Expressions of Judgment: An Essay on Kant’s Aesthetics

by Eli Friedlander

The Critique of Judgment ―the third and final work in Kant’s critical system―laid the groundwork of modern aesthetics when it appeared in 1790. Eli Friedlander’s reappraisal of this seminal accomplishment reformulates and elucidates Kant’s thought in order to reveal the inner unity of the Third Critique.

Expressions of Judgment emphasizes the internal connection of judgment and meaning in Kant’s aesthetics, showing how the pleasure in judging is intimately related to our capacity to draw meaning from our encounter with beauty. Although the meaningfulness of aesthetic judgment is most evident in the response to art, the appreciation of nature’s beauty has an equal share in the significant experience of our world. Friedlander’s attention to fundamental dualities underlying the Third Critique―such as that of art and nature―underscores how its themes are subordinated systematically to the central task Kant sets that of devising a philosophical blueprint for the mediation between the realms of nature and freedom.

This understanding of the mediating function of judgment guides Friedlander in articulating the dimensions of the field of the aesthetic that opens between art and nature, the subject and the object, knowledge and the will, as well as between the individual and the communal. Expressions of Judgment illuminates the distinctness as well as the continuity of this important late phase in Kant’s critical enterprise, providing insights for experienced scholars as well as new students of philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy

144 pages, Hardcover

First published November 17, 2014

Reviews

[Alina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Friedlander sets out to examine Kant's account of aesthetic judgment, as found in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, with an eye to Kant's view on the faculty of judgment itself, more generally, and so the role judgment might play in Kant's other two Critiques. Friedlander argues that understanding Kant's view on the faculty of judgment is essential to understanding how we can possibly categorize objects (or, in other terms, follow rules that specify that a given particular ought to be conceptualized in a certain way).

Overall, this book is concise and readable. But I found Friedlander's writing as ambiguous and technical as Kant's own writing at times, which makes it unhelpful as a secondary resource. I do not think a reader should go to Friedlander, without background familiarity with Kant's other Critiques (especially the First). I also recommend reading at least the Preface and Introductions to the Third Critique before looking at secondary resources. I read about a third of the Third Critique before turning to Friedlander's book, and think this was essential, for letting me formulate my own views on Kant and be able to critically evaluate Friedlander's interpretation. A lot of the rest of this review is informed by my reading of Kant, which helped me clarify and interpret what Friedlander is up to.

Kripke made famous Wittgenstein's take on the paradox of rule-following, which might be interpreted as an implicit criticism of Kant. The paradox goes like this: if categorizing objects involves the application of rules, then how can we know that these rules were the right ones to apply in a given context? A tempting answer is that we appeal to a second-order set of rules, which tell us that this first-order set of rules is the appropriate one to apply, given features of the context. But then we have a regress; we'd need yet another set of third-order rules to explain how we apply the second-order rules.

Kant does not explicitly raise or address this paradox. Moreover, Kant does not explicitly examine the faculty of judgment on its own in the Third Critique. Friedlander's unique interpretation of the Third Critique is that an account of this faculty can be found in this Critique, and can be used to address this paradox. We'll first need to cover Friedlander's explications of other claims in the Third Critique to arrive at this thesis; I'll summarize these parts in this review. Kant's First Critique focuses on the domain of nature, or how it is possible for us to experience and cognize nature; this involves the formulation of factual and empirical knowledge of the world. Kant's Second Critique, in contrast, focuses on the domain of freedom, or morality; this involves examining the constraints that must necessarily be in place for us to act ethically. In the Third Critique, Kant shows that the domain of aesthetic experience (i.e., beauty) and teleological judgment (i.e., recognizing purposes or ends of things in the world) somehow bridges these two domains of nature and freedom.

Aesthetic judgment and experience requires that we are not interested in the object; Kant means this in a technical sense. Interest amounts to seeking to use the object for some activity or end. This even includes simply categorizing an object, or taking it to be an member of some determinate class; for once something is conceptualized, it has determinate significance, which is grounded in our interests and ends. Disinterestedness amounts to the total absence of all of this; we do not seek to use the object for our purposes, and we also refrain from identifying the object as any particular kind of thing. Instead, we let some formal configuration of the object (e.g., a visual pattern, a pure color) 'trigger' the free play of the imagination.

In the First Critique, Kant takes the faculty of the imagination to have a determinate, constrained role in relation to the faculty of the understanding. Namely, the understanding draws on determinate concepts and governs the imagination to synthesize the manifold of intuition (i.e., scattered, pre-perceptual sense data) into a form, which can be subsumed under this concept. The free play of the imagination totally defies this order of things. There is no determinate concept thrust upon imagination. The imagination is rather free to 'play' or synthesize the manifold of intuition in any which way. But this freedom is not total. The understanding still exerts some constraint on the imagination, a constraint based in the formal configuration of the object that we judge as beautiful. But the direction of constraint goes both ways; the imagination and the understanding mutually or reciprocally influence one another. They play around like this, as we have an aesthetic experience.

Phenomenologically speaking, this amounts to the unique pleasure that accompanies the perception of beauty; we do not see a thing for any utility, but it rather seems to contain an infinity of potential facets and meanings. We can indeterminately access many of these facets, as the object shows up in different ways (none of which are determinately conceptual though); the indeterminacy of this all allows for the preservation of this sense of infinite potential. In contrast, if we determinately conceptualized an object, it becomes finite, known, limited.

In judging that something is beautiful, the validity and necessity of such judgments are not grounded in any features of the object that is deemed as beautiful. In this sense, aesthetic judgments are purely subjective, rather than objective (as cognitive judgments centered on in the First Critique are). The validity of aesthetic judgments is grounded in the necessary presupposition that this judgment would be universally shared by all people, or that everyone would agree with us that this object is beautiful. This presupposition, in turn, is grounded in the universality of the faculties of the understanding and the imagination, and of the special dynamic relation that can hold between them, which all humans share.

Now, how does any of this address the paradox of rule-following mentioned above? According to Friedlander's interpretation, this free play of the imagination might be taken as a stage involved in all judgments, including the cognitive or empirical ones centered on in the First Critique. This free play opposes the procedure of rule-following, which describes the process that Kant explicitly accounts for in the First Critique. This free play might be taken as sensitive to a particular perceptual context, and as opening to us potential though indeterminate concepts to be applied in this context. Then, one particular concept is made determinate and is applied; and this is how the procedure of finding the right concept, before the procedure of applying any concept at all, does not have to consist in the application of concepts, and so avoids the regress. The question of how this concept gets to be chosen, however, is not explicitly addressed by Friedlander, let alone by Kant. So I'm not sure how satisfying this is.

Again, I would not recommend this book to readers who haven't read Kant straight-up before. Kant is daunting, but all the difficulties in approaching him are rewarded in the epiphanies and pleasures: Kant's ideas at first seem counterintuitive, but once grasped, turn out to explain everything about our minds and reality in a super profound way. Friedlander's book might be interesting or useful to readers who know Kant's First or Second Critiques well, and want some preparation for or aid in approaching the Third Critique.