Response to my critics: In
defense of Kant’s aesthetic non-conceptualism
Dietmar H.
Heidemann*
University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Abstract
In this article I respond to objections that Matías Oroño, Silvia del
Luján di Saanza, Pedro Stepanenko and Luciana Martínez have raised against my
non-conceptualist reading of Kant’s aesthetics. The objections are both,
substantial and instructive. I first sketch my non-conceptualist reading of
Kant’s doctrine of judgments of taste and then turn to what I take to be the
most important criticisms that these authors have put forward. Two difficulties with a non-conceptualist reading of Kant’s aesthetics
seem to be central: the cognitive status of judgments of taste and the
representationalist capacity of aesthetic feeling as non-conceptual mental
content. I respond to these and additional objections and defend my overall
non-conceptualist interpretation of Kant’s aesthetics against my critics. I
argue that Kant’s aesthetics is highly relevant for the debate over whether or
not Kant is a (non-)conceptualist.
Keywords
Kantian
non-conceptualism, judgment of taste, aesthetic feeling, aesthetic experience
In his article “El (no)-conceptualismo de Kant y los juicios
de gusto”[1], Matías Oroño critically discusses my paper “Kant’s Aesthetic Nonconceptualism”.[2] In
that paper I defend a non-conceptualist reading of Kant’s aesthetics. Oroño
dismisses my non-conceptualist account of judgments of taste and offers an
alternative interpretation of Kant’s theory of aesthetic evaluation. In
reaction to Oroño’s criticism of my paper and to his alternative account, Con-Textos Kantianos has published a
series of articles that engage – partly critically – with Oroño’s
interpretation as well as with my non-conceptual reading of Kant’s aesthetics.[3] The objections Oroño
raises against my reading as well as the critical discussion of my account in
that series of articles are well-considered, thoughtful and challenging. Since
I take them to be substantial and important for a proper understanding of
Kant’s aesthetics and for his theory of cognition as such, I will, in what
follows, defend my arguments against my critics. To start with, I will sketch,
very briefly, though, my non-conceptualist reading of Kant’s theory of
judgments of taste, then present Oroño’s objections against my reading and
discuss them. I then turn to the aforementioned articles published in Con-Textos Kantianos, 9 especially to additional points their authors make. My aim is to show
why a non-conceptualist reading of Kant’s aesthetics can be defended against
their criticisms, although they raise well-justified objections that require
further arguments on my part.
1. A
non-conceptualist reading of Kant’s theory of judgments of taste
In the first Critique Kant
still thought that it would not be possible to make aesthetics into a science
as Baumgarten believed for judgments of taste rest on empirical (psychological)
grounds rather than a priori principles:
The ground for this is a failed hope, held
by the excellent analyst Baumgarten, of bringing the critical estimation of the
beautiful under principles of reason and elevating its rules to a science. But
this effort is futile. For the putative rules or criteria are merely empirical
as far as their sources are concerned, and can therefore never serve as a
priori rules according to which our judgment of taste must be directed, rather
the latter constitutes the genuine touchstone of the correctness of the former.
(KrV A 21/B 35 Anm.)
This view changes dramatically in the third Critique, i.e., after the discovery of purposiveness as the a
priori principle for reflective judgment. Now aesthetics receives the status of
a ‘science of taste’ in the sense that aesthetic judgment estimates formal,
i.e., subjective purposiveness by means of the feeling of pleasure and
displeasure and hereby allows for judgments of taste. For the problem of
non-conceptual content in Kant’s aesthetics this turns out to be crucial. Since
in order to be relevant for the problem of non-conceptualism as such, judgments
of taste must exhibit cognitive quality and cannot just count as (linguistic)
expressions of private aesthetic feeling (cf. KU, AA 05: 211). Judgments of
taste would in fact be irrelevant for the problem of non-conceptual content if
Kant would conceive them as such expressions, similar to Wittgenstein’s
observation that statements like ‘I am in pain.’ are nothing over and above the
linguistic form of the expression of pain itself, namely ‘ouch!’. But for Kant,
judgments of taste are not to be understood as bare expressions of aesthetic
feeling, e.g., like ‘wow!’ (in the sense of ‘wow, what a beautiful sculpture’).
Judgments of taste have, for Kant, cognitive quality, since they involve the
working together of (universally valid) cognitive faculties, i.e., imagination
and understanding (cf. KU, AA 05: 217-219). Of course, judgments of taste are
not judgments of cognition and do not have objective validity. But they are
cognitive judgments since they are not unregulated private exclamations of
conscious aesthetic feeling.[4] In a judgment of taste,
Kant says, “we do not relate the representation by means of understanding to
the object for cognition, but rather relate it by means of the imagination
(perhaps combined with the understanding) to the subject and its feeling of
pleasure or displeasure.” (KU, AA 05: 203).
In Kant’s aesthetics the feeling of pleasure or displeasure is about the
mental state the perceiver is in rather than about the logical determination of
a sensible given through concepts like in a judgment of cognition. This feeling
occurs given the harmonious relation of understanding and imagination. In “Kant’s
Aesthetic Nonconceptualism” I argue that since the aesthetic feeling is
conceptually undetermined, it counts as non-conceptual content on which judgments
of taste are based. Of course, from the fact that feeling of pleasure or
displeasure is non-conceptual it does not follow that it is non-conceptual in
the relevant cognitive sense of ultimately bringing about judgments of taste.
For as the general debate on conceptualism and non-conceptualism in philosophy
of mind and cognition has shown, in order for mental content to be cognitively
relevant it must be representational, phenomenal and intentional. As I try to
show in the paper, the feeling of pleasure as non-conceptual content in
judgments of taste meets all of these three criteria. Very briefly: The feeling
of pleasure is phenomenal since in the mental state of aesthetic feeling it is
somehow for the subject to be in that state (see below section 2.6.). The
feeling of pleasure is intentional since in that state the subject feels
itself, that is, is directed toward itself: “Here the representation is related
entirely to the subject, indeed to its feeling of life, under the name of the
feeling of pleasure or displeasure” (KU, AA 05: 204).[5] And most importantly, it
is representational since in that state of feeling of pleasure the subject is
representing the harmonious relation of understanding and imagination (see
below section 2.5.). Therefore, judgments of taste are not judgments of
cognition but they are cognitive. They are cognitive because they are possible
only through the workings of cognitive faculties. The harmonious relation of
these faculties elicits the feeling of pleasure. And the feeling of pleasure is
the non-conceptual mental state on which the judgment of taste is based.
2. Oroño’s
objections against the non-conceptualist reading of Kant’s theory of judgments
of taste
In the following discussion of Matías Oroño’s criticism of my non-conceptualist
reading of Kant’s aesthetics I focus on six objections that he raises in El (no)-conceptualismo de Kant y los juicios
de gusto. Since Oroño confines himself to my reading of Kant’s theory of
judgment of taste and does not consider the non-conceptualist interpretation of
Kant’s doctrine of the aesthetic genius that I am also proposing in my paper, I
shall not consider the letter either.
2.1. Cognitive judgment and judgment
of cognition
The first important criticism of my interpretation is Oroño’s (2017, pp.
95-96, et al.) objection that throughout my paper I illegitimately characterize
judgments of taste as “cognitive” and that I confusingly speak of “the
cognitive appreciation of the beautiful” (Heidemann 2016, p. 118). Oroño points
out that judgments of taste do not count as judgments of cognition by referring
to the classical place in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” (§ 1): “The judgment
of taste is therefore not a cognitive judgment, hence not a logical one, but is
rather aesthetic, by which is understood one whose determining ground cannot be
other than subjective.” (KU, AA 05: 203). Further, Oroño (2017, p. 96)
correctly reconstructs my argumentation that judgments of taste can only be
relevant for the debate about non-conceptual content if they are cognitive judgments in order to then
show that judgments of taste are based on non-conceptual content. Oroño finds
this reasoning unconvincing since Kant clearly denies that judgments of taste
can count as judgments of cognition.[6] Now, in my paper I am not
claiming that judgments of taste are judgments of cognition. Quite the
contrary, my claim is that judgments of taste are relevant for the debate about
non-conceptual content only if they are cognitive which does not mean that they
are judgments of cognition. The correct translation of Kant’s standard term
“Erkenntnisurteil” in the third Critique
is “judgment of cognition”. The translation as “cognitive judgment” is
inappropriate because the predicate “cognitive” only indicates – for Kant – that
the judgment involves cognitive faculties such as sensibility, imagination and
understanding and their working together. This is clearly the case with
judgments of taste since they rest on the harmony of imagination and understanding
and the (non-conceptual) feeling of pleasure. But from the fact that a judgment
is cognitive it does not follow that it is a judgment of cognition, i.e., a
judgment that is objective because we “relate the representation by means of
understanding to the object” (KU, AA 05: 203). In particular, for judgments of
cognition the principles of the pure understanding apply as their
transcendental conditions, which is not the case with judgments of taste. With
respect to judgments of cognition it must be possible to attribute certain
quantitative, qualitative, and relational, especially causal properties to the
object of cognition whereby these attributions are objective only in accordance
with the transcendental conditions of the possibility of cognition. Judgments
of cognition are therefore the product of the subsumption of what is given in
sensible intuition, or what is spatio-temporally determinable, under a general
rule, the transcendental principle of cognition. This subsumption is possible
only by mediation of a (transcendental or empirical) schema provided by the
schematism of imagination. This is not the case with judgments of taste.
Judgments of taste are not the product of conceptual determination, i.e.,
logical subsumption of what is given in sensible intuition under a general rule
or concept, but reflective such that mediation through a schema is not required
either and not even possible. Still, judgments of taste involve cognitive
activity of the imagination and the understanding which qualifies them as cognitive judgments.[7]
In connection with this Oroño (2017, p. 96) agrees with me that
cognition essentially consists in the necessary cooperation of intuition and
concept. Opposed to my view, however, Oroño puts forward that although
intuition cannot be reduced to concepts and vice versa, this does not implicate
that sensible intuition’s immediate and singular reference can do without any
conceptual activity. Oroño indicates, correctly as I think, that this is the
main point of disagreement between us – a point that goes, of course, beyond Kant’s
aesthetics since it concerns the overall question of whether or not Kant is a
non-conceptualist about mental content in general. Here I cannot develop a
broad discussion of that question. But I would like to emphasize that in my paper
I am claiming that in Kant’s transcendental philosophy the cooperation of
intuition and concept is a necessary requirement for objective cognition. I am
not claiming that this is the case for cognition in general, especially not for
aesthetic cognition or judgments of taste. It seems clear to me, though, that
as a matter of fact, in objective cognition the direct reference to the object
through sensible intuition must be retained since otherwise it is hard to see
how to individuate objects by means of judgments like in the judgment “This
flower is beautiful.” The issue here is not that judgments always take
conceptual or linguistic form. Judging is, for Kant, conceptual but prelinguistic. So, from the fact that judgments of
taste are conceptual or linguistic expressions it does not follow that
aesthetic cognition, too, is conceptual all the way down. I shall take this
point up again further below.[8]
2.2. Categorical determination and
judgments of taste
Oroño (2017, p. 98) also maintains that I am not explaining in what sense
judgments of taste are categorically determined. I can see his point, although
this is actually not what I wanted to say. A judgment like “This flower is
beautiful.” can be read as a judgment of perception if we abstract from the
predication “is beautiful”. In this case what I am focusing on is that there is
an object in my visual field and this object is a flower. Here categories are
clearly operative as Oroño’s accepts. But I did not want to argue that in a judgment
of taste an object (e.g., the beautiful flower) is categorically determined
(cf. Heidemann 2016, pp. 124-5). For the judgment of taste is about the
“feeling of pleasure and displeasure” (KU, AA 05: 209) that elicits the
predication “is beautiful” through the free play of imagination and understanding.
Kant is not explicit on how the free play is performed. But since it takes
place in inner sense and since feeling as mental state is the object of “inner
sense” (KU, AA 05: 218), the cognitive operations of the understanding must be
conceived as some kind of categorical determination, although we cannot say
what they look like. For the free play of imagination and understanding is not
chaotic but, in some way, formally structured (cf. KU §§ 10-14) which can only
be explained through the understanding being active. And the kind of activity
that the understanding exercises here is categorical synthesis which is in line
with Kant’s general view that categories are logical functions conceived as
determinations of intuition (cf. Prol. AA 4: 300, 322ff.). Clearly, there is no categorical determination or logical subsumption
going on in aesthetic cognition or judgments of taste such that an object is
somehow cognized like in objective cognition. But since the activity of the
understanding consists essentially in synthesizing of what is given in
intuition and since synthesis is possible only according to rules, i.e.,
categories, categories must be somehow operative in aesthetic cognition, too,
although, as Kant says, “without a concept of the object” (KU, AA 05: 217). The
way Kant lays this out is certainly not satisfying since he is not sufficiently
clear on this important point. To me, however, it appears at least conclusive
that in, e.g., aesthetic evaluation of a painting the perceiver playfully puts
together structures and combines them in multiple ways such that the feeling of
pleasure is occasioned under the rudimentary influence of the understanding.
But this remains problematic for conceptualists and non-conceptualists alike.[9]
2.3. Communicability of judgments of
taste
Another major objection against my non-conceptualist reading of Kant’s
aesthetics consists in Oroño’s critique (2017, pp. 97-8) that I am misreading
Kant’s conception of universal communicability. Whereas I argue that universal
communicability applies to judging in general such that also judgments of taste
must be universally communicable, Oroño claims that although judgments of taste
must in fact be universally communicable in order to avoid scepticism, this
does not mean that judgments of taste refer to objects like judgments of
cognition do. For the object of a judgment of taste is a mental state, i.e.,
aesthetic feeling brought about through the free play of imagination and understanding.
Therefore, in the case of the judgment of taste nothing is predicated about an
object, e.g., a beautiful flower, and as a consequence universal
communicability in judgments of cognition and judgments of taste is not the
same. It is not clear to me, how this argument speaks against non-conceptualism.
But maybe what Oroño has in mind is that judgments of taste are not objectively
referential and in order for mental content, and by implication non-conceptual
mental content, to be cognitively relevant it must be objectively referential.
Since judgments of taste are not objectively referential their supposed
non-conceptual content is cognitively irrelevant. As I am explicitly stating in
my paper, I fully agree with Oroño that the object of a judgment of taste is
the aesthetic feeling: “The feeling of pleasure or displeasure, however, cannot
be objective in the same sense as a logical cognitive judgement. For an
aesthetic feeling is about the subjective state the perceiver is in, given the
affection through the representation she has, rather than about the logical
determination of a sensible given through concepts such as in a cognitive
judgement.” (Heidemann 2016, p. 124). If this is true, especially if in a
judgment of taste, no conceptual determination is operative (KU, AA 05: 217),
then this seems to speak in favor of non-conceptual content that receives a
specific role in aesthetic experience, i.e., the role of grounding those
judgments. The problem then is for Oroño to make sense of the non-conceptual aesthetic
feeling in aesthetic experience.
2.4. The universality of judgments of
taste
Oroño (2017, p. 98) raises a similar objection against my understanding
of universality of judgments of taste. Accordingly, Kant distinguishes between
universality or universal validity of judgments of cognition and the mere
pretension that judgments of taste are equally valid for everyone who is
equipped with the same cognitive faculties. Here again the criticism is that I
am not sufficiently clear about this difference and even confounding universal
validity and pretension of universal validity. The difference is obviously a
crucial one and my impression is that I did make it sufficiently clear: I not
only state that “[…], both, logical cognitive judgements and judgements of
taste lay claim to universality, the former in the objective sense, the latter
in the subjective sense.” (Heidemann 2016, p. 126). I also specify that
[…] the subject of aesthetic evaluation is
entitled to claim that the satisfaction is universal and “consequently he must
believe himself to have grounds for expecting a similar pleasure of everyone”
(KU, AA 05: 211). Thus judgements of taste are supposed to be universally
valid. The kind of universality in play here cannot count as objective
universality because aesthetic universality “cannot originate from concepts”,
“for there is no transition from concepts to the feeling of pleasure or
displeasure” (KU, AA 05: 211). Although it is not a private judgement and hence
is valid only for the author of that judgement, a judgement of taste cannot lay
claim to objective but only to “subjective universality” (KU, AA 05: 212).
(Heidemann 2016, p. 131)
In my explication of that difference I am not quoting the phrase as
Oroño is rightly expecting me to do, and which makes all the difference: “through
the judgment of taste (on the beautiful) one ascribes [“ansinnen”] the
satisfaction in an object to everyone, yet without grounding it on a concept”
(KU, AA 05: 214). But I think the difference between both, objective and
subjective universality is obvious in my account, especially that since Kant’s
wants us to treat a judgment of taste as
if it were objectively true and that everyone is called upon to endorse
(cf. Heidemann 2016, p. 133). Here again it is not entirely clear to me how
this terminological issue affects my argument for Kant’s aesthetic
non-conceptualism since that judgments of taste are not objectively universal
does not imply by itself that they are conceptual all the way down. For as I
shall show further below subjective universality is compatible with non-conceptual
content being representational.
2.5. Representation and aesthetic
feeling
A highly questionable aspect of my non-conceptualist interpretation is,
according to Oroño (2017, pp. 99-100), my claim that judgments of taste, or the
feeling of pleasure as I would prefer, is representational. As mentioned in
section 1 above, I define three criteria that mental content must meet in order
to be cognitively relevant. The crucial and most challenging criterion is that
mental content must be representational, as both of us agree. Oroño objects
that in contrast to my claim judgments of taste, although involving
representations, are not representational, more precisely do not represent the
harmony of imagination and understanding. For the harmony is the ground of the
feeling of pleasure but the feeling itself does not represent the harmony. Therefore, even if it were true that the
feeling of pleasure is not conceptual, it cannot count as representation of the
harmony and therefore my argument for the representational character of
aesthetic feeling and its non-conceptuality does not go through.[10] I would like to respond
to this important point in two ways: First, from the fact the harmony of the
faculties is the ground of aesthetic feeling it does not follow, at least not
conceptually, that the aesthetic feeling cannot represent the harmony. As I see
it, ‘ground’ can only signify that it brings about the feeling. The ‘aesthetic
feeling’ is then cognitively related to its ground in inner sense such that it
would not have arisen if the harmony would not have been occasioned. The ground
is, of course, different from its effect, here the feeling, nonetheless this
does not seem to imply that the effected feeling is only a receptive mental
occurrence that is somehow related to its ground. It is the special character
and the cognitive role of the feeling that explains why it is representational
with respect to harmony even though the latter is its ground. This is obvious
from my second response: With respect to the representational character of
feeling as non-conceptual content, the crucial point is that we only know about
the harmony of the faculties because of the feeling of pleasure. By being
conscious of or experiencing pleasure we are automatically (maybe unconsciously)
aware of that harmony as its ground. The absence of the ground (harmony)
implicates the absence of the effect (feeling). But why is feeling
representational? In addition to the reasons that I have presented in my paper
(Heidemann 2016, pp. 128-130), I would like to give the following
specification. The point of dispute here is not that feeling is mental content
that we can be aware of. The crucial question rather is whether feeling as
(non-conceptual) mental content is representational (with respect to harmony).
In contemporary philosophy and specifically in the debate over
non-conceptualism in philosophy of mind and cognition it has been widely
accepted that mental content is representational if it has accuracy conditions,
i.e., it must be possible to distinguish between an accurate and an inaccurate
representation of the mental content in question. Is this the case with respect
to feeling? At first glance it isn’t, since feelings do not have accuracy (or
even truth) conditions. In Kant’s aesthetics, however, this is different. For
here the feeling of pleasure does have such conditions for Kant specifies that
aesthetic feeling only occurs under the condition of the harmony of the
faculties. Again, Kant is not specific about what the harmony itself exactly
looks like since it is not conceptually determined in any objective sense,
although the understanding is operative in the free play. This is also the
reason for why the representation of the aesthetic feeling in inner sense is
subjective rather than objective like in judgments of cognition. I therefore
hold onto my claim that aesthetic feeling is non-conceptual mental content that
is capable of representing its ground, i.e., the harmony of the faculty of
imagination and understanding, because as mental content it has relevant
accuracy conditions since it obviously makes a difference for the awareness of
aesthetic feeling whether the faculties are in harmony or not. That accuracy
conditions apply here is made possible through the faculty universalism, i.e.,
Kant’s view that all humans share the same cognitive faculties in the same way.
2.6. First person experience and
aesthetic evaluation
In my non-conceptualist reading of Kant’s aesthetics, I make the case
that for Kant aesthetic experience is essentially dependent on the
first-person-perspective such that in order to aesthetically evaluate a work of art it is the evaluating, judging person who must
have first-hand experience of the work that he or she judges. Thus, in
aesthetic evaluation the judging person cannot rely on heteronomous sources,
e.g., reports by third persons, but must itself experience the work.
Furthermore, if aesthetic evaluation depends on the first-person standpoint it
cannot be carried out by conceptual or logical proof which is by definition
independent of any individual perspective. This, too, I argue, supports my
non-conceptualist reading since phenomenal experience of one’s own state of
mind like aesthetic feeling cannot be conceptually described and therefore is non-conceptual.
Oroño dismisses this reasoning because the first-person perspective is
insufficient for evidencing non-conceptual content, not least because the
judgment of taste is an expression of a feeling and does not represent an
object. In section 2.5. I have indicated why I think aesthetic feeling is in
fact (subjectively) representational. Along these lines I would also like to
respond to this objection. To start with, Kant clearly says that aesthetic
experience cannot rely on “the approval of others” and “that what has pleased
others can never serve as the ground of an aesthetic judgment.” (KU, AA 05:
284) Aesthetic experience must draw on first-person-experience. In order to
illustrate this Kant makes use of a telling analogy:
Someone may list all the ingredients of a
dish for me, and remark about each one that it is otherwise agreeable to me,
and moreover even rightly praise the healthiness of this food; yet I am deaf to
all these grounds, I try the dish with my tongue and my palate, and on that basis
(not on the basis of general principles) do I make my judgment. (KU, AA 05:
285; Kant’s emphasis)
The point Kant makes here is very similar to Thomas Nagel’s argument in What is it like to be a bat? In that article Nagel develops an argument
for the irreducibility of phenomenal experience, of so-called
qualia-consciousness that we experience when we, e.g., perceive the specific
red colour of a sunset or the unique taste of the sweetness of a candy. The
argument consists of three steps: First Nagel specifies two features of
consciousness: The one is that “an organism has conscious mental states if and
only if there is […] something it is like for that organism”. (Nagel
1974, p. 436) This is what Nagel calls the “subjective character of
experience”. (Nagel 1974, p. 436) The reason why conscious experience is subjective can be
explained by the second feature: “every subjective phenomenon is essentially
connected with a single point of view”. (Nagel 1974, p. 437) Therefore, a
physicalist theory cannot explain the subjectivity of consciousness since it is
by definition an objective theory that is completely detached from a single
point of view. To put it in another way: Conscious experience like seeing the
red colour or tasting the candy is something that I cannot know objectively,
since it is something that I can know exclusively from my own case, without
being able to conceptualise it. The second step of the argument tries to show
that the subjectivity of consciousness is undeniably a fact about what it is like
to be an organism, e.g. a bat. To this end Nagel takes it for granted that bats
have phenomenal experiences. He invites us to imagine what it is like to be a
bat, a creature which experiences the world by echolocation. Of course, Nagel
argues, we can imagine having poor vision and spending the day hanging upside
down by ones feet in an attic. But whether we can imagine that from our human
perspective is not the question. What we want to know is what it is like for a
bat to be a bat. To get to know that is not possible for us because we cannot
take up a bat’s subjective conscious experience since our imagining being a bat
is tied to our single human points of view and can never reach what it is like
for the bat itself. Nevertheless, we have to acknowledge the fact that bats have subjective conscious
experience though human imagination and concepts are not able to grasp exactly
what it is like to be a bat for a bat. In the third step of the argument Nagel
depicts the position he holds with regard to facts. He calls it “realism about
the subjective domain”, a form of realism that acknowledges “the existence of
facts beyond the reach of human concepts” (Nagel 1974, p. 441). This conception
of realism is specifically a metaphysical realism, according to which reality
does not coincide with what we are able to think is real or grasp conceptually.
Metaphysical realism rather is the view that reality goes beyond of what we can
describe. There is no doubt for Nagel that there are facts which humans never
will possess the requisite concepts to represent. Kant clearly rejects
metaphysical, or in his own terms, transcendental realism. But Kant would
clearly acknowledge this reasoning with respect to subjective aesthetic
experience as non-conceptual. As a matter of fact, aesthetic experience is, for
Kant, first-person experience since there are no conceptual tools that make it
possible to describe that experience. The experience (aesthetic feeling) is
therefore non-conceptual although it is factual for it is somehow for the subject
of that experience to be in the mental state of aesthetic feeling, a state that
is a subjective mental fact beyond conceptual grasp. Kant’s insistence on
first-person aesthetic experience therefore supports my non-conceptualist
reading of his aesthetics.
3. Further
objections against the non-conceptualist
reading of Kant’s aesthetics
In addition to the objections raised by Oroño I will, in what follows,
discuss some of the criticisms of my non-conceptualist reading of Kant’s
aesthetics that have been put forward in the aforementioned series of articles
published in Con-Textos Kantianos, 9. All of those criticisms are very considerate and
helpful. Here I do not have the space to respond to all of them in detail and
will restrict myself to those objections that I take to be most threatening for
my account. This does not mean that the objections I am not considering in this
response in detail are irrelevant.
3.1. Concept, intuition and non-conceptual representation
In his contribution
“La persistencia de los conceptos. Un comentario sobre una
objeción de Matías Oroño a Dietmar Heidemann” Pedro Stepanenko joins and
elaborates on Oroño’s critique that from irreducibility of intuitions to concepts
non-conceptualism does not follow, to put it differently, from the acknowledged
fact that intuition qua repraesentatio
singularis cannot be reduced to concept qua repraesentatio generalis it cannot be inferred that intuition is a
cognitive mode that allows for non-conceptual representation of objects. In his
discussion Stepanenko
(2019, p. 346), first, very helpfully reconsiders the recent debate on Kant and
non-conceptualism, and points to the difficulty that Kantian
(non-)conceptualism might not stand for what the contemporary (analytic) debate
conceives as (non-)conceptualism.[11] Now like Oroño, Stepanenko contends that it is the nature
of intuition that ultimately justifies why on the judgmental level
non-conceptual mental content is conserved. For this reason, there arises a
conflict in my reading, he argues, between the claim that non-conceptual
content is cognitively relevant only if it can be preserved on the judgmental
level, and the view that intuition is irreducible to concepts, hence to any
judgmental structure. In this context he makes the additional point that in
order to substantiate this view I should have presented a definition of mental
content. It is in fact the understanding of mental content that he considers to
be at the heart of the problem (Stepanenko 2019, pp. 346-7).
In response to these astute considerations, I would like to point out
that I am not claiming that since intuition cannot be reduced to concept, Kant
must count as a non-conceptualist. This would be a much too simple argument.
The crucial point is that intuition qua non-conceptual content can only be
cognitively relevant if it meets a certain set of criteria that warrant how it
can have justificatory force. As
argued above, the most important one is the condition that non-conceptual
content must be representational. With respect to this requirement in
particular, Stepanenko
reminds us of the famous dictum of
the first Critique: “Thought without
content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” (KrV, A 51/B 75). In
a nutshell, it is from this dictum that it gets clear that intuitions without concepts
cannot refer to anything at all.
It seems to me that this is not correct. Let’s briefly look at how Kant
comes to argue that intuition and concept are different in kind and why their
difference implies that intuition is representational. From Kant’s essay Concerning the Ultimate Foundation of the
Distinction of the Directions in Space (1768) it is evident that in order
to claim that thoughts without content are empty, and intuitions without
concepts are blind, one must show the ultimate difference between intuition and
concept. The crucial argument here is that given incongruent counterparts it is
not the case, as Leibniz thought, that a complete conceptual description of
objects leads to the numerical identity of these objects if the descriptions are
identical. This is not true, according to Kant, since in intuition incongruent
counterparts remain numerically distinct objects as spatial representation
(intuition) shows. I cannot discuss Kant’s argument here at length. But since he
comes back to it later at several other places when clarifying the difference
between intuition and concept (like in De
mundi, Prolegomena) this seems to
be still a relevant move for him. Why is it? Because it shows that it is
possible to represent objects merely on the basis of intuition without concepts
since as incongruent counterparts show we can still refer to numerically
distinct objects and refer to them in cognitively relevant ways. The reason for
this is, as Kant demonstrates later in his (semi-)critical works, that intuition
is repraesentatio singularis rather
than generalis. This does not show
that objective cognition is possible solely through sensible intuition but that
we can represent and numerically distinguish objects in space (whether their position
in space is right- or left-handed etc.) independently of the use of concepts.
For conceptual descriptions do not suffice to distinguish incongruent
counterparts in space. Therefore, intuiton as repraesentatio singularis is, in principle, representational, as I
argue in my paper. This needs, of course, to be referred to the context of
Kant’s aesthetics but it seems to me that Stepanenko’s intellectualist account
of Kant’s distinction between intuition and concept does not hold.
3.2. Non-conceptual content and the genius
In her contribution:
“Kant y el no conceptualismo”
Luciana Martínez takes up various criticisms already raised by Oroño such as
the objection that judgments of taste are not
cognitive or do have cognitive value. There are two points assessed by Martínez
that I would like to consider here a little further. Martínez (2019, pp. 355,
358) objects that I am not explaining the criteria for non-conceptual content
that I define. I accept this criticism but would just like to hint at the general
debate on non-conceptual content where these criteria have been established.
Although this is a fair enough point, I cannot develop the entire arguments for
why these criteria apply.[12] The second important
criticism Martínez (2019, pp. 353-355) makes is that in my paper I do not
integrate my claims about the genius’ non-conceptual making of artwork into my
overall argument. More specifically I do not relate them to the doctrine of the
judgment of taste and ignore its systematic function within Kant’s aesthetics.
I am not sure whether this is the case. It seems to me that in my paper I
discuss the genius’ non-conceptualism to quite some extent, especially with
respect to the question whether the way of production of art by the genius
entails non-conceptual elements or even is non-conceptual all the way down.
With respect to aesthetic ideas this is certainly the case because Kant
repeatedly emphasizes aesthetic ideas exceed any conceptual grasping. He even
says that an “aesthetic idea” is
that representation of the imagination
that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any
determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently,
no language fully attains or can make intelligible. One readily sees that it is
the counterpart (pendant) of an idea of reason, which is, conversely, a concept
to which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate. (KU,
AA 05: 314)
I am not taking Kant’s doctrine of the aesthetic genius to stand for his
non-conceptualism in any positive sense. This is because the genius’ cognitive
behavior does not result in any objective cognition discursive cognizers could
have. This doctrine is therefore merely complementary to Kant’s doctrine of the
judgment of taste. On the other hand, Martínez does not provide any concrete
arguments against my view that because aesthetic ideas are not discursive or
linguistically expressible in ordinary judgments like judgments of taste, they
are non-conceptual. To my claim that the alleged genius’ cognition lays claim
to non-conceptual mental content discursive cognizers cannot have, she does not
respond in detail. – As I said before, I take the objections raised by the
authors considered here to be very enlightening and serious threads to my non-conceptual
reading of Kant’s aesthetics. But what I am missing in all of their
contributions is a conclusive explication of why Kant repeatedly underscores
(cf. KU, §§ 5, 6, 8, 9, 16, 17, 22) that judgments of taste are without concept if it is true, as they
believe, that judgments of taste are conceptual whatsoever.[13]
Bibliography
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Kantianos, 9, pp. 334-343.
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Nagel, T. (1974), “What is it like to be a
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Oroño, M. (2017), “El (no)-conceptualismo
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