The Self-Legislation of Freedom: Reinterpreting Purposiveness in Kantian Aesthetics — Epoche C1
What the phrase says in Kant's text At the close of the third of his four "moments" of the judgement of taste, Immanuel Kant defines beauty as "the form of the purposiveness of an object, so far as this is perceived in it without any representation of a purpose" ( Critique of the Power of Judgment , 1790, §17). This essay is about what the word "purposiveness" can be doing in that sentence, given that the same sentence withdraws the purpose. The German phrase, Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck , is usually rendered "purposiveness without a purpose", and both halves need unpacking before any interpretation of it can be assessed. Kant's technical definition of a purpose or end ( Zweck ) is given at §10: an end is the object of a concept, insofar as that concept is regarded as the cause of the object. A chair is an end in this sense, because someone's concept of a chair explains why the wood has that shape. Purposiveness is the corresponding form: the character an object has when it looks as though a concept of it had governed its production. A beautiful thing strikes us in exactly that way — as if arranged for us — while we can name no concept it was arranged to satisfy. It helps to see where in the architecture this sits. The Analytic of the Beautiful (§§1–22) examines the judgement of taste under four headings borrowed from the table of categories: quality , yielding the claim that the satisfaction is disinterested, indifferent to whether the object exists or what use it has (§2); quantity , that the beautiful pleases universally without a concept (§6); relation , where purposiveness appears (§§10–17); and modality , that the satisfaction is necessary in a peculiar way, since we demand rather than predict the agreement of others (§18). Purposiveness is thus Kant's answer to the question of what relation taste sets up between object and subject. One correction must be made at the outset, because it changes what this essay can claim to have shown. The compressed version presented as the "prevailing interpretation" the view that purposiveness is an objective feature inherent in the aesthetic object, and offered its own reading as a challenge to it. But Kant rules the objective reading out by name. In §15 he distinguishes the merely formal, subjective purposiveness at issue in taste from objective purposiveness, which is perfection — an object's conformity to what a thing of its kind ought to be — and argues that perfection cannot ground a judgement of taste, since judging a thing perfect requires a concept of its end, which taste lacks. The thesis that purposiveness is not a property of the object is therefore not a reinterpretation of Kant but Kant's own position. What remains open, and is what this essay is really about, is what the subjective purposiveness consists in and how far it licenses talk of freedom. Free play, and why the order of pleasure and judging matters The subjective side of purposiveness is filled in by the doctrine of free play, and this section sets out that doctrine because the essay's claim about self-legislation has to be located in it or nowhere. Two faculties are involved. The imagination, for Kant, gathers the manifold of sense into a unified presentation; the understanding is the capacity for concepts, which supply the rules by which such gathering is normally organised. In ordinary cognition the understanding constrains the imagination: I see this object as a chair, and the concept dictates what counts as a successful synthesis. In a judgement of taste no determinate concept is in play, and yet — this is Kant's claim at §9 — the two fall into a proportion suited to cognition in general. The imagination is free, the understanding is nonetheless satisfied, and the resulting state of mind is pleasurable. The purposiveness we seem to find in the object is the felt registration of this fit. Section 9 also poses a question Kant himself calls the key to the whole critique of taste: does the pleasure come first and the judging follow, or the judging first and the pleasure follow? His answer is that the universal communicability of the mental state must come first, and the reason carries the normative claim of aesthetic judgement. If the pleasure came first, "this is beautiful" would report a private sensation and could demand the agreement of others no more than "this wine is pleasant" can. Only if what one responds to is the communicable state of the faculties — a state any subject with the same faculties could be in — is the demand for agreement intelligible. Paul Guyer's Kant and the Claims of Taste (1997) works through the resulting difficulty, arguing that Kant is committed to two distinct acts, a first act of reflection producing the pleasure and a second judging it universally valid; the question is not settled, and it would be dishonest to present free play as a smooth piece of machinery. What matters here is the direction of dependence: the subject supplies the standard, the object only the occasion. What kind of self-legislation this is: heautonomy, not transcendental freedom That result is what the compressed version was reaching for under the name of self-legislation, and the reach was in the right direction but overshot the mark. This section replaces its formulation with Kant's own, which is both more accurate and more useful. Begin with the moral notion the analogy borrows from. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) Kant argues that a will is autonomous when it is subject only to a law it gives itself: the moral law is not imposed from outside but is the form of the will's own rational activity. Transcendental freedom is the metaphysical condition of that, and it is a doctrine of the first Critique , where the Third Antinomy (A444/B472) presents it as the capacity to begin a causal series spontaneously — a capacity Kant assigns to the will considered as a thing in itself, not to the mind as knower. Now the difficulty with the compressed version's