Abstract
According to Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry, aesthetic pleasure and taste are grounded in our essential sociability. On the one hand, the experience of the beautiful is based on our profound ties with our fellow human creatures. The sublime, on the other hand, is rooted in our desire for self-preservation, but it also fortifies our sociable instinct. Indeed, for Burke, the delight aroused by the sublime makes us interested in the tragic fate of others, and lies at the root of morality. Like Burke, Kant emphasises the social nature of aesthetic experience. Kant is not interested in concrete sociability with the suffering other, however. For him, the social nature of aesthetics is transcendental and is exemplified in the universal communicability of aesthetic judgements. Although Kant does not reject the relevance of the senses and the body in aesthetic judging, he rebuts Burke’s empiricist and physio-psychological arguments, because these cannot justify the universal validity claim that for Kant are inherent in judgements of taste.
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Notes
- 1.
References to Burke’s Enquiry are to E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, edited with an introduction and notes by James T. Boulton (London: Routledge, 2008), abbreviated PE. As with the rest of the references in this book, Roman numbers refer to the part and section, followed by the page number in Arabic. Here, PE, I.ix.41–42.
- 2.
I do not claim that Kant’s aesthetic theory in the Critique of Judgment is a response only to Burke’s views on the beautiful and the sublime. It is not only impossible to discuss the historical context of Kant’s third Critique in a single essay, but it would also be absurd to reduce Kant’s treatment of aesthetics to a response to only one author. Kant not only criticises Edmund Burke, but also Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Lord Kames, Alexander Gerard, Alexander Baumgarten and several others.
- 3.
At least according to some commentators. See Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 117: ‘From the fact that a delight is not caused by any interest or desire, it does not follow that it is valid for everyone. It might be entirely accidental, or based on some other kind of merely private condition. Universality cannot be deduced from disinterestedness alone, nor does it follow that in requiring disinterestedness of a pleasure one is requiring that it be universal; one may simply be requiring a source other than interest, quite apart from any consideration of intersubjective validity at all. Indeed, one might maintain that unless the requirement of disinterestedness is already a normative requirement for intersubjective acceptability, trying to deduce such a requirement from disinterestedness confuses a factual matter with a normative requirement.’ For discussion, see Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste. A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 99–103.
- 4.
The abbreviation CJ refers to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Citations to the Critique of Judgment are to volume 5 and the section and page numbers of the Akademie-Ausgabe (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1902–). The English translations are based on I. Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated, with an introduction, by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). I have modified this translation where it seemed appropriate.
- 5.
Rachel Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology. An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 176.
- 6.
Nick Zangwill, “Kant on Pleasure in the Agreeable,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53, no. 2 (1995): 167.
- 7.
Zangwill, “Kant on Pleasure in the Agreeable,” 167.
- 8.
See Anne-Marie Roviello, “Du beau comme symbole du bien,” In: Kants Ästhetik, Kant’s Aesthetics, L’esthétique de Kant, ed. Herman Parret, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 374–85. See also Birgit Recki, “Das Schöne als Symbol der Freiheit” in the same volume, pp. 386–402.
- 9.
In ‘Kant on Pleasure in the Agreeable’, Nick Zangwill rightly emphasises that this unfreedom of the pleasure in the agreeable is ‘a matter of the causes of the pleasure. It does not detract from what Kant is saying about the way that pleasure then provokes desire, via a representation. If a pleasure is unfree, it is unfree because of the way it is caused, not because of what it causes.’ (170)
- 10.
This does not necessarily imply that Kant is offering a purely causal account of the interestedness of pleasure in the agreeable. I here agree with Zangwill, ‘Kant on Pleasure in the Agreeable’, 169: ‘Once we see that Kant is not offering a purely causal account of the interestedness of pleasure in the agreeable, we will be less prone to think that he thinks that pleasure in the beautiful is disinterested because the pleasure bears no causal relation to the objects that we find pleasurable and thus call beautiful. If Kant did think this, it would make his claim that pleasure in the beautiful is disinterested very implausible. But fortunately Kant holds no such view.’
- 11.
Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, p. 152.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
J.-F. Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 161.
- 14.
See J.-F. Lyotard, The Differend. Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 132.
- 15.
Zangwill, ‘Kant on Pleasure in the Agreeable’, 172.
- 16.
Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 153.
- 17.
P. Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), 280–1, and Kant and the Claims of Taste, 104–5.
- 18.
Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology, 233. I here follow Zuckert’s excellent account (233ff.) of the intentional nature of pleasure, but I do not agree with her identification of the intentionality of pleasure with purposiveness without a purpose.
- 19.
Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology, 233.
- 20.
I here refer to I. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).
- 21.
Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology, 233.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Ibid., 236.
- 24.
Ibid., 240.
- 25.
Zangwill, ‘Kant on Pleasure in the Agreeable’, 174.
- 26.
Immanuel Kant, Reflexion 868, Ak. Reflexionen, Refl. 868, AA, 15: 382.
- 27.
Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 174.
- 28.
- 29.
This does not rule out the possibility that the content of aesthetic judgements involves concepts. What Kant claims is merely that concepts cannot form a basis for rationally imputing our aesthetic appraisal to others. Aesthetic judgements are independent of the subsumption of the object under concepts – no more, no less.
- 30.
Although the aesthetic judgement is not cognitive, the subject’s cognitive capacities (viz. understanding and imagination) are clearly involved.
- 31.
Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 132.
- 32.
See also D. Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 70, and Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 111ff., on which the following is partly based.
- 33.
P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 137.
- 34.
See ibid. As Guyer contends, this would imply that in a solipsistic situation no one could take pleasure in a beautiful object. Only if there were the possibility of communication, would aesthetic pleasure be possible. This was actually Kant’s anthropological view before he wrote the Critique of Judgment. See Logik Blomberg, 24: 45–46: ‘taste can therefore impossibly be separately solitary [abgesondert eigenthümlich]’; Logik Philippi, 24: 353–5; Anthropologie Collins 15: 179–80. This also occurs, however, in texts written after the Critique of Judgment, as in, for instance, his Anthropology for a Pragmatic Point of View 7: 244 and the Metaphysics of Morals 6: 212. See also Metaphysik L 1 28: 249–51, where he argues that the universal sense (allgemeine Sinn) underlying judgements of taste has to be identified with a communal sense (gemeinschaftliche Sinn), and also emphasises that ‘whoever does not come into a community has no communal sense’ (28: 249).
- 35.
H. Ginsborg, “Reflective Judgment and Taste,” Noûs 24, no. 1 (1990): 70.
- 36.
See Logik Dohna-Wundlacken, 24: 710: ‘Wenn Anschauung und Begriff zusammenstimmen zur Belebung der Erkenntnis selbst, so machen sie in uns ein Wohlgefallen und dann nennt man es schönes Erkenntnis. Man muss sich bemühen, dass Verstand und Einbildungskraft zu einem Geschaft zusammenstimmen. Dies ist aber nicht mehr Spiel’ (italics added).
- 37.
Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 115.
- 38.
For an interesting treatment of the parallels and differences between beauty’s ‘feeling of life’ (Lebensgefühl) and morality’s ‘feeling of spirit’ (Geistesgefühl), which is not a feeling of sense – although it is in some way palpable, see John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 292–305. Interestingly, Kant also uses the term Geistesgefühl and not Lebensgefühl in connection with the feeling of the sublime.
- 39.
In the anthropology lectures as early as 1781, he still held that aesthetic pleasures are ‘public’, generally shared pleasures. Before the CJ, he denied that they ground universality and necessity claims.
- 40.
For a more extended discussion of this, see B. Vandenabeele, “The Subjective Universality of Aesthetic Judgements Revisited,” British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 4 (2008): 410–425.
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Vandenabeele, B. (2012). Burke and Kant on the Social Nature of Aesthetic Experience. In: Vermeir, K., Funk Deckard, M. (eds) The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 206. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2102-9_9
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