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1 the Background 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A21/B35

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1 the Background 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A21/B35 170 Notes Notes 1 The Background 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A21/B35--6. I have followed the usual practice of referring to pages in the two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason by using A to denote the first edition and B to denote the second. In what follows, I shall refer to the Critique of Pure Reason by noting only the relevant pagination. 2. A50/B74. 3. Recent work on Kant's epistemology suggests that the faculty should be treated distinctly from the concepts it informs. Previously, Jonathan Bennett among others had argued that judgement plays an idle role in explanations of how we make assertions by applying concepts. See, for example, Hubert Schwyzer, The Unity of Under­ standing. A Study in Kantian Problems (1990), Chapters 1-3. 4. Bl31. 5. The use of 'I think' is not intended to lessen its certainty as if we were now falling short of asserting X and had to be satisfied with saying that 'I think that X' in the sense that 'It is my opinion (only) that X'. Rather, the claim is only that I can talk about what I am thinking of. 6. This and the above arguments are culled from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and from Kant's Transcendental Idealism, by H. E. Allison. The latter seems to me to contain the most plausible recent account of Kant's central arguments. 7. Cf. Graham Bird, Kant's Theory of Knowledge, (1962) and Gerd Buch­ dahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (1968), both of whom develop accounts of the difference between transcendental and em­ pirical necessities. 8. Bxiii. 9. Ibid. 10. Sections 383, A. G . Baumgarten, Metaphysica (Hildesheim, 1963). 11. Ibid., Section 462. 12. G. W. Leibniz, New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, Section 11. 13. Vernunftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt, und der Seele des Menschen (1720), (Abbreviated as VGG), Section 276. 14. Wolff also proposes a distinction between figurative and intuitive knowledge (VGG, Section 316) by which to refine Leibniz's account of perfect and imperfect knowledge. In spite of their differences, both provide degrees of knowledge. 15. Section 123, A. G. Baumgarten, Aesthetica (Hildesheim, 1970). 16. Aesthetica, Section 619. 17. Aesthetica, Section 22. 18. Aesthetica, Section 2. Notes 171 19. Reflections on Poetry, Section 13. 20. Ibid., Section 13. 21. Sections 14 and 15. 22. Section 19. 23. Section 38. 24. Section 40. 25. Aesthetica, Section 177. 26. Aesthetica, Section 181. 27. Kant's a priori justifications of validity deny the power of inductive generalizations about our actual behaviour, such as Hume and Burke propose, to justify the validity of aesthetic response. I have not developed the contrast between Kant's theory and empiricist explana­ tions of aesthetics because a great deal of work is already available in English on this subject. The relation between Kant and the rationalists is less studied, and I thought it would be more useful to develop some details of the theories here. Paul Crowther discusses some aspects of the relation between Kant, Burke, and Addison in Part I of The Kantian Sublime. From Morality to Art (1989). 28. Kant wrote this book under the influence of Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, and entertained pronouncements on how ideas of beauty varied between countries, cultures, and races. 2 The 'Analytic of the Beautiful' 1. Though they associated it with perfection. 2. They are also aesthetic in the first sense, of course, but that claim does not need argument because it only says that judgements of taste are judgements of taste. In the second sense it says that judgements of taste have to do with our feelings and sensations. 3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of judgement, ~ection 1, 204. See also Section 25, 228, where Kant notes that the aesthetic judgement gives us no knowledge, not even confused knowledge, of an object. I have usually used the translation of the Critique of Judgement by Werner Pluhar, published by Hackett (1987). Page numbers refer to the Academy Edition of Kant's works, which Pluhar cites in the margins. In some instances I have used the translation of the Critique of Judgement by James Creed Meredith because of the felicity of its phrasing. In what follows, I have abbreviated the Critique of Judgement as KDU. 4. B171. 5. These ways, we know, depend on the twelve categories. Kant classi­ fies those twelve categories under four major headings of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Modality. Thus, causality, substance, and reci­ procity belong under the rubric of Relation, while possibility, necess­ ity, and existence belong with Modality. Any sentence, thought, or judgement must use at least one categorv from each of the four rubrics. We cannot assert at the same time that the same thing is possible and necessary or existent, but it must be one of those. Similarly, that item must constitute a causal relation or one ot 172 Notes substance and its accidents, and so on. Cf. B106, for the list of categories. 6. A133/B172. 7. Ibid. 8. A134/B173-4. 9. My attempt to separate out an act of judging from the particular application of a concept may seem problematic, especially given the criticisms familiar in analytic philosophy against such a distinction. Jonathan Bennett, for example, argues that Kant's distinction is fraught with difficulties and makes an unnecessary complication out of the schematism. More recently, this position has been questioned, I think effectively, by Stuart Bell, 'The Art of Judgement and the Judgement of Art', Mind, 1987, and The Unity of Understanding, A Study in Kantian Problems by Hubert Schwyzer (1990). My account of judge­ ment owes considerably to these two publications. 10. Cf. the Introductions to the Critique of Judgement. 11. But also, because we gain this appreciation of order in judgement, it involves the faculty which is distinctively Kantian. If Kant can associ­ ate taste with the activity of this faculty, he will avoid many of the problems afflicting earlier aesthetic theories, which fell victim to a number of problems because they did not make good use of a concept of judgement and associated taste with mere sense, and sensate knowledge with perfection. 12. KDU, 169. lt may be as well to emphasize here that for Kant judge­ ment shows itself in the beauty of both art and nature. Such an emphasis should go to counter the tendency, prevalent for too long in secondary literature, on Kant's aesthetic theory, to claim that his concern is with natural beauty principally. Rather, given his interest in the spontaneous and creative activity of judgement, Kant is unlikely to be satisfied by its exhibition in natural beauty alone, for fine art best embodies the creative power of judgement, of the activity of discover­ ing order, in which the creative power is at its most exemplary in making us conscious of the fact of grasping a richly novel and valuable material produced by our genius, where genius shares in the sponta­ neity native to judgement. 13. KDU, 169. 14. KDU, 194. 15. KDU. 215. Italics added. 16. KDU, 203 nl. 17. See KDU Section 59 for the claims about realism. The issues appear also in S. Kemal, Kant and Fine Art, 131-4. 18. KDU, Section 43. 19. We should make clear that most claims about the Critique of Judgement are controversial. Although the text has gained serious attention from Kantians only in recent years, in this short span it has generated debate over precisely what its issues are. For example, even if we are agreed that intersubjective validity is a crucial issue, the role it plays and its scope are still open to discussion. In this situation any thesis may be found controversial, and although it is not possible for us to enter into discussion with everyone about everything, in this intro- Notes 173 ductory book we will usually indicate in the end-notes what disagree­ ments there are and what diverse positions authors have identified or developed. 20. KDU, 211. 21. KDU, 219. 22. KDU, 236. 23. KDU. 240. 24. KDU, n 203. 25. KDU, 204. See the interesting papers by Rudolph Makkreel, in which he develops Kant's talk of a 'feeling of life' by reference to Dilthey's work, to show that aesthetic judgements have a wider role to play in our practical lives. The formal properties of aesthetic judgements, therefore, must be put in the context of Kant's more general philo­ sophical concerns. Makkreel identifies a hermeneutical issue in the Analytic and later sections, where by displaying the role and nature of the 'productive imagination' Kant's work can be seen as a contribution to the debate between explanation and understanding. R. Makkreel, 'The Feeling of Life: Some Kantian Sources of Life-Philosophy', Dilthey-Jahrbuch fUr Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften, Band 3, 1985, 83-104; 'The Role of Synthesis in Kant's Critique of Judgement', Proceedings of the Sixth International Kant Congress, 1985, (1990). The results of these papers are presented in R. Makkreel, Understanding and Imagination in Kant. The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgement (1990). 26. KDU, 203. 27. Of course, it is also the case that thinkers at various times have accepted that some role is played by pleasure, but have denied it the centrality which Kant accords to it. 28. In any case, Kant does provide something of a more basic defence of his association of pleasure and beauty, for he sees pleasure as distinc­ tively subjective, and so is able to use it to explain the nature of the activity of judging.
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