There is still wide-ranging disagreement about a basic feature of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, namely, what the a priori principle of judgments of taste is. This is not true of the Critique of Pure Reason: We know what the categories are, even if there are disagreements about whether Kant successfully proves that they are a priori and universally valid. And in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, while there may be disagreements about whether one formulation of the moral law has priority over the others and is that from which the others are derived, there is no disagreement when identifying those formulations. We might fault Kant for not being clearer about such a fundamental issue in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. What I shall argue in this chapter, however, is that commentators have overlooked or dismissed out of hand what Kant explicitly identifies as the principle because it does not seem to be something that could be a principle at all: namely, our shared cognitive nature insofar as our imaginations are predisposed to be attuned to our understandings’ need for unity.1 On my reading, we judge on the basis of this a priori yet subjective and universally valid principle only when we judge on the basis of the harmonious play of our cognitive faculties.2
In an effort to support my view I shall spend the bulk of this chapter carving out conceptual space for it within the terrain of dominant alternative accounts. Setting my candidate in relation to those offered by Henry Allison, Rachel Zuckert, and Paul Guyer will enable me to highlight weaknesses in the alternatives that mine can overcome. It will become clear the degree to which I am indebted to Guyer’s account even as I depart from his in a few significant ways. In closing, I point to the promising implications of my view. I suggest that this way of understanding Kant’s a priori principle helps us to deal with interpretive challenges in the Dialectic of Taste and to clarify the Resolution of the Antinomy. In addition, by recognizing the centrality of Kant’s conception of human nature to his theory of taste, we are better positioned to grasp the third Critique’s political significance.3
Before turning to competing alternatives to the principle I propose, I should clarify a few issues and provide textual evidence so as to dispel some initial worries about this unusual candidate. On the view I am defending, it is a merely empirical, psychological fact that my imagination is predisposed to be attuned to my understanding’s need for unity. In other words, if it were the case that no other individual shared this cognitive nature, then the predisposed attunement of these two faculties could only be a merely subjective basis of my judgment, and any experience of a harmonious play of the faculties could only serve as the basis for a judgment of the agreeable. Only if the imagination and understanding are attuned to one another – not only in me, but also in everyone else – are we able to experience a harmonious play of the faculties in response to the same representations and thus to judge aesthetically on the basis of an a priori principle. In that case, my own cognitive nature (the predisposition of the imagination to be attuned to the understanding) serves as a universal standard or principle precisely because this nature is shared by all judges. Thus, what makes the attunement of my cognitive faculties a principle is also what accounts for its correctness, or validity: the fact that this nature is universally shared. As a subjective yet universally valid principle it has no objective validity. Now, if we could know prior to the experience of universal agreement in judgment that it is universally shared by all subjects, then this principle (our shared cognitive nature) would be a priori. Though I cannot adequately defend my reading of Kant’s Deduction of judgments of taste here, I take this important argument to be drawing the following conclusions: We can know a priori that everyone’s imagination is predisposed to be attuned to the understanding, and, for this reason, our shared cognitive nature can be conceived of as an a priori and universally valid subjective principle of judgment.4
Admittedly, it is an odd candidate for a principle, for our shared cognitive nature (the imagination’s predisposition to meet the understanding’s requirement of unity) is not a discursive basis for judgments. But Kant unabashedly acknowledges that the basis of our judgments of beauty is not a concept, insisting instead that it is inaccessible to cognition.5 While this attunement is not accessible to cognition, it is accessible to consciousness, at least indirectly. The predisposition of these faculties to be attuned to one another is manifested in aesthetic experience; in response to certain forms, these faculties achieve a harmonious play, or heightened agreement in the absence of a unifying concept. In other words, they become active in accordance with their nature – their natural, predisposed attunement to one another.6 When they are active in accordance with their natural attunement to one another, we experience pleasure. The only way we can have access to the attuned nature of these faculties is by “sensing” it when they harmonize and we feel pleasure for that reason.
At this point it should become clear that my view commits me to an account of pleasure more akin to Zuckert’s than Guyer’s. If I were to accept Guyer’s account, according to which pleasures distinguish themselves only by way of their causal history, then I could not claim that my cognitive nature is in fact serving as the basis of my judgment of taste. For on his view, there is nothing a feeling of pleasure possesses that distinguishes it from any other feeling of pleasure; because of this, any judgment made solely on the basis of a feeling of pleasure (no matter what its causal history may be) could only ever be a judgment of the agreeable. My view depends upon an account of pleasure that allows the very identity of the feeling to include the harmonious play that brings it about. I believe this is precisely what Kant attempts to make room for when he describes pleasure in the First Introduction: “Pleasure is a state of the mind in which a representation is in agreement with itself, as a ground, either merely for preserving this state itself (for the state of the powers of the mind reciprocally promoting each other in a representation preserves itself), or for producing its object” (HN 20:231–2). That we “linger” with an object – rather than consume it or use it for some purpose, for instance – is an indication to us as judges that harmonious play is taking place. Kant seems to be at pains to point out that this feeling of pleasure can feel different to us; it can apparently feel communicable insofar as it feels active rather than passive and feels like it serves as its own ground: “Only where the imagination in its freedom arouses the understanding, and the latter, without concepts, sets the imagination into a regular play is the representation communicated, not as a thought, but as the inner feeling of a purposive state of mind” (KU 5:276).7 At the same time, because we can also be mistaken about whether the feeling is in fact communicable, I commit myself to the view that the identity of a feeling of pleasure can include the harmonious play even if it does not feel communicable. In doing so, I simply align myself with recent Kantian scholarship on pleasure that recognizes the pleasure felt through the harmonious play of the faculties as a complex state of mind rather than a “brute” sensation.8 The fact that, as Kant says, it “strengthens and reproduces itself” (KU 5:222) suggests that the very identity of this state of mind could include both the pleasure and the ground of that pleasure (its own activity), whether or not we feel it to be different from consumptive or other sorts of pleasures. Thus, such an understanding of the complex identity of a feeling of pleasure makes room for the possibility of mistaken judgments: It is possible to feel pleasure that we think is universally communicable without it being so, and to feel a pleasure that we do not think is universally communicable even though it is in fact universally communicable. We will return to this issue subsequently.
Finally, let me offer some textual evidence for the candidate I am proposing. After providing his Deduction of judgments of taste, Kant remarks that “in the aesthetic power of judgment one subsumes [the representation of the object] under a relation that is merely a matter of sensation, that of the imagination and the understanding reciprocally attuned to each other in the represented form of the object” (KU 5:291). In Remark I after the Resolution of the Antinomy, he argues,
since the beautiful must not be judged in accordance with concepts, but rather in accordance with the purposive disposition of the imagination for its correspondence with the faculty of concepts in general, it is not a rule or precept but only that which is merely nature in the subject … which is to serve as the subjective standard of that aesthetic but unconditioned purposiveness in beautiful art, which is supposed to make a rightful claim to please everyone.
Section 58 of the Dialectic notes that “nature has the property of containing an occasion for us to perceive the inner purposiveness in the relationship of our mental powers in the judging of certain of its products” (KU 5:350). And in section 59, he observes that “taste … represent[s] the imagination even in its freedom as purposively determinable for the understanding” (KU 5:354). Earlier, in preparation for the Deduction, he explains that “the judgment of taste must rest on a mere sensation of the reciprocally animating imagination in its freedom and the understanding with its lawfulness” (KU 5:287); and that “taste … contains a principle of subsumption … of the faculty of intuitions or presentations (i.e., of the imagination) under the faculty of concepts (i.e., the understanding), insofar as the former in its freedom is in harmony with the latter in its lawfulness” (KU 5:287). He argues that the same principle grounds the production of art: “Yet since without a preceding rule a product can never be called art, nature in the subject (and by means of the disposition of its faculties) must give the rule to art” (KU 5:307); “in products of genius nature (that of the subject), not a deliberate end, gives the rule to art” (KU 5:344).
If we take Kant at his word, we judge beauty on the basis of the natural, predisposed attunement of the imagination and understanding to one another. When we pronounce something beautiful (and thereby demand agreement) because, in reflecting on a representation, we have a feeling of pleasure that feels universally communicable and is in fact brought about through the harmonious play of the faculties, we are in fact judging on the basis of this universally shared basis. It is the Deduction’s task to justify our demand of agreement by arguing that we can know (prior to any experience of agreement among judges) that that natural, predisposed attunement is universally shared. Let me now consider three prominent alternatives.
Allison’s view identifies the a priori principle of judgments of taste as the power of judgment’s requirement or norm that we proceed from intuitions to concepts. He maintains, “in a judgment of taste, representations are subsumed under the condition[s] of subsumption…”; “this condition turns out to be nothing other than the harmonious interplay of the imagination and the understanding” (Allison 2001:170). The power of judgment’s norm is identified as a priori because, in the Deduction, it is shown to be an a priori principle of cognition. Both cognitive judgments and pure judgments of taste fulfill this basic requirement; what distinguishes judgments of taste is that they are reflective judgments in which concepts do not constrain the imagination’s activity of unification. Our feeling of pleasure is our sensing of the fulfillment of the power of judgment’s requirement or norm. For Allison, then, the a priori principle of judgments of taste is a necessary, but not a sufficient basis of these judgments. What is needed, in addition to fulfilling the power of judgment’s requirement, is that these judgments fulfill this requirement “in a certain way,” namely, in the absence of a concept and thus as reflective as opposed to determining judgments.
With the distinctions between these conditions in mind, we can see more clearly what Allison takes the aim of Kant’s Deduction to be. According to Allison, the Deduction is only meant to “establish the normativity of the norm” (Allison 2001:172): in other words, to remind us that the power of judgment’s requirement (that we move from intuitions to concepts) is a necessary condition of cognition.9 That is, the Deduction shows that the norm of judgment, whose fulfillment is sensed (through pleasure) in pure judgments of taste, is a necessary condition of cognition. Successfully grounding the normativity of the norm does not justify particular judgments of taste, for it is always possible that we are not making a pure judgment of taste. The Deduction on Allison’s reading only defends the possibility of pure judgments of taste by showing that the norm, which they fulfill in their own peculiar way, is a necessary requirement of cognition. Additionally, the aesthetic judgment’s demand that others agree is qualified: I am only justified in demanding the agreement of others if I am actually making a pure judgment of taste.
Allison admits that his reading limits the aim and weakens the force of a successful Deduction considerably (Allison 2001:179). Indeed, we might think that the Deduction, so conceived, really sidesteps the question at the heart of aesthetic judgment: how to justify the demand that others agree with us, a demand whose justification seems to require that we ground both the normativity of this norm and the universality of the peculiar way in which that norm is supposed to be fulfilled in judgments of taste (namely, through harmonious play of the faculties in reflective judging in the absence of a concept). In other words, as Guyer has argued, wouldn’t the successful justification of our judgments of taste require that we also demonstrate that everyone is capable of the harmonious play of the faculties and of responding to the same representations in this peculiar way?10 On Allison’s reading, the most the Deduction can do is to identify an a priori principle that reflective judging must meet in order to be a pure judgment, but a Deduction cannot assure us that everyone’s cognitive faculties are even capable of reaching that standard reflectively and in response to the same objects. If even a successful Deduction on Allison’s reading cannot preclude the possibility that some individuals are unable to meet the standard of judgment reflectively or even preclude the possibility that pure judgments could conflict with one another, then we have enough reason to look elsewhere for the a priori principle of taste. Allison attempts to answer this objection but does not ultimately succeed.
He begins with the insistence that the question we have raised about the possibility of a conflict in pure judgments of taste can be reduced to the question of whether a pure judgment of taste could be “erroneous” (Allison 2001:189). (As I indicated, this is only part of our concern, since we are also worried that some people may not even be capable of achieving the standard of judgment reflectively.) Allison points out that if one is “speaking with a universal voice,” as the Fourth Moment purports, then “one’s judgment … cannot err”; so “since speaking with a universal voice is equivalent to making a pure judgment of taste, it likewise follows that a pure judgment of taste cannot err” (Allison 2001:189–90). The argument begs the question. That a person making a pure judgment of taste “speaks with a universal voice” (by definition) does not entail that she is justified in doing so. Being justified in doing so seems to require the Deduction to show that every person’s cognitive faculties are capable of reflectively reaching agreement (through harmonious play) in response to the same objects. Allison admits that “this hardly resolves the problem, since it concerns merely a conceptual claim made with respect to the idea of a universal voice postulated in a judgment of taste purporting to be pure,” but he believes we can resolve this issue by considering this point in connection to two further points. First, the Deduction on his reading shows that these judgments are possible since there is an a priori standard of judgment that the harmonious attunement would be achieving; second, the success of the Deduction so conceived “is not undermined” by the “difficulty of subsuming a particular instance under it” (Allison 2001: 190). But these three points in combination hardly dispel our worry that different judges may disagree in their judgments of taste or even that some judges may be unable to judge reflectively. Even if we grant (1) that the judgment of taste (by definition) speaks with a universal voice, (2) that Kant has demonstrated that judgments of taste are possible because there is a norm of judgment that the activity of reflectively judging could meet, and (3) that the standard is not undermined by the difficulty of meeting it, we are still in no way assured that a conflict in judgments of taste is impossible (let alone that everyone’s cognitive faculties are capable of this mental activity and in response to the same representations).
The point is not to question the very possibility of harmonious play, however, as if the activity itself possesses some problematic characteristic, but rather to question whether it can be expected to arise in all of us in response to the same representations. But turning to Zuckert’s view, we see that she misidentifies the a priori principle because she focuses unnecessarily on the very possibility of harmonious play.
Zuckert’s provocative and well-received account identifies Kant’s principle of aesthetic judgment as a future-directed structure that is internal to the cognitive faculties’ harmonious activity. In her words, the principle of aesthetic judgment is “a purposive temporal structure of anticipating the future within the present” (Zuckert 2007:313). For Zuckert, the cognitive faculties attempt to integrate the heterogeneity of the object into a coherent whole, thereby anticipating the unity of the object. This activity of engaging with the form of the object – of anticipating its unity while attending to different elements, one after the other – brings the faculties themselves into an internally harmonious play. This harmonious play perpetuates itself, thereby anticipating its own state and projecting it into the future. Thus, the harmonious play possesses the temporal structure of anticipating the future in the present. This structure is the principle of aesthetic judging (Zuckert 2007:179).
Zuckert maintains that, because the principle of aesthetic judgment is a temporal structure, it can govern more than the aesthetic state of mind, and indeed, she believes this is a virtue of her view. As we have seen, this temporal structure can be internal to (constitutive of) our state of mind, as it is when it structures the harmonious play (Zuckert 2007:21). But it can also simply serve as a regulative principle for other sorts of judgments. For example, when we project systematic unity in our attempts to form empirical concepts from our experience of the heterogeneity of nature, our judging is, she claims, governed by this future-directed unifying structure (Zuckert 2007:179, 356). That is, in empirical concept formation we anticipate the whole (“as a structure of reciprocal means-end relations that obtain among parts as heterogeneous or contingent”) in which particulars are to be organized (Zuckert 2007:179). These two kinds of judging (empirical concept formation and aesthetic judgment) differ in an important respect. In the case of the former, the temporal structure is a merely regulative, though subjectively necessary, principle guiding our judgment, whereas in aesthetic judging, while this principle is used regulatively at first, it eventually becomes constitutive when the faculties themselves are brought into a future-directed activity and are themselves “governed by the principle of purposiveness without a purpose” (Zuckert 2007:337).
As I have already indicated, Zuckert’s view illuminates nicely the relationship between the harmonious play of the faculties and the feeling of pleasure. She provides strong textual evidence that the harmonious state of mind is formally identical to a feeling of pleasure. The harmonious play of the faculties is a pleasurable state of mind because it endorses itself by serving as the ground of its own perpetuation. But even though we may endorse this part of her account, we do not need to accept her candidate for the principle of aesthetic judgment. Indeed, her conception of the principle of aesthetic judgment as a future-directed structure is open to at least two serious criticisms. First, her account of Kant’s justification of judgments of taste is, like Allison’s view, too weak to ground the demand of agreement in judgments of taste. This is the result of the fact that, as in Allison’s account, her version of the Deduction is aimed at showing that the basis of judgments of taste is a necessary principle for cognitive activities external to aesthetic judgment. In Zuckert’s case, the principle is necessary for empirical concept formation (whereas for Allison, it is a principle necessary for cognition in general). For this reason, her account, like Allison’s, will be unable to dispel the worries about whether we are all able to “internalize” this principle and whether we are able to do so in response to the same objects. Second, her account lacks textual evidence. I will develop each objection in turn.
As already indicated, for Zuckert aesthetic judgment is based upon the same principle that grounds the acquisition of empirical concepts. Zuckert maintains that future-directed unification is so peculiar an activity that Kant has to show that it is subjectively required for creating empirical concepts.11 Showing that the principle must be used to acquire empirical concepts is, according to Zuckert, enough to show that it is an a priori principle.12 Moving on to aesthetic judgment, she claims that all a Deduction of judgments of taste needs to do is to identify that very same principle at work in the judge’s own mental activity: Instead of being a merely regulative principle for the unification of objects, it is experienced as the internalized, future-directed structure of the activity of one’s own cognitive faculties. She concludes that “All human subjects not only can, but ought to, engage in this cognitive activity because it is necessary for the possibility of aesthetic experience, and of empirical knowledge – and thus of experience in general. (Thus we may claim that all others ought to judge aesthetically as we do)” (Zuckert 2007:22).
But even if the Deduction so conceived successfully shows that the harmonious play is possible since it fulfills (is governed by, is structured by) a necessary principle of empirical concept formation, we are still left with the same worries about whether our cognitive faculties are able to achieve the harmonious play (the particular state of mind that is governed by the principle), and whether, if they are, they all respond in the same way to the same representations. The problem is that Zuckert follows Allison’s lead in conceiving of the a priori principle as a norm of judgment in general that the harmonious play of the faculties happens to succeed in meeting in aesthetic judgment. But surely the strongest result such a Deduction can produce is the claim that if one of us succeeds in experiencing the harmonious play, this person’s state of mind in fact meets the standard of an a priori principle. It is not clear how either an expectation or a “demand” that others share one’s judgment is thereby justified. In other words, even if it is the case that (1) all of us must judge in accordance with this principle as we form empirical concepts, and that (2) I experience a harmonious play that is structured by this same principle, this does not justify me in expecting or demanding that others experience the harmonious play (structured by this principle) in response to the same objects. The point is that the standard achieved by harmonious play on Zuckert’s view is a standard that none of us can avoid using in a different sort of judging (forming empirical concepts), but we can certainly avoid using it when judging aesthetically; and, even if I am capable of internalizing that principle, it is not clear why I should be entitled to demand or even expect others to do so. That my cognitive activity internalizes this principle in response to certain objects may simply be a novel empirical fact. Thus, even if Zuckert’s version of the Deduction were successful (by succeeding in showing that the harmonious play is structured by the principle required for empirical concept formation), it would not ground the a priori expectation or demand of universal assent.
Zuckert’s account is also open to criticism because there are no passages where Kant discusses the temporal structure of harmonious play as problematic and therefore in need of grounding. On her view, the reason why judgments of taste require a Deduction is because the harmonious play, like empirical concept formation, is so peculiar in its future-directed anticipation of unity that it has to be shown to be structured by a necessary principle. But Zuckert admits that Kant raises no concerns about the temporal structure of this activity of the faculties in judging beauty. She openly acknowledges, for instance, that
my interpretation of the principle of purposiveness as a principle of judgment – viz., as an anticipatory, temporal, and formal structure of the subject’s judging activity … – both is the pivotal move in my interpretation of the CJ, and is not explicitly presented in the text. The plausibility of this interpretation of Kant’s principle of purposiveness can only be evaluated, I believe, by seeing whether it sheds helpful light on Kant’s discussions in the CJ.
Zuckert defends her substantial reconstruction of Kant’s view for its ability to unify the two halves of the third Critique (Zuckert 2007:5). But the unification her view achieves (assuming such unification is even desirable) comes at too high a cost: substantial reconstruction of Kant’s arguments and a weak Deduction of judgments of taste.13
Setting the issue of the possibility of harmonious play aside, we are able to clear a path to the main issue in Kant’s Deduction. The judgment of taste is in need of a Deduction because, in Kant’s own words, “we require that satisfaction of everyone as necessary” (KU 5:289). Guyer makes this point quite decisively: “[T]he only thing that is claimed to be known a priori in a judgment of taste is the universal validity of the pleasure that the judge has felt (KU 5:289)” (Guyer 2009a:204). Guyer’s insight is that the a priori claim made in the judgment of taste can only be made in relation to others. If only one human being ever existed she would not judge anything to be beautiful. This may sound rather counter-intuitive, but Kant suggests as much when he claims that, “For himself alone a human being abandoned on a desert island would not adorn either his hut or himself, nor seek out or still less plant flowers in order to decorate himself; rather, only in society does it occur to him to be not merely a human being but also, in his own way, a refined human being” (KU 5:297). Having a universally communicable feeling of pleasure, a feeling that I “should” feel, is only possible if it is sharable with all other human beings. Thus, even if the sole human being in this thought experiment were to experience a harmonious play of the faculties in response to, say, a flower, the feeling of pleasure that arises could at most serve as the basis of an empirical judgment that the flower is purposive for, or agreeable to, her.
From this point on I will take for granted that the a priori claim made by the judgment of taste is the universal validity of my pleasure. Guyer then identifies the a priori principle by drawing what I believe to be an unwarranted conclusion from this insight: “Kant himself makes it clear that the only candidate for an a priori principle in the case of aesthetic judgment is the principle that is necessary in order to justify the only claim that is made a priori by an aesthetic judgment…” (Guyer 2009a:204). Guyer maintains that the a priori principle is therefore “… the assumption of the commonality of ‘that subjective element one can presuppose in all human beings (as requisite for possible cognitions in general)’ (KU 5:290), that is, the commonality of the necessary condition for cognition in general that is also supposed to be a sufficient condition for the commonality of aesthetic judgment” (Guyer 2009a:204, my emphasis). Guyer’s view is that when we judge something is beautiful, we expect a priori that others will feel pleasure in response to the object we have experienced ourselves; that expectation rests on the justifiable assumption that the condition of my own pleasure is shared by everyone else.
Before I explain my concern, it is important to do better justice to Guyer’s account. These quotations may seem to suggest that for Guyer the judgment of taste is not based on a feeling of pleasure, but this is because he makes a logical distinction between two moments within our aesthetic experience: first, the judging (Beurteilung), in which we feel pleasure that is caused by the harmony of the faculties, and then, second, the judgment itself (Urteil), which is an expectation of agreement, whose basis is the assumption of common conditions.14 These moments are not always experienced as distinct; thus, he is proposing a logical rather than phenomenological distinction. At the same time, they could be experienced as distinct: The second could follow the first or the first could occur without the second. Importantly, Guyer’s view allows for the possibility that we could feel the pleasure caused by the harmonious play without judging on the basis of the a priori principle.15 As indicated already, to Guyer’s mind the feeling of pleasure cannot, on its own, ground the judgment of taste because there are no clear marks that distinguish pleasure in beauty (caused by the harmonious play) from, for instance, pleasure in the agreeable. In order for a judgment to be grounded on the a priori principle of aesthetic judgment, the judge must ground her expectation of agreement on a conscious assumption of shared conditions. Only then, according to Guyer, is the judgment of taste grounded on an a priori principle.
My objection to Guyer’s candidate may now be considered. Kant may say that the judgment is based or grounded upon an a priori principle of aesthetic judgment, but this is not equivalent to saying that the judgment justifies itself with an a priori principle. Consider first the a priori concepts: When we say that cognition is “grounded” upon these a priori concepts, we do not mean that when we cognize we justify our cognition by appeal to these a priori concepts. This is why Kant characterizes these principles as constitutive and leaves justification to a deduction.16 Kant characterizes the principle of aesthetic judgments in the same way: “The power of judgment’s concept of a purposiveness of nature still belongs among the concepts of nature, but only as a regulative principle of the faculty of cognition, although the aesthetic judgment on certain objects (of nature or of art) that occasions it is a constitutive principle with regard to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure” (KU 5:197, my emphasis). Second, consider judgments of the agreeable. In the case of the agreeable, pleasure grounds these judgments directly; this is what makes the judgment aesthetic and subjective. Kant insists in the First Moment that “even if the given representations were to be rational but related in a judgment solely to the subject (its feeling), then they are to that extent always aesthetic” (section 1, 5:205). In order to understand what it means for the aesthetic judgment to be “grounded on” or based upon an a priori principle, we should look to the way in which the constitutive principles of cognition “ground” cognition and the way in which the feeling of pleasure in the subject “grounds” judgments of the agreeable. We should take Kant at his word and consider the possibility that judgments of taste are grounded directly on a feeling, but a feeling that is universally communicable because it is (quite literally) constituted by an a priori principle (namely, our shared cognitive nature, according to which the imagination is predisposed to be attuned to the understanding).
Moreover, the earlier passage, in which Guyer provides textual evidence in support of his candidate, in fact provides evidence for my proposal and counter-evidence for his. The text he cites appears to support his proposal because of his own addition: The a priori principle is “… the assumption of the commonality of ‘that subjective element one can presuppose in all human beings (as requisite for possible cognitions in general)’ (KU 5:290)” (Guyer 2009:204, my emphasis). This addition should strike us now as significant, given that Kant has actually identified the candidate I propose rather than Guyer’s. Guyer must supplement the text because of his view of pleasure. But if we take pleasure to be a complex state of mind that could bear more than a merely causal relation to the harmonious play of the faculties and to the universally shared nature of these faculties, then we are in a position to be able to embrace Kant’s text as it stands.
These reflections lead me to the following conclusion: that a judgment of taste is based upon a single ground that unifies three elements: (1) the universally communicable feeling of pleasure that is felt to be universally communicable, (2) the harmonious play of the faculties, and (3) the common predisposition of our cognitive faculties to agree with one another. If we are feeling a universally communicable pleasure that we perceive as universally communicable and that is in fact generated through a harmonious play of the faculties (rather than the agreement of the concept of perfection with an intuition), we are judging on the basis of an a priori principle, namely, our common cognitive nature according to which our imaginations are predisposed to be attuned to the needs of the understanding. If these conditions are met and we demand agreement by claiming the representation of the object in question to be beautiful, then we are making a full-fledged judgment of taste. We may possess (3) without experiencing both (2) and (1) (as we do whenever we are not judging aesthetically). But if we are experiencing (1), then it is possible that (2) is taking place as a manifestation of (3); and it is also possible to experience pleasure that we do not feel is universally communicable even if (2) is taking place as a manifestation of (3). In other words, if (2) is taking place, then it is a manifestation of (3) and we are likely to experience (1), though this experience is not necessary.17 Of course, if (1) does not occur then we will not demand agreement and will therefore not make a full-fledged judgment of taste.
Let me consider two possible objections from Allison and Guyer. I have argued that Allison sidelines the crucial issue of the agreement of particular judgments. He neglects to address the gravity of this worry because he believes the Deduction’s task is more limited and the claim that “the harmonious play of the faculties occurs in different persons under the same conditions” concerns merely a “matter of fact.” On Allison’s view, it is “a causal claim about the conditions under which a certain mental state occurs,” and for this reason, “might warrant an expectation of agreement (or, under ideal conditions, a prediction); but, as has often been noted, this is quite different from licensing a demand that others acknowledge the appropriateness of one’s aesthetic response.”18 Allison may object to my reading for precisely the same reason: that the relationship among the three elements I have enumerated is merely causal and cannot serve a “normative” function. But if he makes this objection he will be following Guyer in reducing the relation among these three elements to a causal relation.19
Indeed, the reason that Allison looks elsewhere for an a priori principle is because he accepts Guyer’s view that the relationship among them could only be causal and presumes that a fact such as this could never “ground” aesthetic judgment because it cannot serve a “normative” function. First, why do we have to consider this relation to be merely causal, when (2) and (3) are conceivably nested within the very identity of (1)? When we judge beauty, we are basing this judgment on the very nature of these faculties to agree with one another; put another way, the judgment is based directly on a feeling that is universally communicable because it is a feeling of the harmonious play of the faculties that is itself the manifestation of the universally shared nature or predisposition of the imagination to be attuned to the understanding. Kant is at pains to make precisely this point after he resolves the Antinomy; and though I provided the quotation earlier, it is worth presenting it again:
[F]or since the beautiful must not be judged in accordance with concepts, but rather in accordance with the purposive disposition of the imagination for its correspondence with the faculty of concepts in general, it is not a rule or precept but only that which is merely nature in the subject … which is to serve as the subjective standard of that aesthetic but unconditioned purposiveness in beautiful art, which is supposed to make a rightful claim to please everyone.
I discuss the implications of my view for the Antinomy in the next section. At this point, however, it is important to emphasize that a shared cognitive nature can be considered and can serve as a subjective a priori principle, insofar as it is universally shared, and, thanks to a successful Deduction, we can know a priori that we do share it. So, while Allison might be right that a fact cannot serve as necessary norm (e.g., the moral law) or as an objective principle, it is simply incorrect to say that a fact cannot serve as an inter-subjective principle (insofar as it is universally shared). We can only consider this fact to be a principle of aesthetic judgment, however, once we can know a priori that it is universal (that for all of us the imagination is attuned to the requirements of the understanding). Once we do (thanks to a successful deduction),20 we can consider this fact, which is known a priori, to be an a priori principle of aesthetic judgment.
The possible objection from Guyer takes a different approach. As already indicated, I support Zuckert’s challenge to Guyer’s reading of Kant’s view of pleasure and the logical distinction he proposes. She argues (along the lines of Hannah Ginsborg and Allison) that pleasure is no brute sensation but a complex, intentional state of mind: Pleasure involves consciousness of itself and is therefore a more complex basis for our judgments of taste than Guyer allows. Guyer insists, however, that because she rejects his conception of pleasure and the logical distinction he proposes, she is unable to make room for two scenarios: first, our being able to take pleasure in judging aesthetically without expecting others to feel it, and second, our being able to make a mistaken judgment, in which we think we have felt a pleasure caused by the harmony of the faculties, but have not. These two scenarios are excluded, he thinks, if the basis of our judgment of taste is, as Zuckert believes, constitutive of the pleasurable harmonious play (by serving as its presumably odd temporal structure). Why? Guyer thinks that Zuckert’s view entails that in feeling this pleasure we, by definition, judge in accordance with the principle. We cannot experience the pleasurable harmonious play without making a full-fledged judgment of taste. Guyer thinks the second scenario is also excluded by Zuckert’s view because this intentional feeling of pleasure in beauty distinguishes itself clearly from other sorts of pleasure, so mistaking one’s pleasure in the agreeable for pleasure in beauty, for instance, seems to be impossible.
Guyer may object to my view for the same reasons, so it is important to provide an adequate response. By making the distinction between Beurteilung and Urteil but modifying Guyer’s account of this distinction somewhat, my view is able to allow for these two scenarios. The full-fledged judgment of taste is das Urteil; it is the conscious demand of agreement (“X is beautiful”) that is consciously based upon one’s own pleasure that one feels to be universally communicable and is in fact universally communicable because it is a feeling of the harmonious play of the faculties (and not a feeling in response to the agreement of a concept with an object). In other words, a full-fledged judgment of taste is a valid, or correct, judgment. Mistaken judgments are not judgments of taste but rather judgments of the agreeable or of the good. Mistakes occur (such that we think we are making a judgment of taste when we are not) because the feeling of pleasure generated through harmonious play does not, on its own, always provide clear marks that distinguish it from pleasure in the agreeable or in the good. Though our pleasure may feel universally communicable, we can be mistaken about whether it is in fact universally communicable by way of harmonious play. It is also possible to be conscious of the pleasure that arises through harmonious play but without the pleasure feeling universally communicable and therefore without demanding that others should also feel it. In this case, we may be in some sense judging “on the basis” of the principle (Beurteilung) but not conscious of this; we are thus judging “on its basis” in a much different sense than when we make a full-fledged judgment of taste. So, we may have a feeling of pleasure, which is in fact “constituted” by the a priori principle, without making a judgment (Urteil) of taste in accordance with it.
I may now address the worry that my view might render everything beautiful, even objects we merely cognize. In cognition we do not judge on the basis of the principle of aesthetic judgment (our shared cognitive nature that is characterized by imagination’s predisposition to adhere to the understanding’s need for unity). We cannot judge in accordance with it unless (among other things) the agreement of the two cognitive faculties is achieved without the use of a concept. Thus, when we judge in accordance with concepts or in accordance with a pleasure not brought about through the harmonious activity, it is not possible for us to be judging on the basis of this shared cognitive nature.
Having made the case that my interpretation of the principle of judgments of taste is plausible, textually supported, and internally consistent, I turn now to consider its implications. The first has to do with the notoriously perplexing argument set forth in the “Resolution of the Antinomy of Taste” (section 57). Even if a full defense of an interpretation of this argument cannot be offered here, my interpretation of the principle of judgments of taste (as our shared cognitive nature) introduces the possibility that Kant resolves the antinomy in the idea of a supersensible substratum of humanity rather than in a supersensible substratum in general.21 If we narrow the conclusion in this way we can then raise the question of why Kant thinks he needs to make a transcendental distinction between the empirical facticity of humanity (as a group of discreet individuals that are determined by natural law) and the supersensible basis of this group of individuals.22
A full consideration of this question would, it seems to me, call attention to the political significance of the third Critique, as well as provide yet another reason to reject the view that Kant is a “moral ‘individualist’” (Wood 2003:41). My reading suggests that the first half of the third Critique directs our attention almost exclusively to human nature rather than to external nature and its apparently beautiful forms. According to Kant’s lectures on anthropology, human nature is not determinate but is determinable only through freedom. Moreover, as Allen Wood points out, “determining” human nature is not an individualistic endeavor but rather a “social process”; the moral progress and, indeed, the very identity of an individual human being (as Weltbürger) are bound up with the progress of the human community (Wood 2003:41). If the principle of judgments of taste is our shared cognitive nature, then we should expect Kant to discuss the political significance of taste through its relation to human nature, given that his conception of human nature is tightly connected to his moral and political philosophy. This is precisely what he does in the final section of the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment. These investigations into taste lead him to emphasize the “sociability” of humanity that distinguishes us from animals and that is also in the process of becoming “lawful”: “humanity means on the one hand the universal feeling of participation and on the other hand the capacity for being able to communicate one’s inmost self universally” (KU 5:355).
Agreement in taste is politically significant for Kant because it concerns not merely “correctness” and the individual’s moral progress, but also human connection, communication, and our collective progress. Indeed, agreement in taste concerns our relation to our own shared cognitive human nature, leaving open the possibility of estrangement that is reflected through a lack of feeling of unity within a cosmopolis. Melissa Zinkin makes a similar point, arguing that for Kant “if I do make such a claim and others disagree with me, I don’t merely feel a difference between us, but alienated from an important aspect of humanity…” (Zinkin 2006: 160). At the same time, since human nature is indeterminate, Kant may be suggesting that the unification of human beings is not simply given through our empirical nature but must be achieved by making use of, among other things, our common cognitive nature and the shareable pleasures it makes possible as we work toward ethical and political ideals. By recognizing the a priori principle of aesthetic judgment as our shared cognitive human nature, we are able to do better justice to the link Kant is attempting to forge between taste and politics in the Dialectic of Taste. Given these implications and the defense I have provided, I hope to have offered sufficient reason to take this unusual candidate seriously.
1 In what follows, I clarify the relationship between the principle so identified and the feeling of pleasure, as well as explain how judgments of taste are nonetheless distinguished from all other sorts of judgments (cognition, judgments of the agreeable and judgments of the good [morally good, useful, perfect]).
2 According to Paul Guyer’s metacognitive approach, when the cognitive faculties harmonize with one another,
The understanding’s underlying objective or interest in unity is being satisfied in a way that goes beyond anything required for or dictated by satisfaction of the determinate concept or concepts on which mere identification of the object depends. A beautiful object can always be recognized to be an object of some determinate kind, but our experience of it always has even more unity and coherence than is required for it to be a member of that kind, or has a kind of unity and coherence that is not merely a necessary condition for our classification of it.”
Guyer’s view allows us to acknowledge concepts at work in the perception of art and natural beauty, but recognizes that thanks in part to the imagination, the unification that is “felt” goes beyond the unification provided by any of those concepts. He distinguishes his metacognitive approach from what he calls “the precognitive approach” of Dieter Henrich, Donald Crawford, Ralf Meerbote, Rudolf Makkreel, Hannah Ginsborg, and his own earlier view, as well as from “the multi-cognitive approach” of Gerhard Seel, Fred Rush, and Henry Allison.
3 As is well known, Hannah Arendt maintains that Kant’s theory of taste reflects a new political insight and that the third Critique “should have become the book that otherwise is missing in Kant’s great work,” namely, his political philosophy (Arendt 1992:9). According to Arendt’s reading of Kant’s theory of taste, “sociability is the very origin, not the goal, of man’s humanity” and thus “sociability is the very essence of men insofar as they are of this world only” (Arendt 1992:74). Arendt argues that his account is to be distinguished “from all those theories that stress human interdependence as dependence on our fellow men for our needs and wants. Kant stresses that at least one of our mental faculties, the faculty of judgment, presupposes the presence of others. And this mental faculty is not just what we terminologically call judgment; bound up with it is the notion that ‘feelings and emotions [Empfindungen] are regarded as of worth only insofar as they can be generally communicated’; that is, bound up with judgment is our whole soul apparatus, so to speak” (Arendt 1992:74). My account, which identifies our shared cognitive nature as the a priori principle of judgments of taste, is not only consonant with Arendt’s reading but also lends it support by illuminating the basis for the political insight Arendt ascribes to Kant.
4 I defend my reading of the Deduction in Dobe 2010. The argument endorses Guyer’s appeal to Kant’s informative footnote to the Deduction that helps to clarify an implicit move in the Deduction: Being able to communicate our cognitions with one another entails that we possess all that is required for making correct (universally valid) judgments of taste (because taste simply requires the cognitive faculties we already possess and not some separate faculty of taste). This point supports my conclusion that the sensus communis conceived of as a “faculty” of taste is simply the power of judgment in its reflective use. Based on the argument I will be providing here, the sensus communis conceived of as a “feeling” may be identified as the universally communicable feeling of pleasure in judgments of taste.
5 In the First Introduction, Kant insists that “since a merely subjective condition of a judgment does not permit a determinate concept of that judgment’s determining ground, this can only be given in the feeling of pleasure, so that the aesthetic judgment is always a judgment of reflection” (HN 20:225).
6 The important point for my argument is that the attunement of these faculties is evidence of a natural attunement or predisposition; so even if Kant characterizes the predisposition in slightly different terms (such as the cognitive faculties being naturally attuned to each other or some other variation), what is crucial for my account is that this attunement is conceived of as natural. This means that my proposal for a principle of judgments of taste is potentially consistent not only with Guyer’s metacognitive approach to the harmonious play but also Melissa Zinkin’s view that the harmonious play involves the judging of intensive as opposed to extensive magnitudes (see Zinkin 2006).
7 Kant characterizes taste as “the faculty for judging that which makes our feeling in a given representation universally communicable without the mediation of a concept” (KU 5:295).
9 Allison states, “[T]he ‘deduction’ of §38 then affirms the universal validity of this principle of taste on the grounds that it is also a condition of cognition. Thus, … taste is grounded indirectly in the conditions of cognition by showing that its governing principle has that status” (Allison 2001: 177).
10 In “Dialogue,” Allison believes Guyer confuses the quid facti and quid juris by including justification in his characterization of the principle of taste. But for Guyer, what it means to make a judgment of taste is to ground one’s judgment on several jointly sufficient conditions: a feeling of pleasure, requisite information about the causal history of that feeling, and the assumption of common conditions. The a priori principle is then the judge’s assumption of a common nature (which the Deductions shows is known a priori). So Guyer does not confuse the quid juris and quid facti: He believes the Deduction’s aim is to justify the justification offered in a judgment of taste, or to justify the basis or principle of any judgment of taste. Guyer is perplexed as to why Allison does not think that the Deduction’s aim is to justify the basis of particular judgments of taste. In fact, Allison sidesteps this crucial issue because he believes that a Deduction simply identifies the standard that the cognitive faculties would be fulfilling if they achieve harmony in reflection. I discuss both views in more detail shortly. Importantly, Allison follows Guyer in viewing the harmonious play and the feeling of pleasure as simply “facts of the matter” that cannot in themselves contain anything “normative”; for both Allison and Guyer, the pleasure and harmonious play are not identical with the principle of judgments of taste (see Guyer and Allison 2011).
11 “[S]uch unifying synthesis without following a conceptual rule would seem not to be possible on Kant’s view” (Zuckert 2007:71).
12 “[I]n order to have coherent experience, to render empirical knowledge possible and justified, we require a principle in addition to the categorical principles to guide reflective judging, a principle in accord with which the subject may discern the unity of the diverse as such…” (Zuckert 2007:61).
13 If my candidate is in fact the principle of judgments of taste, then we have reason to maintain a clear distinction between the two halves of the third Critique (and thus to resist readings that provide deep unification of the work): The first half of the text arguably concerns human nature and its amenability to our cognitive, moral, social and political ends, whereas the second concerns external nature (and its amenability to these ends). See Section 6.
14 According to Guyer, the judgment of taste “rests upon two conceptually distinct acts”: “one, the ‘unintentional’ reflection which produces the pleasure of aesthetic response; the other, that further and quite possibly intentional exercise of reflective judgment which leads to an actual judgment of taste, or determines that the feeling of pleasure occasioned by a given object is such a pleasure, and thus is validly attributed to anyone perceiving that object” (Guyer 1979:97). The first reflective act can occur without the second, but the second cannot occur without the first.
15 As I make clear toward the end of this section, my view also allows for this possibility.
17 Of course, the “sole human being” thought experiment entails that if she experiences (2) she experiences it in the absence of (3) and (1).
19 In other words, Allison follows Guyer in overlooking the possibility that the way aesthetic judgments are grounded on an a priori principle is similar to the ways in which cognition is grounded on the a priori concepts and the judgment of the agreeable is based upon a feeling of pleasure in the subject.
20 In Dobe 2010, I argue that the Deduction shows that this “fact” is the necessary condition of some given (namely, our ability to communicate with one another).
21 Hegel interprets the resolution as a general substratum of appearances in Faith and Knowledge, 91 (see Longuenesse 2007:179). See also, among others, Caygill 1995:77; Dunham 1933:50–1; Guyer 1987:308; Matthews 1997:108; and Wenzel 2005:123.
22 For Kant, conceiving of the possibility of judgments of taste seems to require us to think of our empirical nature not only as, in fact, shared, but as determinable through the collective use of freedom. Richard Dean has recently argued that the “idea” of humanity is a rational idea of virtue and thereby “serves as a practical ‘model of virtue’” (Dean 2013:173). Thus, Kant’s resolution may point to this idea of humanity as the ultimate standard of taste: That is, the ultimate standard of taste is not simply the similarity in the functioning of our cognitive faculties (their attunement to one another) but also the idea of humanity, which we use in order to make collective moral and political progress. It is, after all, for the sake of this idea that we are to make use of our shared cognitive nature and our ability to share one another’s pleasures.