This is the second part of Kant’s treatment of the issues raised in Hume’s discussion of the standard of taste. The “antinomy of taste” represents Kant’s final and most formal response to the problem of variation in taste.
§34. Kant’s point in this section is one that he will rely on and develop in the remainder of the assignment.
§55. Each of Kant’s three Critiques contains a section he labels “dialectic” which centers on the resolution of apparent contradictions or “antinomies.” For example, in his first Critique, which concerned scientific knowledge, one of the antinomies concerned the apparent conflict between the necessity of laws of nature and a freedom of the will that Kant took to be presupposed by morality. The present short section marks the transition to the “dialectic” in Kant’s treatment of aesthetics.
§56. The three “commonplaces” Kant mentions point to the connection between Kant’s special theoretical aim here and ordinary discussions of art, but the most important point for his purposes is the distinction between contesting and disputing. The short section 34 (HK 308) is a fuller statement of the impossibility of disputation.
§57. The key to Kant’s solution to the antinomy is his use of the idea of an indeterminate concept to show how the “thesis” and “antithesis” of §56 can both be true. The concept of the supersensible that he introduces here is tied to a range of things (including the world as a whole, the soul, and God) about which we think but of which we cannot have sensory experience and for which we therefore have no determinate concepts. The examples I have just mentioned come from the first Critique and are referred to as “Ideas of Reason” (a phrase you will run into also in this Critique). Kant has no neat label for the aspect of the supersensible he has in mind here but you may connect it with the idea of nature’s purposiveness for our thought and the associated notion of a sensus communis.
Kant’s reference to Hume in §34 is to an essay “The Skeptic.” The paragraph in which Hume’s remark occurs is included below; think how much of this Kant would agree with and where he would disagree.
Hume, “The Skeptic,” ¶11
We may push the same observation further, and may conclude, that, even when the mind operates alone, and feeling the sentiment of blame or approbation, pronounces one object deformed and odious, another beautiful and amiable; I say, that, even in this case, those qualities are not really in the objects, but belong entirely to the sentiment of that mind which blames or praises. I grant, that it will be more difficult to make this proposition evident, and as it were, palpable, to negligent thinkers; because nature is more uniform in the sentiments of the mind than in most feelings of the body, and produces a nearer resemblance in the inward than in the outward part of human kind. There is something approaching to principles in mental taste; and critics can reason and dispute more plausibly than cooks or perfumers. We may observe, however, that this uniformity among human kind, hinders not, but that there is a considerable diversity in the sentiments of beauty and worth, and that education, custom, prejudice, caprice, and humour, frequently vary our taste of this kind. You will never convince a man, who is not accustomed to ITALIAN music, and has not an ear to follow its intricacies, that a SCOTCH tune is not preferable. You have not even any single argument, beyond your own taste, which you can employ in your behalf: And to your antagonist, his particular taste will always appear a more convincing argument to the contrary. If you be wise, each of you will allow, that the other may be in the right; and having many other instances of this diversity of taste, you will both confess, that beauty and worth are merely of a relative nature, and consist in an agreeable sentiment, produced by an object in a particular mind, according to the peculiar structure and constitution of that mind.