Paragraphs 34 and 35 in Kant's Critique of Judgment

Paragraph 34 stresses that there can be no objective principles of taste.  Such a principle would make it possible to deduce by syllogism that something is beautiful.  But Kant believes that to experience beauty I must immediately feel pleasure in the presentation of the object, and not be persuaded of its beauty by proof.  Critics, as Hume says, may reason better than cooks, but they still cannot expect to establish the value of a work of art by way of proof.  They can only expect their judgments to be based on reflection on the proper state of their immediate pleasure or pain in response to the object.  Kant stresses that all precepts and rules need to be rejected here.  (This may go against Hume, who does allow empirically grounded principles of taste.)   

To be sure, reasoning can help critics perfect and extend their judgments of taste.  But rather than finding a universal formula, critics, when acting according to their proper role, investigate the cognitive faculties and their practice of making judgments, as well as explaining, by examples, the form of purposiveness which "constitutes the beauty of the object." (The latter seems to be what we normally expect of critics, although to see the objects of criticism as simply examples seems to put it the wrong way around.)  

The critique of taste, then, is "the art or science of reducing to rules the reciprocal relation between the understanding and the imagination in the given representation." This is a phenomenological point, a point about the structure of our experience of an aesthetic object.   The representation in our mind, say of the Virginia State House by Thomas Jefferson, will exhibit in it this relation between understanding and imagination.  The reference to "reducing to rules" is puzzling since we are supposed to reject objective principles, but see below.  The reciprocity of the relation is also explained below. 

The critique of taste will explain the accordance or discordance between the two faculties, imagination and understanding.  It is an art if it only shows by examples; whereas it is a science if it derives this possibility from the nature of these faculties.  Here, by “science,” Kant means the sort of thing he is doing is doing here.   He calls this "Transcendental Critique."  The Transcendental Critique derives the subjective principle of taste as an a priori principle.  This is all Kant means by "reducing to rules." As art, the critique of taste applies physiological (psychological) rules concerning how taste actually proceeds.  He also thinks it "criticizes the products of beautiful art..." although it is not clear how it could do this.

 

#35 The principle of taste is the subjective principle of judgment in general.  

The subjective condition of all judgments is the faculty of judgment itself.  For beauty to exist there has to be an accord of the two representative powers: the imagination and the understanding.  And “because no concept of the object lies here at the basis of the judgment, it can only consist in the subsumption of the imagination itself…under the conditions that the understanding requires to pass from intuition to concepts.”  Moreover, “because the freedom of the imagination consists in the fact that it schematizes without any concept, the judgment of taste must rest on a mere sensation of the reciprocal activity of the imagination in its freedom and the understanding with its conformity to law.”  This is hard to parse out.  The judgment of taste rests on a feeling in which we judge the object by the purposiveness of its representation in respect of the furtherance of the cognitive faculty in its free play.  In taste there is subsumption not of intuitions under concepts but of the faculty of intuitions, that is, the imagination, under the faculty of concepts, the understanding.  This is freedom harmonizing with conformity to law. To discover the ground of a deduction of taste we need to consider the form of this kind of judgment.

This all goes along with the tenor of the rest of the Critique of Judgment.  Taste is a yin-yang thing:  it involves both the imagination and the understanding, both freedom and law in a reciprocal relationship.  Kant elsewhere talks about the need for academic training for the genius artist, a similar kind of balance.   

Kant says "the judgment of taste is not determinable by concepts" for "it is based only on the subjective formal condition of a judgment in general."  He further says "the subjective condition of all judgments is the faculty of judgment itself."   

It is puzzling exactly what is going on here.  I think that Kant is stressing that in judgments of taste there is a movement from intuition to concepts as we also find in objective reasoning, and yet the concepts at the end of the line are indeterminate and hence not true concepts of the understanding.  Later, these will be referred to as aesthetic ideas.  

What however should we make of the following sentence: "It [the judgment of taste] must therefore rest on a feeling, which makes us judge the object by the purposiveness of the representation (by which an object is given) in respect of the furtherance of the cognitive faculty in its free play."  Kant seems to be saying that the judgment of taste rests on some fusion of the purposiveness in the object with the sense that free play furthers our cognitive powers, a fusion of something seemingly objective and something else seemingly subjective.   It is also hard to know what it means to subsume the faculty of intuitions under the faculty of concepts so that the first "in its freedom harmonizes with the latter in its conformity to law" and how this relates to appropriate appreciation of an art object. 

Well, as you can see, I have not fully understood these two chapters, but this is the best I can do for now.

Interested in learning more?  See my book:  Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary:  The Aesthetics of Everyday Life.  Broadview Press, 2012.  Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 32 pages including the table of contents.  You can also buy it from Broadview. 

Do We Experience Images When We Read a Novel?

In reading a novel silently is there anything that imitates reality?  Surely the words don't.  But what about images or "ideas" brought up by the words?  Addison in his famous essay "On the pleasures of the Imagination" argued that that, in reading, the mind compares ideas that arise from words with ideas that arise from the object themselves.  Peter Kivy in Once-Told Tales (2011) observes that this notion comes from John Locke who believed that when I hear "green apple" I am in a mental state similar to that in which I actually experience a green apple.  Kivy thinks the Addison/Locke view ridiculous.  I am not so sure.  Oh yes, whatever image there is must be quite a bit less precise and, as Hume would put it, weaker or fainter, but this actually makes the view stronger.

But I ask myself:  what happens when I read the following passage from Tom Rachman's novel The Imperfectionists (2010)  "She takes a break at the espresso bar downstairs, where she meets up with her friend Annika, who is unemployed and therefore usually free for coffee.  Hardy empties a packet of artificial sweetener over her cappuccino." What happens in my mind is that I see Hardy in a downstairs espresso bar where there is another friend who perhaps comes up to her table, and I also see Hardy picking up a packet of sweetener and pouring it on the top of her cappuccino.  (I might even have an image of the color typical of the sweetener I tend to use.) Moreover, I have a very specific idea of what a cappuccino looks like, i.e. that it will be in a ceramic cup on a saucer and will have a bit of white foam over coffee-colored coffee.  There are not a lot of details here (and some of these details are admittedly contributed by me, not Rachman), but if the next line describes the cappuccino in such a way as to make it look like a coca-cola, I would be very surprised.  (I am not saying that this could not happen in a novel, but it would have a surreal effect.)  Moreover, the similarity between the experience I am having in my mind as I am reading and the one I would have if I were there in the room observing these characters explains why I would respond with the appropriate emotion if, say, in the story, a bomb went off and parts of Hardy flew by (that would be pretty shocking, and I would experience the emotion of shock....maybe you did just now, just a little).  It is certainly true that the word "cappuccino" here does not evoke an image as complex as the perception I would have on actually seeing, smelling and tasting a cappuccino.  But is this enough to reject the theory as presented by Kivy of Locke, Addison, Hume and Kames?  (Kames adds the emotional response component to the theory). 

Hume says that when I experience an "idea" of the cappuccino I am experiencing a faint copy of the original impression of the thing represented.  Kivy rejects this idea, and yet his rejection is based on an appeal to authority:  he simply says that the idea has been "hung out to dry" and that "no one can possibly accept" it (131).  (I accept it.  But he probably means, no one but a confused philosopher would accept it.)  He also thinks that a passage by Edmund Burke refutes the theory.  Burke's passage says, he claims, that if you read at adult speed these images cannot be aroused.  (How does Kivy or Burke know that the adult imagination cannot accommodate adult-speed reading?)  Here is Burke's telling passage quoted by Kivy: "the most general effect even of these words, does not arise from their forming pictures of the several things they would represent in the imagination; because on a very diligent examination of my own mind, and getting others to consider theirs, I do not find that once in twenty times any such picture is formed, and when it is, there is most commonly a particular effect of the imagination for that purpose."  A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London, 1757).  

So, I am to reject what I see in my mind when I read the passage by Rachman because it doesn't happen in Burke's mind or that, so he says, of his friends?  Remember that Hume had already insisted that the representation would be considerably fainter than the original. So it has already been conceded that it is not terribly similar to the original.  Am I to understand that Burke would in no way see a cappuccino in his mind if he were reading the passage I quoted?  Is this true for Kivy too?  I wonder why novelists would bother to describe things at all if doing so did not produce an image in our minds.  One would think that Rachman was relying on my knowing what a cappuccino looks like when presented in a cafe, so that he can paint a picture for me by using that word, among others.  

Kivy refers to the psychology of perception (Hume's) and theory of linguistic communication (Locke's) as "totally discredited" by Burke's passage.  How is that?  How is it that "The notion that reading a novel or narrative poem produces a continuous series of mental images...in the reader's mind simply will not wash."  (132) Wait!  What was the evidence for this?  Kivy's argument (if we wish to call it such) reminds me of an argument offered in the 1960s by Norman Malcolm that we do not dream at night, despite our recollections of such things:  that dreaming is just a disposition to tell stories in the morning.  You cannot refute a person's experience simply by saying that the idea "will not wash" or that the great Burke never had such experiences -- or claims not to have had them, in any case.  I suspect that Kivy would also have a faint image of a cappuccino when he read this passage every bit as much as I do, although I am lost as to his motive in denying it.  Some of the confusion may be due to some switching back and forth on Kivy's part between an image which is vivid and one which is faint.  He admits that sometimes we do entertain vivid mental images when reading fiction silently.  Fine, but remember that Hume's point was that in addition to the vivid ones there are also faint, non-vivid, even vague ones.  Perhaps they predominate when reading fiction.  I do not claim that my image of the cappuccino upon reading Rachman's novel is vivid or precise.  I do not need that much to "set the scene" and go on with the story.  After all, the subject of the story is not the cappuccino.  Kivy thinks, agreeing with Burke, that only when there is a particular effort of imagination, that one has an image when reading.  But I would argue that it would require a particular effort of imagination not to have a faint image of a cappuccino when reading Rachman's passage. 

Kivy says, "If I pause in my reading to dwell on a particular scene in a novel, I may succeed in conjuring up a mental image vivid enough to arouse an appropriate emotion." (133)  I just read a short story in which a girl threw her dog into a frigid pond and then jumped in after it (no adults around).  I felt a terrible shock and could not read further.  Only later was I able to pick up the story again.  This shock was not the result of pausing, dwelling and conjuring!  It was spontaneous and was connected with the image of a girl leaping fully clothed into a lake, an event that later kills her.