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Kant's Principle of Purposiveness and the Missing Point of (Aesthetic) Judgements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Avner Baz
Avner Baz
Affiliation:
Tufts University
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Extract

My plan in this article is to begin by raising the question of the point of judgements of beauty, and then to examine Kant's account of beauty in the third Critique from the perspective opened up by that question. Having raised the question of the point, I will argue, first, that there is an implied answer to it in Kant's text, and, second, that the answer is ultimately unsatisfying in that it falsely assumes that there is a ‘need’, or ‘task’, or ‘purpose’, that we all necessarily share, to conceptualize all that encounters us in our experience, and fit it into one unified and comprehensive system. It is only against this assumption of our transcendental cognitive interest that Kant can so much as seem to have a real story to tell about where the value that we (‘disinterestedly’) claim for things in calling them ‘beautiful’ derives from. This, in effect, means that to the extent that Kant offers us any answer at all to the question of the point of judgements of beauty, that answer testifies to his general neglect of the question of the point of judgements. And my purpose is to draw attention to that neglect, and to begin to assess its significance for Kant's transcendental project in general and for his conception of beauty in particular.

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Articles
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Kantian Review , Volume 10 , January 2005 , pp. 1 - 32
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Copyright © Kantian Review 2005

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References

1 Let me make clear from the start that in speaking of ‘judgements of beauty’ I take myself to be concerned with what Kant calls ‘aesthetic judgements of taste’ (to which I will sometimes simply refer as ‘aesthetic judgments’). The question I am trying to raise – the question of the point of judgements of beauty – does not concern some particular form of words (say, ‘This is beautiful’ or ‘See this beauty’ or what have you), but rather a particular kind of context in which certain characteristic forms of expression acquire their point. The words ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’ can presumably be used within many different contexts in order to make any of many different points. I will nevertheless often speak about ‘judgements of beauty’ in order to signal, first, that what I am concerned with is some-thing that I think can rightfully be called ‘beauty’, and, second, that I am not talking about other judgements that can be called ‘aesthetic judgements (of taste)’ (such as, in the appropriate context, ‘That shirt is too short') judgements that, for reasons that will appear later, I would not want to assimilate to the kind of judgement that concerns me in this article.

2 In ‘On when words are called for – Cavell, McDowell, and the wording of our world’, Inquiry, 46: 4 (December 2003). I propose that the Kantian ‘discovery’ for philosophy can be put in the form of a truism (though a highly illuminating one): that what we can intelligibly be said to experience has got to be what we can intelligibly be said to experience. Among the several advantages of thinking in this way of Kant's Copernican revolution is that it makes it harder to ignore the significance of the question of the point to our experience of our world.

3 Here I mean to allude to Stanley Cavell's claim that’ “Because it is true” is not a reason or basis for saying anything, it does not constitute the point of your saying something’ and his further claim that ‘there must, in grammar, be reasons for what you say, or be point in your saying of some-thing, if what you say is to be comprehensible’ (The Claim of Reason (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 206)Google Scholar. In ‘On when words are called for’ (see n. 2) I develop a response to those who might wish to argue that judgements, being ‘mental acts’ and not utterances, are exempt from the requirement of having a point.

4 I discuss at some length the question of the point of judgements in general in ‘On when words are called for’ (see n. 2).

5 , Kant, Critique of JudgmentGoogle Scholar(including ‘The First Introduction’), trans. Pluhar, Werner S. (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 1987), 288Google Scholar Academy Edition page number). All future references to the third Critique will appear in the text as CJ, followed by the Prussian Academy Edition page number. References to The First Introduction will appear in the text as FI, followed by the Prussian Academy Edition page number.

6 Savile, Anthony, Kantian Aesthetics Pursued (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), p. 32.Google Scholar

7 Rind, Miles, ‘Kant's beautiful roses’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 43 (1) (2003), 69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Allison, Henry, Kant's Theory of Taste(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 173.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 I argue this point at more length in ‘On when words are called for’ and in ‘What's the point of calling out beauty?’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 44 (1) (January 2004)Google Scholar.The two philosophers most familiar to me whose work seeks to question the philosophical tendency to wish to separate the question of content, or intelligibility, from the question of value are Stanley Cavell and Charles Travis. Both Cavell and Travis take their bearing from Wittgenstein and Austin. In ‘On when words are called for’ I discuss at some length the centrality of the notion of the point of an utterance to Cavell's Wittgensteinian vision of language, and I argue that the content of human experience cannot be specified, or determined, apart from some specific reason or point. In Travis's work, the question of value is not as explicit as it is in Cavell's, but I believe that what Travis describes as ‘the occasion sensitivity of semantics’ can ultimately be understood in terms of the notion of the point of an utterance.

10 ‘Kant's beautiful roses’, 74.

11 Consider the following sample from the first and third Critiques: ‘The impressions of the senses supplying the first stimulus, the whole faculty of knowledge opens out to them, and experience is brought into existence’ (Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, N. Kemp (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), A 86/B 118)Google Scholar; ‘The [understanding] is always occupied in investigating appearances, in order to detect some rule in them’ (ibid., A 126, my emphases); ‘…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’ (CJ, 190); ‘…a given object, by means of the senses, induces the imagination to its activity of combining the manifold, the imagination in turn inducing the understanding to its activity of providing unity for this manifold in concepts’ (C/, 238). Of course, there are ways to interpret such passages in Kant that would make my characterization in the text of his faculty talk appear unfaithful and unfair. But what is important for my present purposes is that Kant can quite naturally be read, and has often been read, as operating with a picture of judgement that seems not to leave so much as room for even just raising the question of the point, let alone addressing it.

12 It will be noted that I try, throughout, to eliminate the rather central role that the notion of ‘pleasure’ plays in Kant's account of beauty. I know some will find that this, by itself, rules out my discussion as a reading of the third Critique. Nevertheless, I find Kant's insistence on the essentiality of pleasure to judgements of beauty misguided, even from his own point of view, and unhelpful. While much ingenuity has been exerted in attempts to make all that Kant says about pleasure and its relation to beauty cohere, it seems to me that not enough attention has been paid to the question of why Kant insists on the essentiality of pleasure to beauty and to the question of whether that insistence is truly justified. So one thing I am trying to do is to show that one can preserve all that is essential to Kant's discussion of aesthetic judgements without availing oneself of the concept of pleasure. Kant's ‘aesthetic pleasure’, I should like to say, echoing Wittgenstein, drops out of consideration as irrelevant to an understanding of judgements of beauty. And, anyway, the notion of ‘liking’ (Wohlgefallen), which I do find helpful and which I do use, is also Kant's. I will come back to this issue in the conclusion of this article.

13 Henry Allison's recent proposal that Kant's ‘principle of purposiveness’ -understood as the assumption of nature's cooperation with our alleged need or purpose to systematize it – is not, or not exactly, the a priori principle that according to Kant grounds judgements of beauty (Kant's Theory of Taste, pp. 59–64), seems to me, in addition to its flying in the face of essentially all that Kant says on the subject (as Allison himself more or less admits), to entirely miss the question, which is Kant's, of why we value beauty and of our right to call upon other people to share our valuing of the thing. Now Allison may believe that that question has nothing essentially to do with the question of the ‘content’ of judgements of beauty, which he glosses as the question of ‘what one means when one claims to find something beautiful’ (ibid., p. 104). But it is precisely my claim in this article that you cannot separate in this way the question of what one means in making a judgement from the question of how a human being could actually mean (care to say) it, or how she could intelligibly mean it.

14 See , Nietzsche, The Genealogy of MoralsGoogle Scholar, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche, trans. Samuel, Horace B. (New York: Random House, 1927)Google Scholar, Third Essay, Section Six.

15 See Guyer, Paul, Kant and the Claims of Taste (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 75Google Scholar, and Kant and the Experience of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996 (2nd edn)), pp. 104–5Google Scholar; Fleischacker, Samuel, A Third Concept of Liberty (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 24–5Google Scholar ; Crowther, Paul, ‘The significance of Kant's pure aesthetic judgment’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 36 (2) (April 1996), p. 115CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crawford, Donald, Kant's Aesthetic Theory (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), p. 78Google Scholar; Meerbote, Ralf, ‘Reflection on beauty’, in Cohen, Ted and Guyer, Paul (eds), Essays in Kant's Aesthetics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 73Google Scholar;Henrich, Dieter, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 46–54Google Scholar;Gibbons, Sarah, Kant's Theory of Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 93–5Google Scholar;Pluhar, Werner, ‘Translator's Introduction’Google Scholar to , Kant'sCritique of Judgment, p. lviiiGoogle Scholar; and Matthews, Patricia, The Significance of Beauty (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), pp. 9–10 and 49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

An apparent lone voice of opposition here has been that of Hannah Ginsborg, who has been arguing for an interpretation of Kant according to which to make a judgement of taste is to ‘take there to be an irreducible harmony or fit between the object and the imaginative activity it elicits’ (‘Lawfulness without a law: Kant on the free play of imagination and understanding’, in Philosophical Topics, 25 (1) (1997), 72Google Scholar. As will later emerge, there is much for me to like in Ginsborg's understanding of beauty. But Ginsborg does not ultimately avoid the assumption of our transcendental cognitive interest. For she still needs to account for the fact that Kant again and again characterizes the beautiful object as ‘purposive’, and specifically as ‘purposive for judgment'. And so she writes:

We perceive [the determination of the imagination and the understanding] as ‘purposive’ in so far as we perceive them not just as happening to function the way they do with respect to that object: in other words, we take their functioning to be appropriate to the object. But this is also to say that we perceive the object, similarly, as ‘purposive’ for the activity of our powers of representation: we perceive it as if it were meant to elicit the mental activity which it does in fact elicit. And this fits with Kant's claims that we perceive the object as subjectively purposive or as purposive for our activity of representing or judging the object. (Ibid.)

The reasoning here strikes me as a bit too quick; and it seems to me to be bringing into the story what Ginsborg has objected to in others – namely, the idea that the beautiful object is purposive in that it answers favourably to a purpose, or to an interest that we all can be assumed to have, and to which we need to assume that nature would answer favourably. Unless some such idea is at play, I cannot see why our sense that we see the object aright should amount to our seeing it as if it were meant to elicit the mental activity it in fact elicits. (When some natural event, say an earthquake, scares me and I scream or run away, my response to the event is in some clear sense ‘appropriate'. But, unless I have some other reason for taking the screaming or the running away to be valuable, I am not going to think of the scary thing as ‘purposive’, and certainly not going to think of it as ‘meant to elicit the activity it does in fact elicit’.)

16 , Savile, Kantian Aesthetics Pursued, p. 89.Google Scholar

17 See ibid., pp. 91-2.

18 Importantly distinguishable from science's actual way of relating to the world.

19 Kant's Theory of Taste, p. 31.

20 ibid., p. 64.

21 , Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, trans. Wolfe, Charles T. (Princeton: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 42.Google Scholar

22 For Paul Guyer's talk of our ‘cognitive craving’, see Kant and the Experience of Freedom, pp. 104-5. For Anthony Savile's idea that beauty, in Kant, is analogous to food, see Kantian Aesthetics Pursued, p. 91.

23 Savile, Anthony, Aesthetic Reconstructions: The Seminal Writings of Lessing, Kant and Schiller (New York and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 140Google Scholar

24 ibid., p. 145.

25 ibid., p. 141.

26 I think it will take the form of what Wittgenstein means by ‘grammar’, which, to an impressive extent, is systematic, but which is not the type of thing that we might plausibly think of as a (Kantian) system. Henry Allison's claim that ‘the very possibility of concepts as general representations presupposes a system of concepts subordinate to one another in terms of the relation of genera and species’ (Kant's Theory of Taste, p. 34) therefore seems to me to be patently wrong. I think one is moved to make such claims when one takes our basic attitude to the world to be that of the (imagined) scientist, and when he forgets that concepts are ‘the expression of our interest’ (, Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), 570Google Scholar) and that their application need therefore be grounded in nothing more, nor less, solid than our shared senses of significance (interest, relevance, satisfaction etc.), however far they may be found to reach.

27 I take this to be one of Wittgenstein's most fundamental insights: that what someone says, or means with his words, must, grammatically, be something that he is aware of and understands. If we add to this the further Wittgensteinian insight that what someone says, or means with his words, is a matter of the point of his words, then we arrive at the claim I am making in the text: that the point of judgements of beauty has got to be known to the judgers of beauty.

28 See , Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, pp. 151–5Google Scholar, and passim; also see , Guyer, ‘Pleasure and society in Kant's theory of taste’Google Scholar, in Essays in Kant's Aesthetics, pp. 23–33; and , Savile, Aesthetic Reconstructions, pp. 101 ffGoogle Scholar.

29 And let me stress right away that it would not do to propose as an answer to my question some sort of interest in establishing or discovering shared sensibilities – something along the lines of what Kant calls ‘the empirical interest in the beautiful’ (C/, 296-8). Because if what I seek to discover is whether or not you (can be brought to) value the thing as I do, whether or not you (can be brought to) see things my way, then I had better first make sure that / truly value the thing, and that I know the way I see it and know it to be truly mine. Otherwise, the most I can hope for is false intimacy. This means, rather trivially, that my reason for valuing the thing cannot just lie in the fact that it would be nice if others shared my valuing. If my judgement does not already have a point, then I have produced nothing (clear) for others to agree or disagree with. Kant too does not allow that a social interest may serve as the ground of the value of beauty.

30 I do more, and somewhat differently, in ‘What's the point of calling out beauty?'.

31 Philosophical Investigations, 89.

32 Ibid.

33 ibid., 109.

34 Ibid.

35 ibid., p. 200.

36 Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), p. 213.Google Scholar

37 Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, Barrett, Cyril (ed.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), p. 37.Google Scholar

38 See Philosophical Investigations, 654,655 and 656.

39 In contrasting the beautiful with the sublime, Kant writes: ‘In presenting the sublime in nature the mind feels agitated, while in an aesthetic judgment about the beautiful in nature it is in restful contemplation’ (C), 258, Kant's emphases).

40 That beauty can be found also in things that we may call ‘ugly’, has not escaped Kant's notice, at least as far as art's portrayal of things go. But he wished to account for it by speaking of a ‘beautiful description’ of ugly things (CJ, 312), and I think that this way of resolving the matter, a way by no means unique to Kant, would only seem justified, and even necessary, given a certain preconception of what beauty is. One should only read Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, however, in order to see that a less forced way of describing what he was doing would be to say that he was looking for beauty (he repeatedly speaks of himself as looking for beauty) so that he could faithfully paint it, even in things that we sensibly, and simultaneously with our finding beauty in them, might call ugly (a face, say, or a pair of peasants’ boots).

41 Which is exactly how Heidegger portrays our world in What is called Thinking (equally translatable as What Calls for Thinking), and portrays it both as the result of our not (yet) thinking, and as the very condition of (being called or provoked to) thinking. The thinking of which Heidegger speaks, it should be noted, is not the entertaining of thoughts or ideas or terms, nor any form of planning or calculation; and it is specifically not what we do when we engage ourselves in scientific research. Rather, it is the attending to things for the sole purpose of letting them come out (from the oblivion for which we ourselves have been responsible by not yet thinking) as what they are: ‘the letting lie before us and the taking to heart of beings in their Being’ (What is Called Thinking?, trans. Gray, J. Glenn (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 217–44)Google Scholar.

42 That which shows u p as already well known, and attracts us only because, and to the limited extent that it is new to us, Heidegger calls ‘interesting’, and has this to say about it: ‘interesting is the sort of thing that can freely be regarded as indifferent the next moment and be displaced by some-thing else, which then concerns us just as little as what went before. Many people today take the view that they are doing great honor to something by finding it interesting. The truth is that such an opinion has already relegated the interesting thing to the ranks of what is indifferent and soon boring’ (What is Called Thinking?, p. 5).

43 Many people are owed thanks for generously helping me to see this article through. During its conception, as the third part of my doctoral dissertation, written at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I was helped by Peter Hylton, Samuel Fleischacker, Marya Schechtman, and Anthony Laden. During the time that I spent at the University of Chicago, I came to rely on conversations with James Conant. This article everywhere bears imprints of those conversations. Special gratitude is owed to Stanley Cavell, not only for some specific and valuable comments and for much-needed words of encouragement, but also for his philosophical inspiration. Others who took the time to read this article and to give me valuable feedback are Jean-Philippe Narboux, Martin Gustafsson and Rupert Read. I thank also the members of the Philosophy Department at Auburn University for a lively and stimulating discussion of an earlier version of this article. Finally, I wish to thank two anonymous referees for the Kantian Review for pressing me to become clearer on some key issues, and for believing in the value of what I try to say in this article.