1 Introduction
You have here a short excerpt from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment intended to exemplify the sort of aesthetic vision alluded to by Roelofs in her discussion of ”the promise of the aesthetic.” The promise of the aesthetic, in short, is that art and the modes of attention that it cultivates and expresses are ways of creating community.
I want to look at Kant’s claim here for two reasons. The first is to give you a sense of the sort of scope someone like Kant thinks taste can have. Kant’s going to argue here that judgments of beauty are “universal,” that is, hold universally for all human subjects. Second, Kant is, so to speak, the mountain in the background of all nineteenth-century philosophy in America, and the claim in these sections of the third Critique is one decent inroad for understanding what that means.
2 The beautiful and the agreeable
Roelofs lumps Kant and Hume together as philosophers who view the aesthetic as connected with a notion of ‘the public’, and that’s fine such as it is, but Kant and Hume have very different views of the aesthetic. For Hume, the beautiful is in essence a fancy way of talking about things I just so happen to like, and between the two I think Hume will probably be intuitively easier for you to make sense of.
For Kant the beautiful is distinct from what he calls “the agreeable.” The agreeable is whatever brings me, specifically, pleasure. When I call something beautiful, Kant thinks, I don’t mean it is “beautiful for me,” which he calls “ridiculous.” Saying something is beautiful is like saying beauty is one of its properties. Kant doesn’t think beauty can be a property of an object the way red or tall can be properties of objects. But he doesn’t think it is ‘merely’ subjective the way that claiming I like raspberries is merely subjective.
His claim in the preceding sections has been to argue that judgments of beauty are “disinterested,” which means that they don’t have to do with my personal proclivities or obsessions. He now claims that judgments of beauty are universal, and he claims this can be “inferred from” their disinterestedness. See pp. 53–54.
3 Universality as an imperative
Note how Kant uses different ways of describing the universality of judgments of beauty. Say for example, to exemplify the relevant difference, I believe: That tree is beautiful. For Kant, this judgment, if true, holds universally, that is, of all human subjects. Now, one way of describing this would be to say that it is, right now, if the judgment is true, true for all subjects. Another way of describing this would be to say that the judgment has a sort of ‘subjunctive’ universality of the form: If anyone were looking at the tree [the way I’m looking at it now], they would find it beautiful, too. And, finally, we might also describe it (which is the more dominant way in Kant) as implying an imperative: That tree is beautiful, and everyone must agree with me.
I think if we all described something we think is beautiful, owing to the fragmentary state of our culture, it would look nothing like what Kant describes. For example, at least one of you, I’m sure, would mention anime, and whatever the capacity is for appreciating anime, I just don’t have it. (I’m sure, inversely, few if any of you are fans of Bach to the degree I am.) But now, instead of a classroom of students who don’t know each other, imagine you are having a discussion with your ‘aesthetic peers’, that is, people who are into the same sort of music, movies, or other art you’re into. And now imagine ‘solving’, as it were, for \(x\), \(y\), and \(z\):
- I’m into \(P\).
- The best \(P\) is \(a\).
- The worst (or ‘least good’) \(P\) is \(b\).
Suppose, again, you are only talking to people who share your interest in \(x\), whatever it happens to be. And your view is the best \(P\) is \(a\), the worst \(P\) is \(b\), and now here comes some schlub who thinks the best \(P\) is actually \(b\), which, you are decidedly certain, is exactly the opposite of the truth. (For example, substitute as follows: \(P\): classical composers, \(a\): Bach, \(b\): Mozart. And imagine the poor schlub who believes Mozart is the best classical composer, hahahahaha!)
Here, now, most of us, I think, will not simply lie down and say “well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” It’s worth, at a minimum, a discussion, and maybe even a lost friend, maybe even a fight.
Hopefully you all get my drift, because if you get my drift, you understand what Kant is claiming here: When we say something is beautiful, we aren’t just expressing a personal preference (I like peaches); we are claiming something that must be true for others, too. Of course we can be wrong about stuff (I can change my views about beauty as much as I can about anything), but the nature of the belief is to command universal assent.
4 Beauty, sensibility, and understanding
What’s weird about aesthetic judgments is that they seem to function simultaneously like objective judgments (e.g., that dog is barking) and like subjective judgments (e.g., I like bananas). Although they are not subjective, they arise from feeling, which is individual. And although they are not objective, they command universal assent. As Kant puts it, a judgment of beauty:
- “resembles a logical judgment inasmuch as we may presuppose it to be valid for everyone”—but it is not universally valid in the same way that judgments are ordinarily universally valid, because:
- “this universality cannot arise from concepts”—it must somehow arise from sensibility (54).
However, Kant is going to argue, while sensibility is the necessary vehicle for aesthetic appreciation, it isn’t the sensible as such that we appreciate (or call beautiful). Any delight associated with sense perception as such is particular and individual. See the contrast between this (the agreeable) and the beautiful on p. 55. Discussion of beauty nevertheless persists in resembling ‘logical’ (objective) and subjective judgments.
A passage on p. 58 is telling both for its clarity about the distinctive weirdness of aesthetic judgments and for its clarity about the distinctive gesture of Kantian philosophy. Kant claims here there is something “strange” about aesthetic judgments. As I’ve noted a few times, they pull in two different directions: based in individual feeling, they nevertheless claim universal assent.
Now, you could imagine someone reading or having the thought expressed by this highlighted portion on p. 58 and saying: Well, then, there must be no such thing as an aesthetic judgment, or anyway one that is in fact universally valid, because the demands can’t be met. Not so Kant, and this fact speaks to a methodological precept of Kantian ‘critical’ philosophy. Kant takes for granted that we form judgments of beauty, of the sublime, of the ugly, and so on. And he is now asking what must be the case as a consequence of that supposition. That transformation in philosophical inquiry is crucial for understanding, for example, the advent of pragmatism in nineteenth-century American philosophy, which fairly self-consciously (in the person of Peirce anyway) built pragmatism out of a thought in Kant.
Kant’s claim here, in any event, is also an important part of his aesthetic theory. It is that, although we might all have different ideas about what is beautiful, we don’t have different ideas about the category and what it would look like if something satisfied it, if something were ‘beautiful’. He stresses the same qualified idea on p. 60.
5 Pleasure and beauty
Judgments of beauty attach to certain experiences, and pleasure is undeniably a part of those experience, but Kant wants to deny that the judgment of beauty is a judgment of pleasure; that, in other words, what I’m calling beautiful isn’t the sensible appearance but the pleasure that the sensible appearance causes in me.
So, there is pleasure involved in it, but a judgment of the beautiful cannot be based in the feeling of pleasure; otherwise it would be an instance of the merely agreeable, and not be, as Kant puts it here, “universally communicable.” See p. 61.
In order for an experience to be universally communicable, it must apply universally to other experiencers. So it cannot be about any particular sensations I just so happen to have. It must instead be about some more basic structural fact associated with the sensation; it must be about how my cognitive powers—imagination and understanding—are at work in some experience.
As background: For Kant, the way I have experience is like this: I’m presented with a sensible manifold (a mess of stuff). My imagination synthesizes it into one or more ‘objects’. My understanding looks for the sort of unity each of these ‘objects’ is. When these two powers do their work in the normal way, objects get ‘subsumed’ or ‘placed under’ concepts that I have beforehand, determinate concepts. So I don’t just see a tangle of brown and green; I see a tree. Sometimes I can’t make sense of what’s in front of me, and this can be frustrating.
It can also be exciting. And it’s this sort of quasi-failure that lies at the root of aesthetic judgment. My imagination and my understanding are busy doing their separate tasks, I never quite achieve the determinate concept of what’s before me, but the back-and-forth work of imagination and understanding seems to bring about a certain sense of satisfaction or fulfillment that I have no interest in bringing to an end. See p. 62.
An example that comes to mind: Imagine you and your friends see a movie or go to a concert, and you all have a great time. You have such a great time, you’re not even sure what to make of it. On the way home, you engage in constant “and then, and then” talk; you’re all trying to make sense of just how good the movie/concert was, and talking about it, piling another enriching description on top of another, is itself enjoyable. An experience of that sort is at the root of judgments of beauty, for Kant.
6 Aesthetics and community
I like the example of the shared discussion after the concert because it brings home a point that Roefels was also interested in: the way in which aesthetic appreciation goes hand in hand with communal identity and construction of a ‘public’. Kant writes here:
That the ability to communicate one’s mental state, even if this is only the state of one’s cognitive powers, carries a pleasure with it, could easily be established (empirically and psychologically) from man’s natural propensity to sociability. (62)
In other words, the communicability of aesthetic experience is pleasurable to the extent that human community is an end or goal we have as humans. We achieve, in a way, the end, or one of the ends, of human community by sharing those experiences.