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 aesthetic 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 translation 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 critique 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 proposition 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 distinction 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 agreeableness 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 understanding (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. (The last claim is the gravamen of Kant’s ‘deduction of judgements of taste’.7) But though a universally valid pleasure must follow the judging of the object if it is not to be a merely privately valid pleasure of sensory agreeableness, I argue, it must, in some logical if not temporal sense, precede the judgement of taste or of beauty, because that is nothing other than the judgement that the pleasure I take in the object is a universally valid pleasure, in other words a judgement about the pleasure. And that judgement could not precede the pleasure on pain of circularity. So my interpretation of Kant is that he supposes that in aesthetic experience one’s imagination plays over or with the representation of an object, resulting in a condition of the imagination that is harmonious with the understanding’s standing demand for unification of our manifolds of intuition that is pleasurable or produces a feeling of pleasure (I will come back to a possible distinction here); but which is not produced by the subsumption of the object under a determinate concept, for then the unification of the manifold would not be a free act of the imagination and would not be noticeably pleasurable. If one judges that one’s pleasure in an object is that sort of pleasure, that it has arisen in that way, then one can reasonably issue a judgement of taste or call the object beautiful, that is, speak with a ‘universal voice’8 and claim that anyone ought to find the object pleasing.9 Thus the judging of the object must precede the feeling of pleasure

6 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5: 216–217. 7 Ibid., Section 38, but see also Section 21. 8 Ibid., 5: 216. 9 Ibid., 5: 111–113. 410 | PAUL GUYER

but the judgement of taste follows, again in some logical if not necessarily temporal sense. This is why Ginsborg calls my view a ‘two-acts’ view.10 I never denied that there are several turns of phrase in Section 9 that do not fit this interpretation very well, as when Kant says that: ‘Thus it is the universal capacity for the communication of the state of mind in the given representation which, as the subjective ground of the judgement of taste, must serve as its ground and have the pleasure in the object as a consequence’.11 I even went so far as to suggest that offending lines in Section Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/57/4/407/3811073 by guest on 28 September 2021 9 may be traces of an earlier theory, evidenced in Kant’s lectures on anthropology from preceding decades, in which he did hold not merely that we do take pleasure in the possibility or fact of agreement with others but that such pleasure is the primary pleasure in the beautiful. I need not and perhaps should not have said that, for as Lewis White Beck once argued in reference to the ‘patchwork theory’ about the transcendental deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason (I remember this from a lecture and cannot give a printed source), anyone who was inconsistent enough to patch together inconsistent arguments from different periods in his life would also have been inconsistent enough to make an inconsistent argument all at once. But my main argument is both philosophical, namely that the pleasure in a beautiful object cannot be a product of its judgement that one’s own state of mind is communicable or intersubjectively valid, because it is a judgement that one’s pleasure is universally communicable, so the pleasure must be there to be judged, and textual, namely that the ‘two-acts’ interpretation is suggested by many other things that Kant says and in turn explains many other things that he says. Here I can only give a sample of what I take to be the textual evidence for my interpretation. One passage that I find compelling comes from the published Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgement, written, we know, only after Kant had completed the entire body of the text and thus, presumably, reflecting his considered view of what he had actually argued.12 I will add italics to show how I read the passage: Apprehension of forms in the imagination can never take place without the reflecting power of judgement, even if unintentionally, at least comparing them to its faculty for relating intuitions to concepts. Now if in this comparison the imagination ... is unintentionally brought into accord with the understanding ... through a given representation and a feeling of pleasure is thereby aroused, then the object must be regarded as purposive for the reflecting power of judgement. ... That object the form of which (not the material aspect of its representation, as sensation) in mere reflection (without any intention of acquiring a concept from it) is judged as the ground of a pleasure in the representation of such an object—with its representation this pleasure is also judged to be necessarily combined, consequently not merely for the subject who apprehends this form but for everyone who judges at all.13 Here Kant says that pleasure is aroused by the imagination’s ‘unintentionally’ coming into accord with the understanding, that is, finding the unity in the manifold of the

10 For example, Ginsborg, The Normativity of Nature, 34–35. 11 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5: 217. 12 For the evidence for this claim, see my Editor’s Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment, xl–xli. 13 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5: 190. ONE ACT OR TWO? HANNAH GINSBORG ON AESTHETIC JUDGEMENT | 411 representation that the understanding demands but without dictation from a concept of the understanding, and that when that pleasure is judged to have been aroused in that way, by the free play of the imagination and understanding in response to the form of the object, then one can judge that this pleasure is valid not only for oneself but for everyone else, at least if all involved are in ideal or optimal conditions for such a response.14 There are clearly two separable acts here, judging the object and thereby arousing the feeling of pleasure, and then judging the pleasure and issuing the judgement of beauty or taste. If the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/57/4/407/3811073 by guest on 28 September 2021 pleasure does not succeed the former step, no claim to universal validity is in order, but if it does not precede the judgement of taste, the latter makes no sense. Again, I note that these two acts do not have to be temporally separable, although I will argue in the conclusion that in our real aesthetic experience they may well be separate and that it allows for this is one of the virtues of my interpretation. Kant does not deploy the two-act model only in the Introduction. In Section 6, the first section of the ‘Second Moment’ of the Analytic of the Beautiful that is concluded by Section 9, he uses it again when he writes that if ‘the person making the judgement feels himself completely free with regard to the satisfaction that he devotes to the object’ he ‘must therefore regard it as grounded in [conditions] that he can also presup- pose in every oneself; consequently he must believe himself to have grounds for expecting a similar pleasure of everyone’.15 And in summing up Section 9 itself, Kant again clearly models the two-act interpretation of his conception of aesthetic judgement: Now the judgement of taste, however, determines the object, independently of concepts, with regard to satisfaction and the predicate of beauty. The animation of both faculties (the imagination and the understanding) to an activity that is indeterminate but yet, through the stimulus of the given representation, in unison, namely that which belongs to a cognition in general, is the sensation whose universal communicability is postulated by the judgement of taste ... A representation which, though singular and without comparison to others, nevertheless is in agreement with the conditions of universality, an agreement that constitutes the business of the understanding in general, brings the faculties of cognition into the well-proportioned disposition that we require for all cognition and hence also regard as valid for everyone (for every human being) who is determined to judge by means of understanding and sense in combination.16 Again, we have the ‘activity’ of the imagination that leads to ‘satisfaction’ and then the judgement that since the faculties of imagination and understanding are required for cognition in general, of which every (normal) human being is capable (under optimal conditions) the ‘predicate’ of beauty can be attached to the object to express the judgement that the pleasure it has produced in the subject is valid for everyone else as well. First Beurteilung, then pleasure, then Geschmacksurteil, which is about that pleasure. In my view the textual evidence for Kant’s own attachment to the ‘two-acts’ model is overwhelming. It also explains further moves that he makes. In particular, it explains

14 Ibid., 5: 237. 15 Ibid., 5: 211. 16 Ibid., 5: 219; italics added. 412 | PAUL GUYER

his account of the possibility of error in one’s judgements of taste, a desideratum for any eighteenth-century theory of taste. In Section 19, Kant states that: ‘The judgement of taste ascribes assent to everyone, and whoever declares something to be beautiful wishes that everyone should approve of the object in question.’17 He then says that: ‘The should in aesthetic judgements of taste is ... pronounced only conditionally’.18 He does not have in mind the point he will make later, that if we are to demand agreement in aesthetic response from others ‘as if it were a duty’, then we will have to find moral significance in aesthetic Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/57/4/407/3811073 by guest on 28 September 2021 experience in spite of its freedom from concepts.19 Rather, he has in mind the epistemic condition that ‘one could count on this assent only if one were always sure that the case were correctly subsumed under that ground as the rule of approval’, that is, if one were always sure that one’s own pleasure is that of the free play of imagination and understanding—of which, however, one cannot be sure.20 This is because the judgement that one’s pleasure is due to this source rather than any other is in fact an empirical and therefore inevitably uncertain judgement. Kant makes this plain when he writes in the run-up to the deduction of judgements of taste: That the representation of an object is immediately combined with a pleasure can be perceived only internally, and would ... yield a merely empirical judgement. ... Thus it is not the pleasure but the universal validity of this pleasure perceived in the mind as connected with the mere judging [Beurteilung] of an object that is represented in a judgement of taste as a universal rule for the power of judgement, valid for everyone. It is an empirical judgement [Urteil] that I perceive and judge [beurteile] an object with pleasure. But it is an a priori judgement [Urteil] that I find it beautiful, i.e., that I may require that satisfaction of everyone as necessary.21 This explanation clearly presupposes the two-act theory of judgement: first there is the Beurteilung of the object, which, if it produces a harmonious free play of imagination and understanding, produces pleasure; then there is, that is, one can make, the empirical judgement that one’s pleasure or ‘satisfaction’ is indeed due to that source, in which case one can further ‘require that satisfaction of everyone as necessary’ on the ground of the similarity of the operations of the human cognitive faculties that Kant is about to demon- strate. The second stage of this process makes no sense unless there has been a first-stage activity of judging the object that has resulted in the pleasure. Thus has been my argument. Now we can turn to Ginsborg’s objections to it and then to her alternative. First, she claims that ‘despite Guyer’s claim to the contrary, there is no textual evidence that Kant himself takes the exercise of taste to involve two separate acts of reflection’. 22 I trust that the passages I have quoted answer that charge. Philosophically, she raises two chief objections. One is that my account does not justify the ‘demand’

17 Ibid., 5: 237. 18 Ibid., 5: 237. 19 Ibid.,5: 296. 20 Ibid., 5: 237. 21 Ibid., 5: 289. 22 Ginsborg, The Normativity of Nature, 37. ONE ACT OR TWO? HANNAH GINSBORG ON AESTHETIC JUDGEMENT | 413 for agreement that according to Kant’s analysis is conveyed by a judgement of taste. Ginsborg asks: How can such a demand be licensed, or in any way supported by reflection on the causal origins of one’s pleasure? At most, it would seem, the empirical discovery that one’s pleasure has a certain cause might allow one to predict whether or not others

will share one’s pleasure. But empirical considerations could never ground the con- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/57/4/407/3811073 by guest on 28 September 2021 trasting claim that the pleasure is one that others ought to share.23 As we have seen, however, in Section 37 Kant himself makes it clear that the judgement that I perceive an object with pleasure, a fortiori with a particular kind of pleasure, is an empirical judgement, and, adding in the analysis of judgements of taste as conditional offered in Section 19, that it is only the judgement that if I have correctly ascribed my pleasure to the free play of my imagination and understanding then I can attribute it to others that Kant considers to be a priori. So Ginsborg’s claim is not an objection to my interpretation, but the conclusion that Kant himself draws from his analysis. In this con- text I might also note that Ginsborg’s repeated characterization of the claim that is made upon the proper response of others as a ‘demand’ maybe more univocal than Kant’s text will bear. Kant uses a variety of terms to characterize the epistemic attitude involved. For example, he introduces the second moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful with the rather abstract thesis that: ‘The beautiful is that which, without concepts, is represented [vorgestellt] as the object of a universal satisfaction’, and in its first section also says that the subject who does not discover ‘any private conditions’ for his pleasure ‘consequently must believe himself to have grounds for attributing [zuzumuten] it to everyone’.24 He uses the verb zumuten again in Section 725 and in Section 8 says that one ‘ascribes’ (ansinne) this pleasure to everyone. These terms are all consistent with the idea of an expecta- tion conditional upon the correctness of one’s judgement about the origins of one’s own pleasure. And, as already mentioned in Section 40, Kant argues that we can only demand agreement in taste from others ‘as if it were a duty’ once we have shown that in spite of its disinterestedness and freedom aesthetic response nevertheless does have moral significance. So I think one needs to treat claims about the ‘normativity’ of judgements of taste with a light hand. Ginsborg’s second main philosophical objection to the ‘two-acts’ interpretation is that it identifies the first stage of aesthetic reflection, that which is supposed to lead to the free play of imagination and understanding, with the first two of the three stages or aspects of ordinary cognitive synthesis that Kant outlines in the first-edition transcendental deduction of the first Critique, the syntheses of apprehension and reproduction, syntheses that take place in every case of cognition, and therefore entails the implausible conclusion that we must find every object of knowledge beautiful.26 As she puts the latter point, ‘if we take literally Kant’s suggestion of a threefold synthesis, then there may seem to be no

23 Ibid., 38. 24 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5: 211. 25 Ibid., 5: 212. 26 Ginsborg, The Normativity of Nature, 35. 414 | PAUL GUYER

reason why apprehension and reproduction should not occur without the final stage of recognition’ by means of a concept, which is barred by Kant’s insistence that the reflecting judgement that leads to the free play of imagination and understanding that takes place without a concept.27 ‘But this alternative appears to lead to an unacceptable conclusion, namely that we should feel pleasure in every act of cognizing a perceptually given object’.28 Presumably no aesthetic theory wants to end up with that consequence, so Kant’s should not be saddled with it—although Schopenhauer took it to be a virtue of what he under- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/57/4/407/3811073 by guest on 28 September 2021 stood to be the Kantian notion of the disinterestedness of aesthetic response, that it does imply that by taking up a properly disinterested attitude we can find any object beautiful. Whatever Schopenhauer might have thought, however, Ginsborg’s worrisome conclusion is not implied by my interpretation of Kant. My interpretation was that it is only if the first two stages of the usual threefold cognitive synthesis take place without the third that the pleasure in beauty will be experienced, not that even if they do take place with their ordinary accompaniment of recognition with a concept there will be a noticeable experience of pleasure. Moreover, if I did not make it sufficiently clear in Kant and the Claims of Taste that the comparison of the free play of imagination and understanding to the first two stages of ordinary cognitive synthesis was more of an analogy than a literal identification, I would say that now. In any case Kant did not repeat the theory of threefold synthesis in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, published three years before the Critique of the Power of Judgement. Further, as I argued in ‘The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited’, but had in fact already suggested in Kant and the Claims of Taste, since according to the transcendental deduction of the categories, all self-conscious cognition of objects involves their subsumption under the categories and under some empirical concepts or other (since the categories themselves are only the forms of possible empirical concepts), the free play of imagination and understanding in the case of aesthetic response must take place in the space left open by the subsumption of its object under relevant empirical concepts. That is, it must be something like a sense of unity in the experience of an object that goes beyond the unity dictated by whatever empirical concepts are recognized to apply to the object (thus in that paper I called my interpretation ‘metacognitive’). This clarification can be made while everything else about my interpretation remains intact and I do not see why it would entail that every object of knowledge will be found beautiful. Only some objects will allow this extra sense of unity in their experience. For these reasons I remain unconvinced that an alternative to my ‘two-acts’ interpretation is required. Nevertheless, let us look at Ginsborg’s approach and see what its own problems are. Her idea, repeated over the years in a number of formulations, is that aesthetic response is a phenomenologically unitary experience which is at one and the same time a pleasure and a judgement, a ‘mental state with an intrinsically self-referential structure’, namely ‘a reflective awareness of its own appropriateness or legitimacy with respect to the object’, indeed ‘awareness of its own appropriateness and hence of its own universal validity’.29 Further, she says:

27 Ibid., 63. 28 Ibid., 63. 29 See Ginsborg, ‘Kant on the Subjectivity of Taste’ in her The Normativity of Nature, 29–30. This essay is originally in Herman Parret (ed.), Kant’s Aesthetics (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 448–465. ONE ACT OR TWO? HANNAH GINSBORG ON AESTHETIC JUDGEMENT | 415

I take my mental state in perceiving [a beautiful] object to be universally communicable, where my mental state is nothing other than the mental state of performing that very act of judgement, that is of taking my mental state in the object to be universally communicable’; at the same time, I need not be ‘explicitly aware of its self-referential structure, but ... my act of judgement is instead manifest to consciousness through a certain experience of pleasure.30 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/57/4/407/3811073 by guest on 28 September 2021 And in that same essay, in the case of a judgement of taste ... there is no antecedently specifiable content to the demand. Instead, it is purely self-referential. I claim that everyone else ought to judge the object just as I do, without any specification of how the object is to be judged beyond its being the way I am judging it in making this very claim.31 And in an essay written in 2010 and published for the first time in the volume at hand, thus a quarter-century after her original statement of her view, Ginsborg repeats her original account that the aesthetic experience is a state of mind that makes: a claim to its own universal validity with respect to the object: that is, ... we take the subject to respond to the object with a state of mind in which she takes it that all other perceivers of the object ought to share this very state of mind. On the resulting ‘one-act’ view of aesthetic judgement, the object elicits in the subject an imaginative response which essentially involves the immediate and nonconceptual consciousness of that very response as appropriate to the object, and thus as one which all other perceivers should share.32 As ‘immediate and nonconceptual’, the response is supposed to be present to consciousness in the form of a feeling of pleasure, although it is supposed to contain (and presumably to make available on reflection) the propositional content that Ginsborg describes. Ginsborg also identifies this mental state with the free play of imagination and understanding: the free play of the faculties and the judgement of beauty are one and the same. More precisely, Kant’s talk of the free play is just another way of describing what we have already identified as both the feeling of pleasure and the judgement that the pleasure is universally valid.33 Thus, on her account, the three factors that I claim that should be distinguished and that Kant did distinguish in his overall analysis of the judgement of taste, namely the Beurteilung of or free play with the manifold of the representation of an object, the pleasure that results when this free play is harmonious, and the judgement that can be made about this feeling of pleasure. If it really is due to such free play then it can also be expected to occur in others who are also suitably disinterested or open to such

30 See Ginsborg, ‘On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste’ in her The Normativity of Nature, 41. This essay is originally found in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1991), 290-313. 31 Ginsborg, The Normativity of Nature, 47. 32 Ginsborg, ‘The Pleasure of Judgement: Kant and the Possibility of Taste’ in The Normativity of Nature, 121. 33 Ginsborg, The Normativity of Nature, 123. 416 | PAUL GUYER

an experience, which, when harmonious, are phenomenologically and conceptually indistinguishable. In addition to arguing that this interpretation is better supported by Kant’s text and that it avoids the objections to which the two-acts view is supposedly subject, Ginsborg also appeals for support to Kant’s ‘transcendental explanation’ of pleasure (as he labels it in the first draft of the Introduction to the third Critique). This is that ‘pleasure is a state of the mind in which a representation is in agreement with itself, either merely for Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/57/4/407/3811073 by guest on 28 September 2021 preserving this state itself ... or for producing its object’,34 or that pleasure has a causality in itself, namely that of ‘maintaining the state of the representation of the mind’, in the case of pleasure in the beautiful that of ‘the occupation of the cognitive powers without a further aim’.35 Thus, Kant says: ‘We linger over the consideration of the beautiful because this consideration strengthens and reproduces itself’.36 Ginsborg takes the ‘self- maintaining structure’ of pleasure as ‘a desire or inclination to remain in one’s present mental state’37 to be identical to ‘a consciousness of itself as appropriate to [its] object’38 and further to be identical to the demand that because I find my response appropriate to the object ‘all perceivers of the object in question should judge it as I do’.39 However, my disposition to remain in my current state, even if it were identical to a judgement of the appropriateness of my state, which it is not, is certainly different from a judgement that others should be in that state too, although Ginsborg identifies all three of these. Ginsborg’s view is open to further objections. Her insistence that the free play of the cognitive faculties, the feeling of pleasure, and the judgement of universal communicability are identical, theoretically and phenomenologically, seems wildly implausible to me and untrue to actual aesthetic experience, but let me come back to that. Even without that claim, her assertion of the self-referentiality of the aesthetic state of mind seems implausible. I used the phrase ‘judgement of universal communicability’ to avoid saying what the judgement is about, because on her view the judgement (identical to the pleasure) is about nothing other than its own communicability. That is, her view is that the judgement is that the judgement of communicability is communicable: it has no other content. In particular, she says that ‘it is not at all clear that all experience of the beautiful involves the ordering and unifying of disparate elements ... all I do in judging an object to be beautiful is to judge that all others should judge it as I do’—namely, that they should judge that all others should judge it as I do!40 Or in aesthetic judgement I take myself ‘to respond to the object with a state of mind in which [I take] it that all other perceivers of the object ought to share this very state of mind’—namely that of judging that all other perceivers ought to share this very state of mind!41 There seems to be something circular or vacuous about this conception of aesthetic judgement, whereas on my account the judgement of taste is

34 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 20: 230–231. 35 Ibid., 5: 222. 36 Ibid., 5: 222. 37 Ginsborg, The Normativity of Nature, 43. 38 Ibid., 121. 39 Ibid., 44. 40 Ibid., 50–51. 41 Ibid., 121. ONE ACT OR TWO? HANNAH GINSBORG ON AESTHETIC JUDGEMENT | 417 the judgement that under ideal circumstances others can be expected to experience the free play of imagination and understanding in response to the object and experience a pleasure like mine. It is a judgement about the universal communicability of something other than universal communicability itself, namely the universal communicability of the experience of pleasure. And it does not claim that others will make my judgement of universal communicability about what they are experiencing, although they may—but again let me come back to that point. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/57/4/407/3811073 by guest on 28 September 2021 To be sure, Ginsborg recognizes that her ‘interpretation might seem implausible’ because of ‘its account of the judgement of taste as essentially devoid of content’.42 She initially defends herself from this objection by saying that ‘Kant himself makes explicit that the judgement of taste is without content,’ in Kant’s words ‘a formal judgement of reflection’ resting only on ‘formal rules of judging, without any matter’.43 But Kant’s use of the term ‘formal’ is complex and he also makes it clear that the proper object of a pure judgement of taste, like a judgement of natural beauty, is the form of an object as contrasted say to its colour, or, in the case of a work of art like a painting, the form of its drawing (in traditional theory of painting, its design or disegno) rather than its coloura- tion.44 Form in this sense is something, not nothing (just ask Clive Bell), and it is certainly not identical to universal communicability, although it may be universally communicable. In Essay 5, the newest piece in the volume, Ginsborg tries out a different response to the objection of vacuousness. She starts by repeating the apparently circular claim that the mental state in aesthetic judgement is just ‘the thought “This state of mind is universally valid”’, but now she puts a different spin on what she means by ‘This’: it is supposed to refer to the specificity of the state of mind induced by the object, what is distinct about it rather than what it shares with every other aesthetic state of mind, namely, universal communicability. Aesthetic judgement becomes the judgement ‘that everyone should feel this pleasure, that everyone should experience this beauty, and that everyone’s faculties should be freely harmonizing in this way’.45 For example, in an aesthetic experience I am ‘simply struck by the subtle vibraphone entry, or the shininess of the silk dress in the Ter Borch painting, or the soprano’s pianissmo high C, or the curve of the dancer’s arm’.46 But this will not do either. First, aesthetic response is not ordinarily to the silkiness of depiction (or depiction of silkiness) or to a pianissimo high C in isolation, but to such things as parts of a composi- tion or a work in which they seem just right—that is, in which they are part of a manifold of intuitions to which we respond with a free play of imagination and understanding. Otherwise, our response is just a sensory gratification, in other words, a response to agreeableness, not beauty. Imagine a patch of Ter Borch’s silkiness in the middle of a Rothko or a Dubuffet. Perhaps it will be agreeable if you can shut everything else out, but it will certainly not be beautiful, because it will not harmonize with the rest of the work, it will hamper rather than promote our continued engagement with the work.

42 Ibid., 51. 43 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5: 288; 5: 290. All from Ginsborg, The Normativity of Nature, 51. 44 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5: 225. 45 Ginsborg, The Normativity of Nature, 125. 46 Ibid. 418 | PAUL GUYER

Second, Ginsborg’s account now seems open to the objection that she made against mine, namely that it will make everything beautiful. For certainly the experience of every object, or at least of many objects that we would not ordinarily judge to be beautiful, has the kind of specificity that can only be captured by pointing and saying ‘this’. For example, if I now stare at the contents of my office wastebasket I will be having an experience of which, after I have said it looks like it contains some plastic wrapping, a card advertis- ing a service I don’t want, etc., I can only say ‘it looks like this’, but of which I can also Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/57/4/407/3811073 by guest on 28 September 2021 say ‘and (if you are not colour-blind and don’t have a bad astigmatism, etc.) it will look like this to you to’—but none of that is enough to make it look beautiful or pleasing to any of us. Perhaps specificity is a necessary condition of beauty and part of what blocks subsumption of the beautiful under determinate concepts or rules, but it is not a sufficient condition of beauty; and we can say something about when specificity is connected to beauty, namely when we can respond to it with a free yet harmonious play of imagination and understanding. For these reasons, I continue to find Ginsborg’s one-act interpretation of Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgement unconvincing. I will conclude by returning to the question of phenomenology. In my view, it is important to distinguish the free play of the cognitive faculties, the experience of pleasure, and the judgement of taste not just because they are conceptually distinct, but because they can come apart in phenomenology as well. I have already suggested that the experience of pleasure and the judgement of taste should be separated because only then can we explain the possibility of erroneous judgements of taste, that is, judgements that a pleasure is universally valid when in fact the pleasure that has been experienced is not. Conversely, one can presumably experience a pleasure that is genuinely communicable but, confused about its origin, erroneously judge that it is not, that is, deny that the object is beautiful when one could and in some sense should assert that it is. But even leaving the possibility of error aside, it seems clear that the experience of pleasure in a beautiful object and the judgement that the object is beautiful can come apart phenomenologically and temporally. I might experience pleasure in a beautiful object now and only later ask myself whether the object was really beautiful, that is, whether others should be expected to experience the same pleasure I did—or never ask myself that question at all. Indeed, I might be so wrapped up in the experience of the object that I cannot step back from my experience enough to reflect on that further issue—although to be sure sometimes my immediate response to the experience of something beautiful is to say to another (hopefully someone I know) ‘Look at that!’ or ‘Listen!’ (if it is not already too late). But that is a disposition, not necessarily a judgement, and those should be distinguished. A disposition does not have propositional content, a judgement does. This leads me to a final comment. Ginsborg has done a service in emphasizing Kant’s ‘transcendental explanation’ of pleasure as a mental state that tends to its own continua- tion or reproduction (under appropriate circumstances). In my view, that makes pleasure a disposition, not a judgement, so I do not think Kant’s definition of pleasure supports Ginsborg’s identification of the pleasure of aesthetic response with aesthetic judgement or the judgement of taste. But I think that Kant’s definition is important because it may point us away from his own tendency, and Ginsborg’s, and perhaps from my own original ONE ACT OR TWO? HANNAH GINSBORG ON AESTHETIC JUDGEMENT | 419 presentation of my interpretation as well, to think of pleasure as a distinctive, identifiable feeling to be found in all experiences of beauty, just like the sensation of red is to be found in (almost) all experiences of fire trucks (Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, has beautiful dark green and gold ones). Perhaps it would be truer to much aesthetic experience and pos- sibly other experiences as well to say that being pleased is just being disposed to continue experiencing the object, or to repeat the experience on subsequent occasions. The first time I saw Vermeer’s View of Delft in the Mauritshaus I simply could not pull away from Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/57/4/407/3811073 by guest on 28 September 2021 it, indeed I felt as if I could have stared at it forever (all of which means I probably stared at it for five minutes instead of the usual 30 seconds). Was I pleased with the painting and would I have recommended it to others, indeed to pretty much anyone else, after I had seen it? Did I find it beautiful? What else would one say? Did I experience a distinctive feeling while looking at it, as opposed to just wanting to keep looking at it? Harder to say, perhaps there is no good reason to say that. Seeing that painting the first time was one of the great experiences of my life (and the several times I have seen it since have been pretty good too). But was there really a distinctive way that experience felt, and was that the same way it felt the first time I heard the first two movements of Brahms’s Sextet No. 1, Opus 18 (at least as I remember it, in a scene of a husband playing a recording of it upstairs while his wife was cuckolding him downstairs, in Louis Malle’s The Lovers), or for that matter how I felt the first time I saw the woman who would become my wife? (That I certainly remember!) That seems unlikely, though in each case I certainly wanted the experience to continue, or to be repeated. Maybe that is all that pleasure really is. An objection to such an analysis of pleasure as a disposition rather than a feeling might be that it would undermine what I have always presented as a virtue of my interpretation, namely that treating pleasure as a feeling that is always phenomenologically the same but can have different origins, either the free play of the faculties or something else, explains how it is possible for us to make erroneous judgements of taste. I do not think this is a problem, because I could just as easily be wrong about the cause of my disposition to continue experiencing an object as I could be wrong about the cause of an identifiable feeling in response to it. But no doubt there is much more to be said about this. There is certainly more to be said about many other issues raised by Hannah Ginsborg’s volume—I have not touched her interpretation of Kant’s teleology nor her more general approach to concepts. I can only conclude that while she has not persuaded me to give up my own approach to Kant’s aesthetics, she certainly has been a worthy opponent, and I look forward to continuing to be stimulated by her vigorous arguments for many years to come.

Paul Guyer Brown University [email protected]