; see A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1938; repr. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 270. John Zammito writes, “A theory of beauty which could find it in the bloom of narcissus or the swirl of a nautilus, but not in the Sistine ceiling or a sonnet of Shakespeare, could hardly have satisfied Kant” (The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], 124–125). No doubt, but how exactly did the earlier account of beauty fail to account for ceilings and sonnets? Anthony Cascardi claims, “The third Critique is mistakenly seen as inaugurating a theory of art” (Consequences of Enlightenment [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 56). Jacques Rancière puts it more bluntly still: in Kant’s third Critique, he declares, “ ‘aesthetic’ only appears as an adjective, and

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it designates a type of judgment rather than a domain of objects. It is only in the context of Romanticism and post-Kantian idealism . . . that aesthetics comes to designate the thought of art” (The Aesthetic Unconscious, trans. Debra Keats and James Swenson [Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009], 6). It is true that the third Critique, as a theory of aesthetic judgment (and, as I have argued, aesthetic experience), gravitates to the subject-pole; it is not, nor does it strive to be, a philosophy of art. Yet if the pages on art offer no theory of art, then what do they do? Henry Allison calls Kant’s account of art and genius “parergonal,” by which he means that it “serves to frame Kant’s theory of taste, rather than constituting an essential part of it” (Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 272). Yet Allison construes this parergon as “remain[ing] extrinsic to the theory of taste itself” (ibid.) and thus passes up the intriguing opportunity of reading it in light of Kant’s own discussion of “ornaments (parerga),” which include “the frames of paintings, draperies on statues, or colonnades around magnificent buildings” (§14, 226). What would it mean to conceive of the theory of art as an ornament to the theory of taste, as the colonnades to the magnificent edifice of aesthetic theory? That is a question worth pursuing. Early on (8), Allison does refer to Jacques Derrida’s use of the concept of “parergon” in The Truth in Painting (trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987]), yet as far as I can see nothing of the latter’s admittedly tangled insights into the logic of the frame makes it into Allison’s reading. 2. Johann Christoph Adelung’s Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart (Vienna: Bauer, 1811), lexika.digitale-sammlungen.de/adelung, the most complete dictionary of the German language of the time, gives as the primary meaning of Willkür “the capacity to act as one pleases,” s.v. “Willkühr.” 3. I am echoing the insight by Walter Biemel, Die Bedeutung von Kants Begründung der Ästhetik für die Philosophie der Kunst (Cologne: Kölner UniversitätsVerlag, 1959), 68–69. 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie/Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, bilingual ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 1: 156 / 156e. Wittgenstein’s “Sprache der Mitteilung” can also be rendered as “language of communication,” rather than “language of information.” 5. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 167. She regards artworks as “objects which are strictly without any utility . . . if they enter the exchange market, they can only be arbitrarily priced.” Therefore, “the proper intercourse with a work of art is certainly not ‘using’ it” (ibid.). 6. Open Adorno’s books virtually anywhere, and you will find a version of this leitmotif, sometimes played softly, but usually not. Here is an instance where it comes through loud and clear: “Art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystallizing in itself as something unique

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to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as ‘socially useful,’ it criticizes society by merely existing, for which puritans of all stripes condemn it. There is nothing pure, nothing structured strictly according to its own immanent law, that does not implicitly criticize the debasement of a situation evolving in the direction of a total exchange society in which every thing is heteronomously defined” (Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor [London: Continuum, 1997], 225–226). 7. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 487. Seeing the aesthetic as a form of false consciousness entails unmasking the freedom of the artist as “the ‘natural’ expression of the occupational ideology of those who like to call themselves ‘creators’ ” (491). For a critique along similar lines, see Terry Eagleton’s influential The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), chap. 3. The historian Eric Hobsbawm gives the thought an unexpected twist, which lends the rote gesture of ideology critique some freshness. Here is his portrait of the artist in the late eighteenth century, unmoored from social support such as patronage: “The artist therefore stood alone, shouting into the night, uncertain even of an echo. It was only natural that he should turn himself into the genius, who created only what was within him, regardless of the world and in defiance of a public whose only right was to accept him on his own terms or not at all” (The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 [New York: Vintage, 1996], 261). As we shall see later, the point of the idea of genius is precisely to counteract the idea that the artist creates “only what was within him.” 8. Henry Staten, “The Origin of the Work of Art in Material Practice,” New Literary History 43, no. 1 (2012): 59. 9. When we read that labor can be “enforced” or “forcibly imposed,” the words Kant uses, erzwingen and zwangsmäßig, both relate to Zwang, coercion or force. 10. By the by, Kant uncovers the basic logic of the commodity and what Marx will come to call its exchange-value: “As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time” (Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes [New York: Penguin, 1990], 1: 130). 11. Establishing a link between Geschäft and coercion does not appear to be a caprice of Kant’s; it exists in the linguistic record, albeit at some remove. Adelung’s dictionary lists as one, indeed the first, meaning of the word Geschäft “an order, will, and the matter ordered.” It does, however, locate this meaning mainly in the Upper German dialects spoken in the South of the country, far from Kant’s East Prussia (Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch, s.v. “Geschäft”). Under the same headword, Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854–1961), woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB, also lists “decree, order, commandment” as a meaning, though it supplies mostly old sources as examples. 12. Hegel too “get[s] tired of a man who can imitate to perfection the warbling of the nightingale (and there are such men).” For him, it is because of the intrinsic limitations

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of imitation itself: “In general this delight in imitative skill can always be but restricted, and it befits man better to take delight in what he produces out of himself. In this sense the discovery of any insignificant technical product has higher value, and man can be prouder of having invented the hammer, the nail, etc., than of manufacturing tricks of imitation” (Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], 1: 43–44). In other words, the trouble with doing impressions is not that it is a “mere” craft, rather than art, but that it isn’t even a proper craft, produced “out of” man himself. 13. As Danto acknowledges, in his 1974 essay ( Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 33, no. 2: 139–148, here 148n) as well as his 1981 book of that title (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, vii), he borrows the phrase from Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. 14. Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” trans. Richard Klein, Diacritics 11, no. 2 (1981): 11. 15. For example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), 48; Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 61–62. The idea that “Kant thinks of free beauties as paradigmatically natural objects” is in fact the doxa of much of the commentary on the third Critique; I am quoting Paul Guyer, one of today’s leading scholars of Kant’s work, in his Kant and the Claims of Taste, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 352. 16. Elaine Scarry turns the idea of the flower as the canonical object of beauty into an anthropological insight in her essay “Imagining Flowers,” chapter 4 of Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 17. See Serge Trottein, “Esthétique ou philosophie de l’art?,” in Kants Ästhetik, ed. Herman Parret (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), 663. Also on the parergon, see Derrida, Truth in Painting, 61. 18. Guyer makes this point cogently in his Kant and the Claims of Taste, 355. 19. There is a long and powerful tradition of reading the appearance of art as a case of deception. Thus even as astute a reader as Jean-Marie Schaeffer claims, in the context of reading the passages in the third Critique we have been considering, that “a component of Schein (in the sense of ‘deceptive appearance’) will always be involved in the finality without representation of a specific end exhibited by the work of genius” (Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger, trans. Steven Rendall [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000], 42). 5. GENIUS

1. The term genius has lost not only force but also currency. This becomes strikingly visible in the Google Ngram Viewer (books.google.com/ngrams), which tracks the use of words in a large corpus of writings in English published between 1800

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and 2000 and which has become a playground of big-data buffs in the humanities. Yet it is not always clear what one can conclude from the statistical distribution of words. So with all caveats in mind and without drawing large conclusions, we can observe that genius is losing ground, and rapidly so. Cult of genius, on the other hand, while used considerably less frequently than plain genius, comes out of seeming nowhere in the 1890s and has seen a steep if uneven rise since. 2. Jens Kulenkampff, “Über Kants Bestimmung des Gehalts der Kunst,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 33 (1979): 67. 3. Although the relevant section of the dictionary was completed in 1886 and so contains meanings and usages that emerged only after the publication of the third Critique, it makes clear that most of the semantic work on the concept is performed from the middle of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. 4. The reverse may also happen. After some puzzling, I may spot a rule where I had not detected one before (I often find myself in that position when looking at paintings by the op-artist Viktor Vasarely). I may feel deflated, but I may also take pleasure in how the artist devised just this rule out of the infinite number of possibilities, which amounts to the feeling that there cannot be a rule for devising rules that give rise to work of arts. 5. We will encounter an argument with the same structure when we turn to Kant’s thinking on the teleology of organisms, developed in part II of the Critique of Judgment. As we shall see in Chapter 7, Kant argues that an organism is made of the same stuff as every thing else in nature and thus is subject to the same mechanical laws as inanimate objects. Yet nothing about an organism as organism can be understood if it is approached with the instruments of mechanical science. “Life” and “art” both denote a structural difference marking the way the understanding of a thing cannot be reduced to an algorithmic procedure. 6. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 39. 7. Here, at a point where we distinguish the engineer from the genius, is a good place to acknowledge that many previous readers have denounced the distinction between art and craft, as well as the one between play and labor, as untenable, elitist, and complicit in shoring up a social order they see as unjust. The fact that the words engineer and genius have a common root in ingenium is taken as bolstering their critique; the media scholar Friedrich Kittler used to make much of the etymological kinship between the two. (I cannot find a place in his writings where he does this, though I am almost certain that I have seen, or perhaps heard, him make the point about the two words.) But this critique has little to say about our line of thinking. Nothing in Kant’s conception of art suggests that art can be produced without craft and labor, without engineering; quite the contrary. His point is rather that we cannot account for production of art if we wish to reduce it fully to craft and labor.

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8. John Dryden, “Of Dramatic Poesy (1668),” in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), 1: 82. Diderot indicts the painter La Tour as “a marvelous machinist” and therefore a mere “genius of technique” because “he is calm and cool; he does not torture himself; he doesn’t suffer, he is never breathless” (Salon of 1767, in On Art and Artists: An Anthology of Diderot’s Aesthetic Thought, trans. John S. D. Glaus, ed. Jean Seznec [Dordrecht: Springer, 2011], 26–27). JeanJacques Rousseau, “Génie (musiq) (1777),” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, 2013), encyclopedie.uchicago.edu. 9. It is sometimes difficult to appreciate how distant Kant’s conception of genius is from that of his contemporaries, in part because he uses many of the same terms. To gauge this distance, it suffices to read the article “Genie” in Johann Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine Th eorie der schönen Künste (Leipzig: Weidemanns Erben, 1771–1774), 1: 456–459, a good source for getting a sense of common knowledge about aesthetic matters at the time, certainly among German thinkers. The article offers a laundry list of the qualities that characterize genius and even attempts to trace its sources into what Sulzer calls “animal nature” (ibid., 457), suggesting that genius “relies on a particular sensitivity of the senses and the system of nerves” (ibid., 458). The search for genius in the body’s fibers continues into our day; witness the decades-long farcical quest to find “Einstein’s genius” in his brain. But Kant’s development of the concept of genius in the third Critique distinguishes itself not only from that of his precursors; it is also strikingly different from ideas he himself offers elsewhere, both from ways of thinking about aesthetic questions early in his career (his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime of 1764 have nothing of substance to say about genius) and from ideas he seems to have entertained at the same time as those we have been considering. Thus in his lectures on anthropology, which he gave throughout his career (and published only after the third Critique), we find passages such as this: “Genius also seems to have different original seeds within itself and to develop them differently, according to the difference of national type and the soil where it was born. With the Germans it strikes more in the roots; with the Italians, in the foliage; with the French, in the blossoms; and with the English, in the fruit” (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 7: 226). This is more or less as far as one can get from the formal reading we have been developing. Giorgio Tonelli provides a useful account of the development of Kant’s conception of genius in “Kant’s Early Theory of Genius (1770–1779),” Journal of the History of Philosophy 4, no. 1 (1966): 109–131, and 4, no. 2 (1966): 209–224. 10. A widely cited instance of such ideological unmasking is the one performed by Jacques Derrida. By his lights, the main point of genius in Kant’s theory is to set in motion a process through which “every thing turns out to be naturalized, immediately or not, every thing is interpreted as a structure of naturality” (“Economimesis,”

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trans. Richard Klein, Diacritics 11, no. 2 (1981): 11. But Derrida never reveals what this “structure of naturality” is (let alone what “naturality” is), nor how it relates to Kant’s elaborations of the structure of nature in his various works. It remains unclear, for example, how Kant’s notion of nature as an open invitation to the human being for exploration and knowledge is to be reconciled with the essential opacity of genius about which nothing may be known. 11. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Metaphysik, trans. Georg Friedrich Meier (Halle: Carl Hermann Hemmerde, 1766), 417, §475. (Because the German translation is abridged, the sections are numbered differently than the Latin original, where the definition of ingenium can be found in section 648.) Even for contemporary readers it seem clear that Baumgarten’s ingenium refers to something quite different from what comes to be called genius by a wide range of writers in the second half of the eighteenth century. When Baumgarten’s student Georg Friedrich Meier, himself a significant thinker in the history of the concept of interpretation, translates the Metaphysica into German, he renders “ingenium” not as Genie but as Kopf, which simply means “head” but is also a metaphor (or a metonymy?) for mental acuity: ein munterer Kopf, “a quick mind.” Both lexically and semantically, his choice marks the distance to the concept of genius we have been seeking to grasp in Kant. What is more, Baumgarten’s remark about ingenium appears in the section on reason (ratio) and not, for example, in the one on imagination (phantasia) or invention ( facultas fingendi) or even judgment (iudicium). A recent English translation follows this intuition, translating ingenium as “wit.” A. G. Baumgarten, Metaphysics: A Critical Translation with Kant’s Elucidations, Selected Notes, and Related Materials, trans. Courtney D. Fugate and John Hymers (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), §648. In his Anthropology, Kant himself uses Kopf to refer to someone who possesses the “faculty of reflection” “to a preeminent degree” (the translator of the Cambridge edition, oddly, renders Kopf as “brain”). Only when a Kopf is “original,” Kant writes, is it called a “genius” (7: 138). 12. For this reason, Derrida’s contention that “ ‘true’ mimesis is between two producing subjects and not between two produced things” (“Economimesis,” 9) misses the key move in Kant’s entanglement with the notion of mimesis. The idea that true mimesis is an imitation of a way of making (rather than a mere copying of products) had long been established by eighteenth-century poetics, both in Johann Christoph Gottsched’s work and in that of his Swiss antagonists, Bodmer and Breitinger (Johann Jakobs both). Thus Gottsched recommends that the artist imitate the “model of nature” (“Muster der Natur”), as the abstract structure that gives rise to beauty; see his Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst, ed. Michael Holzinger (North Charleston: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013), 115. Similarly, Breitinger urges the poet to imitate not the “works of nature,” but its “forces” or “powers” (Kräfte), in Critische Dichtkunst, ed. Michael Holzinger (North Charleston: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013), 7. (Both texts are available at zeno.org.)

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13. This split conception of mimesis proves untenable and is replaced by Kant in section 49 by a complex notion of expression, as we shall see in Chapter 6. 14. This narrow understanding of genius is peculiar to the third Critique. Elsewhere in his work, Kant is more liberal with the term, frequently applying it to scientists and philosophers such as Newton and Leibniz. It may seem curiously dogmatic that Kant insists here that even the most illustrious examples of science traffic in the first form of production, that is, a production that “still lies on the natural path of inquiry and reflection in accordance with rules” (§47, 308) and that genius, by contrast, is reserved for the artist. Everything in Newton’s Principia, “no matter how great a mind it took to invent it,” “could also have been learned,” hence “acquired with effort by means of imitation” (ibid.), because science is fundamentally guided by concepts, regardless of how it developed in particular cases (say, because an apple accidentally fell on a researcher, or because the answer came to him in a dream). But as HansGeorg Gadamer points out, by the lights of transcendental analysis it is only in the making of art that genius is essential; see his Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), 47. For this reason, the usual way of criticizing Kant’s distinction between the artistic and scientific creativity misses the mark. In the case of science, critics say, Kant confuses “the order of discovery (ordo inveniendi or ordo cognoscendi) and the order of teaching or systematic exposition of truths already discovered (ordo docendi)” (Donald Crawford, “Kant’s Theory of Creative Imagination,” in Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, ed. Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], 165). But there is no such confusion. Kant does not aim to provide a psychological account of the order of discovery, which may well remain inexplicable to the scientist. His point is that it “could also have been learned”; opacity is not essential to it, the way it is to the making of art. 15. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in A Susan Sontag Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 104. 16. While Sontag calls for an “erotics of art” (104), a more recent anti-hermeneutic polemic makes a case for ecstatic “presence” as an alternative to meaning; see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). 17. Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder are probably the names we are meant to associate with the “shallow minds.” This polemical moment, in which Kant gives voice to his undisguised scorn for the thinkers of the Sturm und Drang, distorts and trivializes Kant’s conception of genius. If this is where we look to understand the force of the idea of genius, as John Zammito does, for example (The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], 136– 142), we are apt to miss its earlier, more incisive articulation. 18. Poems by William Wordsworth: Including Lyrical Ballads, etc. (London: Longman, Hurst, 1815), 1: 386.

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19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in The Merleau-Ponty Reader, ed. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 80. 20. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, ed. Edith Morley (London: Longmans, Green, 1918), 12. 21. It is not at all clear how to square the accounts of poetic making in, for example, the Ion, which proposes a model of irrational transmission through inspiration (or mania) in the well-known image of the magnetic chain of influence, with the accounts of technical imitation in books III and X of the Republic. The fact that Plato’s Socrates disparages both does not obscure the fact of the gap that yawns between the two. 22. “Does anyone at the end of the nineteenth century have a clear idea of what poets in strong ages called inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If you have even the slightest residue of superstition, you will hardly reject the idea of someone being just an incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of overpowering forces. The idea of revelation in the sense of something suddenly becoming visible and audible with unspeakable assurance and subtlety, something that throws you down and leaves you deeply shaken—this simply describes the facts of the case. You listen, you do not look for anything, you take, you do not ask who is there; a thought lights up in a flash, with necessity, without hesitation as to its form, I never had any choice. A delight whose incredible tension sometimes triggers a burst of tears, sometimes automatically hurries your pace and sometimes slows it down; a perfect state of being outside yourself, with the most distinct consciousness of a host of subtle shudders and shiverings down to the tips of your toes” (Ecce Homo [“Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” 3], in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 126). I am grateful to Dieter Thomä for calling my attention to this passage. 23. “But if any man come to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found” (Phaedrus 245a). 24. Even a reader as sensitive as Gadamer is led to this conclusion when he speaks of the “irrationality” of genius, though unlike Plato he salutes it (Truth and Method, 46). 25. I have rendered Kant’s dynamic idea of “Originalität im Denken” as “originality in thinking”; the translation in the Cambridge edition, “originality of thought,” is too inert to my ear. 26. The pages upon pages that Freud, in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” devotes to quoting dictionaries attempt to come to grips with the mysterious prefi x un-. For in the cases most interesting to psychoanalysis, it signals no logical negation, but rather the way the meaning of a word “finally coincides with its opposite.” See James Strachey, ed., Th e Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud

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(London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), 17: 226. Un-, then, betokens the copresence of opposites, a copresence deferred by a temporal lag. The lexicographic journey thus yields the apothegm: “the prefi x ‘un’ is the token of repression” (245), an idea worked out in his essay on “Negation.” 27. Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious, trans. Debra Keats and James Swenson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 7. 28. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 49; translation modified. 29. Tonelli sketches the changing ways spirit and genius relate to one another in some of Kant’s writings in “Kant’s Early Theory of Genius (1770–1779),” 110–111. 30. “How would it be if we were to use the German term singular spirit [eigenthümlicher Geist] to express the French word génie? For our nation permits itself to be persuaded that the French have a word for this in their own language that we do not have in ours but rather must borrow from them. Nevertheless, they themselves have borrowed it from the Latin (genius), where it means nothing other than a singular spirit” (Anthropology, 7: 225). There are multiple other places where Kant identifies Geist with Genie, suggesting the terms can be used interchangeably, for example, 15: 412, R 926; 15: 412, R 930; 15: 414, R 933. 6. AESTHETIC IDEAS

1. This occurs in section 49. There is an isolated mention of “aesthetic idea” in section 17, yet the concept remains undeveloped there and bears scant resemblance to its later version. 2. The Critique of Pure Reason provides a taxonomy of all mental representations in the form of what Kant calls a Stufenleiter, or stepladder (A 320 / B 376–377). 3. The idea of spirit as an “animating principle” is articulated in many of Kant’s notebook entries, for example, 15: 412, R 926; 15: 413, R 932; 15: 415, R 934; and 15: 418, R 942. 4. I follow the translators of the Cambridge edition in rendering Kant’s idiomatic term schöne Kunst, meaning “fine art” or, in our contemporary idiom, just plain “art,” with the nonidiomatic “beautiful art” to keep the important idea of beauty in focus. 5. Rudolf Lüthe, “Kants Lehre von den ästhetischen Ideen,” Kant- Studien 75, no. 1 (1984): 67. Henry Allison grants art the more ambiguous status of being “parergonal” to Kant’s theory of taste; see his Kant’s Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 8. 6. We linger long enough to call attention to two writers who have lingered here, with dazzling results. See Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” Diacritics 11, no. 2 (1981): 3–25; Richard Klein, “Kant’s Sunshine,” Diacritics 11, no. 2 (1981): 26–41. 7. An example of the first group is Lambert Zuidervaart, “ ‘Aesthetic Ideas’ and the Role of Art in Kant’s Ethical Hermeneutics,” in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays, ed. Paul Guyer (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 2003),

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199–208. Andrea Kern’s Schöne Lust (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998) belongs to the second, as does Paul Guyer’s Kant and the Claims of Taste, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chap. 12. 8. Kern, Schöne Lust, 12. 9. Eli Friedlander puts it well: “Beauty demands a response, and we might often find our answers faint or our words quite inadequate, falling short of our experience. But this very lack is a mode of inhabitation of language; it points at the unfulfilled demand to make one’s encounter with beauty intelligible. Far from drawing apart language and feeling such wordlessness shows their intimate proximity” (Expressions of Judgment: An Essay on Kant’s Aesthetics [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015], x–xi). 10. Textually (and symptomatically) the situation is even worse, for in the manuscript of the third Critique the two terms are not even distinguished by that single letter; they are identical through and through. Kant writes there: “a model not for imitation [Nachahmung], but for imitation [Nachahmung].” It is only his student Johann Gottfried Kiesewetter, charged with supervising the printing of the book, who spots what he takes to be a “writing mistake” and replaces Nachmachung for the first instance of Nachahmung. See his letter to Kant of March 3, 1790 (11: 138). Kiesewetter may have been relying on his own linguistic intuition, or he may have seized on a passage, a few pages on, where Kant chides the disciple “who copies [nachmacht] everything” the master has produced, including “a deformity, only because it could not easily have been removed without weakening the idea” (§49, 318). It is in fact not easy to keep up with the fortunes of the concept of imitation in the third Critique. After Kant rescues it by dividing it from its evil twin Nachmachung, he disparages it a bit later, recommending Nachfolge (“emulation”) instead (ibid.). Hardly a paragraph later, Nachahmung is held up once more, this time against Nachäff ung (“aping”) (ibid.). 11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in The Merleau-Ponty Reader, ed. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Evanston, IN: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 78. 12. Brigitte Scheer, Zur Begründung von Kants Ästhetik und ihrem Korrektiv in der ästhetischen Idee (Frankfurt: Horst Heiderhoff Verlag, 1971), 23. 13. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1: 111. 14. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2002), 371n14. 7. ORGANISMS

1. Kant develops his conception of the basic forces of matter in chapter 2 of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, on dynamics (4: 496–535).

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2. Chemistry did not qualify as a rigorous science in Kant’s eyes, because it had not at his time managed to conceptualize its insights in mathematical form, which, according to Kant, is the only form capable of connecting empirical observations with universal and necessary principles of the understanding (see Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, 4: 470–471). 3. The division of biology into functional and evolutionary is quite standard. For one articulation, see Ernst Mayr, Towards a New Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 28. 4. “Mechanical” has more twists and turns that I can follow here. To provide merely a glimpse of its intricacies: in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant distinguishes two kinds of natu ral laws, the mechanical (or mathematicalmechanical), which assumes atoms and the void as its basic concepts and places the source of motion outside the atoms, and the dynamic (or metaphysical-dynamic), which proceeds from a notion of matter in which the fundamental forces of attraction and repulsion inhere. For reasons that do not bear on our discussion, he goes on to criticize the mechanical and praise the dynamic mode of explanation (see 4: 532– 535). But that notion of “mechanical” is not the same as the one he employs in the third Critique; the latter concept is on a higher level of abstraction and, confusingly, includes the former and the term from which it was distinguished, namely, dynamic. Both kinds of laws—the mechanical and the dynamic— give rise to what the third Critique calls “mechanical” explanations, for example, ones that rely on blind necessity entirely unguided by reason, rather than on the intervention of purposes, which arise from reason alone. Such conceptual complexities are by no means limited to the term mechanical; lift any significant idea in Kant’s philosophy of science, and you uncover a rabbit hole, down which it is all too easy to disappear. Should readers wish to go that way, Michael Friedman’s Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) offers useful guidance, especially the introduction and chapter 3. 5. It is remarkable that one of the most consequential myths we know seems to deviate from this pattern. The first creation story in Genesis not only carefully distinguishes the organic from the inorganic but posits the latter as more ancient than the former. God first assembles an inorganic stage into which “orga nized being” are then inserted one by one. 6. Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 11. 7. The fact that organic beings have an “artificial unity” does not lead Kant to suppose that each has been constructed by a divine artificer. In keeping with his theistic commitments, he prefers to surmise that the apparently contingent order stands under a law caused by “some artificial arrangement,” whose effects “stand under the contingent and artificial order of nature, and by means of which order under God” (2: 108; my translation).

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8. Explaining the generation and structure of such systems is one of two ways in which the “technique of nature” comes into play in the “Critique of Teleological Judgment,” and the one that concerns us here. The other deals with the systematicity that judgment, employing the idea of a technique of nature, establishes as it gathers “the disturbingly unbounded diversity of empirical laws and heterogeneity of natural forms” into a system that enables coherent experience (First Introduction, 20: 209). Sections II and IV of the First Introduction dwell on this classificatory achievement of judgment. 9. I have benefited here from Hannah Ginsborg’s helpful essay “Two Kinds of Mechanical Inexplicability in Kant and Aristotle,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 42, no. 1 (2004): 33–65. 10. Kant is not always consistent in distinguishing animals from machines. Sometimes he explicitly conceives of organisms as machines. Thus he writes in the Opus postumum, a collection of notes he composed from 1796, six years after the first publication of the Critique of Judgment, until his mental powers waned in 1803: “Organic bodies are of a kind that they work [wirken] as machines of their own forces” (21: 194). He goes on to add a concept of machine that is capacious enough to include organic bodies: “A machine is a body or assemblage of bodies each part of which is suited to move the other part inwardly and thereby also outwardly in a purposeful manner” (ibid.). Another passage makes clear that the stakes in the distinction of machine and organism, thus between motive and formative power, that the passage in the third Critique insists on, may not be as high for Kant as it seems there. On the same sheet of the Opus postumum we just cited, Kant declares: “An organic body is a machine that produces itself according to its form, whose motive power is at once means and end” (21: 196). The proposition suggests a way of making superfluous the concept of formative power, which in the third Critique Kant had borrowed from the anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, by putting it in terms of the established mechanistic notion of a motive force (see also 21: 558). 11. Kant has muddled ideas about phylogenesis. He is at one and same time committed to the idea of the immutability of species, yet open to speculation about their evolution in times past. Section 80 of the Critique of Judgment (418–419) puts both sides on display in closest proximity. 12. Here Kant’s linguistic intuition is, I think, sharper than Heidegger’s, despite the latter’s ostentatious use of language. When setting out to translate poiesis (in Plato’s Symposium, 205b), Heidegger too turns to hervorbringen, which in his hands encompasses the modes of bringing forth in both physis and techne. Except he writes Her-vor-bringen. Though it tends to be his hyphenation that attracts readers’ attention, here the more consequential philosophical commitment lies in capitalization (not available to the reader of the English translation), the fact that he turns the verb into a noun: das Her-vor-bringen, ein Her-vor-bringen. While Kant’s participle takes part in the action of making not by signifying duration, but by locating it in the present

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and thus grammatically inhabiting its time, Heidegger’s gerund invokes the verb only to allow it to turn rigid in the noun. See Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 10. 13. For Kant, this never means that God in fact is not intervening—that, we cannot know—but merely that our reports about nature, to carry universal force, cannot include instances of divine intervention, for, as Kant says on more than one occasion, once such intervention is permitted, modes of explanation invite arbitrariness into their midst. For an example relevant to the present context, see a passage from the Only Possible Proof, 2: 115. 14. “For just as human creations are the products of art, so living objects are manifestly the products of an analogous cause or principle, not external but internal, derived like the hot and the cold from the environing universe” (Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, trans. William Ogle [London: Kegan Paul, 1882], I 1, 641b). Aristotle does not hold this view consistently, for he allows what for Kant is nonsense, namely, spontaneous generation. See, for example, On the Parts of Animals, 640b. 15. The Opus postumum contains several passages that suggest such a priority of the whole before the parts in organisms. The most explicit I have found follows on the heels of a passage that understands organisms along the lines of the logic of causality he introduces in section 65 of the third Critique, namely, as a body “each part of which is there on the inside of a whole for the sake of the other.” This conception, which subtends the concept of self-organization, is only one way Kant has of conceptualizing the organic body. He adds: “But one can secondly posit its definition thus: ‘an organic body is one in which the idea of the whole precedes the possibility of its parts with regard to their unified motive powers’” (22: 548). In this second case, the organism is conceived “as a machine (a body formed intentionally with respect to its form)” (ibid.), that is, not as a self-organizing being, hence not a being whose orga nizing purpose is properly natural. As a result, Kant is prompted to suppose “a world soul, as it were,” “a simple, hence immaterial . . . being,” (for all matter is composed and not simple) “as a mover outside of this body or in it . . . (for matter cannot organize itself and work [wirken] according to purposes)” (ibid.). 16. Varela has acknowledged the debt that the concept of autopoiesis has to Kantian self-organization in an essay he wrote with Andreas Weber, published after Varela’s death: “Life after Kant: Natu ral Purposes and the Autopoietic Foundations of Biological Individuality,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (2002): 97–125, for example, 106. 17. In the Opus postumum, Kant returns to the idea of the Earth as an organism more than once. One passage among many: “Finally one could think even of the whole globe itself as an organic, though not living, body: whose progressive yet purposive development, mingled with revolutions, offers a principle of the organ ization of the same, which is mechanically/purposively self-forming, but which can no longer be

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surveyed by our understanding according to its unity” (21: 566–567). But why stop at “our living, birthing globe” (21: 570)? On the following sheet of the same batch of notes, the outward movement of self-organization reaches even into the celestial world: “the orga nizing force of [the globe] has orga nized the whole of the plant and animal species that have been created for one another in a way that they form a circle for one another as links in a chain, the human being not excluded; they are in need of one another for existence (“zum Daseyn”), not merely according to their nominal characteristic (of similarity), but rather according to the real characteristic (of causality), which points to a world organization (to unknown purposes) even of the star system” (ibid.; the same passage appears again in almost identical words at 22: 549). 18. It is interesting— and seems significant—that the part-whole logic in biology holds only discontinuously. Unlike a shoreline, which displays the same dimensionality at every zoom level, self-organization makes leaps as it scales up and down organismic systems, the stops being determined by the observer’s imputation of purposiveness. For some reason, we fail to detect purposiveness at every zoom level. But why? 8. MIND

1. A Kantian antinomy is not an “apparent contradiction” the way a paradox is. It expresses ways that our mental capacities can come into genuine conflict with themselves; thus in a true antinomy both conflicting propositions can be shown to be true if one builds on basic precepts taken to be self-evident. For Kant, the very distinction of his critical philosophy lies in offering a way out of the conflict, usually by showing that those basic precepts have been put to illegitimate use. For this reason, antinomies afford “a decisive experiment that must necessarily reveal to us a falsehood that lies hidden in the preconditions of reason” (Prolegomena, 4: 340–341), and they therefore have crucial heuristic value in each of the three Critiques. 2. Trying to sort out which of the two propositions holds and which does not is a fool’s errand, for as Kant goes on to point out “reason can prove neither the one nor the other of these fundamental principles, because we can have no determining ground a priori of the possibility of things in accordance with merely empirical laws of nature” (§70, 387). In other words, this is no proper antinomy, since reason has no way of determining the truth or falsehood of either of its two sides. Since the conflict between the two propositions only arises in experience, no principle of reason can possibly be in a position to decide for us whether the world is or is not in fact fully structured according to mechanistic laws (or indeed any other kind of law). Both sides of the polemic around “intelligent design” usually fail to take account of this insight, a failure that has the advantage of permitting the polemic to continue. 3. Things are more complicated, for in Kant’s conception intuitions do not consist merely of sensations but are themselves structured by formal constraints peculiar to our minds, the so-called pure forms of intuition of space and time.

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4. One issue that remains unclear to me is the question of why Kant limits managing the contingency of natural objects to organisms alone. As I understand it, mechanically explicable objects too are contingent in relation to the universal concepts by which our understanding orders our experience. The commentators I have found most cogent agree that the mechanical laws of nature do not simply follow from the conceptual structure of our mind. We cannot derive the laws of physics or the properties of matter simply by thinking about matter as such; we need to open our eyes (and ears) and look (and listen). In other words, it is not merely a blade of grass but also a rock whose form is not derivable from a priori concepts. Yet the contingency of objects for which we have (or can have) a full mechanical explanation does not concern Kant here. Why? Is it simply because organisms stand at the focus of his attention? Perhaps, but there may also be a more substantial reason. Mechanically explicable objects, while contingent in relation to our a priori concepts, are by Kant’s account not contingent in relation to the fundamental laws of matter. Because mechanism relies on a type of causality “for which an understanding does not have to be exclusively assumed as a cause” (§77, 406), because, that is, it is a causality in nature rather than in a mind, it is valid not merely for us, but for any observer capable of making sense of causality. Thus the contingency of such objects in relation to a priori concepts would be controlled by their necessity in relation to objectively valid, albeit a posteriori laws. It seems the reason organisms require special philosophical attention is that no objective law that would turn their contingency into necessity offers itself to us. 5. We may be led to think that this failure to observe is limited to natural ends as intentional, that is, that without the further qualification of intentionality natural ends would be observable. But that is not so, since in Kant’s conception the very concept of an end entails intention. Thus: “It is in fact indispensable for us to subject nature to the concept of an intention if we would even merely conduct research among its orga nized products by means of continued observation” (§75, 398). 6. Béatrice Longuenesse has laid bare the complexity in the concept of judgment and shown that reflective judgment is involved in processes that Kant ascribes exclusively to determining judgment. Even the simplest “application” of universal concepts, she shows, can never involve determining judgment alone. See her Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Charles T. Wolfe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 164–165. 7. I have benefited from Hannah Ginsborg’s interpretation of the normative force of teleological judgment in her chapter “Kant on Understanding Organisms as Natural Purposes,” in Kant and the Sciences, ed. Eric Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 248–253. 8. Michael Thompson has keen things to say about the “ought” of life forms, without overt reference to Kant, a good deal of which I found in almost equal mea-

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sure stimulating and perplexing. See his Life and Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 74–75. 9. LIFE

1. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant introduces a distinction between Erkenntnis and Wissen, which the Cambridge edition of his works consistently renders as “cognition” and “knowledge,” a distinction I do not mean to blur here. Yet that distinction carries particular force in the context of the argument of the Critique of Pure Reason. The term cognition of nature, technical and stilted as it sounds, may be taken by the non-Kantian reader more narrowly than it should, for Naturerkenntnis signifies the full-fledged way we know things in nature, nothing less. 2. Certainly the third Critique offers no such argument. Perhaps Kant expects us to look elsewhere. If so, there are two main candidates, the Critique of Pure Reason and the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. At times, Kant seems to suggest in the third Critique that the mechanical laws of nature work hand in glove with the concepts of human understanding (§64, 369–370), which sounds as though the application of the concepts of the understanding to sense data, the synthetic operation that stands at the center of the Critique of Pure Reason, yields a world ordered by “the mechanism of nature.” But I am persuaded by readings of the first Critique that dispute this idea and argue that the concepts of the understanding prescribe some lawfulness, not necessarily mechanical lawfulness; see, for example, Henry Allison, “Kant’s Antinomy of Teleological Judgment,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 30 (1991): S25– S42. The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, published in 1786, proves somewhat more helpful in our context. “What can be called proper science [eigentliche Wissenschaft] is only that whose certainty is apodictic,” Kant maintains there (4: 468). Th is apodictic quality of natu ral science arises “only in the case the fundamental natural laws [of science] are cognized a priori” (ibid.), that is, when they are founded on the concepts of human understanding themselves. Because these concepts and mathematics are intertwined at the deepest level, for Kant this characterization of proper science simply entails the insight that “in any special doctrine of nature there can be only as much proper science as there is mathematics therein” (4: 470). Th is prompts him to dispatch chemistry and psychology from the circle of “proper science” (4: 471). Tellingly, the study of organisms merits no mention at all, though we can surmise that it would have suffered a similar fate, at best. By the time Kant concludes his preface, “natural science” has shrunk to physics, in fact to the part of physics concerned with the motion of bodies. Still, nothing in Kant’s reasoning shows that mechanistic principles alone are fit for mathematical description; it is not clear why some other kind of principle might not also fulfi ll the requirement of “proper science.” 3. Kant’s Blumenbachian terminology is not quite clean. While in the passage I just quoted, “formative power,” bildende Kraft, distinguishes organisms from mere

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machines, in a later passage, in which he doffs his hat to “Privy Councilor Blumenbach,” Kant confusingly assigns the term “formative power,” Bildungskraft, to the “merely mechanical” working of nature and identifies the principle underlying the self-organizing capacity we discern in organisms as the “formative drive,” Bildungstrieb, Blumenbach’s term (§81, 424). This may just be an instance of untidiness, but it may also be more: the fact that Bildungskraft names now teleology, now mechanism, may indicate a blurring of conceptual boundaries along two axes. One axis is the one that is at issue here, namely, the boundary between teleology as a feature of the world and teleology as a feature of the peculiar human mind. In non-Kantian terms, it is the question of whether purposiveness has an ontological or an epistemological status. The other boundary whose blurring the confusion around the term “formative power” may herald is the one between organized and nonorganized beings, a boundary that sustains the entire enterprise of the “Critique of Teleological Judgment” and on which Kant therefore keeps insisting. As I try to show in my discussion of crystals below, the distinction between the two kinds of beings is not as evident as one might think, not even in Kant’s own account. 4. For an instructive analysis of this twofold distinction and its relationship with the question of mechanical explanation, see Hannah Ginsborg, “Two Kinds of Mechanical Inexplicability in Kant and Aristotle,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 42, no. 1 (2004): 33–65. 5. Contrary to what we may suppose, the theory of evolution by natural selection has by no means dispensed with teleological thinking in the sense just developed, namely, as an epistemological requirement for research. The idea lurks in a number of concepts that are crucial to the Darwinian account, concepts such as function, design, and above all adaptation. In effect, anytime we ask why, rather than how, something in organic nature is the case (Why do beavers build dams? Why do bees perform a dance?), the answer involves teleological concepts. Unlike most biologists, philosophers of biology tend to be clear about this issue. See, for example, Robert Brandon, “Biological Explanation: Questions and Explanations,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 12, no. 2 (1981): 91–105; Marc Bekoff and Colin Allen, “Teleology, Function, Design and the Evolution of Animal Behaviour,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 10, no. 6 (1995): 253–255. For multiple perspectives on this issue (including Brandon’s paper), see the collection Colin Allen, Marc Bekoff, and George Lauder, eds., Nature’s Purposes: Analyses of Design and Function in Biology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 6. My use of the phrase “biological understanding” calls forth a question that I raise here without being able to offer an answer: does understanding differ from explanation? When Kant says that “no human reason . . . can ever hope to understand the generation of even a little blade of grass,” is this distinct from explaining the generation of organisms? I have used explain and understand— erklären and verstehen— more or less interchangeably, as does Kant in much of the third Critique. He calls

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accounts based on mechanical and teleological principles “kinds of explanation” (Erklärungsarten, §78, 412), and declares at one point that there are objects— organisms— “that are explicable [erklärbar] only in accordance with natural laws that we can think only under the idea of ends as a principle, and which are even internally cognizable [erkennbar], as far as their inner form is concerned, only this way” (§68, 383). There is a temptation to read back into Kant a distinction first made, to my knowledge, by the historian Johann Gustav Droysen in his Grundriss der Historik (Jena: Frommann, 1858) and later developed by the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey in several of his writings, among them Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (Berlin: Verlag der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1910; The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002]). According to this methodological distinction, explanation, focused on relationships of cause and effect, is the task of the natural sciences, while understanding, relying on notions of goals and purposes, guides historical research in the human sciences. It is true that the third Critique provides little warrant for the idea that Kant may have anticipated such a distinction, certainly not as it concerns historiography. Still, the text has a tendency to associate the use of teleology with understanding, a tendency linked, I think, to Kant’s repeated reference to what lies inside (“internally cognizable, as far as their inner form is concerned”). It suggest that organisms, while finally remaining inexplicable to us, may be understandable in their structure and behavior if we recognize, or at least assume, that purposes propel them toward goals. 7. This leads to fundamental questions for biology. For example, can there be, pace Kant, a point from which one may incontestably adjudicate whether, say, the gene, the individual organism, or the species makes for the proper object of biological study? Can these multiple and multiplying “life sciences”—biochemistry, genetics, molecular biology, cell biology, physiology, integrative biology, ethology, population biology, ecology, and so on—be understood to belong to the same intellectual enterprise, in the sense that the links between them can be fully determined by means of concepts? Can biologists aspire to a unified theory of life the way physicists feel called upon to work toward a unified theory of matter? 8. Kant makes similar use of the snowflake, which, as he recognizes, results from crystallization (for example, 21: 279) and to which Kepler had already called attention as an exemplar of design and purpose in his 1611 essay The Six- Cornered Snowfl ake (trans. John Nims, Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2010), when, in The Only Possible Argument, he lavishes admiration on the “prettiness and proportion,” which surpass “what art can produce.” “And yet,” Kant adds, “it has not occurred to anyone to derive it from a special snow seed and contrive an artificial order of nature; rather one considers it a side effect of more general laws, which contain at the same time under themselves the formation of this product with necessary unity” (2: 114).

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9. For a survey of the “peculiar longing to ascribe to crystals and organisms identical living, directive forces” starting with Maupertuis and reaching into nineteenthcentury biology, see J. Lorch, “The Charisma of Crystals in Biology,” in The Interaction between Science and Philosophy, ed. Yehuda Elkana (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1974), 451. Another overview, especially of the English context, is provided by Alan T. McKenzie and Ann T. McKenzie, “ ‘Nature Doth Everywhere Geometrize’: Crystals, Crystallization, and Crystallography in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 27 (1998): 209–236. 10. Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5. 11. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Knopf, 1971), 6. 12. François Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, trans. Betty Spillmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 281. Some scientists go further and propose actual crystals as the likely source of abiogenesis, for example, A. G. CairnsSmith, who has identified clay crystals this way, a claim by no means universally accepted among scientists; see his Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), esp. chaps. 9–13. 13. I do not mean to make Kant into a Darwinian avant la lettre. He is firmly committed to the idea that species, once brought forth by “the maternal womb of the earth,” “will degenerate no further” (§80, 419); species, that is, do not evolve. But his allegiance to this idea is entirely empirical. “A priori, in the judgment of mere reason,” he argues, “there is no contradiction” in the idea of “generatio univoca,” that is the idea that “something organic would be generated out of something else that is also organic, even though there would be a specific difference between these kinds of beings, e.g., as when certain aquatic animals are gradually transformed into amphibians and these, after some generations, into land animals.” Although reason permits the idea of new species arising from old, “experience gives no example of it” (§80, 419n). 14. Kant makes something like this distinction in The Only Possible Argument, where he faults “physico-theology,” which explains all order in nature with the idea of purposes proffered by a wise God, for confining God to the role of a craftsman (Werkmeister) artfully assembling the world rather than that of a creator (Schöpfer) bringing forth the very matter of the world (2: 122–123). 15. It is also one of the things that makes reading Kant into an adventure of reading: he will spend a dozen or more pages—as many as it takes—in a claustrophobic effort at distinguishing, developing, and evaluating concepts with the utmost care, and then, without warning, he suddenly opens his prose to a vast philosophical vista, inducing a vertigo of ideas in his readers. Here he misrecognizes his own achievement, for this “daring of adventure” is not that of reason alone, but also of the philosophical imagination.

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16. Jacob acknowledges the operational, or discourse-specific, nature of the distinction between the living and nonliving when he declares: “For the biologist, the living begins only with what was able to constitute a genetic programme. . . . For the chemist, in contrast, it is somewhat arbitrary to make a demarcation where there can only be continuity” (Logic of Life, 304). For the biologist, for the chemist—with this attribution, Jacob effectively registers that a neutral way of making the distinction between living and nonliving, one that would not be for somebody, is not possible. We could multiply the positions—for the theologian, for the alchemist, for the legislator, for the child, and so on— but that would never yield, through addition or synthesis or some other integrative procedure, a view of the distinction as such. 17. John Zammito, “Teleology Then and Now: The Question of Kant’s Relevance for Contemporary Controversies over Function in Biology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37, no. 4 (December 2006): 762. The difference between the organic and the living in Kant’s writings is worked out forcefully, if not always clearly, by Reinhard Löw, Philosophie des Lebendigen: Der Begriff des Organischen bei Kant, sein Grund und seine Aktualität (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980). It is a difference many readers notice long enough to make it disappear. Thus Rachel Zuckert first simply asserts that the relationship between organisms and life is analogical according to Kant, where his circumspect prose suggests precisely the limit of such an analogy, and then goes on to claim that Kant’s use of a tree as an example of an orga nized being “suggests— though Kant does not so claim—that with the concept of natural purpose Kant articulates a more inclusive (and perhaps less metaphysically problematic) conception of life” (Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 100n20). I would counter that by making the concept of life “more inclusive”—by simply equating the extension of “organic” and “living”— one has not diminished the philosophical strangeness embedded in the idea of life. 18. More definitions of the concept of life in a similar vein plucked from different parts of Kant’s work can be found in Löw, Philosophie des Lebendigen, 161–164, and 248n149. 19. For example: “An organic (articulated) body is that which in each of its parts necessarily refers with its moving force to the whole [and] to each part in its composition. / The productive force of this unity is life. / This principle of life can be referred a priori from plants to animals in their reciprocal need and to their relation to the whole of both together and to the whole of our world” (Opus postumum, 21: 211). Or: “One can call such a force the life force (Lebenskraft) . . . of matter. The ones that preserve their species, i.e., reproduce the bodies of the vegetable and animal kingdoms are of this kind” (Opus postumum, 22: 272). But to see how vexed the relationship of the organic is to the living, we need merely to look at the following juxtaposition.

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First a seemingly unambiguous statement asserting the logical interchangeability of “organic” and “living”: “That an organic body is animate [belebt, ‘alive’] is an identical proposition” (21: 66). Yet on the very same sheet of the Opus postumum, Kant notes: “A living body is orga nized; but not vice-versa. Because vis locomotiva belongs to life too, not merely interne motiva” (21: 65). 20. In fact, even when we do have access to the general term, the use of our judgment is by no means free of analogical leaps and purely mechanical, as Kant implies when discussing determining judgment. We must still harness our capacity for seeing resemblances when we wish to answer the question of whether, say, a three-wheeled motor scooter is a kind motorcycle or a kind of car. I understand this to be the force of Béatrice Longuenesse’s argument to which I referred in Chapter 8. See her Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Charles T. Wolfe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 164–165. It is also one of the great preoccupations of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. 21. What I say in this paragraph is indebted to Gerhard Lehmann, Kants Nachlasswerk und die Kritik der Urteilskraft (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1939); Löw, Philosophie des Lebendigen.

Acknowledgments

Chapter 6 of the book is a version of “A Surfeit in Thinking: Kant’s Aesthetic Ideas,” published in the Yearbook of Comparative Literature 57 (2013): 55–77. I am grateful to Adam Bresnick, Maximilian Chaoulideer, Jonathan Elmer, Andrew H. Miller, Eyal Peretz, and Dieter Thomä, who read chapters of the book and gave me valuable feedback. They also spent many hours in conversation with me about the Critique of Judgment. I feel lucky to have such intellectually generous friends. Peter Fenves’s comments allowed me to rethink the argument in Chapter 9. Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman helped fine-tune the preface. I also thank Amanda Peery of Harvard University Press and the Press’s three reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. Many of the ideas I develop here began to take shape in the countless discussions I had with friends and colleagues during my stay at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2008–2009. A fellowship from the College Arts & Humanities Institute at Indiana University during spring 2015 allowed me to complete the book. I am grateful to both institutions for their generosity. The seed of this book was planted years ago when my friend Barry Mazur took the risk of agreeing to teach a graduate seminar on the Critique of Judgment with me. Together, we have been exploring this text ever since. He has done more to help this book see the light of day than he may realize. Whenever I felt stuck in writing, I imagined I was writing Barry a letter. The knots into which my thoughts and sentences had tied themselves began to dissolve, as if by magic. Every writer should have a Barry.

Index

abiogenesis, 220 actuality, 230–233 Adams, John Luther, 138 Adorno, Theodor, 25, 79, 125, 136, 195–196 aesthetic environmentalism, 81 aesthetic experience: art as central to, 143–148, 182; communicability of, 52–56; conditions of possibility for, 7–8; content of, 184–185; creativity of, 20–21; defined, 270n8; distinctness of, 9–10, 15–16, 42, 53, 60, 144; essence of, 14; as excess of thinking, 168; happiness not relevant to, 26–27, 273n21; health in relation to, 6; ideological aims imputed to, 12, 14, 26, 99–100, 104–106, 125, 281n7, 284n10; imagination’s role in, 10–11, 15; impersonality of, 21–22; irreducibility of, 151–152; life in relation to, 265–267; location of, 188–192; making homologous with, 142–148, 152, 160–161; morality in relation to, 30, 41, 76–79, 91–92, 96, 97–101; nature claimed to be central to, 144; nature in

relation to, 97–101, 104–107; openness of, 101–104, 141–142, 147, 159; paradox of, 44–45, 56; play as factor in, 123; plea sure as essential to, 3–4; purity of, 82, 94; role of interpretation in, 105; role of judgment in, 270n8; self-perpetuating character of, 36–38; significance of, for human life, 97; subjectivity of, 7–8, 15, 17; thinking involved in, 168, 166–168, 183, 186–187, 193, 197; transcendental structure of, 94; unintentional character of, 148 aesthetic ideas, 173–201; defined, 84, 158–159, 174; and excess of beauty, 95; exemplarity and, 158; expression of, 188–192; ideas (concepts of reason) vs., 175; interpretation and, 103–104; openness of, 84, 103, 185; as puzzling concept, 174; and sense, 185–188; as sensible beyond limits of experience, 192–193; significance of, in Critique of Judgment, 174; spirit as capacity for presentation of, 176; superabundance of

 aesthetic ideas (continued ) thinking occasioned by, 183, 186–187, 193; and the unnameable, 190–191, 196–197 aesthetic judgment: as an act, 20; autonomy of, 41, 73; normative force of, 8, 50–55, 64–67; plea sure in relation to, 58–59; reflective nature of, 151; role of, in aesthetic experience, 270n8; teleological judgment compared to, 99–101; universality of, xv, 20, 21–22, 27, 43, 56 aesthetic plea sure: contrasted to plea sure in the agreeable and the good, 31–34; freedom of, 33–34; as indifferent to existence, 35–41; reflective nature of, 62; universality of, 62 aesthetic theory, criticism of Kant’s, 12, 25–26 aggregates, 215, 225–226, 249–250, 252 agreeable, the: beauty in relation to, 5–6, 11, 21–22, 24–25, 30; pleasures associated with, 9 Anthropolog y from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant), 5–6, 131, 140, 177–178 anti-art, 13 antinomy concerning causation in nature, 239–244, 293n1 Arendt, Hannah, 124, 136 Aristotle, 119, 121–122, 136, 138, 163, 205, 206, 222, 241 art: autonomy of, 127–131, 136, 139, 154; beauty experienced in, 79–80, 106–107, 137–138, 181–182; craft in relation to, 120–126, 153, 165; distinctive character of, 114–115, 141–142, 153–154; freedom in relation to, 118–120, 127–128, 146–147; knowledge appropriate to, 121; life compared to, 283n5; nature in relation to, 79–80, 96, 118–121, 137–139, 143–146, 181–182, 208–209, 214–216, 218–221; not a mere vehicle for expression, 192–195; philosophy not adequate to explain, 171–172; as play, 122–124,

INDEX

132–135; role of, in Kant’s aesthetics, 113–114; rules in, 123–124, 151–152, 159–160; science in relation to, 120–121, 153; successful, 132–133, 184; temporality of, 165; theory of, 279n1; utility of, 124–126, 136. See also making artificiality, 214 “as if ”/“as it were” grammatical constructions, 84, 96, 98, 104, 106, 143, 147, 218–219, 223, 234–236, 252 attunement. See Stimmung autonomy: of aesthetic judgment, 41; of art, 127–131, 136, 139, 154 autopoiesis, 223, 292n16 Bacon, Francis, 210 Basinski, William, Disintegration Loops, 40 Batteux, Charles, 190 Baumgarten, Alexander, 15, 155, 285n11 beauty: the agreeable in relation to, 5–6, 11, 21–22, 24–25, 30; artistic, 79–80, 106–107, 137–138, 181–182; excessive character of, 83–84, 95; expressions of, 19–21; feeling in relation to, 6–7; goodness in relation to, 30–31, 77–78, 91; historical schemas or concepts of, 53; a lack in experience of, 175–176, 178–181; modern connotations of, 12; natural, 79–81, 91, 106–107, 137–138, 142, 181–182; plea sure associated with, 9–10, 13; spirit in relation to, 175–176, 178–181; subjective conditions of, 6–7; the sublime in relation to, 92–95; universality of, 20; various conceptions of, 93–94 Bergson, Henri, 226 biology, 203, 207–208, 223, 246, 249–250, 258, 297n7. See also organisms Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 226, 245, 247, 295n3 Bodmer, Johann Jakob, 285n12 body, its role in experience of the world, 262–265

INDEX

Bourdieu, Pierre, 125, 274n1 Breitinger, Johann Jakob, 285n12 Brillo boxes (Warhol), 126, 139 bringing forth. See making Burke, Edmund, 47 business, 129–130, 132–134 Camper, Petrus, 120–126 Caravaggio: The Calling of St. Matthew, 36–39; The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, 274n25 causation: mechanical vs. teleological, 203–211, 227–229, 239–244, 247–248; reciprocal, 217–219; technique and, 211–214 chance, 99, 107, 108, 152, 205, 212. See also serendipity Chauvet cave paintings, 40 choice, 32, 118–120, 123, 146–147, 166. See also will ciphers, beauty appears as, 102–104 claim, aesthetic judgment as, 50–52 coercion. See force/coercion cognition, 15, 19, 60–61, 231 communicability: of aesthetic experience, 52–56, 58–59, 61–62; Stimme/Stimmung and, 63–64; universality and, 54–56, 58–59, 61–62 community, 42–75; communicability and, 52–56; force and, 64–66; humanity as norm, 59–62; Hume’s concept of taste and, 44–48; objects of aesthetic apprehension as occasion for, 66; pedagogy and, 72–75; Stimme/Stimmung and, 63–64; universality and, 43, 56–59 compensation, 128 concepts: not adequate to capture aesthetic experience, 15–16, 18–19, 21, 30, 55–56, 59–60, 62, 116–117; of reason (i.e., ideas), 173, 174; thinking undertaken without, 166–168; of understanding, 173, 174 conditions of possibility, 7–8 confusion, 60–61

 contingency, 71, 211–214, 231–235 copies, 136–139. See also imitation craft, 120–126, 165; art in relation to, 153 creativity: in aesthetic experience, 20–21; Kant’s philosophy of art chiefly concerned with, 116; making of aesthetic experience as, 74; mystery of, 196; novelty as characteristic of, 116, 196; roles of spirit and taste in, 177; of taste, 13 critical philosophy, 7, 241, 293n1 criticism. See interpretation Critique of Judgment (Kant): introductions to, 3; poetic quality of, 107–109; reading and thinking with, xiii–xv Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), 87, 173, 259 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 86, 87, 98, 173, 230, 240, 251, 264, 295n2 crystals, 252–257 Danto, Arthur, 139 De Man, Paul, 12, 100–102, 105 demand, as aspect of aesthetic judgment, 28, 48, 50–55, 59–62, 64, 67 Derrida, Jacques, 141, 284n10 Descartes, René, 220, 257 desire, 31–32, 259 determinate/external standards: antithetical to art and aesthetic experience, 52–53, 127–133, 136, 139, 154; play not judged by, 132–133 determining judgment, 236 Diderot, Denis, 154 difference, and genius, 154, 164–165 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 297n6 disgust, 180–181 disinterestedness: aesthetic experience and, 22–30, 77–82; concerning existence, 35–41; interest linked to, 78–79; morality and, 78, 90–91; nature and, 92; universality and, 57 Dreams of a Spirit- Seer (Kant), 263 drinking. See eating and drinking

 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 297n6 Dryden, John, 154 Duchamp, Marcel, Fountain, 13 Earth, as organism, 292n17 eating and drinking, 9, 272–273n17. See also hunger ecstasy, 83–84, 93, 106 emergence, 226 emotion, as plea sure, 5 empiricism: and aesthetic judgment, 53; and contemplation of beauty, 7 emulation, 74, 164 epigenesis, 246–247 evolution, 296n5 evolutionary biology, 207 examples, 68–70, 274n22 exemplarity, 68, 70–71, 73–75, 157–160 existence: indifference to, 35–41; of natural objects, 81–82 experience, 192–193, 270n8 experimentation, 16, 18 explanation, 296n6 expression, 188–192 external standards. See determinate/external standards falling, 34–35, 148 favor, 33–35, 141, 148, 151 feeling: aesthetic experience not determined by content of, 4, 11; beauty in relation to, 6–7; expression in relation to, 191–192 flowers/wild flowers, 9, 19, 81, 82, 85, 90, 93–95, 100, 144–145, 252 foliage, 145 food. See eating and drinking; hunger force/coercion, 8, 28, 32, 50–55, 64–66, 128–130 forgery, 136–142 form, 209–210 formalism, 97, 100, 115, 134, 146–147, 154–155, 169 Frederick II of Prussia, 184, 187

INDEX

freedom: in aesthetic experience, xv, 13, 17–18, 27, 31–35; art in relation to, 118–120, 127–128, 146–147; character of, 27, 31; nature in relation to, 85–90; necessity in relation to, 99; normative character of, 88–89; in play, 122–124; plea sure in relation to, 31–34; resulting from a disinterested attitude, 25, 27, 39; volatility of, 18 free play. See play Friedlander, Eli, 20, 55 Friedrich, Caspar David, 88 functional biology, 207 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 60, 106, 169 Galileo Galilei, 210 genius, 149–172; contemporary accounts of, 284n9; criticisms of concept of, 149; defining, 150, 154–155; and difference, 154, 164–165; and exemplarity, 157–160; and expression, 189–191; formalist conceptions of, 154–155, 169; knowledge in relation to, 165–166; and meaning, 159; nature in relation to, 284n10; as neither imitation nor inspiration, 162–164; as neither natural nor supernatural, 154–155; as neither subjective nor objective, 155; opacity of, 164–170; and originality, 155–156; production/ transmission of, 161–164; psychological conceptions of, 154–155; rules brought forth by, 150–152, 157, 159–161, 163; in science and philosophy, 286n14; and spirit, 169–171, 190–191; and subjectivity, 191–192; taste in relation to, 168–169 God, 88, 97, 173, 175, 200–201, 214, 216, 221, 230–231, 234, 290n7, 292n13, 298n14 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xiv, 109; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 108–109 goodness, 76–109; beauty in relation to, 30, 77–78, 91; disinterestedness and, 90–91;

INDEX

freedom in relation to, 31–32; plea sure gained from, 31–32 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 285n12 Hamann, Johann Georg, 286n17 happiness: not applicable to aesthetic experience, 26–27, 273n21; one’s private good linked to, 24–26 health, 6 Hegel, G. W. F., 79–80, 106, 167, 194–195 Heidegger, Martin, 291n12 Heine, Heinrich, 107 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 286n17 hermeneutics, 106 heteronomy, art not characterized by, 127–131 hexagon example, 204–210 holism, 225 Horace, 136 humanity, as norm, 59–62 Hume, David: on beauty, 7; on interest as incompatible with taste, 24; on paradox of aesthetic experience, 44–48; on taste, 44–48 hunger, 24, 32, 36, 37. See also eating and drinking Hutcheson, Francis, 23–24, 272n15 ideas, Kantian conception of, 173–175. See also aesthetic ideas ideology, aesthetics as, 12, 14, 26, 99–100, 104–106, 125 imagination, 10–11, 15, 187, 269–270n3 imitation, 73–74, 119, 121, 156, 162–164, 188–189. See also copies; mimesis impersonality, 21–22, 28 indifference, 23, 35–41 innovation, 126 inspiration, 162–164 instinct, 166 intellectual interest: in beauty of nature, 80–81, 95, 102–103, 106, 137, 142–143, 235; in correspondence of

 plea sure with nature, 85, 235; in disinterest, 77 intelligent design, 240, 293n2 intention, 18, 147, 171, 294n5 interest: absence of, from aesthetic experience, 22–28; disinterestedness as object of, 78; existence as aspect of, 35–36; in moral vs. aesthetic experience, 77–82; in natural beauty, 79–82; private, 22–28; public, 29–30; in relation to aesthetic experience, 79–80. See also intellectual interest interpretation, 102–106, 183–185 intuition, 229–231, 293n3 invention, 10–11, 270n3. See also making invisible hand, 225–226 Jacob, François, 253, 257, 299n16 Jonas, Hans, 210–211 Jonson, Ben, 154 judgment: antinomy concerning causation in nature, 227–229; defined, 69; failure of, when faced with organisms, 260–261; guidance for, 68–69; heautonomy of, 154, 240, 251; making in relation to, 115; mediating character of, 85–86; nature and freedom mediated by, 86–87; sublime of, 261. See also aesthetic judgment; reflective judgment Kafka, Franz, 26, 126, 158 Kern, Andrea, 186 knowledge: appropriate to art, 121; of nature, 262–265; in relation to genius, 165–166 Kulenkampff, Jens, 149, 162 Lascaux cave paintings, 40 lawfulness: in aesthetic experience, 270n3; free, 65. See also purposiveness without purpose; rules/laws laws. See rules/laws learning. See practice and learning

 Lebrun, Gérard, 92 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 87 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 65 life, 242–267; aesthetic experience in relation to, 265–267; ambiguity of, 251–257; analogue of, 258–259; art compared to, 283n5; defined, 259; feeling of, 265–266; humans’ “inside” knowledge of, 262–265; inscrutability of organisms, 257–259, 261–262; irreducibility of, 210–211; mechanical vs. teleological perspectives on, 243–251; nonlife vs., 210, 257, 299n16; organism in relation to, 259–260, 299n17; plea sure in relation to, 4–6; as source of analogy, 261–265. See also organisms lingering, 32, 36 Löw, Reinhard, 299n17 Luhmann, Niklas, 223–224 madness, 60–61 making, 113–148; aesthetic experience homologous with, 142–148, 152, 160–161; copying vs., 136–139; Heidegger on, 291n12; judgment in relation to, 115; mistaken applications of, to aesthetic experience, 33, 35; nature as form of, 107, 118–120, 203–226; organisms’ self-organization as a form of, 220–226; as play, 122–124; plea sure as outcome of, 32–33; role of, in aesthetic experience, 10–11, 33, 74; significance of, in experience of art, 115–124; technique in relation to, 113, 125–126, 153; through freedom, 118–120, 123, 131, 146–147. See also art Marxism, 125 Maturana, Humberto, 223 meaning. See sense and meaning mechanical causation, 203–211, 213–214, 227–229, 239–244, 247–248, 290n4, 294n4 Meier, Georg Friedrich, 285n11

INDEX

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 161, 191–192 Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Kant), 295n2 Metaphysics of Morals, The (Kant), 83, 128 mimesis, 119, 156, 285n12. See also imitation mind, 227–241; and actuality/possibility, 230–232; and antinomy concerning nature, 227–229, 239–244; and contingency/lawfulness, 233–235; as part of world, 262–263; play of the capacities of, 60–61; and reflective judgment, 235–239. See also thinking, in aesthetic experience Molière, 149 money, 124, 127–130 Monod, Jacques, 253 mood. See Stimmung morality: actuality and possibility concerning, 231–232; aesthetic experience in relation to, 30, 41, 76–79, 91–92, 96, 97–101; and disinterestedness, 90–91; exemplarity in, 70; and natural beauty, 79–81, 91–92; nature in relation to, 86–87, 90–91; sublime in relation to, 92; universality of, 91 music, 133, 177–178 natural selection, 296n5 nature: aesthetic experience in relation to, 97–101, 104–107; antinomy concerning, 227–229, 239–244; art in relation to, 79–80, 96, 118–121, 137–139, 143–146, 181–182, 208–209, 214–216, 218–221; beauty experienced in, 79–81, 106–107, 137–138, 142, 181–182; causation in, 203–211, 213–214; comprehension of, 96–97, 258; and contingency, 211–214; and disinterestedness, 92; freedom in relation to, 85–90; genius in relation to, 284n10; humans as part of, 262–263; interpretation of, 103–105; making as performed by, 107, 118–120, 203–226;

INDEX

moral interest in the beauty of, 79–81, 91–92; morality in relation to, 86–87, 90–91; organisms and, 203–226; plea sure in relation to, 85; and reciprocity, 217–221; reflective judgment and, 235–239; rules/ laws of, 203–205, 209–210, 236–237; and self-organization, 221–226; sublime in relation to, 92; as technical product, 214–216, 220–221, 247–248, 253–254, 291n8; understanding of, 203, 209 necessity: in aesthetic experience, 67–68, 71, 157, 237; contingency in relation to, 212–213, 231, 233–234; freedom in relation to, 99; in nature, 118, 205, 212–213, 215 Nietz sche, Friedrich, 162, 167, 240 nightingale, 104, 107, 137–138 noble contagion, 162 nonlife, 210, 299n16 nonsense. See original nonsense norms: aesthetic, 53–55, 64–67; exercised in judgment, 238–239; of nature, 87, 90, 238–239; of reason, 87, 90 novelty/strangeness, in aesthetic experience, 13, 16, 116, 155–156, 196 objects: indifference to, 35–41; role of, in aesthetic experience, 4, 7–11, 14–16, 20–21, 25, 27–28, 33, 35–41, 49, 66–67, 182; role of, in desire, 25; singularity of, 67 Ogilby, John, 45 Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God, The (Kant), 211, 214, 252 ontogenesis, 220 Opus postumum (Kant), 224, 260, 263–265, 291n10, 292n15, 292n16 organisms, 203–226; aggregates compared to, 249–250; ambiguity of, 251–257; artifacts compared to, 221–222, 248–249; causation and, 205–211; and

 contingency, 211–214; Earth and space as, 292n17; inscrutability of, 257–259, 261–262; irreducibility of, 204; knowledge of, 257–259, 262–265; life in relation to, 259–260, 299n17; machines in relation to, 220, 291n10, 292n15; and reciprocity, 217–221, 224; self-organizing character of, 221–226; as technical products, 214–216; two perspectives on, 246–251. See also life originality, 155–156 original nonsense, 132–133, 156, 158 original orga nization, 247–248 particularity, 43–44, 157, 232, 237–238. See also singularity part-whole relationship, 206, 215, 218, 222–225 passivity, in relation to aesthetic experience, 10, 17, 32–34 payment, antithetical to art, 124, 127–130, 140 pedagogy, 72–75, 161–164 personal self: happiness as satisfaction of, 24–26; impersonality in contrast to, 21–22, 28; transcendence (going beyond) of, in aesthetic experience, 13, 17, 28. See also private interest; subjectivity philosophy: art not explicable by, 171–172, 185; genius in, 286n14; incompleteness of, 185 phylogenesis, 291n11 Plato, 19, 119, 162–164; Ion, 116, 121, 163, 166, 287n21; Republic, 39, 287n21 play: art as, 122–124, 132–135; business in relation to, 133–134; of capacities of mind, 60–61; defined as free making, 33; freedom characteristic of, 122–124; Kant’s conception of, 131–132; in making and experiencing art, 122–123, 127; purpose of, 61 plea sure, 3–41; active vs. passive, 32; aesthetic judgment in relation to, 58–59;

 plea sure (continued ) associated with beauty, 9–10, 13; associated with the agreeable, 9; emotion as, 5; as essential element of aesthetic experience, 3–4; falling as aspect of, 34–35; and the feeling of life, 265–266; freedom in relation to, 31–34; life in relation to, 4–6; modern connotations of, 12; nature in relation to, 85; three forms of, 31–34. See also aesthetic plea sure poetry, 10–11, 20–21, 21, 133–134, 177–178 politics, 275n7 Pollock, Jackson, 158 possibility, 230–233 practice and learning, 72–75 preformationism, 246–247 private interest, 22–28. See also personal self production. See making promises, not characteristic of art, 140–141 psychoanalysis, 167 public interest, 29–30 purity, of aesthetic experience, 82, 94 purpose, mind’s projection onto nature of, 96–97, 100, 227, 229, 232, 235–236, 238, 244–246 purposiveness without purpose, 61, 100, 101, 133, 134. See also lawfulness Rancière, Jacques, 167 rationality, 121, 163–164 reason, 86, 89, 173 reciprocity, 217–221, 224 Reflections on Metaphysics (Kant), 266 reflective judgment, 151, 232, 235–239, 250, 260–261 remuneration, 127–130 representation, 4–5 Romanticism, 125, 139, 153, 177 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 29, 77, 80, 83, 154 rules/laws: contingency and, 211–214, 233–235; examples and, 68–71; of nature, 203–205, 209–210, 236–237; in

INDEX

relation to art and aesthetic experience, 16–18, 71, 123–124, 151–152, 159–160; rule-boundedness without, 71; succession and, 73–74; teleological judgment and, 237–238. See also lawfulness Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 153 Scheer, Brigitte, 193 Schiller, Friedrich, 60, 74–75, 99, 101–102; On the Aesthetic Education of Human Beings, 131–132 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 102 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 167 Schrödinger, Erwin, 253, 257 science: art in relation to, 120–121, 153; defining, 295n2; genius in, 286n14; and mechanical causation, 203–211, 243–244; not adequate to elucidate aesthetic experience, 14, 117; teleology in relation to, 244–246, 255 self. See personal self self-interest. See private interest self-organization, 221–226, 258, 260 sensation, 15, 230 sense and meaning, 116, 134–135, 185–188; in art, 156–159. See also original nonsense senses, 29–30, 272–273n17 sensibility, pushed beyond limits of experience in art, 192–193 sensible, the, 86 serendipity, 16–17, 37, 67. See also chance sexual lust, 83–84 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley- Cooper, Third Earl of, 23–24, 272n15 Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, 187–188 singularity, xv, 44, 48, 75. See also particularity Smith, Adam, 225 Socrates, 116 Sontag, Susan, 159 Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 187–188 spirit: as animating principle, 177, 178; beauty in relation to, 175–176, 178–181;



INDEX

as capacity for presentation of aesthetic ideas, 176; genius and, 169–171, 190–191; in Hegel’s philosophy of art, 194–195; taste in relation to, 176 standards: determinate/external, 52–53, 127–133, 136, 139, 154; of taste, 44–45, 48–49 Staten, Henry, 125–126, 153 Stimme (voice), 63–64, 275n7, 276n12 Stimmung (mood, attunement), 63–64, 87, 91, 276n12 subjectivity: of aesthetic experience, 7–8, 15, 17; conditions of beauty located in, 6–7; and expression, 191–192; genius and, 191–192; impersonality in relation to, 21–22; universality in relation to, 44, 48, 64. See also personal self sublime, 82, 92–95, 261 success, determination of artistic, 132–133, 184 succession, in artistic matters, 73–74 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 284n9 supersensible, the, 86 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 116 sympathy, social formation through, 65 system, nature’s products as, 215, 225–226, 249–250, 252 taste (mind): creative essence of, 13; defined, 11; genius in relation to, 168–169; Hume on, 44–48; Kant’s vs. Hume’s conception of, 48–49; modern connotations of, 12; risk as aspect of, 17; society as context for, 78; spirit in relation to, 177–179; standards of, 44–45, 48–49; subjectivity of, 17 taste (sensation), 29–30, 272–273n17 technique: for achieving beauty, 113; making in relation to, 125–126, 153; natural vs. artistic, 214–216, 220–222, 253–254, 291n8 teleological causation, 213–214 teleological judgment: aesthetic judgment compared to, 99–101; antinomy of, 241;

as reflective judgment, 235–239, 250; rules/laws and, 237–238; and the understanding of nature, 212–214 teleology: causation grounded in, 205–211, 227–229, 239–244; defined, 206; evolutionary theory and, 296n5; human, 219; natural, 216–220, 243–246, 250; and relationship of necessity and contingency, 212; role of, in comprehension, 96–97; science in relation to, 244–246, 255 thinking, in aesthetic experience, 84, 166–168, 183, 186–187, 193, 197. See also mind time: art and, 165; causation and, 206–207 transcendental conditions, 7 transcendental philosophy, 94, 234 unconscious, the, 165–167 understanding, 86, 133, 173, 203, 229–231, 296n6 universality: of aesthetic judgment, xv, 20, 21–22, 27, 43, 56; in aesthetic plea sure, 62; communicability and, 54–56, 58–59, 61–62; criticisms of, 43; difficulties of concept of, 49–52; disinterestedness in relation to, 57; as impersonality, 28; life and, 266; misconceptions about, 27; of moral feeling, 91; not subject to quantitative analy sis, 53; priority of, 56–59; singularity in apparent contradiction with, 44, 48; Stimme/Stimmung and, 64; subjectivity in relation to, 44, 48, 64 unnameable, the, 190–191, 196–197 unthinking, 167–168 ur-mother, 250, 253–256 Varela, Francisco, 223, 292n16 visual arts, 133 vitalism, 226, 245–246 voice. See Stimme voting, 275n7

 Walpole, Horace, 17 Warhol, Andy, Brillo boxes, 126, 139 Wellbery, David, 276n12 wild flowers. See flowers/wild flowers will: aesthetic experience in relation to, 147–148; morality linked to, 77, 91–92; play in relation to, 147; rational goals grounded in, 31. See also choice

INDEX

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 20–21, 124 Wolff, Caspar Friedrich, 226 Wordsworth, William, 161, 192 world, the human place in, 234–235 Young, Edward, 162 Zammito, John, 258–259 Zuckert, Rachel, 299n17