Aesthetic
Normativity and Knowing How To Go On
Hannah Ginsborg*
University of California, Berkeley, U.S.
Abstract
This
paper addresses a problem about aesthetic normativity raised by Kant. Can aesthetic
experiences be appropriate or inappropriate to their objects? And, if so, how
is that possible given that, according to Kant, aesthetic experience is not
objective? Kant thought the answer to the first question was yes. But his
official answer to the second question, in terms of the free play of the faculties,
is obscure. The paper offers a clearer answer, inspired by Kant, which invokes
Wittgenstein’s notion of “knowing how to go on.” Aesthetic normativity is
problematic only on the assumption that claims to the normativity of one’s
responses to things must be based on the recognition of objective properties of
those things. However, Wittgenstein’s discussion shows that we need not accept
that assumption. There can be legitimate claims to the normativity of one’s
responses which do not rely on those responses’ reflecting appreciation of
objective facts.
Keywords
aesthetics, normativity, Kant, Wittgenstein
§1 Kant on the normativity of aesthetic response
This paper addresses a problem about
aesthetic normativity, and specifically about whether there are norms governing
aesthetic experience or aesthetic response. Is there such a thing as an
appropriate or inappropriate aesthetic response to an object, and if so, how is
that possible?[1] This is a question which was thematized
by Hume in “On the Standard of Taste” and discussed more systematically by Kant
in his Critique of Judgment, specifically
the “Analytic of the Beautiful” and the “Deduction of Taste.” In the Kantian
formulation the paradigm aesthetic experience is the feeling of pleasure in the
beautiful, whether in nature or art, and this is the kind of aesthetic response
I will have in mind throughout. When I come upon a cherry tree in bloom, or see
a vase in the window of an antique shop, or hear music on the radio as I walk
into a room, I may have a certain experience of pleasure which is naturally
expressed by thinking or saying “That’s beautiful.” That is the paradigm
aesthetic experience for Kant, and the question I want to raise, following Kant,
is whether we can think of such an experience as one which we not only do have,
but in some sense should have, when
confronted with the object. Is there such a thing as how I should respond
aesthetically to an object, where the “should” reflects something over and
above how I am naturally disposed to respond? Can I claim, of someone who is
left cold by the cherry tree, that they are mistaken in how they are
experiencing the object, that they are failing to see something in it which
calls for a response of pleasure? Or is my response to be compared to liking or
not liking the taste of goat cheese or “peaty” Scotch whisky, where talk of how
one ought to respond seems out of place, and where there doesn’t seem to be room
for criticism of someone whose tastes differ from mine?
Kant himself wanted to defend the idea
of aesthetic normativity in this sense. He held that we can indeed say of my
response to the cherry tree or the vase that it is appropriate. He makes the
point in terms of a sharp distinction between judgments of beauty and judgments
of the agreeable. As he puts it, judgments of beauty have what he calls
universal validity and necessity, where the necessity he has in mind is clearly
normative necessity. When I judge something to be beautiful I claim that
everyone —myself included— should judge it as I do. But this is missing in the
case of judgments of the agreeable; these more or less correspond to
expressions of my own liking for something. When I judge that an object is
agreeable, saying for example that Lagavulin whisky is delicious, I don’t judge
that everyone should agree with me—I accept that others might not share my
taste for peaty Scotches. I’m happy to accept, as a reformulation, “I like the
taste of Lagavulin.” This is not the case for judgments of beauty, according to
Kant: in their case it seems to us that we are picking out an objective
property of the object, one whose presence should be recognized by everyone. In
fact, as we shall see, he denies that judgments of beauty are in fact
objective: beauty is not an objective property of the cherry tree and in
judging that the object is beautiful we are not bringing it under a concept, at
least not in the ordinary way. But judgments of beauty carry the same claim to
their own appropriateness as objective judgments, and for that reason it can
seem as though they involve the same normativity as objective empirical
judgments.
Now it might seem here that in
talking about Kant on aesthetic judgments I have changed the subject. I began
by raising the question of the normativity of aesthetic response or aesthetic
experience: isn’t there a difference between my pleasurable response to the
cherry tree and my judgment that it is beautiful? On my reading of Kant, the
answer to this last question is “actually no; for Kant the pleasure just is the
judgment.” Saying of the cherry tree “That’s beautiful” just is a way of
putting into words the pleasure one feels, so the pleasure is just the taking,
or finding, of the tree to be beautiful. This is a controversial reading of
Kant.[2] If it is accepted, then saying that
the judgment of beauty involves a claim to its own appropriateness to the
object amounts to saying that the pleasure involves a claim to its own
appropriateness: it is part of my feeling of pleasure that I feel the rightness
of that pleasure as a response to the object. There are reasons, which I won’t
go into here, to ascribe that view to Kant; and it is also an appealing view in
its own right. But you do not need to accept my controversial view on the
identity of the pleasure and the judgment to find in Kant a defence of the
normativity of aesthetic response as well as judgment. For he makes clear that,
in judging something to be beautiful, I claim not only that everyone should
agree with my judgment, but that
everyone should share the pleasure I feel.
So even if we do make a distinction between feeling pleasure in an object’s
beauty, and making some kind of considered judgment about the object on the
basis of that pleasure, we still have to allow that the pleasure itself, for
Kant, is normatively governed. And this, I think, has some plausibility in its
own right. If somebody I respect disagrees with me aesthetically—for example if
they dismiss Bill Evans as mere lounge music, or Andrea del Sarto’s religious
paintings as listless and vapid—it is my aesthetic response that I will feel
defensive about, not any explicit judgment I might have made on the basis of
that response. A criticism of my taste criticizes my liking what (in the view
of the critic) doesn’t deserve to be liked, or my failure to like what I should
like. My own inclination is to see this as grounds for identifying aesthetic
response and aesthetic judgment: to be a good judge of aesthetic value in some
domain to have the appropriate aesthetic responses to objects in that domain.[3] But we do not
need to go down that route to see that Kant’s view at least includes the idea
that we take our aesthetic responses to be subject to normative constraint, and
that that idea has some initial plausibility.
§2 The problem of aesthetic normativity and Kant’s
answer to it
Why is there a problem about the
possibility of this kind of aesthetic normativity? Why shouldn’t it be
appropriate for me to experience pleasure in the flowering cherry tree just as
it is appropriate for me to see the blossoms as white rather than yellow, or to
see the cherry tree as having a tree-like shape rather than the shape of a
house? In other words, why shouldn’t we treat the perception of an object’s
beauty just as we do the perception of any other property of the object, that is,
as subject to norms of veridicality? On that way of treating aesthetic
experience, my feeling pleasure in something which arguably doesn’t deserve it,
or failing to feel pleasure in something which does, is simply a matter of
mistaken perception: it is a matter of my seeming to discern an objective property
of the object which is not in fact there, or failing to discern one which is. (This
is the approach which is suggested by Hume’s parable, in “On the Standard of
Taste,” of the key with the leathern thong.) On that approach there is no
special problem about aesthetic normativity, any more than there is a problem
about how ordinary perceptions can be veridical, or fail to be veridical, with
respect to the object perceived. Kant’s reasons for thinking that there is a
problem are bound up with his denial that judgments of beauty can be
assimilated to cognitive judgments. In his terminology, although the judgment
of beauty makes a claim to universal agreement, it is not objective. Relatedly,
when we feel pleasure in a beautiful object, or find it beautiful, we are not
perceiving a feature of it which is there independent of the particular experience
we are having of it. This has to do with the difference between the feeling of
pleasure or displeasure, or “subjective sensation,” and the objective sensation
associated with, say, the perception of colour (CJ §3, 5:206). In the case of
the feeling of pleasure our experience is never of the object as such, but always
of what he calls its relation to the subject: how the object is affecting us in
the experience we are having of it. This is true both of pleasure in the
agreeable and of pleasure in the beautiful.[4]
The subjective status of the feeling
of pleasure is reflected in a number of other features of judgments of beauty
to which Kant draws attention. One is that judgments of beauty cannot be
proved; there are no criteria for determining whether or not something is beautiful.
Another is that I cannot judge that something is beautiful on the basis of
someone else’s feeling of pleasure. I cannot, for example, learn by hearsay
that something is beautiful; I have to see the thing myself in order to be able
to make a judgment of beauty about it. Moreover, if I do find something
beautiful, and someone else looking at the same object fails to share my
pleasure in it, that is not a reason for me to change my judgment. “The
approval of others in no way provides. . . a valid proof for judging beauty . .
. what has pleased others cannot serve as the ground of a judgement of beauty’
(CJ, §33, 5:284). The point that it is only my own feeling that is relevant to
judging beauty, and hence that I must myself perceive the object in order to
judge it to be beautiful, is brought out by Kant through a comparison with
judgments of the agreeable. “Someone may recount to me all the ingredients of a
dish, and remark of each of them that it is agreeable to me... Yet I am deaf to
all these reasons; I try the dish with my own tongue and palate, and lay
down my judgement accordingly.” The same general point, according to Kant,
applies to judgments of beauty. “Although critics, as Hume says, may reason
more plausibly than cooks, they still share the same fate” (CJ, §34, 5:285). It
is my feeling of pleasure alone which is decisive in determining whether I can
or cannot judge something to be beautiful. This distinguishes judgments of
beauty from what might seem to be their nearest cognitive analogues, nonevaluative
judgments of sensory properties like colour and taste. For in these cases I can
rely on the reports of others to determine whether or not such judgments are
legitimate.
This lack of objectivity, according
to Kant, is what makes aesthetic normativity, in the sense I have been
discussing, problematic. In the kind of paradigm experience I have described,
of finding a flowering cherry or a passage of music beautiful, I take my own
pleasurable response to the object to be appropriate to or called-for by the
object. And as long as I do not think that the response is due to some personal
interest that distinguishes me from other human beings—for example happy
memories of flowering cherries from a childhood visit to Paris—I take it to be
called for from all human beings. So I make a normative claim on the agreement
of others, that is, a normative claim that my aesthetic response should be
shared. And I do so, Kant says, in just the way that I demand agreement from
others regarding the perceptual states relevant to cognition. He compares the
claim to that made by someone who perceives a movable drop of water in a
rock-crystal and “rightly demands that everyone else must find it just as he
does.” (CJ Introduction VII, 5:191). The demand, he says, is the “very same” in
the case of a judgment of beauty. Presumably in the case of a judgment of
beauty I am also demanding that everyone have the same experience as I do, in
respect of my finding it beautiful, or feeling the corresponding pleasure in
it. One might here wonder why Kant uses the somewhat arcane example; I believe
that it has something to do with debates going on at the time about whether
rock-crystal, that is quartz, was formed from hardened ice. Presumably if
someone sees a drop of water in a rock-crystal that might be evidence for the
ice hypothesis. What is relevant here is that the demand bears not on a
theoretical judgment but on the experience of seeing the rock-crystal: I
rightly demand that everyone should see it as I do, where the seeing it as I do
is described as seeing a movable drop of water in it. My entitlement to do that
is a condition of our going on to have a theoretical debate about the origin of
rock-crystals—it is needed if we are to have common data on which to base our
subsequent hypotheses.
But there is also an obvious
disanalogy. In the rock-crystal case I can cite a ground for my claim in terms
of a property of the object. There is a fact about whether or not there is a
movable drop of water inside the crystal, and I can appeal to that fact as offering
an objective, albeit uninformative justification for the claim. (Spelled out,
the justification would be something like: Everyone ought to see it the way I
do, because I see it as having a drop of water in it and it does have a drop of
water in it.) There are also facts which might be seen as warranting or
providing evidence for the claim, and so providing a kind of subjective
justification: for example that it looks as though there is a movable drop of
water, or that it looks as though there is a clear liquid in it, and an
arbitrary clear liquid in these circumstances is most likely to be water. And
there are means of finding out whether I have been experiencing the situation
correctly. If there is doubt about whether the liquid is water, we can crack
open the crystal and find out. Or if my perceptual capacities are in question,
I can have other people, with better vision, take a look. But in the aesthetic
case, there are no corresponding sources of justification. Since beauty is not
an objective property of things I cannot claim that my finding the flowering
cherry beautiful is appropriate to the flowering cherry just because it is, in
fact, beautiful. Relatedly, there are no tests or criteria I can employ to
justify my claim. And, as Kant is at pains to emphasize, I cannot appeal to how
other people experience the object. Whether or not I am entitled to claim that
something is beautiful, and so that everyone else ought to share my pleasure in
it, is independent of whether anyone else feels pleasure in it: the only basis
for my judgment can be my own pleasure. So how can I possibly be entitled to
demand universal agreement for that pleasure? As Kant puts it in a canonical
statement of the problem: “how is a judgement possible which, merely from the
subject’s own feeling of pleasure in the object, independent of the
concept of it, judges this pleasure to attach to the representation of the same
object in every other subject, and does so a priori, that is without
being allowed to await the agreement of others?” (CJ, §36, 5:288).
§3 Kant’s answer to the problem
Kant offers an apparent answer to
this question in terms of his notion of the free play of the faculties of
imagination and understanding. He claims that pleasure in the beautiful consists
in a state in which the imagination apprehends the object in a way which
accords with the requirements of understanding, but does so freely, that is,
without being governed by concepts of the understanding. This state of free
play, he says, is one for which we can claim universal agreement, he says,
because it manifests what he calls the “subjective formal condition of a
judgment in general” (CJ §35, 5:287). The possibility of cognition requires
that we be able to claim universal agreement for our cognitive states, for
example experiential states like that of seeing the movable drop of water in
the rock-crystal. This yields an entitlement to claim universal agreement which
carries over from our cognitive states to the state of the free play. Because
of the free play’s status as a subjective condition of cognition, we are
entitled to claim agreement not just for particular cognitions, but for the
free play, and hence for the feeling of pleasure in which it is manifested. This
answer, viewed at the most general level, attempts to justify the normativity
of aesthetic judgment by making a connection between aesthetic and cognitive
experience. Although aesthetic experience is not itself cognitive, its relation
to cognition is such that we cannot deny the claim of aesthetic experience to
universal agreement without also undermining the possibility of cognition. But
it is notoriously difficult to make sense of Kant’s argument here. Those who
attempt a charitable interpretation are typically faced with a dilemma
regarding the relation of the free play to ordinary cognition. If the free play
is a necessary condition of cognition then it would appear that every object we
cognize should be experienced as beautiful. But if it is not a necessary
condition of cognition then it is not clear why the claim of cognitive
experience to universal validity should carry over to aesthetic experience. And
even aside from this specific obscurity in the argument, we also have to
contend with the more general obscurity of the transcendental-psychological
language in which it is framed. So if we take seriously the question Kant
raises, and want to address it, we either need to find a way of clarifying
Kant’s answer and making it persuasive, or adopt another approach.
Philosophers who have taken the
problem seriously but rejected Kant’s answer to it have tended to address it either
by rejecting aesthetic normativity or by insisting on the objectivity of
aesthetic experience. The latter can seem like the more tempting approach,
especially given that, in many ways of using the term “objectivity” it is
interchangeable with Kant’s notion of universal validity. It can seem like a
contradiction in terms to assert that I am entitled to claim universal agreement
for my judgment that something is beautiful, and yet to deny that the judgment
is objective. Or it can seem as though Kant must be operating with an unduly
demanding notion of objectivity, one which demands, say, that judgments must be
provable to count as objective, or that it must be possible to formulate them
in terms which make no reference to specifically human responses. But I think that
this approach misses an important commonality between the experience of
something as beautiful, or positive aesthetic experience more generally, and
the experience of just liking something, as in Kant’s judgments of the
agreeable. We do not want to lose sight of the fact that ordinary experiences
of beauty are in the first instance experiences of pleasure, liking or
enjoyment. They play a different role in our psychological economy, so to
speak, from experiences which serve to register the features of objects, to
tell us what kind of things they are. If I find the flowering cherry beautiful
and you do not, it seems strained to describe the difference in our experiences
by saying that I notice a feature of the cherry which you fail to notice. Assuming
that the two of us have an equally clear view of it and that we come to it with
the same conceptual background, we see it as having all the same features. The
difference lies in how we see it, our
way of seeing it, where “how we see
it” does not translate into “how we see it as
being.” Unlike you, I see it in a way which is pleasurable; but this does
not mean that I see it as being a certain
way, that I see it as having a property which you fail to see it as having.[5] In not seeing it the way I do you are
not cognitively worse off. What you are missing is not some item of information
about the cherry tree, but rather the pleasurable way of seeing it. If we
insist in this way on the subjectivity of taste, dissociating aesthetic
experience from cognition and insisting on the connection with pleasure, then
the question of aesthetic normativity remains pressing.
In the remainder of this paper I
want to propose an answer which is at the very least inspired by Kant’s own
answer, and arguably an interpretation of it. I have in fact argued previously
that Kant’s account of aesthetic normativity should be understood roughly along
the lines of the answer I’m now about to sketch,[6] but in this paper I will not try to defend that
point, but will simply present the answer in its own right. Putting it very
roughly: it is a misapprehension to think that there is a conflict between the
normative character of aesthetic judgments and the fact that they are not
objective. The thought that there is a tension rests on the mistaken view that
normativity in one’s judging or more generally in one’s cognitive or perceptual
response to an object, depends on the judgment’s being objective or on one’s
response to the object amounting to appreciation of an objective feature of it.
We can avoid this mistaken view by acknowledging a kind of normativity
applicable to our psychological responses to things that does not depend on
those responses registering objective facts but that is, rather, a condition of
objective cognition. Once we recognize the possibility of taking one’s response
to an object to be normative—to be appropriate to the object—in a way that doesn’t
stand in need of justification in terms of the objective features of the
object, then there is no longer any mystery about aesthetic normativity. The
fact that we can take our psychological response to a beautiful object to be
one that everyone should share is simply an instance of a more general
entitlement to take our natural psychological responses to things to be appropriate
to those things. This answer explicitly follows Kant in accounting for the
normativity of aesthetic response in terms of the conditions of cognition, and
more specifically in terms of the normativity of the perceptual responses which
enter into cognition. But it aims to clarify the kind of normativity at issue
in a way which makes clear that it is not incompatible with the denial of
objectivity.
§4 Knowing how to go on and primitive
normativity
I want to explain the notion of
normativity I have in mind by looking at an idea which appears frequently in
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, the idea of “knowing how to go on.”[7] This idea appears in the context of
Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations. Here Wittgenstein is concerned
with the general question, what is it to grasp a rule, where it is clear that
his concern is also with grasping the meaning of an expression or grasping a
concept. Part of his strategy in approaching this question is to consider how
children come to master linguistic expressions or acquire concepts. His answer
is that they do so by a kind of training in which the teacher presents them
with examples of behaviour which they are encouraged to follow. A normal child
presented with a sufficient number and range of examples will come to “know how
to go on” from them, and this knowledge makes possible the grasp of a
corresponding rule or concept. In the Philosophical
Investigations, Wittgenstein illustrates this knowing how to go on with the
example of mastering basic arithmetical concepts. Learning the decimal system,
for example, is a matter of multiple stages of learning how to go on from
examples of behaviour modelled by the teacher. A child must first learn how to
write the individual numerals 0 through 9 by first perhaps having her hand
guided by the teacher, or tracing the shape that the teacher has given her,
before she can go on to write each number on her own. She must then learn to
get the numerals in the right order, again going on from examples she has been
given. Following that she must learn to continue the pattern of numerals
exemplified by the series of natural numbers in the teens, twenties, thirties
and so on, and then into the hundreds. At some point we can say she knows how
to go on: she has, we might say, got the hang of, or come to understand the
principle of decimal notation, even if she is not able to give a good
explanation of it. This teaching might employ verbal explanation, but
Wittgenstein makes clear that it does not have to. Describing it in the Investigations he talks about “[using]
particular emphases, underlin[ing] figures, writ[ing] them one under another in
such-and-such ways, and similar things” (Investigations
§145). And in Zettel he says that
the learning may happen “only through examples,” without any rule being given (Zettel §295). Once a child has learned
the principle of decimal notation, we can teach her the meaning of expressions
for simple arithmetical operations. Wittgenstein gives the example of an
expression he calls ‘+2’ which corresponds to developing the series of even
numbers (Investigations §185). We can
teach a child the meaning of this expression, and, correspondingly, the concept
of adding two to an even number, by giving her the example of the series of 0,
2, 4, 6, 8... and so on, and showing her how to continue it. If she is able to
continue the series for high enough numbers, we can say of her that she knows
how to go on, and this, for Wittgenstein, is equivalent, or at least comes
close, to her having come to grasp the rule or concept underlying it.
Against this background, Wittgenstein
introduces his famous example of the aberrant pupil who has apparently learned
to develop the sequence of even numbers, and who does so competently up to
1000, but then goes on with 1004, 1008, 1012 instead of, as expected, 1002,
1004, 1006. When the pupil is challenged, he says: “Yes, isn’t that right? I thought
that was what I was supposed to do” (Investigations
§185). We try to explain to him that this is not the right way to go on,
but he misunderstands our explanations in just the same way in which he seems
to have misunderstood what we were trying to teach him. Wittgenstein suggests that it is as though it
comes naturally to him to understand the command “+2” as we would understand
the order “Add 2 up to 1000, 4 up to 2000, 6 up to 3000” and so on. And he
compares the case to one in which a person responds to a pointing gesture by
looking in the direction of fingertip to wrist rather than the other way around
(ibid.). The aberrant pupil, we’re inclined
to say, has got the wrong end of the stick: he has not caught on to the rule we
intended him to catch on to. But, as in the case of someone who misunderstands
the pointing gesture, we do not seem to have any way of correcting him. In the
case of the pointing gesture there is literally nothing we can do to show the
person which way to look: anything we provide (more pointing, arrow signs, even
physically turning him around) will be understood in the opposite way from the
way we intended. Something similar is the case for the aberrant pupil. Imagine how we might try to show him that he
is going on wrong. We might have him write the numbers vertically in columns
and compare the unit column for the numbers he’s given with the corresponding
columns for all the other numbers. Look, we might say, this last column is
different! And here we have to imagine that he insists that it’s the same: that
the column 0, 4, 8, 2, in the context where those numbers appear in the units
column of the four digit numbers, is the same as the column 0, 2, 4, 6 where
the numbers appear in the units column of the three digit numbers. Perhaps then
we have him compare just the number 4 which he has written in 1004 and compare
it with the 2 he wrote in 992, and he again insists that they’re the same. Let’s
suppose now that we just cut out the two numbers -- the 4 he wrote in 1004 and
the 2 he wrote in 992 and put them side by side. “Now they’re the same,” he says; but when we
put them back in their places he says, “Now they’re different.”[8] It is as though something went wrong
at the very beginning, when we were teaching him just to write the numerals. We
thought he had learned how to go on in the sequence of writing the same numeral
again and again, that he had got the hang of what the numeral 2 is. But
actually he hadn’t: he had apparently picked up an alternate way of going on in
which the correct numeral to write after 2 if you are, say, copying numbers
from the units column of a column of three digit numbers to the units column of
a column of four digit numbers, is 4.
The example of the aberrant pupil is
relevant for our purposes because it brings into relief a certain kind of
normativity associated with knowing how to go on, and it is in terms of this
kind of normativity that I want to address the question of how aesthetic
normativity is possible. Notice that, when we challenge the aberrant pupil, the
first thing he says is “Isn’t that right?” He not only says 1004, he thinks
that it’s the right thing to say in this context, that it’s the appropriate
response to being shown the series of numbers he’s already written and being
asked to “go on.”[9] This isn’t a peculiarity of the
aberrant pupil; a normal child who writes 1002 also probably thinks that what
she is doing is correct, although she is not likely to express this thought
unless she is challenged. And we can assume that this is true also in the more
basic cases of going on, like copying individual numerals or writing them in an
order which matches the teacher’s. The child is not simply producing the
numerals mechanically like an automaton, but is rather conscious of herself as
attempting to meet a normative demand set by the teacher’s examples. The case
of the aberrant pupil gets us to focus on this normativity by having us imagine
a context in which it is called into question. Consider again the aberrant
pupil’s claim that going on with 1004 is correct. I think the natural reaction
to this claim is to reject it: writing 1004 is going on wrong from the previous
sequence and it is 1002 which is right. Yet there is, as we have seen, no way
to persuade the pupil of this. And this isn’t just because he is stubborn or
stupid. We could imagine him, indeed, as highly intelligent and capable of
sophisticated rational argument, but still unconvinced. The point is that there
is in fact no rational argument to be given for the correctness of his writing
1002 as opposed to his writing 1004. If we could assume that he had been
previously been applying the add-two rule, and that in asking him to go on from
the sequence we were asking him to apply the same rule he had applied
previously, then we could argue that 1002 is correct by appealing to the
obvious objective fact that the add-two rule as applied to 1000 yields 1002. But
his previous behaviour is equally compatible with his having applied any number
of rules, including the rule “add 2 up to 1000 and then add 4.” Once we drop
the assumption that the pupil’s previous behaviour manifested his application
of the add-two rule, then we have no objective ground for rejecting his claim
that writing 1004 is just as good a way of going on as writing 1002.
One way in which Wittgenstein’s
example has been understood is as calling into question the very possibility of
rule-following and meaning. The impossibility of giving reasons for the
correctness of 1002, or of citing an objective fact in virtue of which writing
1002 is correct, has implications not just for the pupil but for ourselves; it
implies that we have no grounds for our own conviction, under normal
circumstances, that writing 1002 is the right way to go on from a series which
begins with 0,2,4,6,8... and goes up to 1000. We
might think that at least in our own case, if not in the pupil’s, we know what
rule we are applying when we write such a series, but Wittgenstein gives
convincing reasons for supposing that we are no better off epistemically in our
own case than in that of the pupil. I know, for instance, that I have been
following the rule that I have been taught by being given examples like those
that the pupil has been given, or with words like “count by twos” or “write out
the even numbers.” But knowing that I learned the rule from being shown the
examples does not tell me any more about what I should write than I know about
what the pupil should write. And regarding the verbal instructions I was given,
I learned the meaning of the words in them by learning how to go on from a
finite set of examples I was shown, so the question of what I should write in
the light of those instructions remains just as open as the question of how I
should go on from the sequence taken in isolation. The upshot, according to
this way of understanding Wittgenstein, is that “knowing how to go on” is a
misnomer. We may all be disposed to continue the sequence in the same way and
to do so with a feeling of conviction that we are going on appropriately, but
there is no genuine recognition of how to go on. And if, as Wittgenstein suggests,
knowing how to go on is the foundation of our grasp of rules, concepts and meaning,
then that yields the skeptical conclusion that there are no such things, and
correspondingly no such thing as truth-evaluable judgment.[10]
However, as I see it, the moral we
should draw from the example is quite different. The fact that there is no
rational argument to be given for the rightness of 1002 as opposed to 1004
should not be taken as undermining our conviction that writing 1002 is the
right way to go on and that writing 1004 is not. Rather it should be taken as
showing that our claim to the correctness of 1002 can stand without rational
justification. More generally, in the kind of learning situation which
Wittgenstein describes, the sense of correctness in which 1002 and not 1004 is
the correct thing to write, is not a matter of objective truth. The
appropriateness of 1002 at that point in the sequence neither amounts to, nor
depends on, the truth of the arithmetical judgment that 1000+2=1002. It is, I want
to say, more primitive, both in the conceptual sense that we need it to make
sense of their being such things as arithmetical judgments, and in the ontogenetic
sense that our capacity to grasp it precedes our capacity to recognize
arithmetical truth.
I understand Wittgenstein’s examples
of learning how to go on as intended at least in part to draw our attention to
this primitive appropriateness. We cannot explain the correctness of writing
1002 after 1000 in terms of the accordance of that behaviour with a previously
grasped rule. But that does not mean to say that we cannot make sense of 1002
being the correct thing to write in those contexts. The same goes for the more
basic cases of knowing how to go on illustrated by a child learning to write individual
numerals following the teacher’s example. If a teacher writes the number 2 several
times and tells the pupil to go on, the correct thing for the pupil to do is to
keep writing the number 2; she should not, for example, start writing 4 after
500 occurrences, or if the place she is asked to write it is in the units place
of a four-digit number. Moreover, although Wittgenstein illustrates this kind of
correctness in a context of learning arithmetical expressions and concepts, it
is applicable also to the acquisition of everyday concepts like dog and chair. A child comes to grasp
the concept dog, in a way which
allows her to make judgments like “That’s a big dog” or “Grandma’s dog is in
the park,” through mastery of sorting activities in which she learns to respond
in certain specific ways to dogs in contrast to other things in her environment.
Such activities might form part of everyday interactions with actual dogs: the
child learns to treat unfamiliar dogs with caution, to pat them if allowed to do
so, to say “hello doggie,” and so on. Her learning how to behave around dogs
can be seen as a kind of learning how to go on: her parents have encouraged her
to say “hello doggie” to various dogs she has encountered and at a certain point
she finds it natural to do so spontaneously with new dogs which cross her path.
She can also learn the concept through more structured activities, for example
activities of sorting different kinds of toy animals into different bins. The
child who is able to add more dogs to the bin where she has seen the teacher
putting them, and to leave on side the cats and the horses, is “going on” in a
way analogous to that of the child continuing the add-two series.
As in Wittgenstein’s
examples we can speak of knowledge of how to go on, and not a mere disposition
to go on, because the child recognizes, as we do, that what she is doing fits
the context. We might imagine her, like the aberrant pupil, protesting if her
behaviour is challenged. If we try to put the spotted dog with the cats rather
than with the other dogs she might rightly object that it “doesn’t belong
there.”[11] So
there is a recognition of her behaviour as normatively governed, both by her
and by us: we all recognize that the spotted dog should be sorted with the dogs
and not the cats. But, again as in Wittgenstein’s cases, the “should” here is
not a matter of the truth of an objective judgment. We cannot justify the claim
about where the spotted dog belongs by appealing to the fact that it is a dog,
or that it has other objective features in common with the dogs in the bin. We
can see this by noting that the child must be able to recognize the “should”
before having acquired the concept dog
or other concepts of features which dogs have in common; the sorting activity
is one which makes possible, rather than depending on, possession of the
concept dog. Another way is to note
that, as the rule-following considerations suggest, there are any number of
objective features to which we could appeal to justify sorting the spotted dog
with the cats rather than the dogs already in the bin. For example the spotted
dog shares with the cats the feature of being either a spotted dog or a cat;
and assuming that none of the other dogs in the bin have spots, this is a
feature which it does not share with the dogs that have previously been sorted
together. The upshot is that our grasp of ordinary empirical truths about dogs
and chairs, like our grasp of arithmetical truth, depends on the recognition of
a kind of normativity more primitive than that associated with objective
judgment. There is such a thing as sorting an object correctly or incorrectly
with others, where the correctness does not depend for its ascription on the
idea that the object possesses some general feature in virtue of which it
should be sorted that way.
§5 Conclusion
Let us return now to the problem of
aesthetic normativity. As we saw, that problem as Kant construes it arises
because of a seeming conflict between the normative character of aesthetic judgments
and the fact that they are not objective. I proposed to address the problem by
showing that it is based on the misapprehension that claims to the normativity
of one’s responses to things must be based on the recognition of objective
properties of those things. There can be legitimate claims to the normativity
of one’s responses which do not rely on those responses’ reflecting appreciation
of objective facts. My discussion of the normativity involved in knowing how to
go on was intended to show how this can be. In order to avoid skepticism about
rules, meaning, and content we have to allow a kind of normativity in our ways
of going on—imitation of others’ behaviour, continuing patterns, sorting
objects based on examples—whose recognition does not depend on the appreciation
of objective truth. If this kind of normativity is accepted, then the supposed
problem of aesthetic normativity disappears.
It is important to note that this
solution does not depend on simply identifying aesthetic responses to objects
with the kinds of perceptual responses to things which make it possible to know
how to go on. I am not claiming, for example, that the child’s knowing to sort
the spotted dog with the other dogs rather than the cats is due to some kind of
aesthetic sensitivity. Although we might think of her behavioural response to
the dog as reflecting her way of perceiving it—a way that allows her to see it
as more similar to the other dogs than to the cats—this is a quite different
way of perceiving than the pleasurable way in which we perceive the flowering
cherry. Conversely, when one feels pleasure in a thing, one is precisely not
having the kind of response which allows one to classify it as belonging in some
general kind rather than another. That distinction is central to Kant’s
distinction between objective and subjective sensation as well as to his point
that judgments of beauty are not conceptual. The point is rather that we can
appeal to the normativity involved in knowing how to go on in order to show
that there need not be a special problem about how we can take our aesthetic
responses to be appropriate to the things we perceive. Rather than suppose that
any claim to appropriateness or universal agreement requires a justification
for its legitimacy, we can, so to speak, shift the burden of proof. If someone
wants to deny that our aesthetic responses can be appropriate to their objects,
then they need to come up with a reason. They need to argue, for example, that
aesthetic pleasure is invariably “interested” (in Kant’s sense of the term),
that is, that it is always rooted in the individual’s particular desires or preferences.
That would require showing that my pleasure in the flowering cherry is not, as
it seems to be, something which is obviously called for by the object and so
something which any human being ought to recognize, but rather that it reflects
idiosyncratic preferences due to my particular history and education. I have
not been claiming that aesthetic normativity cannot be challenged on those or
similar grounds. What I have been claiming is that the mere absence of what
Kant calls objectivity in our aesthetic judgments is not sufficient to motivate
such a challenge. The impossibility of providing rational justifications for
our aesthetic judgments is not in itself a reason for questioning our intuitive
commitment to the normativity of our aesthetic responses.[12]
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