CHAPTER III: Aesthetic Taste, Teleology, and the World Order

1) SPONTANEITY TO FREEDOM TO AESTHETIC FREEDOM: In the picture of the mind’s relation to the world that emerged in Kant’s first two Critiques and his other works, there was in our general experiential engagement with the world a necessary element of spontaneity on the part of the mind in apprehending objects of experience; this spontaneity was both underived and involved neither an apprehension of any given object nor any self-evident first principle. Instead, its spontaneous character indicated the way in which it, as it were, sprang up by its powers. In such spontaneity, the human agent produced the “rules” by which the “intuitions” of our experience were combined into the meaningful whole of human experience; without the rules being combined with such experiential, intuitional elements, the results of such spontaneity were devoid of significance (Bedeutung), in the sense that they were devoid of any objective relation to the world. When transferred to the moral realm, though, such spontaneity was no longer chained to intuition for its significance, and, in relation to action, spontaneity became autonomy, the capacity to institute the moral law and to move ourselves to action by virtue of having so instituted it [66]

a) In our theoretical orientation to the world – i.e. in our cognitive orientation to a nature that we set out to know – the understanding is tied to intuition, given sensory contents, and legitimately legislates in ordering such a manifold of intuition. So the understanding is spontaneous, not derived or causally determined, but still constrained to operate over given sensory contents. In our practical orientation to the world – i.e. in our interaction with others in a social world – reason is not constrained by anything but its own exercise. In our aesthetic orientation to the world – i.e. in our playful engagement with appearances – the imagination is free to play with particulars as if they were presenting some universal.

2) DENY KNOWLEDGE TO MAKE ROOM FOR FAITH AND FANTASY? RENEGOTIATING THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL RESTRICTION: Although Kant had in one crucial respect seemingly undermined that whole line of thought in his denial that we could ever have knowledge of things-in-themselves or of the “unconditioned” totality of nature, in another respect he still subscribed to it, holding that experiential knowledge and moral knowledge required us to understand our place in certain totalities. In the case of experience, spontaneity (combined with intuition) produces not merely individual perceptions of things, but an experience of a natural order governed by necessary causal laws and fitting the a priori laws of mathematics and geometry; in the case of action, it produces a moral order, a “kingdom of ends.” Both … require us to appeal to Ideas of reason to make them intelligible to us, although such Ideas could only be regulative, not constitutive of experience … necessary ways of ordering the particular elements of our experience into a meaningful whole [67]

a) Regulative ideals re-open the issue of the relationship between knowledge and morality as a question about the handling of belonging to two different orders of reality at once:

i) Natural order: Nature

ii) Moral order: Freedom

3) PARADOX OF FREEDOM: HOW CAN WE BOTH SOVEREIGN AND SUBJECT OF MORAL LAWS? The most obvious difficulty in Kant’s approach was also clearly seen by Kant himself: how do we explain the way in which we are both subject to the norms of reason and yet also the agents who institute those norms? How, after all, can we actually be bound by the laws we make? In particular, Kant’s conception required some account of how “we” institute norms and whether the norms making up what we call “reason” are not “instituted” by us at all but imply are what they are [67]

4) In that work [The Critique of Judgment (1790)], Kant took on the issue concerning our “institution” of norms by focusing on another problem: how do we go about orienting ourselves in the moral and empirical order, and how is such orientation tied into what is necessary for us to make valid judgments? Putting the question in that way required him to examine what he called “reflective judgments” as distinct from “determinative judgments.” In “determinative judgments,” we have a general concept, and we subsume a particular under it. (For example, we might have the concept of a “rose” and then judge whether the flower we are observing is indeed a rose – is indeed an “instance” or “instantiation” of the more general concept.) In the case of “reflective judgments,” however, we begin with particulars, and we then search for which or what kind of general concepts they might fall under [68]

5) Quite strikingly, Kant singled out both aesthetic and teleological judgments as the prime exemplars of such “reflective judgment” [68]

6) FEELING COMES ONLY WITHIN THE REFLECTIVE JUDGMENT: Indeed, so Kant was to go on to conclude, the pleasure that we experience in a beautiful object does not precede the judgment that it is beautiful, but is instead attendant on it [68]

7) KANTIAN PARADOX HAS TWO FACES: AUTHOR/SUBJECT & ACTIVE/PASSIVE: Since aesthetic experience paradigmatically involves a passive element of pure experiential receptivity and an active element of (“reflectively”) judging something to be beautiful, an investigation into aesthetic judgment, Kant concluded, might hold the clue to comprehending the way in which we are agents subject to norms that we ourselves also institute [68]

8) The key to understanding such judgments involves the reflective judgment that what is experienced is beautiful. In such judgments, we are not applying a general concept (that of the “beautiful”) to a particular instance, but rather perceiving the instance as beautiful and, as it were, searching for a concept under which we could subsume it [69]

9) [judgments] involve taste … However, to the extent that we judge something to be indeed beautiful, we are making a judgment that our subjective state of mind in such experience is, as Kant puts it, “universally communicable,” something that is of more than merely private significance and is subject to some universal norms [69]

10) THE AESTHETIC OUGHT AS NORMATIVE THOUGH NOT DETERMINATELY CONCEPTUAL: In making a subjective judgment about the beautiful, one is making a normative statement about how oneself and all others ought to experience something, not an empirical prediction about how others actually will react to the objects in question; in making a subjective judgment about what pleases oneself, one is merely reporting on one’s own private mental states and, on that basis, is entitled to say nothing about what others ought to feel in experiencing the same thing (although there might indeed be room for empirical prediction, as when one advises a friend that something on the menu is not likely to be something that he will find agreeable) [69]

11) Such experience of the beautiful as universally communicable must therefore be structured by universal norms that cannot themselves be explicated as concepts, since there are no rules for determining what counts as beautiful. The condition of the possibility of such experience is thus the possession of some “universal” or “shared” sense – that is, the capacity for aesthetic taste [70]

12) … the possession of taste means that one has the ability to apprehend objects as beautiful. Taste is thus an ability to have such aesthetic appreciation, not an ability to state rules about what counts as beautiful [70]

13) AESTHETIC NORMATIVITY ARISES FROM THE FREE PLAY OF SENSIBILITY AND UNDERSTANDING: This, of course, made such an ability very puzzling: since it is a universally communicable state, it involves norms – since only normative matters can be so communicated – but it cannot involve conceptual norms since there are no rules for such judgments. It must therefore involve the cognitive faculties of the mind in a way that does not conform to rules. Kant concluded that aesthetic appreciation must therefore involve the way in which both imagination and intellect (der Verstand, “the understanding”) are in free play with each other – free in the sense that their interaction with each other is not constrained by any rule. When the result is a harmonious free play between intellect and imagination in experience, it is an apprehension of something as beautiful [70]

14) When, however, the imagination constructs a unity of experience that, although not guided by a concept (a rule), is nonetheless in harmony with the kinds of conceptual judgments produced by the intellect (as guided by rules), and this harmony is itself spontaneously produced without any rule to guide it, then one has the possibility of an apprehension of the beautiful. Such harmonious free play, however, is not itself directly experienced (at least in the same way in which a feeling of agreeableness or pleasure is directly experienced); it is by an act of attending to it, of reflective judgment, that the agent apprehends the harmony [70]

15) ACTIVE AND PASSIVE AT THE SAME TIME: In that way, aesthetic experience combines elements of both spontaneity and passivity: one must have the unconstrained harmony between intellect and imagination at work, and the harmony must be spontaneously attended to [71]

16) Because of this, the pleasure experienced in aesthetic appreciation does not precede the judgment itself [71]

17) … that one is spontaneously attending to the free harmonious play between one’s intellect and imagination – in order to experience the aesthetic pleasure, which as harmonious free play is the pleasure itself (or, to state the same thing differently, the pleasure experienced is not pleasure in harmonious free play as distinct from it, but rather the harmonious free play is the pleasure itself). One is reflectively judging, in effect, that this is the way that one’s experience really ought to be [71]

a) Said differently, we are not please that understanding and imagination are in play but, in contrast, our pleasure is the way this harmony obtains.

18) … on what grounds are we saying that this is the experience really ought to be, and what necessitates the claim that judgments of taste really are to be analyzed in the way Kant claims? That itself raised three other related and equally crucial issues. What exactly is the capacity for taste and is it something that all “minded,” rational agents have? Is there any greater significance that taste is pointing toward? Is there any sense to saying that rational agents ought to develop their capacity for taste? [71]

19) THE “AS IF” BASIC STRUCTURE OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE: The structure of aesthetic experience was thus made explicit. To have the capacity for taste is to have an ability to respond reflectively to objects of experience as if they had been designed to elicit that experience [71]

a) Ricky Fitz: “It was as if god were looking at me and, for a moment, I looked back”

20) … we encounter something … that appears to us as if it were designed to match exactly what the result of a spontaneously produced harmony between our unfettered imagination and intellect would have produced [72]

21) The experience of nature of a natural object as beautiful is based on a reflective judgment about the purposiveness of the world around us and how that world harmoniously fits our nature as spontaneous beings [72]

22) NO RETURN TO METAPHYSICS: … as if they [imagination and intellect] had been designed that way. However, we may not – if we have learned the proper lesson from Kant’s first Critique – conclude that the world actually was so designed to meet our requirements, since that would not only violate the conceptual conditions of the possibility of experience, it would require us (impossibly) to know what things are like in-themselves [72]

23) Experience of the beautiful is thus, as Kant phrased it, an experience of “purposiveness without purpose,” a sense that things fit together according to a purpose that we cannot state. The solution to the “antinomy” of aesthetic judgment – that aesthetic judgments are normative and thus must be conceptual; and that aesthetic judgments cannot be conceptual since judgments of taste cannot be based on concepts – is that aesthetic judgments are based on the “indeterminate concept of the supersensible substrate of appearances.” This, however, raised the obvious question for Kant: since we cannot in principle know anything about the “supersensible substrate of appearances,” are our aesthetic judgments merely a matter of “as if” (as if the world were ordered for us), or is there some deeper account to be given? [73]

24) The term, the “beautiful soul,” had come to play a key role in Enlightenment thought; as the belief in the theological grounding of morality had come under suspicion, it was thought that only some kind of beauty could provide the proper incentives for morality, and that “beauty” and “morality” had therefore to be joined [73]

25) THE “DIS-INTERESTED NATURE” OF BOTH MORAL AND AESTHETIC JUDGMENTS: (This was most vividly laid out in the Early of Shaftesbury’s writings.) However, Kant ruled out appeal to such motivation in his writings on moral philosophy: morality was motivated by no prior interest, and likewise aesthetic appreciation was also, he concluded, a disinterested appreciation [73]

26) Why, though, should “purposiveness without purpose” be the kind of thing that prompts us to take such an interest? And why should nature and not “fine art” be superior in this regard? Since the “purpose” that we seek and which prompts such an interest in us cannot be encountered in nature, we seek it, Kant said, “in ourselves, namely, in what constitutes the ultimate purpose of our existence: our moral vocation,” which would be the “highest good,” the union of virtue and happiness/ The very conception of the “highest good,” so Kant’s writings seemed to suggest, requires us to have the Idea of nature as a purposive unity, as structured in some way that is commensurate to our own cognitive faculties and our own moral hopes … [74]

27) … “we compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others, and put ourselves in the position of everyone else, merely by abstracting from the limitations that happen to attach to our own judging (Critique of Judgment, §40) [74]

28) Something like the “kingdom of ends” thus seems to be at play in aesthetic judgment, except that the “kingdom of ends” involves the use of concepts (there are indeed moral rules and reasoned moral arguments), whereas aesthetic experience does not involve concepts [75]

29) MORALITY AND ART AS FINAL GOODS? The feelings of respect for the moral law and aesthetic pleasure are both empirical features of our mental lives that do not, indeed cannot, precede our encounters respectively with the moral law and the beautiful (particularly in nature); we are prompted by those encounters to take the interest that produces those subjective states of ourselves. Even though there can be no theoretical reason – nothing consistent with the way we must understand the physical universe – for the necessity of such feelings, we must presume nonetheless that there is something in the world, as Kant puts it, that is “neither nature nor freedom and yet is linked with the basis of freedom, the supersensible” that makes all of this possible … the “indeterminate concept of the supersensible substrate of appearances” [75]

30) Natural beauty, on the other hand, displays no such conceptual background: a beautiful sunset over the mountains is not, except in the most metaphorical sense, one of nature’s genres, and thus it is much more suited to express, even reveal, the spontaneous, free play of the faculties that Kant holds to be essential to aesthetic experience, and it moreover intimates (non-conceptually, and thus literally inconceivably) the underlying sense of order in the “supersensible substrate” that is at issue in our appreciation of art – and thus only those who appreciate the superiority of natural beauty to the beauty of fine art have truly “beautiful souls” [75]

31) … the “genius” is in effect the person who, almost inexplicably, resolves the “Kantian paradox” by an act of legislation that is somehow not indebted to prior reasons, that is, concepts. This was to have no small effect among the early Romantics, some of whom in turn invoked the idea of the “moral genius” for much the same reason [75]

32) Clearly, such teleological reflective judgments raise the issue about whether this is only an “as if” judgment, since the purposes seem to be imputed by us, not encountered in nature itself [76]

33) … we cannot objectively consider nature as a system of purposes [77]

34) KANTIAN ANTHROPOCENTRISM: Yet, from the moral point of view, we necessarily must judge humanity to be an end in itself, to be the ultimate purpose in terms of which everything else is a means [77]

35) Indeed, to see man as a moral being is already to impute some kind of purposiveness to him; it is not to describe him or explain him naturalistically – the most evil person follows the same natural laws as a the greatest saint – but to evaluate him normatively [77]

36) Building on arguments found earlier in his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argued that such a moral conception of humanity requires that we think of the whole world as purposively structured in terms of providing the possibility for man’s achieving the “highest good” as the union of virtue and happiness, and that requires us to conceive of a moral initiator (Urheber) of the world who has designed the world in that way [77]

37) Given our empirical natures, we find ourselves filled with the natural desire to enter society, yet we also find that our inherent egoism (manifested in the moral realm as “radical evil”) produces in us an “unsocial sociability” [78]

38) To act according to the moral law and to seek the improvement of man’s lot, we must have some practical faith that doing so makes a difference, that the sees we sow now are not in vain, that nature does not conspire against our highest ideals [78]