I’d like to introduce the Dialectic and describe Kant’s solution. Then the two ‘Comments’ we can perhaps leave to later in the semester, along with §§58–60. ## Introduction The general pattern in Kantian critiques, when evalauting various mental faculties, is:
anayltic \(\Rightarrow\) deduction \(\Rightarrow\) dialectic,
where:
- the analytic tells us what the faculty is, and what its principle or basic rule is
- the deduction explains what makes the use of that faculty in that way legitimate
And from the legitimate use of a faculty, Kant argues, often as a result of its universal extension, a conflict or contradiction comes about. Here’s a simple version: We rightly hold that everything has an explanation. Now, extend that principle universally. Is there some ‘first’ explanation? or none at all? or is some explanation circular? One of these, it seems, must be true, all are possible, but they cannot all be true. The legitimate extension of the principle comes into conflict with itself. Thus:
- the dialectic describes the inevitable contradiction or antinomy/-ies that result from the legitimate use of a faculty
1 The antinomy of taste
You could tease Kant’s antinomy of taste out of common practice or out of Kant’s theory of taste. Consider, to construct it in the first way, the fact that, if you’re like me, you:
- accept that other people may hold views contradicting yours about ‘good’ art, and yet
- are willing, sometimes eagerly, to argue about which art is ‘good’.
There is a tension here. What counts as good art seems to be, as it were, both a private and a public category, and the two sorts of categories are mutually exclusive.
The Kantian version of this tension derives from his presentation of judgments of taste as universal but not involving determinate concepts. The problem is that universally valid judgments are (or are expected to be) determinate, or ‘provable’, but aesthetic judgments aren’t. Let’s work through all of §§55–56, pp. 209–11.
Note Kant’s outline of the solution, but his acknowledgement that the tension is “natural and hence unavoidable”; see p. 211 blue.
2 The solution
Kant’s solution is to mark out the distinctive ‘concept’ at issue in aesthetic judgment. Let’s describe the antinomy then like this:
- We argue about art as if that discussion were based on concepts
- Our views on art are private because they are not based on concepts
When we argue about art (or beauty more generally; but I the think point is clearer if we focus on art), we point out that a work of art has these and those properties, with a sort of implicit structure that looks like this:
- \(a\) is \(P\), \(Q\), etc.
- Anything that is \(P\), \(Q\), etc. is great
- \(a\) is great
We suppose that determining what is great art is like identifying zebras in a field. The problem is that 1 and 2, in the case of zebras, are strictly specifiable, but not in the case of art—which is captured in that other, entirely natural view of great art, that you and I have merely private views about it.
What gives rise to this indeterminacy, Kant argues, isn’t whether or not the judgments are based on a concept, but what sort of concept the judgments are based on. Kant thus distinguishes between:
- determinate concepts of the understanding: those from which definitive proofs are possible, and that determine what their sensible object is; and
- indeterminate concepts of reason
The specific indeterminate concept of reason Kant has in mind is the concept of the thing that is a ground of appearances.
When we argue about whether this or that is a zebra, we are arguing about an appearance. We have all the tools we need to determine which of us is wrong. We compare the animal to a schema for what is a zebra. We compare its anatomy to the anatomy of the type. And so on. One of us is right and the other is wrong. The thing we’re judging is the thing that appears.
When we argue about whether a work of art is great, Kant thinks we’re not talking about the object as an appearance but rather as a ground of appearances, and this difference accounts for the distinctive tension of taste. The structure is the same but the constituents of it are unknowable.
Perhaps this won’t be helpful, but consider Olafur Eliasson’s 2003 The weather project. One of the things interesting about this work was that, in addition to lying down, people would explore the space as if it were a park. (It was a common place to meet up for lunch.) You might say that, for Kant, when we get into discussing whether this installation was beautiful or great art, we aren’t talking about the thing as a sum of appearances but the thing as a ground of appearances (a ground not only of certain sensible properties but of certain responses in us) and it’s the indeterminate relation between the work of art as a thing in itself and not only its outward appearance as such but the experience of pleasure in the audience as an appearance of it too that introduces the indeterminacy of aesthetic judgment.
I want to look at just about all of p. 212 and the paragraph on p. 213.