This assignment includes the remaining two moments of Kant’s treatment of beauty as well as a later selection on related topics. Taken together, they form one part of Kant’s treatment of the issues raised in Hume’s discussion of the standard of taste (as well as in Shaftesbury). (We will look at a second part of his treatment of these issues in the next class.)
Second moment (HK 286-293).
Although there is discussion here of the role of concepts in aesthetic judgment, the key idea is “subjective universality.”
§6. Think about the connection between universality and disinterestedness Kant claims here—is he right? Notice also the concluding phrase “subjective universality”; it will appear again and it serves as a paradoxical label for this side of Kant’s views about art comparable to the label “purposiveness without purpose” for the views we considered last time.
§7. Here Kant contrasts judgments about beauty with judgments about one’s favorite color, musical instrument, etc. In the latter case, we expect that “everyone has his own taste” while in the former we expect others to agree with us. Kant says here that we “demand” this agreement; in §6 he said we “presuppose” it and in §8 he says that we “impute” it. One function of these terms is to distinguish his view from a claim, like Hume’s, that agreement in taste is a general observation founded on experience (see, for example, “Of the Standard of Taste,” ¶9). What do you think Kant has in mind when he distinguishes the “general” from the “universal” (HK 288)?
§8. This section pursues these ideas further but also pursues a distinction between judgments of beauty and judgments of goodness mentioned briefly at the end of the last section. A judgment of beauty does not depend on a use of concepts because it is associated with a feeling of pleasure (something Kant spoke about in §6). One important feature of its independence from concepts is described in the first full paragraph of HK 290.
§9. The importance of this section lies less in the stated topic than in the several descriptions of “free play” of the imagination and the understanding—e.g., their “excitement ... to indeterminate but ... harmonious activity,” their “lively play ... when animated by mutual agreement.” For Kant, understanding is the faculty that enables us to employ concepts and imagination plays a variety of roles mediating between it and the senses. In this Critique, he is especially interested in the role of the two in the process of forming new concepts in response to sensations, something he calls reflective judgment (and that you’ve seen him speak about as “reflection”).
Fourth moment (HK 301-304).
The concept of subjective necessity is very close to subjective universality, so these sections serve to fill out ideas you’ve seen in the discussion of the second moment. The key new idea here is that of a “common sense.” Be sure to ask yourself what Kant means by this term; he distinguishes his meaning from the one most common today when he introduces the term in § 20 (HK 302) and does so again in § 40 (HK 312). (Incidentally, the term had been used in something like Kant’s sense already by Shaftesbury.)
§18. Here Kant again distinguishes judgments of beauty from judgments of pleasantness or of goodness. Why do you think he describes the necessity of judgments of beauty as “exemplary”?
§19. The fact that the ought implicit in a judgment of beauty is “conditioned” is something that distinguishes it from moral oughts, which he calls “categorical” (a term which, in this use, means roughly “unconditional”).
§20. Kant identifies the condition noted in §19 as a “common sense” and be sure to note that he wishes to distinguish his use of this term from the ordinary one. He explains he says a little about what he does in the parenthetical remark near the end of the section—notice his use of ideas from §9.
§21. Here there is more on Kant’s idea of a common sense, again using ideas from §9. The last sentence is especially important because it is about as close as Kant comes to explaining why universal communicability is presupposed.
§22. Much of this section is a good summary of the preceding discussion but in the full paragraph on HK 304 Kant moves beyond it and asks deeper questions (which he may take himself to answer in the some of the sections you will go on to read).
From Kant’s “Deduction” (this handout and HK 312-313)
§39. The following paragraph is one of Kant’s more explicit accounts of some of the ideas he has been suggesting:
Kant, Critique of Judgment from §39 (Bernard, tr.)
... Pleasure in the beautiful is neither a pleasure of enjoyment nor of a law-abiding activity, nor even of rational contemplation in accordance with ideas, but of mere reflection. Without having as rule any purpose or fundamental proposition, this pleasure accompanies the ordinary apprehension of an object by the imagination, as faculty of intuition, in relation with the understanding, as faculty of concepts, by means of a procedure of the judgment which it must also exercise on behalf of the commonest experience; only that in the latter case it is in order to perceive an empirical objective concept, in the former case (in aesthetical judgments) merely to perceive the accordance of the representation with the harmonious (subjectively purposive) activity of both cognitive faculties in their freedom, i.e. to feel with pleasure the mental state produced by the representation. This pleasure must necessarily depend for everyone on the same conditions, for they are subjective conditions of the possibility of a cognition in general; and the proportion between these cognitive faculties requisite for taste is also requisite for that ordinary sound understanding which we have to presuppose in everyone. Therefore he who judges with taste (if only he does not go astray in this act of consciousness and mistake matter for form or charm for beauty) may impute to everyone subjective purposiveness, i.e. his satisfaction in the object, and may assume his feeling to be universally communicable and that without the mediation of concepts.
§40. This section contains more on the “common sense.” While most of what Kant says here runs along the same lines as §§20-22, the writing is a little less dense so it may help in getting a grasp of his idea.