Aesthetic
Normativity and the Acquisition of Empirical Concepts
Ido Geiger*
Ben-Gurion University
of the Negev, Israel
Abstract
In the Introduction to the Critique
of the Power of Judgment, Kant claims that the Critique of Pure Reason
accounted for the necessary conditions of experience and knowledge in general,
but that it was not a complete transcendental account of the possibility of a
particular empirical experience of objects and knowledge of empirical laws of
nature. To fill this gap the third Critique puts
forward, as an additional transcendental condition, the regulative principle of
the purposiveness of nature. In
this paper, I will attempt to show how Kant’s account of pure aesthetic
judgment can be read as articulating an aesthetic non-conceptual condition of
the search for the conceptual order of nature and so as constituting an
essential part of the account of the transcendental conditions of empirical
experience and knowledge.
Keywords
Critique
of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment, beautiful form, natural kinds, concept
acquisition, aesthetic normativity, Ginsborg
Introduction
In the Introduction to the Critique
of the Power of Judgment, Kant claims that the Critique of Pure Reason accounted for the necessary conditions of experience and knowledge
in general, but that it was not a complete transcendental account of the
possibility of a particular empirical experience of objects and knowledge of
empirical laws of nature. The forms of intuition and the pure concepts and
principles of the understanding are necessary but not sufficient transcendental
conditions of empirical experience and knowledge. They “yield such an
interconnection among things with respect to their genera, as things of nature
in general, but not specifically, as such and such particular beings in nature”
(KU 5:183; see also: KU 5:181; EEKU 20:208-210). To fill this gap the third Critique puts
forward, as an additional transcendental condition of empirical experience and
knowledge, “the principle of the purposiveness of nature in its multiplicity”
(KU 5:180).
The principle has two aspects:
logical or conceptual and aesthetic. The first is the assumption that nature
constitutes a comprehensive system of regularities and so can be subsumed under
a comprehensive system of empirical concepts. Kant’s claim is that this
assumption is a transcendental condition of empirical experience and knowledge,
because the employment of any empirical concept presupposes the comprehensive and
systematic conceptual purposiveness of nature. The assumption of empirical
determination by a comprehensive hierarchy of concepts, leading up to the most
general concepts and down to ever more specific concepts, is, I think, Kant’s
way of talking about real or objective unity. The thought is that only the complete
determination of the sensibly given by a comprehensive system of concepts would
ground in full the claims to objectivity and truth we make when we subsume a
particular under an empirical concept in a determinative judgment. Kant thus
holds that employing any empirical universal concept to make a purportedly
objectively true assertion presupposes the conceptual purposiveness of nature
as a whole.
I further suggest that we should add
to the picture of a comprehensive system of empirical concepts the thought that
the hierarchy of concepts leads up to general causal forces and laws and down
to ever more specific complexes explainable in their terms. Ideally, for Kant,
our empirical concepts are to inform us about the causal connections between
things in the world. Kant is then concerned with the objectivity of kinds,
causal laws and causal explanations. Thought of in this way, the assumption of
the comprehensive conceptual purposiveness of nature underwrites the
universality and strict necessity of empirical causal laws. The assumption of
the conceptual purposiveness of nature is the transcendental bridge Kant draws
between the general conditions of experience and the principle of causality
specifically and, on the other hand, the conditions of a particular experience
of nature comprising empirical concepts and causal laws.
The principle of the conceptual
purposiveness of nature is a subjective regulative principle. It does not
determine objects. But it is nevertheless a condition of our particular
experience and knowledge of nature. For Kant, the investigation of nature is an
on-going task. Empirical knowledge is continuously subject to critical
scrutiny, refinement – and possibly, to radical revision. This is the deep
significance of claiming that a transcendental condition of empirical
experience is a regulative principle.
This sketch might seem to offer a
complete if telegraphic answer to the question of how the third Critique
completes the account of the transcendental conditions of experience and
knowledge. In this paper, I will suggest that the principle of the aesthetic
purposiveness of nature can be read as an essential part of Kant’s
transcendental account. My principal aim is not exegetical. Rather, I hope to
show how Kant’s account of pure aesthetic judgment can be read as articulating
an aesthetic non-conceptual condition of the search for the conceptual order of
nature and so as constituting an essential part of the account of the
transcendental conditions of empirical experience and knowledge.
Pure Aesthetic Judgment
and the Beautiful Forms of Natural Kinds
In what follows, I will describe
briefly how I propose to read Kant’s analysis of pure judgments of taste and to
explain how they are related to the process of acquiring empirical concepts. I
should say again clearly that although I will employ passages from the Critique
of the Power of Aesthetic Judgment to support the view I am proposing, my aims
in this paper are not exegetical. Rather, I hope to put forward a
philosophically valuable model for the acquisition of our most fundamental
empirical concepts.
Pure judgments of taste, according to
Kant, are not attributions of a property or set of properties to an object.
They are reports of a distinct pleasurable feeling experienced by a subject in
view of an object. More specifically, they are responses to what Kant
characterizes as the purposive form of an object. Kant describes the
pleasurable feeling as an animated self-sustaining absorption in the form of an
object, which he thinks of as the “feeling of life” (KU 5:204; see also: KU
5:219; EEKU 20:230-231) and as the harmonious free play of the imagination and
the understanding (KU 5:217-218) or the feeling of their mutual subjective
correspondence or agreement (KU 5:218, 219). The feeling can be glossed, I
suggest, as the feeling that the form of an object is cognitively significant.
Although pure aesthetic judgments are not attributions of concepts to objects
and do not furnish us with concepts, we nevertheless feel that for the objects,
the forms of which evoke pure aesthetic pleasure in us, concepts can be found.
In other words, we feel that the beautiful forms of objects reveal the
conceptual order of nature.
It is of particular importance to
Kant to underscore that pure judgments of taste are subjective, but that they
nevertheless lay claim to universal assent. They “must be combined with a claim
to subjective universality” (KU 5:212) – thus giving them the appearance of
objective cognitive judgments. Indeed, Kant calls the necessity of pure judgments
of taste “exemplary, i.e., a necessity of the assent of all to a judgment that
is regarded as an example of a universal rule that one cannot produce” (KU
5:237). He calls this presupposition of universal assent the “indeterminate
norm of a common sense” (KU 5:239). In other words, the pleasurable working of
the mind, to which overt judgments of taste give expression, is taken to be
common to all subjects. This, Kant opaquely suggests, explains why their
analysis might be of interest to transcendental philosophy (KU 5:213).
The first step towards seeing how
pure judgment of taste might be related to the task of empirical
conceptualization is to ask what precisely Kant means by form. This is a deeply
contested matter. But many readers agree that what Kant means is the spatial
(or, less frequently, spatio-temporal) shape of an object. There is
considerable textual evidence for this. But perhaps the clearest is Kant’s
explicit statement that beauty in nature is “ascribed to objects only in
relation to reflection on their outer intuition, thus only to the form
of the surface” (KU 5:375).[1]
Pure aesthetic judgments express the feeling that a spatial figure or outline
apprehended in intuition is cognitively purposive.
It is particularly important to see
that although Kant emphasizes that pure aesthetic judgments are not the
attributions of a property to an object but reports of the inner pleasurable
feeling of the subject, they are nevertheless responses to an aspect of the
object. The spatial figure or outline of an external object is a subjective
aspect of its representation in the sense that space is the subjective a
priori form of outer intuition. But as Kant says clearly, space “in spite
of its merely subjective quality, is nevertheless an element in the cognition
of things as appearances” (KU 5:189). – This is the first, very important clue
about the relation between pure judgments of taste and the cognition of objects
given externally in space.
The second crucial step to unraveling
the connection between aesthetic judgment and empirical cognition is to see
that Kant’s most prevalent examples are a host of what he thinks of as natural
species or kinds. The most prevalent examples are flowers and other biological
kinds. Specific examples include the rose (KU 5:215) and the tulip (KU 5:236
note); Kant speaks of wildflowers (KU 5:299) and most often of flowers in
general (KU 5:207, 216, 229, 233, 281). Indeed, some of these loci seem
to suggest that all flowers are beautiful. “Flowers,” Kant says, “are free natural
beauties” (KU 5:229; cf., MS 6:443). Animal kinds are also very common
examples: “Many birds (the parrot, the hummingbird, the bird of paradise) and a
host of marine crustaceans are beauties in themselves” (KU 5:229); but Kant
also speaks, generally again, of a bird or insect as beautiful (KU 5:299) as
well as of seashells (KU 5:349).
It cannot be stressed enough that
Kant lays great emphasis on the fact that “all judgments of taste are singular”
(KU 5:215) and says emphatically that the statement that “roses in general are
beautiful, is no longer pronounced merely as an aesthetic judgment, but as an
aesthetically grounded logical judgment” (KU 5:215; see also, KU 5:285). Very
surprisingly, he nevertheless self-consciously employs general terms or concepts
to present his examples. Kant is claiming, I suggest, that each ordinary or
typical specimen of the general kinds he mentions is singly beautiful.
This surprising claim finds in fact
considerable support in the text. First, consider the notion of an aesthetic
normal idea of a species: it is “the image for the whole species, hovering
among all the particular variously diverging intuitions of the individuals,
which nature used as the archetype underlying her productions in the same
species, but does not seem to have fully achieved in any individual” (KU
5:234-235). It is the shape we would get if we were “to superimpose one image
on another and by means of the congruence of several of the same kind to arrive
at a mean that can serve them all as a common measure” (KU 5:234). The
discussion strongly suggests that Kant holds that very many species have such
normal ideas. In pure judgments of taste, I am claiming, we typically and
paradigmatically respond to spatial forms, the archetype of which is an aesthetic
normal idea of a species. Indeed, it is precisely this claim that enables us to
explain how Kant can say that “in beautiful nature the mere reflection on a
given intuition, without a concept of what the object ought to be, is
sufficient for arousing and communicating the idea of which that object is
considered as the expression” (KU 5:320). The idea he is talking about in this
vexed passage is the normal idea of a species.[2]
By saying that in pure judgments of
taste we typically respond to spatial forms, the archetype of which is an
aesthetic normal idea of a species, I don’t mean that we respond to them as
(approximations of) normal ideas. This would make the judgment conceptual. What
we respond to are particular intuitions of individual forms. It is Kant’s
analysis that asserts that hovering among them and expressed by them is the
normal idea of the species to which they belong.
Towards the end of the Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment, Kant points once again to the beauty of flowers, “blossoms,
indeed the shape of whole plants; the delicacy of animal formations of all
sorts of species” and to the beauty of pheasants, crustaceans, insects (KU
5:347). He moves on to discuss inorganic matter, mentioning a variety of
striking examples of the beauty of solids that have crystallized (KU 5:348-349;
see also, MS 6:443). Significantly, he claims that solids generally assume
“upon solidification a determinate shape or fabric (figure or texture) [Gestalt
oder Gewebe (Figur oder Textur)] which, where there is a specific difference
in the matter, is different, but if the matter is the same is exactly the same”
(KU 5:348). He further says that “internally all materials that were fluid only
because of heat and which through cooling have become solid reveal, when
broken, a determinate texture, and thus make it possible to judge that if their
own weight or contact with air had not prevented it, they would also have
displayed their specifically proper shape [spezifisch eigentümliche Gestalt]
externally” (KU 5:349). Kant is clearly proclaiming that inorganic solid kinds
have a “specifically proper shape.” The beautiful forms of the organic world,
animal and vegetable, as well as the forms of solid matter, suggest how the
kingdom of nature might initially be cut at the joints.
Finally, further very significant
support for the claim that Kant is discussing the beautiful forms of natural
kinds comes from an examination of the Idealist tradition in the theory of art,
still very prominent in Kant’s own day, and its conception of the beauty of the
idealized forms of natural kinds.[3]
The Forms of Natural
Kinds as Conditions of the Acquisition of Empirical Concepts
Now it might well be thought that the
mental process of constructing idealized forms of natural kinds presupposes the
sorting of nature into such kinds (as indeed it does for the Idealist
tradition) – and so cannot illuminate the process of acquiring our most
fundamental empirical concepts. But Kant suggests that this is not the case.
His proposed elaboration of the mental process of the formation of aesthetic normal
ideas begins by contrasting the imagination’s capacity to recall for concepts,
even after a long time, their sensible signs or marks with what the imagination
can apparently achieve without the guidance of concepts. The imagination “also
knows how to reproduce the image and shape [das Bild und die Gestalt] of
an object out of an immense number of objects of different kinds, or even of
one and the same kind; indeed, when the mind is set on making comparisons, it
even knows how, by all accounts actually if not consciously, as it were to
superimpose one image on another and by means of the congruence of several of
the same kind to arrive at a mean that can serve them all as a common measure”
(KU 5:234). The important emphasis, I suggest, is that the imagination is not
working under the conceptual guidance of the understanding. It does not create
normal ideas for a conceptually sorted kind. Rather, it operates on its own.
Kant goes on to say that the imagination operates “by means of a dynamic
effect, which arises from the repeated apprehension of such figures on the
organ of inner sense” (KU 5:234) – speaking only of the imagination and its
capacity for apprehension. By speaking of a dynamical effect he seems to be
stressing that the activity here is properly that of the imagination.
Kant is not claiming then that we
arrive at normal ideas by a process of abstraction, which presupposes a
conceptual sorting of objects that belong to a species or kind. Crucially for
our concerns, he suggests that it is such normal ideas and the mental process
of comparison it presupposes that make possible the empirical judgment of
nature. He speaks of the normal idea as “the standard for judging it as
a thing belonging to a particular species of animal” and as the “universal
standard for the aesthetic judging of every individual of this species” (KU
5:233). Our capacity to apprehend the characteristic shape of a species is a
condition of our possession of concepts for this species: “This normal idea is not derived from the
proportions taken from experience, as
determinate rules; rather, it is in accordance with it that rules for
judging first become possible” (KU 5:234-235).
The
First Introduction is even more explicit about this point. Kant there
distinguishes the “multiplicity and diversity of […] laws” from the “natural
forms corresponding to them” (EEKU 20:209) – a distinction he also describes by
speaking of empirical laws and “specific forms matching these, which
however through their comparison with others are also generically
corresponding forms [generisch übereinstimmende Formen]”
(EEKU 20:213). Indeed, in characterizing what he calls there the
principle of reflection he seems briefly to distinguish its aesthetic and
conceptual tasks:
The
principle of reflection on given objects of nature is that for all things in
nature empirically determinate concepts can be found, which is to say the same
as that in all of its products one can always presuppose a form that is
possible for general laws cognizable by us. For if we did not presuppose this
and did not ground our treatment of empirical representations on this
principle, then all reflection would become arbitrary and blind [bloß aufs
Geratewohl und blind], and hence would be undertaken without any
well-grounded expectation of its agreement with nature. (EEKU 20:211-212)
Kant suggests here that we seek
general laws for objects that have in common their mere form. If we did not
presuppose this first aesthetic sorting of nature then anything at all might be
a potential object of the process of comparison through which we seek empirical
concepts. We would have no clue what objects we are to compare – “all
reflection would become arbitrary and blind.”[4]
In
the note clarifying this passage Kant makes the decisive claim that the
principle of reflection is not a principle of mere logic, which teaches us that
we can compare objects and thus form concepts. It is a synthetic
transcendental assumption, which is a condition of applying this principle of
logic to nature.[5]
On
first glance, this principle does not look at all like a synthetic and
transcendental proposition, but seems rather to be tautological and to belong
to mere logic. For the latter teaches how one can compare a given
representation with others, and, by extracting what it has in common with
others, as a characteristic for general use, form a concept. But about whether
for each object nature has many others to put forth as objects of comparison,
which have much in common with the first in their form, it teaches us nothing;
rather, this condition of the possibility of the application of logic to nature
is a principle of the representation of nature as a system for our power of
judgment, in which the manifold, divided into genera and species, makes it
possible to bring all the natural forms that are forthcoming to concepts
(of greater or lesser generality) through comparison. […] the (reflecting)
power of judgment, which also seeks concepts for empirical representations, as
such, must further assume for this purpose that nature in its boundless
multiplicity has hit upon a division of itself into genera and species that
makes it possible for our power of judgment to find consensus in the comparison
of natural forms and to arrive at empirical concepts, and their interconnection
with each other, through ascent to more general but still empirical concepts;
i.e., the power of judgment presupposes a system of nature which is also in
accordance with empirical laws and does so a priori, consequently by
means of a transcendental principle. (EEKU 211-212 note)
The logical process of the formation
of concepts, alluded to in this passage, comprises three steps: comparison,
reflection and abstraction (see, for example: V-Lo/Wiener 24:909; Log 9:94-95).[6] But
logic, Kant says, does not answer the question of “whether for each object
nature has many others to put forth as objects of comparison, which have in
common with the first their form.” This precisely is the role of the merely
formal division of the manifold into species and genera. As proposals of
comparison sets, it “makes it possible for our power of judgment to find
consensus in the comparison of natural forms and to arrive at empirical
concepts.”
Our aesthetic response to the
beautiful forms of objects and the sorting that is based on it are to be
understood as proposing a hypothesis. This is suggested, I think, by the fact
that aesthetic judgments cannot claim universal validity and demand universal
assent, for they are not grounded in concepts. Kant thus says that aesthetic
judgment “solicits assent from everyone [wirbt um jedes andern Beistimmung]”
(KU 5:237), adding that the “should [Sollen] in aesthetic
judgments of taste is […] pronounced only conditionally” (KU 5:237). Kant calls this assumption of universal
assent, we saw, the “indeterminate norm of a common sense” (KU 5:239). The
assumption is that we can all find the same forms beautiful and so sort nature
aesthetically in the same way. This is a subjective condition of finding the
objective conceptual order of nature.
The assumption of the aesthetic
purposiveness of nature is then the assumption of the existence of
aesthetically significant forms. Sorting nature into objects, which share these
forms, is a condition of the search for concepts under which to subsume these
objects and kinds. The assumption of the aesthetic purposiveness of nature is a
necessary transcendental condition of empirical experience and knowledge. As I
will claim below, it is very important that this first sorting of nature is aesthetic
and non-conceptual.
Two Objections and Adaptations
I am claiming that for Kant the capacity
of the imagination to construct idealized forms of natural kinds is a condition
of the search for the empirical conceptual order of nature. This will inevitably
raise a whole host of objections and questions. I will try to answer two that
are most important in order to begin to make the idea plausible and
interesting.
The first obvious objection is that
even if we accept that Kant thinks there is a connection between non-conceptual
aesthetic pleasure and concept acquisition, there might be reason to think the
connection is somewhat looser than he claims. For there’s tension between
taking aesthetic pleasure to be the first step in or condition of discovering
the empirical order of nature and claiming that we feel aesthetic pleasure when
the imagination is “unintentionally brought into accord with the understanding”
(KU 5:190) and that we experience pleasure in the form of an object “without
any intention of acquiring a concept from it” (KU 5:190).
A way of resolving the tension would
be to begin with what at the most fundamental level we would subconsciously
identify as an object possessing significant form. It is these objects that we
would pick out were we imaginarily first setting out to investigate nature; and
we would naturally take their forms as first clues as to what objects possess
common properties beyond their form. Our experiences of natural beauty can be
thought of as making conscious such moments – but, in cases of aesthetic
judgment, our attention remains focused on the object and goes no
further. So pure aesthetic judgments would be very closely allied to what we
imaginarily conceive of as the first step in or condition of the search for
empirical knowledge, without themselves being the first step in that search.
Indeed, it might make sense to think of aesthetic pleasure as an experience
that presupposes possessing empirical knowledge of nature (as Kant clearly
does) and as a disinterested and protracted return to those moments of
naturally focusing on an object and its form. The experience of pure aesthetic
pleasure would in this way reveal to us a condition of empirical experience and
knowledge, without itself being the condition. To get at what is
philosophically significant in Kant’s view, I propose reading him as revealing
that a condition of the search for empirical knowledge of nature is a
pre-conceptual identification of would-be objects and a rudimentary
pre-conceptual sorting of them into would-be kinds.
The second no less obvious objection
is that it seems implausible to claim that what Kant thinks of as significant
form infallibly directs us to every natural object and kind. Some natural kinds
might not possess a beautiful common form; and some objects which share such a
form might not constitute a natural kind.
I suggest taking Kant to hold that
pure judgments of taste and the pre-conceptual sorting of nature that they make
possible offer a first, partial delineation of nature into objects,
which in turn makes possible a first provisional sorting of nature into
kinds. Pure judgments of taste are nevertheless a necessary condition of
experience generally, because in the order of discovery they in effect serve as
our first, fallible and revisable hypothesis where the joints of nature are
located. Some of these hypotheses might ultimately have to be rejected;
other joints will be discovered later by conceptually-guided empirical
research. But in both cases, empirical investigation sets out from and so
depends upon these first hypotheses. In what follows, I will emphasize the
advantages of reading Kant in this way, relating it to the distinct normativity
of pure aesthetic judgments.
Before proceeding, I want to
acknowledge clearly that neither of these responses is found in Kant’s text.
Ginsborg
on The Acquisition of Fundamental Empirical Concepts
It will prove particularly fruitful
to compare the view of our most fundamental experience of the world, which I am
attributing to Kant, with the view Ginsborg defends in a number of important
and detailed papers on this and closely related matters. One obvious reason for
examining this body of work is the fact that Ginsborg is a leading interpreter
of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment and of the Critique of the
Aesthetic Power of Judgment in particular. Moreover, her account of our most
fundamental experience draws significantly on Kant’s view of aesthetic
judgment. These facts will facilitate the examination of her position and make
for some interesting points of comparison. But it bears emphasizing again that
the principal purpose of this paper is not to defend the reading of Kant I
presented above as an exegesis of the third Critique. Its aim rather is
to examine the philosophical value of the theory I am attributing to Kant; and
I propose doing so by comparing it to an important contemporary account. It
should be noted furthermore that Ginsborg herself does not claim that her view
is an interpretation of Kant – though she does claim to be drawing on and
developing central insights of his.[7]
More importantly then, Ginsborg’s
contribution to the debate over the nature of experience aims to account for
the acquisition of our most fundamental concepts of observation. Significantly,
she undertakes to offer a philosophical account of experience, according to
which the acquisition of new conceptual capacities need not in all cases
presuppose that such capacities are already in play and indeed presupposed by
any experience. In other words, she aims to give an account that will help us
make sense of the acquisition of our most fundamental empirical conceptual
capacities. On this count in particular it will prove illuminating to compare
her view to the position I attributed above to Kant. For this, I have claimed,
is a task that the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment too undertakes.
To begin to describe Ginsborg’s
Kantian conception of experience it is very useful to turn to her discussion of
his empiricist predecessors. According to the view we find in Locke and
Berkeley, Ginsborg recounts, universal concepts are constructed from particular
ideas by attending to some features different particulars share and
disregarding other features peculiar to them. But the account is circular: It
attributes to us the capacity to recognize common, general features; and it
attributes to us the capacity to distinguish those features that make up the
content of the universal concepts we employ from those that do not (Ginsborg
2015b, pp.
154-156). Significantly, the same problem would arise for Kant, if the
often-quoted account of concept formation, which I discussed above and which
Ginsborg too analyzes, were taken to be his complete answer to the question
(Ginsborg 2015b, pp. 151-153). These accounts obviously fail to meet Ginsborg’s
demand for an account of empirical concept formation that does not presuppose
the possession of such concepts.[8]
Hume’s account of the customary
association of a variety of particulars with a common name can be read as
suffering from the very same circularity found in Locke and Berkeley. To
acquire universal concepts we must view particulars as possessing certain
relevant features and resembling others in just these respects. But Ginsborg
proposes to read Hume differently, specifically as claiming that “it is a basic
psychological fact about us that our association of ideas follow certain
regular patterns […] ‘Finding a resemblance’ […] on this reading, does not
precede the acquisition of the corresponding disposition; rather, acquiring the
disposition is just what finding the resemblance consists in” (Ginsborg 2015b,
p. 157). On this reading, Hume, unlike his predecessors, does not implicitly
presuppose a basic capacity to represent universals, but offers a genuinely
non-circular account of acquiring a capacity to identify resemblances or
similarities. But there is an obvious problem with this dispositional account.
It describes a subjective tendency rather than the normative representation of
objective similarities (Ginsborg 2015b, pp. 158-159).
It is at this juncture that Ginsborg
turns to Kant in order to give Hume what she describes as a normative twist.
[…]
I want to see Kant as adopting a Humean view, but with two significant
modifications. First, Kant expands the role that Hume had ascribed to the
association of ideas, holding that dispositions to associate ideas are required
not just for general thought and belief, but also for perception itself […]
Second and more importantly for the purposes of this essay, Kant gives the
Humean view a normative twist. My perception of a tree not only involves my
being in a state of readiness to call to mind – or in Kant’s terms to
‘reproduce’ – representations of other trees; it also involves my taking it
that, in so far as I do call ideas of other trees to mind, I am doing what I
and everyone else ought to be doing under the circumstances. The generality of
my disposition is thus, so to speak, incorporated into my perception, rather
than remaining external to it, as on the Humean view. I see the tree as
a tree in virtue not merely of my state of readiness to call to mind previously
perceived trees in connection with it, but also of my awareness that this state
of readiness is appropriate given my present perceptual situation.
(Ginsborg 2015b, p. 160)
Ginsborg claims that it is in Kant’s
account of the ruled-governed activity of the imagination that we find this
view, specifically in his discussion of the first two stages of the threefold
synthesis of the A deduction. Kant, she says, is usually understood as holding
that the categories as well as empirical concepts of the understanding guide
the reproductive syntheses of the imagination (Ginsborg 2015b, p. 162).
But
we can also read Kant in a way that brings him closer to Hume while still doing
justice to the rule-governed character of our reproductive associations. For
the claim that our activity of imagination is governed by rules does not
necessarily imply that our activity must be guided by those rules. Nor does it
imply that the activity cannot be, as on Hume’s view, the expression of natural
dispositions of the kind that are shared by animals. On the reading that I am
proposing, the activity of reproductive synthesis, like the association of
ideas for Hume is simply something that we are naturally disposed to do. It is
a natural psychological fact about human beings that, if shown a certain number
of trees, they will develop a disposition such that the perception of one tree
will tend to call to mind other previously perceived trees. What makes the
corresponding associations rule-governed is not that they are guided by a
specific, antecedently grasped rule, but rather the fact that we take them to
have normative significance. The associations are rule-governed because in
carrying them out I take myself to be doing not only what I am disposed to do,
but also what I (and everyone else) ought to do. That is, I take my actual
associations, blindly habitual though they are, to manifest conformity to a
normative standard applicable to everyone. The rule-governedness of my
associations is thus a function of my taking them to be rule-governed, which is
in turn a function of my taking my natural dispositions as exemplifying a
universally valid norm. (Ginsborg 2015b, p. 162)
As Ginsborg emphasizes, on her
reading, Kant answers the question of how empirical conceptual capacities are
acquired without assuming that rules must be grasped antecedently to the
experiences through which we acquire these very capacities (Ginsborg 2015b, p.
162). She also emphasizes in different papers that the normative twist she
attributes to Kant’s account of experience draws on his analysis of pure
judgments of taste: “the idea that our imaginative activity can be, and be
recognized by us, as rule-governed, without our having any awareness of the relevant
rules prior to engaging in that activity […] is not explicitly articulated by
Kant, but I take it to be a consequence of the account of aesthetic experience
which he gives in the Critique of Judgment” (Ginsborg 2006a, p. 357).
Can Pure Aesthetic Judgment Serve as
a Model for Fundamental Empirical Conceptualization?
To compare fruitfully the view of Kant I
sketched above with Ginsborg’s the first thing to do is to bracket the status
of space and time as the subjective transcendental forms of receptivity and
with it the Kantian distinction between the aesthetic transcendental and
empirical aspects of our psychology. To insist on the indispensability of these
foundational Kantian doctrines and distinctions would be to put a great,
possibly unbridgeable distance between Kant and contemporary views about the
nature of experience. Bracketing the matter also allows us not to make too much
of the difference between Kant’s exclusive focus on spatial form and
empirically oriented approaches to perception that acknowledge its importance,
but emphasize the importance of other fundamental sensible properties such as
say color and whatever other deliverances of our sense modalities are
discovered to be involved in our perception of the most fundamental order of nature.
Having said that a good place to
start the comparison is to note that while Kant insists on the subjectivity of
pure judgments of taste, Ginsborg describes the primitive feeling or
consciousness of normativity as “appropriate given my present perceptual
situation” (Ginsborg 2015b, p. 160) or as “exemplary of how the object ought
to be perceived” (Ginsborg 2015c, pp. 190-191) and as “appropriate to
those things” (Ginsborg 2006a, p. 359). The perception, for Ginsborg, is of a
thing or object. Kant though describes the comparable pleasurable feeling of
harmony or fit as subjective, specifically, as a quality of the interaction of
capacities of the mind of the subject.
But is this not to lay emphasis on
just the sort of point I said above we should set aside? It might seem that to
insist on the subjectivity of judgments of taste is to bring back into the
discussion Kant’s doctrine of space and time as the subjective transcendental
forms of intuition. But bracketing this discussion, we should be willing to describe
Kant as claiming that we take pure aesthetic pleasure in the form of an object.
Indeed, as I pointed out above, Kant is obviously aware of the fact that
spatial form can be ascribed to an object as its property. Furthermore, Kant
sees very clearly that concepts that describe shapes are for us of special
salience. It is precisely this that leads him emphatically to deny that simple
geometrical forms are rightly called beautiful (see, KU 5:241).[9]
So Kant’s insistence on the
subjectivity of pure judgments of taste is perhaps a way of insisting on their
non-conceptuality. But Ginsborg employs judgments of taste as a model for experiences that are conceptual.[10] She crucially describes the primitive
feeling of appropriateness as accompanying tasks of sorting objects, like with
like. It is no coincidence that she speaks both of how an object – in the
singular – ought to be perceived and of appropriateness to things – in the
plural. It is this fact precisely that makes the feeling a way of grasping a
concept. But Kant insists that aesthetic judgment “is not grounded on any
available concept of the object and does not furnish one” (KU 5:191). Like
Kant, Ginsborg emphasizes that the primitive feeling of appropriateness “is not
grounded on any available concept of the object” – our most fundamental
experience does not presuppose concepts on her view. But she does claim that it
serves to furnish concepts.
But again, it is not clear what this
difference amounts to. For Kant, on the reading I presented, holds that aesthetic
judgment delineates a spatial form. I also suggested that he should further be
taken to hold that we can recognize the same form in other objects. For I
claimed that aesthetic judgments can serve for a first pre-conceptual sorting
of objects according to mere shape. Presumably, Kant would not deny that we can
register comparable similarities of other sensible properties such as color;
and anyway, I suggested we should not insist on the difference between shape,
color and other sensible properties. Why then would Kant deny that aesthetic
judgment can serve to furnish a concept, say of objects with a certain shape or
with a certain shape and color and whatever other sensible properties serve the
most fundamental sorting of nature into kinds?
So perhaps a different way of getting
at the difference might be noting that, on the interpretation I proposed, it is
important that the claim of an aesthetic judgment to universal validity is
grounded in the assumption of a common sense. Aesthetic judgment, as I have
been emphasizing, “solicits assent from everyone [wirbt um jedes andern
Beistimmung]” (KU 5:237); the “should [Sollen] in
aesthetic judgments of taste is […] pronounced only conditionally” (KU 5:237).
For Kant then aesthetic judgment has a different normative status than does the
feeling of appropriateness accompanying a sorting response described by
Ginsborg. As I see it, an aesthetic judgment is not itself normative. It asks
for or seeks assent rather than demands it, precisely because it is not grounded
in concepts and for this reason is not itself already normative. It is proposed
as the ground of a norm – but is not itself one. Ginsborg’s sorting responses
too are not grounded in concepts. But they are normative or taken as normative.
They demand universal assent. The child she describes as acquiring the concepts
of a solid does not suggest or propose but rather simply “recognizes that the
chalk should go with the stone” (Ginsborg 2015b, p. 165; see also
Ginsborg 2015a, p. 141, 146).
But again, what is the significance
of this difference? Kant thinks of aesthetic judgment as asking for assent. But
he also appears to think that if others judge disinterestedly, assent will
indeed be given. Considering the possibility that sorting responses might differ,
Ginsborg similarly emphasizes that by and large “human beings naturally
converge in the ways they are inclined to sort objects and, correspondingly, to
associate representations” (Ginsborg 2015b, p. 167; see also Ginsborg 2015c,
pp. 199-200). The difference between the views might not then be great.
Finally, Kant insists that “judgments
of taste are singular judgments” (KU 5:215). They are responses to a single
object. This, of course, is something of which Ginsborg is very clearly aware.
She presents in detail the problem of the content of experience precisely as a
problem about the singularity of sensible intuitions (Ginsborg 2015b, pp. 150-154).
But again perhaps the thought is that we can clearly identify the form of a
single beautiful object in those similarly shaped; and the same presumably
holds for other sensible properties. Judgments of taste can then serve as a
model for sorting objects.
I think, however, that Kant should be
read differently. I suggested reading Kant as putting forward a three-step
model: 1) the delineation of objects in pure aesthetic judgments; 2) the
sorting of objects according to form; 3) the search for empirical concepts
describing these aesthetically sorted kinds. I claimed that Kant views the
first two steps as pre-conceptual. Evidence of this is found in Kant’s
description of the common spatial form of a kind as an aesthetic normal
idea. It is clearest in his claim in the First Introduction that the sorting of
objects according to spatial form logically precedes the search for empirical
concepts through the process of comparison, reflection and abstraction. The
comparison of like-formed objects is a condition of the search for empirical
concepts and not the first fruit of this search. Empirical concepts, for Kant,
must properly contain more than a common form; and, extending again, empirical
concepts must contain more than merely basic observational properties.
I emphasized above that Ginsborg’s
account of experience does not claim to be an interpretation of Kant’s analysis
of judgments of taste and that in any case this is not what is of interest to
us in this paper. The comparison of Kant’s view to the model Ginsborg proposes
is meant to serve as a guide to getting at the philosophically significant
differences between these accounts. I claimed that whereas for Kant pure
judgments of taste are subjective, Ginsborg uses them as a model for
fundamental objective norms. Very closely related to this is the fact that for
Kant, as I propose to read him, pure judgments of taste presuppose an
inter-subjective common sense that is a condition of sharing objective norms.
Furthermore, Kant emphasizes the singularity of the judgments, while Ginsborg
employs them as a model for how universal conceptual norms are furnished. Finally,
whereas Kant emphasizes the non-conceptual nature of pure judgments of taste
and insists that they do not furnish us with concepts, Ginsborg employs them as
a model for an account of how our most fundamental concepts are acquired. Though
I have emphasized the differences between Kant (as I propose reading him) and
Ginsborg, I think the comparison also shows that Ginsborg claims with very good
reason that her account of experience is drawing on Kantian insights. The
important question is this: What is the significance of the differences between
the view I am attributing to Kant and the model Ginsborg defends?
As I emphasized above, Ginsborg lays
great emphasis on the role played in her account by our natural modalities of
sense. Indeed, this is an important part of the force of her view, specifically
because it contends with the challenge of proposing a philosophical account of
concept acquisition that can link up to the discoveries of the sciences of
perception. Now Ginsborg clearly does not claim that the bare deliverances of
natural sense modalities are normative. To so claim would be to attribute to
non-rational animals standing in the space of reasons. This is precisely why
she emphatically adds, we saw, a normative twist to the naturalist reading of
Hume. But on her account, our natural dispositions are accompanied by a
primitive awareness that we are perceiving an object as it ought to be
perceived and thus that we are sorting it with others in the right way. The
deliverances of our sense modalities are clearly natural and the primitive
awareness of appropriateness appears to belong to our nature too. Indeed, to
describe the feeling as primitive amounts perhaps precisely to claiming that it
is part of our nature, though to our nature as potentially conceptual beings.[11]
Thus Ginsborg ascribes to unsynthesized intuitions a merely causal and thus
clearly natural role in the constitution of experience, while emphasizing the
non-directive role the understanding plays in the process of synthesis (see, Ginsborg
2006b, pp. 94-96). To put the main point simply, on Ginsborg’s account, our
natural dispositions turn out to give us our most fundamental norms. This is
indeed a principal advantage of her view.
We can begin to appreciate Kant’s
distinct view by recalling that, on the picture he has in mind, in aesthetic
judgment the imagination is “taken not as reproductive, as subjected to the
laws of association, but as productive and self-active (as the authoress of
voluntary [willkürlicher] forms of possible intuitions)” (KU 5:240) and
that it is “unintentionally brought into accord with the understanding” (KU
5:190). Both the fact that the imagination is not itself guided by a rule but
rather freely produces and tries forms out (so to speak) and the fact that the
faculty of concepts is required to respond in approval to a proposed form are
significant. I suggest that this is a way of insisting that aesthetic pleasure
is not natural – precisely not something we share with animals, though he
emphasizes the fact that it is in part grounded in our animal nature: “beauty
is valid only for human beings, i.e., animal but also rational beings” (KU
5:210). Nor is it a distinct natural feeling
that accompanies an otherwise natural mental function we do share with animals.
Animal cognition is pre-determined by laws of association (see, Letter 362 to
Herz; 26 May 1789; Br 11:52); and, on Ginsborg’s account, so is our most
fundamental experience of things. She says clearly that our activity of
imagination is “the expression of natural dispositions of the kind that are
shared by animals” (Ginsborg 2015b, p. 162). Kant though describes human
cognition as distinct even at the most fundamental level. As rational creatures
charged with making sense of what is given to us empirically even the most
fundamental order is a result of a mental activity distinctive of conceptual
creatures.
What is the significance of Kant’s
insistence on the distinct cognitive and normative nature of pure judgments of
taste? What, specifically, is the significance of the claim that the
imagination is not reproductive and subjected to the laws of association but
“productive and self-active” and of the role the understanding plays in pure
judgments of taste?
It might be thought that a capacity
that is not bound by given associative rules allows us to contend with
potentially very different environments – including environments very different
from our own. It would be the faculty of versatile investigators of nature
equipped for all epistemic occasions. But it seems implausible to claim that
even in an environment radically different from ours we would still find the
forms of fundamental natural kinds (and their other distinctive sensible
properties) cognitively significant. Think of being relocated to an environment,
in which the most important distinctions are revealed by very subtle
differences in odor or by electro-magnetic radiation other than visible light.
Put differently, Ginsborg is in at least one sense right to insist on the
continuity of human and animal cognitive capacities. Our cognitive capacities
are evolutionary products of contending with our environment. For this reason
it is not promising to read Kant as thinking of our most fundamental experience
of nature as, in this way, radically different from that of our animal
ancestors. It would be far better to find a way of reading Kant that allows us
to incorporate the sort of sober commitment to naturalism we find in Ginsborg’s
account.
Kant describes the imagination as
freely producing forms and aesthetic pleasure as requiring the positive
response of the understanding. But this interaction falls short of being
conceptually normative. On the account I offered, aesthetic pleasure can serve
to ground a conceptual norm. But it is not itself conceptually normative. Kant
emphasizes that pure judgments of taste do not depend upon or furnish us with
concepts. On the model Ginsborg presents, the imagination seems to present us
with the rules by which it operates; it seems to impose these rules upon us. And
these rules just are our most fundamental observational sortal concepts.
Against this view, Kant can be read
as making a conceptual point: A natural fact cannot be a norm. For Ginsborg,
the way in which we perceive objects and are disposed to sort them is a
“natural psychological fact about human beings” (Ginsborg 2015b, p. 162). It
also appears to be a fact about us that we take these dispositions to be
normative. Somehow, these two facts together are supposed to yield a norm:
What
makes the corresponding associations rule-governed is […] the fact that we take
them to have normative significance. The associations are rule-governed because
in carrying them out I take myself to be doing not only what I am disposed to
do, but also what I (and everyone else) ought to do. That is, I take my actual
associations, blindly habitual though they are, to manifest conformity to a
normative standard applicable to everyone. The rule-governedness of my
associations is thus a function of my taking them to be rule-governed, which is
in turn a function of my taking my natural dispositions as exemplifying a
universally valid norm. (Ginsborg 2015b, p. 162)
To this suggestion Kant might respond
that a fact about me, a blind habit, can’t just be declared a norm.[12]
The
Integration of Fundamental Perception into the Space of Reasons
It isn’t clear though that this
response makes sense in the context of the present discussion. After all, on my
account, Kant allows for the aesthetic delineation of objects and for their
sorting according to their spatial form alone. But I have also agreed that we
should loosen the Kantian distinction between the formal-aesthetic and the
material-conceptual and allow for sorting according to sensible properties
generally – properties the identification of which Kant would understand as
requiring concepts that apply to the matter of experience. How, in this looser
account, does our most fundamental capacity to sort objects according to their
fundamental observable similarities fall short of giving us a preliminary
conceptual sorting of nature into kinds? How does this sorting fall short of
providing us with conceptual norms?
I want to suggest that even for the
more relaxed Kantian view we are considering our fundamental sorting is not in
itself conceptually normative. What is missing in order to make them
conceptually normative is taking upon ourselves rational responsibility for the
natural operations of our mind. This means, among other things, that these
fundamental proposed norms are not immune to rational criticism. We have the
responsibility of testing them empirically. We accept them provisionally and
take upon ourselves the rational responsibility to revise or even reject them –
if that is required. Of decisive importance, on Kant’s view, is the question of
whether any further generalizations, crucially, any causal generalizations
apply to a proposed sort or kind. Putting the point skeptically, on Kant’s
account, we might ultimately claim that what our senses most fundamentally
present to us as similar are not in fact similar, or, more precisely, not
similar in any way beyond being merely observationally similar. This is the way
I am suggesting we gloss the distinction between aesthetic and conceptual
normativity and between the aesthetic and the logical purposiveness of nature.
Ginsborg’s proposed kinds are not yet
integrated into the sort of systematic and causally informative body of
knowledge, which Kant envisions as our end in cognition. Suppose sorting
like-shaped and similarly colored objects is causally just uninformative. They
would then be precisely the causally unprojectible ‘grues’ and ‘sphubes’ of
discussions of empirical conceptualization. I suggested in the introduction to
this paper that Kant thinks that the idea of the complete determination of what
is given to us sensibly by a comprehensive system of empirical concepts grounds
the claims made by empirical determinative judgments to being objectively true.
So for Kant, objects that are merely observationally similar are not
objectively similar. Conversely, to claim that observationally similar objects
are objectively similar is to claim that they would fit into the comprehensive
system of concepts that fully describes the natural world and its laws.
Putting the point about the
integration of observational kinds into a system of knowledge in this way
brings to mind a very important passage from Sellars, in which he affirms that
experience rests on observation and that these observations, like
empirical knowledge generally, can be revised or rejected.
I
do wish to insist that the metaphor of “foundation” is misleading in that it
keeps us from seeing that if there is a logical dimension on which other
empirical propositions rest on observation reports, there is another logical
dimension in which the latter rest on the former.
Above
all, the picture
is misleading because of its static character: One seems forced to choose
between the picture of an elephant which rests on a tortoise (What supports the
tortoise?) and the picture of the great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its
tail in its mouth (Where does it begin?). Neither will do. For empirical
knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because
it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which
can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once. (Sellars
1997, §32, pp. 78-79)
To
put the point skeptically, the worry is that no further empirical propositions
might rest on our fundamental observations and, conversely, that there would be
no sense in which the observations rest on such further empirical propositions.
Put non-skeptically, Kant’s deep concern is getting right the precise status of
our most fundamental observations. They are proposals or hypotheses; their
normative status, content and truth ultimately depend on what they turn out to
ground. Put slightly differently, our fundamental observations of similarity
are not normative independently of revealing further similarities – crucially
for Kant, similarities in causal properties. Insisting on this means that, on
Kant’s account, even our most fundamental observations of similarity can be put
in jeopardy and corrected, if and when this is required. On Ginsborg’s view,
these fundamental observations are facts about us and seem immune to correction.
But it should be definitive of empirical norms that they must not be immune to
revision and possibly even rejection.
Recall
here the important passage from the Introduction to the Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science (ignoring in this context the very important
distinction between properly and improperly so-called natural science).
[…]
the doctrine of nature can be better divided into historical doctrine of
nature, which contains nothing but systematically ordered facts about
natural things (and would in turn consist of natural description, as a
system of classification for natural things in accordance with their
similarities, and natural history, as a systematic presentation of
natural things at various times and places), and natural science […] Any whole
of cognition that is systematic can, for this reason, already be called science,
and, if the connection of cognition in this system is an interconnection of
grounds and consequences, even rational science. (MAN 4:468)
Systematically
ordered our fundamental observations might perhaps constitute a historical
doctrine of nature. But they would not qualify as rational
natural science. I think Kant is assuming that the historical doctrine of
nature and natural history specifically employ for classification similarities
that can also serve for constructing a system in accordance with causal
similarities. This is why natural history employs for classification time and
place. On the skeptical scenario we are considering, however, this would not hold
true. The systematized descriptions or observations would be cognitively barren
– in no way part of the self-correcting enterprise of a rational science of
nature (in Kant’s sense) or of the logical space of reason (to use the
Sellarsian phrase). It is in this way, I suggest, that Kant’s insistence on the
subjectivity and distinct normative status of pure judgments of taste is of
significance.
Experience,
Assent and Commitment
I think there is reason to believe
that the claims I have been making and the adjustments they suggest would not
be rejected out of hand by Ginsborg. My reason for thinking this can be
supported initially by returning to a criticism she raises against McDowell.
McDowell holds that having an experience does not imply that its contents are
endorsed; it requires, he claims, a further act to assent or commit oneself to
the content of an experience. To this Ginsborg responds:
[…]
if experiences do not carry with them commitment or assent to the claims
figuring in their contents, then they cannot serve as rational grounds for
judgments. This expression draws on the intuition expressed in Davidson’s
well-known remark “nothing can count as reason for holding belief except
another belief” (1986, 310). McDowell assumes that Davidson’s point can be
recast as the claim that “nothing can count as a reason for belief except
something that is already in the space of concepts” (1994, 140), but in fact
Davidson wants to make the stronger point that, to be a reason, a psychological
state must involve assent or commitment. The mere entertaining of a conceptual
content is not enough to supply me with reasons for endorsing either that
content, or any other content which is inferentially related to it. (Ginsborg
2006b, p. 79; see also, Ginsborg 2006a, p. 351)[13]
In
Ginsborg’s account of concept acquisition, the primitive feeling of
appropriateness obviously meets the requirement of experience involving assent
or commitment. And now it is a matter of spelling out
what assenting or committing yourself to an empirical content must be for an
experience to be a reason for belief. But as Sellars claims, in the space of
empirical experience and knowledge all beliefs are open to criticism, revision
and even rejection. Part of what it is to commit yourself to an empirical
content is to take upon yourself the responsibility of revising or even
rejecting it – if there are reasons to do this. Indeed, it is precisely the
commitment to take into account reasons that might demand revising our beliefs
that makes these beliefs good reasons for endorsing other beliefs. Making them
immune to criticism would also make their status as reasons highly
questionable. The point can be made by saying that commitment to empirical
beliefs is an on-going task that requires taking into account new evidence that
might count for or against these beliefs. A great advantage of Kant’s view of
empirical knowledge is precisely his appreciation of the fact that the
acquisition of empirical knowledge is an on-going task. This is the deep
significance of claiming that the transcendental assumption of the aesthetic
and conceptual purposiveness of nature is regulative. It governs our on-going
investigation of the empirical order of nature.
Ginsborg emphasizes that when we
acquire a concept the feeling of appropriateness that accompanies our mental
activity in effect makes a normative claim on others. But she also says, more
specifically, that “insofar as the subject’s imaginative synthesis involves the
awareness of its own appropriateness with respect to the circumstances, it
carries with it the kind of commitment or endorsement that is characteristic of
judgment” (Ginsborg 2006b, p. 94); the person whose synthesis it is “commits
herself to it and thus in a sense makes it her own” (Ginsborg 2006b, p. 94). I
am claiming that being open to criticism and so to the possibility of revision
or rejection is characteristic of empirical judgments; we take upon ourselves
this responsibility in making these acts our own.[14]
Indeed, in a recent essay, Ginsborg
explicitly connects her account of concept acquisition with the assumptions of
the systematicity of nature and of its conceptual purposiveness, explicitly
addressing the issue of revisability. Her account, she says, “does not rule out
the thought that we might come to reject particular concepts and systems of
concepts in favor of concepts that we find more appropriate to nature than the
ones we had before” (Ginsborg 2017, p. 84). But it does, she emphasizes, entail
the denial of the thought that “while there are appropriate ways of
conceptualizing nature, these are completely at odds with our natural ways of
conceptualizing” (Ginsborg 2017, p. 84). This might sound like an emphatic
rejection of the claim I am insisting upon. But I conceded above, on Kant’s
behalf, that it makes good sense to think of the most fundamental operation of
our cognitive capacities as evolutionary products of contending with our
specific environment. In this sense, we cannot revise or reject them. And
Ginsborg furthermore recognizes that it is only from the first-person
perspective that we must view our distinct way of sorting nature as
appropriate. Things look different when we consider the matter from the
third-person perspective.
We assume, in our activity of conceptualizing, that
nature calls for, or makes appropriate, this very activity. But even though we
cannot exercise reflective judgment without conceiving of a normative fit
between our activity of reflective judgment and nature, we can still step back
and adopt a third-personal view on the relation between that activity, now
conceived as the actualization of human sorting dispositions, and the ways in
which natural things ought to be sorted. And from that point of view, the
concept of a way natural things ought to be sorted comes apart from the concept
of how human beings in fact sort them. We get the idea that there so much as
are ways in which nature ought to be conceptualized – that there are, in other
words, genuine natural kinds and corresponding empirical laws – only through taking
our own ways of sorting natural things to be appropriate to nature, and thus
ruling out the possibility of a radical mismatch between our ways of
conceptualizing and ways in which nature ought to be conceptualized. But once
we have the notions, on the one hand, of a way in which nature ought to be
conceptualized, and, on the other, of the way in which human beings are
naturally inclined to conceptualize it, we can see how the two might come
apart. (Ginsborg 2017, pp. 87-88)
What I am insisting on is the
importance of this third-person perspective on our attempt to conceptualize
nature. How we most fundamentally sort nature is a fact about us. To take it to
be rationally normative is a further step and comes with accepting that even
the most fundamental concepts and distinctions we make might need revision or
even rejection. Once again, I take it to be crucial for Kant to distinguish
clearly aesthetic from conceptual normativity. As we just saw, Ginsborg makes
room for a distinction that in an important respect resembles the Kantian
distinction. But she also seems to want to merge the two perspectives and in
doing so to assimilate the third-person perspective to the first person
perspective. She claims that our fundamental sorting behavior is part of our nature.
But she further claims that our attempts to arrive at increasingly systematic
conceptions of nature are also natural.
There
is also a second respect in which, in revising our systems of concepts, we rely
on our natural sorting inclinations. This is that we are naturally inclined to
sort things not only at the “basic level” and in ways corresponding to simple
features like color and shape, but also at various different levels of
specificity. We do not – and this is something that again comes naturally to us
– rest content with just sorting Fido together with the other dogs. We also
sort him more specifically with the poodles and, if we are dog fanciers, with a
particular variety of poodles. In the other direction we sort him with other
animals and more generally with living things. It is of a piece with this
feature of how we sort that we are inclined to prefer ways of sorting that are
more conducive to systematic classification. This is part of what drives us to
revise our initial classifications. Our carrying out such revisions with the
aim of arriving at an increasingly systematic classification of nature is
itself a natural feature of our sorting behavior, and it is part of what makes
it the case that we do not stop at the conceptualizing that is required for
ordinary experience but rather go on to engage in scientific inquiry. (Ginsborg
2017, p. 85)
I don’t think Kant would deny that
the pursuit of a systematic conception of the empirical world is natural to us.
But it is natural to us as rational creatures. It is part of the second-nature
of creatures who move in the space of reasons – rational cognizers who seek to
systematize their worldview and are driven by further discretionary
intellectual and practical goals, the goals of scientists and dog fanciers. In
this we differ from all other animals. And Ginsborg emphasizes that our
fundamental sorting behavior employs the “same kind of sorting or
discriminative capacities possessed by animals” (Ginsborg 2017, p. 81) and she
is explicit that the sense of appropriateness she highlights “cannot be spelled
out in terms either of veridicality or of rational justification” (Ginsborg
2017, p. 82). I thus think Ginsborg is wrong to say that when we “come to
classify whales as mammals instead of fish […] we are still following our
natural sorting inclinations” (Ginsborg 2017, p. 85). We classify whales as
mammals, because there are good reasons to do so – though we continue to see
them as fishlike. On Kant’s behalf, I am insisting on the importance of distinguishing
our first from our second nature, precisely by distinguishing aesthetic from
rational-conceptual normativity. We will not stop identifying certain things as
objects or seeing fundamental similarities where we do. But we need not take
these facts on as rationally normative. This is the lesson I think we should
take from Kant.
In attempting to compare Ginsborg’s
account of the acquisition of fundamental empirical concepts and the view I am
attributing to Kant I made a significant concession on his behalf. I suggested
that we set aside his exclusive focus on spatial form and accept the idea that
our fundamental attempt to order the empirical world might involve all our
sense modalities. Ultimately, I think it is a question for empirical investigation
what sensible properties play a role in the performance of this task. I now
suggest a further very significant concession: Perhaps Kant is wrong about the
connection between aesthetic pleasure and cognition. Perhaps this too can be
empirically decided. Then the views of Kant and Ginsborg could be seen as very
close to one another. The remaining very important difference would be Kant’s
insistence that the feeling that we are rightly perceiving objects and right to
associate them with others cannot itself be epistemically or rationally
normative. To become rationally rather than aesthetically normative we must
take the deliverances of our natural dispositions to constitute hypotheses, to
be corroborated or refined – possibly even rejected – by further empirical
investigation. For in this way we take on rational responsibility for our
natural dispositions and so integrate them into the self-correcting enterprise
of discovering the empirical order of nature.
I think there is a very good reason
to concede this last point to Kant. Ultimately, I think it is this crucial
aspect of Kant’s view that shows he is not vulnerable to the myth of the given.
And the fact that for Ginsborg our natural dispositions account for our most
fundamental conceptualization of nature threatens to make her vulnerable to the
charge. For Kant, our most fundamental experience of the world is not
conceptual or rational. It can nevertheless serve as the ground of conceptual
norms and can thus be brought under our rational responsibility. On Ginsborg’s
account, the most fundamental deliverances of our sense modalities are
proto-conceptual. But it seems we cannot reject them, precisely because on her
view perception ties us to the empirical world. Our most fundamental experience
of the world thus appears to be immune to rational control. For Kant, in
contrast, there is an important sense according to which it is not perception
that ties us to the empirical world. What ultimately ties us to the empirical
world is the on-going and self-correcting investigation of nature. I have
suggested that there are reasons to think Ginsborg should concede this last
important point to Kant. In her terms, this would mean giving the third person
perspective on our most fundamental encounter with nature its due – our natural
conceptualizing dispositions too might need to be revised or rejected.[15]
Abbreviations
The Critique of
Pure Reason is referred to by citing the pagination of the 1781 (A) and
1787 (B) editions of this work. All other references are to the volume and page
number in the Academy edition. The page numbers appear in the margins of the
translations I use.
I
use the following abbreviations and translations:
A/B: Kant, I. (1998), Critique of Pure Reason, edited and translated
by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Br: Kant, I. (1999), Correspondence, edited and translated by
Arnulf Zweig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
EEKU: Kant,
I. (2000), “First Introduction to the Critique
of the Power of Judgment,” in Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by
Paul Guyer, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
KU: Kant, I. (2000), Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by
Paul Guyer, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Log: Kant, I. (1992), The Jäsche Logic, in Lectures on Logic, edited and
translated by J. M. Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
MAN: Kant, I. (2002), Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. In Theoretical
Philosophy after 1781, edited by Henry E. Allison and Peter Heath,
translated by Gary Hatfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
MS: Kant, I. (1997), Metaphysics of Morals. In Practical
Philosophy, edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
V-Anth/Mron: Kant, I. (2012), Anthropology Mrongovius, in Lectures on
Anthropology, edited by Allen W. Wood and Rober B. Louden, translated by
Robert R. Clewis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
V-Lo/Wiener: Kant, I. (1992), The Vienna Logic, in Lectures on Logic, edited and
translated by J. M. Young. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
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