Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kant on Judgment

Robert Wicks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415281102
• eBook ISBN: 9781134461899
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Kant's Critique of Judgment is one of the most important texts in the history of modern aesthetics. This GuideBook discusses the Third Critique section by section, and introduces and assesses:

• Kant's life and the background of the Critique of Judgment
• the ideas and text of the Critique of Judgment, including a critical explanation of Kant's theories of natural beauty
• the continuing relevance of Kant's work to contemporary philosophy and aesthetics.

This GuideBook is an accessible introduction to a notoriously difficult work and will be essential reading for students of Kant and aesthetics.

1

The Pleasure in Pure Beauty (§§1–22; §§30–40)

[First Part, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Section I. Analytic of Aesthetic Judgment. Book I. Analytic of the Beautiful.] In the first 22 sections of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant analyzes the structure, grounds, and objects associated with “judgments of taste” (Geschmacksurteile). To do this systematically, he organizes his exposition according to a fourfold division inherited from the logic books of his time. This fourfold division also guided his earlier analyses in the Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason. In the first Critique, for example, Kant structured his expositions of the logical preconditions for any human experience into the four logical aspects of “quantity,” “quality,” “relation,” and “modality.” These will be further described below, since they apply similarly to Kant’s present analysis of judgments of taste. In the second Critique, he used the same fourfold structure to organize his treatment of moral issues.

Kant’s topic in the third Critique as a whole is concerned specifically with judgments of a particular sort, namely, those that are purpose-related in a manner that is either determinate (i.e., when the purposes are specified) or indeterminate (i.e., when they are not). The fourfold logical format referred to above continues to apply, and Kant utilizes this division as a template – with varying degrees of success – to organize his expositions of aesthetic and teleological judgments, both of which are purpose-related types of judgment.

As outlined in the Critique of Pure Reason, logical quantity concerns whether a judgment’s scope extends to only a single thing, to some things or to all things; logical quality concerns whether a given judgment is positive, negative or unlimited;¹ logical relation concerns whether the judgment is categorical, hypothetical or disjunctive; logical modality concerns whether the judgment is presented as only a possibility, as an actuality, or as a necessity. A judgment such as “This rose is red,” for instance, is a singular, positive, and categorical judgment that asserts a matter of fact. Kant will argue that a judgment such as “This rose is beautiful” is a singular, positive, categorical judgment that, rather intriguingly, asserts a matter of necessity. His analytic exposition of judgments of pure beauty is accordingly partitioned into four main logical aspects or “moments” (Momente), following the above divisions, and any instance of a judgment of pure beauty will embody the four aspects simultaneously.

A judgment such as “this is beautiful” also, however, has a peculiar subjective component in that it amounts to a person’s report about how, upon disinterestedly contemplating an object’s form, the object makes him or her feel. This entails that judgments of beauty will require furthermore a specialized analysis within the basic parameters of the standard fourfold division of logical judgments, since this crucial subjective factor needs to be additionally elucidated.

To highlight the different moments of judgments of pure beauty and to introduce an assortment of aesthetics-related themes, Kant organizes his analysis of judgments of pure beauty – an analysis that grounds the remaining discussions in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment – according to the four following logical headings, which we will discuss in the sequence, following Kant’s text. He presents:

§§1–5: [Quality]² The first moment of the judgment of pure beauty, with respect to its quality. This concerns the judgment’s disinterestedness.

§§ 6–9: [Quantity] The second moment of the judgment of pure beauty, with respect to its quantity. Although the judgment of pure beauty is always singular in logical form, this second moment concerns the judgment’s universality in reference to its grounds.

§§ 10–17: [Relation] The third moment of judgments of pure beauty, with respect to the relation of the purposes that such judgments bring into consideration. This concerns the judgment–s purposiveness.

§§ 18–22: [Modality] The fourth moment of pure judgments of beauty, with respect to the modality of the satisfaction in the object. This concerns the judgment’s necessity.³

As noted above, in the initial sections of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Kant is concerned with analyzing the features of a particular kind of judgment that he calls a “judgment of taste” (Geschmacksurteil). It is easy to assume that this type of judgment is made every time someone intends to judge a thing’s beauty and makes the pronouncement, “X is beautiful.” In fact, however, the majority of such “actual” judgments of taste might not be attending to the object’s beauty at all, but to other features of the object, such as its sensory charm or its attractive meaning. We must therefore distinguish between actual judgments that are intended to be judgments of taste and ideal judgments of taste. Ideal judgments of taste attend to the object’s beauty exclusively.

The bulk of Kant’s initial analyses in §§1–15 concern ideal judgments of taste. His concern is to describe the essential features of such judgments, and he aims to characterize the perfect attitude that would stand as the ideal for anyone who would like exclusively to judge an object’s beauty. In such an ideal situation, as we shall see, the judgment of taste would be disinterested, would demand universal agreement, would attend to the object’s purposiveness, and would involve a kind of necessity. To underscore such idealizing intents on Kant’s part, I will refer to a “Geschmacksurteil” (which would literally be translated as a “judgment of taste”) as a “judgment of pure beauty.”

The First Logical Moment: Judgments of Pure Beauty are Aesthetic and Disinterested (§§1–5)

Aesthetic Judgments vs. Cognitive Judgments

[§1: “The Judgment of Taste is Aesthetic”] The most fundamental assertion in the Critique of the Power of Judgment is that judgments of pure beauty are aesthetic judgments. They are based on feelings of pleasure or displeasure, i.e., how something makes us feel:

To decide whether something is beautiful or not, we relate the representation, not through the understanding to the object for cognition, but through the imagination (perhaps joined with the understanding) to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure.

(§1, Ak 203 (4), G 89, P 44, M 41, B 37)

Kant formulates this characterization with several background assumptions about how the human mind operates. To start, he distinguishes a representation(s) of an object from the object itself, as when several people all perceive the same object and where it is possible to distinguish the object itself from the way each person perceives it. For instance, if each person drew a picture of the object that he or she was seeing, the pictures would each look different, given the different angles from which each was drawn. The object itself, however, would remain constant and independent of the various perspectives or representations taken upon it. When judging an object’s beauty, Kant maintains that we refer immediately to how the object presents itself to us, and we attend thereby to our own representation of the object. An object’s beauty concerns first and foremost how the object appears to you or to me, and we each reflect upon how that appearance makes us feel.

The above excerpt also reveals how Kant identifies and isolates various mental capacities and how he describes our psychological processes in terms of the interaction of those capacities. In the present case, we have the representation of an object, and two ways to relate ourselves to this representation, either for the purposes of cognition (i.e., to obtain knowledge of the natural world), or in reference to how the representation makes us feel. To comprehend, cognize or empirically know the object in some determinate way, we call upon the understanding. To judge how the representation makes us feel, we presumably call mainly upon the imagination. As we read the very first sentence of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, we thus have before us (1) the representation of an object, (2) two stated ways to interpret that representation, and (3) two mental capacities – understanding and imagination – through which we can focus the interpretation in one direction or another.

Distinctive in this philosophical arrangement is the claim that when we judge the pure beauty of an object, we are not deciding whether the representation of the object tells us anything true about the object or provides empirical or scientific knowledge of it. The relevant factor in beauty is not objectively directed to securing factual information about the object. Rather, what is relevant is subjectively centered, for it initially concerns only how the object’s appearance makes us feel. We disengage our interest from the cognitive, knowledge-related contents of our representation of the object, and in judging the object’s beauty we attend only to the pleasurable or displeasurable feelings that the object’s presentation generates through our judging of it.

Judgments of pure beauty thereby concern themselves in the first instance with subjective feelings of pleasure and displeasure, although they are directed towards objects that have properties with the power to generate these feelings. Judgments of pure beauty are not cognitive judgments where we attend to an object’s qualities to determine what sort of thing it is. From the outset, then, there is a distinction between cognition (i.e., objectively knowing about or comprehending an object) and merely experiencing how the object makes us feel (i.e., aesthetic awareness).

Kant consequently refers to judgments of pure beauty as aesthetic judgments, in contrast to cognitive judgments. The term “aesthetic” does not refer exclusively to beauty, however, and – this is a crucial point – not all aesthetic judgments are judgments of pure beauty. Some aesthetic judgments do not involve beauty at all. Kant refers to judgments of beauty as aesthetic judgments, as one might refer to diamonds as minerals, as opposed to plants.

The term “aesthetic” derives from the Greek “aistheta” (αισθητα), which means “sensible particulars.” Within the present context, “aesthetic” refers simply to that which is related to feeling. An aesthetic judgment is about how something makes us feel, and there are different kinds of feelings that have respectively different sources or grounds. Some of these feelings and grounds are peculiar to judgments of pure beauty and some are not.

It is consequently important to note at the outset that in the absence of added qualifications such as “pure” or “reflective,” it is terminologically confusing if the term “aesthetic judgment” is used flatly as a synonym for either “judgment of pure beauty” or “judgment of taste” within Kant’s aesthetics. “Aesthetic judgment” is a comprehensive generic category under which judgments of pure beauty (e.g., “this object (which happens to be a snowflake) is beautiful”) along with judgments of sensory gratification (e.g., “this wine has a spicy, citrus aroma”), not to mention judgments of the sublime (e.g., “the starry skies are mathematically sublime”), are included as distinct species, just as primates, rodents, and marsupials are included under the class “mammal.”

Kant concludes §1 with some examples that foreshadow his upcoming analysis of judgments of pure beauty. The first example is of some given regular, purposive construction (ein regelmäßiges, zweckmäßiges Gebäude). Such a construction, as “purposive,” is one whose organization very strongly suggests, although it does not necessitate, that it was intelligently designed. Kant states that in view of such a purposive presentation, we can either begin to wonder what sort of thing it specifically is, or we can more generally and less determinately “hold the presentation up to the entire faculty of representation” and derive a feeling from the overall intelligibility of the presentation’s design, quite independently of being concerned with what sort of thing we have before us. Kant associates this latter activity of judging a presentation’s abstract and formal intelligibility with judging the presentation’s pure, or free, beauty.

In later sections, Kant expands upon what this sort of aesthetic judgment more specifically involves, and indeed, the above example of the purposive construction encapsulates the rudiments of his theory of beauty. At present, though, he only states that when we judge a presentation with respect to its degree of overall intelligibility with respect to its design, we derive a pleasure or displeasure that can be present independently of trying to comprehend what sort of thing we are perceiving. Kant adds that even if we had a presentation that had no sensory content (e.g., some abstract mathematical or geometrical structure), our judgment would still be an aesthetic judgment, if we were to consider solely how the presentation’s configuration makes us feel. Whether the presentation has a sensory content or whether it is purely conceptual or formal makes no difference. We can aesthetically judge the formal configuration of either sort of presentation in a judgment of pure beauty.

Judgments of Pure Beauty are Not Grounded upon Interests

[§2: “The feeling of approval that determines the judgment of pure beauty is devoid of all interest”] After having established that the basic quality of judgments of pure beauty is “aesthetic,” Kant continues with a definition of the term “interest” (Interesse) and asserts that when we have an interest in something, the representation of that thing’s existence produces a liking, satisfaction, or feeling of approval (Wohlgefallen).⁴ He maintains further that desire is necessarily related to the feeling of approval in the existence of things, and that interests therefore accompany desires. Interests and desires go together, for if one has an interest in something, then one has the desire that the object will be a reality. It follows that if there is some pleasure that arises independently of whether the object that causes it is physically real or merely imaginary, then interests and desires would not be involved in explaining the basis of the pleasure. Kant maintains that the latter is exactly the case in the satisfaction that is associated with pure beauty, and he concludes that judgments of pure beauty are disinterested judgments and are independent of the faculty of desire. Judgments of pure beauty accordingly require an attitude of disinterestedness on the part of the person making the judgment.

To support this contention that the pleasure in pure beauty is distinct from the pleasures associated with interests and desires, Kant offers a thought experiment to show that judgments of pure beauty are independent of practical affairs. Suppose that we have an image of a palace before us. To deny that the palace is beautiful because it took an excessive amount of money and human labor to build it would be to confuse the cause of the building with how the building looks. Similarly, supposing alternatively that the palace were only a vision in the air, to deny consequently that the building is beautiful because it is only an imaginative vision would be to confuse the building’s possible physical existence with how it happens to appear as a mere image. If the building looks exactly the same as a vision and as a physically real palace, then the distinction between imagination and reality makes no aesthetic difference. The palace’s merely imaginary existence would not detract from how it looks. Neither would the palace’s actual existence need add anything to how it looks. The situation is similar to how, if one had ten imaginary dollars in one’s pocket, or if one had ten actual dollars in one’s pocket, the “ten” remains the same in both cases.

Kant concludes from such examples that reflection upon the actual causes of the presentation – an activity which introduces the issue of whether or not the presentation refers to an existing object, either natural or artificial – is beside the point when judgments of pure beauty are concerned. What is exclusively relevant, once again, is simply how the intelligibility of the presentation’s design makes us feel. Judgments of pure beauty should not, in other words, depend upon the existence of the object of the judgment, as would be the case, for instance, if we were praising the quality of a satisfying restaurant.

In §§1–2, then, Kant argues that judgments of pure beauty are independent of both cognitive (i.e., theoretical) determinations and desire-and-interest-related (i.e., practical) determinations. The former are essentially scientific concerns, the latter are moral concerns in the broad sense, and Kant claims that judgments of pure beauty are reducible to the contents of neither. Judgments of pure beauty stand as a third sort of judgment within an independent philosophical sphere of their own.

In sum, judgments of pure beauty are a species of aesthetic judgment and, owing to their non-knowledge-producing and disinterested quality, are distinguished from cognitive judgments, moral judgments, any type of aesthetic judgment that involves interests (e.g., judgments of sensory gratification), along with concerns about whether or not the object actually exists as either a natural or artifactual object. Kant detaches the judgment of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• A Note on the English Translations of the Critique of the Power of Judgment
• Introduction
• 1. The pleasure in pure beauty (§§1–22; §§30–40)
• 2. The sublime and the infinite (§§23–29)
• 3. The fine arts and creative genius (§§41–54)
• 4. Beauty’s confirmation of science and morality (§§55–60)
• 5. Living organisms, God, and intelligent design (§§61–91)
• Conclusion: the music of the spheres and the idealization of reason
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index