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Feeling the Life of the Mind: Mere Judging, Feeling, and Judgment

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The Palgrave Kant Handbook

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Abstract

Hughes argues that in the Analytic of the Beautiful Kant introduces an account of feeling that operates as a non-cognitive and yet reflective form of awareness. The range of modes of awareness – which hitherto comprised sensible intuitions, concepts of understanding and conceptually determining judgments, but also ideas and principles of reason – is extended to include a new distinctively aesthetic type of judgments that have feeling as their ground. Crucially, Kant views this development as the condition of the integrity of his critical system.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See, for instance, the debate between John McDowell and Hubert Dreyfus on this issue in Inquiry 50, no. 4 (Aug. 2007): 338–77.

  2. 2.

    Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 110–16, 151–60.

  3. 3.

    Hannah Ginsborg, “Reflective Judgment and Taste,” Noûs 24, no. 1 (March 1990): 71–72; and Hannah Ginsborg, “On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72, no. 4 (Dec. 1991): 292.

  4. 4.

    Throughout I adjust the Cambridge translation to render Gemütszustand as “mental state” rather than “state of mind,” and Vorstellung as “presentation” rather than “representation.” My preference for the first is on account of the neutrality of its ontological implication, while the second avoids suggesting that Kant is committed to a representational theory of mind. On the latter issue, see also Werner Pluhar’s note in his translation of the Critique of Pure Reason (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), Bxvii note 73.

  5. 5.

    For a discussion of this question, see Fiona Hughes, “Analytic of the Beautiful: Design and the Role of the Object in Taste,” in The Kantian Mind, ed. Sorin Baiasu and Mark Timmons (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

  6. 6.

    See Rudolf A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the “Critique of Judgment” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), ch. 5, for a discussion of the importance of the idea of life for the third Critique. Makkreel insists that free play is not connected to synthesis (94, 106). For a criticism of his position, see Fiona Hughes, Kant’s Aesthetic Epistemology: Form and World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 156–60.

  7. 7.

    This is in contrast to an aesthetic judgment of sense, where the intuition of the object determines the judgment (FI 20:224).

  8. 8.

    Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 106–10; see also 205.

  9. 9.

    Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 53–54; and Henry E. Allison, “Pleasure and Harmony in Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Critique of the Causal Reading,” in Kants Ästhetik/Kant’s Aesthetics/L’esthétique de Kant, ed. Herman Parret (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), 466–83. See also Richard E. Aquila, “A New Look at Kant’s Aesthetic Judgments,” in Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, ed. Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 87–114; and Hannah Ginsborg, “Aesthetic Judging and the Intentionality of Pleasure,” Inquiry 46, no. 2 (June 2003): 164–81.

  10. 10.

    Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 53–54.

  11. 11.

    Allison, “Pleasure and Harmony in Kant’s Theory of Taste.”

  12. 12.

    When I say that mere judging is the reason for our feeling pleasure, I do not mean that feeling is the result of a prior rational principle. Rather, when contingently we find something beautiful, then we feel pleasure that has as its ground mere judging.

  13. 13.

    Thus I disagree with Allison’s distinction between reflection (or judging) and feeling (Kant’s Theory of Taste, 70). See Ginsborg, “Aesthetic Judging and the Intentionality of Pleasure,” who also criticizes Allison on this issue.

  14. 14.

    See Hughes, Kant’s Aesthetic Epistemology, 284–90; and Hughes, “Analytic of the Beautiful.”

  15. 15.

    See Hughes, “Analytic of the Beautiful” on the contingency of judgments of taste.

  16. 16.

    Melissa Zinkin argues that Allison is committed to two pleasures, one in the object and one “directed to the purposiveness of the mental state in reflection on an object” (“Kant and the Pleasure of ‘Mere Reflection,’” Inquiry 55, no. 5 [Oct. 2012]: 439–40). She refers to Henry Allison, “Reply to the Comments of Longuenesse and Ginsborg,” Inquiry 46, no. 2 (June 2003): 182–94, where Allison himself criticizes Longuenesse for claiming that there are “two orders of pleasure involved in the judgment of taste: a first-order pleasure in the apprehension of the object and a second-order pleasure in the shareability or universal communicability of the first-order pleasure” (185–86). Allison refers to Béatrice Longuenesse, “Kant’s Theory of Judgment, and Judgments of Taste: On Henry Allison’s Kant’s Theory of Taste,” Inquiry 46, no. 2 (June 2003): 153.

  17. 17.

    Kant uses the Latinate term Comparation at JL 9:94.

  18. 18.

    Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 22; and Béatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the “Critique of Pure Reason,” trans. Charles T. Wolfe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 116.

  19. 19.

    Kant also links Comparatio to “the agreement [Übereinstimmung] and identity of things” in the Vienna Logic (VL 24:907–8).

  20. 20.

    Kant also uses reflexio at A260/B316.

  21. 21.

    See also CJ 5:203 on the priority of imagination in judgments of taste.

  22. 22.

    See Avner Baz, “Kant’s Principle of Purposiveness and the Missing Point of (Aesthetic) Judgments,” Kantian Review 10 (Jan. 2005): 1–32; and my response in Fiona Hughes, “On Aesthetic Judgment and Our Relation to Nature: Kant’s Concept of Purposiveness,” Inquiry 49, no. 6 (Dec. 2006): 547–72.

  23. 23.

    When Kant uses Darstellung nontechnically, it is equivalent to Vorstellung.

  24. 24.

    See also A713/B741 on mathematical exhibition.

  25. 25.

    This conclusion is supported by Kant’s account of schematic hypotyposis (i.e., exhibition) (CJ 5:351).

  26. 26.

    Thus, although I agree with Ginsborg that judgments of taste are self-referential, I deny that they are “purely self-referential.” See Hannah Ginsborg, “On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72, no. 4 (Dec. 1991): 306.

  27. 27.

    Kant clearly did not use this terminology, but this does not preclude that his insight can now be identified in this way.

  28. 28.

    I have argued that this amounts to a “dual harmony.” See Fiona Hughes, Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment”: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2010), 21, 149–53.

  29. 29.

    Although literally this means “connected,” and that is how Guyer and Wood translate it in the Cambridge edition, Kemp Smith’s “bound up with” better captures the strength of the connection (Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” trans. Norman Kemp Smith [London: Macmillan, 1933], A218/B266).

  30. 30.

    Aesthetic judgments thus do not appropriate the imagination into the project of understanding, which Longuenesse refers to as Vermögen zu urteilen. See Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, 7, 208.

  31. 31.

    Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 69.

  32. 32.

    Ibid. Allison’s account of discrimination is puzzling. Since judgments of taste are singular, a judgment comparing beautiful objects is not aesthetic (CJ 5:215).

  33. 33.

    Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 69.

  34. 34.

    Makkreel remarks that aesthetic harmony qualifies as “pure spontaneity” (Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, 92). Kant, admittedly, says – although does not develop the idea – that imagination, insofar as it is productive, is spontaneous (CJ 5:240). However, it must be the case that the productivity of imagination is distinct from the spontaneity of understanding, for the productivity of imagination in aesthetic judgments arises when there is no determination by the understanding.

  35. 35.

    I would like to thank Fabian Freyenhagen for helpful comments.

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  1. School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, UK

    Fiona Hughes

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Correspondence to Fiona Hughes .

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  1. Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington, USA

    Matthew C. Altman

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Hughes, F. (2017). Feeling the Life of the Mind: Mere Judging, Feeling, and Judgment. In: Altman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_17

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