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Abstract
In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant refers to the pleasure that we feel when judging that an object is beautiful as the pleasure of “mere reflection”. Yet Kant never makes explicit what exactly is the relationship between the activity of “mere reflection” and the feeling of pleasure. I discuss several contemporary accounts of the pleasure of taste and argue that none of them is fully accurate, since, in each case, they leave open the possibility that one can reflect without having a feeling of pleasure, and hence allow a possible skepticism of taste. I then present my own account, which can better explain why Kant thinks that when one reflects one must also have a feeling of pleasure. My view, which emphasizes the role of attention in Kant, depicts well what we do when we judge something to be beautiful. It can also suggest a way to explain the relation between judgments of taste and moral feeling, and begin to show how the faculty of feeling fills a gap in the system of our cognitive faculties.
Notes
1. Hereafter CJ. All references to Kant's works are given in the text by volume and page number of the Akademie edition, Kant's Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: de Gruyter, Citation1900). Citations of the Critique of Pure Reason utilize the customary format of ‘A’ and/or ‘B’ to refer to the first and/or second edition.
2. See Allison (Citation2001, p. 69), “that the judgment of taste involves reflection is only one side of the story; equally significant is the fact that it is based on feeling. Indeed, since Kant tends to argue from rather than to this thesis, whereas he does endeavor to explain how such judgments can nevertheless explain reflection, the aesthetic nature of judgments of taste may be viewed as the most basic underlying presupposition of his whole account”. See also Rind (Citation2000, p. 79).
3. In what follows, I will merely refer to the feeling of pleasure. This is both for the sake of brevity and also because, in his discussions of taste, Kant himself mostly refers to the feeling of pleasure. I think that my argument also holds for the feeling of displeasure. See note 17.
4. Allison writes of Guyer's view that if the pleasure of taste is merely the effect of the free harmony of the faculties, then “the pleasure on this view must be regarded as an inference ticket, from which the free harmony is then inferred. But in that event […] the judgment of taste (becomes) an empirical causal claim and a rather problematic one at that” (2001, p. 54).
5. Rather than finding two orders of the feeling of pleasure in Allison's account, as I do, Ginsborg finds two orders of the free play of the faculties. For Allison's response to Ginsborg, see Allison (Citation2003, p. 191). Allison argues that rather than there being two orders of free play, there is, first, the free play of the imagination and the understanding, and then the aesthetic appraisal of this relationship by the reflective power of judgment. Allison argues that reflection is something distinct from the activity in which the imagination and the understanding are engaged in their free play. Although I agree with Allison that reflection is something distinct from the free play of the imagination and the understanding, I do not think that it relates to it merely as an object for its appraisal.
6. Zuckert is citing Kant (20: 226).
7. “Every abstraction is simply the canceling of certain clear representations; the purpose of the cancellation is normally to ensure that what remains is that much more clearly represented. But everybody knows how much effort is needed to attain this purpose. Abstraction can therefore be called negative attention. In other words, abstraction can be called a genuine doing and acting, which is opposed to the action by means of which the representation is rendered clear” (2:190).
8. See Lectures on Anthropology (7: 131).
9. See note 7.
10. “If I am conscious to myself of the representation it is clear, if I am not, it is obscure” (9: 33).
11. See (7: 135) also (9: 34).
12. See (7:135). Clear representations, such as the Milky Way, can be either distinct (when we see all the stars) and indistinct (when we do not) (see 9: 35).
13. Zuckert (Citation2007, p. 48) writes: “If we do not have any way of sorting, making salient or intelligible, the diverse, contingent aspects of natural objects […] any coherent experience will be impossible”. It is my view that attention is what makes possible the “salience” that Zuckert refers to. See also Zuckert (Citation2007, pp. 127, 128, 222, 224).
14. I am grateful to a referee for emphasizing that I clarify this point.
15. See Nehamas (Citation2007, pp. 130–31): “Beauty, which draws us forward without any assurance of success, is […] a call to look attentively at the world and see how little we see”.
16. (Whereas hearing a sound is not necessary for hearing in the same way.)
17. Here we can say that the feeling of displeasure is what makes us overlook an object or aspects of it. Displeasure is thus what makes distraction possible, that is, it causes us to consider something else. One could object here that, on this account, it would be impossible to have cognition of anything that is unpleasant, since we would not maintain our mental state long enough for cognition. How could I ever cognize a rotten egg, for example? But here it should be noted that what Kant refers to as the “pleasure of mere reflection”, which is the kind of pleasure under consideration here, is not the “pleasure of enjoyment”. It is therefore possible that even the cognition of objects we do not find enjoyable still requires the pleasure of “mere reflection”. There is still something worth considering, and purposive for reflection, in a rotten egg. My account suggests that for Kant nothing can be judged to be aesthetically ugly. Rather, we find things to be either disgusting (disagreeable) or morally abhorrent. I am grateful to Tommy Hanauer, Charles Goodman and a referee for making me think about these points.
18. I think my view here is consistent with Guyer's “multicognitive” approach to the harmony of the faculties in which our experience of beauty is what “goes beyond anything required for or dictated by satisfaction of the determinate concept or concepts on which the mere identification of the object depends” (Guyer, Citation2006, p. 183).
19. Zuckert (Citation2007, p. 360) notes that Kant does attribute a feeling of pleasure to successful reflective judging. However, this is “not the necessary concomitant to an ongoing self-sustaining judging, but reflects our recognition that we have accomplished a cognitive purpose […] (5: 184)”. It is not the pleasure of “mere reflection”. I agree.
20. Although on my account it is pleasure that sustains the reflection, whereas for Zuckert it is reflection that sustains itself.
21. By sustained attention, I mean the activity by which we try to find a concept for a given manifold, while focusing on this manifold. Thus, even though we might spend a lot of time trying to figure out a mathematical problem, this is not an activity that requires attention. In solving math problems, we “bring in” new information, make analogies, etc. This is different from being drawn into a given object through attention.
22. See Barchana-Lorand (Citation2002, p. 311). According to Barchana-Lorand, pleasure is a priori because it “depends on the conditions of perception and is therefore provoked by every object, rather than just certain objects”.
23. This does not mean, however, that the feeling of pleasure precedes the judging. Rather it structures or “maintains” it. Similarly, the a priori intuition of space does not precede our empirical experience. Rather it provides its form.
24. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes that it is by means of attention that the understanding affects inner sense: “I do not see how one can find so many difficulties in the fact that inner sense is affected by ourselves. Every act of attention can give us an example of this” (B156n).
25. The above comments are merely suggestive. Lack of space prevents a fuller treatment of the connections between beauty, attention, love and morality in Kant. Velleman, in “Love as a moral emotion”, referring to Murdoch's discussion of love as a form of attention—“really looking”—, points out that attention translates to Achtung, which is Kant's term for the motive of morality (Velleman, Citation1999, p. 343). Velleman does not refer to Kant's CJ. Murdoch, who does discuss Kant's aesthetics in relation to morality, writes: “the shortcomings of Kant's aesthetics are the same as the shortcomings of his ethics. Kant is afraid of the particular” (Citation1999, p. 214). It should be clear from the above that I disagree with Murdoch.
26. I would like to thank Charles Goodman, Robert Guay, David Hills, Tommy Hanauer, Theodore Kinnaman, Clinton Tolley, Rachel Zuckert, and two excellent reviewers for making insightful comments on various drafts of the paper.