Kant's Aesthetic Judgement as a Cultivation of Experiential Adaptability — Epoche C1
The denial Kant begins with, and what it leaves standing The first section of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement , published in 1790, states that in order to decide whether something is beautiful we relate the representation not to the object by way of the understanding, with a view to cognition, but to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Kant's word for this is that the judgement is aesthetic rather than logical : it predicates nothing of the thing. Calling the Rosary Chapel in Puebla beautiful adds no property to the chapel, in the way that calling it seventeenth-century or gilded does. That denial is the foundation of the reading this essay defends, and it is worth pausing on how strong it is. It is not the claim that aesthetic judgements are unreliable or hard to justify. It is the claim that they are not about their objects at all, in the sense in which cognitive judgements are. Whatever value taste has, it cannot be the value of telling us something about the world; and so the question of what it is for has to be answered elsewhere. The original version of this essay set out to answer it, proposing that aesthetic experience refines the subject's capacity to adapt to the diversity of experience. That thesis is defensible. Making it defensible requires three things the original did not supply: the distinction that gives it a place in Kant's system, the sections of the text that support it, and an honest account of two places where the original's evidence does not do what it was asked to do. Determining and reflective judgement, which is where the thesis lives The reader arriving from a neighbouring discipline will know Kant's earlier picture: concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind, and cognition consists in bringing a particular under a universal. Judgement, on that picture, is the faculty that performs the bringing-under. The fourth section of the Introduction to the third Critique divides this into two cases, and the division is the piece of apparatus without which the essay's thesis cannot even be stated. Where the universal — the rule, the law, the concept — is already given, and judgement has only to subsume the particular under it, judgement is determining . Where only the particular is given and the universal has to be found for it, judgement is reflective . The second case is not a marginal one: it covers the whole business of arriving at empirical concepts and empirical laws in the first place, since no rule can be given for finding the rule. Kant's point in the fifth section of the Introduction is that reflective judgement cannot borrow a principle from the understanding and must therefore give itself one — the principle that nature, in the endless variety of its particular laws, is so ordered as to be graspable by a mind like ours. Kant calls this the purposiveness of nature and insists it is heuristic : it prescribes nothing to nature and constitutes no knowledge. It is a rule for how to go on looking. The sixth section then makes the connection the original essay needed and did not have. Kant observes that when two heterogeneous empirical laws turn out to fall under a single higher principle, we feel a very noticeable pleasure, and that we no longer notice this pleasure only because long practice has fused it with cognition itself. Pleasure, on Kant's own account, is what accompanies the fit between nature's manifoldness and our capacity to take it in. That is what the phrase "adaptability to the diversity of experience" means in Kant's vocabulary, and it is his sentence, not a modern imposition. The free play of the faculties, and what the ninth section actually claims Kant identifies the ninth section as the key to the critique of taste, and its argument is more specific than the summary the original essay gave. The question it poses is one of order: in a judgement of taste, does the pleasure come first and the judging follow, or does the judging come first? Kant answers that the judging comes first, and the reason is that if pleasure came first the judgement would be a report of private sensation, like the pleasantness of a wine, and could claim nothing of anyone else. What must be prior, and what must be universally communicable, is a state of mind : the relation between the imagination, which gathers a manifold into a presentation, and the understanding, which demands that presentations have unity. In cognition this relation is fixed by whichever determinate concept is doing the subsuming. In the judgement of taste no such concept is in play, and the two faculties fall into what Kant calls free play — the imagination presenting a form that satisfies the understanding's general demand for lawfulness without answering to any particular law. The step that carries the universality is this: because cognition of any kind requires some proportion between these two faculties, and because cognitions are communicable, the proportion must be communicable too. So a judgement grounded on nothing but this proportion may demand agreement from everyone, even though it rests on a feeling and not on a concept. Kant's argument is thus that taste rides on a condition that all cognition presupposes without being a case of cognition. How to understand the free harmony is the central disagreement in the literature, and the original essay wrote as though there were consensus. Paul Guyer's reading of 1979 treats it as a state in which the imagination's presentation happens to satisfy the understanding's requirement of unity without a concept being applied. Hannah Ginsborg's account, developed in essays collected in 2015, has the state be self-referential: in judging aesthetically one takes one's own mental state to be the one everyone ought to have in the presence of the object, and this primitive normativity, not any concept, is what the demand for agreement expresses. Henry Allison's reading of 2001 emphasises the reflective