1 The demand for a deduction
What is a “deduction” and why is it needed? Let me put it in as non-Kantian way as I can muster.
In the relevant legal context, a “deduction” answers a question about property rights. It tells us to whom some tract of land belongs.
Metaphorically, a deduction in philosophy answers the question: Who or what ‘owns’ this? Who’s responsible for it?
Now, generally, you might say that Kant only needs to answer this sort of question wherever claims obligating others are at issue. For example, if I say “I just so happen to like cake” or “That wall seems white to me,” I don’t need to answer questions like: By what right do you make that claim? because, in short, I’m not obligating anyone else to hold my views.
But when I say “Elephants have a fourteenth-month gestation period” or (relevant to us) “That painting is beautiful,” I am making a claim that obligates (or claims to obligate) others, that is, to assent to the meaning and truth of the claim.
See the justification on pp. 141–142.
2 The sublime and the beautiful
The case for a deduction of judgments of the beautiful is fairly clear. Judgments of the sublime seem not to involve the same clear case. Kant claims “the exposition we gave of judgments about the sublime in nature was also their deduction” (142). The reason seems to be that judgments of the sublime have a different relation to their objects than judgments of the beautiful.
In the case of the beautiful, although the way we perceive it seems to be an essential part of calling something beautiful, the thing (the work of art, say, or the landscape, or whatever) is not interchangeable with some other object. So judgments of the beautiful retain a kind of essential relationship to some object.
On the other hand, in the case of the sublime, the object is merely an occasion for the feeling, and the relation between judgment and object is more tenuous; what matters is instead the ‘purposiveness’ of the relation between reason and the imagination. See pp. 142–3.
3 Deduction of judgments of the beautiful: introductory remarks
Judgments of the beautiful are not about objects, in the strict sense. They are “subjectively universal,” meaning they aren’t to be taken as claims about things but about the way people (subjects) perceive them. This matters for purposes of figuring out just what is need in justification. See pp. 143–4.
Side question: Why don’t “votes” establish the “universal validity” of a judgment of beauty? (See p. 144.)
What we “feel” for Kant in the experience prototypical for claiming something is beautiful is the interaction between the imagination and judgment as such. Let’s look at this passage toward the bottom of p. 151. I think if you get what’s going on there, you could make sense of everything preceding it in this paragraph.
Kant phrases the question of the deduction in terms of the odd coupling of (individual) experience and its putatively universal validity like this: p. 153.
4 Deduction
Kant says the deduction is “so easy”: See p. 156. A judgment of beauty is, again, a claim that the presentation of some particulr object will bring about in others (other humans) pleasure at the interaction between the faculties of imagination and understanding. The underlying idea is that, in order to be universally valid, judgments of the beautiful require just two things:
- that the conditions of cognition are universal, and
- that an individual correctly determines when the imagination and the understanding are excited in ‘free play’
The second question is basically, to put it one way, an empirical question. It’s sort of like saying there is a difference between:
- the giraffes have long necks and
- the question whether this or that is a giraffe
1 could be a ‘valid’ concept without requiring every judgment of the form ‘\(x\) is a giraffe’ (every version of 2) to be true. (Of course!)
Now, if the two things above—the fact that the conditions of cognition are universal etc.—are the only things requisite to the validity of a judgment of beauty, then the fact that the conditions of cognition are universal amounts to a demonstration of the validity (in principle, not in fact) of judgments of beauty.
I’ve left out of this that the sort of judgment at issue is the pleasure of the experience of “[the] subjective purposiveness of the presentation [of some object] for the relation between our cognitive powers”—i.e., pleasure at experiencing an object as if it were designed for me to make sense of it—but we now get that and the above described on p. 155 (and let’s also look at that footnote).
There’s a question in Kant scholarship by the way about whether all experience is beautiful. I don’t think it is. But, much as I understand the stakes and relative legitimacy of the question, I also have no particular thoughts about it that I care about either. But it does strike me that this passage at the bottom of p. 156 is or could be relevant to that question. The upshot would seem to be that there is something about the framing of the question (whether all experience is beautiful) that involves suppositions worth interrogating. I think the passage highlighted at pp. 158–159 might also be helpful for thinking about this question.
5 The pleasure of the beautiful
There’s also a good question here about what’s going on: Is Kant done ‘deducing’? He begins here to discuss the particular pleasure associated with judgments of the beautiful. Is this part of the deduction or not? I’ll leave that question to one side.
Beauty involves pleasure of some sort. What are the rival conceptions of pleasure? They are:
- the pleasure you might think of as ‘ordinary’, that is, what Kant calls agreeableness
- the pleasure of doing the right thing
On these two, see the passage at the top of p. 158. But the pleasure associated with judgments of the beautiful:
- is not particular and
- does not involve concepts.
Kant’s conception of the pleasure associated with sublime (in green on p. 158) suggests:
- that the sublime and the beautiful involve objects in different ways:
- the beautiful being connected to a certain presentation of some particular object (not therefore to the object as such, which is just garden-variety concept + intuition = experience)
- the sublime being connected to a certain presentation only as a possible occasion for the arousal of the experience of the sublime
- that the universality of the sublime and the beautiful differ:
- the beautiful being universally valid for a certain presentation, but
- (perhaps just exaggerating) the sublime being universaly valid for the form of cognition but without any tie to any specific presentation (or, of course, object).
Is it possible just anything can arouse the experience of the sublime?
6 The sensus communis
The question here is: What are the conditions of possibility of judgments of the beautiful? Judgments of the beautiful are claims that certain presentations of objects must coincide with an experience of pleasure arising from the free play of the imagination and the understanding. This ‘must’ rests (“must coincide . . . “), in a sort of hand-wavingly general way, on the universality of the structure of experience. Calling something beautiful is like saying: If you contemplate this object in this way, you will experience pleasure.
All of this points up—as part of the answer to the question, What are the conditions of possibility of judgments of the beautiful?—the existence in us of a capacity for taking up the position, so to speak, of an observer or judger (a human observer or judger) as such. The ‘sense’ that enables this operation is what Kant calls “the sensus communis”; see p. 160.
Understanding is difficult. Forming aesthetic judgments isn’t; it comes to us easily; it is a mere effect of the use of our cognitive faculties. For that reason, Kant claims, aesthetic judgment is “more legitimately” general than understanding. See this passage on p. 162.