On Aesthetic Judgments and Contemplative Perception in
the Critique of the Power of Judgment
Hemmo Laiho·
University of Turku, Finland
Abstract
The paper argues that much of Kant’s
largely formalistic account of aesthetic appreciation stands on the idea that the judger is able to engage with the
object of her judgment purely sensibly and hence non-conceptually or
non-cognitively. This is to say that the judger must be able to ground her
judgment on the immediate sensory affection by the object (which makes her
judgment an aesthetic judgment of sense) or on the object’s sensible form
(which makes her judgment an aesthetic judgment of taste). The paper also
argues that these two purely sensible grounds, accessible in the aesthetic
examination of objects, underlie the feeling involved in such judgments. In
broader terms, the paper outlines how Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment
suggests what might be called a contemplative model of perception.
Key words
Aesthetic Judgment;
Contemplation; Form; Intuition; Sensation
1.
Introduction
I argue, in what follows, that much of Kant’s account
of aesthetic appreciation, as presented in the Critique of the Power of Judgment in particular, stands on the idea that the judger is able to
engage with the object of her judgment purely sensibly and hence
non-conceptually or, as one might also want to put it, non-cognitively (pace e.g. Janaway 1997). Put differently, I
want to underline that for Kant the possibility of certain kinds of judgments
depends on purely sensuous or formalistic outlook on things, and that such an
outlook implies conceptually unmediated sensible content. By such content Kant
means, roughly, the way a thing looks or sounds, or is represented to look or
sound, which can be understood either as a representation of the immediate
sensory affection by the thing or its sensible structure, composition or form (Gestalt, Form).
In aesthetics, such a position
implies formalism. That said, I suspect that Kant’s complex theory in the third
Critique completely fits formalism or any other common label or “ism”.
Formalism nevertheless has its place in aesthetic evaluation, at least in
certain contexts, and I think this is also true of Kant (see e.g. Zangwill
2001). Instead of arguing for a formalist interpretation of Kant, however, my
goal in what follows is to examine some of the basic tenets of Kant’s theory of
aesthetic judgment, and while some of these tenets do support a formalist
reading of Kant’s aesthetics, they are perhaps more illustrative of Kant’s views
on perception underlying his aesthetic theory more generally. Relatedly, I will
speak about aesthetic appreciation in two senses: as a matter of palate and the
like, or “the taste of the senses” (KU, 5:214), on the one hand, and as
a matter of taste in the 18th century sense of the term, or “the
taste of reflection” (ibid.), on the other. Kant’s formalist tendencies
have to do with the latter, but the former is, I think, equally illustrative of
Kant’s overall position.
I
begin, in §2, by examining the ground of aesthetic judgment, which can be
understood in two ways, namely either as a feeling or as that which prompts the
feeling. The latter kind of ground can be either a mere sensation (which makes
the judgment an aesthetic judgment of sense) or intuition (which, at least
ideally, makes the judgment a pure aesthetic judgment of taste). In §3, I
examine what it means to engage with objects merely sensibly, as suggested by
both kinds of aesthetic judgment. In §4, I show how such a stance on objects
not only suggests what I call a contemplative model of perception but finds
further support from Kant’s views on contemplation and aesthetic reflection. In
the concluding remarks, I consider briefly how the contemplative model of
perception, as suggested by the Critique
of the Power of Judgment, might connect with Kant’s theory of cognition as
presented in the Critique of Pure Reason.
2.
Grounds of Aesthetic Judgments
Kant famously lays out his account of aesthetic
judgement in the Critique of the Power of
Judgment. Many things Kant says in
that book suggests that Kant’s view on aesthetic appreciation of nature
and art can be considered to be more or less formalistic. One of the things
that points to this direction is the idea that the cognitive subject must be
able to represent the object of her aesthetic judgment without basing her
representation on concepts in order to get the required kind of satisfaction
out of the object in question (see e.g. KU, 5:219). A more explicitly
formalistic demand is that “beauty […] should properly concern mere form” (Kant
2000b, p. 108; KU, 5:223).
Many commentators have been puzzled
about these requirements. If, for example, the non-conceptuality of aesthetic
judgment is taken to mean that in order to make aesthetic judgments we must
abandon all our conceptual understanding of the things we make judgments about,
then Kant’s position may indeed appear as absurd (e.g. Cohen 2002, p. 2). One
might want to add to this that here we are speaking of judgments, and one of
the core features of Kant’s theory of cognition is that the human thinker is
more than anything a maker of judgments the constituents of which are concepts
or other judgments (A69/B94; B141). It might therefore be considered trivially
true that all kinds of judgments are in some sense conceptual and trivially
false that judgments could be made without the application of concepts, or the
faculty of concepts also known as understanding, for that matter.[1]
In a similar vein, the “mere form” requirement may suggest some kind of “empty
cognitive stock” on the part of the judger, which some commentators find
utterly implausible (see e.g. Janaway 1997, pp. 459-460; Wollheim 1980, p. 33
and passim).
Still, there are reasons to attribute
the idea of non-conceptual engagement with objects to Kant without confusing
him for Schopenhauer, for example (pace Janaway 1997, 461-463).[2]
The first thing to acknowledge is that the idea of the non-conceptuality of
aesthetic judgment ultimately concerns the ground
of judgment (or so I wish to argue). By the ground of aesthetic judgment
Kant sometimes means feeling (e.g. KU, 231). Accordingly, any such
judgment has to do with the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, understood
either as a particular feeling or the faculty responsible for feelings (see
e.g. EEKU, 20:224; KU, 5:196). And for Kant feelings are
non-cognitive states that concern objects’ influence on us rather than objects
as such (see e.g. V-Met/Arnoldt aka Metaphysik Vigilantius, 29:1009).
This, however, is not the end of
story. To identify the ground of aesthetic judgment straightforwardly with
(dis)pleasurable feeling and leave it at that would be to overlook another
crucial point about the ground of aesthetic judgment (cf. e.g. Janaway 1997).
The further thing to acknowledge is that which enables the feeling. As Kant
repeatedly suggests, although he is not always explicit about it, this
feeling-enabler is that which is sensibly present to the judger, namely the “representation through which the object is
given (not through which it is thought)” (Kant 2000b, p. 115; KU, 5:230). By such a representation,
Kant must mean what he calls intuition (Anschauung).
Kant also speaks of the “form of the purposiveness of an object” as the ground
of the judgment of taste (Kant 2000b, p. 106; KU, 5:221). As I read this
phrase, Kant means, basically, the object’s spatial form or structure, although
the phrase also contains the further idea that aesthetically praiseworthy
objects arouse a peculiar kind of sense of purposiveness as we examine them (I
will return to both of these topics below).
For
now, the most important thing to acknowledge is that the
feeling is but a consequence or effect (see also A29/B44) of a certain kind of
response allowed by (a certain kind of examination that targets) the object as
it is given to us. In other words, the touchstone of aesthetic judgment is not
just feeling as such, but a specific manner of representation of the object on
which the feeling itself is grounded. Here there are two alternatives: either
the feeling is grounded on sense-sensation or the feeling is grounded on
sense-intuition, as the distinction is put in the 1794-95 lectures on
metaphysics, where Kant briefly explains his aesthetic theory as well (Kant
2001, p. 479; V-Met/Arnoldt aka Metaphysik Vigilantius, 29:1009-1010).
The distinction between
sense-sensation and sense-intuition maps quite neatly onto Kant’s distinction
between two kinds of aesthetic judgment. As far as Kant’s theory of judgment in general is concerned, the
central new thing in the Critique of the
Power of Judgment is of course the distinction between determining and reflecting judgment. Undoubtedly, the most
discussed variant of reflecting judgment is the judgment of taste, a
special kind of subjectively yet universally valid judgment concerning the
beautiful—e.g. “This rose is beautiful.” As everybody familiar with the third Critique
knows, such a judgment is also known as reflecting aesthetic judgment in
distinction to reflecting teleological judgment. However, even though
it is not uncommon in the literature to identify aesthetic judgment with the
reflecting variety (see e.g. Kukla 2006, p. 6n10; Pillow 2006, p. 255;
Longuenesse 2000, pp. 168-169n4), there is also non-reflecting aesthetic
judgment, namely the aesthetic judgment of sense—e.g. “This wine tastes nice.” As opposed to reflecting aesthetic
judgments, non-reflecting aesthetic judgments are supposed to express merely a
private viewpoint on objects, which need not be anything more than an
expression of personal (dis)liking or “agreeableness”.
Most
importantly for the present purposes, aesthetic judgments of sense—or judgments
of sensation, as Kant at one point calls them (KU, 5:288)—are ultimately based on sensation, understood as the matter of perception (A167/B209). By contrast, the possibility of the judgment of
taste, although necessarily feeling-bound, ultimately stems from the object’s form (Gestalt, Form). This also means that such a judgment depends on intuition
(see also V-Met/Arnoldt aka
Metaphysik Vigilantius, 29:1010)—i.e.
the kind of representation or operation of the mind that gives us
spatiotemporally structured somethings with their distinctive Gestalten.[3]
Unsurprisingly,
then, Kant calls aesthetic judgments of sense material aesthetic judgments in
distinction to formal aesthetic judgments also known as judgments of taste (KU, 5:223; see also EEKU, 20:224). As will be
elaborated in what follows, in the case of formal aesthetic judgment, the
pleasurable mental state required for a successful judgment can only arise from
attending the form of the object, not from thinking it under some concept. In a
similar vein, to make a material aesthetic judgment, you must base your
judgment on sensations—i.e. “the matter of the representations” (Kant 2000b, p.
108; KU, 5:224)—produced by the
object (as it affects your palate, for example), not on what you happen to know
about it. Indeed, it must be this non-cognitive or non-conceptual stance
towards objects from which Kant’s theoretical need to distinguish between
“merely” aesthetic judgments (see e.g. EEKU, 20:223) and
knowledge-aiming, cognitively determining judgments originates.
3. Attending to the Given
The non-cognitive dimension of aesthetic judgments
alluded to in the previous section does not need to mean that such judgments,
as judgments, are purely sensuous. On the contrary, it should be clear that we
cannot make and utter the judgment “This rose is beautiful” without being
perfectly aware that we are examining a rose, and this requires
concept-application like any judgment. In the same vein, it would be odd to
insist that making a certain kind of judgment about a particular rose would
require that we abandon all our knowledge and beliefs about roses.
Accordingly,
the kind of contemplative perception suggested by Kant in his aesthetic theory
most likely does not mean that the overall cognitive state of the subject
must be totally concept-free at a certain moment. It sounds more plausible that
the subject, while possibly perfectly understanding that she is looking at a
rose, succeeds in also regarding the object only according to those features
that are not concept-bound. Kant himself alludes to such a situation in his
lectures, when he tells his students how the existence of a house may pain him
on grounds presented by his understanding—presumably, because of what he knows
about its past—yet continue to please him as far its form is concerned (V-Met/Arnoldt
aka Metaphysik Vigilantius,
29:1009-1010).
What
I take to be crucial is that the judger ought to ground her judgment on the sensation
itself, if the judgment is supposed to be a material aesthetic judgment.
Similarly, the judger ought to ground her judgment on mere intuition, i.e. the
kind of representation that provides the form, if the judgment is supposed to
be a formal aesthetic judgment, as it appears to be the case in Kant’s example.
Otherwise, the judgment is either not aesthetic at all or the judgment is not a
pure and free aesthetic judgment, i.e. it might still be a judgment of adherent
or relative beauty (KU, 5:229-230) or “a partly intellectualized
judgment of taste” (Kant 2000b, p. 117; KU, 5:232-233). Similarly, if an
aesthetic judgment is mixed with interest, it is not pure but partial (KU,
5: 205).
The main
point is that the judger could not make fully-fledged aesthetic judgments
unless she had access to purely sensible grounds. In other words, in order to
make material aesthetic judgments, the judging subject must be able to attend
to tastes, smells, colors, sounds and textures, and perhaps also joys and sorrows
and the like, insofar (and only insofar) as these are sensed or felt. For
example, the manner a specific red color looks like, or the taste of coffee
(and its taste alone), could serve as proper grounds of such judgments. An
actual material aesthetic judgment thus is, basically, both an indication of how
something tastes to me, for example, and an indication of the fact that my
attending to this particular sensation caused by certain object comes with
pleasure or displeasure (see also e.g. V-Met-L2/Pölitz,
28:586). In a similar vein, for formal aesthetic judgments to be possible, the
judger must be able to attend to the object’s Gestalt and ground her
judgment on this and only this. For example, the spatial constitution of the
house (see V-Met/Mron, 29:1009) could
serve as such a ground of judgment insofar as the object is considered merely
formally yet sensibly, that is, without basing the judgment on the material
features provided through sensation or features attributed to the object when
thinking it under some concept or the other.
Such material or formal yet merely sensible features of objects should be strictly distinguished
from features such as size or length, understood as measures based on some
unit. Indeed, merely sensible features of objects should be kept apart from any
such properties attributed to the object through which we come to understand
what kind of an object it
is—including, in particular, what purpose
the object might serve (e.g. KU,
5:221, 226-227).[4]
Certainly, concepts are necessary for understanding and experiencing objects
this way—ultimately, you would need both the categories and empirical concepts
for that. For example, when you think of the rose as a certain kind of organic
complex that has this or that feature, you employ at least the categories of
Plurality and substantia et accidens,
but also the empirical concepts of rose and plant.
It is, however, equally crucial to
distinguish features accessed via sense-sensation and sense-intuition from any
such features determined through concepts. In particular, it does not seem to
be the case that, for Kant, the categories or empirical concepts would have
anything to do with the exact way things look, sound, taste, feel or smell
purely sensibly speaking—in their empirical uniqueness, as it were. Indeed, not
only are the categories a class of a priori concepts, but apparently all
concepts for Kant are representations that “[contain] only the common
characteristic (leaving out what is particular)” (Kant 2000b, p. 345; KU,
5:484). By contrast, for you to make an aesthetic judgment you will have to
base your judgment on the particular or otherwise your judgment is ruined.
There are many ways to ruin an
aesthetic judgment. To try and base your judgment on pre-established rules, to
base your judgment on testimony, to base your judgment on generalizations, or
more generally and more closely to the point just made, to base your judgment
on concepts are all ways to ruin a judgment if the judgment is supposed to be
truly an aesthetic judgment (KU, 5:215-216, 231-232, 285-286). As far as
the judgment of taste is concerned, to be interested in the existence of the
object (i.e. to desire it) would be a yet another way to ruin the judgment (see
e.g. KU, 5:209). Indeed, the disinterestedness criterion—according to which you
must attend to the object for its own sake—might just as well be the most
central feature of Kant’s theory of aesthetic evaluation. I do not think that
the notion of disinterestedness is crucial for understanding the more general
idea behind Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment and contemplative model of
perception, however.
More crucially for our purposes, as
Kant writes when he explains that judgments of taste are independent of
perfection as well, basing an aesthetic judgment on concepts is simply
something we cannot do, because
if
one were to call confused concepts and the objective judgment that is grounded
in them aesthetic, one would have an understanding that judged by sense or a
sense that represented its object through concepts, both of which are
self-contradictory. (Kant 2000b, p.
113, KU, 5:228)
Here, Kant partly reiterates one of the basic points
of his view about the human mind, according to which the faculties of
understanding and sensibility are separate capacities whose cognitive functions
and contributions are unexchangeable and irreducible to one another (see e.g.
A51-52/B75-77). At the same time, it seems that he also wants to make a very
simple point, which is that the very notion of aesthetic judgment would be a misnomer if it would require as
its ground something that cannot really be sensible (sinnlich, ästhetisch) in
the end. In the quote, “confused concepts” are such a thing: even if confused
or lacking in clarity and distinctness, they are nevertheless concepts, not
sensible representations.
To put it differently, the ground of
aesthetic judgment must be something that is left out from the conceptual
determination of the object, and the maker of an aesthetic judgment about the
object must pay attention to just this something, which Kant identifies with a
feeling, on the one hand, and the way the object shows itself to the senses, on
the other. For Kant, taste in particular requires the capacity to abstract from
conceptual determination, or as he explicates his position using an expert’s
knowledge of plants as an example,
even the botanist, who recognizes in [the
flower] the reproductive organ of the plant pays no attention to this natural
end if he judges the flower by means of taste. (Kant 2000b, p. 114, KU,
5:229)
Of course, “paying no attention to natural ends” can
be seen as a further point, but the botanist example at least partly repeats
the main point made above: namely, that in order to make certain kind of
judgments, you must be able to limit your attention to certain things available
to you and not let other things, such as your knowledge base, come in the way
of your appreciation of the object. As one might also want to put it,
conceptual knowledge is irrelevant for aesthetic appreciation (Budd 2002, p.
11n14).[5]
More technically put, to attend to the
object’s form, as required by the judgment of taste, is to apprehend the object
in mere intuition.[6]
Crucially for current purposes, as Kant says explicitly in the Section VIII of
the Introduction to the third Critique,
apprehension (Auffassung, also apprehensio) takes place “prior to any
concept” (Kant 2000b, p. 78; KU, 5:192). Though he also suggests that
usually the goal of apprehension is “to unite the intuition with concepts for a
cognition in general” (ibid.), clearly such a unification is something
that need not happen. He repeats the very same point in his lectures in the
1790s when he remarks that understanding can
connect with intuition or the “representation through the senses” (Kant 2001, p. 480; V-Met/Arnoldt aka
Metaphysik Vigilantius, 29:1010). Most importantly for the
present purposes, as Kant suggests in the third Critique, uniting intuition with the concept(s) of the object furnished
by understanding must not happen insofar as the grounding of an aesthetic
judgment is concerned. Instead, since the ultimate ground of judgments of taste
depends on (or indeed is) intuition, which is the “representation through which the object is
given (not through which it is thought)” (Kant 2000b, p. 115; KU, 5:230), you are supposed to
apprehend the object by targeting it as it is given to you merely sensibly.
Apprehension
involves the power of imagination, which Kant identifies with the faculty of
intuition in the third Critique (e.g.
KU, 5:190). As he further explicates
in the lectures: “All objects of sense-intuition or the
power of imagination are also objects of the aesthetic power of judgment” (Kant 2001, p. 480; V-Met/Arnoldt aka
Metaphysik Vigilantius, 29:1010). Thus, whatever we “intuit”
is a potential object of aesthetic judgment—including, apparently, imagined
objects too.
In addition to sense-intuition and
the power of imagination, the procedure for finding out whether an object is
beautiful also involves understanding. This is a delicate issue. As
Kant infamously has it, we are supposed to recognize the beauty of the object
when our imagination and understanding are in “harmony” as we attend to the
object disinterestedly. Accordingly, beauty is not exactly an objective feature
of the object itself, but a feature of our own mental constitution that may or
may not end up in a certain kind of state in the apprehension of a certain kind
of object (see e.g. KU, 5:211). For example, if I judge
that the rose is beautiful, even though I do attribute beauty to the object,
ultimately this means that this particular rose has the power to produce a
certain kind of pleasurable mental state in me as I examine the rose. To this
extent, judgments of taste are like any aesthetic judgments.
Much ink has been spilled on the harmony
of the faculties.[7]
I am suspicious, however, how much really rests on this rather
speculative-sounding notion. To skip a detail or two, I take Kant’s key point
to be simply this. As we examine an object, we may encounter “a certain
purposiveness” (Kant 2000b, p. 120n; KU, 5:236*) in the way we confront
the object, although this purposiveness has nothing to do with any of the ends
attributable to the object. Rather, the purposiveness in question is “a
purposiveness of the representational state of the subject” (Kant 2000b, p.
112; KU, 5:227). Crucially for
current purposes, however, such a purposiveness without external
purpose—ultimately reflecting the fact that objects regarded as beautiful nonetheless
seem as if they were designed for our faculties—rests on the objects’
perceptual shape (Gestalt) or form (Form) (KU, 5: 279).[8]
The task of the imagination is to observe the perceptual form as if the
imagination was merely playing with the object, which also implies that the
imagination is not restricted by concepts (KU, 5:230). In the process,
understanding does not—or is not let to, as it were—fulfill its usual cognitive
function of uniting intuition with concepts, at least not insofar as the
grounding of aesthetic judgment is concerned.
Again, the minimized involvement of
the faculty of understanding need not mean that we must totally ignore our
beliefs and knowledge about the observed objects. As adult human beings with complex
conceptual repertoires, something like that would indeed be easier said than
done. Besides, we judge the rose to be beautiful in our examination of it—we do
not simply gaze at it. However, it seems to me that this observation would
still be beside Kant’s main point, which is that it must be possible for us to
access what is merely sensibly given to us as we engage with objects, or
otherwise we could not make properly grounded aesthetic judgments about them.
It may thus sound, paradoxically, that we need to cognitively abandon
everything else in the aesthetic examination of objects and that we do not need
to do so because we cannot.
Maybe
the following example helps to ease this apparent tension. Suppose there is a
table in front of you. As you look at its rectangular shape, you also attend to
the sensation that you get when you feel its surface with your hand. In
addition to this, suppose you think what a smooth table it is—much smoother
than your previous table, say. None of this means, however, that the exact way
you feel the smoothness of the table would somehow disappear from you when you attend
to its rectangular form or compare the texture of this table to the texture of
that other table you recall from memory. Instead, you have got yourself a
full-blown experience that makes all these things and aspects available to you.
At the same time, these different things and aspects are perfectly
distinguishable and detachable from the all of it, including their sources. For
example, the smooth texture felt hapticly against your fingertips as such is
detachable from the shape-perception of the tabletop, just as the judgment
about the two tables is detachable from the sensations you had when you touched
them, just as both of these instances of perception are detachable from
remembrance. Most importantly, all these different aspects and stances towards
objects can in their turn serve as grounds of judgment.
Let me draw
another example from pictorial arts. Basing your judgment on the form of the
drawing does not obviously require that you leave the colors unattended.
Indeed, it would be next to impossible to visually perceive anything like that.
As Kant himself rightly emphasizes, the colors actually help us attend to the
object (KU, 5:225-226). At the same time, Kant would insist that in order
to make a formal aesthetic judgment about the drawing, you cannot base your
judgment on colors or color-sensations. Instead, you must base your judgment on
the form of the object—in this case, more specifically, on the drawn
figure—provided through your sense-intuition of the object. Similarly, if it is
a material aesthetic judgment that you are making, then you must base your
judgment on the sense-sensations that accompany the intuition of the object.
Crucially for understanding Kant’s aesthetic theory and the view of perceptual
examination of objects at its background, only by having access to such grounds
can we have something to merely reflect and contemplate upon. Next, we shall
turn to these two notions.
4. Contemplation and Mere Reflection versus Conceptual Thinking
As I argued in
the previous section(s), Kant’s view of aesthetic judgment depends on the idea
that we can attend to the sensibly given, whether that originates in
sense-sensation or sense-intuition (as Kant called sensations and intuitions in
one of his lectures). Kant himself stresses this by distinguishing between
representations through which the objects are given and representations through
which the objects are thought (KU, 5:230). The kind of representing
through which we attend to the sensibly given might be called a purely aesthetic
examination of objects. In the case
of material aesthetic judgment, this would mean attending to the way the object
affects the senses in sensation. In the case of formal aesthetic judgments,
purely aesthetic examination would require attending to the form of the object given
in intuition.
To this extent, the kind
of judgment we make depends on what we are attending to. It can also be that we
do not attend to some of the perceptual aspects at all, although they are still
“there” all the time. This can also be due to our physical constitution. Kant
alludes to this at one point in the Anthropology,
when he states that “sight comes
nearer to being a pure intuition (the immediate representation of the
given object, without admixture of noticeable sensation).” (Kant 2009, p. 268; Anth, 7: 156) As
one might also put it, we can alternate our focus on the material and formal
aspects of perceptual content, depending on which kind of judgment we are
aiming at. Since Kant mostly discusses the kind of aesthetic judgment that
targets the formal aspects, i.e. the judgment of taste, let us focus on it for
the time being.
In the third Critique, when Kant analyzes the concept of sublime,[9]
he alludes to the distinction between purely aesthetic representing and
thinking as follows:
[W]e
must not take the sight of the ocean as we think it, enriched with all sorts of knowledge (which are
not, however, contained in the immediate intuition), […] rather, one must
consider the ocean merely as the poets do, in accordance with what its
appearance [Augenschein] shows[.] (Kant 2000b, p. 152; KU, 5:270)
As I read this passage, for a poem to be sublime, it
must reflect the way the subject of the poem—here, the ocean—shows itself to
the eye (Augenschein), which in turn
must have a special kind of effect on us. In particular, the poem, to be a
sublime representation of nature, is not supposed to reflect our knowledge of
nature. As Kant points out, such knowledge is not available to us immediately
in intuition, implying in addition that a successfully sublime poem must
reflect just that, namely, what is “contained in the immediate intuition.”
The
more general point Kant wants to emphasize with this distinction is, again, the
difference between judging “on the basis of what he has before his sense” and
judging “on the basis of what he has in his thoughts” (Kant 2000b, p. 116; KU,
5:231). As should be clear by now, aesthetic judging is of the former kind. The
archetype of such judgment is the judgment of taste, which Kant also describes
as contemplative:
[T]he
judgment of taste is merely contemplative, i.e., a judgment that, indifferent
with regard to the existence of an object, merely connects its constitution
together with the feeling of pleasure and displeasure. But this contemplation
itself is also not directed to concepts; for the judgment of taste is not a
cognitive judgment (neither a theoretical nor a practical one), and hence it is
neither grounded on concepts nor aimed at them. (Kant 2000b, p. 95; KU, 5:209)
For the purposes of this paper, the most crucial thing
in the passage—beside the already made points that aesthetic judgment must not
be grounded on concepts and that aesthetic judgment is not even aimed at
conceptual understanding of objects—is the following phrase: “this contemplation
itself is also not directed to concepts.” As I read him, by this Kant wants to
underline that the act of contemplation itself must be non-conceptual, not just
the feeling involved.
As we
have seen, judgments of taste require that the imagination can play freely with
the object, which involves apprehending the object in mere intuition. Now, for
Kant, thinking about the object would require bringing
the object under concepts and letting the faculty of understanding determine
the act of apprehension, i.e. the way the intuition is to be united with
concepts. However, as we have seen, this need not happen and indeed must not
happen if the imagination is to remain in the kind of state that is required for
grounding a judgment of taste. In other words, you are not supposed to bring
the object under concepts with respect to those sensible features upon which
your aesthetic judgment is to be based, most notably the object’s Gestalt.
More
generally, all of the above suggests what can be called a contemplative model
of perception. Such a view suggests that the perceiving subject is presented
with things to look at and listen to—and so on and so forth for the rest of the
sensory modalities—and, most importantly, to aesthetically reflect upon. Such a
stance also requires that concepts do not come in the way of contemplation (or,
say, mere tasting, if it is a material judgment that is at stake). More
technically put, contemplation can carry on as long as concepts are not being
used to actively determine the content of perception. As a matter of fact, such
a stance seems to be demanded by the possibility of aesthetic power of judgment
itself. As Kant wrote in the longer, unpublished introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment,
for
the logical power of judgment intuitions, even if they are merely sensible
(aesthetic), must first be raised to concepts in order to serve for cognition
of the object, which is not the case with aesthetic power of judgment. (Kant
2000c, p. 46; EEKU, 20:247)
We have already provided reasons to think that the
kind of proto-cognitive situation, where intuitions are not “raised to
concepts”, consists in apprehension that remains merely contemplative. As one
might also put it, contemplation comes very close to apprehension done for its
own sake. Kant also coins such an operation as “mere reflection on a given
intuition” (Kant 2000b, p. 197;
KU, 5:320). One might also describe such a merely reflecting or
mirroring stance as follows. In full-blown contemplation, it is as if our
thoughts about objects escape us and we let our sensibility lead the way.
However, even then it is certainly not the case that the objects themselves
escape us. In other words, Kant’s view suggests that merely contemplative
perception or reflection is nevertheless “objectual”. In above, we tried to
concretize this idea with the table example: even if you were thinking about
the old table, you could still perceptually attend to the new table, and indeed
merely sensibly.
Such
an interpretation, as unorthodox as it may be, has some benefits, among them
the fact that it leaves plenty of room for the idea that our sensible
representations of objects remain richer in content than our thoughts about those
very same objects. Indeed, perhaps in some cases we simply fail to achieve a
determinate or precise enough conceptual determination of the object no matter
how hard we try. In the third Critique,
Kant alludes to such a possibility with the notion of inexponible (inexponibele) intuition, by which he means intuition that gives us more than we
can express linguistically (KU,
5:314, 342-343; see also Makkreel 2002, p. 240).[10]
As far as the faculties are concerned, this also means that sensibility, the
faculty of intuition and imagination, can provide us with representations of
objects that we simply cannot capture, at least not thoroughly, in a
determinate thought—representations that the understanding cannot fully grasp,
i.e. synthesize according to concepts. As Kant and many others would have it,
the realms of art and nature are full of objects that can provide us with such
representations. Moreover, as one might put it, this ineffable character of
aesthetic experience, if anything, makes these objects aesthetically valuable.
5. Contemplative Model of Perception and the Critique of Pure Reason
One question that
arises in light of the above is the compatibility of the purely contemplative
account of perception with Kant’s views in the Critique of Pure Reason.[11]
This is not the time and place to dive deep into the thorny debate about the
role of non-conceptual content and the like in Kant’s theory of cognition,
however.[12]
Instead, let me try to show, in a brief and general fashion, how the
contemplative model of perception suggested above can be regarded as fully
compatible with Kant’s views in the Critique of Pure Reason without,
say, assuming that Kant changed his views between the first and the third Critique.
Perhaps
the most important thing to acknowledge is that one of the core features of
Kant’s account of aesthetic examination or contemplation is that it is not even
supposed to be an activity that aims at cognition (see KU, 5:209). Indeed, one of Kant’s main points in making the
distinction between aesthetic and cognitive judgment in the first place must be
that only cognitive judgment is grounded on a definite rule or principle, which
for Kant involves bringing the object of judgment under a concept.[13]
Key parts of the Critique of Pure Reason deal exactly with the latter
kind of cognition-aiming activity. However, key parts of the Critique of the
Power of Judgment do not.
Another
thing to keep in mind at this point is that the non-conceptual dealings with
objects, as required by contemplation, only need to imply that the objects are
not epistemically assessed insofar as grounding one’s aesthetic judgment is
concerned. Put this way, one might claim that in order to judge aesthetically,
you must focus on the particular object offered to you by the senses (see KU,
5:186; cf. Anth 7:145), and,
moreover, in the way that lets you attend to the exact way the object appears
to you. Kant’s use of the term Augenschein,
which he contrasts with a thought about objects, is particularly telling in
this context. Another revealing passage can be found from the so-called Dohna-Wundlacken
Logic, where Kant is recorded to have said: “E.g., tasteful poetic descriptions of regions, which
produce only intuition, do not serve at all for cognition, are only cosmetic”
(Kant 1992, p. 444; V-Lo/Dohna, 24:706). And here is yet another
illuminating passage from the third Critique:
“Beauty in
nature […] is ascribed to
objects only in relation to reflection on their outer intuition, thus only to
the form of their surfaces […]” (Kant 2000b, 246; KU,
5:375).
Again, such a non-cognitive view on
objects that centers on “the form of their surfaces” is clearly something that
is not at stake in the Critique of Pure
Reason, where Kant, as far as his theory of cognition is concerned,
ultimately analyzes cognitive (objective) judgment. Just as importantly,
nowhere in the first Critique Kant
says that concepts or judgments have something to do with the exact way objects
present themselves to the senses. Some commentators seem to think that
perceptual content is “contaminated” by concepts according to Kant, but I do
not think that this is at all the case, and many things Kant says in the third Critique is a case in point.
Kant
hints at what I have called the contemplative model of perception in other
places as well. In the first Critique,
Kant suggests time and again that objects are given in intuition—or as we put it above, that mere intuition is
already an objectual representation
(see also e.g. McLear 2016, pp. 99-100; Okrent 2002, p. 94). In addition, Kant
suggests that synthesis as such is but a mere effect of imagination (A78/B103),
which too stands in opposition with the idea that all kinds of representational
activity would require synthesizing the manifold of intuition according to the
concepts of understanding. In support of this, Kant also points out that “in itself
the synthesis of imagination […] is nevertheless always sensible, for it
combines the manifold only as it appears in intuition, e.g., the shape of the
triangle” (A124). This passage, which I take to be crucial in understanding
Kant’s views on perception, can be read as suggesting that the way an object
shows itself purely sensibly speaking falls outside the scope of what Kant is
trying to explain about synthesis in the first Critique (see also e.g. Laiho 2020).
Moreover,
as Kant points out in the metaphysics lectures, the faculty of understanding
deals with objects in general terms: “It represents only the object in general, without looking to the
manner of its appearance” (Kant 2001, p. 256; V-Met/Mron, 29:888).
Similarly, in another lecture, Kant points out that “the logical power of
judgment judges the object not as such in intuition but rather through reason
alone” (Kant 2001, p. 480; V-Met/Arnoldt aka Metaphysik Vigilantius, 29:1010). Accordingly, as far as our
conceptual and cognitive understanding of objects goes, it seems that we must
present the objects in a way that abstracts from the exact manner the objects
appear to our senses. This in turn suggests that in fully cognitive dealings
with objects we need to ground our representations on objects’ shared features
(see also e.g. Log, 9:58). In contrast to this, arguably any such
generalizable, rule-indicating property is something on which not to ground one’s aesthetic
judgment. Rather, aesthetic judgments are grounded on sheer
particularity that lacks that kind of general or universal projectability (see
also Cohen 2002, p. 3). This is intimately related to Kant’s point that there
are no rules of taste, the point being that if there were such rules, the
beauty of the object would not only be generalizable and suitable for
testimony, but beauty would also indicate a genuine property of an object,
which, however, is exactly what Kant denies (e.g. KU, 5:211).
To
press on the point, the fact that we express
our aesthetic appreciation of objects with concepts—including putting the
general label ‘beautiful’ on them—does not need to undermine the idea that the
basis of aesthetic appreciation has little to do with concepts. What the
contemplative model of perception suggests is that the grounding elements of
aesthetic judgments—either the sensible form of the object or its immediate
effect on the senses, together with the feelings that follow or accompany
them—are utterly non-conceptual features of our experience and have to remain
so in order to serve as proper grounds of aesthetic judgment.
To
put it differently, as Kant implies in the lectures, the aesthetic power of
judgment has to do with the determination of the object of senses “according to
the laws of sensibility” (Kant 2001, p. 480; V-Met/Arnoldt aka Metaphysik
Vigilantius, 29:1010). The case of aesthetic
examination being ultimately governed by the laws of sensibility can be seen as
largely analogical with Kant’s analysis of the so-called incongruent
counterparts.[14] The
basic idea of that analysis is that the exact spatial configuration of such
counterparts—your left and right hand, for example—and the way they occupy
their places in space reveals something that our concepts cannot account for.
Instead, the ultimate difference of such counterparts is grounded in space (see
esp. Prol, 4:285-286). Most
importantly for the purposes of this paper, you may think about your hands as
you like, yet the very thing that makes you treat them as uniquely different
remains independent of your thoughts about them. Similarly, in aesthetic
judging, even though making an actual aesthetic judgment features concepts, the
very thing you base your judgment upon remains independent of any concepts. In
other words, the ground of your aesthetic judgment is (and indeed must be)
something purely sensible—just as the very difference between the two otherwise
seemingly similar hands.
It
could be argued further that it is indeed space that provides the ultimate
support for Kant’s universalistic theory of taste, according to which we may
demand agreement in matters of taste, though no-one can prove the truth of
their judgment.[15] The
argument might go roughly as follows. Space is shared by all human judgers.
Judgments of taste are grounded on the sensible forms of objects. These forms or
Gestalten are grounded in space. If
you and I manage to ground our individual judgments only on such formal
features of objects, we can claim to have achieved a universal standpoint on
them (at least humanly or “subjectively” speaking; see A26/B42). This is
because regarding objects this way has its roots in that which allows us to
represent them (or indeed any spatial objects) in the first place. Of course,
the aesthetic examination of objects also needs to have a specific effect on
the mind to have the objects count as beautiful, the universality of which we
cannot ascertain in the same way. However, this factor is external to the
purely sensible representational ground given in the object’s form, which
ground is there regardless of whether we assess the object’s beauty or not.
As a
final remark, let me repeat that the above findings do not mean that the judger
needs to be in a non-cognitive state altogether when she aesthetically examines
and appreciates an object. This is to say, among other things, that the judger
does not need to completely cease to conceptualize the object—if she did, she
would not be a judger anymore,
but just a gazer. At the same
time, aesthetic judgments are grounded not only on feeling but on a
representational content—be it a sense-intuition or sense-sensation—that by
itself must be wholly non-conceptual, and must also be so
taken, for it to serve as a proper kind of ground for aesthetic judgment. As
should be clear by now, this kind of representational content is the exact way
the object appears to the senses as the object is examined purely aesthetically
or contemplatively. Such an examination, which by itself does not depend on
concepts at all, must not only be possible according to Kant but seems to tell
us something deeply true about a certain—albeit very limited—type of aesthetic
appreciation of objects more generally.
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