1 Notes
Our goal in these first few sessions is not so much to master Kant as it is to get an overall sense of the main claims of the third Critique, its basic structure and orientation. Today we’re going to do that for the “Analytic of the Beautiful.”
What is an “analytic of the beautiful”? It is an answer to the question: What is “the beautiful”?
Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” has this sort of structure:
The four “moments” of the beautiful:
§§1–5: that judgments of the beautiful are “disinterested”
§§6–9: that judgments of the beautiful are “universal” or universally valid
§§10–17: that judgments of the beautiful are “purposive”
§§18–22: that judgments of the beautiful are “necessary,” that is, that their univerality is necessary
§23: A “general comment”
Let’s work through these five parts. I’m going to focus on the sections assigned: §§2, 5–9, 10–12, 16, and 18–22. We’ll leave the “general comment” for a rainy day.
2 §§1–5: first moment: disinterest
The central gist of these sections is a negative point: The beautiful is not an expression or object of desire.
Kant gives an example in §2 of someone being asked whether they think a palace is beautiful. The person might answer by saying they don’t like palaces, but then they would not have answered the question.
The questioner may grant all this [that palaces are not likable] and approve of it; but it is not to the point. All he wants to know is whether my mere presentation of the object is accompanied by a liking, no matter how indifferent I may be about the existence of the object of this presentation. (46)
I think it is easy to get lost in the view that beauty is simply liking, and keeping this sort of criticism in mind will help keep you in mind of Kant’s view. If you say, “Isn’t this symphony beautiful?” and the person you’re saying it to says: “I don’t like symphonies,” they haven’t answered your question.
The beautiful, Kant notes in §5, is distinguished from two other sorts of “liking”:
- the agreeable: what pleases me in some particular moment
- the good: what I am obligated always to do
The beautiful, characteristically, has nothing to do with action but everything to do with contemplation. Moreover the beautiful creates a different sort of relation between me and an object. The agreeable gratifies us, the good is something that we esteem or endorse, and the beautiful is something that “we just LIKE,” as Kant puts it (see 52).
There is something characteristically human about beauty, Kant thinks, and his way of claiming this makes for interesting contrast with the good. See p. 52.
3 §§6–9: second moment: universality
A judgment of liking “devoid of all interest,” Kant notes, that is, independent of all personal or individual interest, should hold universally. See pp. 53–54, and I want to note here, because Kant will this sort of language throughout, the way Kant slides from the idea that judgments of beauty, say, are universally valid to the claim that one may be “justified in requiring a similar liking from everyone” (54). I would take this second formulation as the canonical claim, so to speak, and the first as a cheap or offhanded gloss. Thus the claim, as I interpret it, is less that ‘judgments of the beautiful are universally true’ so much as it is that ‘judgments of the beautiful give the judger every reason to adopt the stance that they are universally true’. Notice here especially the “he will talk about the beautiful” etc. line.
The contemporary reader probably has the immediate reaction to Kant that he is definitely wrong about the ‘universality’ of the beautiful, and I think it is at least worth considering how the agreeable differs from the beautiful before committing ourselves to that view. As Kant puts it (and I think we should take this as definitional for the beautiful if we are to understand him), it would be “ridiculous” to say that something “is beautiful for me” (55). There may be substitutes for ‘beauty’ that help us understand the distinct character of judgments of beauty for Kant, but I can’t think of any. In any event, to get ourselves into Kant’s head, I think it’s important we begin from this idea (that to say something is beautiful “for me” is “ridiculous”).
But the characteristic oddness of judgments of beauty—maybe the reason we reject their universality—is that, based as they are on feeling, their universality seems to derive from what is ordinarily a highly individual and particular source. “[S]urely there is something strange here,” Kant himself writes. See p. 58.
Judgments of beauty are also strange because they purport to be universal (hold for everyone) but are singular in scope. They are about this tree, this painting. And they have the challenging fact about them that arguments cannot convince people of the truth of a judgment of beauty. See p. 59.
All of these count merely as qualifications of judgments of beauty. They may be strange, Kant seems to be saying, but this is what they are. Importantly, there is no general response to the question whether such judgments are actually to be found; only that, if they are possible, this is what they’re like. See p. 60.
Kant in §9 stresses that judgments of beauty are not judgments that some experience is pleasant and will be so for everyone. Recall from the palace claim that something may be beautiful, in Kant’s sense, and yet, for some, repugnant. Thus what is universal and “communicable” in a judgment of beauty is not the pleasure but “the mental state.” See pp. 61–62, where we get the fuller description of the ‘free play’ between imagination and understanding that is involved in judgments of beauty; Kant describes it on 63 as a “quickening of the two powers (imagination and understanding) to an activity that is indeterminate but . . . nonetheless accordant: the activity required for cognition in general.”
Any pleasure associated with beauty, then, is not pleasure arising from the object but pleasure directed at “the harmony of the cognitive powers” (62). It is universal because the conditions of cognition are universal.
4 §§ 10–17: third moment: purposiveness
A purpose is a reason why something is the case.
To call something “purposive” is to say that the structure of a purpose is useful (or even necessary) for understanding it, even, as Kant puts it, “on a will that would have so arranged them in accordance with the presentation of a certain rule” (65). Thus is it possible to say something is “purposive” without that requiring any actual purpose, “insofar as we do not posit the causes of this form in a will, and yet can grasp the explanation of its possibility only by deriving it from a will” (ibid.).
Pleasure is “consciousness of a presentation’s causality directed at the subject’s state so as to keep him in that state” (65). A pleasurable activity is one that sustains itself. In the same way that, when doing or making something, a representation of the end precipitates the achievement of the end, with pleasure a certain activity or representation precipitates maintenance of that activity or representation. Pleasure is thus “purposive” in that sense: To the extent that a certain activity is the reason why we persist in that activity, it serves as the basis of that persistence.
Any pleasure associated with judgments of beauty can be neither subjective (those would be judgments of what is agreeable to me) nor objective (those would be judgments of the good). Rather, the pleasure associated with beauty “involves merely the relation of the presentational powers to each other, insofar as they are determined by a presentation” (66).
If the pleasure associated with a judgment of beauty is purposive, then, it must be pleasure having to do, structurally (not subjectively), with the free play of the powers of cognition. See p. 66.
5 §§18–22: fourth moment: necessity
Judgments of beauty, for Kant, hold ‘necessarily’. What does that mean? See p. 85.
Judgments of taste presuppose a “common sense,” as Kant claims in §20. The basic argument is on p. 88.
But what is the nature of this “common sense”? It is more, simply, than the fact that we all have the capacity for sense perception, but it is also not simply the empirical generalization that we all share the same standards of taste. Importantly, Kant infers it merely here from the possibility of judgments of taste: If it is possible to form judgments of taste, then there must be some shared capacity for feeling that is, say, moved by this or that.
When we call something beautiful, we mean something like: An individual who perceives this, paying attention to this and that, will find it beautiful. The ‘subject’ (the ‘an individual’) of this judgment is an approximation of what Kant means by a “common sense.”
But Kant also thinks the “common sense” has a normative sense: It isn’t just ‘everyone’ I address a judgment of beauty to, but to a certain ‘exemplary’ perceiver. See this passage on p. 89.