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Hannah Ginsborg on Aesthetic Judgement Paul Guyer Downloaded from by Guest on 28 September 2021 20May201620May20163June2016 Symposium Paper One Act or Two? Hannah Ginsborg on Aesthetic Judgement Paul Guyer Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/57/4/407/3811073 by guest on 28 September 2021 Hannah Ginsborg rejects my ‘two-acts’ interpretation of Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgement as untrue to Kant’s text and as philosophically problematic, especially because it entails that every object must be experienced as beautiful. I reject her criticisms, and argue that it is her own ‘one- act’ interpretation that is liable to these criticisms. But I also suggest that her emphasis on Kant’s ‘transcendental explanation’ of pleasure as a self-maintaining mental state suggests an alternative to the common view that pleasure is a distinctive feeling, even if Ginsborg herself does not draw that conclusion. Hannah Ginsborg has been tenaciously defending a controversial interpretation of Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgement since her 1989 Harvard dissertation on The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition.1 As the title of her dissertation suggests, her interpretation of Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgement has been part of a larger interpretation, not of Kant’s aesthetics, but of Kant’s epistemology, where this means primarily Kant’s theory of empirical concepts and empirical knowledge, such as that is, rather than his argument for the existence of synthetic a priori cognition. In the last decade she has been developing a general theory of empirical concepts on the basis of her approach to Kant, an ambi- tion which she has said was the original reason for her interest in Kant. The subtitle of her collection, ‘Essays on Kant’s Critique of Judgement,’ suggests that this volume collects only some of her papers specifically on Kant, but that is a little misleading. The volume is divided into three parts, ‘Aesthetics’, ‘Cognition’, and ‘Teleology’, and the papers in the first and third parts do chiefly concern topics in Kant’s third Critique, namely his concep- October tion of aesthetic judgement in Part I and his qualified revival of a teleological approach to conceiving and explaining organisms and the system of nature as a whole in Part III. The papers in Part II, however, are more focused on her general approach to empirical concepts, although the first of these papers, ‘Reflective Judgement and Taste’ (originally published in 1990, thus the earliest paper in the collection) is still focused primarily on the case of aesthetic judgement, and would better have been included in Part I. Ginsborg has consistently presented her interpretation of Kant’s model of aesthetic judgement as an alternative to the interpretation that I offered in Kant and the Claims of Taste2 as well as to that proposed by Donald Crawford in his Kant’s Aesthetic Theory 1 Hannah Ginsborg, The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990). 2 Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); See also the second edition which has a foreword on subsequent literature and an additional chapter on ‘Kant’s Conception of Fine Art’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 57 | Number 4 | October 2017 | pp. 407–419 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayw050 © British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] 408 | PAUL GUYER (1974)3 (which appeared after I had completed my dissertation in 1973 but before I re- wrote it as the 1979 book). With the exception of one paper, ‘The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited’, most of my further work on Kant’s third critique has concerned topics in Kant’s aesthetics more broadly construed, such as his theory of adherent beauty, fine art, genius, and the sublime, as well as his place in the larger history of aesthetics, which Ginsborg does not address, as well as Kant’s teleology, which she does, but where I am not as much of a target for her as I am in the case of aesthetic Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/57/4/407/3811073 by guest on 28 September 2021 judgement.4 So it would seem natural for me to take this occasion to respond to her critique of, and alternative to, my interpretation of Kant’s basic conception of aes- thetic judgement. I will first briefly restate the basic idea of my interpretation and, next, discuss Ginsborg’s chief objections to it and explain how her own approach is intended to resolve those objections. Then I will raise what might be considered an internal objection to her theory and finally argue that my model of Kant offers a more plausible account of the phenomenology of aesthetic experience than does Ginsborg’s. But before I turn to the details, I might suggest that the difference between her trans- lation of the title of Kant’s work, Kritik der Urteilskraft, and mine already reflects key differences in our interpretation. I chose to translate Kant’s title as Critique of the Power of Judgement because I believed that ‘power of judgement’ is a literal translation of Kant’s term Urteilskraft, but also because I thought Kant meant that title to indicate that his cri- tique concerns different domains of the faculty of judgement, namely the aesthetic use of judgement and its teleological judgement, and further because in the case of aesthetic judgement he distinguishes between Beurteilung and Urteil, the activity of judging and the product of such activity, namely a judgement, the assertion of a proposition or the prop- osition asserted.5 Translating Kant’s title term as the ‘power of judgement’ rather than conflating Urteilskraft with Urteil preserves room for the distinctions that Kant makes, especially that between Beurteilung and Urteil, or at least does not prejudice the reader of the translation against that distinction from the outset. But the gist of Ginsborg’s approach to Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgement is precisely to collapse the distinc- tion between Beurteilung and Urteil, between the activity or activities that may lead up to the judgement of taste, the judgement that an object is beautiful, and that judgement itself or even its assertion, and her unexplained retention of the traditional translation of Kant’s title may be reflective of her approach. But it also suggests that Ginsborg’s approach may not have quite as much textual support as she likes to claim. 3 Donald W. Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974). 4 This appears both in Paul Guyer, Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Rebecca Kukla, Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), in which Ginsborg’s paper ‘Thinking the Particular as Contained Under the Universal’, essay 7 of Hannah Ginsborg, The Normativity of Nature: Essays on Kant’s Critique of Judgement (Oxford: OUP, 2015) also first appeared. 5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). In the original, Kant used Fettdruck or larger, heavier type to indicate emphasis, and in the Cambridge edition we use bold type to indicate that; this leaves me free to use italics to indicate my own emphasis of words in quotations from Kant (which, however, will also be explicitly noted). For the original text see Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Royal Academy of Sciences, subsequently German, trans. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, vol. 29 (Berlin: Georg Reimer, subsequently Walter de Gruyter, 1900–). When referencing my translation I use the format (Akademie Volume: Page), in accordance with the original work. ONE ACT OR TWO? HANNAH GINSBORG ON AESTHETIC JUDGEMENT | 409 Having said all that, I will begin by re-stating my interpretation of Kant’s core notion of aesthetic judgement. In Section 9 of the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgement, which he labels the ‘key to the critique of taste’, Kant poses the question ‘whether in the judgement of taste [Geschmacksurteile] the feeling of judgement precedes the judging [Beurteilung] of the object or the latter precedes the former?’ and then answers that: If the pleasure in the given object came first, and only its universal communicability Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/57/4/407/3811073 by guest on 28 September 2021 were to be attributed to the representation of the object, then such a procedure would be self-contradictory. For such a pleasure would be none other than mere agreeable- ness in sensation, and hence by its very nature could have only private validity.6 My claim is that this answer is correct if, but only if, Kant is talking about the pleasure that one takes in a beautiful object as preceding the judgement of taste (Geschmacksurteil), not the judging (Beurteilung) of the object. In order to be properly judged to be universally valid or communicable rather than merely privately valid, which is what is asserted of pleasure in a given object by the judgement ‘This is beautiful’ or the judgement of taste, the pleasure must be due to activity of the cognitive powers of imagination and under- standing (in the simple case that Kant calls ‘pure’ or ‘free’ beauty; the response to art will involve reason as well) leading to the harmonious state that he calls the ‘free play’ of those faculties rather than to mere sensory stimulation (the ‘agreeable’). Kant supposes that the latter is variable from individual to individual, but the former response can be expected to be invariable among different individuals, at least if they are all in optimal conditions, because this response involves the fundamental faculties of cognition itself and these, Kant further supposes, can be expected to work the same way in all normal human beings.
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