Miles Rind
Kant and the Problem of Judgments of Taste
Introduction
What I call “the problem of judgments of
taste”
is formulated by Kant at one point as follows:
How is a judgment possible that,
merely from one’s own feeling of pleasure in an object,
independently
of concepts of it, would judge this pleasure a priori—that is,
without
having to wait for the concurrence of others—as attaching to the
representation
of the object
in every other subject? (§ 36, Ak. 5:288)1
With such concision comes the need for
explanation.
First, what sort of judgment is Kant talking about? The judgment of
taste;
a judgment on the beauty of an object. What he calls an object is
typically
a visible, tangible, bodily thing, though it may also be an audible
object,
such as a bird’s song or a piece of music, or a verbal one, such as a
poem.
It may be an artifact or a thing of nature, though Kant, for reasons
that
I shall explain later, takes natural objects as his primary case. The
term
“judgment” has the usual Kantian ambiguities: it may signify a mental
act
or operation, or the shareable content of such an act, or the
expression
of such a content in words.
What is special about the judgment of taste, in Kant’s view, is the
following
combination of characteristics: On the one hand, it is made from a
purely
subjective basis, specifically that of one’s pleasure in contemplating
an object. Kant describes this characteristic by saying that “the
judgment
of taste is aesthetic” (§ 1 title, Ak. 5:203). On the other hand,
such a judgment is made with a claim to the concurrence of everyone—not
as a general claim about how human beings do respond to a certain
object,
but as a normative requirement for them to respond in a particular way.
In Kant’s terms, the judgment is made with a claim to subjective
universal
validity, or universal communicability, or with “a universal voice”
(§
8, Ak. 5:217). The problem of judgments of taste is to explain how this
combination of characteristics is possible. This is the topic of my
dissertation.
Kant’s explanation comprises two tasks. One is the analysis, or in his
terms the “exposition,” of the judgment. This is an explanation of what
goes into such a judgment, how it is properly made, what is asserted or
claimed in it. The other task is the proof of the legitimacy of such a
judgment; this he calls its “deduction.” Now Kant is not interested in
taste merely on its own account. Rather, he is interested in it because
he thinks that a transcendental inquiry into it “reveals a property of
our faculty of cognition which, without this analysis, would have
remained
unknown” (§ 8, Ak. 5:213). This property turns out to be a
“harmony”
or a “proportionate disposition” of the cognitive faculties of
imagination
and understanding. Such a state of mind is the “subjective principle”
making
judgments of taste possible, as well as being “the subjective formal
condition
of a judgment in general” (§ 35, Ak. 5:287). This is why an
explanation
of the possibility of judgments of taste figures as the principal part
of a critique of the power of judgment. I am concerned with all these
aspects
of Kant’s account, though the only part of it in which I find him to
have
much success is in the analysis or “exposition” of the judgment.
At this point two explanatory remarks are in order. The first of them
concerns
the use of the term “aesthetic.” Kant is often credited with
originating
the modern conception of “the aesthetic” as a specific range of human
experience
or concern. That may be right, but it is certainly not an instance of
Kant’s
use of the term “aesthetic.” For Kant, “This wine is agreeable”
is just as good an example of an “aesthetic” judgment as is “This
flower
is beautiful,” because both, in his view, are judgments based on
something
purely subjective, i.e., something incapable of cognitive employment,
namely
a feeling of pleasure. The Kantian term closest in application to the
term
“aesthetic judgment” as we use it today would be “pure aesthetic
judgment.” Kant reckons two kinds of judgment under this term,
judgments
of beauty (i.e., judgments of taste) and judgments of sublimity.
Judgments
of agreeableness he calls empirical aesthetic judgments, or
aesthetic
judgments of sense. The idea behind this classification is that the
feeling
on which judgments of agreeableness are based is an effect of
sensation,
while that on which judgments of beauty and judgments of sublimity are
based is independent of sensation. In this respect the contrast between
“empirical” and “pure” agrees with Kant’s use of those terms in his
epistemology.
But in fact, matters are more complicated than this. It
turns out that a judgment of taste can fail to be “pure” not only by
dint
of being “mixed with sensations,” but also by dint of being “mixed with
concepts of the object.” (Phrases from § 38, Ak. 5:290 n.). If,
for
example, I find a certain palace beautiful, and my pleasure in the
contemplation
of it depends on my recognizing it to be a palace and not,
e.g.,
a church, then, by Kant’s reckoning, my judgment of taste is not
“pure.”
In one place he calls this sort of judgment an “applied” judgment of
taste
(§ 16, Ak. 5:231). He seems to suppose that we can talk about a
special
kind
of beauty here, “adherent beauty,”2 as
contrasted with “free beauty.” I consider this part of his thought a
conceptual
marshland, and I mention it here solely in order to avoid it. For
present
purposes, it is enough to note that the case that requires special
attention,
in Kant’s view, is the case where our appreciation of the beauty of an
object is independent of our bringing it under any particular
concept. This,
by the way, is the main reason why works of art are not his primary
examples
of objects of judgments of taste.
My second remark concerns the organization of the “Critique of
Aesthetic
Judgment.” Kant first set out to write what he called a “critique of
taste.”3
A Kantian critique is supposed to comprise two main parts, an
“analytic”
and a “dialectic.” An “analytic” in turn is supposed to comprise an
“exposition”
and a “deduction,” as explained above. Unfortunately, Kant decided to
add
a treatment of judgments of sublimity as well, but seems not to have
known
where to put it. The result is that, although the “Critique of
Aesthetic
Judgment”—the successor to the proposed “critique of taste”—is properly
divided into an “Analytic of Aesthetic Judgment” and a “Dialectic of
Aesthetic
Judgment,” the “Analytic” is disastrously divided into two parts
bearing
the parodic-sounding titles “Analytic of the Beautiful” and “Analytic
of
the Sublime,” with the “Deduction of Judgments of Taste” incongruously
located under the second of these headings. The “Analytic of the
Beautiful”
is commonly understood to end with § 22, or the “Remark”
following.
But according to the proper use of Kant’s own terms, the analytic of
taste,
or of judgments of taste, merely breaks off at § 22 and resumes at
§ 30 or 31. What ends with § 22 is the exposition of
judgments
of taste. This is the terminology that I shall be using in this
dissertation.
The dissertation is in six chapters. The first chapter concerns the
claim
of judgments of taste to subjective universal validity. Many
commentators
have supposed that by this Kant means a claim about how people will or
would respond to a given object under certain conditions. Others have
held
that he has in mind a normative requirement that people should respond
to the object in a certain way, but at the same time, such commentators
have mainly held that Kant does not mean to justify such a requirement
by epistemological considerations alone. In their view, the
universality
claim is only supposed to be legitimated by the connection that Kant
draws
between taste and morality in the closing sections of the “Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment.” I argue against both interpretations. It is
manifest
that Kant understands the universality claim in judgments of taste as a
normative claim, though the point has been obscured by the common
practice
of using the verb “impute” to render his verbs ansinnen and zumuten.
Thus he is made to say that in making a judgment of taste one “imputes”
one’s feeling to others. Jemandem etwas ansinnen/zumuten can
mean
either to think someone capable of something, or to think something due
from someone. For this reason, I render the construction as “to expect
something of someone,” which is correspondingly ambiguous. But neither
verb can mean “impute,” and it is clear from the contexts of use that
Kant
uses them primarily with the sense of “to think due.” On the other
hand,
the fact that the universality claim in judgments of taste has a
normative
character does not mean that it is a moral demand. Kant makes it clear
that ordinary empirical judgments are made with a demand of exactly the
same sort. This, however, raises a problem: why should the universal
agreement
required by a judgment of taste consist in the sharing of a feeling,
rather
than simply in the sharing of a thought? The quick answer is that, in
Kant’s
view, a feeling takes the place of a concept in a judgment of taste,
namely
as the predicate. But what justifies this view? How are we even to make
sense of it? I address these questions in the next chapter.
My second chapter concerns the subjectivity of judgments of taste, or
what
Kant terms their “aesthetic” character. He holds that judgments of
taste
are based on feelings of pleasure, and that such feelings cannot be
given
cognitive employment. He offers no justification for either claim, but
seems at least to build quite a lot on the first of the two. It is not
so clear that he has much resting on the second claim, and for this
reason
some commentators have doubted that it is really integral to his
account.
In their view, Kantian judgments of taste are just as objective and
cognitive
as any other judgments, though they have the peculiarity of being based
on feelings of pleasure. This view takes two forms. According to one of
them, a judgment of taste refers a feeling of pleasure to an object in
the same way as a judgment on a sensible quality of an object refers a
sensation to it. I argue that there is no way to make sense of this
idea.
According to the other view, a judgment of taste is a claim to the
effect
that any human being perceiving the given object will find pleasure in
doing so. I argue that such a view cannot accommodate the evaluative
character
of judgments of taste: it reduces them to mere psychological
generalizations.
This leaves us with two problems. First, how are we to make sense of
the
idea of a judgment in which a feeling is the predicate? I try to do so
in terms of Kant’s conception of judgment as a conjoining of
representations
in self-consciousness, though in the case of aesthetic judgments (in
his
sense of the term), the conjunction is between a representation and a
feeling.
Second, the interpretation of Kant’s view of the relation between
judging
and feeling is complicated by his assertion, in what he announces as
“the
key to the critique of taste” (§ 9, Ak. 5:216), that the judging
“precedes”
the feeling. I argue, first, that Kant’s statements cannot be made
mutually
consistent by distinguishing between different acts of judging in a
judgment
of taste: there can only be one such act. I try to make sense of Kant’s
position by supposing that what “precedes” the feeling is not properly
the full act of judging itself, but merely the requirement that one
make
something universally communicable of one’s representation. The basic
point
of Kant’s thesis of the priority of judging to feeling, in my view, is
that it is impossible to form a concept of the pleasure distinctive of
a judgment of taste without specifying the origin of that pleasure in
an
act of judging.
My third chapter concerns the argument of Kant’s deduction of judgments
of taste. I begin with one of the premises of that argument, the claim
that a harmony of the cognitive powers is the subjective condition of
judgments
of taste and of judgments in general. I find that he offers no sound
argument
for this claim, or even for the claim that there is any such thing as the
subjective formal condition of a judgment in general. The argument of
the
deduction proper (§ 38) is, in outline, this: If any of our
judgments
at all have subjective universal validity, then so must the state of
mind
required for them; and if that state of mind has subjective universal
validity,
then so do judgments of taste. So we have as much right to expect
agreement
with our judgments of taste as we have to expect agreement with our
other
judgments. Such a line of argument raises obvious difficulties. In the
first place, Kant’s talk of a harmonious or proportionate relation of
the
cognitive faculties cries out for explanation, yet he retails such talk
as if it were an explanation. The statements that he offers by
way
of elucidation of it are to such effect as that the imagination
“schematizes
without a concept,” or that there is a “subsumption, not of intuitions
under concepts, but of the faculty of intuitions . . .
under
the faculty of concepts” (§ 35, Ak. 5:287). That is as
much
as to say that the state of mind in question is just like what happens
when we match a concept to an intuition, except that it takes place
without
the use of a concept. With such “solutions,” one scarcely needs
problems.
A second difficulty is that the strategy of Kant’s argument seems
self-defeating.
Granted that judgments of taste are made possible by some state of our
cognitive faculties required for all judgments, that fact cannot
legitimate
such judgments unless the mere occurrence of the said state is
sufficient
for the occurrence of a judgment of taste. But if that were the case,
then
we would never be able to make any judgment whatever without also
making
a judgment of taste. Moreover, since Kant describes the harmony of the
cognitive faculties as specifically a source of pleasure, these
judgments of taste would all have to be favorable ones. (This is
sometimes
known as the everything-is-beautiful objection.) Such a consequence
would
be absurd. Kant can avoid it only by distinguishing between a general
sort
of harmony of the cognitive faculties required for judgments generally
and a specific variety required for judgments of taste. In fact, he
does
just this, specifically by suggesting that what is distinctive about
the
state of mind required for a judgment of taste is that the cognitive
faculties,
or at least the imagination, remain in “free play.” But then the
problem
is: granted that judgments generally require a harmony of the cognitive
faculties, it does not follow that any objects should require the
special
harmony-in-free-play. Of course, Kant can simply stipulate, as he seems
to do in one place (§ 21), that some objects do require it. Such
an
argument “works,” logically speaking, but is of dubious philosophical
interest,
since its premises, being as much devoid of justification as of clear
meaning,
add nothing to the plausibility of the conclusion.
My fourth chapter concerns Kant’s conception of disinterestedness as a
distinguishing characteristic of the pleasure on which judgments of
taste
are based, or “the liking for the beautiful,” as he terms it. (The
awkwardness
of the phrase is partly, though not entirely, the fault of my
translation.)
I argue, first, that the understanding of Kant’s position has been
impeded
by a failure to respect his distinction between what is interested,
i.e., what depends on an interest, and what is interesting,
i.e.,
what produces an interest. Kant claims that the liking for the
beautiful
is both disinterested and, in a certain sense, uninteresting (i.e.,
productive
of no practical interest in the object), but it is the former
characteristic
alone that is supposed to distinguish it from other pleasures. I find
that
disinterestedness will distinguish the liking for the beautiful from
what
Kant calls the liking for the good, but not from what he calls the
liking
for the agreeable, or sensory gratification. The latter kind of
pleasure
simply does not depend on a prior interest, and though it may generate
one, it does not do so necessarily, but only as a matter of empirical
generality.
In fact, I argue, the attempt to find a distinctive characteristic of
the
liking for the beautiful simply as a pleasure is bound to be defeated
given
Kant’s own thesis of the priority of judging to feeling.
My fifth
chapter concerns Kant’s concepts of purposiveness and form. Although he
moves freely between the concept of formal purposiveness and the
concept
of purposive form, I argue that we must distinguish these. The
purposiveness
characteristic of the beautiful object is just its conduciveness to a
harmonious
play of the cognitive faculties. This purposiveness may be “formal” in
the sense of arising from the most general subjective conditions of
judging;
but that does not entail that it has to do with the “form” of an object
in the sense derived from Kant’s doctrine of space and time as the
forms
of our intuition. Although Kant makes this identification, I argue that
it is groundless. “Form,” I argue, must be merely that in an object
with
which reflection is occupied.
My sixth and final chapter concerns Kant’s account of the relation
between
judgments of taste and what he calls reflective judgment in the two
versions
of the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment. His argument
runs
as follows. The power of judgment operates in two different ways:
subsuming
cases under universals that are “given,” and finding universals for
given
cases. In the first capacity it is determinative judgment, in the
second
capacity, reflective judgment. Any empirical exercise of judgment is
implicitly
reflective, because empirical concepts must always be “found.” We could
not, however, find any empirical concepts if things in nature were not
systematically divided into genera and species in a fashion that is
suited
to our powers of cognition. Thus any reflective exercise of judgment
presupposes
that nature is systematically comprehensible. To presuppose this,
however,
is to presuppose that nature is “purposive” for our faculty of
cognition,
and in two senses: first, in that it accommodates itself to our
cognitive
purposes (“purposive” in the sense of “expedient”), and second, in that
it is as if systematically ordered by a higher intelligence
(“purposive”
in the sense of “as if intelligently produced”). Finally, this
purposiveness
of nature is concretely represented in an object when our reflection on
it brings the imagination and the understanding into a harmonious free
play, which is to say, when we make a judgment of taste on it. Hence a
beautiful object is an exhibition of the subjective purposiveness of
nature.
Such is Kant’s reasoning. Its chief weakness is obvious: even if one
can
show that all empirical judgments presuppose that nature is purposive
in
relation to our cognitive faculty, there does not seem to be any basis
for the final step, according to which such purposiveness is exhibited
in judgments of taste. Even if a beautiful object is purposive in the
sense
of being conducive to a harmonious play of the cognitive faculties,
purposiveness
of that kind cannot be identified with that of nature as a whole. At
most
Kant can say that a beautiful object is a kind of analogue or symbol of
the purposiveness of nature for our cognitive faculties. It is possible
that this is all that he means to claim. If so, then his claim may be
defensible,
though it retains the obscurity of the idea of a harmonious free play
of
the cognitive faculties.
Notes
1. All references for Kant’s writings (in this case the Critique of
Judgment) are to Kants gesammelte Schriften, edited by the
German
Academy of Sciences (Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften;
originally
the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, Königlich
Preußliche
Akademie der Wissenschaften) (various publishers, 1902–; now Berlin
and New York: Walter de Gruyter), cited as “Ak.” All translations are
my
own.
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2. Anhängende Schönheit, commonly mistranslated as
“dependent
beauty.” The German word for “dependent” is abhängend, not
anhängend.
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3. There are several mentions of a work to be called Kritik des
Geschmacks
(or in some places Grundlegung zur Kritik des Geschmacks, or Grundlage
der Kritik des Geschmacks) in Kant’s correspondence in the years
1787–1789.
The relevant passages are cited in Giorgio Tonelli, “La formazione del
testo della Kritik der Urteilskraft,” Revue Internationale
de
Philosophie, 8 (1954): 423–448, at pp. 427–429. The phrase
“critique
of taste” appears in several places in the finished Critique of
Judgment,
most prominently at § 34, Ak. 5:286. [RETURN]
Last modified August
25, 2003