Can everything be beautiful? Pan-aestheticism and the
Kantian puzzle of the free play of the faculties
Elena Romano·
Università
degli Studi di Padova, Italia
Abstract
My
contribution deals directly with the problem of Kant’s apparent commitment to
pan-aestheticism, which is in particular attached to the task of explaining the
possibility of the free play of the faculties. The aim is to provide an
overview of the ways in which this problem can be confronted and eventually
solved. In this regard, one way to deal with this problem
consists in revisiting the assumption that the free play of the faculties is to
be understood as simply occurring without presupposing any concept. By contrast,
one can fully endorse Kant’s commitment to pan-aestheticism and hence focus on
how Kant’s account explains the fact that one does not actually experience
everything as beautiful. Both of these alternatives, I firmly reject. By
remarking upon the merely reflecting status of judgments of taste, I explain
why Kant’s account of taste does not lend itself to pan-aestheticism.
Key words (TNR 11)
Kant;
pan-aestheticism; judgments of taste; the free play of the faculties;
reflecting judgment.
Introduction[1]
Within the Kantian studies on the Critique
of the Power of Judgment[2]
the problem of pan-aestheticism[3] is
well-known. Contributions regarding especially the relation drawn by Kant between
taste and cognition cannot avoid facing this problem, which is in particular
attached to the explanation of the notion of the free play of imagination and
understanding. According to Kant, the latter implies the capacity of the
imagination to schematize without concepts, though in agreement with the
conditions of cognition in general. In this regard, the free play of the
faculties is commonly explained as a state of mind which fulfills all of the
conditions of cognition except that of the application of a concept for the
determination of the object. Moreover, Kant declares that the free play of the
faculties is a relation of the representative faculties which is required by
cognition in general, so as to justify the claim to universal validity of
judgments of taste. If the free play of the faculties is to be understood as
requisite for cognition in general, then why does not every cognizable thing elicit
the very feeling of the free play of the faculties and hence not be found
beautiful?
Kant’s eventual
commitment to the view that everything can be beautiful is often rejected as
counter-intuitive or at least as inconsistent with the assumption of taste as a
faculty which discriminates what is beautiful from what is not. For this
reasons, such a conclusion is often found to be absurd. As a result, it is
rejected by assuming that Kant cannot have submitted it, not even by implication.
This line of argument is, however, not satisfying. First of all, if one
considers that on Kant’s account the predicate beautiful refers by definition
to a feeling, which is the very peculiar feeling of the free play of faculties,
and hence that it is referred to the subject rather than to the object, then it
seems at least legitimate to ask whether, given this fundamental statement,
every object cannot be seen as being potentially beautiful. This may or may not
be true for Kant’s account of the beautiful, but I assume that it is certainly
not an absurd conclusion from which Kant must be divorced at any cost.[4]
On the basis of this
assumption, my contribution directly confronts the problem of Kant’s apparent
commitment to pan-aestheticism and aims first of all to provide an overview of
its source within Kant’s critique of taste and of the main attempts to deal
with it. In what follows I will consider two of these attempts. The first
solves the problem of pan-aestheticism upstream, by revisiting the claim that
the free play of the faculties is to be understood as simply occurring without
presupposing any concept. In this account, the free play of the faculties is
explained as a state of mind satisfying all of the conditions of cognition in a
way which, instead of excluding the application of a concept, is regarded as
additional to what is required for the ordinary cognition of the object by
means of concepts. By contrast, the second fully endorses the conclusion
according to which everything can be beautiful. By individuating special
circumstances under which exclusively the free play of the faculties can be
explicitly felt, this approach explains why one does not actually experience
everything as beautiful. However, I reject both of these attempts. With regard
to the first, I argue that according to Kant’s descriptions, the free harmony
of the faculties is to be understood as occurring independently of any
application of concepts, and hence it cannot be taken as fulfilling any
cognitive aim, not even in an additional way. With regard to the second
proposal, I argue that the free harmony of imagination and understanding is to
be distinguished from the ordinary agreement of the faculties required by
cognition.
In the last section, I
propose a third way, which while accepting the explanation of the free play of
the faculties as fulfilling the subjective condition of cognition without the
presupposition of concepts, nonetheless explains why Kant’s account of taste
does not lend itself to pan-aestheticism. In fact, the free play of the faculties
entails an aesthetic specificity and it is the result of a specific act of
judging. The latter is merely reflecting, that is, it is not meant to satisfy
any cognitive aim, and it is ultimately dependent on peculiar forms apprehended
by the imagination.
I.
The importance of the notion of the free
play of the faculties within Kant’s
critique of taste can hardly be overestimated. An object, Kant states, is
judged to be beautiful in virtue of its capacity to elicit the feeling of the
free play of the faculties in the subject, rather than in virtue of certain features.
Even though the free harmony of the faculties can actually be defined as the “key” notion of the critique of
taste, Kant’s
explanations remain obscure: for instance, Kant explicitly describes it as implying the capacity of the
imagination to schematize without concepts (KU, AA 05:287 / 167); a
statement, among others, which leaves the reader with the task of explaining
how this is possible, especially on the basis of Kant’s exposition of the
ordinary operations of the imagination within his theory of cognition exposed
in the first Critique.
As it is known, Kant’s very first concern in the
Analytic of the Beautiful is to distinguish judgments of taste from cognitive
judgments. Judgments of taste are aesthetic judgments, hence their determining
ground is a feeling rather than a concept of the object. However, judgments of
taste are to be differentiated from merely aesthetic judgments, which are
grounded on the sole feeling of affection for the object. In fact, judgments of taste share
with cognitive judgments the claim to universality and necessity (KU, AA 05:191 / 77). Clearly,
if judgments of taste were grounded on the mere feeling of pleasure, then these
claims would remain unexplained. Thus, in order for this pleasure to
legitimately claim to universality, it must rest not on merely subjective
conditions, as it is the case of the pleasure of the senses, but on a state of
mind which can be universally communicable. Since according to Kant only
cognition can be universally communicable, then:
The
subjective universal communicability of the kind of representation in a
judgment of taste, since it is supposed to occur without presupposing a
determinate concept, can be nothing other than the state of mind of the free
play of the imagination and the understanding (so far as they agree with each
other as is requisite for a cognition in general). (KU, AA 05:218 / 103)
A similar argument can be found with
regard to the explanation of the claim to necessary validity exposed by Kant in
the fourth moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful. The claim to necessary validity
sheds light on the idea of common sense as the subjective principle of
judgments of taste, which is defined as “the effect of the free play of the
cognitive faculties”
(KU, AA 05:238
/ 122). By assuming this definition, it is possible to see the involvement of
the free play of the faculties within the argument regarding whether or not one
has good reason for presupposing a common sense.[5]
Kant’s
argument is that common sense is to be taken as the necessary condition of the
universal communicability of cognition. As Kant argues, this is the case
because the subjective condition of cognition can be universally communicable
only under the presupposition of a common sense. Within this framework,
“subjective condition of cognition” refers to the optimal agreement of
imagination and understanding with regard to cognition. As Kant specifies, this
disposition of the faculties can exclusively be felt, a
specification which supports the identification of the very subjective
condition of cognition with the free harmonious agreement of the faculties
grounding judgments of taste.
The strategy carried out
by Kant in order to justify the claims of taste is to explain them as due to
the fact that the feeling of pleasure is the expression of a state of mind
which is required by cognition in general as its subjective condition.[6]
Despite the initial apparent neat distinction between judgments of taste as
aesthetic judgments and logical judgments, the comparison between judgments of
taste and cognitive empirical judgments is thus revealed to be crucial for the
understanding of the possibility of judgments of taste. Within Kant’s theory of
the reflecting power of judgment, it seems in particular that the claim to
universality and necessity of judgments of taste has the same ground as the one
of cognitive judgments, namely an act of judging resulting from the shared operations
of apprehension and reflection on a given object which put the imagination and
the understanding in agreement independently of any particular concept.[7]
In this regard, Kant holds that since
the
judgment of taste is not determinable by means of concepts, it is grounded only
on the subjective formal condition of a judgment in general. The subjective
condition of all judgments is the faculty for judging itself, or the power of
judgment. This, employed with regard to a representation by means of which an
object is given, requires the agreement of two powers of representation:
namely, the imagination (for the intuition and the composition of the manifold
of intuition), and the understanding (for the concept as representation of the
unity of this composition). (KU, AA 05:287/167)
The free play of the faculties appears to
be conceived by Kant as the formal condition of all judgments and hence of the
faculty itself of judgment. In this respect,
the free play of the faculties can
be more precisely described as the very explanatory
notion of the merely reflecting status of judgments of taste. The reflecting
power of judgment does not subsume the beautiful form under a concept but
rather reflects on it and this very
act of reflection elicits the pleasure grounding a judgment
of taste. Within this framework, the reflecting power of judgment, whose task is to find an universal for
the given particular, requires an agreement between the imagination and the
understanding which, however, cannot be conceived as guided by concepts, as
would be required by the determining power of judgment. Kant describes this
agreement as “a
subjective correspondence of the imagination to the understanding without an
objective one”, which
is characterized by “a
lawfulness without law” (KU, AA 05:241 / 125). In turn, this implies that on the one
hand the imagination in its freedom schematizes independently
from concepts, while on the other that this act of the imagination occurs
in a way which is found by the reflecting power of judgments to be in agreement
with the requirement for
unity and lawfulness of the understanding.[8]
In a very famous passage from the first Introduction Kant clearly summarizes
this idea:
A
merely reflecting judgment about a given individual object, […], can
be aesthetic if (before its comparison with others is seen), the power of
judgment, which has no concept ready for the given intuition, holds the
imagination (merely in the apprehension of the object) together with the
understanding (in the presentation of a concept in general) and perceives a
relation of the two faculties of cognition which constitutes the subjective,
merely sensitive condition of the objective use of the power of judgment in
general (namely the agreement of those two faculties with each other). (EEKU, AA 20:223-4 / 26)
While the “objective use of the
power of judgment” presupposes
the application of a concept to the manifold of intuition synthesized by the
imagination, the free play of the faculties as the ground of judgments of taste
as merely reflecting judgments does not require any concept to occur. Thus, it is often considered as that very
relation between the faculties as required by the power of judgment in general minus
that which would otherwise make it objective, namely the fulfillment of the
purpose of cognition by means of the application of a concept. As a result,
Kant remarks that the state of mind underlying judgments of taste is that of
the perception, by means of a
feeling, of the fulfillment of the subjective
conditions of the power of judgment. In turn, this is decisive for his explanation
of the claims of taste:
Someone
who feels pleasure in mere reflection on the form of an object, without regard
to a concept, rightly makes claim to the assent of everyone else, even though
this judgment is empirical and is an individual judgment, since the ground for
this pleasure is to be found in the universal though subjective condition of
reflecting judgments, namely the purposive correspondence of an object (be it a
product of nature or of art) with the relationship of the cognitive faculties
among themselves (of the imagination and the understanding) that is required
for every empirical cognition. (KU, AA 05:190
/ 77)
Meaningfully, this last passage highlights
that the pleasure felt in the mere reflection, that is, the feeling of the free
play of the faculties, is grounded on the very subjective condition of the
reflecting power of judgment. The latter, Kant concludes, requires the
purposive suitability of objects for our cognitive faculties and hence seems to
be needed not only as condition of judgments of taste, but also in order for
empirical cognition to be possible in
the first place.
II.
On the basis of Kant’s descriptions of the
free play of the faculties a common interpretation has established. Paul Guyer
has denominated the traditional explanation given of the free harmony of the
faculties as the “precognitive
account”
(Guyer 2006).[9] According to such an
account,
the free play of the faculties is a state of mind which fulfills all of the
conditions of cognition except that of the application of a concept. According
to this reading, the free play of the faculties can be conceived as being
requisite for cognition in general, for it satisfies the subjective condition
of cognition without producing any cognition at all, hence without determining
the object by means of concepts. The free play of the faculties is then
understood as a requisite not only for judgments of taste to justify their
claims, but also as a very requisite of the reflecting power of judgment in
general and hence of empirical cognition.
This result is
intriguing, but highly problematic. The acknowledgment that the free play of
the faculties is requisite for empirical cognition as well as for judgments of
taste sets the stage for the problem of pan-aestheticism. If one fully endorses
the idea that the free play of the faculties is the very subjective condition
of cognition, then it seems that every cognizable thing should presuppose this state of
mind and hence elicit the very feeling of the free play of the faculties, for every cognizable object
seems to satisfy the conditions required in order to make a judgment of taste.
In this regard, Guyer
writes:
The
obvious —and
often recognized —problem
with the precognitive approach is that on this approach it may seem as if everything
ought to be beautiful, or at least capable of being found beautiful. That
is, if our feeling of beauty in a given manifold is a response to the fact that
it satisfies a condition that must be satisfied in every case of cognition,
even if it does not satisfy all of
the conditions that must be satisfied for actual cognition, then why don’t we experience beauty
in every case of cognition? (Guyer 2006, p. 172)
Here Guyer seems to distinguish two
possible claims of pan-aestheticism deriving from precognitive accounts:
1) “Everything ought to be
beautiful”.
According to precognitive accounts, the condition of judgments of taste is a
condition that must be satisfied in order to have any cognition whatsoever,
that is, every case of cognition always satisfies the condition of judgments of
taste; it follows that every cognizable object should elicit the very feeling
of the free play of the faculties and hence be beautiful; but since there are
objects—in
fact, the majority of them —that
we perceive as ordinary, then it is pretty counter-intuitive to claim that
everything is beautiful. In fact, this formulation of pan-aestheticism claims
more exactly that all objects ought to be found beautiful, as to make
manifest that we do not actually perceive all objects as beautiful, which is
however precisely what seems apparently inexplicable within a precognitive
approach to the free play of the faculties.
2) “Everything [is] at least
capable of being found beautiful”.
Guyer does not specify how such a formulation of pan-aestheticism derives from
precognitive accounts, but from a precognitive point of view one could argue,
that the reason why we don’t
experience beauty in every case of cognition is for instance that the actual
application of a concept to the manifold synthesized by the imagination
modifies the perception of the object, which otherwise would have elicited
pleasure and been considered beautiful; this does not however prevent one from
claiming that Kant’s
account implies that all object are potentially beautiful, that is, they
can all be found beautiful.
This slightly different
formulation of the problem accounts more effectively for the fact that one does
not actually find all objects beautiful. In this regard, precognitive accounts should “explain why we are
pleased, indeed especially pleased, with a state of mind that falls short of
satisfying all of the conditions for ordinary cognition” (Guyer 2006, p. 165),
which is precisely what according to Guyer they fail to do. In other words, if
one accepts
the precognitive account then
one has
to clarify why some objects actually elicit the feeling of the free play
of the faculties while other objects fail to satisfy this potentiality. Rather
than exposing Kant to a counter-intuitive conclusion, this second formulation
of pan-aestheticism represents a genuine challenge to his account of taste.
III.
A first way to confront Kant’s eventual
commitment to pan-aestheticism is to solve this problem upstream, by rejecting
the main premise of the precognitive account, that is the very “precognitive”idea that the
aesthetic response depends on a cognitive state of mind which occurs prior to
and independently from the application of determinate empirical concepts. In so
doing it revisits the role of concepts within the aesthetic judging and hence
the relation between the free play of the faculties and cognition. This is a
central issue within Kant’s account of taste since the reader of the third Critique cannot but notice
Kant’s
insistence on the supposed non-conceptuality of judgments of taste. In this
regard, it has been noted that there are philosophical difficulties attached to
it, namely judgments of taste, like any kind of judgments about objects, should
involve the identification of the object by means of determinate empirical
concepts. If it were so, then Kant’s
non-conceptuality claim regarding judgments of taste should be revisited
together with the precognitive assumption regarding the free play of the
faculties.
This line of argument is
clearly exposed by Guyer (2006). After Guyer’s initial rejection of the precognitive approach as
subjected to pan-aestheticism, he goes on to criticize it more seriously as
contrasting with the main premises of Kant’s account of cognition,
according to which there cannot be any conscious representation of an object
without the application of some determinate empirical concept to the manifold
of intuition presented by the imagination to the understanding.[10]Thus,
according to Guyer, judgments of taste cannot but presuppose ordinary empirical
concepts. Accordingly, the harmony of the faculties cannot be understood as
simply involving the absence of ordinary determinate concepts of objects, as
the precognitive approach suggests. As a result, Guyer proposes a new approach
to the free play of the faculties,
namely the so-called “metacognitive” account.
(Guyer, 2006)
On Guyer’s metacognitive
account, the harmonious play of the faculties required as a condition of
judgments of taste and the aesthetic experience of beauty is understood in
primis as a state of mind in which the manifold of intuition, synthesized
by the imagination and thus presented to the understanding, is recognized as
satisfying the rule dictated by the corresponding concept on which both the
synthesis of the imagination and the identification of the object depend; this
is to say that the beautiful object is first of all a cognized object and this,
according to Guyer, cannot be otherwise. In addition to this fundamental
requirement, the metacognitive account explains the free play of the faculties
as a state of mind in which it is felt that the requirement for unity demanded
by the understanding is not only fulfilled, but satisfied in a way that goes beyond
what is normally required for the ordinary cognition of the object.[11]
Guyer then concludes :
A
beautiful object can always be recognized as an object of some determinate
kind, but our experience of it always has even more unity and coherence than is
required for it to be a member of that kind, or has a kind of unity and coherence
that is not merely a necessary condition for our classification of it. (Guyer
2006, p. 183)
As to how his metacognitive account
provides a solution to the question of pan-aestheticism, Guyer seems at least to presuppose that it does so successfully:
We
could not make such judgments, although we surely do, unless our aesthetic judgments
were compatible with our ordinary classificatory judgments, and gave expression
to the way in which some objects but not others occasion a free play of
imagination and understanding that goes beyond the relation between them that
is required for ordinary cognition. (Guyer 2006, p. 183)
By means of the explanation of the free
play of the faculties as an extra-ordinary fulfillment of the very same
conditions of cognition, thus included the application of empirical concepts,
Guyer seems to argue that the harmony of the faculties cannot then to be regarded as a state of mind required by any
act of cognition. Rather, it occurs in determinate cases, when, according to
Guyer, the kind of unity of the object goes beyond the very requirement for
unity demanded by the understanding and fulfilled by means of concepts. In
other words, from the contingent occurrence of the free play as an
extra-ordinary state of mind, it does not derive that everything can be found
beautiful.
It is right to remark
upon Kant’s
no-concept requirement not being taken as claiming that judgments of taste do
not involve concepts at all.
However, such a remark need to be further
articulated. First of all,
it must be noted that Guyer considers as paradigmatic examples of judgments of
taste exclusively those employing concepts of the subjects of predication, as
for instance the famous
example: “This
rose is beautiful”.
This assumption is meaningful because Guyer does not seem to recognize the
judgment “This is beautiful” as
a good example of judgment of taste; however, Kant does not provide any example
of a judgment of taste having this form, any more than he provides reasons for
excluding this kind of formulation. This sheds light on the fact that with
regard to the subjects of judgments of taste, one can always recognize the
object as, for instance, a flower and hence to apply to the object at issue a
determinate empirical concept. However, by definition, the beautiful does not
really require to be recognized as an instantiation of a certain kind, that is
to be subsumed under a concept, in order to be found beautiful. In this regard,
Kant clearly claims that judgments of taste are not grounded on concepts
and hence that pleasure in the beautiful is not determined by concepts;
this means that the ascription of beauty to an object on the basis of the feeling of
pleasure which it occasions, is not due to the concept of the object. It must
be then emphasized that this eventual recognition of the beautiful object under
a determinate empirical concept is possible as long as the concept is not
intended as determining ground of the pleasure. In turn, this is possible because
in judgments of taste concepts that are actually applied to the object do not
function “as”concepts, as Zuckert
suggests. In other words, concepts are not employed so as to determine and
classify the object, but rather in an “indicating”way which makes any eventual application irrelevant:
in aesthetic experience concepts could be well taken as being used for the
indication of the individual beautiful object without being responsible for its
unification as a beautiful object. (Zuckert 2007, pp. 199-201)[12]
The way in which concepts are employed matters: Kant’s account of judgments of
taste rules out the ordinary use of concepts either as rules for the
imaginative synthesis, hence for the unification of the manifold of intuition
in the representation of a unified object, or as marks grounding the ascription
of a concept to the subject of predication.
If it is necessary to
account for “some use” of concepts within the aesthetic judging, then the
questions at stake are how the free play of the faculties must be understood
and whether the precognitive account must be rejected, as Guyer suggests. With
regard to the metacognitive account, the claim that the free play of the
faculties takes place beyond ordinary cognition of the object does not fully
explain how it is supposed to be possible
in the first place and how it can justify the claims of taste.[13]
But more seriously,
it does not seem to provide a strikingly consistent explanation of Kant’s descriptions of the
free play of faculties. This seems to be the case in primis with regard
to Kant’s statement on the harmonious relation of the faculties as satisfying
the conditions for a “cognition
in general”.
How is the free play of the faculties to be understood with regard to the
satisfaction of the conditions of a cognition in general, as opposed to
determinate cognition if, again, the conditions for the cognition of the
beautiful object are actually fulfilled, as Guyer seems to claim? According to
Guyer, the subject feels that the form of the object fulfills the conditions of
cognition more than it is required for that ordinary cognition itself. But Kant’s descriptions of what
the fulfillment of the conditions of cognition in general by means of the state
of mind of the free play of the faculties could mean does not seem to
presuppose any actual fulfillment of cognition whatsoever, not even in
an additional way. Kant seems rather to suggest the indeterminacy of the
fulfillment of such conditions, which prevents the object from being actually determined.
Moreover, it is unclear
to what extent the metacognitive account would be able to explain the very freedom of the
imagination: “since
the freedom of the imagination consists precisely in the fact that it
schematizes without a concept”
(KU, AA 05:287/167),
then if a concept is needed to
be applied to the manifold of intuition constituting the form of the object,
the imagination cannot but be taken as schematizing according to
concepts rather than independently of them. Here again, the problem is that of
grasping how this “without
concepts” is
to be taken. In this regard, Guyer would argue that the imagination can still
be consistently conceived as free from concepts since the form apprehended is
not adequately unifiable by the concepts of the understanding and rather goes “beyond”what would be required
for this mere conceptual unification. However, my suggestion is that this can be
intended as implying either the absence of empirical determinate concepts or
the irrelevance of an eventual application of empirical concepts with regard to
the imaginative synthesis in a basically precognitive sense. Both the
approaches support the idea that no concept at all can guide, at least totally,
the imaginative activity and hence concur to the unification of the form of the
object, for which the imagination alone is to be considered responsible.
Ultimately, the
precognitive idea seems though to be more adequate, if one considers the explicative
role played by the free play of the faculties within Kant’s theory of the
reflecting power of judgment and in particular of judgments of taste as merely
reflecting judgments. In a nutshell, as explicated in the first section, the
free play of the faculties cannot be considered as meta- or extra-cognitive,
because such understanding would not be able to account for the merely
reflecting status of judgments of taste. The reflecting power of judgment, “which
has no concept ready for the given intuition” (EEKU, AA 20:223-4 / 26), in
order to form empirical cognition requires an agreement between the faculties
such as to satisfy independently of concepts the conditions for a cognition in
general. In the aesthetic case, such agreement is explicitly felt by means of a
feeling of pleasure because the form presented by the imagination it is found
by the reflecting power of judgment as fitting the requirements for unity and
lawfulness of the understanding for the possibility of cognition. In the
Deduction, Kant has, moreover, explicitly regarded the state of mind of the
free play of the faculties as the very subjective condition of the power of
judgment in general which implies the idea that all judgments presuppose such
an agreement; it is precisely in virtue of this presupposition that judgments
of taste, albeit aesthetic,
claim to be valid for everyone. As a result of these considerations, it seems
more appropriate to understand the free play of the faculties in a “precognitive”sense rather then
in the metacognitive way suggested in this section. Thus, the metacognitive
solution of pan-aestheticism is excluded and the question of whether in Kant’s account everything can
be beautiful is still at stake.
IV.
An alternative way to deal with
pan-aestheticism consists in taking seriously Kant’s description of the free
play of the faculties provided by precognitive accounts and hence in claiming
that indeed every cognizable object elicits the very pleasure determining
judgments of taste. In this way, such an approach fully accepts the challenge
of explaining why every object does not actually satisfy the potentiality to be
found beautiful. A famous and controversial passage from the published
Introduction is often cited in support of this approach:
To
be sure, we no longer detect any noticeable pleasure in the comprehensibility
of nature and the unity of its division into genera and species, by means of
which alone empirical concepts are possible through which we cognize it in its
particular laws; but it must certainly have been there in its time, and only
because the most common experience would not be possible without it has it
gradually become mixed up with mere cognition and is no longer specially
noticed. (KU, AA 05:187 / 74)
According to this
view, having got used to this feeling, we no longer perceive it, but we can
become aware of it, that is, we can explicitly feel it only under the special
circumstance of a pure aesthetic experience: the pleasure of the free play of
the faculties makes us attentive to a fundamental feeling of pleasure which
accompanies every act of reflective judgment.[14] Indeed, Kant defines the
pleasure of the free play of the faculties as a pleasure “of mere reflection” (KU, AA 05:292 / 172) which is as
such “inevitably
shared by all of our reflections (i.e., we feel it whenever we perform
reflective judgments).” (Barchana-Lorand
2002, p. 317) By referring to the pleasure of the beautiful as a pleasure of
reflection Kant appears to support the precognitive reading of the free play of
the faculties together with the implication of pan-aestheticism:
Without
having any purpose or fundamental principle for a guide, this pleasure accompanies
the common apprehension of an object by the imagination, as a faculty of
intuition, in relation to the understanding, as a faculty of concepts, by means
of a procedure of the power of judgment, which it must also exercise for the
sake of the most common experience: only in the latter case it is compelled to
do so for the sake of an empirical objective concept, while in the former case
(in the aesthetic judging) it is merely for the sake of perceiving the
suitability of the representation for the harmonious (subjectively purposive)
occupation of both cognitive faculties in their freedom, i.e., to sense the
representational state with pleasure. (KU, AA 05:292 / 172)
Thus, such fundamental pleasure is to be
regarded as an essential, non-cognitive component of reflecting judging, which,
as precognitive accounts state, “precedes
any cognition of the object and merely lays out the conditions for cognition”. (Barchana-Lorand, 2002,
p. 316) Within this framework, an object is found beautiful, that is, the free
play of the faculties is explicitly felt and hence grounds a judgment of taste
exclusively under particular conditions rather than in every case of empirical
cognition, namely if one contemplates an object with disinterested pleasure.[15]
Another way to articulate
this point is to appeal to the capacity of abstraction and to argue that, in
Kant’s
account, the aesthetic appreciation is possible as distinct from the actual production
of empirical cognition by means of the mere operation of reflection as long as
it would be possible to abstract from the actual application of a determinate
concept, so as to contemplate the mere form of the object. (Budd 2001)
According to this view it seems then that the very characteristic mark of the
free play of the faculties with regard to the relation of the faculties
required for empirical cognition consists in the different role played by
concepts within the two acts of judging. If the difference between cognitive
judgments and judgments of taste depends exclusively on the guiding role played
by concepts with regard to the imaginative synthesis (Longuenesse 2006, p.
205), and if one could any time abstract from cognition of the object, then
everything cannot but be considered as potentially beautiful.
Kant’s text seems to support
the idea according to which it is always possible to abstract from the
conceptual determination of the object and hence to actually feel the pleasure
it elicits. Kant seems to address the issue when, with respect to the
distinction between free and adherent beauty, he makes the famous example of
the botanist and claims:
A
judgment of taste in regard to an object with a determinate internal end would
thus be pure only if the person making the judgment either had no concept of
this end or abstracted from it in his judgment. (KU, AA 05:230-1 / 114-5)
Even though Kant seems to be supportive of
the idea that everything can be beautiful and that we may actually find
something beautiful as long as we abstract from the conceptual determination of
the object, Kant’s
account is not clear as to what extent it is possible to abstract from a
cognitive point of view in order to judge the object aesthetically according to
the requirements of taste. For instance, Kant clearly denies such a possibility
with regard to some cases of adherent beauty, i.e., churches, horses, human
beings. According to Kant, such things cannot but be judged according to the
concept of their end and hence no abstraction from this concept would be
permitted. Ultimately, it seems that Kant’s unclarity with regard to this issue
cannot be avoided:
His
invocation of a lawful faculty (the productive imagination), which however is
not governed by laws, inherently precludes an explanation of the circumstances
and manner of performance of that faculty. […] no way is forthcoming
of specifying in some detail the reasons for which conformity triggering
disinterested pleasure arises (when it does). (Meerbote 1982,
p. 85)
Such explanations of why we do not
actually perceive the feeling of the free play of the faculties with regard to
every object seems to imply Kant’s commitment
to a view which explains
the possibility of beauty by means of a peculiar aesthetic attitude that the
subject must adopt in order to perceive beauty, a view which however Kant does not explicitly
submit. (Guyer 2006, p. 172) In this regard, a different kind of objection to
the problem of Kant’s eventual commitment to pan-aestheticism is the one which
appeals to the beautiful object. In fact, it may be that some but not all
objects can elicit the free play of the faculties and hence be beautiful,
because only some but not all object present a form which is felt to fulfill
the intellectual requirements for unity and coherence without the application
of any concept. This objection can be seen as being provided by Kant’s argument in favour of the right to presuppose a common
sense as the subjective principle of taste (§21), where the free play of
the faculties receives an explanation in terms of the optimal proportion of the
disposition of the representative faculties with regard to cognition in
general. According to Kant,
the “disposition
of the cognitive powers has a different proportion depending on the difference
of the objects that are given” (KU, AA05:238 / 123). However, it is not clear how this
reference to the optimal proportion is to be taken. In fact, Kant
holds, for instance, that
the pleasure in the beautiful
must
necessarily rest on the same conditions in everyone, since they are subjective
conditions of the possibility of a cognition in general, and the proportion of
these cognitive faculties that is required for taste is also requisite for the
common and healthy understanding that one may presuppose in everyone. (KU, AA 05:292-3 / 172-3)
This passage suggests that ultimately the same
proportion seems to be
required by both cognition and taste. Hence, the remark upon the optimal
proportion, instead of providing an argument against pan-aestheticism, would rather
support Kant’s
implicit commitment to it. Besides,
what Kant defines with regard to the beautiful object
is only its suitability to elicit the free play of the faculties in the subject, in virtue of which its form is judged as purposive. As
to how the form of the object should present itself in order to be found
beautiful, it remains unclear. As a result, it is difficult to conceive how the
reference to the form of the object can alone imply some constraint on the determination
of an object as beautiful. In fact, the mere representation of the form can
only consist in the elements of the manifold of intuition apprehended by the
imagination and capable of being unified by the understanding: it will then
present the spatial and temporal structure of the object intuited and combined
by the imagination, such as to be unifiable by the understanding. This
explanation does not provide any determination of the beautiful form which
would consist just in those elements — the ones apprehended by the imagination
and organized in a way suitable for the requirement for unifiability demanded
by the understanding — which all cognizable objects have.[16] It is then hard to
determine how the solution could lie in the object itself of taste, since it is
not clear to what extent the beautiful object contributes to Kant’s critique of taste in
the first place.[17]
To
conclude, this second way of dealing with pan-aestheticism accepts Kant’s commitment to the view that
everything can be beautiful as a consequence of a precognitive interpretation
of the free play of the faculties, thus focusing on the explanation of why one
does not perceive everything as beautiful. Despite Kant’s lack of clarity with regard to this issue,
which would alone represent a good argument to be skeptical towards this
conclusion, there is a more fundamental difficulty attached to this
reading, namely the very derivation of pan-aestheticism from a precognitive
approach to the free play of the faculties. The apparent necessity of such an implication derives,
as I will argue, from an unidirectional explanation of the notion of the free
play of the faculties. In fact, on the one hand the possibility of the free
lawfulness of the imagination should be indeed explained by referring to Kant’s theory the reflecting
power of judgment in general
as involved in the formation of empirical cognition,
however, on the other hand, it is
essential to consider the free harmony of the faculties as the very determining
ground of judgments of taste qua
aesthetic judgments, hence in its
very aesthetic specificity.[18]
By focusing exclusively on Kant’s
justification of the claims of taste, which shows the conformity of the free
play of the faculties with the conditions of a cognition in general, the
aesthetic specificity
of the free play of the faculties cannot but take second placeto the apparent urgency of explaining why
everything is not actually perceived
as aesthetically
pleasing; an issue which remains highly
controversial due to Kant’s lack of clarity,
as this section tried to make clear. As a result, the precognitive account should be
combined with a specific comprehension
of what is then aesthetically peculiar about the free play of the faculties. I
argue that without raising this point, the problem of pan-aestheticism would
remain partially unclarified. Moreover, by means of a direct investigation into the
aesthetic specificity of the free pay of the faculties, the crucial role played by Kant’s reference to the beautiful object will receive a decisive clarification.
V.
The aim of this last section is to show
that there is a third way in which the problem of pan-aestheticism can be faced, and
ultimately that it is the most appropriate one. On the one hand, this
alternative view maintains
the precognitive
assumption regarding the free play of the faculties and, on the other hand, it
claims
that the latter does
not lend itself to pan-aestheticism. In
this regard, it considers the view according to which everything can be
beautiful as a conclusion resulting from a sole consideration of
the cognitive
aspect of the free harmony of
the faculties, which has in fact both a cognitive
and an aesthetic aspect. (Gorodeisky 2011, p. 417) The source of confusion
which leads to the conclusion of
Kant’s
commitment to pan-aestheticism consists in misunderstanding the distinction
Kant makes between the logical reflecting power of judgment, responsible
for the formation of empirical concepts, and the aesthetic reflecting
power of judgment, that is, taste, on the other hand. (Makkreel 2006, pp.
224-5; Gorodeisky 2011, p. 419) In particular, the latter distinction within
Kant’s
discussion of the reflecting power of judgment should provide a hint on how to
grasp the aesthetic peculiarity of the free play of the faculties, just as it
had a decisive role in supporting the precognitive approach. In this regard, I
argue that the free play of the faculties is a state of mind to be considered
as different in kind from the relation of the faculties which is required for
cognition, although it satisfies its subjective conditions.
In a nutshell, the very
specificity of the free play of the faculties consists in the freedom of the
imagination. Neither determining judging nor the logical kind of reflecting
judging involves an
activity of the imagination, which, despite its lawfulness, can be described as
free. Even though the logical reflecting power of judgment does not presuppose
any concept of the object so that the synthesizing activity of the imagination
cannot be thought of as being directly guided by conceptual rules, it still
cannot be considered as involving the free harmonious relation of the faculties. As Ginsborg
points out, the formation of a concept always corresponds to its first
application (Ginsborg 1997, pp. 69-70), so that within the problematic
framework of the formation of empirical concepts for which the reflecting power
of judgment is responsible 1) the imagination cannot be conceived as genuinely
free from concepts; 2) the imagination is not in agreement with the
intellectual conditions for the exhibition of a concept in general, but rather
its synthesizing activity satisfies the conditions required for the very
application of a determinate concept. In this regard, the free harmony of
imagination and understanding is not however to be intended exclusively as due
to the absence of conceptual determination, or in other words, the
absence of conceptual determination must be seen as aesthetically peculiar. In
this last section, I try to articulate this claim and to show that there are
compelling reasons supporting the distinction of the free play of the faculties
from the ordinary agreement of imagination and understanding involved in the
formation of empirical cognition.
First of all, it should
be considered that despite Kant’s
insistence on the conformity of the free play of the faculties with the
subjective condition of cognition so as to justify the claims of taste, he is
not willing to reduce the aesthetic peculiarity of judgments of taste to
cognition and its requirements.[19]
In fact, not only do judgments of taste fail to produce any cognitive
determination of the object, but more fundamentally they are not aimed at
cognition at all in the first place.[20]
Essentially, this remark supports the consideration of the free play of the
faculties as an agreement of imagination and understanding which is different
in kind from the one required by the reflecting power of judgment for the
purpose of cognition. In this regard, Fiona Hughes proposes to distinguish between
the “cooperation” of
the faculties and their “harmony” as respectively involved
in cognitive judgments and in judgments of taste. In particular, she
meaningfully holds that: “The
harmony such judgments display is a special case of the cooperation of the
faculties necessary for any cognition.” (Hughes 2007, pp. 263-264) In this way, it
seems possible to explain both the familiarity and the specificity of the free
play of the faculties with regard to the agreement of imagination and understanding
required for the possibility of empirical cognition. Moreover, by
distinguishing in this way between the two states of mind it is possible,
according to Hughes, to argue that Kant’s definition of the free harmony of the
faculties as fulfilling the subjective condition of cognition is necessary not
only to provide a ground for the claims of taste, but also ultimately to
highlight the very requirements of the logical reflecting power of judgment. In
other words, the harmony of the faculties could count as exemplary for the
initial condition of possibility of cognition, which can be only shown in
judgments of taste, since in cognitive judgments the cognition-oriented
cooperation of the faculties is masked by the actual fulfillment of the
cognitive aim. (Hughes 2007, p. 262)
The free play of the
faculties can be then effectively taken as shedding light on the non-aesthetic
agreement of the faculties necessary for the reflecting power of judgment. As
an advantage, this reading may provide a further interpretation of Kant’s intriguing suggestion
of a pleasure which used to be felt in the comprehensibility of nature in its
empirical order, which “requires
a study to make us attentive to the purposiveness of nature for our
understanding in our judging of it.” (KU,
AA 05:187 / 74) Hence, this could actually explain to what extent the aesthetic
experience of the beautiful counts as “an experience in which the basic pleasure
of reflection is revealed” (Barchana-Lorand
2002, p. 319), namely
on the condition that such a “revelation” depends on the contingent
occurrence of a state of mind which merely exemplifies the functioning of the representative faculties within the act of sole reflection as
carried out by the logical reflecting power of judgment.
As it is known, unlike the case of the
determining power of judgment, the activity of the reflecting power of judgment
does not presuppose concepts. In this regard, Kant states that the condition
for the comprehension of the form apprehended by the imagination under a
concept must be individuated by the reflecting power of judgment by means of
reflection “on
a rule concerning a perception” (EEKU, AA 20:220 / 23).[21]
The state of mind requisite
for such a process is that of a relation between the faculties as required by the power of judgment in
general. This involves a comparison between the actual relation of the
faculties in the given perception with the one required for the effective
exhibition of a concept. Within this framework,
If,
then, the form of a given object in empirical intuition is so constituted that
the apprehension of its manifold in the
imagination agrees with the presentation of a concept of the
understanding (though which concept be undetermined), then in the mere reflection
understanding and imagination mutually agree for the advancement of their business,
and the object will be perceived as purposive merely for the power of judgment,
hence the purposiveness itself will be considered as merely subjective; for
which, further, no determinate concept of the object at all is required nor is
one thereby generated, and
the judgment itself is not a cognitive judgment. –Such a judgment is called an aesthetic judgment
of reflection. (EEKU, AA
20:220-1 / 23)[22]
It seems that the key
to grasp the very functioning of the reflecting power of judgment with regard
to the production of empirical concepts is to consider the case of merely
reflecting judgments which, as Hughes points out, makes explicit what the mere
state of mind of sole reflection on a given form consists of. The case of
aesthetic judgments of reflection is then in this sense paradigmatic. In this
regard, Kant holds moreover, that judgments of taste
as merely reflecting judgments are “grounded
only on the subjective formal condition of a judgment in general”, which is “the faculty for judging
itself”. (KU, AA 05:287
/ 167 my emphasis) Unlike cognitive judgments, only judgments of taste are solely
grounded on a mere act of judging:
since
no concept of the object is here the ground of the judgment, it [the agreement
of the faculties] can consist only in the subsumption of the imagination itself
(in the case of a representation by means of which an object is given) under
the condition that the understanding in general advance from intuitions to
concepts. […]
taste, as a subjective power of judgment, contains a principle of subsumption,
not of intuitions under concepts, but of the faculty of intuitions
or presentations (i.e., of the imagination) under the faculty of
concepts (i.e., the understanding), insofar as the former in its freedom
is in harmony with the latter in its lawfulness. (KU, AA 05:287 / 167-8)
While cognitive judgments are the result
of a determinate agreement between the faculties as due to a determinate act of
subsumption of intuitions under concepts as performed by the power of judgment,
the free harmony of the faculties achieves the conformity with the subjective
conditions of cognition, hence “the
well-proportioned disposition that we require for all cognition” (KU, AA 05:219 / 104)
as a result of a general and hence undetermined subsumption of the faculties
themselves.
Ultimately, the
distinction between the free play of the faculties and the ordinary cooperation
required for the possibility of empirical cognition clarifies to what extent
Kant’s
reference to the beautiful object contributes to the issue of pan-aestheticism.
In this regard, the previous section pointed out that 1) the disposition of the
faculties depends on the given object; 2) the free play of the faculties sets
imagination and understanding in an optimal
disposition with regard to cognition in general,
which can only be
felt; 3) however, the analysis of the notion of the optimal disposition
concluded that it is the same proportion which is required by both cognition
and taste. On the basis of the previous considerations, it is possible now to
see how this may be possible,
namely by considering the two agreements of the faculties, hence the
proportions of their disposition, as a result of two
different acts of judging. In the free play, the representative faculties are
set in the very same proportion in which they are supposed to
be in order for empirical cognition
to be possible, hence for the actual application of an empirical concept, which
ultimately provides the manifold of intuition with the kind of unity required
for cognizing the object. In the case of the
beautiful, however, the act of judging occasioned by the form of the object is merely
reflecting, hence the result is
a judgment
of taste because reflection
on that particular form
apprehended by the imagination
finds this latter as already accomplishing the intellectual requirements for unity and
lawfulness independently of concepts. As a result, it is felt with pleasure and the object
judged as purposive with respect to the reflecting power of judgment.[23]
It is right then to claim
that since the disposition of the faculties depends on the objects given to us
in intuition, then exclusively some but not all objects can elicit the feeling
of pleasure due to the free play of the faculties. However, as already pointed out,
one should not expect from Kant’s account of taste more
than this sole remark, since it leaves undetermined in virtue of which
properties an object is to be judged as beautiful. It can only be presumed that
the beautiful form should be such as to make it particularly pleasant for the
understanding to subsume the manifold apprehended by the imagination under
concepts in general, for it provides
by itself some kind of unity which would be normally
guaranteed by the application of a concept.[24] Thus, the free harmony of the faculties can be finally
described as consisting precisely in “the facilitated
play of both powers of the mind […] enlivened through mutual agreement” (KU, AA 05:219 / 104). Thus,
again, the fact that the aesthetic unity is performed without concepts does
matter, since the very possibility of being perceived without concepts by means
of a disinterested pleasure
depends finally on the individual form at issue. In other words, the capacity
of the imagination to present a form which is contingently found by the power
of judgment to be in agreement with the intellectual requirement of unity
without producing any cognition cannot but be determined by the aesthetic
specificity of the object.
Conclusion
The claim that everything is potentially
beautiful seems to follow from Kant’s
account of judgments of taste as grounded on the feeling of the free play of
the faculties, which in turn seems to be a common condition for both taste and
cognition. The strategy to determine whether Kant’s account is to be
committed to the claim that everything can be beautiful has been that of
challenging Kant’s
need to explain the free and yet harmonious play of the faculties in terms of a state of mind satisfying the
subjective condition of cognition. In
this regard, the metacognitive attempt to revisit Kant’s claim on the
non-conceptuality of judgments of taste has been rejected in favour of a precognitive
explanation of the free play of the faculties. Finally, even though the free
play of the faculties does not presuppose any conceptual determination of the
object in a precognitive sense, it has been argued that it also does not lend
itself to pan-aestheticism. In fact, it has emerged that the free play of the
faculties has to be kept distinct from the ordinary cooperation of the
faculties required by the reflecting power of judgment for the possibility of empirical
cognition. In particular, the activity of the
imagination cannot be considered as free within any act of the power of
judgment, either determining or reflecting, which is aimed at cognition.
Moreover, Kant’s argument explicitly shows that
the beautiful object contributes crucially to the solution of the problem of
pan-aestheticism, so that it can be concluded that the only circumstances under
which the pleasure of the free play of the faculties can be elicited are those
determined by the perceived object, even though the latter cannot be conceptually
determined. Thus, pan-aestheticism cannot follow from Kant’s account of judgments of
taste. Even though it could be accepted that everything is potentially beautiful
by explaining why everything is not actually felt as such, this would not
represent a consistent conclusion to be drawn from Kant’s account of judgments of
taste, for the very freedom of the imagination is not involved in cognition and
hence does not occur every
time an object is cognized.
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