CHAPTER THREE
KANT’S ANALYTIC OF THE BEAUTIFUL: FOUR MOMENTS IN
THE JUDGMENT OF TASTE
Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful
takes the form of a study of what he calls four moments of the judgment of
taste, corresponding to the four logical forms that formed the outline of his
categories as we saw in the preceding chapter. The elucidation and appraisal of
each of these four moments, namely – moments of quality, quantity, relation and
modality – of which each result in a partial definition of the beautiful is our
concern here in this chapter.
As an overture to our project, it is
important to note that Kant’s concern is to describe the essential features of
the judgment of taste, aiming to characterise 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. But before that
he sets to distinguish the judgment of taste, which is a form of aesthetic
judgment from other forms of aesthetic judgments, like judgments of sensory
gratification and judgments of the sublime. Hence it is terminologically
confusing if the term ‘aesthetic judgment’ is used flatly as a synonym for
‘judgment of taste’ within Kant’s aesthetics. In this stance Robert Wick refers
to the “judgment of taste” as the “judgment of pure beauty.”[1]
The first moment of the judgment of taste, moment of quality underscores this
preoccupation.
3.1 First
Moment of the Judgment of Taste: Moment of Quality
The
first moment of the judgment of taste[2]
opens up with the assertion – in the form of a title – that judgment of taste
is aesthetic. This means that they are based on feelings of pleasure and
displeasure, that is, how something makes us feel. To judge how something makes
us feel, we presumably call mainly upon the imagination. In fact, Kant says
that
If we wish to
discern whether anything is beautiful or not, we do not refer the
representation of it to the object by means of understanding with a view to
cognition, but by means of the imagination (acting perhaps in conjunction with
understanding) we refer the representation to the subject and its feeling of
pleasure or displeasure.[3]
And
from this statement of his we elicit: the representation of an object, two
stated ways to interpret that representation, and two mental capacities –
understanding and imagination – through which we can focus the interpretation
in one direction or another.
Distinctive in this philosophical
arrangement of our eliciting, is the claim that when we judge the 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
centred, 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.
Hence
judgments of taste 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 from cognition (objectively knowing about or comprehending an
object) and merely experiencing how the object makes us feel (that is,
aesthetic awareness). With such distinction between aesthetic judgment and
cognitive judgment, Kant goes on to expound upon what this sort of aesthetic
judgment more specifically involves.
He
starts with a definition of the term interest; 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. Now if one has an interest in the
existence of 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 would not be involved in explaining the bases of the pleasure. Kant
thus maintains that the latter is exactly the case in the satisfaction that is
associated with the beautiful, and he concludes that judgments of taste are
disinterested judgments and are independent of the faculty of desire. Judgments
of taste accordingly require an attitude of disinterestedness[4] on
the part of the person making the judgment.
Elaboration
on these issues of ‘interest’ and the subsequent ‘disinterestedness’ makes Kant
to contrast judgments of taste with two
different types of judgment that carry an interest with them. The first is a
contrasting type of aesthetic judgment, namely, judgments of sensory
gratification, and the second is moral judgment.
To
establish the distinction between judgment of taste and judgment of sensory
gratification, Kant makes a distinction between sensation and feeling. As a
rule, he reserves the word sensation specifically for pleasures and
displeasures related to the five senses, and uses the term feeling more
generally to refer to aspects of experience that include non-sensory
satisfactions. To this end he recalls the earlier distinction drawn between
disinterested pleasure as opposed to interest-grounded pleasure, and he
associates the sensory pleasure with the latter. He refers to these as
satisfactions related to what is agreeable in sensation, or what can also be
referred to as satisfactions related to sensory gratification. His claim is
that when there is a subjective sensory satisfaction, we necessarily desire
that the satisfaction continue, and therefore have an interest in the item that
is objectively related to the sensation. No subjective sensory satisfaction can
consequently be a disinterested satisfaction.
To
express this fact about sensations, Kant argues that what is agreeable in
sensation produces a feeling of gratification. All sensory gratification is
consequently bound up with interests. This brings us to an important conclusion
about judgment of taste: the feeling of approval peculiar to them cannot rest
on sensory stimuli, sensory satisfaction or gratification, and interests. Still
based on the fact that judgments of taste include no interests, Kant further
distinguishes judgment of taste from judgments of goodness; saying that
judgments of goodness carry with them an interest in realizing certain effects
in the world, and is characterised in reference to what kind of thing the
object ought to be. His words are:
To find something good, I must always know what kind
of thing the object ought to be, that is, I must have a concept of it. To find
beauty in something, I do not need that. Flowers, free patterns, lines
wandering intertwining in each other called foliage – signify nothing, depend
on no definite concept, and yet please. Delight in the beautiful must depend
upon the reflection on an object that leads to some (not definitely determined)
concept. It is thus also differentiated from the agreeable, which rests
entirely upon sensation.[5]
To
this end that we have examined that the judgment of taste is based on a feeling
of pleasure or satisfaction, and that this feeling of pleasure or satisfaction
is not based on any interests, which implies that it is distinct from both the
satisfaction in what is pleasant in sensation and the satisfaction in what is
good, we understand that judgments of taste are also contemplative, and ought
not to be determined by practical concerns or conceptual definitions. Kant
hence concludes the first moment with this partial definition of the beautiful:
“Taste is the capacity to judge an object or a kind of representation through a
satisfaction or dissatisfaction devoid of all interest. The object of such a
satisfaction is called beautiful.”[6]
3.2 Second Moment of the Judgement of Taste:
Moment of Quantity
From the first moment, we understand
that the disinterestedness of the judgment of taste entails that the feeling of
approval associated with such judgments must be independent of one’s own
personal conditions, desires and interests. For this reason he maintains that
we can expect – or certainly can begin to expect – every person to experience
this feeling identically in relation to any beautiful object, if everyone were
to judge the object in an equally disinterested fashion. Hence a universal
feeling of approval abounds in such judgments.
An important implication of this
universal feeling of approval that grounds judgments of taste is the quality of
objectivity that the judgment carries along with it. The general idea is that
if there is a mode of awareness that everyone necessarily and universally
shares – if there is a mode of awareness that is founded on a priori conditions – then this mode of
awareness generates a sense of publicity and objectivity, and contributes to
our apprehension of being together in a shared and common world.
Since the disinterested nature of
the satisfaction associated with judgments of taste leads us to ascribe beauty
to the object itself, as if it were an objective, public quality of the object,
and since this disinterestedness is independent of our private conditions and
interests, it makes no sense to say of something, that it is merely beautiful
‘for me.’ When we believe that we are making a judgment of taste and are
assuming that we are judging disinterestedly, there is the expectation that
everyone else who judges disinterestedly will arrive at a very similar, if not
exactly the same conclusion, for we are not judging as private individuals, but
are judging solely in light of our capacities as human beings in general. Thus
Kant maintains that when we believe that we are making judgments of taste, we
demand that others agree. To the extent that we are confident that our judgment
is disinterested, the demand follows. It is therefore null to append the phrase
‘for me’ in judgments of taste.
Despite
the universal voice one adopts in judgment of taste, this universality does not
involve a process of generalization to other objects of the same kind. That is,
it contradicts the aesthetic nature of judgment of taste to reason from
premises that refer to some objects judged to be beautiful, to other objects
that have not yet been experienced. In point of fact, judgments of taste does
not allow for generalization of any sort, even among the same set of beautiful
things.
Given these reflections, Kant
reaffirms that judgments of taste are not logical judgments that involve
relationships of validity between conceptual premises and conclusions, and that
judgments of taste do not issue from drawing logical implications or
constructing proofs. Accordingly, it is impossible to persuade someone that an
object is beautiful, if he or she has not somehow perceived the object in
question. These considerations show how logical judgments and judgments of
taste are distinct, even though both involve the assertion of a universal
validity.
All of the above notwithstanding
Kant in the last section of the second moment, identifies what he calls the
‘key to the critique of taste’, which is an answer to the question as to
whether in a judgment of taste, the pleasure or satisfaction is prior to one’s
judging of the object, or vice-versa.
He
importantly announces that determining an answer to this question is essential
for understanding the nature of the judgments of taste. The answer nonetheless
amounts to the fact that in the judgment of taste, the judging of the object is
prior to the pleasure or satisfaction from the object. Let us throw some light
on this in the following fashion. Let us assume that we are apprehending an
object that has a purposive form (that is, it is highly organised and
systematic). To judge that object in terms of its pure beauty, we try to
apprehend the object disinterestedly, and if successful, the object’s purposive
form will then generate a harmony of the cognitive faculties to a degree that
radiates a satisfaction associated with cognition in general. This satisfaction
is the activity of the harmony of the cognitive faculties which, most
importantly, can be seen itself to have the form of a judgment in general. The
experience of the harmony of the cognitive faculties is thus a mode of judgment
that issues in an experience of satisfaction, owing to the mind’s operating
effectively as it ought to operate as a precondition for the acquisition of
knowledge.
One
could say then that the harmony of the cognitive faculties directly expresses
the power of judgment in general, and that the universal feeling of approval in
beauty is the pleasurable expression of the power of judgment. Since we are
involved here with cognition and hence with public, communal agreement and
validity, Kant maintains that this feeling of approval that grounds judgment of
taste is none other than the postulation and projection of the idea of public,
social, inter-subjective validity in general (that is, the feeling and the
sense of a social or communal agreement are not separate). For this reason, he
maintains that judgments of taste carry with them the demand that other people
agree. Hence Kant says that the “beautiful is that which is universally
appreciated, without a concept.”[7]
3.3 Third
Moment of Judgements of Taste: Moment of the Relation of the Ends Brought under
Review in Such Judgements
From
the first two moments we now have before us a substantial portion of Kant’s
account of the disinterested and universal feeling of approval that grounds
judgment of taste. What immediately stands ahead is an account of an object’s
features that occasion the universal feeling that radiates from the harmony of
the cognitive faculties. The harmony of the cognitive faculties can occur with
different intensities, and an account of these differences is necessary to
complete the core account of judgment of taste. Central to this is Kant’s
discussion of purposiveness within the context of beauty.
The
terms ‘purpose’ and ‘purposiveness’ are closely associated in Kant’s account
and he begins with some definitions. He defines a purpose as the object of a
concept whose meaning suggests a plan or intention; and says that the
purposiveness of a concept is correspondingly the causality of a concept with
regard to its object. Having drawn this distinction between ‘purpose’ and
‘purposiveness,’ Kant adds a further proviso upon the concept of purpose. He
maintains that we refer to an object itself as a purpose only when the object
can be thought of in no other reasonable way than as the result of some plan or
concept. Nothing can count as purpose, if can be easily considered to have come
about by accident or by merely mechanical, natural means.
If
we call some object a purpose, it is tantamount to saying that if we did not
postulate some intelligence as the teleological cause of the object, the
object’s presence would be absurd. Given such a strong relationship between
plan (that is, concept) and it realization (that is, an object), the concept of
purposiveness enters into the situation by referring to the causal relationship
between a plan and its realization. It refers to the directedness of a concept
towards some specific end and expresses the presence of a planning intelligence
that specifies how things will happen. Within this context, Kant introduces the
adjective ‘purposive’ to refer, not to concepts that have a purposiveness or
causal power, but to objects, states of mind, and actions, that is, the sorts
of things that could count as purposes. This introduces a subtle distinction
between objects that are regarded as purposes and objects that are regarded as
purposive.
In
specificity, we understand that Kant’s terminology of ‘purpose,’ ‘purposive,’
and ‘purposiveness’ is intended to help organise his aesthetic theory. Thus,
Kant maintains that judgments of taste are grounded on the apprehension of the
appearance of purposes – they are grounded upon the apprehension of an object’s
purposiveness – rather than upon the apprehension of actual purposes or ends.
This is partially because judgments of taste do not involve knowing what the
purpose of the thing judged happens to be. Moreover since the judgments of
taste are not based on sensory gratification, only the object’s spacio-temporal
design – at least on face level – can be relevant to the apprehension of an
object’s purposiveness, and relevant to stimulating the harmony of the
cognitive faculties. This helps to reveal what sort of purposiveness in the
object we need to consider in making judgments about the object’s pure beauty.
When
we reflect upon an object for the purpose of judging its pure beauty, we
consider only its form, and consider this form only in relation to whether it
compels us to ascribe an intelligent cause to that form. This is to reflect
upon the purposiveness of the object’s form, or its purposiveness of form.
Conversely, the form of purposiveness reiterates the claim that when we reflect
upon an object with respect to its beauty, we ascribe a purposiveness without
purpose[8] to
the object. To make full sense of Kant’s claim that the disinterested feeling
of approval that grounds judgments of pure beauty stems from the apprehension
of an object’s purposiveness without purpose (that is, form of purposiveness),
it is important to underscore that the form of purposiveness is instantiated
exclusively in the object’s purposiveness of form.
To be clear
on the above it is important to distinguish an object’s purposiveness without
purpose (the form of purposiveness) from the object’s purposive form, which we
attend to specifically in the object when we judge its beauty. As noted the two
are not the same, since in general it is possible to discern an object’s
purposiveness without purpose in a way that it involves qualities over and
above the object’s configurational qualities. Hence the form of an object’s
purposiveness is equivalent to the object’s purposiveness without purpose, and
there is no other way to perceive this form of purposiveness except without the
representation of a purpose. Thus Kant concludes the third moment by stating
that “beauty is the form of an object’s purposiveness, insofar as this is
perceived in the object without the representation of a purpose.”[9]
3.4 Fourth
Moment of the Judgement of Taste: Moment of the Modality of the Delight in the
Object[10]
The fourth moment
returns to the core characterization of judgment of taste and addresses their
relationship to the modal concept of possibility, actuality, and necessity. The
focus is specifically upon the kind of necessity associated with the feeling of
approval that grounds judgments of taste, for in such judgments we feel that
everyone ought to agree with us.
In judgments
of taste, the kind of necessity involved stems from the identical way in which
the faculties of understanding and imagination are assumed to resonate with
each other in any person, if the person were to apprehend some given object
disinterestedly and aesthetically. The necessity is exemplary insofar as each
person would (ideally) apprehend a purposiveness without purpose in the
objects’ form, or a universal rule. Thus Kant recognises that there is a
universality and necessity associated with judgments of taste and he has
identified this a priori quality in
connection with the rigidities of our shared cognitive structure.
Maintaining
and recognizing that this necessity is based on a satisfying feeling of the
free play[11]
of the cognitive faculties, but also noting that no definite rules for the
cognition of this or that object are applied during such free play, he
concludes that this disinterested feeling of approval can be defined in
reference to a ‘common sense’ that people have. He adds that this common sense
is the effect of the free play of our cognitive powers (that is, it is a
feeling).
As an effort
to understanding Kant’s notion of common sense, we can notice that in the first
place it is a ‘sense’ or is related to a type of feeling. Secondly, we need to
keep in mind that it is ‘common,’ which implies that everyone has the capacity
for similarly experiencing the feelings involved. Unlike senses that depend on
the structures of the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and surface of the skin, all of
which structures can vary from person to person, the ‘common sense’ depends
upon what all human beings share identically. For Kant this is the structure of
cognition and its specific interplay between the understanding and imagination.
We can infer
that a motivation for Kant’s reference to a common sense can be seen in his
implicit recognition that with respect to any given object, various attunements
between the imagination and understanding are possible, not only between
objects, but between people who are nonetheless perceiving the same object in a
disinterested fashion. Some could experience a free play of the cognitive
faculties relative to the object, but in a less intense way than might be
possible under a better attunement between the imagination and understanding.
This Kant’s
hypotheses of an ideal attunement between the imagination and understanding to
which judgments of an object’s pure beauty would be coordinated is in a bid to
standardizing the experiences of the harmony of the cognitive faculties. This
mutual convergence upon a single attunement would provide a necessary condition
for ensuring that the feeling is the same between people who are perceiving the
object disinterestedly. This in turn, would ensure that it will make sense for
one to expect someone else to have the same feeling with respect to the object
when one judges that the object is beautiful to such a degree. In general,
then, the condition of disinterestedness removes the factors of
sense-gratification and conceptualization, and the condition of common sense
removes the remaining variations in attunement between the imagination and
understanding that can arise, even when two people are reflecting upon the
object disinterestedly.
As a further thought, Kant states accordingly
that the common sense – the capacity to experience the optimal free play of the
harmony of the faculties without any admixture of interest – is only an ideal
norm that regulates our efforts to make judgments of taste. Whether judgments of
taste are realizable remains an open question, for it could be that we might only
be able to approximate the ideal of making a judgment of taste without any
influence by charm, practical interests, or external considerations. It could
be that in almost all, if not all, cases, alleged judgments of taste are always
impure to some extent, either through an admixture of sensory gratification or
through an admixture of conceptually-grounded interests, or through an
admixture of both. If this were so, however, it would nonetheless remain
necessary to recognize at the basis of the judgment of taste, the ideal norm of
common sense as that which accounts for the possibility of agreement on such
judgments. This is because even among a set of perfectly disinterested people,
their respective attunements between the understanding and imagination can
vary, not because the object varies, but because individuals’ inner cognitive
dispositions can vary.
The idea of
common sense, or optimal attunement, would serve to adjudicate between the
differing cognitive dispositions and remaining differences in judgments of two
people who are judging the beauty of an object, after the two have successfully
abstracted from interests related to concepts and sense-gratification. Hence,
Kant concludes the fourth moment by his definition that: “the beautiful is that
which apart from a concept is cognised as an object of a necessary delight.”[12]
From the
foregoing, we understand that each of the four moments of the judgment of taste
is a further specification of what the judgment of taste must be based upon if
it is to make a legitimate claim to hold for all persons, to demand their
agreement, and not simply to be a report of one’s personal satisfaction in an
object. It therefore serves as we noted at the beginning of this chapter, to
satiate Kant’s concern which we said was to describe the essential features of
the judgment of taste, aiming to characterise the perfect attitude that would
stand as the ideal for anyone who would like exclusively to judge an object’s
beauty. This perfect attitude inferentially informs the aesthetic-attitude
tradition in philosophical aesthetics that pervaded Western aesthetics after
Kant. We shall deal with this more in the next chapter when we try to situate
Kant’s ‘Theory of Taste’ in the whole history of Western aesthetics.
[1]By such
reference of ‘judgment of taste’ to ‘judgment of pure beauty’ Robert Wick tries
to capture the idealizing intent of Kant that anyone who would like to judge
ideally an object’s beauty must meet with the prerogatives of the four moments
in the judgment of taste, as such the judgment will be the judgment of that
object’s pure beauty; without any form of adherents be it practical, cognitive
or moral. (Cf. Robert Wicks, Routledge
Philosophy Guidebook to Kant on Judgment (London: Routledge Taylor and
Francis Group, 2007), p. 17)
[2]We are impelled by clarity to
replicate Kant’s own footnote here, where-in he says: “The definition of taste
here relied upon is that it is the faculty of estimating the beautiful. But the
discovery of what is required for calling an object beautiful must be reserved
for the analysis of judgements of taste. In my search for the moments to which
attention is paid by this judgement in its reflection, I have followed the
guidance of the logical functions of judging (for a judgement of taste always involves
a reference to understanding). I have brought the moment of quality first under
review, because this is what the aesthetic judgement on the beautiful looks to
in the first instance.” (Immanuel Kant, The
Critique of Judgement (trans., Meredith, C, James) in Mortimer J. Adler,
(ed.), Great Books of the Western World:
39, Kant, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. 1990), p. 476)
[3]Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (trans.,
Meredith, C, James) in Mortimer J. Adler, (ed.), Great Books of the Western World: 39, Kant, Ibid.
[4]The notion of
disinterestedness in aesthetics did not originate with Kant, as we find such in
the writings of earlier eighteenth-century British aestheticians like Lord
Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and Edmund Burke. (Cf. Jerome Stolnitz, “On the
Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness’” in George Dickie and R J Sclafoni eds.,
Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology,(New
York: St Martin’s Press ,1977), pp. 607 – 625). In any case, the notion of
disinterestedness plays a central role in the development of Kant’s aesthetic
theory. Kant characterizes disinterestedness in terms of the absence of
(further) interest, and defines interest as the satisfaction which we combine
with the representation of the existence of an object. Hence we must note that
disinterestedness is not the same as uninteresting, but is of immediate and not
further interest. (Cf. Donald W, Crawford, Kant’s
Aesthetic Theory, (London: The University of Wisconsin Press Ltd., 1974),
p. 38) We have a succinct understanding of this in the next chapter.
[5]Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (trans., Meredith,
C, James) in Mortimer J. Adler, (ed.), Great
Books of the Western World: 39, Kant, Ibid., p. 478
[6]Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (trans.,
Meredith, C, James) in Mortimer J. Adler, (ed.), Great Books of the Western World: 39, Kant, Ibid., p. 479
[7]Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (trans.,
Meredith, C, James) in Mortimer J. Adler, (ed.), Great Books of the Western World: 39, Kant, Ibid., p. 483
[8]The notion of ‘purposiveness
without purpose’ is commonly explained by the reference to the notion of
organic interconnectedness. Körner speaks of particulars which display
purposiveness without purpose as “particular …whose parts are so intensely
interrelated and so harmoniously fitted together and to the whole of which they
are parts, that we speak of the whole as having a design…” Although instead of
design Kant would speak of purposiveness. Hence beauty is accordingly compared
with the notion of an organised being. An organised being is one, Kant says, in
which none of the parts are in vain, in which the maintenance of any one part
depends reciprocally on the maintenance of the rest. (Robert Burch, “Kant’s Theory
of Beauty as Ideal Art” in George Dickie and R J Sclafoni eds., Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology,
op.cit., pp. 688 – 703
[9]Cf. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (trans.,
Meredith, C, James) in Mortimer J. Adler, (ed.), Great Books of the Western World: 39, Kant, op.cit., p. 491
[10] Robert Wick renders the title of
the fourth moment to read: “The Universal Feeling of Approval that Grounds the
Judgments of Pure Beauty Carries the Force of Necessity” this is replicated
here because it captures more the project of the fourth moment, but our
presentation above is as seen in Kant’s work. (Cf. Robert Wicks, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kant on
Judgment, op.cit., p. 76
[11] In the Critique of Judgment, Kant explicitly refers to the free play of
the imagination as characteristic of the experience of the beautiful, and he
links this free play to the productive imagination. Hence what Kant terms “free
play of the imagination” can be viewed as the spatial and temporal ordering in
the imagination of perceptions, the relating of parts (elements and complexes
of elements) to each other in a variety of ways to determine whether a relatedness,
a purposiveness of form, can be apprehended. All appearances are consequently
intuited as aggregates, as complexes of previously given parts. (Cf. Donald W,
Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory,
op.cit., p. 89)
[12]
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (trans.,
Meredith, C, James) in Mortimer J. Adler, (ed.), Great Books of the Western World: 39, Kant, Ibid., p. 493
No comments:
Post a Comment