DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2009.00356.

Kant on Recognizing Beauty

Katalin Makkai

Abstract: Kant declares the judgment of beauty to be neither objective nor merely subjective. This essay takes up the question of what this might mean and whether it can be taken seriously. It is often supposed that Kants denials of objectivity to the judgment of beauty express a rejection of realism about beauty. I suggest that Kants thought is not to be understood in these termsthat it does not properly belong in the arena of debates about the constituents of reality motivating the suggestion by first considering a pair of opposing views on the question of whether Kant can be understood to develop a real alternative to realism about beauty at all.

And yet a piece of music comes very close to being no more than a medley of sound sensations: from among these sounds we discern the appearance of a phrase and, as phrase follows phrase, a whole and, finally, as Proust put it, a world. (Merleau-Ponty 2004: 99)

1. Kant and Amerikss Revisionism The distinctive nature of the judgment of beauty is a guiding idea of Kants Critique of Judgment.1 But it is also a radical idea, given Kants own critical project. For as Kant tells us in his elaboration of its twofold peculiarity, the judgment of beauty is neither objective judgment nor merely subjective (KU 31: 281, 32: 281 and 33: 284). Kant thus appears to be introducing something which, from the point of view of the first Critique, ought to be unintelligible: a region of experience lying somehow between the polesas they now turn out to beof objectivity and subjectivity. The claim that the judgment of beauty is not objective seems to be interchangeable, for Kant, with the claim that beauty is not a property of the object,2 and is closely linked with the thought that as the judgment is neither grounded on concepts nor aimed at them it does not constitute knowledge (cognition) of the object (KU 5: 209). Kant thus contrasts the judgment of beauty with theoretical judgments, including ordinary empirical judgments, as well as practical judgments. What is connected with the representation of the object in the judging of its beauty is (not a concept, but) pleasure, the only so-called sensation that can never become a concept of an object, and through which therefore I cognize nothing in the object of the representation.3 Yet for all that
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the judgment of beauty is not merely subjective, for it involves a claim to speak with a universal voice (KU 8: 216). Again Kant makes his point by way of a contrast, now with another way of judging aesthetically. With regard to the agreeable, everyone is content that his judgment, which he grounds on a private feeling, and in which he says of an object that it pleases him [dab er ihm gefalle], be restricted merely to his own person. Hence he is perfectly happy if, when he says that sparkling wine from the Canaries is agreeable, someone else should improve his expression and remind him that he should say It is agreeable to me . . . . (KU 7: 212) Kant here ties the agreeable or pleasantthat which pleases the senses in sensation (KU 3: 91)to a certain spirit of judgment, one in which I take my liking for an object to carry no implication concerning how it will (much less ought to) strike others. The object agrees with me (so to speak); I happen to like itthis is all I am in a position to say. The judgment of the agreeable is so modest that it doesnt even anticipate the agreement of others despite the fact that a quite extensive unanimity is often to be found. It is in this sense that the ground of my judgment is a private feeling, and that the judgment itself is merely private (KU 8: 214). Others might be pleased in the same way by the same thing, but this would not render my feeling any less private. It is private not because it cannot be shared, but because its being shared is a matter of contingent congruence: how it is with you when you sip this wine is, it turns out, how it is with me too. So [i]t would be folly to dispute the judgment of another that is different from our own in such a matter, with the aim of condemning it as incorrect, as if it were logically opposed to our own (KU 7: 97); likewise, another judgment of the object as agreeable would not logically agree with our own. The judgment of beauty, however, is entered as public:4 It would be ridiculous if (the precise converse) someone who prided himself on his taste thought to justify himself thus: This object (the building we are looking at, the clothing someone is wearing, the poem that is presented for judging) is beautiful for me. For he must not call it beautiful if it merely pleases him. [. . .I]f he pronounces something to be beautiful, then he expects the very same liking of others; he judges not merely for himself, but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things. That is why he says: The thing is beautiful, and does not count on the agreement of others with his judgment of liking because he has frequently found them to be agreeable with his own, but rather demands it from them. (KU 7: 21213)5 In my judgment of beauty, I do not regard agreement as likely. I regard it as necessary, and I point to the objectthe thing itselfas that which makes it necessary.6 Insofar as it demands agreement, the judgment of beauty is similar to objective judgments (cognition), and to empirical judgments in particular. For
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ordinary empirical judgments demand agreement, as Kant illustrates with an example: A singular judgment of experience, e.g., one made by someone who perceives a mobile droplet of water in a rock crystal, rightly demands that anyone else must also find it so.7 Thats why Kant says that we treat the judgment of beauty as if it were objective, and as if beauty were a property of the object.8 But we dont treat the judgment as if it were objective (and beauty as if it were a property) in every respect. While we accept perceptual judgments based on what others see, we do not allow that a judgment of beauty can be founded on the pleasure of others, much less on would-be rules of beauty: neither offers a substitute (or a basis) for ones own pleasure in the object. On this front, Kant says, the judgment behaves as if it were merely subjective.9 Kants example of the rock crystal is meant to bring into sharp focus a crucial point. In the case of the judgment about the rock crystal, what is demanded is the connection of a concept with the representation of the object: others are to recognize the concept contains a mobile droplet of water as applying to this rock crystal. But what is strange and anomalous about the judgment of beauty is: . . . that it is not an empirical concept, but rather a feeling of pleasure (consequently not a concept at all) which, through the judgment of taste, is nevertheless to be required of everyone and combined with its representation, just as if it were a predicate connected with the cognition of the object. (KU VII: 191) How could such a demanda demand for pleasurebe anything other than sheer presumption? Answering this question means, for Kant, providing the judgment of beauty with a deduction of its own. Both valences of peculiarity mlichkeit) are therefore apt: what is peculiar about the judgment of beauty (Eigentu is precisely what is peculiar to it. But does Kant succeed in establishing that the judgment of beauty has the distinctive character he claims for it, and, specifically, that it should be understood as not objective? Karl Ameriks develops an impressive argument for concluding that Kant does not. In Amerikss view, the considerations that Kant adduces in support of denying objectivity to the judgment of beauty fail to make the case: in no substantive sense of objectivity does he give us reason to withhold the title from the judgment of beauty. Consider, first, the claim that the judgment of beauty does not proceed by applying a concept. Ameriks argues that it is at most in a merely stipulative sense of concept that the judgment of beauty can be construed as distinct from concept application, much less as devoid of concepts at all. At best, what Kant shows is just that certain kinds or uses of concepts are not involved, or that beauty cannot be determined from concepts alone but also requires particular sensory input. But such features are hardly restricted to the judgment of beauty: the latter is true of empirical judgments, which Kant himself calls objective.10 Regarding the supposedly special status of pleasure, Ameriks objects that Kant simply assumes without warrant that pleasure cannot have an objective reference, that (in other words) it cannot
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constitute a mode of awareness of a feature belonging to an object (Ameriks 2003a: 303). And while we can grant that pleasure is subjective if by this we mean that it exists in us, the concession is harmless, since on the Kantian view all empirical judgments involve elements that are subjective in this sense. Ameriks rejects two further kinds of considerations on the grounds that they too are not unique to the judgment of beauty. Kant notes that we dont make aesthetic judgments by surveying and comparing the opinions of others, but one could argue similarly that there are some non-aesthetic judgments (e.g. immediate observation reports) where non-reliance on a comparison of others reports is also guaranteed as a matter of meaning (Ameriks 2003a: 3001). And the apparent non-measurability of beauty and absence of laws of beauty which Kant cites attach to so-called secondary qualities as well (Ameriks 2003a: 3002). For all that Kant says (or that one could say on his behalf), Ameriks concludes, beautyand aesthetic qualities more generallycan be taken to be objective and conceptual. Indeed, Ameriks calls for a mild revisionism in our reading of Kant which involves conceding that precisely for Kants own purposes it would ultimately be better to say that taste is conceptual and objective, despite Kants frequent remarks to the contrary.11 While this approach foregoes taking the text at its letter, according to Ameriks it is nevertheless more faithful than its main alternatives can be to some of Kants own deepest commitments. Thus mild revisionism straightforwardly upholds the basic tenet of the first Critique that judgment requires concepts, unlike the orthodox approach which holds on to the language of nonconceptuality and non-objectivity, but at the price of making the nature of Kantian taste unduly mysterious.12 And by contrast with a strong revisionism that begins by abandoning Kants idea of the judgment of beauty as laying claim to universal validity and hence forfeits the motivation for the deduction of the judgment of beauty, mild revisionism preserves both (Ameriks 2003b: 3089). Now because the term objective is hardly transparent, it is not immediately obvious what we commit ourselves to if we heed Amerikss call.13 Amerikss own glosses are compatible with understanding the judgment of beautys objectivity to consist in its being subject to a standard of appropriateness of some sort (other than that of truth).14 But Ameriks might have in mind the more robust notion of aptness for truth. Then accepting beauty to be objective means granting that it is part of the fabric of the world, available to be encountered by us.15 That Ameriks intends the more robust notion is suggested by his remarks that a Kantian ought to acknowledge the objectivity of taste (which, in this context, means that it rests on objectively beautiful and immediately perceivable natural forms) and that taste involves the perception of aesthetic form (Ameriks 2003c: 293 and 2003b: 318).

2. Ginsborgs Defense of Kant Hannah Ginsborg has challenged Amerikss assessment as failing to appreciate the powerful reasons for denying the objectivity of beauty that flow from the
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autonomy of the judgment of beauty.16 It is a central insight of Kants that autonomy is a condition of the judgment of beauty, Ginsborg argues, but objectivism or realism about beautythe contention that beauty resides in the worldcannot explain this condition, and so Kant has (and gives us) serious grounds for rejecting it.17 The condition of autonomy received brief mention above. It is the requirement that one judge of beauty for oneself, on the basis of ones own pleasure in the object and not on the basis of what others say or feel about it. Take someone who does not find a building, a view, or a poem beautiful although a hundred voices . . . all praise it highly.18 He can, of course, pretend to like the object. He can even begin to doubt whether he has adequately formed his taste by acquaintance with a sufficient number of objects of a certain kind (just as one who believes himself to recognize something in the distance as a forest, which everyone else regards as a town, doubts the judgment of his own eyes). But the person seeking to identify what lies in the distance can rationally take the fact that everyoneor many otherssee a town as grounds for adopting their judgment and abandoning the judgment of his own eyes. He can discount his own experience. This is what the person judging of beauty cannot do. [W]hat he does see clearly is this: that the approval of others provides no valid proof for the judging of beauty, that others may perhaps see and observe for him, and that what many have seen in one way what he believes himself to have seen otherwise, may serve him as a sufficient ground of proof for a theoretical, hence a logical judgment, but that what has pleased others can never serve as the ground of aesthetic judgment. (KU 33: 284) When judging of beauty we are bound to our own experience. Ginsborg reads Ameriks as arguing not merely for objectivism about beauty, but also for a particular substantive account of beauty. Pairing a construal of secondary qualities as simply a particular complex of primary qualities19 with the thought that beauty can be understood on analogy with secondary qualities, this account takes beauty to be a complex of primary qualities that causes us to experience impressions of beauty, that is, feelings of pleasure of a certain kind.20 But this account, Ginsborg argues, cannot uphold the condition of autonomy. For it must allow that the feelings of other people would provide reasons for me to judge one way or the other on the question of an objects beauty. This is because they would serve as evidence for the presence or absence of the pleasure-causing property.21 The fact that so many others find (say) the building before us to be beautiful would give me reason to accede to their judgment, just as would the fact that they all see it as red (rather than golden), or as a church (rather than a library). For a version of objectivism that looks better suited to deal with the autonomy challenge, Ginsborg turns to the theory of aesthetic valueand of value more generallyelaborated (without explicit reference to Kants aesthetics) in the
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work of John McDowell and David Wiggins.22 As does Ameriks, McDowell and Wiggins appeal to an analogy with secondary qualities in thinking about beautyvalues more generallyas part of the fabric of the world. But they deny something which the identification of beauty with a complex of primary qualities entails: that secondary qualities and values can in principle be characterized in a way that makes no reference to sensation or feeling (Ginsborg 1998: 455). On the contrary, for secondary qualities as for values no adequate conception of what it is for a thing to possess it is available except in terms of how the thing would, in suitable circumstances, affect a subjecta sentient being (McDowell 1998a: 113). For example, what it is for an object to be redan objects being redis understood in terms of its being such as to look red in certain circumstances. Values and secondary qualities thus stand in an essential or internal relation to our sensibility. While they are internal to our sensibility, on this approach, values and secondary qualities are nevertheless real (part of the world) in their own right. The core of the approach is its call for the reconception (or the recovery of a conception) of the mind-independence which characterizes reality. For (so it argues) on the orthodox conception of realityon which what is real would have to be like a primary quality in being simply there, independently of human sensibility or brutely and absolutely there (McDowell 1998b: 132 and 133)the reality of a quality will seem impossible to reconcile with its internality to sensibility except by postulating mysterious entities together with a mysterious faculty whereby we know of them (an unattractive intuitionistic realism) (McDowell 1998c: 157). The thought is that this underlying and fateful primary quality model for reality (McDowell 1998b: 147) is all but pervasively taken for granted, as though it required no justification, and so must be brought to light, exposed (in the first place) as a model. We are to recognize that it is not compulsory, that it can (and indeed should) be given up.23 The spirit of the enterprise is to recover the richer conception of reality revealed as available when we abandon the artificial constraints imposed through the impoverishing model. The upshot (for our purposes) can be specified by drawing a distinction between two senses of objectivity and hence of subjectivity. The first has already been mentioned: a quality is subjective in the first sense insofar as it is internally related to our sensibility as described above (and objective otherwise). A quality is objective in the second sense insofar as it is there independently of any particular apparent experience of it or there to be experienced, as opposed to being a mere figment of the subjective state that purports to be an experience of it (McDowell 1998b: 136). An objects being such as to look red is independent of its actually looking red to anyone on any particular occasion (McDowell 1998b: 134), and so redness is objective in this second sense. The fact that secondary qualities and values are subjective in the first sense (sensibility-internal) is perfectly compatible with their being objective in the second (individualindependent); objectivity in the first sense is not a condition of objectivity in the second. And the central proposal is that objectivity in the second sense captures all that we genuinely need or should wantall that bears wantingin a notion of
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reality. An experience is of an objective reality when its object is independent of any particular purported experience of it.24 Recall that the point of Ginsborgs introduction of the McDowell and Wiggins approach was to develop an aesthetic objectivism or realism that is not vulnerable, as the version Ginsborg attributes to Ameriks is, to allowing a preponderance of disagreement to give me reason to discount my own experience. Now the proposal as sketched thus far will not accomplish this end. After all, like that earlier version it has pressed the idea of construing beauty on analogy with secondary qualities, and no one would deny that others can judge for me in the case of secondary qualities. The viability of this proposal as an advance over the version Ginsborg attributes to Ameriks depends on locating a relevant disanalogy between secondary qualities and beauty. And the McDowell and Wiggins approach highlights a disanalogy that appears to fit the bill. To make a secondary quality judgment is to judge the object to be such as to elicit a certain response. But to judge something to be beautiful is to judge it to be such as to merit or make appropriate a certain response, specifically a certain feeling of pleasure (McDowell 1998b: 143). This disanalogy reflects the special way in which value judgments are regarded as open to criticism. One might be faulted for failing to appreciate an objects beauty (or a persons bravery), for failing (that is) to meet it with the response it merits. There is no correlate to this when someone is taken to fail to see something as red; at most we will say, rather, that she would see it as red if her color perception were normal. The disanalogy blocks the challenge, Ginsborg argues, to which the account she attributes to Ameriks is vulnerable. It is not irrational for me to remain unmoved by the fact that many (even all) others do not find beautiful what I find beautiful: I might believe that they are all failing to give the object the response it merits. But while Ginsborg points out that this revised objectivism is an improvement over its predecessor, her real aim is to show that even so itand indeed any objectivismcannot contend with an implication of the condition of autonomy that Kant does not mention explicitly: that I am barred from judging to be beautiful (or not beautiful) something which I do not myself experience. Suppose I am told by many maximally reliable sources that an object I have not seen is beautiful. In terms of the approach we are now considering, what I am being told is that the object merits a certain kind of pleasure. Why should this not constitute rational grounds for me to judge that it does indeed merit that pleasure, even though I have not seen it myself? The route to discounting the responses of others that was available in the case in which I met with disagreement is no longer available, for now I do not have a countervailing response of my own on which to rely. So I would seem to have no reason not to concurat least provisionally with the general verdict (Ginsborg 1998: 462). In Ginsborgs view, this conditionthat I must experience the object in order to judge of its beautyposes a serious problem for objectivism about beauty in general. Ginsborg endorses McDowells specification of independence from individual experience as a requirement of a qualitys objectivity (objectivity as reality): a quality that is part of the world must be independent of each particular
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apparent experience of it. But it is just because of this requirement that any variety of objectivism will be at a loss to account for autonomys condition of experience: If the quality were genuinely independent of the experience, then there would be no reason, at least in principle, why someone should not assert the presence of the quality itself without herself having had the experience (Ginsborg 1998: 461). Kant (as Ginsborg reads him) denies that beauty meets this requirement of independence, and that is why he denies objectivity to beauty and its judgment (Ginsborg 1998: 4589). While the experience of beauty presents itself to us as awareness of some quality in the object that is independent of the experience, the matter is not as the phenomenology would have it: the quality apparently perceived in the experience is not in fact independent of it (Ginsborg 1998: 461). The negation of the independence claim is the claim that beautyan objects being beautifuldepends on some particular experience through which it is apparently perceived. It should be noted that Ginsborg takes a further step, for she holds that beauty is dependent on each particular apparent experience of it.25 This is a surprising proposal. There is reason to believe that it cannot pair with allowing the judgment of beauty to make a full-blooded claim to universal validity. For what Ginsborg denies to beauty seems to be a condition that a quality must meet not merely if it is to be real, but if its judgment is to be so much as open to criticism. Thus an antirealist account which acknowledges the judgment of beauty to be assessable as better or worse must (so it would seem) suppose that an objects being beautifulthat is, its being appropriately or aptly judged beautifulis independent of any particular experience of it as beautiful.26 In other words, denying beautys independence from individual experience would apparently preclude a conception of its judgment as subject to any sort of standard (e.g., appropriateness), not merely a standard of correctness (truth). Contrast Ginsborgs objection to the McDowell and Wiggins approach with the line of criticism that the approach could be said most naturally to invite, and that tends in fact to orient its critics of either antirealist or realist persuasion. On that linewhich the McDowell and Wiggins approach would regard as internal to its point to anticipate and defusethe view of value as independent of the individuals experience is unproblematic; what is balked at is the unfounded insistence (so goes the charge) that this condition of appropriateness or correctness can do, or replace, the metaphysical work required of a genuine alternative to antirealism. The puzzle concerns how beauty could be denied to be independent of the individuals experience without forfeiting its judgments claim to speak with a universal voice. After all, McDowell (as we saw) aligns what lacks such independence with the mere figment of a subjective state purporting to be an experience of it (a hallucination, for example). What Kant calls pleasure in the agreeable does not purport to be an experience of a feature of the world, so in this regard it is unlike the hallucination. Still, on a narrow construal of the agreeable an objects being agreeable (to S) means, simply, that it is experienced as agreeable by S. Then the agreeable depends on a particular experience of it as
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agreeable: the object is agreeable (to me) only in virtue of my experiencing it as agreeable, that is, my receiving pleasure in my perception of it.27 Like a hallucination or an after-image, agreeableness does not exist apart from being experienced. If I dont find an object to be agreeable (to me), it isnt; my finding it agreeable makes it agreeable (that is, agreeable to me). The judgment of the agreeable is always (properly speaking) the judgment that something is agreeable to me, the spirit of judgment which Kant says would be ridiculous with respect to the beautiful. The question, then, is whether Ginsborgs proposal can escape folding the beautiful in with the agreeable, so that a beautiful object is, properly, beautiful for me or for us (who find it so). Ginsborg does not explain how her account bears out the claim that beauty is not independent of each apparent experience of it (or the stronger claim that it is dependent on each apparent experience of it). In the following section, I consider Ginsborgs account in some detail with an eye to this question. (There I argue from grounds internal to that account that it does not succeed in making good either claim, andfurthermorethat it does not succeed in making good either claim, andfurthermorethat it does not succeed in avoiding objectivism.). First I want to return to her thought that objectivism is, after all, vulnerable to the autonomy challenge, since it is unable to explain why someone requires experience of an object in order to judge of its beauty (or lack thereof). Ginsborg simply asserts, as though it required no defense, that the objectivistthat is, the theorist who thinks of beauty as in the worldcannot explain why an individual human being should be limited to his or her own experience as a basis for judging that beauty is present, and specifically can have no reason for barring someone from asserting something to be beautiful without experiencing it for herself.28 But is it obvious that the objectivist is empty-handed? Consider the following outline of a defense of autonomy, which I think has at least a claim to plausibility, and which is open to (but not restricted to) the objectivist. Value judgment in general is a matter of assessment or appraisal. When it is voiced, a value judgment is a proclamation or pronouncement concerning its object. Value judgment, in short, involves passing judgment, a position one can be entitled to take only if one understands oneself to have reasons for ones judgment.29 This rules out value judgment on the basis of testimony. Specifically, testimony is not a basis for judging beauty, because it does not transmit reasons for finding the thing to be beautiful. If I do not have reasons for finding a speech to be cowardly or a painting to be beautiful, then I am not in a position to judge the speech to be cowardly or the painting to be beautiful; indeed I cannot be said to find it cowardly (beautiful).30 Then might not someone offer me a description of the objectone that does not invoke beauty (or other qualities that I cannot judge on the basis of testimony)that provides me with the reasons I would need to judge of its beauty? What rules this out is that one cannot understand any such description apart from experience of the object; apart from experience of the object one does not know what those descriptions mean. The idea has, I think, some intuitive appeal. There is a sequence in The General in which a rebuffed Buster Keaton sits on a nearby standing trains driver

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rod to give himself over to a state of sorrowful absorption so deep that he then fails to notice the sharp rise and fall of his perch as the train is set into motion. I would call this a sequence of beauty; there are others. But if I try to imagine that Ive not seen the film, and that someone describes the sequence to me in great detailadducing (say) Keatons forlorn unseeing gaze, or the toy-likeness with which he is hoistedI feel that apart from having seen it for myself I cant know what she means by the forlornness of his gaze, the toy-like motion, and so on. I dont know what those words pick out unless Ive seen Keatons forlornness myself. I would, of course, understand the words. I know what toy-likeness and expressions of forlornness are. To possess such understanding is not to understanding the description Im offered, although it is a condition of that. Arnold Isenberg offers a way of spelling this out. By contrast with ordinary communication, critical descriptionthe description the critic proffers in support of her judgmentdoes not designate the quality it communicates (or is meant to communicate). Its point, rather, is to get us to seeto give us directions for perceivinga quality (Isenberg 1973: 162). We do see the quality by means of understanding the quality that the words designate, but the two are not the same; one may grasp what the words designate (what a forlorn face is) and perhaps even see that they fit the object (see that this is a forlorn face) without grasping the quality the critic seeks to communicate. [T]he critics meaning is filled in, rounded out, or completed by the act of perception, which is performed not to judge the truth of the description but, in a certain sense, to understand it (Isenberg 1973: 163). Her words need to be filled in not because critical language is (either contingently or inherently) inadequate to the task of meaning and so of communication but because this is what meaning and communication are in this realm; this is how the critical (aesthetic) meaning of words is determined. The critical meaning of the words is a matter of experienced contents or sensory contents.31 On this view, if I do not have experience of an object at all, then in an important sense I cannot understand the reasons someone might advance for judging it to be beautiful.

3. Ginsborgs Account: A Closer Look How can Ginsborg deny (on Kants behalf) that beauty is independent of individual experience, while maintaining that the judgment of beauty makes a claim to universal validity? Her initial specifications of her interpretation fuel rather than answer the question, since (at first glance) they seem to place it decidedly on the side of what Ginsborg calls objectivism. Indeed, Ginsborgs reading of Kant shares a number of important features with the account suggested by McDowell and Wiggins. Not merely does Kants judgment of beauty represent something as being the case, according to Ginsborg. For Ginsborgs Kant as for McDowell and Wiggins, to experience an object as beautiful is to be aware of something about it, where this awareness takes the form of a feeling of pleasure. And there are more specific points of similarity. As
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Ginsborg reads Kant, what I am aware of through the feeling of pleasure is that the object merits that feeling of pleasure (or, equivalently, that the pleasure is appropriate to the object).32 In fact, for Ginsborg the experience of an object as beautiful qualif[ies] as a perception of the object.33 But the construal of the experience of beauty as awareness or perception seems impossible to square with the denial that beauty is a feature of objects (much less with the denial that it is independent of the individuals experience): surely it entails that the objects beauty is there to be perceived? What is supposed to block this consequenceand more generally to separate her approach from that of McDowell and Wigginsis the selfreferential character of the awareness which, on Ginsborgs reading, constitutes the experience of beauty (Ginsborg 1998: 465). Within a discussion that he declares to hold the key to the critique of taste, Kant suggests that the experience of beauty involves a distinctive mutual engagementa harmonious free playof the cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding (KU 9: 216). It is this notion of free play that Ginsborg interprets as a self-referential state of mind, wherein one is aware that ones present state of awareness is appropriate given ones current objective environment (or, simply, appropriate to the object).34 This state of mind consists, phenomenologically, in a feeling of pleasure in the object (Ginsborg 1991: 299). The identification of the state with pleasure, together with the fact that it is awareness of its own appropriateness, allows us to put it this way: pleasure in the beautiful consists in a reflective awareness of its own appropriateness or legitimacy with respect to the object (Ginsborg 1998: 463). The claim of appropriateness (or legitimacy) is meant to capture what Kant figures as the judgment of beautys claim to universal validity: when I feel pleasure in the beautiful with respect to an object, what I am aware of is that anyone who perceives the object ought to experience the same pleasure as I do (Ginsborg 1998: 463). The idea that the awareness constituting the experience of beauty refers to itself does not yet distinguish this account from the McDowell and Wiggins approach. What does single it out is its construal of the awareness as purely selfreferential (Ginsborg 1998: 306). The state of mind does not simply involve or constitute awareness of its own appropriateness: it consists in this awareness.35 We are not to imagine a state of mind directed to an object which represents that object in some particular way or which manifests some particular feeling of pleasure in addition to making a claim to its own appropriateness to the object. There is nothing more to the state of mindor the pleasure that it is experienced asthan the claim to its own legitimacy: I take my mental state in perceiving an object to be universally [valid], where my mental state is nothing more than the mental state of performing that very act of judgment, that is, of taking my mental state in the object to be universally [valid].36 The judgment of beauty, or the experience of beautythese are one and the same; they do not come apart, for Ginsborg is a judgment which, in effect, claims nothing but its own universal validity (Ginsborg 1991: 300; emphasis added).
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Although the fundamental position remains the same, some of its elements are modified in Ginsborg 1997. Here the self-referential act of judging is elaborated in terms which explicitly invoke the imagination. When I make a judgment of beauty, I take my imaginative activity to be appropriate to (universally valid with respect to) the object.37 More specifically, I take the activity of my imagination to be as it ought to be in the primitive sense, that is to set a standard for how my or anyone elses imagination ought to function with respect to the object which elicits it rather than to conform to some antecedent standard (Ginsborg 1997: 70). Ginsborgs account is evidently intended to accommodate Kants separation of the judgment of beauty from the merely subjective judgment of the agreeable (since it builds the claim to universal validity into the judgment of beauty, as its content). But it is as yet unclear why Ginsborg is entitled to say either that the judgment of beauty is not the claim that beauty is present, or that although pleasure in the beautiful consists in awareness it does not constitute awareness of any feature of the object.38 It is worth noting that elsewhere Ginsborgs defense (on Kants behalf) of the judgments lack of objectivity does not invoke the denial of beautys independence from the individuals experience. Instead it proceeds by way of an interpretation of Kants argument from the absence of concepts, which takes the following shape in Ginsborg 1997.39 As weve seen, for Ginsborg my experience of an object as beautiful consists in my taking the imaginative activity the object elicits in me to set a standard for how it, and the imaginative activity of anyone else perceiving the object, ought to be. Now according to Ginsborg I dont have a determinate conception of how my imaginative activity ought to be, and that just means that I dont have a concept of how it ought to be. Consequently I dont perceive the object as having any determinate property. Hence my experience can yield no objective cognition of the object. It is not that I dont have any conception at all of how my imaginative activity ought to be; the point, rather, is that I have merely an indeterminate conception: I have no conception of how it ought to be except that afforded by the example of my activity itself: namely, the indeterminate conception that it ought to be this way (1997: 70). What makes this conception indeterminate? The key seems to be that it is wholly dependent on my pointing to my instance of it. I have no grasp of how my imaginative activity ought to beno grasp of the appropriate kind of imaginative activitythat is independent of my pointing to my instance of it. This is not because (say) the content to be picked out is too rich to be otherwise conveyed. Something like the contrary: there is no determinate content to the standard I am invoking, because there is no determinate content to the way my imaginative activity ought to be.40 The absence of any determinate content stems from the purely self-referential nature of the claim. Perhaps the point could be put this way: there is no determinate content to how my imaginative activity ought to be because there is no determinate content to how it is, inasmuch as it consists in the purely self-referential claim. The argument turns on the idea that the content of my claim has to be specifiable or graspable otherwise than self-referentially if it is to count as
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determinate, and hence as the use of a concept. But the justification for this idea is missing.41 (Ginsborg sometimes says something stronger about the claim I make in my judgment of beauty: not just that it lacks determinate content, but that it lacks content altogether. This, however, seems misleading. After all, it does say something about the object and about the kind of feeling it merits, and so (at least in this sense) has content. Content that is grasped or specified selfreferentially is not the same as sheer lack of content: only in the former case is a claima judgmentmade at all.42) And even if we admit that Ginsborg has captured a sense of concept in which the judgment of beauty lacks a concept, it is not obvious that this is the sense of concept that is relevant to settling the question of whether or not the experience of beauty ascribes a property to the object. It is, of course, a fundamental Kantian tenet that a qualitys being part of the fabric of the worldits being objective in that senserequires that it be ascribed by way of a concept. But it is not self-evident that the sense of concept on which this tenet rests corresponds to that which Ginsborg employs. Ginsborgs sense might well be more stringent than Kants tenet requires. Lets return to the concern which most directly motivated this closer look at Ginsborgs account, Ginsborgs claim that an objects being beautiful is not independent of each apparent experience of it as beautiful. As I mentioned above, Ginsborg does not specify how this claim is to be borne out. Note that the considerations just canvassed do not help in this regard. Suppose that I cannot grasp or specify the imaginative activity the object merits except by pointing purely self-referentially to my instance of it: it does not follow that its being the merited activity is dependent on my, or any, particular experience.43 Nor does Ginsborg explain how the claim can be advanced without conceding the beautiful to be, properly, beautiful for those who find it so. But we can perhaps reconstruct the approach she might take to these questions by drawing on her remarks regarding the judgment of beautys title to correctness. According to Ginsborg, a judgment of beauty is always correct.44 To find something to be beautiful (to make a judgment of beauty) is ipso facto to judge correctly. To apparently perceive something as beautiful is to perceive it as beautifulwhich is to say that there is no such thing as merely apparently perceiving something as beautiful.45 Crucially, the notion of correctness invoked here is full-blown. That is, the point is not that being found to be beautiful is all that is required for what counts as correctness in this region (so that the judgment is correct for the judge). If someone finds an object to be beautiful then it is correctly found beautiful, which is to say that it is beautiful not for that particular judge but tout court. It is then a sufficient condition of an objects being beautiful (tout court) that it be judged to be beautiful. And to deny that an objects being beautiful is independent of each apparent experience of it as beautiful is to say that it is a necessary condition of an objects being beautifulwhere, again, this means beautiful tout courtthat it be apparently experienced, hence (we can now say) genuinely experienced, as beautiful. In other words, an object is beautiful when and only when it is experienced or (equivalently, for Ginsborg) judged to be beautiful.46
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My sense is that Ginsborg wants to say, further, that what makes something beautiful is its being judged to be beautiful. So I gather from the stretch of reasoning in which Ginsborg ascribes to Kant the view that there is a fundamental principle of judgment (the principle that we are licensed to take our imaginative activity in general to set a normative standard) and that to make a judgment of beauty is to realize an activity of judgment which is such as to constitute an application of that principle.47 For reasons related to a worry I discuss below, I dont know how to fill in the details, but the general idea (if I understand) is that the principle of judgment somehow confers validity on the activity which corresponds to the (to any) judgment of beauty. Given that an objects being beautiful depends on its being judged to be beautiful, the suggestion seems to be that it is the very making or performance of the judgment of beauty whichthanks to a fundamental principlemakes it correct, makes (that is) the object beautiful. Contrast the sense of finding it so is what makes it so that applies to the agreeable (narrowly construed). There my finding it so is simply what it means for it to be so (which is why it is so only for me). Whether something is agreeable is determined by the experience of the individual asking the question. Whether it is beautiful is not determined by, and in particular does not depend upon, the experience of the individual asking the question. One can fail to find beautiful something that is beautiful, something, in other words, that one ought to find beautiful. Such considerations begin to address our second question (How is Ginsborgs account supposed to prevent beauty from being for its judges?). While they speak to our leading question (How is the account supposed to substantiate the claim that beauty is not independent of the experience of it?), it is less clear that they support the stronger claim which, as weve seen, Ginsborg enters: that beauty is dependent on the experience of each individual who makes a judgment of beauty. Suppose that you make a judgment of beauty with respect to something. On this picture, it is then correctly judged beautiful: it is beautiful. Suppose that I, in turn, also find it to be beautiful. It is hard to see why its being beautiful would depend on my particular experience as well as yours. After all, I might not have judged it beautiful; I might not even have had a chance to experience ityet for all that it is beautiful. So perhaps it would be more accurate to this picture to say that an objects being beautiful depends on someones experience of it as beautiful (the first one to judge it to be beautiful), or that it depends on that kind of experience. Clearly it wont suit Ginsborgs aims if a condition of the possibility of performing a judgment of beauty is a prior fact of the objects being beautiful: that would short-circuit the attempt to ground the objects being beautiful on the making of the judgment, and it would convert the account into a version of what Ginsborg calls objectivism. The more serious problem I now want to consider is that such short-circuiting seems unavoidable. Whether I make a judgment of beauty about a given object is not just up to me.48 I cannot make the judgment of beauty about whatever object I choose. As Ginsborg allows, if I am to judge an object to be beautiful it must in fact elicit in me the self-reflective imaginative
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activitythe imaginative activity that constitutes the judgment of beauty. But if that is so, then, furthermore, its eliciting that imaginative activity in me has to reflect its being such as to (or disposed to) elicit it in me, and in any perceiver, given the right conditions. For it is not enough that my judging something to be beautiful be (at least in part) out of my hands; whats also needed is that it be (in part) up to the object and not, say, a matter of chance. After all, my judgment of beauty demands of any perceiver of that object that she respond with my imaginative activity. Unless the object plays its part in allowing the perceiver to satisfy that demand, neither the demand nor the judgment will be wellgrounded. The judgment must be arbitrary neither on my end nor on the worlds. The right conditions just mentioned include the obvious conditions of perception: adequate lighting, and so on. But they must also include the perceivers doing her part. The perceiver must have a part of her own to carry out, some work to do beyond getting in the line of fire. Otherwise there wont be any sense in which her imaginative activity is a response that reflects the exercise of her powers of discernment (taste), as opposed to a reaction merely wrested from her. So, putting all of this together: if I am to judge an object to be beautiful, it must be such as to elicit that imaginative activity in any perceiver who does her part, who observes it discerningly (and in conditions adequate to perception; I leave this sort of qualifier implicit from now on). Now that place for the perceivers part is precisely what merits records: the objects being such as to elicit that imaginative activity in an observer who does her part is its meriting it. And (on Ginsborgs account) an objects meriting that imaginative activity is its being beautiful. The possibility of judging something to be beautiful has thus turned out to depend on the objects being beautiful, so the objects being beautiful cannot be grounded on the performance of the judgment of beauty. Furthermore, since it is (in Ginsborgs words) as a matter of empirical fact that the object elicits the relevant imaginative activity, if it does, its being such as to elicit the activitythat is, its meriting itis an empirical feature. So beauty emerges as objective in Ginsborgs terms, a feature in the world and independent of individual experience. The judgment of beauty, which on Ginsborgs construal is the claim that the object merits the relevant imaginative activity, is then an objective judgment in those terms, a judgment that ascribes an empirical feature to an object.49 4. Recognizing Beauty [P]urposiveness is a lawfulness of the contingent as such. (KU EE VI: 217) Ive argued that Ginsborgs reading of Kant does not meet Amerikss challenge in the way it claims: by bringing to light good grounds for denying that beauty is a feature of objects belonging to an objective reality. Yet one might feel that revision along the lines Ameriks suggests requires us to abandon much of what promises to be of interest in Kants critical aesthetics. Where does this leave us?
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It is worth considering the possibility that what Kant has in mind when he denies objectivity to the judgment of beauty has little to do, at least in principle, with the question that is at issue between antirealists about beauty and their opponents, namely whether or not beauty is part of the fabric of the world. The proposal I want to sketch is that in this context Kant means by objective something which is (in principle) orthogonal to that debate, although the judgment of beautys lack of objectivity in this sense might fit most naturally with an understanding of Kantian beauty as in the world. We saw that the approach of McDowell and Wiggins grants that value (aesthetic or ethical) is not objective in a sense that does not compete with its being in the world. My proposal is similar in structure, though it invokes a new sense of objectivity (in which it is indeed distinctive of aesthetic judgments that they are not objective). It might be thought that there can be no question about the basic meaning of Kants denial of objectivity to the judgment of beauty. As we saw, Kant glosses that denial in terms characteristic of (noncognitivist) antirealism. He cites the objectivity of empirical judgments, and the objectivity that the first Critique claims for empirical judgments is of a piece with Kants (empirical) realism. Kant never indicates that he is introducing a new sense of objectivity in the Critique of Judgment. Just the contrary, apparently: he seems to think that the judgment of beautys lack of objectivity follows from its lack of a basis in a concept, which suggests that he is drawing on the tenet, mentioned earlier, that a claim about the world requires the use of (empirical and pure) concepts. Kants idea that beauty is not a concept of the object50 does, in my view, drive his argument, but in a different direction. It articulates a dimension of what he calls the essential singularity of the judgment of beauty, an upshot of which is that (in a sense to be specified) one objects beauty has nothing in common with that of anotherexcept, of course, for the bare fact of exemplifying beauty. The antirealist declares that beauty is not a property of the object; by contrast, the thought I am drawing from Kant is that although beauty is (or at least may be) of the objectpart of the worldit is not a property of the object. Now the thought has to be drawn from Kant because he does not explicitly carve out the notion of a property on which it relies. I am suggesting that there is a strand of his thought that is worth isolatingthough Kant does not do soas independent of any denial (or endorsement) of realism. So there is an element of critique in my proposal: appreciating the force of Kants insight requires separating strands that he takes as one. Kant frames the Critique of Judgment in terms of an evocative, if abstract, distinction between reflective and determinative judgment. In the determinative case the universal (a rule or concept) is given and judgment subsumes the particular under it, but in the reflective case only the particular is given, for which the universal is to be found (KU IV: 179). Judgments move from the particular to the universal can take two forms: To reflect (to consider) [. . .] is to compare and to hold together given representations either with others or with ones faculty of cognition, in relation to a concept thereby made possible.51 In the judgment of beauty, the given representations are not compared with other
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representations, which is to say that the given object is not compared with other objects.52 Instead the given representations are compared with ones faculty of cognition. The point is elaborated through the notion of the free play of the cognitive faculties. The free play arises when [a] representation which, though singular and without comparison to others, nevertheless is in agreement with the conditions of universality, which constitutes the business of the understanding in general (KU 9: 219).53 Understanding conducts its business by unifying the representations given in the manifold of intuition. In empirical cognition, the manifold of intuition is found to have unity as an instantiation of some empirical concept. This depends on comparison of the object with others since it means identifying the object as like other (actual or possible) objects in the relevant respects. In the judgment of beautys free play, however, the manifold is found to be unified (not as the instantiation of some empirical concept, but) in itself. It is found to cohere as such. Clearly this sketch requires development. It will be useful to begin by addressing a natural worry: that it is by no means clear that anything along such lines (however developed) will allow us to deny that judging beauty is a matter of deploying the concept beauty and ascribing the property of beauty (except in some merely stipulative, hence uninteresting, sense). Indeed the attempt might appear to be hopeless, on the following grounds. To accept the bare possibility of multiple beautiful thingsthings which may all legitimately be counted as beautifuljust is to admit the property of beauty (what they have in common) and the concept beauty (what the judgments of them as beautiful share).54 One could hardly withhold this minimal concession, which does not entail taking a stand on either the metaphysical status of the property or the nature of the commitment the judgment consists in. In this light, what Kants view (as Ive sketched it) appears to yield is an analysis of the concept beauty, in terms of unity as such or even unity apart from a concept, rather than a demonstration of its absence. But Kant contests this minimal construal of concepts (and properties). The role for comparison with other objects issues in a more robust requirement for empirical concepts which is not met in the case of judgments of beauty. The requirement can be elaborated by setting Kants view against a line of thought to which it seems (and is, up to a point) akin. The emphasis in Kants aesthetic theory on attending to and appreciating the object as a particular might call to mind the so-called moral particularism championed by a range of contemporary philosophers (among them McDowell). While the affinities between the Kant of the Critique of Judgment and the moral particularist merit consideration, it is what separates them which is most illuminating.55 The moral particularist disavows would-be moral rules or principles. There is disagreement with regard to how this disavowal is to be specified, but a characteristic central claim concerns the holism of reasons. A strong moral particularism takes the moral significance of nonmoral features to be contextdependent, even with regard to their valence: whether a given such feature counts as any moral reason at alland if so, in which directionis itself
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dependent on the background context (Little 2000: 2889). Moral knowledge therefore does not rest on the inference of moral conclusions from generalizations (however complicated), and the grasp of moral concepts does not reduce to the grasp of such generalizations.56 However, even the strictest proponent of moral particularism concedesor (I would argue) should concedethat moral competence requires a certain capacity for the comparison of cases. What I have in mind is an essential component of ordinary moral thinking, often explicit when one wonders whether the attitude or feeling with which one is responding to a person or act is well-placed. Finding myself angered by something someone has done, it might be in order for me to ask myself how I would feeland what feeling the situation would meritif it had been different in some specific and relevant respect: If she had asked my permission in advance; if she had gone through with it more discreetly; if I hadnt been so tired to begin withwould I still be angry? Would there be something to be angry about? Considering such questions allows me to see more clearly what it was that she did (what to call the act) and so what attitude it calls for. By no means is this all that moral thinking requires; but it is an important aspect of reflecting on what response a situation gives me reason to have, so of shaping how I see it and the people it involves, myself included. In short: In the moral realm, competence requires the ability to think about what moral difference, if any, specific (nonmoral) differences might make.57 Now part of Kants idea, I suggest, is that there is no analogue of this in the aesthetic case. Indeed, there could be no aesthetic analogue, because in this case nonaesthetic parts cannot be separated from the whole so as to make it possible to identify the part of one whole as the same as that of another (much less to isolate its aesthetic contribution to the whole). The suggestion does not ignore the practices of comparison which are indispensable to our contemplation of aesthetic matters: we compare different photographs and notice how the lack of contrast works in one case but is insignificant, or is a weakness, in the other; we imagine how the poem could be improved by making it leaner and more terse. Kant is denying not that we make such comparisons, but rather a certain understanding of what making such comparisons involves. When we make aesthetic comparisons (between one object and another, real or imagined) we are not considering variations against a shared context, or shared parts against varying contexts. We are comparing, rather, two wholes which (in the nature of the case) share no partstwo worlds.58 The difference stems from a more general difference, in connection with which the motivation for denying a concept beauty emerges. The moral particularist allowsindeed insiststhat if my saying of an act that it was kind or cruel is to constitute a genuine judgment or assessment of kindness or cruelty, it must flow from my capacity to reliably detect and appreciateas kind or cruelinstances of kindness or cruelty. If I lack such a capacity, it is not merely that my words will have hit their mark only accidentally (supposing that the case is one of kindness or cruelty): they will not be regarded as amounting to an assessment of kindness or cruelty at all. In that sense, my words will be empty. For my words will fail to reflect an understanding of kindness or crueltya grasp of the conceptwhich
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would be required for them to express an appraisal. But it is an interesting upshot of Kants account of beauty, if one that remains implicit in his development of it, that nothing of this sort obtains. My failure to appreciate beauty in a range of cases, however vast or varied, does not stand in the way of allowing this instance of finding something to be beautiful to be, fully, what it claims to be: an appreciation of beauty. I neednt possess the capacity to reliably discern beauty in order to count as genuinely and fully appreciating beauty in some given instance. Consideration of this feature brings to life Kants remark that one puts ones judgment of beauty forward as an example of a universal rule that one cannot produce (KU 18: 237). When this remark is discussed, it is generally the thought that the rule cannot be produced (or cited or adduced) which is emphasized. What also deserves notice is that it is as an example of the rulenot an instance or case of itthat, according to Kant, I present my judgment: as though underscoring the point that particular judgments of beauty neither express nor yield any grasp of a rule which would guide me in projecting into further judgments of beauty. The Kantian picture excludes any such form of mastery or expertise in aesthetic judgment.59 One might comprehensibly hope to capture this featureperhaps it is not the best wayby saying that appreciating something as beautiful does not depend on the grasp of a would-be concept beauty. Yet there would remain a point to saying that beauty is recognizeda point that does not depend on realist ambitions. Judging something new to be beautiful is finding that here too is beauty (recall the minimal criterion of multiplicity). And recognition records the bringing to bear of an exercise of sensitivity or discernment on a matter which is independent of the individuals experience (as, Ive suggested, is required for judgment to be open to criticism and subject to a standard of appropriateness or correctness). But since these linked requirements are not enough for concept application, there is also a point to saying that in the case of beauty recognition takes place without a concept. By now I might appear to have wandered far from Kants text. Not merely are my suggestions about fleshing out the absence, in the judging of beauty, of comparison with other objects (the absence of a concept) not explicitly pursued by Kant. But this last thought, about recognition without a concept, sounds alien to Kants thinking. It hardly seems imaginable that Kant could be found even to countenance talk of recognition without a concept. Yet as I hope now to show, Kant canand shouldbe read as characterizing the judgment of beauty in just this way: as a matter of recognition without a concept. And as indirect support for my proposal I enlist the fact that it allows us to make good sense of this talk. Kants definition of the beautiful drawn from the fourth moment of the n ist, was ohne Begriff als Gegenstand eines analytic of the beautiful is this: Scho notwendigen Wohlgefallens erkannt wird.60 The published English translations give cognized for this erkannt: That is beautiful which is cognized without a concept as the object of a necessary liking.61 In the first Critique and elsewhere, Kant is centrally concerned with the notion of erkennen, which (for various
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reasons I wont discuss) is often rendered not as know but as cognize. (Correspondingly Erkenntnis becomes cognition, and so on.). The translators of the Critique of Judgment follow this practiceas, for the sake of simplicity, I do in this essayand evidently take this appearance of erkannt to be of a piece with the notion that practice is meant to track. But it is worth registering how plainly bizarre it would be if Kant were indeed speaking of (defining) our relation to the beautiful as one of cognizing without a concept. As weve seen, Kant does not tire of flatly denying the judgment of beauty to be a matter of cognition. And Kants contention that cognition without a concept is not a possibility for us could not be clearer or more uncompromising. Kant would be advancing a claim that undercuts both of these basic commitments, and doing so blithelywithout explanation or so much as the acknowledgement that explanation of some kind might be expected. Moreover, the remark is presented with deliberate prominenceeach of the four definitions is set apart at the end of the moment from which it is drawn making it a most unlikely site for a slip or for informal shorthand. There is an alternative. Notice, first, that a natural translation of this use of erkennenespecially given the construction erkennen alsis recognize: That is beautiful which is recognized without a concept as the object of a necessary liking.62 By itself, of course, this settles nothing. It might well be granted that the translation is available but constitutes no advance. For the obvious reply is that the terms are effectively equivalent for Kant: Kant thinks of cognition as recognition, which is to say the application of concepts (the (re)cognition of an object as x). Then this translation would simply inherit the difficulties which beset the standard choice. But it would promise an escape from those difficulties if it were backed by a basis for distinguishing recognition from cognition (in this context) such that recognition may occuras cognition may notwithout a concept. My proposal regarding Kants construal of concepts provides such a basis, for while it makes plausible sense of the idea that the judgment of beauty is free of a would-be concept beauty, it leaves room for (and indeed requires) something that deserves to be called the recognition of beauty.63 If I am right, Kant is appealing (here) to a notion of recognition that is wider than that of cognition. This notion is not technical or artificial; it is perfectly ordinary. Recall the aspects of recognition I mentioned four paragraphs ago. We are concerned with recognition as the identification of an object: making out discerning or comprehending, appreciating, taking the measure ofthe proper identity of something or someone. Such recognizing is naturally glossed in terms of seeing or perceiving (how matters stand or how things (really) are).64 Think of recognizing a facial expression as one of amusement, recognizing a situation to be perilous or a person to be in need of assistance, or recognizing someone as ones neighbor or soulmate. The central point is that recognition (so construed) need not be cognition, for cognition requires a concept, whereas recognition does not. This would explain why pleasure is integral to the judging of beauty: it steps in, as it were, to do what the application of concepts cannot. Beauty is not recognized by way of a concept beautyit must, then, be recognized by way of a feeling of pleasure.65
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As I have intimated, we might have reservations about casting the dimension of singularity that Ive been discussing as a matter of the absence of a concept. (We might find the underlying construal of concepts to be too strict.)66 Even putting such reservations aside, however, we might feel that it is unnecessary, and perhaps distorting, to oppose recognition without a concept to cognition. The problem (it would be argued) is the excessively narrow idea of cognition produced by Kants insistence on tying cognition to conceptuality. If we sever that tie, we can take the more compelling view of recognition and cognition as of a piece. Then judging something to be beautiful can be allowed to be cognizing (recognizing) without a concept. I close by suggesting that Kants awkward attempt to maintain that the judgment of beauty is recognition yet not cognition can be seen as hinting at a further, and provocative, thought which we might find useful even if we reject the framework in terms of which it is formulated. In his specification of the claim that it is the form of the object which pleases in the experience of beauty, Kant says that colors can of course enliven the object in itself for sensation, but they cannot make it worthy of being intuited and beautiful (KU 14: 225). The implication that is relevant now is that the beautiful objectthe object of beautiful formis worthy of being intuited. This opens up a further way to develop the idea that in the judgment of beautys free play one finds the given representations to manifest a unity or coherence as such. To find the manifold to be unified as such is to find it to be worthy of being intuited, and so to find the object to be worthy of being perceived. In the case of judging an object to be a bounding dog the manifold is as it ought to be if I am thereby to represent (perceive) the object as a bounding dog. But if the bounding dog is beautiful, the manifold is worthy of being intuited and the bounding dog is worthy of being perceived; we could say that the manifold is as it ought to be as such. I take this to mean that recognizing something to be beautiful involves not merely identifying what sort of thing it is, but finding it to deserve or to call for recognition as beautiful.67 Perhaps, then, we can hear in Kants refusal to allow the judgment of beauty to be cognition the thought that the position that I thereby take with respect to the object is less squarely epistemological than it is akin to a relation I might take to another subject. In the case of the beautiful, recognizing erkennenis close to anerkennen (which corresponds to another sense of English recognize, one related to acknowledge). To the extent that this is so, Kant can be said to cast the beautiful object as laying claim to something like acknowledgment.68 Then we can think of Kants rejection of aesthetic cognition as distancing the judgment of beauty from recognition as identification and aligning it with recognition as acknowledgment.69 Katalin Makkai Barnard College Columbia University USA kmakkai@barnard.edu
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References to the Introduction and body of the Critique of Judgment (KU) are by section number followed by page number in volume 5 of the Akademie edition. References to the First Introduction are abbreviated EE and are by section number followed by page number in volume 20 of the Akademie edition. I have followed, but sometimes emended, the Guyer and Matthews translation (Kant 2000). The judgments of beauty I discuss throughout this essay are what Kant calls pure judgments of beauty. Following Kants practice, I leave the qualifier implicit. 2 See, for example, KU 6: 211, 7: 212 and 32: 282. 3 KU EE VIII: 224 and VII: 189. It is by virtue of this ground in pleasure that the judgment is aesthetic, as opposed to logical. (Kants remarks are actually about pleasure as well as displeasure; in this essay I ignore displeasure.) 4 See KU 8: 214. 5 Translation modified. 6 The German here is die Sache. According to Kant, one claims universal validity as well as necessity for ones judgment of beauty. (I leave aside the question of what difference, if any, there is between the two.) 7 KU VII: 191. See 6: 211 on the similarity. 8 See KU 32: 282 on as if objective. 9 See KU 33. 10 See Ameriks 2003a: 2967 and 2003b: 31318. 11 Ameriks 2003b: 308. See also 2003a: 293 and 2003a: 305. 12 Ameriks 2003b: 308. Citing Kants remark at KU 21: 238 (Ameriks uses Ginsborgs translation) that judgments must [. . .] allow of being universally communicated, for otherwise they would not be entitled to any agreement with the object, Ameriks contends that [s]uch agreement is precisely what one ordinarily understands by objectivity, and Kants statement here is meant explicitly as both a general claim about judgment as such and a specific claim about aesthetic judgment (Ameriks 2003b: 309). Mild revisionism has the advantage (Ameriks argues) of upholding both claims. 13 Ameriks says that Kant is best understood as presenting what wethat is, current theoreticians using the standard terminology of our own erashould rather term an objective account of taste (Ameriks 2003c: 326), but the term is used less univocally than this remark suggests. 14 Cf. Amerikss remark that the need for a deduction is lost if the relevant judgments are not even thought of as valid, as holding for all in the proper context, and as being in this core sense objective and not merely subjective (Ameriks 2003c: 335). 14 The phrase is Mackies (Mackie 1977: 15). 16 Ginsborg 1998: 449. 17 As Ginsborg uses the term, an objectivism about beauty holds that beauty is in the world, there to be encountered by usthe basic commitment of what goes by the name of realism about beauty. I will therefore speak of objectivism and realism interchangeably in describing her argument (although Ginsborg does not use the latter term). Just what objectivism or realism entailsand what Ginsborg in particular takes it to entailwill shortly become my main focus. 18 All quotes in this paragraph are from KU 33: 284. Kant discusses the condition of autonomy under that name in 32, but the line of thought opened with this example (from 33) is clearly connected.

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Ameriks 2003a: 302. As Ameriks points out, Kants texts do not present an unequivocal view of secondary qualities. Some remarks in the first Critique indicate that colors (for example) cannot rightly be regarded as properties of things: see A 289 and B 45. But in the third Critique Kant speaks of color in terms of objective sensation, through which an object is represented (KU 3: 206). 20 This is Ginsborgs gloss at 1998: 452. Ameriks objects that his proposal was advanced not in full voice but rather as part of a dialectical strategy aimed at establishing that aesthetic features can still be said to be at least as objective as typical secondary ones, for all that Kants arguments show (Ameriks 2003b: 320). 21 Ginsborg 1998: 453. See Ameriks 2003b: 3223 for Amerikss reply: Ameriks effectively calls for revision with regard to the condition of autonomy as well (How could it be in principle impossible to say that if a certain objective environment is there then a certain aesthetic judgment is appropriate?). 22 See McDowell 1998a and 1998b and Wiggins 1998. In what follows I focus on McDowells texts. 23 As should the idea that keeps it in place, that the question of the relation to reality of an area of our thought and language (in this case, the evaluative aspects of our lives) would have to be addressed from an external standpoint, outside of our evaluative and other standpoints. 24 McDowell 1998a: 129 n. 22. See also 1998b: 136 and 146. 25 See Ginsborg 1998: 460 [B]eauty is subjective not only in [the sense in which McDowell and Wiggins grant that it is subjective, viz. internality to sensibility], but also in a deeper sense. It is subjective because its ascription to an object in any particular case depends on the sentiments of the particular human being making the ascription. Thus the subjectivity of beauty is a matter, not only of its relation to human sensibility in general, but also of its relation to the sensibility of each particular individual who makes a judgment of beauty. Since Ginsborg holds that someone who makes a judgment of beauty thereby actually and not merely apparently perceives beauty, she drops the qualifier: The beauty perceived in an object is not independent of the experience through which it is perceived (1998: 461 n. 8). See my section 3 below. 26 Hume 1985 might be read as offering such an account. The quasi-realist form of ethical expressivism developed by Simon Blackburn is presented as an antirealist account on which our practices of assessing ethical judgments are well-grounded (Blackburn 1984 and 1993). See Hopkins 2001 on the attempt to read Kants theory of beauty as quasirealist. Note that expressivism is often credited with having to hand a particularly clear explanation of autonomy: without my own response (here that of a certain pleasure), I do not have the attitude it is the business of judgment to express. Ginsborgs move from the claim that realism cannot account for autonomy to the denial of beautys independence of individual experience might seem to neglect the alternative of an expressivist antirealism. But expressivism is not a candidate for Ginsborg for reasons that are internal to her account: as we will shortly see, she construes the judgment of beauty as an assertion. 27 On the narrow construal of the agreeable, the judgment is always of an individual object on a particular occasion. Kant perhaps thinks of the judgment of the agreeable more widely, so that it is wine from the Canaries (that kind of object) that I enjoy and for which I express my liking. On the wider construal, an objects agreeableness to me is a matter of its being such as to be experienced by me as agreeable, which is independent of any particular experience of it as agreeable (as a bottle of wine I havent yet sampled may be of just the sort Id like). On neither the narrow nor the wide construal do I judge with a universal voice (that is, lay claimon the objects behalfto the pleasure of others).

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Note that what would be needed is not simply a reason why its unwise or irresponsible to judge aesthetically based on what others tell us (say because taste varies so unpredictablynot just by person but even by occasionthat one really cant rely even on those who have hitherto proved to be impeccable judges): on Ginsborgs interpretation of the condition of autonomy, which I am granting for the purposes of this paper, to judge of beauty heteronomously is to fail genuinely to judge of beauty at all. 29 These features do not distinguish value judgment from some judgments of fact: see Austin on verdictives (Austin 1962: 151ff). 30 An effort to flesh out this outline would have to address the question of whether I need to be able to articulate my reasons (and if so, how fully) in order to count as possessing them. 31 Isenberg 1973: 163 and 166. A consequence that Isenberg draws is that there can be no general norms of the form any work that has such-and-such quality is pro tanto good. 32 See 1998: 465, where Ginsborg calls attention to a central aspect of this similarity. 33 Ginsborg 1997: 70. See also n. 47: the experience of beauty is the perception of the object as appropriate to [. . .] my present imaginative activity. This perception, as in the cognitive case, is at the same time a judgment. 34 Ginsborg 1998: 463 and Ginsborg 1997: 72. See, for example, Ginsborg 1991: 300: [T]his self-referential act of judging is the same activity which Kant describes as the free and harmonious play of imagination and understanding. See also Ginsborg 1997: 801 n. 47. 35 Pleasure in the beautiful is a state of mind which consists in the awareness of its own appropriateness with respect to an object (Ginsborg 1998: 464). 36 Ginsborg 1991: 299. Pleasure in the beautiful consists in the awareness of ones present state of mind (with respect to a given object) as one which anyone else perceiving that object ought to share, and hence as one which is universally [valid]: where ones present state of mind is, of course, that very awareness mentioned earlier in the sentence (Ginsborg 1989: 24). In both quotes I have substituted valid for communicable, as Ginsborg treats the terms as synonyms (in this context): see Ginsborg 1991: 313 n. 12 and Ginsborg 1989: 43 n. 18. 37 But the judgment is still self-referential. This is because the imaginative activity in question can be characterized only by saying that it is the imaginative activity taking place in my very act of judging the object: to put the point more strongly, the imaginative activity is the judging (Ginsborg 1997: 80 n. 47). 38 Ginsborg 1998: 463. Earlier on the same page: this pleasure does not consist for Kant in the awareness of an objective feature. 39 The quotes that follow are from page 70. 40 See Ginsborg 1991: 3056. 41 Ameriks contests the idea, I think: see Ameriks 2003b: 312 (To employ such a certain way is precisely what is commonly called using a concept.). Another worry worth mentioning (although I do not pursue it) is that the way ones imaginative activity ought to be appears to be (at least in some sense) specifiable otherwise than purely selfreferentially, given how as Ginsborg and I have both been specifying it (viz., as the selfreferential act of imagination consisting of the claim to its own appropriateness). 42 Denying content altogether might yield the conclusion that beauty is not a feature of objects, but at a cost that seems prohibitively high. In her earlier work Ginsborg appears to regard Kant as accepting, or anyway saddled with, the cost. [I]t seems as though I cannot be making any claim about the object at all. Accordingly, it seems as though the object is irrelevant to the act of judging: any object is equally suitable as a candidate for such a judgment, since the judgment does not say anything about the object which might turn out

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to be false [or, it should be added, true]. What, then, is to prevent me from engaging in this empty act of judgment with respect to every object, and hence judging that every object is beautiful? While this might be the basis of a legitimate complaint against Kants aesthetic theory, it is not an objection to my interpretation of that theory. [. . .] It follows, then, that from an objective standpoint, there is indeed nothing to prevent me from judging each and every object to be beautiful. If judgments of taste are not based on objective grounds, then there can be no fact about any object which rules it out as a candidate for being regarded as beautiful (Ginsborg 1991: 30910). In the more recent Ginsborg 1997, Ginsborg seems to want to be able to say that the judgment lacks content without allowing that it makes no claim. She points out that the experience of beauty is the experience of something about the object: namely, the objects appropriateness or suitability to the imaginative activity through which it is perceived (1997: 71) and remarks that even though the act of judging lacks content, in that it does not bring the object under a specific concept, it still has reality insofar as it can be identified with a particular imaginative response that I have to the object (1997: 81 n. 47). But this leaves it quite unclear in what sense the judgment lacks content. The last quote suggests that the judgments lack of content is explained by the lack of a concept, but this doesnt help, since (absent further discussion of the matter) so far as weve been given a purchase on the judgments lack of a concept that came precisely from the idea of its lack of (determinate) content. 43 And it is worth noting that even if the argument just examined were accepted as establishing that beauty is not a feature of objects, it would not thereby establish that beauty is not independent of the individuals experience, since (as I suggested earlier) independence from individual experience does not entail objectivity. 44 Ginsborg 1989: 89. See 93: The judgment of beauty is an activity whose "performance" ensures that it is valid or correct. Ginsborg remarks that there is still room for error: I can misidentify my pleasure as pleasure constitutive of a judgment of beauty when in fact it is pleasure in the good or in the agreeable. In either case I fail to make a judgment of beauty at all (1989: 101 n. 53). 45 One might worry that there is then, properly, neither apparent nor genuine perception of beauty, that unless a (synthetic a posteriori) judgment can be incorrect it cannot be correct. (Could the idea be that the judgment of beauty is a priori? That would be a counterintuitive claim for various reasons, not least of which is that it appears to cut against the essential singularity of the judgment of beauty. Still, it is a claim that some of Kants remarks could be argued to express (see KU 36 and 37), although I would argue Kants point there to be that the judgment of beautys demand for agreement depends on an a priori ground.) 46 Then an object that is not judged beautiful is, by these lights, not beautiful. (There is no such thing as a an object that is beautiful though its beauty has yet to be appreciated.) 47 See Ginsborg 1997: 64ff. and especially 74. 48 [W]hether I make a judgment of this kind about a given object is not just up to me, but depends on the imaginative activity whichas a matter of empirical factthe object elicits. I cannot arbitrarily choose to engage in this kind of judgment with respect to a given object, any more than I can arbitrarily choose to perceive a given object as a dog (Ginsborg 1997: 81 n. 47). Cp. Ginsborg 1991 (see my note 42). 49 In the judgment of beauty we regard our imaginative activity with respect to some particular object in the same way that we must regard it with respect to objects in general if cognition is to be possible. Thus we may take it, as we may [ 5 are entitled to] take our imaginative activity in general, to exemplify a normative standard and hence to be universally valid (Ginsborg 1997: 74). The thus in this last sentence (which closes the

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paper) has yet to be secured: Ginsborg explains that what we do in a particular judgment of beauty is what we are entitled to do in general, but not why we are entitled to do it in that particular case. For the general entitlement Ginsborg has in view does not translate into entitlement with respect to particular cases, even where those cases areas the judgment of beauty is supposed to beindeterminate or (as Ginsborg also puts it) general. The worry is that my being entitled to make a particular judgment of beauty will turn out to require the fact that the object merits my imaginative activitythe fact that it is beautiful. 50 KU 38: 290 (Remark to the deduction of judgments of taste). The point is not that the judgment of beauty involves no concepts at all, but that it does not involve a would-be concept beauty. 51 KU EE V: 211. Kant emphasizes to reflect; remaining emphases are added. 52 The judgment of beauty about a given individual object considers it before its comparison with others is looked at (KU EE VIII: 223). 53 Translation modified. 54 See Ameriks 2003c: 339. 55 It is often pointed out that Kant understands concepts in terms of rules. Too often this is interpreted fairly crudely, as though Kants idea were that the application of concepts involved the use of a decision procedure or formula. (Cp., for example, Allison 2001: 239: Kants is a natural understanding of what is meant by a concept, namely, a determinate set of marks that provides a rule or decision procedure for the recognition of what falls under it.) Then Kants target in denying a role for a concept beauty in the judging of beauty would be little more than a straw man. Against this, I claimalthough I cannot argue for it herethat Kants denial is more defensibly interpreted as akin to what I am describing as particularist thinking. (When Kant is invoked by particularists he is typically cast as a moral generalist; his third Critique tends to be ignored by defenders of particularism rather than recognized as a potential ally.) As I argue below, however, Kants point goes further than does the particularists, and this is reflected in the fact that the particularist (qua particularist) has no reason to deny a role for concepts in the judgment of beauty or of anything else (just the contrary). I am agreeing with Ameriks in rejecting crude readings of Kant on concepts as rules (see Ameriks 2003b: 31213 and 2003c: 339). Contra Ameriks, however, I think that sense can profitably be made of Kants claim that the judging of beauty is undetermined by a concept (or rule). But see my note 66. 56 Instead of inferring moral conclusions from the details of the particular to which we attend, moral knowledge involves seeing what moral properties such details together ground (Little 2000: 292). 57 According to the particularist, this ability does not depend on the ability to make ceteris paribus (all else equal) judgments. 58 Cp. Isenberg 1973: 165: [T]he meaning of a word like assonancethe quality which it leads our perception to discriminate in one poem or anotheris in critical usage never twice the same. 59 Taste is the capacity to reliably discern beauty; it is independent of any grasp of a would-be concept beauty. Thus the aesthetic power of judgment is indeed a special faculty for judging things in accordance with a rule but not in accordance with concepts (KU VIII: 194). Cp. Little 2000: 304 (and 297 n. 35, citing the work of Dreyfus and Dreyfus) on the moral expert. I dont mean to deny the importance that Kant places on the development or cultivation of taste (see, e.g., KU 32: 2823). On the contrary: my claim is about what the cultivation of taste involves (and excludes), for Kant. 60 See the definition following KU 22: 240.

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This is a modified version of the Guyer and Matthews translation (Kant 2000). The Bernard, Meredith, and Pluhar translations of this definition vary in respects which for present purposes are unimportant (Kant 1970, 1952, 1987). The English-language commentary on this definition with which I am familiar likewise employs cognized. Translators and commentators alike pass over in silence the problems raised by this choice, which I discuss below. 62 Note that standard French translations offer reconnu (recognized): see the Renaut and Philonenko editions (Kant 1995, 1968). 63 (By contrast, the minimal construal of concepts in terms of multiplicity (which Ameriks endorses) leaves no such room.) See also KU VII: 191: For similar reasons, I think Kant should there be read as saying that the judgment of beautys pleasure can never be understood through concepts to be necessarily combined with the representation of an object, but must always be recognized [erkannt] to be connected with this only through reflected perception. In neither quote, it is true, is what Kant says strictly that beauty is recognized without a concept. Mightnt it be argued that while the necessity of the liking is recognized, the beauty is not (in Kants view)? The problem with this is that it is quite unclear that the judgment of beauty can be drawn apart from the claim to the necessity of ones liking in the object in the way that would be required. (To say that something is the object of a necessary liking is to say that the liking is not contingently produced by it, that it merits the liking. There is perhaps space between this and the judgment of beauty itself, but not much. Of course, further argument would be needed to establish that the available space is not enough.) 64 This perhaps illuminates Kants description of the recognition of beauty as perception. See, for example, the definition drawn from the third moment and the quote in the previous note. 65 Cf. KU EE VIII: 228: [T]he representation of a subjective purposiveness of an object is even identical with the feeling of pleasure (without even involving an abstract concept of a purposive relation). 66 My overall aim is to show that the recognition of beauty (aesthetic recognition more generally) is genuinely distinctive and that the denial that there is a concept beauty and a corresponding property can be appreciated as an attempt to record its distinctiveness. I am not endorsing the denial, for I am sympathetic to the point of view (represented by Ameriks) which would ask: Couldnt (shouldnt) we grant its distinctiveness without taking on board the awkward claim that beauty is not a concept? Why not say instead that beauty is a concept, if a special one? (Similarly for the property claim.) But this point of view will do justice to Kant only if it undertakes to spell out what the concepts specialness consists in. Apart from such an undertaking we will not see how Kants formulation is motivated, even in its own way natural, if not ideal. 67 Ones response is merited by the object in a stronger sense than Ginsborg has in mind (and perhaps than McDowell and Wiggins have in mind): the response is owed to (deserved by) the object, so that failure here is a matter of something like doing wrong by it. 68 As Ive just indicated, the duality of English recognition is not matched in German, which divides the labour between erkennen and anerkennen. But Kant uses the latter at least once: Thus there can also be no rule in accordance with which someone could be compelled to acknowledge [anerkennen] something as beautiful. (KU 8: 21516) Pleasure in the beautiful bears comparison with respect as acknowledgment of the authority of the moral law. On my reading, the experience (what I recognize in pleasure) is of a kind of

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necessity: I am bound by the object as I experience it. Cp. Paul Guyers reading, which takes the source of my pleasure to be the (felt) contingency of the felt unity (Guyer 1997: 746). 69 The implied restriction of knowledge (cognition) to recognition as identification should perhaps itself be questioned: it might be better to allow that recognition as acknowledgment is (a form of) knowledge.

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Little, M. (2000), Moral Generalities Revisited, in B. Hooker and M. Little (eds), Moral Particularism. Oxford: Oxford University. Mackie, J. L. (1977), Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. New York: Penguin. McDowell, J. (1998a), Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World, in J. McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (1998b), Values and Secondary Qualities, in J. McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (1998c), Projection and Truth in Ethics, in J. McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2004), The World of Perception, trans. O. Davis. London: Routledge. Wiggins, D. (1998), A Sensible Subjectivism, in D. Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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