The Supersensible in Kant’s «Critique of Judgment» (American University Studies) 9781433131912, 9781453916766, 1433131919

Table of contents :
Cover
Table of Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Judgments about Beauty, the Sublime, and the Agreeable
2. Kant’s Four Moments of Judgments about Beauty and How Aesthetic Judgments Are Synthetic A Priori Judgments
3. Hume’s Views and How Standards of Taste and Beauty Vary
4. The Supersensible, the Nature of Aesthetic Judgments, and the Faculty of Common Sense
5. The Failure of the Supersensible
6. Motives for the Supersensible
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography

Citation preview

Books_Cover_AUS dd.qxd 11/12/2015 8:08 AM Page 1

Books

A M E R I C A N

U N I V E R S I T Y

S T U D I E S

In this close analysis of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics in his Critique of Judgfor his desired necessity and universality of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. Drawing upon her extensive background in the visual arts, art history, and philosophy, Dr. Books provides a unique discussion of Kant’s supersensible, illuminating how it cannot justify his a priori nature of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. She uses examples from the history of art, including paintings by Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rubens, and Constable, to support her views. This book will make a significant addition to courses on the philosophy of Kant, aesthetics, philosophy of art, metaphysics, the history of Western philosophy, ethics, psychology, and art history.

JULIE N. BOOKS, Esq., received her A.B. with honors from Princeton University, her J.D. from The College of William and Mary’s Marshall-Wythe School of Law, her M.A. in philosophy from New York University, and her Ph.D. in philosophy from The University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The Supersensible in Kant’s Critique of Judgment

ment, Julie N. Books explains why Kant fails to provide a convincing basis

v • 222 PETER LANG

www.peterlang.com

A M E R I C A N U N I V E R S I T Y S T U D I E S

The Supersensible in Kant’s Critique of Judgment JULIE N. BOOKS

Books_Cover_AUS dd.qxd 11/12/2015 8:08 AM Page 1

Books

A M E R I C A N

U N I V E R S I T Y

S T U D I E S

In this close analysis of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics in his Critique of Judgfor his desired necessity and universality of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. Drawing upon her extensive background in the visual arts, art history, and philosophy, Dr. Books provides a unique discussion of Kant’s supersensible, illuminating how it cannot justify his a priori nature of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. She uses examples from the history of art, including paintings by Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rubens, and Constable, to support her views. This book will make a significant addition to courses on the philosophy of Kant, aesthetics, philosophy of art, metaphysics, the history of Western philosophy, ethics, psychology, and art history.

JULIE N. BOOKS, Esq., received her A.B. with honors from Princeton University, her J.D. from The College of William and Mary’s Marshall-Wythe School of Law, her M.A. in philosophy from New York University, and her Ph.D. in philosophy from The University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The Supersensible in Kant’s Critique of Judgment

ment, Julie N. Books explains why Kant fails to provide a convincing basis

v • 222 PETER LANG

A M E R I C A N U N I V E R S I T Y S T U D I E S

The Supersensible in Kant’s Critique of Judgment JULIE N. BOOKS

The Supersensible in Kant’s Critique of Judgment

SERIES V PHILOSOPHY VOL. 222

This book is a volume in a Peter Lang monograph series. Every volume is peer reviewed and meets the highest quality standards for content and production.

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JULIE N. BOOKS

The Supersensible in Kant’s Critique of Judgment

PETER LANG

New York  Bern  Frankfurt  Berlin Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The supersensible in Kant’s Critique of judgment / Julie N. Books. pages cm. — (American University studies. V, Philosophy; Vol. 222) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. Kritik der Urteilskraft. 2. Judgment (Logic). 3. Judgment (Aesthetics). 4. Teleology. 5. Aesthetics. I. Title. B2784.B66 121—dc23 2015025395 ISBN 978-1-4331-3191-2 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4539-1676-6 (e-book) ISSN 0739-6392

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

Cover illustration: Oil painting The Road Less Travelled by Julie N. Books

© 2016 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

For Bruce Aune, Bas van Fraassen, and Margaret Wilson, my kind and wise philosophy teachers

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: Judgments about Beauty, the Sublime, and the Agreeable Chapter 2: Kant’s Four Moments of Judgments about Beauty and How Aesthetic Judgments Are Synthetic A Priori Judgments Chapter 3: Hume’s Views and How Standards of Taste and Beauty Vary Chapter 4: The Supersensible, the Nature of Aesthetic Judgments, and the Faculty of Common Sense Chapter 5: The Failure of the Supersensible Chapter 6: Motives for the Supersensible Conclusion Notes Bibliography

ix xi 1 7 19 37 55 67 79 95 99 109

Illustrations

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait14 Peter Paul Rubens, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus40 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Crucifixion of St. Peter42 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, St. Matthew and an Angel42 John Constable, Wivenhoe Park, Essex48 Frederic Edwin Church, Cotopaxi48 Julie N. Books, Pond Showing Egyptian Perspective50 Albrecht Dürer, House by a Pond50 Underwood and Underwood, A High Caste Lady’s Dainty “Lily Feet” 70 Thomas Cole, Voyage of Life: Childhood93 Thomas Cole, Voyage of Life: Youth 93 Thomas Cole, Voyage of Life: Manhood94 Thomas Cole, Voyage of Life: Old Age94

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my philosophy teacher Bruce Aune for encouraging me to write this book. Thanks also to my father, husband, and the editors at Peter Lang Publishing for their help with getting this book ready for publication. Finally, thanks to my teachers, employers, friends, and pets for their support.

Introduction

In his Critique of Judgment, the famous philosopher Immanuel Kant claims aesthetic judgments about beauty should be necessarily agreed to by everyone. However, most people today would reject Kant’s claim because they believe aesthetic judgments about beauty are based on subjective feelings that vary so much among individuals that there can be no necessary and universal agreement. Kant agrees that aesthetic judgments about beauty are based on subjective and variable feelings, but he still believes that despite this subjectivity and variability, we can expect and even demand necessary, universal agreement to our aesthetic judgments about beauty. To justify his claim, he bases his a priori nature of aesthetic judgments about beauty on the supersensible, his indeterminate concept that is supposed to provide the basis for his necessity and universality of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. In this book, I will argue that there can be no necessary, universal agreement to our aesthetic judgments about beauty, so Kant’s supersensible fails to justify his a priori nature of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. In the Introduction, I will explain some of Kant’s most fundamental tenets, such as his transcendental idealism, and his other ideas that are relevant to this book, such as how we have knowledge of objects through his mental process of three-fold synthesis. In Chapter 1, I will discuss Kant’s judgments about beauty, judgments about the sublime, and judgments about the agreeable. In Chapter 2, I will discuss Kant’s four moments (or features) of pure judgments of taste about

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beauty, including their universality and necessity. I will also discuss his reasons for believing aesthetic judgments about beauty are synthetic a priori judgments. In Chapter 3, I will discuss the aesthetic views of David Hume, who believed beauty is relative to the perceiver. Kant was reacting against his views, for he said Hume awakened him from his “dogmatic slumber.” I will also show how standards of taste and beauty vary over time by giving some examples from the history of art. In Chapter 4, I will explain how Kant thinks his concept of the supersensible solves his antinomy of taste. I will also discuss how his nature of aesthetic judgments as involving a free play of our mental faculties and his faculty of common sense fail to provide a credible basis for the necessity and universality that he believes aesthetic judgments about beauty have. In Chapter 5, I will discuss how the supersensible fails to provide the ultimate basis for his a priori nature of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. In Chapter 6, I will explain some possible motivations Kant may have had for introducing the supersensible. Finally, I will conclude that Kant fails to justify his a priori nature of aesthetic judgments about beauty through his nebulous notion of the supersensible. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is best known for his transcendental idealism, or his view that we cannot know reality as it is in itself, the noumenal reality, but we can know reality as perceived through our minds, the phenomenal reality, because our minds necessarily and automatically structure our representations of the phenomenal world in ways that make that world comprehensible to us. For example, he believes space and time are not in the noumenal world, but rather they are in the minds of the perceiver in the phenomenal world. Since we can’t know anything about things as they are in themselves, he believes that metaphysics, which tries to tell us about such things in the noumenal world, is an illusion. Kant says his indeterminate and indeterminable concept of the supersensible is a thing in itself in the noumenal world that we can’t know anything about. Since we can’t know anything about the supersensible because it is a thing in itself, as he defines it, then we can’t know that it exists. He gives us no compelling reasons for believing in its existence. He just assumes it exists to solve his antinomy of taste and to provide a basis for his a priori nature of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. Since we can’t know anything about it (including its existence), it’s possible that the supersensible doesn’t exist. I will elaborate on this problem and other problems with the supersensible later in this book. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant attempts to solve the conflict between rationalism and empiricism over the role of experience in acquiring knowledge. The rationalist philosophers, like Kant, believed the primary source of our knowledge is our reason (our ability to think about the world we experience),

Introduction | 3 while the empiricist philosophers, like Hume, believed the primary source of our knowledge is our senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) that we use to experience the world. Kant says, “though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.”1 He means that while we may start with the information that we acquire through our senses to obtain knowledge about our world, we can then go beyond that information by using our reason. In addition, he believes there are certain ways in which our minds have to make judgments about the categories of quantity, quality, relation, and modality of objects.2 These categories are necessarily and automatically superimposed on our experience by our minds.3 The synthesis, or act of putting together different representations, of our experience with these categories produces knowledge.4 Kant says there are three aspects of this synthesis, namely apprehension in intuition, reproduction in imagination, and recognition in a concept. He begins his explanation of the synthesis of apprehension in intuition by grounding the origins of all our representations, both a priori and empirical, in “inner sense” (A99).5 He refers to inner sense as the “means of which the mind intuits itself or its inner state” (A22).6 From this statement, one might think that Kant is referring to objects of introspection, as opposed to empirical observations of objects in the phenomenal world. However, in Section 2, he points out that “all representations, whether they have for their objects outer things or not, belong, in themselves, as determinations of the mind, to our inner state.” (A34).7 In other words, physical objects are representations of the mind which can be perceived by introspection, so they too belong to inner sense. Thus, the notion of inner sense encompasses objects of inner and outer representations. The formal condition of inner sense is time (A99).8 As a result, all of our representations are subject to time in the sense of being ordered, connected, and brought into relationship to it (A99).9 Furthermore, every intuition consists of a manifold (a plurality of representations), which is represented as such only if the mind distinguishes the time involved in the sequence of one impression upon another (A99).10 For instance, in order to be conscious of the series of numbers 1, 2, and 3, we must be conscious of these impressions coming one after another or successively, i.e., first 1, then 2, and then 3, in order to discriminate between them as separate and distinct units. In addition, “each representation, in so far as it is contained in a single moment, can never be anything but absolute unity” (A99).11 It is not clear what Kant means by “absolute unity.” At first it might seem that he is saying that any representation, at any given moment, is a unity and not a diversity, so that we could not perceive a multiplicity of representations in a single instant. However, this interpretation is

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erroneous in light of the fact that we can and do perceive different representations at the same time. For instance, when looking at the objects on my desk, I can see the books, the computer, and the lamp at the same moment in time. It is not the case that I see the books first, then the computer, and finally the lamp, and then put this series of representations of objects together into one unified image in my mind. In what sense then are my perceptions unified? For one thing, they exist in that one moment in time in which I see them. Thus, Kant might be saying that each representation is unified in time. In other words, the fact that each representation exists as a unity in time is what is presupposed by the singularity of the moment, and not that each representation must be singularly perceived in order for them to be unified. Kant says that “all judgments are functions of unity among our representations” (A69).12 Above all, Kant wants to stress the need for synthesis to achieve unity. He explains that in order for unity of intuition to arise out of a manifold, it must be run through and held together through a synthesis of apprehension (A99).13 In other words, the various impressions must be combined into a unified consciousness of temporal succession. In the counting example, for instance, we must be conscious of 1, 2, and 3 together. Kant says that “by synthesis of apprehension I understand that combination of the manifold in an empirical intuition, whereby perception, that is, empirical consciousness of the intuition (as appearance), is possible” (B160).14 Thus, the synthesis of apprehension involves grasping sense impressions and holding the manifold of intuition together in a unity. But this synthesis of apprehension can also be exercised a priori, i.e. in respect to representations which are not empirical; he calls this act a “pure synthesis of apprehension” (A100).15 Such a pure synthesis is necessary for knowledge of such things as space and time. Kant’s synthesis of reproduction in imagination is similar with respect to the consciousness of temporal succession of impressions. He begins by introducing the psychological phenomenon, which he calls the laws of reproduction, whereby representations which often follow or accompany another become associated with one another, such that in the presence of one, the other will be brought into mind (A100).16 This observation is important for Kant because he wants to establish that such a phenomenon is a rule-based and not an arbitrary condition of our perceptual experience. If it were arbitrary, then it could not help us to determine the nature of objects. For example, Kant says that our empirical imagination would never be able to associate the color red with heavy cinnabar (an ore of mercury), if cinnabar were sometimes red and sometimes black, sometimes light and sometimes heavy (A100).17 This rule-based condition of the imaginative faculty can also be found in Kant’s notion of recognition in a concept.

Introduction | 5 Kant further shows that a pure transcendental synthesis of imagination conditions the very possibility of experience, since “experience as such necessarily presupposes the reproducibility of appearances” (A101).18 For instance, when thinking of a line, we must think not only of its individual parts, but also reproduce its elements so that we perceive its parts one after another (A102).19 If we forget the parts of the line that came before as new elements appear, we would never arrive at the complete consciousness of a single line. It is therefore necessary that we reproduce past ideas in our imagination, i.e. that we represent what has been given in the imagination when that impression is no longer present to us in intuition, in order to have consciousness of the whole of experience. Kant next discusses the synthesis of recognition in a concept. He notes, “If we were not conscious that what we think is the same as what we thought a moment before, all reproduction in the series of representations would be useless” (A103).20 Kant gives the example of counting. If one forgets in counting that the units have been added in succession, then one will never know that a total sum is being produced through the successive addition of one unit to another, and subsequently a sum could never be arrived at (A103).21 We must also know that these units are the same in kind, so that we add similar and not disparate units to produce a sum. Such a recognition involves the concept of unit and also of number. The synthesis of recognition in a concept thereby explains the unity of consciousness which “combines the manifold ... into one representation” (A103).22 Such consciousness is a necessary condition for knowledge of objects (A104).23 According to Kant’s three-fold synthesis, in any experience we apprehend the individual representations and unify them into one connected object of thought, we reproduce in the imagination the individual units of thought to compare and connect them with what came before, and we recognize or are conscious of this temporal succession as unifying the manifold. Rather than understanding the three parts as distinct and separate elements, we should conceive of them as interconnected aspects of a single cognitive experience. Kant’s theory of synthesis is an important part of his transcendental deduction of the categories in his Critique of Pure Reason because it attempts to explain the way in which the objects of our experience are connected by our minds to form a meaningful whole. As Kant says, “It is only when we have thus produced synthetic unity in the manifold of intuition that we are in a position to say that we know the object” (A105).24 This same process is used to have knowledge of the objects that we judge to be beautiful.

1

Judgments about Beauty, the Sublime, and the Agreeable

In his Critique of Judgment (1790), which was his third Critique after his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant tries to answer the question of how it is possible to judge something as beautiful on the basis of a subjective feeling of pleasure and yet demand that our judgment be universally agreed upon by everyone else.1 To answer this question, he first explains the nature of an aesthetic judgment. He says an aesthetic judgment is not a determinate judgment in which a particular object is brought under a universal concept (such as “That rose is red”), but rather it is a reflective judgment in which no concept is given (such as “That rose is beautiful”).2 No concept is given in an aesthetic judgment about beauty because beauty has no concept; it is entirely dependent on a subject’s feeling, and “apart from a reference to the subject’s feeling, beauty is nothing by itself.”3 There is nothing about the object (no property or feature) that makes it beautiful and nothing about the object that causes us to see beauty when we look at it. What makes an object beautiful is just that we perceive it to be beautiful, which depends completely on our feelings, specifically our feelings of pleasure.4 The pleasure we feel when we judge an object to be beautiful is generated in our minds by the free play of our cognitive faculties of the imagination and understanding.5 According to Kant, our imagination apprehends what is given in intuition (the manifold of representations) and attaches that manifold to a concept6

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(as in the recognition in a concept stage of his three-fold synthesis that I discussed earlier). Our understanding supplies the concepts (like universals).7 Our reason supplies the principles of a priori knowledge, which for Kant means with no experience or sensation mingled with it.8 It also allows us to make inferences (like when we see smoke and infer fire as its cause). Our judgment mediates between our understanding and our reason9 by allowing individual acts of subsuming the particular under the universal, as when we make the determinate judgment “That rose is red.”10 However, when we make a reflective judgment about beauty, like “That rose is beautiful,” our imagination is free from being governed by any concepts, so we do not subsume a particular under a universal.11 I believe an example of how our imagination is freed from being governed by any concepts is when we look at the clouds in the sky and see familiar shapes in them, such as cotton balls, whipped cream, animals, and human faces. In these cases, we are projecting things to be there that are not really there because our imagination is not being limited to any concept, such as the concept of a cloud. Similarly, when we look at a painting, our imagination is not limited to any concept, such as the concept of a painting. We can project ourselves into the painting and imagine we are there inside the two-dimensional scene. This phenomenon of being able to project ourselves into the artistic scene by using our imaginations has been written about by various philosophers of art. For instance, Gregory Currie says that when we watch a film, we engage in imaginings that depend on what we actually see in film images.12 However, as I argued in my doctoral dissertation The Ontology of Film, film viewers are not limited to imagining just what they actually see depicted in film images because they can also create their own mental images that are different from what they are seeing depicted in film images.13 For example, they could insert images of people they know and superimpose those images on the actors and actresses in the film. By so doing, they make the experience of film viewing more personal and meaningful to their own lives. This ability of our imagination to go beyond what is seen in the artistic image or in the real world shows how our imagination is not bound by any concepts, but is entirely free to imagine whatever it wants. It is this freedom of our imagination that enables us to see things in objects that are not really there (like animals in the clouds or monsters in the shadows) and to project ourselves in fictional scenes (like when we imagine ourselves as participants in a painting, a photograph, a movie scene, a novel, or a theatrical performance). Kant does not explain how this “free play of our imagination” works exactly. As a result,

Judgments about Beauty, the Sublime, and the Agreeable | 9 there are still ongoing disagreements among philosophers trying to interpret his views on that subject. By using our imaginations, we can even judge objects to be beautiful that are often judged to be ugly by most people. For example, most people would judge mud to be ugly, but in the mind of an artist, it can be judged to be beautiful. A sculptor takes the mud and molds it into his desired shape, like a human figure or an animal figure, and then he judges that mud to be beautiful. To most other people, his molded mud is just a clump of wet dirt and is still ugly. Here is a case of projection where the artist is projecting beauty onto an otherwise mundane object that is typically not judged to be beautiful. The sculptor can even judge the mud to be beautiful before molding it into his desired shapes, since he sees its potential to be shaped into beautiful forms. Similarly, the botanist sees beauty in an ordinary seed, since she sees its potential to become something beautiful, like a plant or a tree. We can therefore use our imaginations to see beauty in mundane objects that other people would not judge to be beautiful. We also tend to judge objects as being beautiful when we are interested in them. For instance, a geologist is interested in rocks, so he judges rocks to be beautiful. A paleontologist is interested in the bones of extinct animals, so she judges them to be beautiful. While some people would argue that we should not see beauty in mundane objects like mud, rocks, and bones, the fact is that people do see beauty in such mundane objects because they are able to project beauty onto these objects. Our imaginations are therefore important faculties of our minds that enable us to see beauty in just about anything we want. No wonder we can’t get everyone to agree on what is beautiful. We don’t all use our imaginations in the same ways to be able to see beauty in the same things. For example, while I judge an Arabian horse to be beautiful, another person might judge the same Arabian horse I am looking at to be ugly. When Kant says our imagination is not bound by any concepts, he recognizes this important ability that our imaginations have in allowing us to see beauty in all sorts of things. Our imaginations are also the source of our creativity and intellectual genius. Artists use their imaginations to create new visual images, and scientists use their imaginations to create new ideas to explain the world around them. Kant next distinguishes between judgments about beauty and judgments about the sublime. He says if the free play is between our imagination and our understanding, we make a judgment about beauty; if it is between our imagination and our reason, we make a judgment about the sublime.14 When we experience the sublime, he says we feel fear in the presence of things that are extremely large (what he calls the mathematically sublime), such as the starry skies in the vast

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heavens, or when we are in the presence of things that are over-whelmingly powerful in their relation to us (what he calls the dynamically sublime), such as the ocean heaved up in a storm.15 Other examples he gives of the dynamically sublime are threatening rocks, thunderclouds with lightning, volcanoes, hurricanes, and a high waterfall.16 When we experience the sublime, he says we also have a feeling of displeasure that is caused by the awareness of our imagination’s inadequacy to grasp the magnitude of the idea, such as the idea of the vastness of the heavens.17 Kant’s account of the sublime as arousing fear in people echoes the views of the philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797), who described the sublime in terms of “vastness” and “terror” in his treatise, “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” (1757),18 which preceded Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790). Burke said that while we love and long for the beautiful, the sublime is something we fear and dread but in a pretend way.19 For example, when we look over the edge of a cliff and see powerful waves crashing on jagged rocks below us, we feel afraid even though the waves pose no real danger to us.20 We can experience this feeling when we stand along the precipice of Niagara Falls and look down at the turbulent waters below us or imaginatively project ourselves into Frederic Edwin Church’s painting Niagara Falls from the American Side (1867). For Kant, judgments of the sublime are therefore unlike judgments of beauty because they involve feelings of fear and displeasure that judgments of beauty do not have (judgments of beauty only involve feelings of pleasure), and they involve the use of our reason, which tries to make sense of ideas that are too difficult for our minds to comprehend, like the idea of infinity when we try to comprehend the vastness of the heavens. Kant next says aesthetic judgments can be divided into empirical and pure judgments. They are empirical if they assert that an object is agreeable or disagreeable, and they are pure if they assert that an object is beautiful.21 For example, the judgment “That rose is beautiful” would be a pure aesthetic judgment about beauty. I will often leave out the word “pure” when discussing judgments about beauty (or judgments of taste), as Kant does, for the sake of brevity. By contrast, a judgment about the agreeable would be the judgment “That chocolate flavor is agreeable.” With a judgment about the agreeable, he says we can agree to disagree, since everyone has their own differing tastes “of the tongue, palate, and throat” and of “one’s eyes and ears.”22 Here are some examples of these different kinds of tastes of the tongue, eyes, and ears. Some people like the taste of chocolate; others like the taste of vanilla. Some people like the color blue; others like the color red. Some people like the sound of wind instruments; others like the sound of string instruments.23 These are all tastes of our senses that vary with each individual,

Judgments about Beauty, the Sublime, and the Agreeable | 11 so we can’t say that someone is incorrect for having his/her own taste that differs from our own taste.24 We may therefore disagree about what tastes, colors, and sounds are agreeable to us, but with judgments about beauty, Kant says we expect agreement from everyone. I disagree with Kant’s view that we expect universal agreement to our judgments about beauty because when I say an object is beautiful, I am saying it is pleasing to just me. I am not saying it ought to be pleasing to everyone else who sees it. Kant would say my way of talking about beauty is not the way we commonly use the term “beauty.” He says when we make a judgment about beauty, we have an expectation that everyone will agree, and we even demand that everyone agree. He writes: For he must not call it beautiful if [he means] only [that] he likes it. Many things may be charming and agreeable to him; no one cares about that. But if he proclaims something to be beautiful, then he requires the same liking from others; he then judges not just 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 other people to agree with his judgment of liking on the ground that he has repeatedly found them agreeing with him; rather, he demands that they agree.25

Once again, I disagree because I, and lots of other people in today’s society, make judgments about beauty without any expectation of universal agreement. When I make a judgment about beauty, I am making a judgment based on whether my sense of sight is being stimulated in a pleasurable way. I do not expect everyone else to be stimulated in the same pleasurable way when they look at the same object I judge to be beautiful, so I do not expect them to agree with me. Kant uses the word “agreeable” instead of “pleasurable” to describe how our senses are positively affected in our judgments about the agreeable, but I think we should be using the word “pleasurable” in our judgments about the agreeable because when we say objects of our senses are agreeable to us, we really mean they are pleasurable to us. For example, blue color is pleasing to me (not just agreeable to me). Chocolate flavor is pleasing to me (not just agreeable to me). Woodwind sounds are pleasing to me (not just agreeable to me). The smell of a rose is pleasing to me (not just agreeable to me). Similarly with my judgments about beauty, I would say the object I judge to be beautiful is pleasing to me. According to Kant, the “to me” part only applies to judgments about the agreeable and not to judgments about beauty, as he says, “For he must not call it beautiful if [he means] only [that] he likes it.”26 I disagree because when I judge an object to be beautiful, I mean only that I like it. In this respect, my judgments about beauty are like Kant’s judgments about the agreeable.

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Furthermore, Kant’s distinction between judgments about beauty and judgments about the agreeable is not so clear-cut when our judgments about beauty are based on our judgments about the agreeable. We have different tastes of our eyes, he says, so that some people will enjoy seeing the color blue and other people will enjoy seeing the color red. If that’s true, then when a painting of just the color red and a painting of just the color blue are presented to a person who likes the color red and a person who likes the color blue, the person who gets pleasure from seeing the color red will judge the painting of the color red to be beautiful, while the person who gets pleasure from seeing the color blue will judge the painting of the color blue to be beautiful. Their judgments about which painting is beautiful hinges on whether a certain color pleases them, so we shouldn’t require them to agree (because as Kant says, we can’t expect there to be agreement about colors), and yet because they are making a judgment about beauty, they should be in agreement (because as Kant says, we can expect there to be agreement about beauty), so how can they be expected not to agree and be expected to agree at the same time? Kant could respond by saying that judgments about fine art, like paintings, are not pure judgments of taste or pure judgments about beauty (I take judgments of taste to be synonymous with judgments about beauty, as Kant does), and as such we cannot expect agreement with respect to them. He says, “When we judge free beauty (according to mere form) then our judgment of taste is pure,” and by free beauty he means beauty that “does not presuppose a concept of what the object is [meant] to be,” such as flowers, many birds, and crustaceans in the sea.27 By contrast, “Accessory beauty does presuppose such a concept, as well as the object’s perfection in terms of that concept.”28 He says fine art (like a painting) is not a free beauty, since it “is a way of presenting that is purposive on its own,” and “art always has a determinate intention to produce something.”29 However, if I substitute two colored natural objects (like two colored flowers) in my example, to eliminate Kant’s likely rebuttal, we still have the same problem. We still have one person who judges the red flower to be beautiful because of its color, and another person who judges the blue flower to be beautiful because of its color. In both cases, they are using their judgments about what is agreeable to them (the red color or the blue color) to make a judgment about beauty. Hence, they can be expected to agree because they are making a judgment about beauty, and yet be expected not to agree because they are basing their judgment about beauty on a judgment about what color is agreeable to them, so the same conflict as before arises. Kant could further argue that my example is more about what color is agreeable to me than about what painting (or flower) is beautiful, and so we should not

Judgments about Beauty, the Sublime, and the Agreeable | 13 expect any agreement on that basis. He said colors belong to charm, which is not involved in a pure judgment of taste, and while they can make an object vivid to sense, “they cannot make it beautiful and worthy of being beheld.”30 However, I don’t think Kant is right to say that colors cannot be the basis for judging an object to be beautiful because the colors of objects do influence our judgments about beauty. In my example above, we are making a judgment about the beauty of two paintings (or two colored flowers) that is based on whether we are pleased when we see a certain color, since each of the two paintings has only one color on its canvas (or one color on each of two flowers) and there is not much else to consider. (I am assuming in my example that the sizes, the surface textures, the lighting, the setting, and other variables are the same and that these other variable are not being used as factors in the judgments about beauty.) My example shows that our judgments about beauty can be based on our judgments about the agreeable, like our judgment about the agreeableness of a certain color, and so we cannot expect agreement by everyone to our judgments about beauty, since as Kant says, we cannot expect everyone to agree about which colors are agreeable to us. So my example is a counterexample against Kant’s view that our judgments about beauty require agreement by everyone. Even if we added other elements to the paintings in my example above, like lines that form the outline of a human body (or added other elements to the flower, like lines on its petals), we might still be judging the beauty of the painting (or the flower) in terms of its color. As my second example of this point, consider Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait (1889) (Fig. 1)31 (shown on the next page) that is primarily blue in color. The fact that the color blue causes a viewer pleasure (or displeasure) when seeing it would influence his or her judgment about whether a work of art with lots of blue color in it can be judged to be beautiful (or whether a colored flower can be judged to be beautiful). In this case, the viewer might still be considering the color of the work over and above the visual features of the human form (or flower), and if so, his or her judgment about beauty once again relies on a judgment about the agreeable, namely whether the color blue is pleasing or not. Even though we can’t determine the degree of influence certain colors will have in our evaluations of a work of art’s beauty (or of an object in nature’s beauty), my counterexamples show that colors can and do influence our judgments about beauty. Scientists have shown how colors can affect our feelings and emotions by their studies on the science of color and the psychology of color perception in human beings. Cool colors (like blues, greens, and purples) are perceived as soothing and relaxing, while hot colors (like reds, yellows, and oranges) are perceived as exciting and agitating. Artists often employ their knowledge of how colors will affect

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Fig. 1.  Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889, oil on canvas, 57.15 cm. × 43.82 cm. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Judgments about Beauty, the Sublime, and the Agreeable | 15 people. If they want a scene to appear soothing, they will use cool blue or purple colors, and if they want a scene to appear exciting, they will use hot red or orange colors. If they want viewers to feel sad, they will use dark colors (like blue and purple), and if they want viewers to feel happy, they will use bright colors (like red, orange, and yellow). Colors also affect our perception of depth. If you put a bright, light color next to a dark color, it will appear to our eyes as though the dark color is in the background and the light color is in the foreground. Many landscape painters will paint the backgrounds a lot darker in color than the foregrounds to achieve this illusion of spatial recession. You could also paint the foreground dark and put the lightest colors in the background, and then the viewer’s attention would be drawn to the lighter area in the background, as with my oil painting The Road Less Travelled, which is featured on the front cover of this book. Colors are also used in society to affect our behaviors and judgments. For instance, a yellow color on a traffic sign tells us to slow down to avoid an accident involving something potentially dangerous ahead, like a sharp curve or an animal crossing the road. A red color on a traffic sign tells us to stop moving forward to prevent a real danger of our being hit by other vehicles. Colors have also been used in advertising to influence our judgments about what products to buy. For example, advertisers will put green colors on food packages that are advertised to be healthy because we tend to associate green colors with healthy green vegetables, so when we see green colors on food packages, we will think the food inside them is healthy and be more likely to buy them. Kids are especially attracted to bright colors, so we see bright colors in candies (like M&Ms and Skittles), cereals (like Froot Loops and Fruity Pebbles), and popsicles (like Fla-Vor-Ice), and we see bright colors on the packages of various products to get kids to want them. Thus, colors do affect our judgments and our behaviors. Even in nature, there are certain bright colors animals have on their skins that provide a visual warning to other animals of their lethality and that thereby influence their behaviors. Eastern coral snakes have bright yellow colors next to bright red colors on their skins to show they are venomous. Also, certain species of poison dart frogs have bright red and yellow colors on their skins to indicate they are poisonous. Finally, the southern black widow spider has a red hourglass figure on the underside of its abdomen to show it is venomous. People also see the colors on these animals as warnings signs of potential danger, so they will avoid getting too close to these animals and avoid touching them. Dr. Temple Grandin, a scientist who studies animal behaviors, observed how animals can react to colors with fear or avoidance. She said, “If a horse is hurt

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or abused by a person wearing a black hat, he may show a fear response the next time he sees someone wearing a black hat, whereas someone wearing a white hat will probably not provoke any fear response.”32 I think the same thing happens with people. If you were hit many times with a yellow baseball bat when you were a child, you would probably develop an aversion to the color yellow. If you then see a yellow flower as an adult, you might not judge it to be beautiful because you associate the color yellow with being beaten. You might even feel pain when you see the color yellow if the color yellow triggers a flashback of a painful memory of being abused. These examples show how colors affect our feelings, emotions, perceptions, behaviors, and judgments. Kant is therefore wrong to say colors are not relevant when we make our judgments about beauty. We are affected by colors, both consciously and subconsciously, and how we are affected by colors will influence our judgments about the beauty of colored objects. In conclusion, even if we accept Kant’s distinction between judgments about the agreeable and judgments about beauty, our judgments about beauty are sometimes based on our judgments about the agreeable (especially on our judgments about the agreeable that involve our sense of sight), as my counterexamples above showed. Since for Kant our judgments about the agreeable cannot have any necessary, universal agreement, then our judgments about beauty that are based on (or depend on) our judgments about the agreeable (such as what colors are pleasing to us) cannot have any necessary, universal agreement as well. There can be no necessary, universal agreement in these cases where we are using our sense of sight to judge the beauty of an object because our sense of sight is just like the senses used when making a judgment about the agreeable, and what we consider pleasing to our sense of sight will vary so much from one individual to another that we cannot expect agreement by everyone. Kant himself says, “for we cannot assume that in all subjects the sensations themselves agree in quality, let alone that everyone will judge one color more agreeable than another.”33 Just as Kant thinks we cannot all agree on what color is agreeable, we cannot also agree on what colored object is beautiful either. Kant only mentioned colors in his initial discussion of judgments about the agreeable that involve the use of our sense of sight, but there are certainly other things that we see in objects that are like colors, such as forms, shapes, lines, contrasts, and textures, and they also influence our judgments about beauty. Since the forms, shapes, lines, contrasts, and textures that we see in natural and humanmade objects all influence our judgments about beauty (just as colors do), then there is no necessary, universal agreement to our judgments about beauty because

Judgments about Beauty, the Sublime, and the Agreeable | 17 it is natural for us to disagree about such things based on our different sensibilities and our different ways of experiencing these things. Thus, I cannot expect everyone to agree to my judgments about beauty because they are based on what is pleasing to just me, like the colors, forms, shapes, lines, contrasts, and textures of objects. Furthermore, since what I see in a beautiful object can be very different than what someone else sees in the same object (owing to my creative imagination, my feelings about color and other visual features, my unique psychology, my different life experiences, and many other factors), I believe I am correct to not expect that everyone else will agree with me when I judge an object to be beautiful.

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Kant’s Four Moments of Judgments about Beauty and How Aesthetic Judgments Are Synthetic A Priori Judgments

Kant further defines judgments about beauty by discussing four essential features or “moments” that pertain to them. The first moment of a judgment about beauty (or judgment of taste), according to its quality, is disinterestedness.1 He means we are not interested in the beautiful object’s existence.2 Also, we do not want to acquire the beautiful object to fulfill our own interests, but we enjoy the beautiful object for its own sake.3 For example, when I look at a beautiful flower, I do not want to acquire it to fulfill my own interests, like wanting to take it home to show to my friends or to paint a picture of it. I enjoy it solely for its own sake. Kant says taste is the ability to judge an object based on this disinterested satisfaction, or liking that is “devoid of all interest.”4 He says the judgment of taste is “merely contemplative, i.e., it is a judgment that is indifferent to the existence of the object: it [considers] the character of the object only by holding it up to our feeling of pleasure and displeasure.”5 Is Kant right that when we make a judgment of taste or judgment about beauty, we are indifferent to the existence of the beautiful object? I believe he is not right because we do have an interest in the existence of the beautiful object. We want to acquire it and preserve its existence to experience the pleasure we get from seeing it over and over again. Beautiful works of art have sold for millions of dollars because people have a strong interest and desire to acquire them. After

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we acquire a beautiful work of art, we put it in our home so we can view it at our leisure or we put it in a public place (like an art museum) so other people can view it at their leisure, and we try to preserve its existence by putting it in safe environments and restoring it whenever necessary. We also have a strong interest in preserving the existence of other beautiful, human-made objects, such as buildings (like the Pantheon in Rome and Taj Mahal in India) and historical monuments (like the Statue of Liberty in New York and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota). Thus, people do have an interest in the existence, acquisition, and preservation of beautiful, human-made objects.6 We also have an interest in the existence, acquisition, and preservation of beautiful objects in nature. For instance, when we see a beautiful flower, we often take it home and put it in a container of water so we can preserve it and admire its beauty. The widespread and profitable business of selling flowers to people shows that we have an interest in flowers and want to acquire them to share their beauty with others, as when we give them as gifts to people during the holidays, such as Easter, Mother’s Day, and Valentine’s Day. We also remove other kinds of beautiful objects from their natural environments, such as seashells, precious gems, and fossils, and we put them in our homes or in our workplaces to admire their beauty. We also have an interest in preserving these beautiful natural objects for future generations, so we put them in museums for safe-keeping or pass them to our progeny. While these kinds of beautiful objects in nature are acceptable to have, there are others that we should not try to possess. For example, lots of people desire ivory jewelry and ivory products they judge to be beautiful, but the ivory comes from the tusks of elephants, and these animals are killed in brutal ways to remove the ivory from their bodies. Elephants are shot multiple times and often bleed to death before their tusks are removed. They were almost driven to extinction because of the high demand for their beautiful ivory. Furry animals have also been killed in inhumane ways to obtain their beautiful pelts which were used to make clothing and other functional items that people desired. For example, people would hit baby seals on their heads repeatedly with a heavy wooden club with a hammer head and metal hook on the end until they died to obtain their fur skins in a widespread practice called “clubbing.” In addition, people have used spring traps that snap tightly onto animals’ legs to catch and kill animals for their fur skins. These trapped animals would suffer for days with injured legs and broken bones, and they would often try to chew off their own legs to escape with the result that they often bled to death. These examples show that people have an interest in beautiful, natural objects, even when the methods for obtaining them are morally repugnant.

Kant’s Four Moments of Judgments | 21 People also have an interest in preserving beautiful animals, especially the ones in danger of going extinct, such as giant pandas, Siberian tigers, cheetahs, white rhinos, spider monkeys, black-footed ferrets, gray whales, gray wolves, bald eagles, certain species of parrots (Kant said parrots were free beauties like flowers), giant armadillos, American bison, and Przewalski’s horses. The prolonged efforts to try to keep these animals alive through public awareness of their plights and obtaining funding for conservation measures show that people do have an interest in the existence and preservation of beautiful animals in nature. What about beautiful rainbows, skies, oceans, mountains, and other things in nature that are impossible to acquire? Even though we know we can’t acquire them, we still have an interest in them. For example, when I was a child and saw a rainbow for the first time, I thought it was so beautiful that I told my father to go get it and bring it to me. He said he could not do that, so I asked him to hold me up high so I could touch the rainbow. He held me up as high as he could, and I stretched out my arm and hand to try to touch the rainbow, but it was too far away to be touched. I still desire to have rainbows as an adult, so I put up pictures of rainbows in my house as a substitute for the real thing. This example shows that even when we can’t have beautiful, natural objects, we still have an interest in them, and we make things or buy things that remind us of them so we can look at them again and again for our viewing pleasure. For example, inside our homes, we put plants and flowers to remind us of forests and meadows, tanks of water with fish in them to remind us of aquatic environments, and bright, luminous paints on our walls to remind us of the colors of the skies. Outside our homes, in our yards, we put trees, bushes, plants, flowers, and water fountains to remind us of the beauty in nature. Some people even build replicas of beautiful natural environments on their properties, such as ponds, lakes, waterfalls, and gardens. These examples show how much we value the existence of beautiful, natural objects. In conclusion, when we make an aesthetic judgment about beauty, we do have an interest in the object (both natural and human-made) as shown by our frequent attempts to acquire it and preserve its existence. We try to preserve its existence for its own sake because we think it is valuable in its own right, but we can also preserve its existence because we want to continue the pleasure we get from viewing the object multiple times and for many other reasons. Kant would likely respond to my previous arguments by saying we are disinterested in objects we judge to be beautiful because the judgment of taste is merely contemplative, and the character of the object is only considered by holding it up to our feeling of pleasure and displeasure.7 He says what matters to be able to say that an object is beautiful is what I do with this presentation within myself, “and

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not the [respect] in which I depend on the object’s existence,” and “if a judgment about beauty is mingled with the least interest then it is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste.”8 Furthermore, while the agreeable object (such as a piece of chocolate) gratifies us (as by pleasing our sense of taste), the beautiful we just like (we don’t “give our approval by any interest, whether of sense or of reason”).9 I disagree with Kant because I think the beautiful object (such as a rainbow) does interest us, does please our sense of sight, and can even please our reason too (as when the rainbow is seen as a symbol of God’s promise not to destroy humankind, which is what the rainbow symbolized in the Old Testament of the Bible). We don’t just like the beautiful object; we are also gratifying our senses with it. For example, we take the beautiful flower home with us so we can see it over and over again, thus gratifying our sense of sight. We also are gratifying our sense of smell because it is fragrant to our noses. We may also be gratifying our sense of touch because its fragility and softness are pleasing to our fingers when we touch it. Finally, we may even be gratifying our reason when we contemplate what the flower means to us or what it symbolizes. For example, Dutch still-life painters of the Baroque period depicted wilted flowers, tapering candles, and half-eaten foods as symbols of the transience of life. Tens of thousands of emblem books were produced in the Netherlands then that explained what the various images in the paintings symbolized. Emblem books were “an illustrated form of literature in which an image—often of an everyday object—was appended with a motto and poetic commentary prompting thoughts of larger issues, frequently moral in nature.”10 To give an example, in his painting called Art of Painting (1665–1668), Vermeer used the symbols of a laurel wreath, trumpet, and book to allude to the fact that the young girl in the background personifies Clio, the muse of history. Such symbolizations pleased viewers because they were using their reason to figure out the meanings behind the beautiful objects depicted in the paintings. Thus, a beautiful object can please us and gratify us on many different levels with respect to our different senses and our reason. Kant acknowledges that there can be interests, but he thinks those interests occur after the judgment we make that the object is beautiful and not before it. He writes: That a judgment of taste by which we declare something to be beautiful must not have an interest as its determining basis has been established sufficiently above. But it does not follow from this that, after the judgment has been made as a pure aesthetic one, an interest cannot be connected with it. This connection, however, must always be only indirect. In other words, we must think of taste as first of all connected with something else, so that with the liking of mere reflection on an object there can [then] be connected, in addition,

Kant’s Four Moments of Judgments | 23 a pleasure in the existence of the object (and all interest consists in pleasure in the existence of an object).11

Here he says the interest in the object and the pleasure in the existence of the object occur after the judgment has been made. Kant could therefore reject my counterarguments by saying that all of the interests I discussed above come after the judgment that the object is beautiful. I still would disagree with Kant because I think our judgments about beauty come about because of an interest we take in the object first, and this interest leads to a feeling of pleasure, which itself involves an interest. As Paul Guyer says, a defining characteristic of pleasure is that it produces an interest in its own continuation.12 Here’s my explanation of what happens during the process that precedes our making a judgment about the beauty of some object we are looking at. We first direct our eyes toward the object, and then we examine it by observing its visual features (such as its size, shape, colors, textures, etc.). When we examine it, we may find some of its visual features appealing or interesting (such as its vibrant colors), and so we look at it for a longer period of time. If we don’t take an interest in it, we look away to some other object in our visual field. But if we do take an interest in it, we keep looking at it, and then we may notice more things about the object that are visually interesting (such as the way it glistens in the sunlight). Once we have experienced the object in this way, by taking an interest in the object and finding certain visual features appealing or interesting to us, we can then have a feeling of pleasure. All of these interests occur before we make our judgment that the object is beautiful. If we didn’t have any interest at all in the object, and we didn’t find the object visually interesting in some way, then we would not be able to have a feeling of pleasure when looking at the object, and we would not be able to make a judgment that the object is beautiful based on that feeling of pleasure. Kant is therefore wrong to say that any interest we have in the object comes after our judgment that the object is beautiful and not before it. I believe after we find some visual features about it that are appealing or interesting to us and after we feel some pleasure from looking at the object, then we can make our judgment that the object is beautiful. He is also wrong to say our aesthetic judgments about beauty are all disinterested because I believe we have to first take an interest in the object to be able to notice it and look at it more closely in our visual examination or inspection of it. If we didn’t first take an interest in the object, we would look at other things instead, and we would not take the time to notice anything about it that interests us and that would enable us to have a feeling of pleasure when looking at the object.

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Why does Kant want to remove all of our interests that occur before we make our judgment that an object is beautiful? The reason is he wants to argue for a necessary, universal agreement to our judgments about beauty, and he doesn’t think he can do that if our idiosyncratic interests are involved before we make our judgment that the object is beautiful. For instance, if I feel a strong interest towards a beautiful object, and you don’t feel any interest towards it, how can I persuade you (and others) to agree with me? But if interests are left out, then I can argue that you should agree with me because you have the same ability to make the same judgment as I (as well as others). The basis for our agreement then is not that we both like the object and are interested in it, but rather that we both have the same ability to judge the object. This interpretation is consistent with what Kant says about taste. When he says taste is the ability to judge the beautiful,13 then our judgment of taste simply involves our ability to judge the beautiful. It is this ability to judge the beautiful that we all have in common with one another, and he thinks this ability can serve as the basis for the universal agreement he desires. In his “Deduction of Judgments of Taste,” Kant writes: To be justified in laying claim to universal assent … one need grant only the following: (1) that in all people the subjective conditions of this power [of judgment] are the same … (2) that the judgment has taken into consideration merely this relation (and hence the formal condition of the power of judgment) and is pure, i.e., mingled neither with concepts of the object nor with sensations as the judgment’s determining bases.14

And again in the “Comment” that follows, he says what made his deduction so easy was that “All it asserts is that we are justified in presupposing universally in all people the same subjective conditions of the power of judgment that we find in ourselves.”15 However, Kant’s idea that the universal assent or agreement is justified by virtue of the fact that we all have the same ability to judge is wrong. The fact that we all have the same ability to judge does not mean we will all agree to judgments about beauty and does not mean that we all ought to agree to judgments about beauty. Our many disagreements about beauty clearly show that although we all have the same ability to judge an object to be beautiful, we still do not all agree because we don’t make the same judgments about an object’s beauty. For example, when I judge a certain bird to be beautiful, and you judge the same bird to be not beautiful, we both have the same ability to judge the bird to be beautiful, but we don’t agree that the bird is beautiful (and we ought not to agree just because we have the same ability to judge the bird to be beautiful, since there may be very

Kant’s Four Moments of Judgments | 25 good reasons why we disagree). Thus, having the same ability to judge does not guarantee that we will all make the same judgments, or ought to make the same judgments, so Kant cannot ground the universal agreement to our aesthetic judgments about beauty on the same ability to judge. The second moment, according to its quantity, is that our judgments about beauty involve a universal liking of the object judged to be beautiful.16 Judgments about beauty are based on our feelings, which are subjective and vary from individual to individual. But even though they are subjective and variable, Kant believed we have a right to require agreement from everyone. He says, “But in a judgment of taste about beauty we always require others to agree.”17 So, if I judge that an object is beautiful, then everyone else ought to judge that same object as being beautiful too. Kant says the “universality cannot arise from concepts. For from concepts there is no transition to the feelings of pleasure or displeasure.”18 Also, “there can be no rule by which someone could be compelled to acknowledge that something is beautiful. No one can use reasons or principles to talk us into a judgment on whether some garment, house, or flower is beautiful,” so concepts are not involved in our judgments of beauty.19 When we do “call the object beautiful, we believe we have a universal voice, and lay claim to the agreement of everyone.”20 Thus, for Kant, aesthetic judgments of beauty are subjective, because they depend on our feelings, and they are universal, because they are to be agreed upon by everyone.21 Henry Allison points out that for Kant the subjective universality of one’s feeling is part of the judgment of beauty itself.22 Kant writes, “this claim to universal validity belongs so essentially to a judgment by which we declare something to be beautiful that it would not occur to anyone to use this term without thinking of universal validity.”23 Well, I use the term “beautiful” without thinking of universal validity when I use it, and I think lots of other people do the same. When I judge something to be beautiful, I mean that it is pleasing just to me, like Kant’s judgment of the agreeable where what is agreeable is just agreeable to me. Kant gives us no compelling reasons for believing everyone must agree, or should agree, so we should not blindly accept his necessary, universal agreement or his necessary, universal validity (where the judgment about beauty is necessarily valid for everyone). They are ideals he wants judgments about beauty to have, but they can’t be attained. The fact that there are so many disagreements about judgments about beauty throughout history shows that people simply cannot agree about what is beautiful. Getting everyone to agree is an impossible feat, so Kant’s demand for universal agreement is unreasonable. Thus, we should not expect any necessary, universal agreement (or necessary, universal validity) to our judgments about beauty.

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The third moment, according to relation, is that the judgment of taste is based solely on the form of purposiveness of an object.24 What does Kant mean by “form”? Rachel Zuckert says most critics believe he means “certain spatial and/ or temporal properties (such as proportion, line, shape).”25 Kant left out color as one of the aesthetically relevant feature of a beautiful object. He said color was merely a sensation that belongs to charm, and as such it cannot make an object beautiful.26 We therefore cannot expect agreement on what colors we deem beautiful.27 Zuckert says what Kant means by form is “all (or indeterminately many) of its sensible properties as inextricably interrelated or unified to make the object what it is.”28 I disagree with Zuckert because Kant is not concerned with any sensible properties of the object when we judge an object to be beautiful, such its colors, form, proportions, lines, and shapes.29 He is concerned with the form of our judgment, not the form of the object, as other commentators have correctly noted. For instance, Henry Allison says when Kant talks about “form” he means the form of our judgment, “which means a capacity to occasion a harmonious interplay of the cognitive faculties, rather than merely a spatiotemporal form.”30 Miles Rind also states that Kant is talking about “the form of judging … in which the cognitive faculties of imagination and understanding harmonize without any definite conceptualization of the object.”31 Kant has thus been incorrectly called a “formalist” because of his use of the word “form” in his discussions about aesthetic judgments, and he was wrongly included in the camp with such formalists as the art critic Clive Bell, who talked about using the formal characteristics of the object to determine its aesthetic value. Bell wanted to find the essential quality in a work of art that distinguished it from all other objects. The only thing he could find was significant form. He wrote, “lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call ‘Significant Form’; and ‘Significant Form’ is the one quality common to all works of visual art.”32 Bell’s formal characteristics (combinations of lines and colors) are not what Kant means by form. Kant is talking about the form of our judgment, not the form of the object (or any other characteristics of the object). He writes about this form as follows: An aesthetic judgment instead refers the presentation, by which an object is given, solely to the subject; it brings to our notice no characteristic of the object, but only the purposive form in the [way] the presentational powers are determined in their engagement with the object.33

Kant’s Four Moments of Judgments | 27 This form of our judgment (the state of free play of our cognitive powers) is what is universally communicable and demands universal agreement.34 He explains this mental state as follows: This state of free play of the cognitive powers, accompanying a presentation by which an object is given, must be universally communicable; for cognition, the determination of the object with which given presentations are to harmonize (in any subject whatever) is the only way of presenting that holds for everyone.35

Kant is therefore not grounding our universal agreement on the pleasure that is the result of cognition, but rather on cognition itself, which means that his universality requirement lies within our minds as a condition of thought itself. He thinks we will all necessarily agree because of the mental state (the state of free play of our cognitive powers) that we all have when we make aesthetic judgments about beauty. But having the same mental state when we make aesthetic judgments about beauty doesn’t mean we will all necessarily agree about what we judge to be beautiful, as shown by the fact that we have different judgments about beauty despite our having the same mental states. In his discussion of the third moment, Kant also says the beautiful is to be understood as purposive without purpose. He means that when we look at a beautiful object, we should think that it has a purpose or reason for its being, even if no purpose can be found. For example, a flower is considered beautiful, but only because in our perception of it we find a purposiveness (we think it was created for some purpose), even though we cannot refer to any purpose whatever.36 He says when I judge a natural beauty, like a flower, which is a free beauty,37 I don’t need a concept of what kind of thing the object is meant to be, and I don’t judge it in terms of its purpose.38 “But the beauty of a human being … or the beauty of a horse … does presuppose the concept of the purpose that determines what the thing is [meant] to be, and hence a concept of its perfection, and so it is merely adherent beauty.”39 Kant says many birds are free beauties, since they are not determined by concepts as to their purposes.40 However, I don’t see the difference between birds and horses as Kant does, since horses are also not determined by concepts as to their purposes, just like birds. Perhaps the reason I see horses differently is because in Kant’s time horses were used for transportation and for doing work (such as carrying materials or plowing fields), so they did have an important purpose in meeting the needs of human beings. Nowadays, horses are not used as much for carrying materials and for farming, and they are not the primary means of transportation. We now ride horses mainly for pleasure and for recreational sport. The purpose of a horse has

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therefore changed since Kant’s time. They are not just limited to do what human beings want them to do as their beasts of burden. They have more freedom to do what horses in the wild do, namely eat grass, run around, and reproduce. My own horses are an example of this wonderful life of leisure and freedom. Aside from the times when they carry me around on their backs, they don’t do any work, as in their natural state before humans domesticated them and made them do work for them. Since horses run around freely, as the birds in the air fly around freely, I see horses as free beauties of nature like other animals that are found in nature. I also don’t need a concept of what kind of thing the horse is meant to be, and I don’t judge a horse in terms of its purpose, just like the way Kant describes the free beauties of a flower or a bird. If the reader agrees with Kant that horses are not free beauties, then when I use horses in my examples of beautiful natural objects, insert flowers instead. Kant says a pure judgment of taste is concerned with free beauty, while an applied judgment of taste is concerned with accessory or adherent beauty.41 With respect to works of fine art, the artist no doubt has some purpose or reason for making it, but Kant says that purpose is not why the work of art is judged to be beautiful. He says fine art is a way of presenting that is purposive without a purpose.42 I disagree with Kant because we can consider the purpose of a work of fine art (the reason the artist made it), and we can evaluate whether it is beautiful in terms of that purpose (whether the purpose was met by the artist). For instance, in a work of fine art meant to convey an idea, such as in a work of symbolic art, we can evaluate its beauty if it succeeds in relaying the idea the artist intended. Also, when we look at conceptual art, we might evaluate it in terms of how well it expresses the concepts the artist intended to convey, and when we look at expressionistic art, we might evaluate it in terms of whether it expresses what the artist intended to express. Finally, when we look at photorealistic art, we might evaluate it in terms of whether it looks like a photograph. We might not know what the artist intended exactly, since he or she doesn’t always tell us and we can’t know what is in his or her mind, but we can still speculate about those intentions, and then we can decide if the work of fine art meets them. Thus, our evaluations about the beauty in a work of fine art are sometimes based on our determinations about whether the purposes for the work of fine art have been met. Kant does say that if I judge a work of art to be beautiful, then I must decide what kind of thing the object is meant to be and judge its perfection accordingly.43 Since he previously said fine art is purposive without a purpose, I guess what he means is that after we make the judgment about an art object’s beauty, we can look at the purposes of the artist and determine whether those purposes have been met,

Kant’s Four Moments of Judgments | 29 but not before the judgment is made, which is like the distinction he made earlier with our interests coming after the judgment that an object is beautiful and not before it. I once again disagree, because we can make our evaluations about the purpose of a work of art before we make our judgment that the work of art is beautiful and use the fact that the purpose for the work of art has been met as a reason for judging the work of art to be beautiful. For example, when I look at a portrait of a person, if it looks like the person the artist was trying to paint a portrait of and the artist’s purpose was to make a realistic portrait that looked like the person, then I would probably call it beautiful for meeting that purpose of the artist, and if it didn’t look anything like the person the artist wanted to realistically portray, I would not call it beautiful. To give you a more specific example, if Leonardo’s famous portrait Mona Lisa did not look anything like the beautiful woman he was trying to paint, but instead depicted an ugly hag, I would think he did not meet his intended purpose for his painting and I would not judge it to be beautiful. E.H. Gombrich, a famous art historian of the twentieth century, believed John Constable’s Wivenhoe Park, Essex (1816) (Fig. 5)44 (shown on p. 48) was a beautiful landscape painting because it so closely resembled the actual Wivenhoe Park the artist was trying to copy and thus met the intended purpose of the artist. He said, “We accept it as simply a faithful record of what the artist actually saw in front of him—‘a mere transcript of nature.’”45 Thus, there are times when we do try to determine the purpose of the artist and whether his or her purpose has been met to decide whether to make a judgment that the work of art is beautiful. We can also think about the purposes of natural objects before we judge them to be beautiful. We may not be sure why God made free natural beauties, like flowers and birds, since we can’t really know God’s intentions, but we can speculate about God’s purposes and try to determine if God’s purposes were met. We can also speculate about the purposes behind natural objects and whether those purposes have been met without invoking God as the creator of all natural objects. For example, we could assume the purpose of plants is to convert sunlight to oxygen. Since plants have successfully met that purpose, then we can judge them to be beautiful. We could also assume the purpose of bees is to pollinate flowers, since that is what bees do so well, and judge bees to be beautiful in terms of successfully meeting that purpose. Kant would respond by saying purposes are not relevant to our judgments about the beauty of natural objects, since judgments about beauty are “purposive without purpose” (meaning we think there is a purpose but no real purpose can be found), and we only rely on our feelings of pleasure (or displeasure) to tell us

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whether an object is beautiful or not. However, I disagree. We often try to determine what the purposes are for an object (both natural and human-made) and whether those purposes have been met, and our determinations about purposes can occur before making our judgment that an object is beautiful. The example I gave to illustrate this point was when an artist paints a portrait of a person and we determine his purpose to be the depiction of a reasonable likeness of the person he intends to paint, which we can tell by his use of a realistic style (as opposed to an abstract style), and then we judge the beauty of his painting in terms of how well he painted a reasonable likeness of the person that was the model for his painting. We could be wrong in our determinations, but even still, we wrongly make the determination about his intended purpose, and we still judge his work of art to be beautiful based on our incorrect presuppositions about his intended purpose. Thus, contrary to what Kant says, we can and do make judgments about the beauty of objects based on their purposes and whether those purposes have been met. The fourth moment, according to the modality of the liking for the object, is that judgments about beauty involve a necessary liking of the object judged to be beautiful.46 When we say that some object is beautiful, Kant says we “require” that others like the object too.47 He writes, “For he must not call it beautiful if [he means] only [that] he likes it. … But if he proclaims something to be beautiful, then he requires the same liking from others.”48 In even stronger language, he writes, “when, in judging an object of sense in general, we feel this pleasure, …, then we must be entitled to require this pleasure from everyone.”49 The necessity lies in our feeling of pleasure, not in any qualities or properties of the object. For that reason, Kant said the object’s existence is not relevant when making a judgment about beauty, which is why he made disinterestedness one of his four features of a judgment about beauty. What is relevant to our judgment about beauty is just our feelings of pleasure, which Kant thinks is necessary for the judgment about beauty because without those feelings of pleasure, we could not make a judgment about beauty. Thus, he says an aesthetic judgment about beauty requires a necessary liking of the object and necessary feelings of pleasure from everyone. I would disagree with Kant’s view that the feeling of pleasure is necessary in the sense of being a pleasure that everyone else must feel. If I feel pleasure when looking at an object, but you don’t feel any pleasure when looking at the same object, how can my feeling of pleasure be one that everyone must feel? My feeling of pleasure can’t be necessary to everyone, since people clearly do not have the same feelings as I, and they shouldn’t necessarily have the same feelings as I. Since feelings of pleasure will inevitably vary from one person to another (which

Kant’s Four Moments of Judgments | 31 explains why people so often have different judgments about what is beautiful), there is no necessity to our feelings of pleasure and our judgments about beauty that depend on those feelings of pleasure. Also, the necessity can’t be based on our subjective and variable feelings of pleasure if Kant wants to get his desired necessary, universal agreement. We cannot all necessarily agree to an aesthetic judgment about beauty if some people have feelings of pleasure when looking at an object and other people do not have feelings of pleasure when looking at the same object. Thus, I believe Kant should not be grounding his necessity on our subjective and variable feelings of pleasure. Later, he will amend his statement to say the necessity is based on the universal validity of the feeling of pleasure, which he thinks can better support his desired necessary, universal agreement. This amendment has flaws too, which I will discuss later. Kant also believes aesthetic judgments are synthetic a priori judgments. He explains what he means by synthetic in his Critique of Pure Reason. He writes in section B10 that “Either the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as something which is (covertly) contained in this concept A; or B lies outside the concept A.”50 In the former case, the judgment is analytic; while in the latter case it is synthetic. For example, he says “All bodies are extended” is an analytic judgment because the predicate “are extended” does not add any new idea to the subject of body but is already contained within our understanding of body as an object taking up space.51 However, “All bodies are heavy” is a synthetic judgment because the idea of weight adds something extra to the idea of body.52 Thus, analytic judgments are merely explicative, adding nothing to the content of knowledge, while synthetic judgments are expansive, increasing the given knowledge.53 In his Critique of Judgment, Kant also explains how aesthetic judgments are synthetic. He says they are synthetic because “they go beyond the concept of the object, and even beyond the intuition of the object, and add as a predicate to this intuition something that is not even cognition: namely [a] feeling of pleasure (or displeasure).”54 From an aesthetic judgment, we do not learn anything about the object, such as its properties, but we do learn something about ourselves, namely that we feel pleasure or displeasure. This feeling of pleasure or displeasure adds to our knowledge, so for Kant, every aesthetic judgment is synthetic. Kant also says aesthetic judgments are a priori judgments. Generally, the term a priori means before experience, and Kant uses it to describe that which is knowable independently of experience (as opposed to a posteriori, which means after experience, or known through experience).55 In section 12 of his “Analytic of the Beautiful,” he says the a priori nature of an aesthetic judgment comes

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from its necessity. This necessity is not a theoretical, objective necessity, where “everyone will feel this liking for the object I call beautiful.”56 Instead, it is “exemplary, i.e., a necessity of the assent of everyone to a judgment that is regarded as an example of a universal rule that we are unable to state.”57 Kant is saying that while we will not all agree, we all “ought” to agree to a judgment about beauty.58 Note that this necessity of the aesthetic judgment is different from the necessity of the liking of the object that is found in Kant’s fourth moment, which I discussed earlier. This necessity of the judgment means that when I judge an object to be beautiful, everyone ought to agree to my judgment that the object is beautiful. Necessity for Kant typically means what has to be the case without any exceptions, as he defines it in his Critique of Pure Reason.59 In that work, he gives the example of mathematical propositions (like 7 + 5 = 12), which he says are both necessary and universal.60 This sense of necessity is a much stronger sense of necessity than his exemplary necessity of aesthetic judgments. This strong sense of necessity does not apply to our judgments about beauty because one can easily find exceptions with our judgments about beauty. The predicate “beauty” does not have to be applied to an object with any strong sense of necessity. For example, some people do not judge flowers and birds to be beautiful. They just do not have the feeling of pleasure that other people have when looking at flowers and birds. They are not wrong to feel this way. Their lack of a feeling of pleasure when looking at flowers and birds is fitting for them. Hence, the judgment that a flower is beautiful or the judgment that a bird is beautiful does not have to be the case. As a result, there is no necessity to our judgments about beauty in Kant’s typical and strong sense of necessity. There is also no necessity in Kant’s weak sense of an exemplary necessity. This weak sense of necessity says that when we judge an object to be beautiful, we are not saying that everyone will judge the same object to be beautiful, but rather that everyone ought to judge the same object to be beautiful. Why ought they? I believe Kant’s answer is that the nature of the judgment itself is such that they ought to. But, as I explained earlier, we no longer define judgments about beauty in this way. There is no expectation that everyone ought to agree. I will grant that maybe people in Kant’s time thought that way about beauty and had an expectation of universal agreement. (Henry Allison says people in Kant’s time expected taste to have inherent universality.61) But most people today do not have this expectation of universal agreement. They do not believe we all ought to agree to judgments about beauty. There is thus no weak sense of necessity (as with Kant’s exemplary necessity) that applies to our judgments about beauty.

Kant’s Four Moments of Judgments | 33 Furthermore, when Kant says we are using our judgment about beauty to serve as an example of a universal rule that we are unable to state, I think that is not what we are doing. We are not holding up our judgment as an example of a universal rule for other people to follow. We are simply making a judgment about how we feel about an object we are looking at, and we are not trying to tell anyone else about how they ought to feel about that same object. Also, if we can’t state the universal rule, as he says, why should there be any necessity to our judgments about beauty? For instance, if I can’t state why I judge a certain flower to be beautiful as a rule for others to follow, why should I expect others to necessarily agree to my judgment? There is no good reason to make our judgment an example of a universal rule when we can’t state what that universal rule is. One might wonder how Kant can require “necessity of the assent of everyone” when all we can know is our own private feelings. He asks himself this question, saying: How is a judgment possible in which the subject, merely on the basis of his own feeling of pleasure in an object, independently of the object’s concept, judges this pleasure as one attaching to the presentation of that same object in all other subjects, and does so a priori, i.e. without being allowed to wait for other people’s assent?62

In section 37, he answers this question as follows: Hence it is not the pleasure, but the universal validity of this pleasure, perceived as connected in the mind with our mere judging of an object, that we present a priori as [a] universal rule for the power of judgment, valid for everyone. … that I find the object beautiful, i.e. that I am entitled to require that liking from everyone as necessary, is an a priori judgment.63

Here Kant is saying that even though we only have our own private feeling of pleasure when we judge an object, it is not our own private feeling of pleasure that grounds the necessity, but rather the universal validity of this pleasure. Kant therefore realized that he could not ground the necessity on just the feeling of pleasure alone, since feelings of pleasure are subjective and variable (as I discussed earlier), and so he next tries the universal validity of the pleasure. However, I would refute Kant’s universal validity of the pleasure by saying that when we look at an object and feel pleasure, we are not saying that everyone else “ought” to feel the same pleasure. We are simply reporting how we are feeling. For example, when I see a flower and I feel pleasure, and then I judge that flower to be beautiful, I am not saying that everyone else “ought” to feel the same pleasure I feel when they look at that same flower. I am simply reporting that

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the flower pleases me. In addition, my feeling of pleasure is not universally valid for everyone else. Someone else may not feel the same feeling of pleasure when looking at the same flower, and I don’t think they should have the same feeling of pleasure when looking at the same flower. For instance, another person might be allergic to that same flower, causing him to sneeze constantly and vigorously if he gets too close to it, or even feel sick from it, and so he feels no pleasure and maybe even feels displeasure when looking at the same flower. His feeling of displeasure would be a legitimate and reasonable feeling to have. He would then not be able to judge the same flower as beautiful. I wouldn’t expect him to agree with me, and I wouldn’t say he ought to agree with me. My feeling of pleasure (or someone else’s feeling of pleasure) should not be universally valid in the sense of having to apply to everyone else. Thus, I would disagree with Kant that our feelings of pleasure have universal validity. Kant would disagree with my view that my judgment about beauty has only private validity because for him we are not making a judgment about what is pleasurable just to me. We are making a judgment about what ought to be pleasing to everyone. Kant’s response would be that the judgment is of a kind that ought to generate universal agreement by everyone who should feel the same pleasure when making a judgment about beauty.64 However, if beauty is a relative term that has a different meaning for different individuals, then we probably would not think there can be any necessary, universal agreement to our judgments about beauty. There is no one feature (or group of features) with any objectivity in it (or in them) that would apply to beauty that could keep beauty from being a relative term. If beauty is solely in our minds, and not in any objects, as Kant so often says, then to me that means beauty is a relative term that varies from one individual to another. Kant writes, “Yet beauty is not a property of the flower itself. For a judgment of taste consists precisely in this, that it calls a thing beautiful only by virtue of that characteristic in which it adapts itself to the way we apprehend it.”65 Here Kant is saying beauty is solely to be found in the way we apprehend an object, and to me that apprehension is completely subjective and variable, and thus relative to the individual. Because beauty is relative to the perceiver (since beauty depends wholly on my subjective and varying feelings), I believe there can be no necessary, universal agreement to our judgments about beauty. As a result, Kant’s attempts to find necessity and universality in our judgments about beauty are bound to fail. In conclusion, Kant’s attempt to find the basis for the necessity of our aesthetic judgments in the universal validity of our pleasure does not succeed because our pleasure is not something that has to apply to everyone. People today don’t think

Kant’s Four Moments of Judgments | 35 judgments about beauty have any normativity, objectivity, or necessity because they believe beauty is relative to the perceiver. They believe that what is judged to be beautiful by one person may be judged to be not beautiful, or even ugly, by another person, and there is no right or wrong judgment; they are just different judgments about beauty. As a result, they comfortably allow other people to make different judgments about what is beautiful without arguing with them or trying to change their minds.

3

Hume’s Views and How Standards of Taste and Beauty Vary

Before I examine Kant’s indeterminate concept of the supersensible, I want to explain the nature of the philosophical dispute about aesthetics to help the reader understand what Kant was reacting to. Kant said it was David Hume who awakened him from his “dogmatic slumber,” so I will explain Hume’s view and their relevance to Kant’s views. I will specifically explain why Hume believed beauty is relative to the perceiver and how this relativism means there can be no necessary, universal agreement to our aesthetic judgments about beauty. After that discussion, I will show how Hume was correct to say that standards of taste and beauty vary over time by giving some examples from the history of art. In the 18th century, British empiricists argued that all of our knowledge was grounded in sense experience. They were interested in the psychology of art in terms of how art is perceived by our senses. In fact, the word aesthetics comes from the Greek word aisthētikos, which means perceived by the senses. John Locke (1632–1704) said when we are born, the mind is a blank slate (tabula rasa) onto which new sense impressions are inscribed. Gradually, as we get older, our sense impressions pile up and are organized by our mind to give us knowledge about our world. Locke also made a distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities (such as solidity and extension) are in objects themselves, and they exist whether we perceive them or not. Secondary qualities (such as colors

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and sounds) are not in objects themselves, and they depend on our perceptions of them. Other empiricists also recognized that the qualities we perceive in objects are not actually in the objects themselves. For example, the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) said, “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”1 This view is often rephrased as the often-quoted and popular saying, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” For Hume, there was no observable property that can be found in an object that makes it beautiful. He said that beauty and deformity are not objective qualities in things themselves; they exist only in our minds as sentiments or feelings.2 Hence, one person will feel that an object is beautiful, while another person will feel that same object is ugly, and neither person is right or wrong for having such feelings. In his famous essay “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757), Hume argued that it is natural to seek a standard of taste by which aesthetic preferences could be called correct or incorrect.3 He said we can come up with some general rules for judging works of art by finding features of a work of art that please a person who is experienced, calm, and unprejudiced because variations in judgments of taste are due to “some defect or perversion in the faculties … proceeding either from prejudice, from want of practice, or want of delicacy.”4 If we could somehow overcome these deficiencies, then maybe we could agree as to what is beautiful or in good taste, but he admitted that “a certain degree of diversity in judgment is unavoidable, and we seek in vain for a standard, by which we can reconcile the contrary sentiments.”5 Hume believed we could develop our taste, or the ability to judge that a work of art is good. To begin, he said we need delicacy of the imagination, which is the ability to discern the smallest ingredients in the composition of the whole.6 For an example, he used an anecdote from Cervantes’ Don Quixote in which two kinsmen of Sancho Panza made conflicting judgments about the taste of some old wine. One said it was good but had the taste of iron, and the other said it was good but had the taste of leather; both were ridiculed for disagreeing until they found a key with a leather thong at the bottom of the container.7 Hume said if people do not have delicacy, they can improve it by practice and by frequent contemplation, and they should use their good sense or reason to check the influence of prejudice, to compare parts to the whole, and to identify the purpose behind the artwork.8 However, not all questions about the merits of a work of art will be settled by standards of taste because there are natural variations of sentiment.9 For example, the young prefer amorous and tender images, while the old prefer wise, philosophical reflections, and in both cases, the one taste is not better than the other; they are

Hume’s Views and How Standards of Taste and Beauty Vary | 39 just different.10 Thus, there is no reason to dispute matters of taste because our tastes are subjective and depend on our varying and subjective feelings. I believe Hume was right to say that standards of taste and beauty will vary. After taking twelve art history classes as an undergraduate student at Princeton University, I learned that standards of taste and beauty in art have varied from one culture to another and from one time period to another. For example, in the time period and culture of Peter Paul Rubens, a Baroque artist of the 17th century, the ideal standard of beauty for women was obesity, since the affluent in society could afford to eat more, and they proudly showed off their corpulent bodies as a sign of their high status and wealth. As a result, Rubens painted rotund, fleshy women to reflect that ideal, as in his painting The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (c. 1617) (Fig. 2),11 shown on the next page. Nowadays, skinny women are considered the ideal of beauty for women in many different countries, and so skinny women is what you often see depicted in photographs, magazines, movies, television programs, advertisements, billboards, toys (like Barbie dolls), fashion shows, etc. Unfortunately, women are even discriminated against in their places of employment if they are too heavy. Think of actresses who have had to lose weight to get roles, such as Margaret Cho and Jennifer Lawrence. There are even studies that have shown that obese women are not as popular or well-liked as their thinner counterparts, which makes us realize how arbitrary standards of beauty impact people’s lives and often in negative ways. To give another example from art history of how standards of taste and beauty have changed over time, consider Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment (1541) in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, Italy. This fresco depicts the second coming of Jesus Christ and God’s judgment of all human souls. The nude figures in this fresco were viewed as immoral, obscene, distasteful, and disrespectful. One critic, Biagio da Cesena, who worked for the Pope as his Master of Ceremonies, said Michelangelo’s nudes were disgraceful and inappropriate for such a holy setting. When Michelangelo heard about his negative comments, he painted a portrait of Biagio in his fresco as Minos, the judge of the Underworld, in the bottom right corner with donkey ears and with his genitals covered by a coiled snake. When Biagio complained to the Pope, the Pope said his jurisdiction did not extend to Hell, so the portrait of him would have to remain there. After Michelangelo died in 1564, the genitals on his nude figures were covered up by another artist named Daniele da Volterra (a.k.a. “the breeches-painter”), nearly twenty years after the Council of Trent first condemned nudity in religious art in 1545.12 In deference to the great artist, the Pope waited until after Michelangelo’s death to have Daniele da Volterra change his masterpiece. Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment was the most

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Fig. 2.  Peter Paul Rubens, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, c. 1617, oil on canvas, 224 cm. × 211 cm., Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

Hume’s Views and How Standards of Taste and Beauty Vary | 41 famous work to be amended under the guidelines and authority of the Council of Trent’s decrees. The draping of his nude figures was a clear warning to other artists to beware of showing nudity in their religious works of art. Today, most people probably would not be offended by Michelangelo’s nude figures or by seeing religious figures depicted as nudes. For instance, consider Michelangelo’s David (1504), a marble statue of a heroic religious figure. That sculpture of a nude young man is a work that most people admire and are not offended by even though his genitals are prominently displayed in a public place. Similarly, most people today would be even less likely to be offended when viewing religious figures shown with just a few bare body parts. However, in the 17th century, the Italian artist Caravaggio was criticized and censured because he painted saints with their dirty, bare feet exposed to the viewer, which was considered highly offensive and sacrilegious. Saints were supposed to be painted with noble and dignified appearances, wearing elegant clothes, but he painted them as if they were humble and dirty peasants, wearing the garments of paupers. For examples, look at his Crucifixion of St. Peter (1601) (Fig. 3)13 and his first version of St. Matthew and an Angel (1602) (Fig. 4),14 shown on the next page. His first version of St. Matthew (1602) was rejected by his patron, so he painted another version (Inspiration of St. Matthew, 1602) in which St. Matthew looks more dignified with a halo over his head and wearing elegant clothes. Also, in his first version, the angel is guiding the hand of St. Matthew, who appears to be needing assistance with his writing, while in his second version, the angel is farther away in the air above his head and is not guiding the movement of his hand as he writes. Caravaggio also painted the Virgin Mary as a pale corpse with a swollen belly in The Death of the Virgin (1606), which was deemed highly offensive and sacrilegious, since she was shown to be physically decaying instead of being assumed into heaven with no trace of her physical body. He also portrayed the Virgin Mary as a common woman standing in the doorway of her ordinary home with her bare feet showing in his Madonna of Lareto (1604–1606). The pilgrim visiting her also has his dirty, bare feet exposed to the viewer. While Caravaggio’s down-to-earth, unidealized figures were thought to be ugly in his time, today we tend to think his figures are beautiful. They are poignant in their brutal honesty for showing the flaws in human physical appearances that we can all relate to. Caravaggio’s paintings have a powerful impact on us, not only because his religious figures are people we can relate to, with their physical imperfections and ordinary appearances, but also because they are placed within a clear, dramatic, and monumental format that has an immediate and direct appeal to our senses. He gains immediacy and accessibility by placing his figures in close proximity to

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Fig. 3.  Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Crucifixion of St Peter, 1601, oil on canvas, 230 cm. × 175 cm., Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome.

Fig. 4.  Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, St. Matthew and an Angel, 1602, oil on canvas, 232 cm. × 183 cm., formerly Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, Berlin.

Hume’s Views and How Standards of Taste and Beauty Vary | 43 the viewer in the foreground plane against a very dark background. In addition, his mysterious lighting effects and dramatic use of chiaroscuro (strong contrasts between light and dark) heighten the emotional appeal of his scenes. His dramatic paintings influenced other famous artists such as Rubens, Rembrandt, Velasquez, David, and Dalí. While underappreciated and not highly regarded in his time, Caravaggio’s paintings are now widely admired and revered. These examples from art history show that standards of beauty and taste inevitably change over time. In modern times, we are no longer offended by seeing nude figures because they are ubiquitous in our society. We see them in paintings, sculptures, photographs, books, magazines, advertisements, movies, television shows, videos, pornographic images, and Internet images on our computers. Lots of nude figures have appeared in paintings since Michelangelo’s time by famous artists such as Rubens, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Goya, Renoir, Manet, Gauguin, van Gogh, and Picasso, and by less famous artists such as Andrew Wyeth (from the U.S.; see his Helga Pictures, painted from 1971 to 1985) and Lucian Freud (from the U.K.; see his Supervisor Sleeping, a.k.a. “Big Sue,” painted in 1995). Nude sculptures can be found in modern art museums, such as The Age of Bronze and The Three Shades by Rodin and Standing Woman and Floating Figure by Gaston Lachaise. Nude figures are also the subjects of modern photographs, such as those by Alfred Stieglitz, Rudolph Koppitz, Edward Weston, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Annie Leibovitz (such as her famous photograph of the pregnant actress Demi Moore on the August 1991 cover of Vanity Fair magazine). While many people were shocked to see a nude pregnant woman on the cover of a widely-circulated and popular magazine in 1991 (when nudity was rarely seen in public images), in 2015 (when nudity was more widespread and seen on television, in movies, and on the Internet), people were not so surprised or shocked to see images of nudes in public places. The most widespread presence of nude figures in today’s society is probably found in pornography. People buy so many pornographic images of nude people engaging in a wide variety of sexual acts that it has become a multi-billion-dollar industry. Pornographic images are very easy for people to find on the Internet, and they are even available free of charge. Young people can access the pornographic websites to see pornographic images and pornographic videos by simply “clicking” that they are 18 years of age, with no proof of their age required. With all this exposure to nudity in our society today, we have become far less offended by it and maybe even indifferent to it. Thus, the nudity in art that was once considered offensive and censored a long time ago, as during the time of Michelangelo and

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the Counter-Reformation, is not considered as offensive anymore, which goes to show that standards of taste and beauty change over time. Hume was therefore right to believe that we would be searching in vain to find standards of beauty and taste that are objective, since our ideas about what is beautiful and our ideas about what is tasteful change over time. But even though I agree with Hume that there are no objective standards of beauty and taste, some people have argued that there can be such objective standards. For instance, the art historian E.H. Gombrich argued that there is an objective progress within the history of representation towards greater naturalism, so we can say that some works of art are objectively more naturalistic and more beautiful than other works of art, such as John Constable’s landscape painting Wivenhoe Park, Essex (1816) (Fig. 5) (shown on p. 48). However, I disagree with Gombrich because when we study art history, we find no consensus on what is judged to be beautiful in terms of naturalism or any other standard of beauty. Our definitions of naturalism have changed over time, just as our definitions of beauty have changed over time. In the 20th century, naturalism was defined as “an approach to art in which the artist endeavors to represent objects as they are empirically observed, rather than in a stylized or conceptual manner conditioned by intellectual preconceptions or other factors.”15 Greek classical art is regarded as the first naturalistic art because the Greeks were concerned with making convincing facsimiles of the visible appearances of things. Although Greek artists frequently idealized nature, their art is still considered to be naturalistic. As an ideal of beauty, naturalism was common throughout various art historical periods, especially during the Baroque period (around 1600 to 1725). Giovanni Pietro Bellori, a famous art historian and one of Caravaggio’s harshest critics, believed art should be a creation of ideal beauty achieved by the assimilation of the best parts of the most beautiful objects in nature. However, Caravaggio believed the competent painter is the one who knows how to imitate natural things well without any idealizing.16 He painted the natural imperfections in his depictions of religious figures, such as their wrinkles and dirty bare feet (as in his two paintings shown on p. 42). He wanted to study Nature as opposed to the classical works of antiquity, saying “that all works, no matter what or by whom painted, are nothing but … trifles … unless they are made and painted from life, and that there can be nothing … better than to follow Nature.”17 These different definitions of naturalism occurred within the same time period—one idealizing nature and the other showing the imperfections in nature.

Hume’s Views and How Standards of Taste and Beauty Vary | 45 Another view of naturalism during the Baroque period was that of illusionistic verisimilitude, or trying to convince the viewer of the actual appearances of things. Perhaps the best example of this kind of naturalism can be seen in the so-called “photographic realism” of Dutch Baroque paintings. This concern for truth in the observation of reality was no doubt influenced by the rise of science. Among other scientific advancements, painters had optical instruments that increased their vision, such as the magnifying glass and the microscope. The influence of the camera obscura was also prevalent. As a result, Dutch artists were not copying what appeared to their own unaided eyes, but rather what their instruments captured. For instance, in Maidservant Pouring Milk (1658–1660) by Vermeer, there are “circles of confusion” and “halation of highlights” that are best explained as optical phenomena that can be seen on the viewing-screen of a camera obscura.18 Thus, by trying to exactly reproduce reality through the use of such devices, some Dutch painters actually distorted reality and created works of art that appear to be unnatural. The problem with these past definitions of naturalism, as noted by modern art historians and philosophers, is that we no longer think artists are seeing the natural world and copying it, as in Caravaggio’s time, but rather they are interpreting what is seen. Gombrich upholds this view that visual perception is an interpretive act. He says, “much of what we call ‘seeing’ is conditioned by habits and expectations.”19 Nevertheless, he believes there is an objective and progressive scale of naturalism in which works of art become increasingly naturalistic over time. He views naturalism as a process of schema and correction in which we start with an initial framework as our standard of comparison and then begin making guesses which we modify by eliminating false guesses in light of our experience.20 For a work to be naturalistic, he says we would have to get no false information from it, which means we would get “as much correct information about the spot as … if we looked at it from the very spot where the artist stood.”21 He believes the standards for evaluating naturalism are not relative because we can use reality as a way to check on the veracity of images.22 However, Gombrich’s definition of naturalism as a faithful record of what the artist saw in nature at the time he or she was painting it is highly problematic. When he says John Constable’s Wivenhoe Park, Essex (Fig. 5) (shown on p. 48) is “a faithful record of what the artist actually saw in front of him,”23 how does he know this? Since it is impossible for Gombrich to have observed the same natural landscape that Constable observed over a hundred years ago, Gombrich cannot know whether what he saw in the painting is what Constable saw in the actual Wivenhoe Park in 1816. For example, he cannot know the colors and contrasts

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of light and dark in the landscape, the intensity of the sunlight, the opaqueness of the water, and other visually acquired information about the scene. Even if we had a photograph of Wivenhoe Park taken then, the photographer would have selected various aspects of the scene and developed it according to his/her own taste. For example, in addition to choosing the composition, the photographer might have manipulated the lightness or darkness of the image through the type of film, the shutter speed, and certain aspects of the developing process, such as varying the length of time that the image rested in its various chemical baths. Gombrich acknowledges that there are problems with using photographs to check on the veracity of the painted image. He writes: Surely there is not one square inch in the photograph which would be identical with, say, a mirror image, such as one might have produced on the spot. The reason is obvious. The black-and-white photograph only reproduces gradations of tone between a very narrow range of grays. Not one of these tones, of course, corresponds to what we call “reality.” Indeed, the scale depends largely on the photographer’s choice in the darkroom and is partly a matter of processing.24

Nevertheless, he still thinks the standard of correctness is not necessarily truth but rather a lack of false information that the work of art conveys to the viewer.25 He wants to refute the relativist view that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and argue instead that an objective claim to naturalism is possible, because even though what we call seeing is conditioned by our habits and expectations, he believes certain schemata will evoke the same responses in different beholders.26 As a result, Gombrich believes that a naturalistic work of art will evoke the same responses from the viewer as the real object that that work of art represents. I disagree because our responses to two-dimensional, naturalistic works of art differ from our responses to the three-dimensional reality that such works of art can represent. For example, the way we respond to a two-dimensional image of a painted tiger is usually very different from the way we respond to a three-dimensional, real tiger. The real tiger is more frightening for obvious reasons, such as its growling noises, teeth being bared, gleaming eyes, and predatory movements like stalking. We are usually able to easily tell the difference between a real tiger and a picture of a tiger, which is why we often run away from a real tiger, especially if it is moving towards us in an aggressive manner, while we tend to stand still when we look at a picture of a tiger. In addition, while people tend to have similar fear responses when they see dangerous animals (like the urge to run away quickly), that does not mean they

Hume’s Views and How Standards of Taste and Beauty Vary | 47 will also have similar responses when they see works of art. For example, when people see a venomous snake on the ground in front of them that is poised to strike, a bear in the woods walking towards them, or a shark in the water swimming nearby, they feel the urge to move away from the dangerous animal. However, it does not follow from our having such innate, biologically programmed fear responses that everyone will judge John Constable’s Wivenhoe Park, Essex to be a beautiful landscape painting. Thus, even though we may be hardwired by innate, biological mechanisms to have similar fear responses to seeing dangerous animals (which no doubt helped to ensure our survival from an evolutionary standpoint), we are not necessarily hardwired by innate, biological mechanisms to see beauty in objects. Kant has a similar problem. Even if we assume for the sake of argument that Kant is correct when he says that we all have a faculty of common sense whereby our minds work in the same ways when we look at objects, like works of art, it does not follow from our having this faculty of common sense that we are all going to be able to agree about what object is beautiful. For example, we will all not be able to agree with Gombrich that Constable’s Wivenhoe Park, Essex (Fig. 5)27 is a beautiful painting. We might judge that it is not beautiful when we compare it to some other painting, such as Frederic Edwin Church’s Cotopaxi (Fig. 6),28 which has vibrant red and orange colors that can excite us more than the tranquil blue and green colors in Constable’s Wivenhoe Park, Essex. Look at these two paintings (Fig. 5 and Fig. 6) on the next page and judge for yourself. Is one painting more beautiful than the other? Why or why not? Do you think everyone should agree with your judgments about beauty? Why or why not? Nelson Goodman, in his book Languages of Art, argues for a semiotic theory of art in which pictorial representation always involves classifying things according to some symbol system made up of signs, which stand for something other than themselves.29 As a result, he says there can be no resemblance to nature because resemblance is not necessary for reference, since “almost anything may stand for almost anything else.”30 For Goodman, naturalism is based on habituation rather than resemblance, so to say that “a picture looks like nature often means only that it looks the way nature is usually painted.”31 Thus, he says our responses to naturalistic works of art are the result of our conditioning and habituation to conventional coding,32 not something innate or biologically inherited, as Gombrich argues. I agree with Goodman that what we see as naturalistic depends on our conventions for naturalism. For instance, we do not think Egyptian paintings are naturalistic because they do not have the depth, spatial recession, or perspective that

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Fig. 5.  John Constable, Wivenhoe Park, Essex, 1816, oil on canvas, 56.1 cm. × 101.2 cm., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Fig. 6.  Frederic Edwin Church, Cotopaxi, 1862, oil on canvas, 121.9 cm. × 215.9 cm., Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan.

Hume’s Views and How Standards of Taste and Beauty Vary | 49 we are used to seeing in the paintings of the Italian Renaissance period. In turn, the Egyptians would not think paintings from the Italian Renaissance period are naturalistic because they are not used to seeing depth, spatial recession, or perspective in their depictions of nature. Rudolph Arnheim describes an imagined debate between an Egyptian and a Westerner about the correctness of a picture. Compare these two paintings on the next page to help you understand the nature of the imagined debate. The first painting showing Egyptian perspective, which I painted (Fig. 7), is based on “Pond in a Garden” from the Egyptian Tomb of Nebamun (c. 1400 BCE).33 The second painting showing Renaissance perspective, below it, is called “House by a Pond” (c. 1496) (Fig. 8)34 by the Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. The Egyptian might criticize the perspective drawing as follows: “This picture is all wrong and very confusing! The shape of the pond is distorted. It is an irregular quadrilateral rather than a square. In reality the trees surround the pond symmetrically and meet the ground at a right angle. Also, they are all of equal size. In the picture some of the trees are in the water, some outside. Some meet the ground perpendicularly, others quite obliquely; and some of them are much taller than others.” If the Westerner retorted that the Egyptian’s own pond was acceptable only as an airplane view and that all the trees were lying flat on the ground, the Egyptian would find this impossible to see and hard to understand.35

This example shows how the way we typically represent nature through twodimensional pictures is a matter of convention. As our conventions change, so do our definitions of naturalism, thus making our evaluations of naturalism relative to a particular time period and culture. Similarly with our ideas about beauty, as our conventions change, so do our definitions about what is beautiful, so that our evaluations about beauty are relative to a particular time period and culture. Kant rejects this relativity because he wants to be able to argue for his necessary, universal agreement to our judgments about beauty. His explanation for how we can all agree lies in the ways our minds work in the same ways through his faculty of common sense. However, Kant does not say how this faculty of common sense works exactly. (I will criticize his argument for common sense in Chapter 4.) He also doesn’t prove that we always use it when making our judgments about beauty, or that we use it in the same ways as everyone else when making our judgments about beauty. He just assumes it must exist to get the universal communicability and universal validity he wants. Kant says it was Hume who awakened him from his “dogmatic slumber.”36 At first, he says some things that seem to be in agreement with Hume’s views. For instance, he says, “There can be no objective rule of taste … that determines by concepts what is beautiful.”37 Hume had said that we struggle in vain to find an

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Fig. 7.  Julie N. Books, Pond Showing Egyptian Perspective, 2015, oil on canvas, 22 in. × 28 in., Winchester, Virginia, based on Pond in a Garden, c. 1400 BCE, fresco, Egyptian Tomb of Nebamun, British Museum, London.

Fig. 8.  Albrecht Dürer, House by a Pond, c. 1496, watercolor and gouache on paper, 21 cm. × 23 cm., British Museum, London.

Hume’s Views and How Standards of Taste and Beauty Vary | 51 objective standard of taste. Kant echoes this sentiment when he says, “If we search for a principle of taste that states the universal criterion of the beautiful by means of determinate concepts, then we engage in a fruitless endeavor, because we search for something that is impossible and intrinsically contradictory.”38 However, these statements just underscore Kant’s views that beauty has no concept and our judgments about beauty are concerned with the subject’s feelings, not any properties of objects. He believed we are not able to explain what makes an object beautiful by looking at the properties of the object, since beauty is not a property of the object. He said beauty comes from our feeling of pleasure, which is found in our minds. The universal agreement he is looking for therefore has to come from within our own minds, from our faculty of judging that involves the free play of our cognitive faculties of the imagination and understanding and from our faculty of common sense. However, Kant realized that these faculties of our mind would not be able to convincingly ground the necessity and universality of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. For that, he felt he needed something that could not be argued against, namely his concept of the supersensible. Karl Ameriks believes Kant should have regarded beauty as an objective property so that he could have been better able to find his universal validity by looking at the object as being the cause of the harmony of the faculties and the pleasure, instead of looking at the way the perceiver’s mind works.39 He could have said there was a property in objects that caused beauty.40 Kant did say, “The green color of meadows belongs to objective sensation.”41 Along the same lines, he could have said beauty works like the green color of the meadows in belonging to objective sensation. Then, we could judge an object to be beautiful because the object causes us to feel a certain way when we look at it. In that way, there could be something objective about beauty upon which we could all agree. The problem with Ameriks’ proposal is that Kant did not think beauty was an objective property of objects. He says beauty is subjective, since it depends solely on the feelings of subjects, and it does not depend on the object’s existence.42 Also, as Henry Allison explains, Kant explicitly rejects a causal model, since Kant believes the judgment of taste rests on a priori grounds, and causal relations among objects of experience are known only a posteriori.43 Kant explains his reasons as follows: We cannot possibly tell a priori that some presentation or other (sensation or concept) is connected, as cause, with the feeling of a pleasure or displeasure, as its effect. For that would be a causal relation, and a causal relation (among objects of experience) can never be cognized otherwise than a posteriori and by means of experience itself.44

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Here Kant is saying that a casual relation between the object and our experience of pleasure that leads to our judgment of beauty is not involved because that would involve our experience of the object, which is not a priori, but is a posteriori. Kant wants an a priori ground that does not depend on our experience. Since for Kant beauty comes straight from our own feelings (and ignores the nature and properties of objects), I believe he is making beauty relative to the perceiver, and such relativism jeopardizes his ability to argue for his necessary, universal agreement. He says beauty is solely a matter of our perception, so when we determine that some object is beautiful, we can only know that it is beautiful to us—to the way our own individual mind sees it. We cannot know for sure if it is really beautiful in any objective sense. As a result, I believe there can never be any necessary, universal agreement to our judgments about beauty. Our perceptions about what is beautiful vary too much, as they are relative to the perceiver. Even if we could indoctrinate or brainwash people to hold the same views about beauty to achieve some semblance of universality, their judgments about beauty are never going to be necessary and universal in Kant’s sense of being required by everyone. Kant would reject this relativity because even though he agrees that our aesthetic judgments are based on subjective and variable feelings, he thinks everyone should be required to agree to our aesthetic judgments about beauty. However, we really can’t require or demand necessary, universal agreement if there is no objective beauty that is independent of our varying perceptions of beauty. Furthermore, I believe that my personal judgments about what is beautiful should not be required or demanded of everyone. For instance, if see an Arabian horse and judge it to be beautiful, I don’t expect or demand everyone to agree with me, because I realize that other people might look at that same Arabian horse and judge it to be not beautiful, or even ugly. I could still try to change other people’s mind by pointing out all the features I admire, such as the horse’s dished face, small muzzle, wide forehead, large eyes, etc., to try to persuade them that the Arabian horse is beautiful, but all these features mean nothing to a non-horselover. As a result, no matter how many good arguments I make to try to change their minds, they will not agree with me that the Arabian horse is beautiful. The reason we cannot agree (and should not agree) is because there are no objective features in an Arabian horse that make it necessarily beautiful; it is just beautiful to me and to other people who admire Arabian horses. Kant could respond by pointing out that my judgment in that case is not a pure judgment about beauty because horses are not free natural beauties. I disagree because to me a horse is a free natural beauty, just like a flower or a bird,

Hume’s Views and How Standards of Taste and Beauty Vary | 53 for the reasons I gave earlier. Even if we substitute a flower in my example, my point still remains that I don’t expect or demand everyone to agree with me. Kant does not give us any convincing reasons for believing our judgments about beauty should extend beyond ourselves to others. He simply assumes that is the way our judgments about beauty should work. As I showed with my examples from art history, standards of beauty and taste have changed over time, and they will continue to change over time, so there will never be any consensus, or any necessary, universal agreement, about what objects should be judged to be beautiful. Kant’s necessary, universal agreement is an ideal of what he would like to be the case but can never be attained in reality. While he could just stipulate that his definition of a judgment about beauty includes this necessary, universal agreement, we would not be convinced by such an arbitrary stipulation that is not based on any persuasive arguments. Kant realizes he needs an irrefutable basis for the necessity and universality of our aesthetic judgments about beauty, and he thinks the irrefutable basis can be provided by his indeterminate concept of the supersensible.

4

The Supersensible, the Nature of Aesthetic Judgments, and the Faculty of Common Sense

In his “Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment” in his Critique of Judgment, Kant attempts to resolve the antinomy of taste. An antinomy is a contradiction that occurs between two reasonable statements, principles, or laws. The antinomy resides in the thesis that a judgment of taste is not based on concepts because if it were, one could dispute about it (since such disputes could be resolved through proofs) and the antithesis that a judgment of taste is based on concepts because otherwise one could not dispute about it (since everyone has his/her own subjective tastes, and so one could not be able to command necessary assent by others).1 Kant explains how he resolves this antinomy of taste through his notion of the supersensible (das Übersinnliche) as follows: [A]ll contradiction disappears if I say this: A judgment of taste is based on a concept (the concept of a general basis of nature’s subjective purposiveness for our power of judgment), but this concept does not allow us to cognize and prove anything concerning the object because it is intrinsically indeterminable and inadequate for cognition; and yet this same concept does make the judgment of taste valid for everyone, because (though each person’s judgment is singular and directly accompanies his intuition) the basis that determines the judgment lies, perhaps, in the concept of what may be considered the supersensible substrate of humanity.2

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Kant’s solution is to say that a judgment of taste is based on a concept, but this concept does not allow us to cognize or prove anything concerning the object because it is intrinsically indeterminable and inadequate for cognition, and yet this same concept does make the judgment of taste valid for everyone. The thesis should then be changed to state that a judgment of taste is not based on determinate concepts, and the antithesis should state that a judgment of taste is based on a concept but on an indeterminate concept, namely the supersensible. There is no conflict between the thesis and antithesis by qualifying the differences in the nature of concepts. The thesis involves determinate concepts, while the antithesis involves an indeterminate concept. The effect of this solution is that aesthetic judgments can’t be proven since they don’t rest on determinate concepts, and we can command necessary assent to them by others because they rest on an indeterminate concept, namely the supersensible. Kant says the supersensible is a concept that is indeterminate and indeterminable because “there is not even an intrinsic possibility for anything corresponding to it in quality to be given in experience.”3 He also says it is a thingin-itself, which is a noumenal object that can’t be known, and yet it is supposed to allow us to answer his critical question: how can a synthetic judgment based on our experience of an object’s beauty also be a judgment that is a priori? One way to answer this question is to consider Kant’s notion of purposiveness. He says, we do not know the purpose of a flower in Nature, but we can assume that there is a purpose nonetheless.4 Kant often refers to this purposiveness as “purposiveness without a purpose.”5 The idea of the supersensible is similar. It is something that we cannot know anything about, but we can assume it exists. In fact, the idea of the supersensible is just “the principle of nature’s subjective purposiveness for our cognitive power.”6 Kant writes about this relationship as follows: Hence the subjective standard for that aesthetic but unconditioned purposiveness in fine art that is to lay rightful claim to everyone’s necessary liking cannot be supplied by any rule or precept, but can be supplied only by that which is merely nature in the subject but which cannot be encompassed by rules or concepts—namely, the supersensible substrate (unattainable by any concept of the understanding) of all of his powers …. It is in this way alone, too, that this purposiveness, for which we cannot prescribe an objective principle, can be based a priori on a principle that is subjective and yet universally valid.”7

Thus, Kant believes the a priori nature of an aesthetic judgment is made possible through his notion of the supersensible. It is the underlying basis for the subjective, universal validity of our aesthetic judgments. Why is Kant saying that the subjective, universal validity of an aesthetic judgment is made possible through the supersensible? To understand his reasons, we

The Supersensible, the Nature of Aesthetic Judgments | 57 have to examine the ways in which Kant first tried to ground the subjective, universal validity on other things—first on the nature of the aesthetic judgment itself and second on his notion of common sense. When we understand how these two attempts failed, then we can see how Kant realized he needed something more persuasive that he thought could not be argued against, namely his indeterminate concept of the supersensible. Let’s begin by examining how Kant thinks we make an aesthetic judgment. First, we use our mental faculty of the imagination to apprehend the phenomenal world through our senses (as when we perform the first two parts of Kant’s three-fold synthesis that I explained in the Introduction on pp. 3–5), and then we use our mental faculty of the understanding to cognize the phenomena into an indefinite concept. The harmony of these two mental faculties occurs when our imagination is in agreement with our understanding, and our understanding is not performing its usual role of applying a concept to a manifold as the rule for its unification8 (as with the third part of Kant’s three-fold synthesis). Kant describes this process in this key passage. When pleasure is connected with mere apprehension (apprehensio) of the form of an object of intuition, and we do not refer the apprehension to a concept so as to give rise to determinate cognition, then we refer the presentation not to the object but solely to the subject; and the pleasure cannot express anything other than the object’s being commensurate with the cognitive powers that are, and insofar as they are, brought into play when we judge reflectively, and hence [expresses] merely a subjective formal purposiveness of the object. For this apprehension of forms by the imagination could never occur if reflective judgment did not compare them, even if unintentionally, at least with its ability [in general] to refer intuitions to concepts. Now if in this comparison a given presentation unintentionally brings the imagination (the power of a priori intuitions) into harmony with the understanding (the power of concepts), and this harmony arouses a feeling of pleasure, then the object must thereupon be regarded as purposive for the reflective power of judgment. A judgment of this sort is an aesthetic judgment about the object’s purposiveness; it is not based on any concept we have of the object, nor does it provide such a concept. When the form of an object (rather than what is material in its presentation, viz., in sensation) is judged in mere reflection on it (without regard to a concept that is to be acquired from it) to be the basis of a pleasure in such an object’s presentation, then the presentation of this object is also judged to be connected necessarily with this pleasure, and hence connected with it not merely for the subject apprehending this form but in general for everyone who judges [it]. The object is then called beautiful.9

In this passage, Kant says that when the form of the object is judged to produce a feeling of pleasure in us (from the harmony of our imagination and understanding), and that feeling of pleasure is necessarily connected with our judging,

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then it is connected not just for the subject apprehending the form but also for everyone else who judges it, and then we call the object beautiful, or judge it to be beautiful.10 As Paul Guyer correctly points out, there are thus two judgments: the first one is our judgment about the form of the object and the second one is the judgment that the object is beautiful.11 Kant next makes a statement that has been the source of much controversy among contemporary scholars. He says: Hence it must be the universal communicability of the mental state, in the given presentation, which underlies the judgment of taste as its subjective condition, and the pleasure in the object must be its consequence.12

According to this statement, the pleasure we feel comes after the universal communicability of our mental state involving the free play of our cognitive faculties. Kant explains that if the pleasure came first, then it would just be an agreeableness in the sensation, which only has private validity. He says: If the pleasure in the given object came first, and our judgment of taste were to attribute only the pleasure’s universal communicability to the presentation of the object, then this procedure would be self-contradictory. For that kind of pleasure would be none other than mere agreeableness in the sensation, so that by its very nature it could have only private validity, because it would depend directly on the presentation by which the object is given.13

Thus, Kant believes the universal communicability of our mental state involving the free play of our cognitive faculties comes before the pleasure, and it is the universal communicability of our mental state that makes us able to have a judgment of taste.14 Kant wants our mental states to be universally communicated (not just universally communicable15) to get the necessary, universal agreement he wants. I disagree with Kant’s view that universal communicability and universal communication are required to make a judgment of taste or judgment about beauty. I believe I can still make a judgment about beauty even when I am keeping that judgment of beauty to myself. For example, if I am on a deserted island, and I see a flower, and I can’t communicate my mental state of pleasure to anyone else, I can still judge that flower to be beautiful. Similarly if I am on a deserted island, and I make a painting of a horse, and I can’t communicate my mental state of pleasure to other people, I can still judge my painting of a horse to be beautiful. The fact that my judgment about beauty is not communicated to other people and is not capable of being communicated to other people does not mean I can’t

The Supersensible, the Nature of Aesthetic Judgments | 59 make my judgment about beauty. Communicability and communication are not necessary for making a judgment about beauty. For Kant, judgments about beauty are made only within society where a person can communicate his or her judgments to other people.16 He says, “Only in society is the beautiful of empirical interest.”17 To prove this point, he says, if someone were to exist on a desolate island, that person would not look for flowers or grow them or use them as adornments.18 I disagree. If I were on a desolate island, I would stop and look at the flowers, and I would try to grow them if there were not enough of them to look at. I would also use them as adornments. Even if I didn’t adorn myself with flowers, as by putting them in my hair, I would certainly decorate my home with them, as I do now. I put brightly colored flowers on my kitchen table for decoration for my own pleasure. If no one came into my home and I could not tell other people about the beauty of my flowers, I can still judge them to be beautiful. Thus, I can certainly judge a flower to be beautiful even when I am completely alone and cannot communicate my judgment to other people. Kant would therefore believe that “beauty brings no pleasure in solitude.”19 I believe this view is incorrect because it contradicts our common experiences of beauty. When we are alone in a natural environment (such as in a meadow, in a forest, or on a ski slope), we are able to feel pleasure when looking at the natural objects there (such as a flower, a tree, or a mountain), and we are able to judge those objects to be beautiful. The fact that we are alone and can’t communicate our pleasure to other people does not mean we can’t judge those objects to be beautiful. I actually prefer the solitary moments of discovering beauty in nature when I don’t have the distraction of other people turning my attention away from those objects of beauty. For instance, when I am skiing in the mountains, I prefer skiing on the empty trails without other people on them because I can stop and look at the scenery in quiet and undisturbed moments of reflection. I can then make judgments about the beauty of the landscape around me in the peace and quiet of solitude. Having other people around to communicate with is not needed for having a feeling of pleasure or for making a judgment about beauty. Kant’s second attempt to argue for his necessary, universal agreement involves his notion of common sense. He writes, “We solicit everyone else’s assent because we have a basis for it that is common to all.”20 But this notion has the same problems as before, because he says that when we use our common sense, we are saying that everyone ought to agree, not that they will agree.21 Furthermore, he says this “ought, i.e., the objective necessity that everyone’s feeling flow along with the particular feeling of each person, would signify only that there is a possibility

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of reaching such agreement.”22 Thus, Kant’s notion of common sense is a faculty that we all possess that allows for the universal communicability of the pleasure, but it does not guarantee it. Kenneth Rogerson says Kant’s common sense is an imperative that makes a command,23 but I disagree because Kant says the “ought” signifies “only that there is a possibility of reaching such agreement”24 and because Kant thinks we cannot command a feeling, such as a feeling of pleasure. As a result, common sense is not an imperative, or a command that tells us what to do. It is mental faculty that we have in common with other people that allows us to reach agreement but doesn’t mean that we all will in fact reach agreement. Why does Kant think we need this notion of common sense? The answer is because he believes that when we make an aesthetic judgment about beauty, our mental state must be universally communicable. He says, “Cognitions and judgments, along with the conviction that accompanies them, must be universally communicable.”25 However, I don’t think our mental state has to be universally communicable, as I argued before. Even if my mental state was capable of being universally communicable to others, that doesn’t mean that it is in fact universally communicated to others. For instance, my mental state of pleasure when I look at a horse is communicable to others in the sense that I can tell them about that feeling of pleasure, but I don’t always actually tell anyone else about it. The communicability of my mental state is thus not a prerequisite for my being able to make an aesthetic judgment about beauty. Above all, there is no reason to believe that if our minds worked in a similar way through this faculty of common sense, we would all necessarily make the same judgments about beauty and we would all necessarily agree to our judgments about beauty. For example, even if my mind worked exactly like yours in the ways in which we experience the feeling of pleasure, it does not follow from this similarity in the ways our minds work that when I look at a horse and feel pleasure, you look at the same horse and feel pleasure too. If that actually were the case, everyone would feel the same way about horses, but they clearly don’t feel the same way. Our judgments about beauty are based on other factors including our experiences with horses. For example, if a man were kicked by a horse, he might not be able to have the same judgment I have that a horse is beautiful. Even if we were to assume that he had no negative experience with horses, he still might not be able to judge a horse to beautiful because he doesn’t see any visually interesting features about a horse. I have been a lover of horses since I was a child, so I see lots of visually interesting features that mean nothing to him. Our minds work in the same ways in that we can both feel pleasure when looking at the same object,

The Supersensible, the Nature of Aesthetic Judgments | 61 but we have different judgments about the beauty of that object. Thus, having the same mental faculties or mental abilities, as with a shared faculty of common sense, does not mean that everyone will have the same judgments about beauty, or ought to have the same judgments about beauty. Furthermore, I believe Kant does not give us a convincing argument for why we all have a common sense. Henry Allison summarizes the steps of his argument, which I have edited down to the bare essentials as follows: 1) Cognitions and judgments must be universally communicable. 2) If (1) is true, then the mental state required for cognition must also be universally communicable. 3) The mental state required is one of attunement of the cognitive powers. 4) The attunement can be determined only by feeling. 5) The attunement and the feeling of it must also be universally communicable. 6) The universal communicability of this feeling presupposes a common sense. 7) Thus, we do have a basis for assuming a common sense.26 Kant describes the ideal attunement as involving the imagination which combines the manifold and the understanding which unifies that manifold. I will now refute each one of Kant’s steps. Step 1—Kant says the first step (cognitions and judgments must be universally communicable) must be the case because “otherwise we could not attribute to them a harmony with the object, but they would one and all be a merely subjective play of the presentational powers, just as skepticism would have it.”27 This rationale for the first step is not convincing. He is saying that if they were not universally communicable, then we could not attribute a harmony with the object to them. This claim is not true. Even when our cognitions (thoughts) and our judgments are not universally communicable (as when they are private - in our own heads and not shared with everyone), we can still attribute a harmony with the object to them. For example, I can have a harmony of my mental faculties of the imagination and understanding that gives me a feeling of pleasure when I look at an object, and then I can make a judgment that the object is beautiful, and that judgment of mine does not have to be universally communicable. I can make the judgment of beauty to myself in my own mind, as when I am alone and I see a flower whose appearance pleases me. I can think or judge that the flower is beautiful without communicating my thought or judgment to other people. Cognitions (thoughts) and judgments occur in our minds in a private setting, not in a public setting where they are communicable to others.

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Next, even when our cognitions and judgments are not universally communicable, we can still attribute a harmony of the object to them. By this harmony of the object, Kant means the attunement of our mental state to the object, which involves a harmony with the object through the free play of our cognitive faculties of the imagination and understanding. Obviously, this harmony can occur even when our cognitions (thoughts) and our judgments are not universally communicable. Why would a person lack this capability of communicating? A bunch of different reasons are possible. The person might not be able to have the physical ability to speak (as by damaged vocal chords), the person might have various mental functions not working properly, or the person is simply not aware of his or her own mental states and not able to reflect on them. In such cases, the person is still able to have the harmony of the object, or the attunement of the mental state to the object, that is requisite for making a judgment about beauty, and that person can still form cognitions (thoughts) about beauty and judgments about beauty. For example, consider a person who cannot speak and cannot communicate his thoughts and judgments to others, but whose eyes light up and who smiles when seeing a sunset that he or she thinks is beautiful or judges to be beautiful. Thus, we can still have a harmony of the object, or Kant’s mental attunement, even when our thoughts and judgments are not universally communicable. Step 2—This second step is also untenable. The mental state required for cognition does not have to be universally communicable, as Kant says. For example, I can judge a flower to be beautiful without even being aware of the mental state I am in when I judge it to be beautiful. If I am not aware of my mental state I am in when I judge an object to be beautiful, then I can’t communicate it to others, and it is not universally communicable, or capable of being communicated to everyone. Most of the time, I simply make my judgment about beauty regardless of whether my mental state is universally communicable. To conclude, Step 2 should be rejected because it is not true that our mental states have to be universally communicable. My mental states are private (not public), and they are frequently unknown to me and not reflected upon by me, so I typically don’t communicate them to others. They also don’t have to be universally communicable or have the capability of being communicated to everyone. I can still have my mental states without that feature. Thus, even if my mental states weren’t capable of being communicated (and so weren’t communicable), I can still have my mental states and be able to make a judgment in my own mind about the beauty of an object. That judgment within my own mind also doesn’t have to be communicated to everyone or be capable of being communicated to everyone.

The Supersensible, the Nature of Aesthetic Judgments | 63 Step 3—We can dispute that the mental state is one of attunement. Who knows what is really going on in our minds when we see an object and judge it to be beautiful? Kant says there must be an attunement of our cognitive powers, but maybe that is not what is going on. Maybe I am feeling a certain way based on my past experiences. I gave an example earlier in Chapter 1 (on p. 16) of a child being abused by being hit many times with a yellow baseball bat. That child might then come to associate the color yellow with being hit and feel displeasure when seeing the color yellow. He might even have a flashback of that traumatic experience when he sees the color yellow, and so he might even feel pain when seeing that color. As a result, the child may never be able to judge the color yellow to be beautiful and might also not be able to judge a yellow-colored object to be beautiful, like a yellow flower. This reasonable explanation of how our memories of past experiences influence our feelings and our judgments about beauty does not involve Kant’s attunement of our cognitive powers, so it’s possible Kant’s account of attunement is wrong. Maybe what is involved is our memories of past experiences with certain colored objects and how they made us feel in the past, which influence how similar colored objects affect us in the present and our judgments about their beauty. We can then explain how and why we make our judgments about beauty without involving an attunement of our cognitive powers. Step 4—In this step, Kant says the attunement is determined only by a feeling and not by concepts. I disagree. First, as I argued in the previous step, the attunement of our cognitive powers might not exist. There can be other factors at work that can explain our state of mind when we judge an object to be beautiful, such as our memories of past experiences or our use of our reason, which involves concepts. Second, I believe Kant is remiss for leaving out reason in making our judgments about beauty, and relying solely on our feelings instead. For example, I can reason that I like the object that I am looking at because certain visual features about it (like its colors or its textures) are interesting to me, and then I can make a judgment about its beauty based on my reason telling me why I like the object. In this case, my judgment is based on my reasoning about why I like the object and not on my feeling of pleasure. Furthermore, we can judge an object to be beautiful just by using our reason alone and without having any feelings of pleasure. Kant says “a lot of crustaceans in the sea” are free beauties,28 but I feel no pleasure when looking at crustaceans in the sea, like crabs. When I was a little girl, I tried to save the crabs my father brought home that he was going to cook for dinner. I put them in the bathtub upstairs with some water in it for them to breathe. Little did I know that bathtub water was not the right kind of water for them to breathe, and they all died. I felt

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bad that I had failed to keep them alive because they were beautiful creatures that were worth saving. Now I don’t feel any pleasure when I look at crabs, perhaps because of my painful memory of how I had failed to keep them from dying. However, I can still judge them to be beautiful. Our reason tells us that animals are still beautiful even when they are dying (or already dead), and when we feel no pleasure when we look at them. For example, when I was a little girl, my tiny finch was beautiful to me even when it had died. The yellow color of its feathers was still very bright, and its feathers were still very soft when I stroked them gently as I cried. Though I felt a great deal of pain when I looked at its lifeless body in my hand, I could still judge that my little bird was beautiful. We don’t need a feeling of pleasure to make a judgment that an object is beautiful, as Kant thinks we do. In conclusion, we can reject Step 4 because the attunement that Kant wants to come solely from our pleasure might not exist. Other things might provide a better explanation of how we make our judgments about beauty, such as our memories of past experiences and the use of our reason. Kant leaves reason out of the picture when he discusses how we make our judgments about beauty. He says our imagination and our understanding are at work in a harmonious free play. That decision of his to leave out reason is entirely incorrect. Our reason helps us to identify what is beautiful and to appreciate beauty. If we didn’t use our reason, how could we make the judgment that a living creature that is dying before our eyes, or is already dead, is beautiful when we feel so much sadness and pain and absolutely no feelings of pleasure? Step 5—Kant says the attunement and the feeling of the attunement must be universally communicable. The same arguments I made before apply here. The attunement might not exist. There may be other things that generate the feeling of pleasure instead of an attunement of our imagination and our understanding. For example, my remembering past pleasant experiences in my life could give me the feeling of pleasure, instead of the attunement. When I judge a flower to be beautiful, it could be because I am remembering a past pleasant experience which involved flowers (maybe a time when I received some flowers from someone I loved), so there is no attunement of my cognitive powers, but just a past pleasant memory of mine being triggered when I look at that object. I am assuming that such pleasant memories (and painful memories) can occur without Kant’s attunement of our cognitive powers. With no attunement, we don’t have any universal communicability of it or its feeling. Kant might respond by arguing that having a pleasant memory (or a painful memory) also requires his attunement of our imagination and understanding. But even if we grant just for the sake of argument that some memories involve Kant’s attunement, not all

The Supersensible, the Nature of Aesthetic Judgments | 65 memories do involve his attunement, and those that don’t can cause us to make judgments about beauty. I think the abuse case I discussed in Chapter 1 (on p. 16) is a good example. Colors are of sense, not of judgments about beauty, Kant says29 (as I discussed earlier in Chapter 1), so our memory of how we reacted to colors in the past is also of sense, which makes it a sense memory. The child with the memory of the yellow bat used to beat him is using such a sense memory. Kant would say sense memories are not used in our judgments about beauty, but rather they are used in our judgments about the agreeable (as when I remember how chocolate tasted in the past and then judge chocolate flavor as being agreeable to me). Therefore, Kant would say we can’t be using our sense memory to make our judgment about the beautiful. But in the abuse case, I believe that is what’s happening. The person is using his sense memory that is triggered by seeing the yellow flower to make a judgment that the yellow flower is not beautiful. Thus, Kant’s attunement is not always involved in making a judgment about beauty. Step 6—Kant says the universal communicability of this feeling presupposes a common sense. This statement is not true. The fact that I am capable of communicating my feeling to other people does not mean that I have a faculty of common sense. We may indeed all have some similarity in the ways in which our minds work but that does not mean we all have Kant’s faculty of common sense. There could be some other mechanism at work that enables us to communicate with one another or to have the ability to communicate with one another, like language. For instance, without language, I could not communicate my feelings (and judgments) to other people or be able to communicate them. So even if our minds did work in similar ways, if we don’t have language, we can’t communicate our feelings (or judgments about beauty) to other people and we can’t have the ability to communicate our feelings (or judgments about beauty) to other people. Universal communicability presupposes language, not necessarily Kant’s faculty of common sense. Step 7—We do not therefore have a good basis for assuming we have a common sense for all the reasons I gave above. Kant says this common sense is the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our cognition. Since his argument for common sense fails for the reasons I gave above, then we don’t have such a necessary condition. In conclusion, I have explained how Kant was unsuccessful in providing an irrefutable basis for his necessary, universal agreement to our aesthetic judgments. His first idea that our own mental state provides the basis for a necessary, universal agreement will not work because we do not have to communicate our mental state to others to make judgments about beauty. His second idea of common sense

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failed because each step of his argument for common sense could be refuted, so we can’t conclude that we all have a common sense. Even if we were to assume that we all have the same mental faculties and they all worked in the same ways, we don’t all use the same mental faculties in the same ways when we make judgments about beauty, which explains why people so often disagree about judgments about beauty. A shared common sense will therefore not give Kant the necessity and universality he desires. Kant next turns to his indeterminate concept of the supersensible to try to provide the basis for his a priori nature of our aesthetic judgments, but as I will show in the next section, his indeterminate concept of the supersensible also fails.

5

The Failure of the Supersensible

For Kant, the supersensible is supposed to be the reason why there is necessary, universal agreement, but if there is no necessary, universal agreement, as I believe, then the supersensible fails. It cannot do the work for which it was intended and should be discarded. I will try to explain why there can be no necessary, universal agreement by using examples drawn from my own personal experiences, from art history, and from cultural anthropology. I will start with an example from my experiences with horses. When I look at an Arabian horse with superb conformation, I feel the animal is so amazingly beautiful that I could cry. Now, when someone else looks at that same Arabian horse, they might feel absolutely nothing pleasurable at all. If our minds worked in the same ways, through the use of our common sense, then shouldn’t we be experiencing the same kinds of feelings, the same feelings of pleasure, when we look at the same Arabian horse? I don’t think we should, because we have different experiences with horses that explain why we perceive the same things in different ways. For instance, I rode horses that were very nice to me when I was a child in Okinawa, Japan. They didn’t bite me, kick me, or try to buck me off, so my good experiences with horses made me view them with great love and reverence. However, my mother was kicked in the stomach by a horse around the same time period, which hurt her a great deal, so she didn’t like horses and didn’t think they were beautiful. Our experiences with horses were

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very different, so our views about whether horses are beautiful were very different too. I would not expect her to be able to understand or appreciate the beauty of a horse. Her mind worked similarly to mine I think, and yet she could never agree with me that horses are beautiful. Thus, our different life experiences affected our judgments about what we believed was beautiful. Earlier in this book I gave examples from the history of art of how standards of beauty and taste have varied in different cultures and in different time periods, which in my mind showed that there is no necessary, universal agreement to our judgments about beauty. I explained how nudity in art was censored in paintings of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods because it was considered in bad taste, such as Michelangelo’s nude figures in his The Last Judgment fresco, but nowadays we are not offended by nudity in art and don’t censor art that has nudity in it. Iconoclasm (the destruction of religious images), which occurred in Europe during the time of the Counter-Reformation in the 16th and early 17th centuries, showed how people then believed art was a form of idolatry (idol-worshipping) that was offensive to God and how their misguided beliefs resulted in the destruction of thousands of works of art, which is a shame because some of those works would have no doubt been judged to be beautiful and worth preserving. But in modern times, we tend to not destroy offensive works of art that have nude figures in them. For example, while there was a huge controversy about showing the provocative black-and-white photographs of nude men taken by Robert Mapplethorpe in art galleries in the U.S. in the early 1990s, his works were usually not destroyed by people opposed to them. Although I must admit that when I went to the Library of Congress to see a book of his photographs to see what all the fuss was about (to prepare for my Rhodes Scholarship interview, which involved defending artistic freedom), the pages that showed his more controversial photographs of nude men were torn out of the book. Someone had decided the photographs were too offensive to be viewed by others, so there are still occasions in modern times when private individuals will censor works of art themselves. Robert Mapplethorpe’s most controversial photographs of nude men would most certainly have been censored and probably burned in Europe during the time of Leonardo and Michelangelo for being lewd, lascivious, and distasteful. Nowadays, we respect the rights of artists to create works as they see fit, even if we don’t like their works and even if we are offended by them, and we tend to reject any form of censorship by individuals in power who are capable of censoring works of art. Another compelling example of how standards of beauty have changed over time is the Chinese practice of foot-binding which started in the 10th century

The Failure of the Supersensible | 69 and continued until the 1930s. Because the powerful male emperors who ruled China and other Chinese men thought women who had small, pointed feet were beautiful, there was a widespread practice of tightly binding the feet of young girls, typically between the ages of 3 and 10, to make their feet grow into the desired, deformed shape. The effects of wearing such tight bindings for so many years were broken toes, ingrown toenails, frequent infections (some of which led to deaths), and many other health problems. Some critics of this practice believed it was perpetuated by Chinese men to keep the women oppressed and dependent on their husbands by limiting their mobility, since they could not walk or run far away and they could not work effectively with such damaged feet. Today, we do not think deformed feet are beautiful, and we would condemn the morally indefensible practice of foot-binding. The picture on the next page shows a Chinese woman with deformed feet from having her feet bound tightly for many years (Fig. 9).1 You can see where her four small toes were broken, forced underneath, and then bound tightly with cloth to try to achieve a much shorter foot length with a pointed front, which was the Chinese ideal of beauty in her culture and time period. You might wonder how women in China could endure such harm to their bodies for beauty’s sake. Well, in today’s society, the practice of wearing highheeled shoes to look beautiful also causes damage to women’s bodies, and yet lots of women continue to wear high heels. Long-term use of high heels can cause damage to feet, ankles, knees, calf muscles and tendons, hips, and lower backs. As a woman, I have felt pressure to wear high heels to conform to society’s standards of female beauty. The pain was so bad in the arches of my feet and toes that I would take my high heels off at work when I was sitting at my desk and when no one was looking to get relief from the pain. Fortunately, I no longer have to work in settings that require wearing high-heeled shoes. Nevertheless, many women do have to wear high heels to work or risk losing their jobs from not wearing the mandatory footwear dictated to them by their bosses. Some male bosses see women wearing high heels as being beautiful, feminine, desirable, and attractive, so they continue to mandate wearing high heels in the workplace. The similarities of modern women wearing high heels to Chinese women binding their feet show how far women will go to conform to standards of beauty, even if their bodies are irreparably harmed in the process. Women do other harmful things to their bodies to make themselves look beautiful, such as getting breast implants to increase the size of their breasts and liposuction to remove unwanted layers of fat on their bodies. They also undergo cosmetic surgeries to fix perceived imperfections with their bodies. For instance,

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Fig. 9.  Underwood and Underwood, A High Caste Lady’s Dainty “Lily Feet”, 1911, photograph, Women of All Nations (London), p. 532.

The Failure of the Supersensible | 71 they will surgically reduce the sizes of their noses or enlarge the sizes of their lips and get injections of botox that paralyzes their facial nerves to remove wrinkles on their faces. All of these surgeries are risky, and they can result in a variety of health problems and even death. Perhaps, in the future, we can dispense with such inane practices of harming our bodies to achieve absurd ideals of beauty. Another compelling example of how agreed-upon ideals of beauty can impact people in extremely harmful ways is the attempts by the Nazis in Germany (from 1933 to 1945) to make people conform to their Aryan ideal of beauty of blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin through medical experimentation on people, such as the mentally ill, physically deformed, and criminals. They also experimented on Jewish people that they had imprisoned in concentration camps. Many terrible experiments were performed on these prisoners to see if their Aryan ideal of beauty could be achieved. For instance, Dr. Josef Mengele injected chemicals into children’s eyes to see if he could change their eye color from their natural brown color to his ideal blue color. These children no doubt suffered a lot of pain during his experiments, which were not successful in changing their eye colors. I believe this example shows why we should not want any necessary, universal agreement to our judgments about beauty. People throughout history have done harmful things to themselves and to others to try to achieve agreed-upon ideals of beauty. Today, many people still believe blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin are beautiful. There are lots of women with such features in popular magazines, movies, television shows, ads, etc. If you look at the popular Barbie doll, you will see that same ideal of beauty. Sadly, we perpetuate that stereotype of beauty by giving such dolls to our children, who believe they should look that way too. People have begun to realize how harmful it is for children’s self-esteem if they believe they should look like idealized dolls to be beautiful. As a result, there have been recent attempts to make dolls for children that look more realistic. For example, the Bratz dolls are not so skinny, have different hair and eye colors, and have darker skin with blemishes. There is even a more realistically proportioned doll called a Lammy doll that comes with stickers of acne, freckles, scars, and cellulite to put on the dolls. Hopefully, when young girls get older they will realize that such ideals of beauty are unrealistic and inane, but even some adult women won’t let go of these unnatural ideals of beauty. For instance, Valeria Lukyanova and Cindy Jackson are both adult women who have spent a lot of money trying to look like a Barbie doll. Even some adult men aspire to look like Barbie’s male companion, Ken. For instance, Rodrigo Alves paid to have numerous surgeries to change the shape of his face and body to look like a Ken doll. These examples show the extreme measures people will take to try to achieve their ideals of beauty.

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My examples from my personal experiences, from the history of art, and from cultural anthropology show that our ideas about what is beautiful often change over time and are based on a wide variety of factors including such things as our different life experiences, upbringings, educational and religious teachings, biology, psychology, and cultural influences. As a result of these different factors that influence our judgments about beauty, there is no necessary, universal agreement to our judgments about beauty. Since there is no necessary, universal agreement to our judgments about beauty, the supersensible cannot be the underlying basis for it. It is thus an empty and useless notion that should be discarded. Perhaps the most troubling feature of Kant’s notion of the supersensible is that we can’t know anything about it. The supersensible lies in the noumenal world, which we cannot have any access to through our senses and that we cannot know anything about through our reason.2 This metaphysical inaccessibility means that we can’t even know for sure that the supersensible really exists. Since we can’t know for sure if it really exists, it is possible that it doesn’t exist at all. Kant gives us no argument for why the supersensible has to exist. He just assumes it exists to provide the underlying basis for his a priori nature of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. To understand why the supersensible is located in the noumenal world, which is a problematic place to put it, we need to examine Kant’s dualistic account of reality. Kant’s division of reality into two worlds, the noumenal world and the phenomenal world, is reminiscent of Plato’s dualism. Plato also divided reality into two worlds, the ideal world of Forms that we know through our reason and the sensible world of particular things that we know through our senses. In his book The Republic, Plato explained these two worlds. One world had particular things in it like flowers, water, air, and other things that we perceive through our senses. The other world had intelligible ideas in it, like equality and triangularity, that we know through our reason. He called these ideas “Forms” with a capital “F” and said they were eternal and unchanging, unlike particular things that change over time. Flowers die, water dries up, and air becomes hot or cold. By contrast, ideas of equality and triangularity never change. They are not like the ideas that we think of in our minds because their reality does not depend on minds to think of them. They are independently existing entities that are eternal and never go out of existence. As a result, Forms are in the realm of Being, while particular things are in the realm of Becoming. How do we know these Forms? Plato believed that we had knowledge of these Forms before our birth, and then after we were born, when we started to use our

The Failure of the Supersensible | 73 senses, we forgot our prior knowledge of these Forms. Over time, we begin to remember these Forms when we experience particular things that resemble the Forms. The example he gives is our knowledge of equality. When we see two sticks that look equal in nature, they remind us of the Form equality, which he says we must have known in a prior existence before we were born. His best example of how we remember Forms comes from his dialogue Meno in which a slave boy named Meno, who is completely ignorant of geometry, begins to grasp geometrical concepts that Plato thinks he could not have known if he did not remember them from his prior life. While some critics say the wise philosopher Socrates asks leading questions that direct Meno to the desired answers, Plato would object and say Socrates is only reawakening his memories of knowledge of geometrical concepts that he had before he was born. I think that after reading the dialogue, you can see Socrates carefully directing Meno to arrive at the right conclusions, so Meno is learning geometry rather than remembering his knowledge of geometry from a past life. As to why we should believe in his theory of Forms, Plato offers his “Allegory of the Cave” in Book VII of The Republic (514a–520a). In that story, people in a cave are chained in such a way that they cannot look behind them and cannot move, and the cave is dimly lit by a fire behind them, which they can’t see. For many years, all they can see are the flickering shadows on the wall in front of them of whatever passes behind them. Then one day, one cave dweller manages to break free from his chains and sees how the flickering images have been formed by the fire and objects behind him, and he climbs out of the cave into the bright light of day outside. At first, he is blinded by the light, but then as his eyes adjust, he is able to see the grass, trees, sky, and sun. He goes back down into the cave to tell the other people about the beautiful world above and outside of the cave, but they don’t believe his story, so they remain in the cave comfortable with their own ignorance because what they have seen and experienced in the cave is all they have ever known. Plato was saying that we are like the cave dwellers because we too are comfortable in our own ignorance. Like them, we only see the world of sensible objects in the cave, which is an illusion, as opposed to the world of Forms outside the cave, which is the truth. Plato thinks only the philosophers will be able to know these Forms, since he thought they were the wisest men in society, but they also had a duty to tell other people about the Forms, even if the less intelligent people were unwilling to believe in them, because he wanted people to know the truth. He thought the philosophers should be kings and rulers in his ideal society of the Republic because they were able to have knowledge of higher things like the Forms.

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Plato believed there was a Form for everything that existed, including tangible objects (like a bed, a flower, a painting, and mud) and intangible ideas (like justice, virtue, and beauty). He said the Form beauty would be something that all beautiful things have. It would provide a standard for judging beautiful things. It would also explain why certain things are beautiful. If you think about what would satisfy all of these features, you would probably fail to come up with anything. What do all beautiful things have in common? Is it harmony of the parts to the whole, symmetry, or proper proportions? What provides a standard for judging beautiful things? Is it verisimilitude, realism, naturalism, or idealism? What would explain why things are beautiful? Is it because God makes things beautiful or is it because esteemed members of our society tell us that some things are beautiful? The answers to these questions will vary, with no way of determining which answers are correct. To remedy this problem of how we can know the Forms, the philosopher Aristotle, who was taught by Plato in his Academy in Athens, gave a much more enlightened account by bringing Plato’s Forms down to earth. He rejected Plato’s idea of two worlds, especially his transcendent world of Forms. He said there were forms (with a lowercase “f ”) that exist in the sensible, particular things in the natural world, and these forms cannot exist independently of those sensible things. For instance, there is a form flower that exists within the actual flower we can know through our senses, and that form gives a thing its shape and makes it what it is. As a result, he believed forms can be studied scientifically. For example, we can study the way in which water, as it gets colder, changes its form from a liquid to a solid. Aristotle’s view of forms is much more plausible because we don’t have to postulate another world of supersensible entities that only intellectual philosophers can really know about, and we can look for answers to our questions about the forms of things in our own world by using our senses and our reason to learn about them. His view also dispenses with Plato’s epistemological blunder of knowing the Forms in a past life before we were born. That view seems absurd today because we don’t believe we had a prior life before our current life, and so we don’t believe we knew the Forms in a prior life (though there are some people today who believe in reincarnation of souls, so Plato’s ideas about our having a prior life might not be so far-fetched to them). Like Plato, Kant also believed in two worlds. There is one world of appearances that we know through our senses and another world of things-in-themselves that we try to know through our reason. However, in creating this dualism, he had the same problem Plato had of explaining how we can know the things that are in the noumenal world? Fortunately, he did not say we remember them from

The Failure of the Supersensible | 75 a past life. He thought we had to use our reason to try to figure out what these things might be, such as God and the supersensible. We make arguments for the existence of God to try to prove God’s existence, but since Kant was a Protestant, he believed in God’s existence solely on the basis of his faith, as the Protestant religion dictates. He believed we cannot give a convincing proof of God’s existence, since God is a supersensible concept which we can know nothing about. We can say God is benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent, etc., but we are merely supposing that God has these qualities, as they are qualities we think God should have. We cannot know for sure. Since we cannot know for sure about the nature of God, Kant puts God in the noumenal world of things-in-themselves or the supersensible realm, which is out of reach of our senses. Do we really need Kant’s dualism, and especially his noumenal world of things-in-themselves? I think not. I would follow Aristotle and adopt the one world view. If we don’t know about something now, we just don’t have the means to attain knowledge of it yet, but that could change over time as we develop new devices and technologies. We didn’t think microscopic organisms existed until we made microscopes and observed such organisms, and we didn’t think elephants and whales communicated by anything other than their body language until we made sensitive sound-recording devices that could record the noises they made through the vibrations of sound waves in their massive skulls. We have built devices to measure our body temperature, our blood pressure, our cholesterol levels, etc., that all help to monitor important bodily functions. We have MRI scans, X-rays, CAT scans, and other ways of showing us the interiors of our bodies to find tumors, cancers, and other abnormalities. Someday, we will have tiny robots that will travel inside our bodies and will function to eradicate diseases from within. We already have computers and robots helping doctors to perform surgical procedures. Our scientific knowledge also improves over time. We didn’t think deadly diseases could be transmitted by fleas on rodents as was the case during the bubonic plague, which wiped out a third of the human population in 1347. People then thought God was punishing them for their sins, while the medieval doctors thought the bubonic plague was caused by corrupted air, decaying bodies, and fumes from poor sanitation. Since that time, we have learned what causes various other diseases (like cancer and AIDS) and how to prevent some of them. We have also learned things that can improve our health, such as what foods to eat to help us live longer, lower our blood pressure, and delay the onset of dementia. Furthermore, scientists make new discoveries that disconfirm old theories. For example, Einstein’s theory of relativity made him famous in his time and many

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decades later, but now scientists are proving that some of his ideas are wrong. For instance, Einstein did not take quantum mechanics seriously, especially its prediction of entanglement, which he called “spooky.”3 But as Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, explains: Something that happens over here can be entwined with something that happens over there even if nothing travels from there to there—and even if there isn’t enough time for anything, even light, to travel between the events. This means that space cannot be thought of as it once was: intervening space, regardless of how much there is, does not ensure that two objects are separate, since quantum mechanics allows an entanglement, a kind of connection, to exist between them. A particle, like one of the countless number that make up you or me, can run but it can’t hide. According to quantum theory and the many experiments that bear out its predications, the quantum connection between two particles can persist even if they are on opposite sides of the universe. From the standpoint of their entanglement, notwithstanding the many trillions of miles of space between them, it’s as if they are right on top of each other.4

Thus, Einstein was wrong to reject what he called “spooky” entanglements that are found in quantum mechanics. As Bas van Fraassen, a renowned philosopher of science and my esteemed teacher who taught me Introduction to Epistemology and Metaphysics at Princeton University, has pointed out in his published works on constructive empiricism, we make scientific theories that are empirically adequate, and not necessarily true. They give us the best explanation for the observable phenomena at the time. That would explain why Einstein disproved some of Newton’s views that had been taken as truth for over 200 years, and why other scientists will disprove more of Einstein’s views in the future. I believe as more scientific discoveries are made, we will learn more about the nature of our planet and our universe. For example, in the 1980s many people believed the Walter Alvarez theory that every 26 million years a rain of meteorites bombarded our planet and caused the major mass extinctions in Earth’s history. To illustrate the popularity of his theory, the May 6, 1985 issue of Time magazine showed a picture on the cover of some dinosaurs with meteorites falling to the earth behind them. However, I showed in my award-winning science fair project in 1986 that the Alvarez theory could not explain the mass extinction during the Permian period of the Paleozoic Era because there were no significant levels of iridium in rocks of that age, which were necessary to show an extraterrestrial origin of objects like meteorites. Therefore, I argued that a rain of meteorites was not responsible for the Permian mass extinction, which in turn called into question the Alvarez periodicity theory. Eventually, the majority of scientists rejected the

The Failure of the Supersensible | 77 Alvarez periodicity theory and confirmed my view that the Permian mass extinction was not caused by a rain of meteorites. Scientists have now been able to convincingly demonstrate that the mass extinctions throughout earth’s history have not been caused by meteorites bombarding the earth. Gerta Keller, a renowned paleontologist and former teacher of mine at Princeton University, has published articles that support her view that the mass extinction of the dinosaurs during the Cretaceous period was not due to meteorites but rather to large volcanic eruptions. When we see how science can change our views about reality, we recognize that our knowledge about reality is not static but ever-changing. We therefore don’t need to postulate a second, noumenal world of things-in-themselves as Kant did. There is just one world, which we learn about through making scientific discoveries over time. Another example of this phenomenon of scientists finding new things in the world is the discovery of the Higgs particle, sometimes called “the God particle,” named after the physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed that it should exist. To try to find this elusive particle, scientists built the large, expensive, and highly complex Hadron Collider. This particle accelerator was used to smash protons together at very high speeds to study the resulting particles formed after these collisions. On July 4, 2012, scientists finally discovered the Higgs particle. Before it was found, this tiny particle would have been said by Kant to be in the realm of the supersensible, since it lay beyond our senses, being far too small to be seen with any device in his time. With more knowledge obtained from scientists, we discover new things that we didn’t know existed, like the “God particle,” and we will be able to explain why certain extraordinary events have occurred on our planet, like why the dinosaurs became extinct. Thus, Kant does not need to postulate another world of inaccessible entities like the supersensible, since there is just our one world that we have to continue to explore and discover new things about.

6

Motives for the Supersensible

One might wonder why Kant resorted to the notion of the supersensible to justify his a priori nature of aesthetic judgments, especially when it is an ambiguous notion that fails to buttress his arguments in any significant way. In this section, I will explain and critically discuss what some commentators have said about the role the supersensible plays in his third Critique. I will also offer my own views about what Kant means by his different ideas of the supersensible and suggest some ways that Kant could have improved upon his arguments for the role of the supersensible in justifying his a priori nature of aesthetic judgments. Werner Pluhar, the translator of the edition of Kant’s Critique of Judgment that I am using to write this book, says in his preface that there are three supersensibles, and that the one in his third Critique (the concept of nature’s subjective purposiveness) mediates the transition between the other two and so the domains of nature and of freedom.1 He believes these three supersensibles are different ways of expressing the same supersensible.2 For instance, he says Kant switches from the concept of nature’s subjective purposiveness to the concept of the supersensible underlying that same purposiveness, and he believes there is abundant textual evidence to support his view that Kant equates them (or treats them as equivalent).3 He says the third supersensible is the concept of freedom.4

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In Comment II of §57, “Solution of the Antinomy of Taste,” Kant says there are three ideas of the supersensible and defines them as follows: “first, the idea of the supersensible in general, not further determined, as the substrate of nature; second, the idea of the same supersensible as the principle of nature’s subjective purposiveness for our cognitive power; third, the idea of the same supersensible as the principle of the purposes of freedom and of the harmony of these purposes with nature in the moral sphere.”5 To simplify, there is the idea of the supersensible that is the substrate of nature (that which underlies nature), the idea of the supersensible that is nature’s subjective purposiveness for our cognitive power, and the idea of the supersensible that is freedom.6 These three ideas of the supersensible correspond to Pluhar’s three supersensibles.7 However, Kant writes later in his teleological section of his third Critique that there are three supersensible concepts (or “pure ideas of reason”) that are God, freedom, and the immortality of the soul.8 He explains how the concept of freedom differs from the other two concepts as follows: God, freedom, and immortality of the soul are the problems at whose solution all the apparatus of metaphysics aims as its ultimate and sole purpose. … The only way to determine these two concepts, of God and the (immortal) soul, is through predicates that, though they themselves are possible only on the basis of [something] supersensible, must yet prove in experience that they have reality: for only in this way can these concepts make cognition of wholly supersensible beings possible. Now the only such concept to be found in human reason is that of man’s freedom under moral laws, together with the final purpose that reason prescribes through these laws. The moral laws enable us to attribute to the author of nature, and the final purpose enables us to attribute to man, the properties that [are] necessary conditions[s] for the possibility of [carrying out] both of them [the moral laws and the final purpose]. Hence it is from this same idea of freedom that we can infer the existence and the nature [Beschaffenheit] of these beings [God and soul] that are otherwise wholly hidden from us. Therefore, the attempt to prove God and immortality by the merely theoretical route had to fail because by this route (of concepts of nature) no cognition whatever of the supersensible is possible. That the attempt succeeds by the moral route (of the concept of freedom) is due to this: not only does the supersensible that underlies [the proof ] in this case (namely freedom) provide us, through a determinate law of causality to which it gives rise, with material for cognizing the other supersensible (the moral final purpose and the conditions for its achievability); but it is also a matter of fact [and hence] establishes its [own] reality in [our] acts. Precisely because of that, however, the only basis it can provide for proving [God and immortality of the soul] is one that is valid from a practical point of view. (That, however, is the only point of view that religion requires.)

Motives for the Supersensible | 81 What always remains very remarkable about this is that among the three pure ideas of reason, God, freedom, and immortality, that of freedom is the only concept of the supersensible which (by means of the causality that we think in it) proves in nature that it has objective reality, by the effects it can produce in it. It is this that makes it possible to connect the other two ideas with nature, and to connect all three with one another to form a religion. Therefore, we have in us a principle that can determine the idea of the supersensible within us, and through this also the idea of the supersensible outside us, so as to give rise to cognition [of them], even though one that is possible only from a practical point of view; and that is something of which merely speculative philosophy (which could provide also merely a negative concept of freedom) had to despair. Hence the concept of freedom (the concept underlying all unconditioned practical laws) can expand reason beyond those bounds within which any concept of nature (i.e., theoretical concept) would have to remain hopelessly confined.9

In the passage above, which I am paraphrasing for brevity and clarity, Kant says the following: The three most important concepts or “pure ideas of reason” are God, freedom, and the immortality of the soul. God and the soul are thought through predicates that depend on the supersensible, which lies beyond our senses. The only viable concept for proving the reality of God and the soul is freedom. From the idea of freedom, we can infer the existence of God and the soul. It is the only concept of the supersensible that proves it has objective reality by the effects it can produce in nature. Freedom is what allows us to connect the other two ideas (God and the immortality of the soul) with nature, and to connect all three with one another to form a religion. We thus have a principle (freedom) that can determine the idea of the supersensible within us and outside us.10

How do these three supersensible concepts (or pure ideas of reason) relate to the three supersensibles previously identified? To review, there is the idea of the supersensible that is the substrate of nature (that which underlies nature). I think this idea of the supersensible substrate of nature can be found in the idea of God, since God underlies all of nature as the Creator of all of nature. Next, there is the idea of the supersensible that is nature’s subjective purposiveness for our cognitive power that I think can be found in the idea of our soul, since we give the subjective purpose to nature through our cognitive power. Finally, there is the idea of the supersensible that is freedom. Kant says freedom is the most important idea because it allows us to infer the existence of God and our soul, and it allows us to connect God and our soul to nature, and to connect all three with one another to form a religion.11 He also says that unlike the other ideas, freedom is determinable, meaning we can know

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something about it, through the effects that freedom produces in nature.12 The fact that we can know something about freedom means freedom is not the supersensible, since the supersensible is by definition something that we can’t know anything about. Thus, we should understand that ideas of the supersensible are not the same things as the supersensible. These ideas include the substrate of nature, nature’s subjective purposiveness, God, the immortality of the soul, and freedom. As ideas, they give us ways to think about the one supersensible that is in the noumenal world. Since we can’t know anything it, who knows which idea best expresses or explains it—maybe all of them, or maybe none of them. Furthermore, Kant writes about the supersensible that underlies freedom. He says that judgment finds itself referred to something that is both in the subject himself and outside him, something that is neither nature nor freedom and yet is linked with the basis of freedom, the supersensible, in which the theoretical and the practical power are in an unknown manner combined and joined into a unity.13

In this sentence, Kant says the supersensible is not freedom, but something that is linked with the basis of freedom. Freedom is one of “three pure ideas of reason.”14 It plays an extremely important role in Kant’s moral philosophy, namely to achieve the requisite synthesis between reason and morality so that we can be moral. The reason why freedom cannot be known immediately is that we cannot know the supersensible substratum on which it rests. As Paul Guyer points out, even if you had to “introduce the idea of a supersensible substratum of humanity as the ultimate explanation of the possibility of morality, knowledge of the basis of morality in this sense is not required for the performance of moral action itself.”15 The supersensible substratum on which freedom rests is not something that we must know anything about in order to be moral. Similarly with aesthetic judgments, we need not know anything about the supersensible basis on which our aesthetic judgments rest in order to make aesthetic judgments. If our capacity to make moral and aesthetic judgments does not rest on knowledge of the supersensible, we might wonder why we need to postulate its existence at all. Kant would respond by saying that the supersensible is important and necessary because it is the underlying basis for our freedom, which in turn enables us to have moral and aesthetic judgments. He writes: [T]he cognitive powers brought into play by this presentation are in free play, because no determinate concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition. Hence the mental state in this presentation must be a feeling, accompanying the given presentation, of a free

Motives for the Supersensible | 83 play of the presentational powers directed to cognition in general. Now if a presentation by which an object is given is, in general, to become cognition, we need imagination to combine the manifold of intuition, and understanding to provide the unity of the concept uniting the [component] presentations. This state of free play of the cognitive powers, accompanying a presentation by which an object is given, must be universally communicable; for cognition, the determination of the object with which given presentations are to harmonize (in any subject whatever) is the only way of presenting that holds for everyone.16

In this passage Kant says that the making of an aesthetic judgment involves the free play of our cognitive powers of imagination and understanding without being bound by any determinate rules or concepts. Furthermore, he says the state of free play of the cognitive powers is what is universally communicable. Thus, freedom by virtue of this free play of our cognitive powers is what makes aesthetic judgments possible. Freedom is important to Kant’s moral and aesthetic theories. In his moral theory, freedom of the will is necessary for moral action. In his aesthetic theory, freedom of the imagination is necessary for recognizing beauty. He says: In judging the beautiful, we present the freedom of the imagination (and hence [of ] our power [of ] sensibility) as harmonizing with the lawfulness of the understanding. (In a moral judgment we think the freedom of the will as the will’s harmony with itself according to universal laws of reason).17

Here Kant compares the freedom of the imagination with the freedom of the will. In a moral judgment, freedom of the will harmonizes with itself according to the laws of reason, while in an aesthetic judgment, freedom of the imagination harmonizes with the laws of understanding. However, while one can find parallels between Kant’s ethics and his aesthetics, the realm of moral judgments and the realm of aesthetic judgments are quite different and should not be conflated. The similarities between aesthetic judgments and moral judgments are that both involve a kind of autonomy, give immediate pleasure, exhibit freedom in accordance with law, and are concerned with universality. The differences are that the pleasure in the beautiful is pleasure apart from a concept, but the pleasure involved in the moral is pleasure in a concept; the moral judgment calls forth a consequent interest, while the aesthetic judgment does not; the freedom involved in an aesthetic judgment is freedom of the imagination as harmonizing with the lawfulness of the understanding, whereas freedom in a moral judgment is “freedom of the will as the will’s harmony with itself according to universal laws of reason”; and the subjective principle for judging the beautiful

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is unknowable through a universal concept, while the objective principle for judging morality is knowable through a universal concept.18 The demand for necessary, universal agreement in Kant’s aesthetics is supposed to be met through his notion of the indeterminate and unknowable concept of the supersensible, while the demand for necessary, universal agreement in Kant’s ethics is supposed to be met through his notion of the determinate and knowable concept of the Categorical Imperative. Kant explains this distinction as follows: We present the subjective principle for judging the beautiful as universal, i.e., as valid for everyone, but as unknowable through any universal concept (The objective principle of morality we also declare to be universal[ly valid], i.e., [valid] for all subjects, as well as for all acts of the same subject, but also declare to be knowable through a universal concept.) Hence not only is a moral judgment capable of [having] determinate constitutive principles, but its possibility depends on our basing the[se] maxims on those principles and their universality.19

Kant’s justification for his a priori nature of aesthetic judgments is therefore different from his justification for his a priori nature of moral judgments. Necessary, universal agreement in the moral realm is from his determinate concept of the Categorical Imperative, while necessary, universal agreement in the aesthetic realm is from his indeterminate concept of the supersensible. As a result, the completion to Kant’s deduction of his a priori nature of aesthetic judgments cannot be found in Kant’s theory of morality. However, Donald Crawford believes Kant’s moral theory is the way Kant wanted to complete his deduction. He writes: If the beautiful is able to be seen by any normal being as such a symbol [of morality], then there is a basis for implying that others ought to agree with our judgments of taste, because they ought to be morally sensitive. The Kantian assumption is clearly that moral sensitivity is the same as, or at least implies, a sensitivity to the basis of morality. Hence, to complete the deduction, Kant must argue or assume that moral sensitivity implies a sensitivity to that which symbolizes the basis of morality.20

Here Crawford is saying the grounds for our universal assent lie in our shared ability to be morally sensitive to beauty. Kant appears to say something similar when he writes: Now I maintain that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good; and only because we refer [Rücksicht] the beautiful to the morally good (we all do so [Beziehung] naturally and require all others also to do so, as a duty) does our liking for it include a claim to everyone else’s assent.21

Motives for the Supersensible | 85 However, from the fact that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good, it does not follow that moral sensitivity corresponds to aesthetic sensitivity. He explains: And hence it seems, not only that the feeling for the beautiful is distinct in kind from moral feeling (as indeed it actually is), but also that it is difficult to reconcile the interest which can be connected with the beautiful with the moral interest, and that it is impossible to do this by an [alleged] intrinsic affinity between the two.22

Also, Kant does not say that a morally good person has a moral duty to take an immediate interest in the beautiful. However, he does say that when someone takes a direct interest in the beauty of nature, then it “is always a mark of a good soul.”23 If we don’t have a moral duty to respond in a similar way to beauty, then it is still unclear how Kant will account for the necessity and universality of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. Brent Kalar argues that judgments about beauty are more akin to moral judgments where we issue a demand or imperative that tells us how things ought to be.24 He says Kant’s “ought” involves two separate demands or imperatives. The first one (the aesthetic ought) is a demand to take pleasure in a given object, and the second one (the moral ought) is a demand to attend to that object.25 The normativity (of the aesthetic ought), he says, is rooted in the proper functioning of the cognitive faculties, and so he calls it a “quasi-cognitive” normativity.26 The normativity (of the moral ought) comes from his notion of necessity in his fourth moment and his build-up to and aftermath of his deduction of taste.27 I disagree with Kalar’s views because for Kant moral judgments are different from aesthetic judgments. I already explained exactly how they are different previously (on pp. 83 and 84). Also, for Kant the necessity of our moral judgments is different from the necessity of our aesthetic judgments. The necessity in a moral judgment is “a practical objective necessity, where, through concepts of a pure rational will that serves freely acting beings as a rule, this liking is the necessary consequence of an objective law and means nothing other than that one absolutely … ought to act in a certain way.”28 The necessity in an aesthetic judgment does not tell us how we ought to behave in accordance with some stated rule or objective law (such as Kant’s Categorical Imperative). It is the “necessity of the assent of everyone to a judgment that is regarded as an example of a universal rule that we are unable to state.”29 The necessity in an aesthetic judgment is a “necessity … of a special kind” that is not derived from determinate concepts and does not come from our experience.30 Bart Vandenabeele says the necessary, universal agreement is strictly epistemological, not moral as others (like Donald Crawford and Ray Elliott) have argued.31

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Paul Guyer also says the demand for universal agreement is an epistemological claim.32 Kant would agree with these views by Vandenabeele and Guyer that the necessary, universal agreement is based on how we and others ought to feel, which is subjective and cannot be based upon any concepts or rules. With an aesthetic judgment about beauty, Kant says we cannot make a claim that we all will have the same kind of feelings, for he says the necessity is not a theoretical objective necessity, where “everyone will feel this liking for the object I call beautiful,” but it is an exemplary necessity.33 But in the moral realm, we can make a claim that everyone should act in a certain way based on having the right kind of feeling that is the same for everyone. Thus, the necessity of aesthetic judgments is not like the necessity of moral judgments. If the supersensible is meant to be the final word on Kant’s justification for his a priori nature of aesthetic judgments, we are still left wondering why Kant chose the supersensible to accomplish this task, instead of some other notion. Paul Guyer suggests that Kant resorted to the metaphysical notion of the supersensible to quiet his skeptics. He says, “Kant’s deepest reason for the introduction of a noumenal basis for taste … is … the feeling that only the suggestion of a metaphysical ground for harmony both among subjects and between subjects and objects will really silence the skepticism which is engendered by the antinomy of taste.”34 But if this is his aim, Kant failed because the notion of the supersensible does not guarantee that all human beings will necessarily agree to aesthetic judgments and so it cannot silence his skeptics. As an indeterminate concept we can know nothing about, the supersensible fails to explain why universal assent is necessary. Kant simply assumes that it is the ultimate ground for his a priori nature of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. To avoid the problems generated by the concept of the supersensible, Kant could have justified his a priori nature of our aesthetic judgments about beauty through a determinate concept such as his Categorical Imperative. By introducing a determinative concept, we could use our reason to understand why our aesthetic judgments about beauty must be necessary and universal. We could also formulate aesthetic principles that would tell us why something is or is not beautiful. Disputes about beauty could then be resolved through a process of rational deliberation about the principles of beauty. For Kant, the problem with this approach is that it would not be able to explain our many disagreements about beauty. In addition, those disagreements could then be resolved through formal proofs, which Kant thinks is impossible. Furthermore, he doesn’t believe a judgment of taste could be based on determinate and objective principles. He writes:

Motives for the Supersensible | 87 It is absolutely impossible to provide a determinate, objective principle of taste that would allow us to guide, to test, and to prove its judgments, because then they would not be judgments of taste.35

Kant believes judgment of taste cannot be determined by an a priori proof in accordance with determinate rules or principles because he believes it is based on “the subject’s reflection on his own state (of pleasure or displeasure), all precepts and rules being rejected.”36 Thus, a judgment of taste for Kant rests completely on the subject’s feelings and not on any rules.37 Furthermore, if judgments of taste rested on determinate concepts, then the free play of our cognitive powers of our imagination and our understanding that makes aesthetic judgments possible would be hindered. Kant explains that the judgment of taste cannot be determined by any concepts as follows: [S]ince the imagination’s freedom consists precisely in its schematizing without a concept, a judgment of taste must rest upon a mere sensation, namely our sensation of both the imagination in its freedom and the understanding with its lawfulness, as they reciprocally quicken each other; i.e., it must rest on a feeling that allows us to judge the object by the purposiveness that the presentation (by which an object is given) has insofar as it furthers the cognitive powers in their free play.38

Kant believes that the freedom of the imagination in a judgment of taste is present because the imagination is schematizing without any concepts. Thus, we could not have freedom of the imagination in a judgment of taste if our imagination’s schematizing were to involve concepts. However, both of these problems can be avoided as follows. First, Kant’s antinomy of taste exists only when we establish that (1) a judgment of taste is not based on a concept (since we can have disputes that can’t be resolved through proofs) and (2) a judgment of taste is based on a concept (since we believe that everyone should agree to it). He can keep the second claim and avoid the problem with his first claim by saying that a judgment of taste is based on a determinate concept, but the fact that everyone does not realize this determinate concept when formulating their aesthetic judgment is what generates the disputes about taste. To make this alternative approach clearer, we can look at its counterpart in the moral realm. The Categorical Imperative grounds the necessity and universality of a particular moral maxim. However, we are not all aware that this is the maxim upon which everyone must necessarily agree until we use our reason to arrive at the soundness of this conclusion. In the same way, in the aesthetic realm, Kant could argue that there is a determinate concept that grounds the necessity and universality of our aesthetic judgments. But since we do not always know

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what that concept is (possibly because our reasoning is clouded by our feelings when we experience beauty), we find that there are disputes about whether or not some object is beautiful. Taking this approach, Kant would not need to postulate the existence of the supersensible to resolve his antinomy of taste. However, if Kant were to take this approach, he would have the difficult task of establishing what that determinate concept is. Would there be a categorical imperative that would apply to aesthetic judgments, and if so, what would it be? How would we use our reason to arrive at standards of beauty to which everyone must necessarily agree? Can we even find any rational principles that would explain why we ought to find an object beautiful? By selecting an indeterminate rather than a determinate concept, such as the supersensible, to ground his a priori nature of aesthetic judgments, Kant avoids having to answer these very difficult questions. To eliminate the second problem of having determinate concepts interfere with the freedom of our imagination and understanding in forming aesthetic judgments, Kant can still maintain that there is a free play of our mental faculties even with the imposition of determinate concepts because the aesthetic experience, while it is an experience that involves feelings, also involves the imposition of reason in the interpretation and understanding of those feelings. Therefore, at the point of having an aesthetic experience of pleasure or displeasure, feelings and sensations without concepts would be involved, while at the point of having an understanding of the aesthetic experience, reason and determinate concepts would be involved. In this way, Kant would not be jeopardizing the role of freedom in the formation of aesthetic judgments about beauty. Even if Kant wanted to preserve the indeterminate status of the supersensible to allow for a metaphysical explanation for judgments of taste, he could still improve upon his argument by explaining why the supersensible is that metaphysical substratum. Kant may have wanted to preserve his distinction between things as they appear to us and things as they are in themselves by postulating a supersensible substratum that exists independently of our experience of it. However, as Kant made clear, our experience of beauty is not concerned with the properties of objects or with the way things are in themselves in the noumenal world, but with the way objects appear to us in the phenomenal world. As a result, there is no need for him to use the supersensible in the noumenal world to explain the nature of aesthetic judgments about beauty in the phenomenal world. Thus, Kant’s solution of relying on the supersensible to ground his a priori nature of our aesthetic judgments about beauty is unsatisfactory and unconvincing. If we truly wish to reach a consensus on what is beautiful, we would have to come up with requirements for beauty, and those requirements for beauty would have to be ones that all rational people could agree to. We just don’t have these

Motives for the Supersensible | 89 requirements for beauty and probably never will, as I tried to show with various examples in this book of how standards of beauty have inevitably changed in different cultures and different time periods. Kant leaves us with the further problem generated by the supersensible, namely that it gives rational minds nothing on which to agree or disagree because we cannot know anything about it. It is therefore an empty notion that should be discarded. To remedy the problem of beauty being relative to the perceiver, Kant resorts to the supersensible, something that lies outside our experience to give him his a priori basis for the necessity and universality of our aesthetic judgments. But using the supersensible as something that lies outside our own minds won’t fix the problem. The supersensible does not instill the property of beauty in objects. It also does not give a relation between objects as they appear to us and objects as they are in themselves (as did Plato’s theory of Forms with the particular beautiful things resembling the Form Beauty). Since it lies solely in the noumenal world that we can know nothing about, the supersensible has no relation or relevance to what we perceive through our minds in the phenomenal world. If Kant wanted to be more convincing, he should have located his necessary, universal agreement in the phenomenal world instead of in the noumenal world. He tried to do that with his notion of common sense by saying all our minds work in similar ways. However, we saw earlier how that notion failed in many different respects. Furthermore, if our minds did work in similar ways that would make necessary, universal agreement possible, as Kant wants, then we should be seeing agreement in people from different cultures and different time periods, and we just don’t see that. Throughout human history, there has been far more disagreement than agreement about what is beautiful. I have already shown how our ideas and standards of beauty have often changed from one culture and time period to another. In addition, our psychological makeups are all different, and we all have different life experiences that influence our views about what is beautiful. These numerous disagreements over the course of human history about what is beautiful (from our differences in our perceptions, our feelings, our judgments, our reasonings, our psychological makeups, and our life experiences) show that there can never be any necessary, universal agreement to our judgments about beauty. However, we might be able to reach a limited and relative consensus about what is beautiful through the indoctrination of people’s beliefs. We can see some of that brainwashing with manipulative advertising in today’s society. For example, the more you see a beautiful women or beautiful man smoking a cigarette in advertisements, the more you begin to associate smoking with being beautiful, which is what cigarette companies want you to believe so you will buy more cigarettes.

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The other examples I gave earlier in this book were the Chinese practice of footbinding, where Chinese women were led to believe that making their feet shorter and narrower would make them look beautiful, the Nazi practice of experimenting on people to change their eye colors to achieve the Aryan ideal of beauty, and the practice of young girls and even adult women and men to look like a doll as the epitome of human beauty. We can indoctrinate people to beliefs about what is beautiful through advertisements in the media (as through tv commercials selling Barbie dolls), through social customs (as by the Nazis who promoted the ideal of human beauty as having blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin), through societal laws (as in China, where foot-binding was officially sanctioned by law), through education (what we are taught in schools by educators), through our upbringing (what we are taught at home by our parents), through social media (what we learn on the Internet on our computers), etc. Through these various forms of indoctrination, we can reach widespread agreement about what is beautiful. But such indoctrination to achieve universal agreement on what is beautiful is not what we should aspire to, because indoctrination minimizes freedom, since individuals are then not making decisions for themselves, but letting other people make decisions for them that they blindly adhere to. Plus, it can cause people to engage in harmful and morally repugnant practices, such as women in China breaking and deforming their feet to look beautiful and the Nazis in Germany conducting painful experiments on people to try to achieve their Aryan ideal. Thus, we should not be trying to reach universal agreement about our judgments about beauty on account of the likely ill effects that trying to attain this universal agreement would have on people. Kant could respond by saying that he does not want an actual universal agreement where everyone actually agrees to judgments about beauty. He could argue instead that we seek an ideal of universal agreement. He did in fact say the nature of the judgment was that we ought to agree, not that we all in fact agree. But if his universal agreement is just that we ought to agree, there is no necessity in that claim. It is not necessarily the case that everyone ought to agree, because a judgment about beauty rests solely on our own individual, private feelings, about which there is no necessity. The a priori component of our judgments about beauty (the necessity) that is supposed to be independent of our experience cannot come from our experience, such as our feelings of pleasure when we make a judgment about beauty, so Kant later clarifies by saying that it comes from the universal validity of our pleasure. But the fact is that our pleasure is not universally valid. It is not a pleasure that holds for everyone in all cases. That is why we disagree about what is beautiful and why we should not be required to agree about what is beautiful. Therefore, Kant has problems with trying to ground his

Motives for the Supersensible | 91 necessity, and so he turns to the supersensible as something lying outside of our experience to ground his necessity. Since Kant undoubtedly believes that God is the underlying basis for our freedom in the moral realm, it would be fitting for him to say that God is the underlying basis for beauty (and our judgments about beauty) in the realm of nature. God would then be the one thing that unifies the sensible world of nature with the moral world of human beings, and would thus bring unity and harmony to all three of Kant’s Critiques. Kant would therefore be consistent if he argued that the supersensible that underlies all things, including his desired necessity and universality of our aesthetic judgments about beauty, is God. In this way, he could argue that God causes us or enables us, through the nature of the mental faculties that He put into us, to see beauty in the objects in the world to give us a way to have access to Him. We could thereby infer that God exists from seeing the beauty in the beautiful objects that He created. We can also catch a glimpse of God through the sublime, or what Kant calls the state of mind we are in when we apprehend natural objects that are great or large in size (like the vast oceans and starry heavens) and that are powerful in relation to us (like the stormy seas and erupting volcanoes). In these cases, our imagination is inadequate to fulfilling the demand of our reason for the imagination to exhibit the object as an absolute whole because the sublime is formless (or unbounded).39 Our minds cannot grasp the sublime fully, just as our minds cannot grasp God fully (since God is also formless). We therefore become aware of the fallibility of our minds in comprehending great and powerful entities like God. This awareness makes us feel small, vulnerable, and insignificant in comparison to such great and powerful things in nature and in comparison to God, who is vastly greater and more powerful than these great and powerful things in nature. We fear the powerful things that we see in nature that reflect God’s awesome power that we are no match for (we would surely drown in a stormy sea or perish in an erupting volcano), and we feel a disconcerting pleasure in the great or large things that we see in nature that reflect God’s infinite boundlessness and formlessness that we cannot conceive of (we can’t see how far the vast oceans or the starry heavens extend). In these ways, I think the sublime can also show us glimpses of God (perhaps His infinite and powerful nature), just as the beautiful can show us glimpses of God (perhaps His kind and benevolent nature). Kant says when we see tempests, storms, earthquakes, and other such things in nature, we think of “God as showing himself in his wrath but also in his sublimity” and that leads to a feeling of “submission, prostration, and a feeling of our utter impotence.”40 Thus, Kant does use the sublime as a means to think about God, since God shares some

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of the same features of the sublime, such as formlessness, boundlessness, vastness, infiniteness, greatness, forcefulness, and powerfulness. Artists have also used their visual representations of the beautiful and the sublime as ways to think about God. For example, Thomas Cole (1801–1848), an American landscape painter who founded the Hudson River School, used the grandeur and majesty of the American landscape to make moralizing, religious messages about God. He painted four paintings as an allegory of the relationship that every individual has with God in his Voyage of Life series (1842) (Figs. 10–13, shown on pp. 93–94).41 In his first painting, depicting childhood, Cole shows a male infant in a boat with his guardian angel, who steers the boat out of a dark cavern. The time is spring, when the flowers are just beginning to bloom and the buds are opening up. The infant, like the natural elements of plants and flowers, also emerges fresh and new. The early morning light is another element of time, suggesting the beginning of the day as well as the beginning of life. The scene is reminiscent of the biblical garden of Eden, where life flourishes with plentiful abundance. In the second painting, where he is a young man, he has left his angel to forge his own way in the world. He is now holding the tiller of the boat, which signifies that he is directing his own destiny. The castle in the clouds is symbolic of grand aspirations and ambitions. He points to that fortress in the sky, showing his confidence that he will be able to realize his dreams in the distance. The angel looks remorseful as she lets him go. In the next painting, illustrating his manhood, the angel is no longer near him or within his sight, which signifies that he has moved away from God. He is shown praying for God’s help as his boat is about to travel into some turbulent waters. The tiller of his boat is lost, so that he can no longer control his destiny. His guardian angel watches from the clouds above, but he cannot see her, while demons hover above his head. In the final painting showing him in his old age, the angel is shown coming to take him to heaven to be with God. The waters have become still, motionless, calm, and uneventful. For the first time in the series, the man faces his guardian angel. With one hand, she gestures to him, and with her other hand, she points to a host of angels in the sky. She gives him a reassuring look, and we expect that he is ready to be borne up into the heavens. In this series of four paintings, Cole shows that we are saved at the end of a long voyage through the natural world, where we are first enamored with Nature in our childhood and youth and then sobered by Nature in our adulthood and old age through the hardships we endure during the later stages of our lives. We are therefore both exalted and humbled in our relationship with Nature, as we move through the various stages of our lives, but through this long journey, we ultimately move closer to God so that our own personal salvation can be achieved in the end.

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Fig. 10.  Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Childhood, 1842, oil on canvas, 134.3 cm. × 195.3 cm., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Fig. 11. Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Youth, 1842, oil on canvas, 134.3 cm. × 194.9 cm., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Fig. 12.  Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Manhood, 1842, oil on canvas, 134.3 cm. × 202.6 cm., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Fig. 13.  Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Old Age, 1842, oil on canvas, 133.4 cm. × 196.2 cm., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Conclusion

Since the supersensible is an indeterminate concept that we can know nothing about, Kant cannot use it to ground his a priori nature of our aesthetic judgments about beauty because it is completely empty and vacuous. It tells us nothing about why our aesthetic judgments about beauty have to be necessary and universal. Kant defines the supersensible as an indeterminate concept that we can know nothing about, which he thinks will make it easier for him to defend and harder for others to criticize because what can you say against something you can know nothing about? By locating the supersensible in the noumenal world, Kant thinks it will be safe from criticism and attack. But I think Kant is wrong to believe that there are two worlds—the noumenal world we can know nothing about and the phenomenal world that we can perceive through our senses. Scientists nowadays are pretty certain that there is only one world that we continue to discover new things about, such as the reasons why the dinosaurs became extinct, ways to refute Einstein’s views, and the existence of the Higgs particle or “God particle.” Thus, there is no good reason to postulate a supersensible concept or a realm of entities that are beyond our experience in another noumenal world. Kant’s appeal to the supersensible is also unnecessary because I believe there is no necessary, universal agreement to our judgments about beauty that it is supposed to explain. There is no necessary, universal agreement because our notions

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of beauty are always wholly subjective (there is no objective basis for beauty; as Kant says beauty is not an objective property to be found in objects), and our notions of beauty vary with our perceptions (Kant often agrees with this point that beauty depends on our subjective and variable perceptions and feelings), and in my mind that makes beauty relative to the perceiver. This relativism of beauty is confirmed by the evidence of how our ideas and standards of beauty have been constantly changing throughout different time periods and different cultures, as I have shown in this book with a variety of examples. We saw how nudity in art was censored during the Renaissance period (as with Michelangelo’s nude figures in his The Last Judgment fresco) and the Baroque period (as with Caravaggio’s scantily clad, bare-footed saints), though now we are not as easily offended by nudity in art and don’t censor art on that basis. We also saw how obesity in women was once regarded as being the ideal of feminine beauty, as depicted in the paintings of Baroque artists like Peter Paul Rubens, but then how that standard of beauty changed over time to where skinny women are now the ideal of feminine beauty, as seen in television shows, movies, advertisements, magazines, and Internet images today. In addition, we saw how foot-binding became a widespread practice in China for many centuries, where women deformed their feet to achieve an ideal beauty of having small, pointed feet despite how painful and damaging it was to them, but now they no longer believe in that ideal of beauty. We also saw how wearing high-heeled shoes in today’s society is a way of achieving ideal feminine beauty, as well as undergoing cosmetic surgery to fix perceived imperfections with one’s body, like breasts that are too small, noses that are too big, faces that are too wrinkled, etc. There were even people who tried to look like Barbie and Ken dolls to achieve their ideals of beauty. We also briefly reflected on the terrible things people will do to other people to try to make them look beautiful, such as Dr. Mengele trying to change the eye color of Jewish children from brown to blue by injecting harmful chemicals into their eyes to make them fit his Aryan ideal of beauty. Finally, we saw how our biology (our use of our sense of sight), psychology (how our minds are affected by colors and other visual features), imagination (how we project beauty onto objects), reason (how we think about beauty), and personal experiences (including our memories of past experiences) all influence our views about what is beautiful. All of these things can explain why there are so many disagreements about beauty that cannot be resolved. As a result, we can conclude that our aesthetic judgments about beauty will never have any necessary, universal agreement, and since we cannot ever get that necessary, universal agreement that Kant wants, then the supersensible (as Kant’s guarantor of that

Conclusion | 97 necessary, universal agreement) fails too. Hence, the supersensible is just an empty and useless notion that should be discarded. In conclusion, Kant fails to resolve the tension between arguing for a necessary, universal agreement to our estimations of beauty and the notion that aesthetic judgments depend on a person’s individual, subjective feelings. The reason for his failure is that his solution rests on the ambiguous notion of the supersensible, an indeterminate and indeterminable concept that we can know nothing about. The indeterminate and indeterminable nature of the supersensible may give Kant the means by which to argue that our aesthetic judgments go beyond the idiosyncratic nature of our sensory experience, but it does not explain how or why there should be a necessary, universal agreement to our judgments about beauty. Furthermore, it remains unclear why Kant introduced the notion of the supersensible, especially when it does little work in his deduction concerning the a priori nature of aesthetic judgments. Since Kant’s two prior attempts to complete the deduction of the intersubjectivity of aesthetic judgments failed (namely, the free harmony of our mental faculties and the faculty of common sense), he may have turned to the notion of the supersensible to come to his rescue. However, the supersensible does not complete the deduction, nor do Kant’s attempts to define beauty as the symbol of the morally good. The parallels that can be found between Kant’s aesthetics and his ethics also do not explain why he introduced the supersensible. Perhaps the only role the concept of the supersensible serves is to resolve Kant’s antinomy of taste. But, as I have shown, this antinomy could have been resolved in other ways, though these ways would probably not be endorsed by Kant. We are therefore still left with the conundrum of why Kant chose the supersensible to justify his a priori nature of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. For Kant, an aesthetic judgment involves both experience and something not derived from experience, but Kant failed to convincingly explain why the supersensible is that aspect that is not derived from experience. The supersensible is far too nebulous a concept to explain why our aesthetic judgments about beauty must be necessary and universal. As a result, it cannot justify Kant’s claim that our aesthetic judgments about beauty should have necessary, universal agreement despite the fact that our aesthetic judgments about beauty come from our subjective and variable feelings, which inevitably change over time. Thus, Kant should have given us a more developed and informative account of the supersensible in his Critique of Judgment to make his account of the a priori nature of our aesthetic judgments about beauty more convincing.

Notes

Introduction 1. Norman Kemp Smith, trans. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (New York: St. Martin’s, 1929), 41. 2. Ibid., 113. These categories, Kant says, reflect Aristotle’s Categories. 3. Ibid., 126. 4. Ibid., 111. 5. Ibid., 131. 6. Ibid., 67. 7. Ibid., 77. 8. Ibid., 131. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 105–106. 13. Ibid, 131. 14. Ibid., 170. 15. Ibid., 132. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 133.

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

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Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 134. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 135.

Chapter 1: Judgments about Beauty, the Sublime, and the Agreeable 1. Werner S. Pluhar, trans. Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), xlvii. Kant also phrases this question as how are synthetic a priori judgments possible? (153, footnote 13). 2. Ibid., liv–lv, 18–19. 3. Ibid., liv, lvi, 63–64. 4. Ibid., liv, lvi, 44, 48, 63. 5. Ibid., lvi–lviii, 62. 6. Ibid., xxxv. 7. Kemp Smith, Critique of Pure Reason, 105. 8. Ibid., 58. 9. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 16. 10. Ibid., 18. 11. Ibid., lvi, 31. 12. Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 181. 13. Julie N. Books, The Ontology of Film (PhD diss., Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2002), 73. 14. H. Gene Blocker and Jennifer M. Jeffers, eds., Contextualizing Aesthetics: From Plato to Lyotard (California: Wadsworth Publishing, 1999), 56. 15. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 113, 119–120. 16. Ibid., 120. 17. Ibid., 114–115. 18. Blocker and Jeffers, Contextualizing Aesthetics, 72. 19. Ibid., 54. 20. Ibid. 21. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 69. 22. Ibid., 55. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 55–56. 26. Ibid., 55.

Notes | 101 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Ibid., 76–77. Ibid., 76. Ibid., 173–174. Ibid., 71. Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889, oil on canvas, 57.15 cm. × 43.82 cm., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., accessed May 15, 2015, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39 /Self-Portrait_%281889%29_by_Vincent_van_Gogh.jpg. 32. Sharon Reichert, “Temple Grandin Speaks at the University of Alberta,” The Beaumont News, January 20, 2011, accessed May 20, 2015, http://www.thebeaumontnews .ca/2011/01/20/temple-grandin-speaks-at-the-university-of-alberta. 33. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 70.

Chapter 2: Kant’s Four Moments of Judgments about Beauty and How Aesthetic Judgments Are Synthetic A Priori Judgments 1. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 46. 2. Ibid., 45 3. Blocker and Jeffers, Contextualizing Aesthetics, 56 4. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 53. 5. Ibid., 51. 6. This idea of mine is not new. Paul Guyer argues that we do have interests in objects for their beauty. He says, “Rather, we all assume that the beauty of an object is one of the best reasons we could have for taking an interest in it, and we justify a wide range of desires and activities—such as wanting to visit museums, travelling to do so, and spending money to gain admission to them—simply by reference to the beauty (or other aesthetic merits) of objects.” Paul Guyer, “Disinterestedness and Desire in Kant’s Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 36, no. 4 (Summer 1978), 450. Henry Allison says, “Surely, one who delights in the beauty of works of art is also pleased by the fact that such works … exist.” See his Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 86. 7. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 51. 8. Ibid., 46. 9. Ibid., 52. 10. Peter C. Sutton, Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984), xxii. 11. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 163. 12. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1979), 182.

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 43. Ibid., 155, footnote 15. The brackets and words inside the brackets are my own. Ibid., 156. Ibid., 53–54. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 59–60. Ibid., 54, 58. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 80. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 57. Ibid., 64–66. Rachel Zuckert, “The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant’s Aesthetic Formalism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 44, no. 4 (October 2006), 599. 26. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 71. 27. Ibid., 55, 70. 28. Zuckert, “The Purposiveness of Form,” 600. 29. For Kant, “aesthetic judgments must not include sense qualities of objects …. The pleasure in sense qualities would not be universal …. All that is left, therefore, is the bare form of the object … a kind of invitation for the cognitive faculties to enjoy engaging with one another in a ‘free’ … manner.” Blocker and Jeffers, Contextualizing Aesthetics, 57. 30. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 175. 31. Miles Rind, “Can Kant’s Deduction of Judgments of Taste Be Saved?,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, Vol. 84 (2002), 22–23. See also Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 30, 151. 32. Clive Bell, Art (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914), 8. 33. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 75. 34. Ibid., 62, 155. See also Kant’s footnote 15 on p. 155, which explains “the formal condition of the power of judgment” that makes possible the universal assent. 35. Ibid., 62. 36. Ibid., 84, footnote 60. 37. Ibid., 76. 38. Ibid., 77, 84. 39. Ibid., 77. 40. Ibid., 76. 41. Ibid., 78. 42. Ibid., 173. 43. Ibid., 179. 44. John Constable, Wivenhoe Park, Essex, 1816, oil on canvas, 56.1 cm. × 101.2 cm., National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, photograph by author, June 2015.

Notes | 103 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 34. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 90. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 155. Kemp Smith, Critique of Pure Reason, 48. Ibid., 48–49. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 48–49. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 153. Kemp Smith, Critique of Pure Reason, 42–43. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 85. Ibid. Ibid., 86, 89. Kemp Smith, Critique of Pure Reason, 44. Ibid. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 1. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 153. Ibid., 154. Hannah Ginsborg says the demand for universal agreement that is implicit in Kant’s judgment of taste is just a demand that others recognize the normativity of one’s own mental state. See her article, “On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 72 (1991), 290–313. See also Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 114–115, where he explains four problems with her view. 6 5. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 145.

Chapter 3: Hume’s Views and How Standards of Taste and Beauty Vary 1. Blocker and Jeffers, Contextualizing Aesthetics, 76. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 83. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 78–79. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 80–81. 9. Ibid., 83. 10. Ibid.

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11. Peter Paul Rubens, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, c. 1617, oil on canvas, 224 cm. × 211 cm., Alte Pinakothek, Munich, accessed May 15, 2015, http://www .the-athenaeum.org/art/full.php?ID=30906. 12. Julie N. Books, Michelangelo and the Council of Trent: An Examination of Sixteenth Century Censorship of the Arts (senior thesis, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Library, 1991). 13. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Crucifixion of St. Peter, 1601, oil on canvas, 230 cm. × 175 cm., Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, accessed May 15, 2015, http://www .the-athenaeum.org/art/full.php?ID=25938. 14. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, St. Matthew and an Angel, 1602, oil on canvas, 232 cm. × 183 cm., formerly Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, Berlin, accessed May 15, 2015, http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/full.php?ID=126989. 15. Ian Chilvers and Harold Osborne, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 351. 16. Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 276. 17. John Rupert Martin, Baroque (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1966), 41. 18. Ibid., 70. 19. E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 89. 20. Ibid., 90, 272. 21. Ibid., 90. 22. Ibid., 118. 23. Ibid., 34. 24. Ibid., 36 25. Ibid., 90. 26. E.H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 1982. 27. John Constable, Wivenhoe Park. 28. Frederic Edwin Church, Cotopaxi, 1862, oil on canvas, 121.9 cm. × 215.9 cm., Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan, accessed May 15, 2015, http://uploads5.wikiart .org/images/frederic-edwin-church/cotopaxi-1862.jpg. 29. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1976). 30. Ibid., 5. 31. Ibid., 39. 32. Ibid., 38. 33. Pond in a Garden, c. 1400 BCE, fresco, Egyptian Tomb of Nebamun, British Museum, London, accessed May 15, 2015, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki /File%3A%22Pond_in_a_Garden%22_(fresco_from_the_Tomb_of_ Nebamun).jpg. 34. Albrecht Dürer, House by a Pond, c. 1496, watercolor and gouache, 21 cm. × 23 cm., British Museum, London, accessed May 15, 2015, https://upload.wikimedia.org /wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Albrecht_D%C3%BCrer_-_House_by_a_Pond _-_WGA07357.jpg.

Notes | 105 35. Rudolph Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 76. 36. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, xxxi, where he cites Kant’s Prolegomena, Ak. IV, 260. 37. Ibid., 79. 38. Ibid. 39. Karl Ameriks, Interpreting Kant’s Critiques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 285. 40. Ibid., 302. 41. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 48. 42. Ibid., 51. 43. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 130. 44. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 67.

Chapter 4: The Supersensible, the Nature of Aesthetic Judgments, and the Faculty of Common Sense 1. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 210–211. 2. Ibid., 213. 3. Ibid., 212–216. 4. Ibid., 84, footnote 60. 5. Ibid., 64–65, 84, footnote 60. 6. Ibid., 220. 7. Ibid., 217. 8. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 89. 9. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 29–30. 10. Ibid. 11. Paul Guyer says there are two distinct acts of judgment: one occurs when we reflect on the object which precedes the feeling of pleasure and the other occurs when we make the judgment of beauty. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 110–111. 12. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 61. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Palmer and Allison argue that the pleasure is based on the universally communicable mental state, and not on the universal communicability of the mental state. See Linda C. Palmer, “A Universality Not Based on Concepts: Kant’s Key to the Critique of Taste,” Kantian Review, Vol. 13, no. 1 (2008), 33, 40. See also Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 115. They make this point to remove Guyer’s absurdity. According to Guyer, Kant makes “pleasure itself the mental state,” so §9 would mean “the universal communicability of a mental state of pleasure is the cause of that pleasure,” which

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is “obviously absurd.” See Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 155. I disagree with Guyer because in §9 when Kant talks about the mental state, he means the free play of our cognitive faculties (not the pleasure) (Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 62), and that mental state precedes the pleasure, so there is no absurdity. 16. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 26. Guyer cites Kant’s earlier lecture notes (the Logik Philippi) where he says, “in solitude man is very indifferent to the beautiful …. Beautiful form seems to exist only for society …. When we are alone, we never attend to the beautiful.” I disagree with these claims made by Kant. I can attend to and admire beautiful forms when I am alone, and even if I were living apart from society. 17. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 163. 18. Ibid., 163–164. 19. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 27. 20. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 86. 21. Ibid., 89. 22. Ibid., 90. 23. Kenneth Rogerson, “The Meaning of Universal Validity in Kant’s Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 40, no. 3 (Spring 1982), 305–306. 24. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 90. 25. Ibid., 87. 26. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 150–151. See also Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 87–88. 27. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 87–88. 28. Ibid., 76. 29. Ibid., 71.

Chapter 5: The Failure of the Supersensible 1. Underwood and Underwood, A High Caste Lady’s Dainty “Lily Feet,” 1911, photograph, Women of All Nations (London), 532, accessed May 15, 2015, https://upload .wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/A_HIGH_CASTE_LADYS_DAINTY _LILY_FEET.jpg. 2. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, xxxvii–xxxviii. 3. Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 80. 4. Ibid.

Chapter 6: Motives for the Supersensible 1. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, lxiv. 2. Ibid., lxiii. 3. Ibid., xxiv.

Notes | 107 4. Ibid., lxiii. 5. Ibid., 219–220. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., lxii–lxiv. 8. Ibid., 368. 9. Ibid., 366–368. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 229. 14. Ibid., 368. 15. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 384. 16. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 62. 17. Ibid., 229. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Donald Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 149. The brackets and words inside the brackets are my own. 21. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 228. 22. Ibid., 165. 23. Ibid. 24. Brent Kalar, The Demands of Taste in Kant’s Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2006), 27. 25. Ibid., 2. 26. Ibid., 4. 27. Ibid., 28. 28. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 85. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Bart Vandenabeele, “The Subjective Universality of Aesthetic Judgments Revisited,” British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 48, no. 4 (October 2008), 416. 32. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 141. 33. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 85. 34. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 345–346. 35. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, 213. 36. Ibid., 149. 37. Ibid., 151. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 98. 40. Ibid., 122. 41. Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life, 1842, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., photographs by author, June 2015.

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