The Aesthetic Use of the Logical Functions in Kant's Third Critique

Stephanie Adair

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110574920
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

In der Reihe werden herausragende monographische Untersuchungen und Sammelbände zu allen Aspekten der Philosophie Kants veröffentlicht, ebenso zum systematischen Verhältnis seiner Philosophie zu anderen philosophischen Ansätzen in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Veröffentlicht werden Studien, die einen innovativen Charakter haben und ausdrückliche Desiderate der Forschung erfüllen. Die Publikationen repräsentieren damit den aktuellsten Stand der Forschung.

Chapter One: Renegotiating Kantian Constraints, Intuiting without Concepts

What happens to a judgment, if there is no concept to act as its determining grounds? From the standpoint of Kant’s first Critique, such a judgment would seem to be so meaninglessly blind that we might hesitate to call it a judgment at all. Knowledge can only occur where both of the two key mental components are involved: intuition and concept.90 As Kant famously declares,

Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.91

The intuitions without concepts, which are so easily dismissed here, reemerge in the third Critique as unexpectedly purposive for our faculties. Far from dissolving into a meaningless abyss of caprice, we find in aesthetic judgment that

[the] inner relationship [between the faculties of imagination and understanding] is optimal for the animation of both powers of the mind […] and this disposition cannot be determined except through the feeling (not by concepts).92

Thus, aesthetic judgment presents us with a bit of a riddle—a mode of judgment that does not operate through concepts and yet boasts an optimal animation of the faculties. The high status of aesthetic judgment is further illustrated in Kant’s discussion of how an aesthetic idea “occasions much thinking, though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i. e., concept, to be adequate to it.”93 Not only is a concept not determining this idea, but what is aesthetically stirred up in it reaches beyond our conceptual grasp.94 Thus, we “linger over the consideration of the beautiful,” and in doing so “this consideration strengthens and reproduces itself.”95

This chapter lays out the set of concerns that lead me to offer a layered interpretation of how Kant’s aesthetic judgment functions. Kant describes aesthetic judgment as a mode of merely reflective judgment that does not depend on concepts in the way that determinative judgments do. As Kant tells us in the First Introduction, aesthetic judgment is a “judgment which precedes all concepts of the object,” and as such it “has its determining ground in the power of judgment, unmixed with any other faculty of cognition.”96 Attempts can be made to understand this quizzical feature of aesthetic judgment in one of the following three ways: 1. concepts are altogether absent, 2. concepts are present but severely limited in their operations, 3. concepts are present but function in a very different manner than in determinative judgments. For instance, Béatrice Longuenesse takes the first view in “Kant’s Leading Thread in the Analytic of the Beautiful” where she writes, “But Kant is adamant that judgments of taste are not cognitive judgments, and that as aesthetic judgments, they do not rest on categories.”97 I will be calling this the strong view. The second view, which I will be calling the limiting view, often takes the form of the suggestion that the pure concepts are operative, while empirical concepts are not. Rudolf Makkreel gives voice to this view in his article “Reflection, Reflective Judgment, and Aesthetic Exemplarity” where he argues that since the categories are a priori and formal, “categories such as substance and causality are applicable to all possible phenomenal objects. No special reflective or technical skill is necessary for their application.”98 This would make the categories already operative before the reflective moment Longuenesse identifies with the reflection of aesthetic judgment.99 Lewis White Beck takes a similar position, writing “The concepts which Kant holds do not play a role in the construction of (pure) aesthetic experience are not categorial concepts but empirical.”100 The third view according to which there is a different conceptual operation in the judgment of taste is held by Henry Allison, who writes “that the beautiful is the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of the understanding.”101 He takes this to be in accordance with the way that the judgment of taste “is a judgment of mere reflection, that is, one not issuing in cognition, which would require a determinate concept.”102 As Allison takes the indeterminate concept exhibited in the beautiful to be of the understanding, he concludes that:

An indeterminable concept of the understanding would be one that is not schematizable, which means that it is merely the form of a concept, not an actual concept. Consequently, we must take Kant’s point here to be that the beautiful is that which has the form of the exhibition of some concept or other (it being undetermined which one), and this is fully in accord with the accounts in the Introductions and the Analytic of the Beautiful considered in the first two parts of this study.103

I will ultimately be arguing for a specific sort of limiting view that does not fall neatly into any of the three options listed above, but does incorporate elements of each. The view I put forward in chapter two will address the difficulties presented in chapter one by limiting the involvement of concepts to certain layers of the activity of judging. The first layer is a normal determinative cognition of an object where the concept determines an intuition, but with a part of the intuition unable to be determined in this way. Thus, the subsumptive activity of the concepts is complete for the part of the intuition subsumed, but there remains a part of the intuition that is unable to be subsumed. The second layer exhibits an activity of judging that is as close as one can come to what the strong view describes. Here, neither empirical concepts nor the categories are operative, although there is the involvement of an “indeterminate concept of the understanding” that can never yield cognition.104 It is then in the third layer that we see the discursive activity that is inspired to conceptually grasp after the feeling of pure aesthetic pleasure, unable to ever subsume it under any of the possible determinate concepts that suggest themselves.105

Over the course of this chapter, I will investigate the first two of these possible interpretations—the strong view and the limiting view, respectively—to show that on their own they do not paint a satisfactory picture of aesthetic judgment. The view that concepts function differently in aesthetic than determinative judgments will be discussed in the next chapter where I lay out my layered solution. Kant has two competing criteria for aesthetic judgment. On the one hand, it is somehow not to involve the subsumption of an intuition under a concept. On the other hand, it is both about objects of experience, and able to lead to a rich contemplation of “aesthetic ideas.”106 We will see that these two stipulations, ultimately, cannot be met without the use of concepts. For this reason, I will argue that the best way to make sense of this is if aesthetic judgment is understood as a streamlined process with distinct acts of judging occurring on three different layers, the first and the third yield discursively articulable judgment statements (“This is a tulip” and “This tulip is beautiful”, accordingly). Meanwhile, the middle layer will be what I call properly aesthetic. Here, the act of judging operates in accordance with the logical functions, but with no object involved to be determined by concepts.

The objective of this chapter is to show why such a layered reading is necessary, and this will be done by tracing out the struggle that we find ourselves in if an unstratified picture of aesthetic judgment is assumed. Flattened conceptions of aesthetic judgment often treat it as if it were driven by the aim to produce the statement that proclaims the object’s aesthetic value, “This x is beautiful.” Over the course of this chapter, it will become clear why such a presumption—assumed both by the strong and by the limiting view—is mistaken.

According to the strong view, Kant has re-imagined the role of concepts in aesthetic judgment, entirely eliminating them so as to give us a form of judgment that is free of concepts, altogether. I will test out this reading by investigating whether there would even be a way of observing something beautiful without concepts mediating the encounter. I work through the possible modes of awareness in which one could encounter the beautiful (experience, acquaintance, perception and representation without consciousness), ultimately determining that the first three involve concepts and although the final mode might be without concepts, it is also without consciousness, and thus too weak to support aesthetic judgment.

At this point I turn to the reading of the concepts as having a limited involvement in aesthetic judgment. If the limiting view is to be seriously entertained, then one must first determine which mode of encounter limits the operation of concepts to the greatest extent without impinging upon other aspects of how Kant describes aesthetic judgement. Following this line of questioning, I work through the previously discussed modes of encounter, but in reverse (representation without consciousness, perception, acquaintance, experience). At the end of the chapter, this investigation may appear to have brought us full circle. Be that as it may, the circle is hermeneutic, not vicious.107 Each time we touch upon the modes of encounter, we do so differently, and the conclusion that one encounters the beautiful in the mode of experience means something different at the close of the chapter than it would have initially.

Moreover, this conclusion signals only another beginning. While at this point it will have, on the one hand, become clear that the process of aesthetic judgment must begin with the experience of an aesthetic object, it will also have become clear that aesthetic judgment must go beyond this experience. The conclusion that one aesthetically judges an object of experience is, on its own, unsatisfactory. Although it accounts for certain aspects of Kant’s aesthetic theory, if it is left at this, then all peculiarities about the role of concepts vanish in the process. Thus, once we have worked our way from conceptualized experience to representation without consciousness, and back again, it will have become clear why we should consider an entirely different interpretive route—one that understands aesthetic judgment to involve not just one, but three, layers of judging. This layered solution will then be carefully laid out in chapter two.

I Intuitions and Objects

The strong view would be a reading in which Kant’s remarks are taken to mean that concepts, cannot be involved in aesthetic judgment at all. This view will ultimately be rejected, because it would corner us into a framework that can neither support aesthetic judgment as pertaining to some singular thing (“This flower”108), nor inspire aesthetic ideas.109 For this study, however, it is meaningful to investigate precisely how the strong view fails, as doing so will give us a better picture of how aesthetic judgment operates and what elements of Kant’s cognitive machinery from the first Critique can be involved. First, let us get the lay of the land for the strong view by considering what complications it would need to resolve regarding intuitions and objects in order to stand firm as an adequate interpretation of Kant’s aesthetic theory.

In “Acquaintance and Cognition,” Mark Okrent tackles a strikingly similar pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgement
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Renegotiating Kantian Constraints, Intuiting without Concepts
• Chapter Two: Logical Functions of Judgment and the Layered Solution
• Chapter Three: Pleasure Without Interest: Affirming a Negated Interest Through the Infinite Logical Function of Quality
• Chapter Four: The Universal Validity of a Singular Judgment
• Chapter Five: Disjunctivity and the Form of Purposiveness
• Chapter Six: An Exemplary, Conditioned Necessity
• Concluding Remarks
• Works Cited
• Abstract
• Index