Aesthetic Normativity in
Kant’s Account: A Regulative Model
Serena
Feloj*
University
of Pavia, Italy
Abstract
The notion of normativity has been key to an actualizing reading of the
subjective universality that for Kant characterizes the aesthetic judgment.
However, in the scholarly literature little discussion is made, somehow
unsurprisingly, of what exactly we should understand by normativity when it
comes to Kant’s aesthetics. Recent trends show indeed the tendency to take
normativity very broadly to the point of nuancing most of its core meaning.
Based on how we speak about normativity in aesthetics, we seem indeed to have
accepted that every kind of evaluative process is normative. I will argue that
the sentimentalist elements of Kant's account call for a revision of its normative
interpretations, for a better framing of its subjective universalism, and
finally for a reconsideration of aesthetic normativity in favour of
regulativity.
Keywords
normativity, regulative, aesthetic judgment, universalism, emotions
In the current debate, the term normativity is increasingly used to define
issues concerning epistemology, moral philosophy, aesthetics. Nevertheless, it
is difficult to understand the meaning of such a broad term and it is necessary
to define it first. In the light of the current debate on aesthetic
normativity, the key role played by emotions, and in particular by the feeling
of pleasure within Kant's account can be a real game changer (see Graham 2014).
The notion of normativity has been indeed key to an actualizing reading of the
subjective universality that for Kant characterizes the aesthetic judgement.
The question ensuing from the discussion on normativity in aesthetics can be
simplified as follows: how can an emotion, that is to say a subjective state of
mind, be expressed in a communicable and universally valid judgement? In this
regard it is true that, up to an extent, the notion of aesthetic normativity
finds suitable ground in Kant's theory of taste and this has lent Kant's
aesthetic judgement a high-rank position within the contemporary debate. Recent
trends show indeed the tendency to take normativity very broadly to the point
of nuancing most of its core meaning. Based on how we speak about normativity
in aesthetics, we seem indeed to have accepted that every kind of evaluative
process is normative.
I will notably argue that the sentimentalist elements of Kant's account
call for a revision of its normative interpretations, for a better framing of
its subjective universalism, and finally for a reconsideration of aesthetic normativity
in favour of regulativity. We will see that given this very wide meaning of the
notion of normativity many problems arise: 1. Based on Kant's aesthetic judgement
no value is attributed to an object, as it is rather a feeling that is
expressed; the question is: can a feeling be normative? 2. How is it possible
to combine the regulative character, essential to Kant's judgement of taste,
with the aesthetic normativity? Is it possible to speak about normativity without
rules, norms and standards (normal idea)? 3. Is it yet possible to speak about
normativity while entirely renouncing to prescriptions? My paper aims to
discuss the normative character of aesthetic emotions in Kant's third Critique by
calling upon the notions of regulativity and exemplarity. An argumentation as
such not only provides an alternative reading to some of the paragraphs of Kant's
aesthetics, that are most discussed in the contemporary debate, but also aims
to retrieve the peculiarity of the aesthetic experience as an experience
characterized by spontaneity and communicable to others through a judgement
with an essential character of indeterminacy.
Among Kantian scholars, two main opposite positions have been upheld on
this topic: the one that ascribes to Kant's theory of aesthetic pleasure an
opaque and non-intentional nature, mostly supported by Paul Guyer (Guyer 1979),
and the one we can call intentionalist, which states the function of aesthetic
pleasure in making us conscious of our faculties activity. This position has
been championed mainly by Henry A. Allison
(Allison 1998)[1].
It should also be added that in the past ten years, also due to the
influence of analytic philosophy on the philosophical scientific debate, much
of the issues connected to Kant's notion of aesthetic pleasure have been
referred to the notion of aesthetic normativity. Such a reference to
normativity seems to grant the possibility to ground the normative validity of
aesthetic judgements on Kant's transcendental philosophy, provided the normative
nature of Kant's notion of emotion is given for granted. Clearly exemplifying
of this assumption, the voice 'Aesthetic Judgement' written by Nick Zangwill
for the Stanford Encyclopedia,
especially in its revisited edition of 2014 and then of 2019 (Zangwill 2019)
applies the most recent acquisition in the Kantian contemporary debate to the
definition of aesthetic judgement. What stands out here is how the normative
character of Kant's aesthetic judgement is taken for granted; the assumption
that Kant's aesthetic is normative ensues nonetheless from the idea that
pleasure in beauty has an intentional content. However, as already anticipated,
this is not an entirely uncontroversial interpretation.
Three interpretations of aesthetic
normativity
The normative essence of Kant's aesthetic judgment is usually evidenced by
the universal validity of aesthetic claims and by the sharable and communicable
nature of this kind of judgments. What is peculiar to Kant's aesthetic theory
is indeed the aspiration to a universal validity of taste, which would allow us
to think that in matters of taste and beauty others 'should' share our
judgment. As a result, Kant's account seems to lay the ground to basic
normativity in the shape of an aesthetic judgment adequacy principle, ensuring
that when I say 'X is beautiful' my judgment is correct, or at least
appropriate. In brief, this is also what allows many scholars to think that
Kant's aesthetics could easily be interpreted as exemplifying the normativity
of the aesthetic judgment. Any claim about correctness in an aesthetic judgment
is, however, problematic and non self-evident as, from Kant's point of view in
particular, beauty is not an attribute of the object, but rather a feeling of
the subject. For this reason, the subjective nature of aesthetic universality
and the meaning of the aesthetic 'should' have generated and still raise many
interpretive problems. After careful assessment of the elements at stake, we
will see that when Kant mentions an element of universality in this context,
what he has in mind is something ideal, different from 'normal' universality,
and that in the Critique of the Power of
Judgment a distinctive definition of the aesthetic 'should' (Sollen) is provided (§ 19)[2] which departs in some important
respects from regular accounts of normativity.
I have isolated three different interpretations about aesthetic normativity
in Kant's account. These three are surely not exhaustive of the debate, but
they summarize three different way to read Kant's account. I would call these
interpretations as follows: 1. vero-functional normativity, 2. primitive
normativity and 3. ideal normativity.
1. I would refer the first position, a vero-functional reading of aesthetic
normativity, to the discussion of Kant by Zangwill. While trying to reconcile
this kind of statement with the normativity suggested by Kant's reference to
what also others 'ought to' judge, Zangwill states that 'a judgment of taste
makes a claim to correctness', which implies 'to shift from the problematic "ought" that is involved in a judgment of taste to a
problematic "correctness" or "betterness". This may be inevitable. We are dealing with a
normative notion, and while some normative notions may be explainable in terms
of others, we cannot express normative notions in non-normative terms'
(Zangwill 2019)[3].
In Zangwill's recasting of normativity, a normative constraint is essential of
our judgments of taste, and so we assume that not all judgments of beauty are
equally appropriate and we think that there is a right and a wrong answer at
which we are aiming. The normativity of judgment derives however from the
normativity of feeling. Zangwill indicates two characteristics of aesthetic
normativity: 'it is definitive of pleasure in beauty that it licenses judgments
that make claim to correctness' and 'it is based on subjective grounds of
pleasure or displeasure' (Zangwill 2019).
This interpretation is to say the least problematic, and for more than one
reason. First of all, it is implausible to speak about correctness in the
absence of a verification criterion. The aesthetic judgment is in fact not an
epistemic statement about an object, but an expression of subjective feelings;
more plausible would be to speak about appropriateness to a community of
judging people. Secondly, even shifting from the problematic aesthetic 'should'
to the maybe even more problematic aesthetic 'correctness' we can ascribe to
aesthetic judgments a normative nature only if this is meant in a very wide (and
vague) manner, without any references to prescriptions.
It is however not clear how can the normativity of judgments of taste be
inherent in the feelings and how can feelings be more or less veridical. As
Zangwill writes, the normative claim of our aesthetic judgments derives from
the fact that 'we think that some responses are
better or more appropriate to their object than others'. In this way, judgments can be more or less appropriate because responses
themselves can be more or less appropriate. The example is clearly taken from
Hume:
if I get pleasure from drinking Canary-wine and you do
not, neither of us will think of the other as being mistaken. But
if you don't get pleasure from Shakespeare's Sonnets, I will think of you as being in
error—not just your judgment, but your liking. I think
that I am right to have my response, and that
your response is defective. (Zangwill 2019)
In Hume's words, only someone with a defective sensibility
could think that there is 'an equality of
genius' between some inferior composer and J. S. Bach (Hume
1757 [1985: 230]; see Kulenkampff 1990). But Hume's solution rests on common sense and on a 'subjective normativity', based on which if 'I get the idea or sentiment and you don't, in contemplating the same object, either you or I
may be "abnormal," but there is no sense in which either of us can be "wrong" or "right," which is to say, "mistaken" or "correct"' (Kivy 2016). What should be emphasized here is that
when I demand the agreement of others as to what I can call beautiful, my request
is neither a prescription nor a matter of facts[4].
It is an ideal agreement based on which all judging people are meant to speak
with an universal voice.
2. The second way to interpret the aesthetic
normativity deal with the notion of primitive normativity and I would refer it
mainly to Hannah Ginsborg. Ginsborg
defines normativity as a necessary condition for knowledge, as the element we
need in order to make a claim for an agreement by the others. Ginsborg defines
so an interpretive model that she calls 'primitive
normative'. This notion of normativity does not necessarily
include a reference to the truth and to the rational justification; it is
however required by every form of empirical conceptualization. Ginsborg understands
the Critique of the Power of Judgment
as a complement of the logic knowledge defined in the first Critique and she
understands thus the aesthetic judgment as a judgment of knowledge in general.
Starting from Kant, Ginsborg aims to deal with a theoretical proposal for the
contemporary debate in aesthetics (Ginsborg 2015, pp. 4-5)[5].
Her thesis expresses a general idea on our relation with the world and she
states that our natural answers, perceptive and imaginative, towards the
objects has to include a primitive require of normativity. This is a kind of
normativity that could be defined as primitive because it refers to the
relationship between the empirical characteristics of the objects and the
functions of natural psychological inclination of the subject. The judgment is
so for Ginsborg a linguistic answer to this inclination, that establishes a
normative relation with the objects and that can be an answer more or less
adequate. The primitive normativity allows thus to give account of aesthetic
conflicts and to show how the aesthetic experience makes explicit divergences
in perception. The claim of adequacy in the aesthetic judgment is however the
same concerning perception, where we understand this claim as not bound with
the objectivity of the concept nor with the truth of knowledge (Ginsborg 2015, pp.
195-201).
Ginsborg's
proposal to understand the aesthetic normativity as a particular case of a more
general primitive normativity has many merits. Nevertheless she does not
actually explain the aesthetic normativity: most of all she does not give an
explanation of the sharing claim in relation to the dynamic between feeling and
judgement. The aesthetic feeling of pleasure seems to be understood, as by
Allison, only as an awareness of the perceptive adequacy (Allison 2001, pp. 130).
The feeling of pleasure seems thus to has been relegated to a precognitive
stage and it does not represent a very alternative to the logic knowledge. It
seems so that the subject remains in a certain mental state because she/he
recognizes that she/he has to do in this way according to perceptive rules and
just for that reason she/he feels pleasure. In doing so every right perception
should give place to a feeling of pleasure and the aesthetic experience would
not explained as a peculiar experience, alternative to the cognitive one.
3.
In Ginsborg's explanation it is completely excluded any element of
ideality, that is rather fundamental in Kant's
aesthetics. Ideality is instead the main focus of Chignell's
reading of aesthetic normativity in Kant's
account. Chignell is convinced,
at variance with Guyer, that in his 'subject-based
theory, Kant clearly did not intend to give up the idea that judgements of
taste are normative' (Chignell 2007, p. 416). Chignell's proposal tries then to
solve the problem of aesthetic normativity by showing that the subjective basis
of the normativity of the aesthetic judgement is not at variance with the theory
of aesthetic ideas (Chignell 2007, p. 419). Chignell's interpretation duly recognizes the ideality of the subjective
universality and he convincingly argues as to bring Kant's formalism back to
the front matter of the discussion. We should not forget that Kant brings into
focus how we experience an object regardless of the content of the object of
our experience. Less convincingly Chignell's line of argument takes once more
for granted the normativity of aesthetic emotions and does not question how
Kant's aesthetic normativity should be understood.
Chignell
reads the ideality of the intersubjective validity of taste mainly based on the
last paragraphs of the Critique of the
Aesthetic Power of Judgement (§§ 49-59) and his argumentation aims to
demonstrate how these texts are not at variance with the main topic of the
entire Deduction, that is the
subjective universality of taste (Chignell 2007, p. 423).
I agree with him as he underlines the continuity between these paragraphs,
however I am also convinced that an alternative path further explains the key
features of aesthetic normativity in Kant. What I suggest is to establish a
comparison between the fourth moment of the Analytic
of beauty and the conclusion of the Critique
of the Aesthetic Power of Judgement. This comparison allows indeed to
stress the importance of the regulative use of the feeling of pleasure in
aesthetic judging.
The ideal nature of the universality of taste is even
more strongly outlined further on in § 17 where Kant includes a discouraging
warning for anyone who is looking for the source of aesthetic normativity in
his theory of taste:
For every judgement from this
source is aesthetic, i.e., its determining ground is the feeling of the subject
and not a concept of an object. To seek a principle of taste that would provide
the universal criterion of the beautiful through determinate concepts is a
fruitless undertaking, because what is sought is impossible and intrinsically
self-contradictory. (KU, 5: 231)
Since the 'determining ground'[6] of judging is the feeling of
the subject, the aesthetic judgement deals with the communicability of the
emotion, which qualifies as rather peculiar inasmuch as it is neither granted
by a concept – as it happens with the normative moral judgement and the good –
nor just derived from some kind of empirical regularity – as it happens with
the agreeable and the descriptive affirmation of one's own preferences –. What defines here the judgement
of taste is neither fully normative nor clearly descriptive. It is rather
defined by its exemplarity.
The aesthetic subjective universality is in fact taken
as ideal as it is determined by the spontaneity of an emotion that cannot be
prescribed to anyone, but that can well be requested from others. There is no
sign or a guarantee of an effective agreement, but there is a possibility. The
ideality of the aesthetic emotion sets therefore the universality of the judgement
of taste in a possible future. The ideal of beauty is defined in the following
terms: as the exhibition of a rational idea, it is an example of judging
through taste and it is 'something that we strive to produce in ourselves even if we are not in possession
of it' (KU, 5: 232).
While excluding any correctness criterion, the
aesthetic normativity in Kant's account leads to the claim that there are no empirical rule, no rational
concept and no norm granting the aesthetic judgement's universality, and no normal idea will not be enough
to explain the communicability of feelings. One may well wonder whether it
still makes sense to talk about normativity when all these elements are
excluded from the aesthetic judging. One element persists in this direction
though. What remains indeed stable in the exemplarity of the aesthetic ideal is
the element of necessity. The ideal of beauty is archetypical and exemplary 'in accordance with which he must judge everything that
is an object of taste, or that is an example of judging through taste, even the
taste of everyone' (KU, 5: 232). The normativity
of the judgement of taste can still be validated, then, through the aesthetic 'should'.
A non prescriptive necessity:
the aesthetic 'should'
Before venturing
into a discussion of regulativity, it is useful to understand how the normative
claim can be crucially combined with the element of ideality. If the
normativity of taste can rest only on the 'should' that characterizes aesthetic
intersubjective validity, and has no rules nor concepts as guarantee, it will
be very useful to understand the kind of necessity here at stake. It is my
belief that in this respect the ideality of the aesthetic demand cannot be
disregarded.
On the topic of the intersubjective validity, Kant clarifies that the
aesthetic necessity is set in the field of possibility:
not a theoretical objective necessity, where it can be
cognized a priori that everyone will feel this satisfaction in
the object called beautiful by me, nor a practical necessity, whereby means of
concepts of a pure will, serving as rules for freely acting beings [...].
Rather, as a necessity that is thought in an aesthetic judgement, it can only
be called exemplary, i.e., a necessity of the assent of all to
a judgement that is regarded as an example of a universal rule that one cannot
produce. (KU, 5: 236-237)
Differently from objective theoretic necessity and from practical
necessity, aesthetic necessity is peculiar in that it can be called only exemplary.
In this sense any rule of taste can be possibly inferred and the necessity of
the aesthetic feeling is far from being apodictic: 'Since an aesthetic
judgement is not an objective and cognitive judgement, this necessity cannot be
derived from determinate concepts, and is therefore not apodictic' (KU, 5: 237).
This also entails that in aesthetics the pleasure we feel and the expression of
the judgement are not two completely separated moments but two elements of the
same experience.
Furthermore, the exemplarity of taste defines not only its necessity but
also the distinctive 'should' implied in aesthetic judging. The aesthetic 'should'
is conditioned as it is granted only by the faculties we have in common, it is
so a subjective should that does not describe an actual agreement nor it
prescribes the approval of others, but it rather places the universality in
ideality and possibility. This ideality of the aesthetic 'should' is to be
linked to the determining function of emotions. When we experience and judge
aesthetically we can only request from others to share our emotions, and the
subjective universality of emotions, granted by the common sense, assumes the
form of a peculiar should that is more an expectation than a prescription. The
unique 'should' Kant is describing here could sound almost as an oxymoron as it
is a non-prescribing 'should'. In this sense the judgement of taste 'determines
what pleases or displeases only through feeling and not through concepts, but
yet with universal validity' (KU, 5: 238).
The determining function of emotions means that aesthetic feelings are non
private. In spite of their unavoidable subjective nature, they are sharable and
universal communicable. The determining function of emotions does not mean
however that feelings follow rules or prescriptions or can be correct or
incorrect. Furthermore, Kant has clear in mind that feeling emotions is not our
choice and does not depend on our will. The spontaneity of emotion is here
preserved.
In this conception of aesthetic evaluation, it is however clear that a
perceptual normativity is not compatible with the specificity of the aesthetic judgement
as an expression of feeling within an experience with a finalistic connotation.
The feeling is not, in fact, to be considered as an objective attribute, nor can
it necessarily be associated with selected qualities of the object. The
subjective feeling is rather the pleasure needed to be able to judge
aesthetically an object. Therefore, pleasure becomes, in the aesthetic
experience, prior to any form of knowledge, to any criterion of truth or
correctness, and it constitutes the starting point for judging aesthetics as a
conscious expression of our sentimental experience. The aesthetic judgement
cannot therefore be understood as a second level judgement of reflection on our
cognitive faculties: there is no intellectual understanding of feeling, no
reasons are given through the judgement. At the same time, the aesthetic
judgement is not simply an activity of sharing one's own pleasure, otherwise
there would be no distinction between aesthetic judgement and the mere
affirmation of one's own preference.
The aesthetic pleasure, on the other hand, in the absence of an
intellectual concept, functions as a unifying principle of experience through
subjective projection; the act of judging is so the awareness of feeling as a
principle that regulates the aesthetic experience and it consists in evaluating
in accordance with this principle, in recognizing experience as unified through
the feeling. The normative element is therefore included in the same evaluation
act, where the claim made towards others, in form of an aesthetic duty, is not
to be understood simply as a request to share our own pleasure. The aesthetic
claim is instead a description of the state of judgment, as a public sharing of
the connection between pleasure and the representation of the object. It is,
therefore, a normativity partly similar to that required by any judgement of
experience, which associates an attribute to a representation of the object. The
aesthetic normativity finds then its specificity in the fact that the
association is related to the feeling of the subject and not to a quality of
the object. In short, just as the judgments of experience express the
relationships within the experience and imply statements that want to be
universally valid, so the aesthetic judgment expresses as necessary the
relationship between pleasure and the object and requires this same connection
to others. The aesthetic pleasure experienced in front of the representation of
an object is therefore perceived as a fact, albeit sui generis, and it is expressed through the judgment. However, it
is a description of a fact that is expected to be shared by others.
The specificity of the aesthetic experience consists therefore in its
articulation in two closely connected moments, the feeling and the judgement,
in which the sentimental moment is the matter of fact of the subject,
constitutively non-normative. The judgement that expresses the feeling, giving
a description of it, constitutes at the same time an evaluative activity that
shows its normativity in the expectation of sharing by the others. The
possibility of a passage from the fact of feeling to the evaluation of judgment
is made possible by the projection of the subject who orders the experience,
that is by the principle of purposiveness as reflection of the subject on the
representation of the object. In referring the feeling to the representation of
the object, the judgement is not describing the subjective mood, but it is
evaluating the object through a finalistic projection of the subject on the
world.
The same teleological system then invests the aesthetic duty and the claim
of an agreement by the others. The expectation of an aesthetic agreement, or
more precisely the legitimacy of this expectation, is guaranteed by the same
finalistic projection that constitutes the necessity to consider others capable
of achieving the same connection between pleasure and the representation of the
object through the judgement. The purposiveness, which connects pleasure to
representation in a projective form, is, in fact, a subjective condition for
the possibility of aesthetic experience, a condition that is thought to be
shared by all subjects, not only by virtue of the common cultural belonging,
but by reason of the same projective capacity of their own feelings.
The difficulties of a 'should' grounded on emotions are openly admitted
also by Kant in the controversial § 22. Here Kant makes clear that the aesthetic
'should', as 'I ascribe exemplary validity' to my judgement of taste, depends
on a common sense that 'is a merely ideal norm' (KU, 5: 239), says Kant. What
is added here is the qualifying remark presenting the judgement of taste as an
'indeterminate norm' (unbestimmte Norm).
Kant himself seems to admit the difficulty of his aesthetic 'should' by asking
whether the common sense has to be taken 'as a constitutive principle of the
possibility of experience' or 'whether a yet higher principle of reason only
makes it into a regulative principle for us first to produce a common sense in
ourselves for higher ends' (KU, 5: 240). Kant seems to prefer the latter
solution, which leads to other complex questions: the judgement of taste, 'with
its expectation of a universal assent', becomes 'in fact only a demand of
reason to produce such a unanimity in the manner of sensing' (KU, 5: 240). And
this has important consequences on the definition of the aesthetic 'should', as
it has to be understood only as a possibility: 'the objective necessity of the
confluence of the feeling of everyone with that of each, signifies only the
possibility of coming to agreement about this, and the judgement of taste only
provides an example of the application of this principle' (KU, 5: 240).
A subjective requirement: from
normativity to regulativity
Interesting results can so ensue from implementing in contemporary terms
the more indeterminate notion of regulativity, possibly as a peculiar kind of
normativity, that preserves the ideality, the exemplarity, the indeterminacy
and, at the end, the emotional nature of aesthetics.
It is possible to argue then that Kant sets his notion of aesthetic
universality in the tracks of the same theory of the regulative use of reason
presented in the first Critique, where the expectation of a universal approval
is meant as a demand of reason and the aesthetic 'should' signifies only the
possibility of coming to an agreement[7]. In the Introduction of the third Critique Kant
gives us some elements to support this idea. He writes in fact that the
combination of the feeling of pleasure with purposiveness is a need of our
understanding to find an order in nature (KU, 5: 186). The feeling of pleasure
is therefore a presupposition for the reflective power of judgement (KU, 5: 188).
The aesthetic feeling is combined then to the representation of the form of
the object with a particular kind of necessity, as it derives from the
agreement between the cognitive faculties that we have in common with others.
What is strange and anomalous is only this: that it is
not an empirical concept but rather a feeling of pleasure (consequently not a
concept at all) which, through the judgement of taste, is nevertheless to be
expected of everyone and connected with its representation, just as if
it were a predicate associated with the cognition of the object. (KU, 5: 190-191)
The subjective universality of the judgement of taste can thus sound 'strange
and anomalous', but what is to keep in mind is that it is 'a feeling of pleasure
(consequently not a concept at all) which, through the judgement of taste, is
nevertheless to be expected of everyone and connected with its representation,
just as if it were a predicate associated with the cognition of the object'
(KU, 5: 191). This expectation 'in spite of its intrinsic contingency, is
always possible' (KU, 5: 191) in virtue of the humanity intrinsic in every
subject.
Furthermore, in the Methodology of
Taste Kant sums up the relation between the ideality and the universal
validity of taste also clarifying the role of norms. In the aesthetic
experience there are no 'universal rules' and no prescriptions; on the contrary
'there must be regard for a certain ideal that art must have before its eyes,
even though in practice it is never fully attained' (KU, 5: 355).
Any concept and any norm prescribed to the subject would thereby nullify
the freedom of imagination, that is the essence of the aesthetic experience.
The notion of subjective universality as mere possibility should instead preserve
the indeterminacy that defines aesthetics. In this regard Kant writes:
the propaedeutic for all beautiful art, so far as it
is aimed at the highest degree of its perfection, seems to lie not in precepts,
but in the culture of the mental powers through those prior forms of knowledge
that are called humaniora, presumably
because humanity means on the one
hand the universal feeling of
participation and on the other hand the capacity for being able to communicate one's inmost self
universally, which properties taken together constitute the sociability. (KU,
5: 355)
In conclusion, in § 60 Kant seems to understand the
'indeterminate norm' that ideally guides our aesthetic feeling as the promotion
of humanity, that – in transcendental terms – consists in the vivification of
the cognitive faculties we share with others. This complex meaning of the
notion of norm in the aesthetic experience allows us to reassess the value of
normativity in Kant's aesthetic theory. More precisely, the ideality of taste,
despite its being mentioned by Chignell in order to strengthen the normative
nature of Kant's aesthetic judgement, is what calls for a revision of the
normativity claim; the ideality of taste shows, in fact, to what extent
aesthetic normativity is a mere subjective need of our reason. Whereas in morality
I can have the prescription of the moral law but I can also decide to have a
morally bad behaviour, in aesthetics I feel pleasure and I express a judgement
of taste without any prescription and without the mediation of any concept. If
we take thus into consideration the ideality, the exemplarity and the
indeterminacy of the aesthetic judgement, we can define the subjective
universality and necessity of taste as a peculiar form of regulative
normativity.
To define aesthetic normativity as a regulative
normativity means, first of all, to recognize the peculiarity of aesthetic
experience in expectation and possibility, starting from the evaluative element
that constitutes the judgement of taste and differentiates it from the
judgement of perception.
The term 'regulative' allows
to overcome a rigid dichotomy between the descriptive and the evaluative
character of the judgement and it allows to think of an agreement between the
judgers without resorting to a criterion of truth. The aesthetic agreement is, therefore,
an ideal agreement that acts as a rule over the aesthetic experience and
invests our judging ensuring it the possibility of sharing. The aesthetic
agreement acts on the judgement as a regulative idea not only by virtue of the
sharing of the same cultural context, but also on a deeper level which, if one
does not want to resort to the transcendental explanation of the sharing of
humanity, can be explained, in Hume's terms, as sharing of the same capacity of
the aesthetic feeling.
The regulative idea, although not constitutive, is – subjectively –
universally and necessarily valid (McLaughlin
2014, pp. 554-572): the idea of the aesthetic agreement, which can be
understood as the unity of representations guaranteed by the principle of
purposiveness, i.e. as the projection of a subjective need, is not a simple
recommendation on how to proceed in the aesthetic experience, but is a norm
generated within the same structure of judgement (McLaughlin
2014, pp. 561-563). The idea, which acts as a rule in judgement, is
therefore 'inevitably necessary' (KrV, A 465 | B 473)[8], and only if the connection between pleasure and
representation of the object is thought as necessary and universal, it can be
expressed in a judgement answering to the aesthetic should. The 'indeterminate
norm' of the aesthetic judgement is therefore to be read according
to a regulative meaning.
The aesthetic feeling requires
the indeterminacy of the norm and avoids a conceptual explanation; the
aesthetic agreement, formulated as a claim, makes the aesthetic judgement normative
and acts as a regulative ideal in our evaluation. Aesthetic normativity
therefore emerges in its specificity, which requires a revision of the very
concept of normativity: being different both from perceptive normativity and
from moral normativity, aesthetic normativity moves between the claim of
sharing, in common with empirical judgements, and the claim of a should, in
common with moral prescriptions. The 'should'
contained in the aesthetic judgement is not prescriptive, it takes the form of
waiting, and it is not guaranteed by any criterion of truth, but it reveals
itself as the possibility of sharing feelings on the basis of an understanding of
the other as part of human society itself.
Bibliography
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