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Aesthetic Judging and The Intentionality of PleasureHannah Ginsborg aa University of California, BerkeleyPublished online: 05 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Hannah Ginsborg (2003) Aesthetic Judging and The Intentionality of Pleasure, Inquiry: AnInterdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 46:2, 164-181, DOI: 10.1080/00201740310001173

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Aesthetic Judging and The Intentionalityof Pleasure

Hannah GinsborgUniversity of California, Berkeley

I point out some unclarities in Allison’s interpretation of Kant’s aesthetic theory,specifically in his account of the free play of the faculties. I argue that there is atension between Allison’s commitment to the intentionality of the pleasure involvedin a judgment of beauty, and his view that the pleasure is distinct from the judgment,and I claim that the tension should be resolved by rejecting the latter view. I concludeby addressing Allison’s objection that my own view fails to accommodate judgmentsof non-beauty or ugliness.

Henry Allison’s new book* represents an important and original contributionto the study of Kant’s aesthetic theory. It covers every aspect of Kant’saesthetics, providing both a comprehensive and detailed commentary on therelevant parts of the Critique of Judgment, and much helpful discussion of thelarge body of secondary literature which has grown up around Kant’saesthetics in the last twenty-odd years. Allison approaches Kant in asympathetic spirit, and he offers a wealth of interpretative suggestionsdesigned to defend Kant’s arguments against a wide range of objections thathave appeared in the recent literature. Not surprisingly, given the notoriousdifficulties associated with Kant’s theory, he does not always succeed inproviding a fully defensible reading, but his interpretative suggestions are ofgreat value, and his discussion of the text goes a long way in helping to clarifythe relevant issues. The book is essential reading for anyone who hopes tomake a further contribution to the subject, as well as a valuable companion forreaders approaching Kant’s aesthetics for the first time.

One of the most rewarding parts of the book falls outside the topic ofKant’s aesthetic theory, properly speaking: this is the first chapter, whichdeals with Kant’s theory of reflective judgment in connection with issuesabout empirical concept-formation and the systematicity of nature. Within thetopic of Kant’s aesthetic theory, I found especially valuable Allison’streatment of issues that have not been well worked over in the literature, forexample his discussions of dependent beauty, and of fine art and genius. In the

*Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).References to this book will be given in the text.

DOI 10.1080/00201740310001173 � 2003 Taylor & Francis

Inquiry, 46, 164–181

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present discussion, however, I want to focus on Allison’s treatment of someissues which have been the topic of a great deal of critical discussion, andwhich arise in connection with the theory of pure judgments of taste whichforms the core of Kant’s views on aesthetics. In particular I want to look atAllison’s approach to two related questions. First, how are we to understandthe activity of “mere reflection,” that is the free play of imagination andunderstanding, which figures centrally in Kant’s account of aesthetic judging?Second, what is the relation, on Kant’s view, between the pleasure which isexperienced when we judge that an object is beautiful, and the judgment ofbeauty itself?

It will be useful to consider Allison’s view on these issues against thebackground of Guyer’s influential 1979 account, which in many ways can bethought of as setting the agenda for all subsequent discussion of Kant’saesthetic theory within analytic philosophy. Guyer’s account is built around adistinction between, on the one hand, the feeling of pleasure which isoccasioned by an object we judge to be beautiful, and, on the other hand, thejudgment of beauty itself, which claims the universal validity of the feeling ofpleasure.1 The feeling of pleasure is produced by an activity of imaginationand understanding, the “free play” or “harmony” of the faculties, in which themanifold of intuition presented by the object is synthesized or unified withoutthe use of concepts. But it does not constitute awareness of the activity of thefaculties, or of the corresponding unity in the manifold, except in the sensethat it is caused by that activity. In spite of the fact that the activity qualifies asan exercise of reflective judgment, neither the activity nor the resultingpleasure has any intentional content: the pleasure, in Guyer’s words, is“opaque” (Kant and the Claims of Taste, p. 119). Intentionality enters thepicture only in so far as the subject engages in a second act of reflectivejudgment through which she comes to identify her pleasure as the product ofthe free play of the faculties, and consequently to view it as arising from apsychological process which is not idiosyncratic but can be universallyascribed to all perceivers of the object. It is through this second act ofreflective judgment that the subject comes to make the judgment of beautyitself, that is the judgment that her feeling of pleasure is universally valid.

We can mark some of the salient features of Allison’s account by notingwhere he disagrees with Guyer. One fundamental point of disagreement bearson what it means to claim that the feeling of pleasure is universally valid. ForGuyer the claim amounts to a prediction that everyone perceiving the objectwill feel the pleasure, whereas for Allison it should be understood as anormative demand that everyone ought to feel it. A second, and related, pointconcerns the success of Kant’s attempt, in the Deduction of Taste, to showthat judgments of beauty are legitimate. Guyer holds that this attempt isunsuccessful: if we assume, as seems plausible, that the free play of thefaculties is not elicited by every object we perceive, then the free play of the

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faculties is not a necessary condition of cognition and hence cannot beascribed to all perceivers of a given object. Allison, on the other hand, holdsthat Guyer’s negative assessment is based on too strong a reading of what theDeduction is intended to accomplish: if the Deduction is seen as aiming toestablish only the general possibility of judgments of beauty, rather than thelegitimacy of individual judgments made on particular occasions, then it issuccessful. Third, and most important for the present discussion, Allisondisagrees with Guyer about the non-intentionality of the pleasure. Rather thanbeing “opaque,” or, in Allison’s terms, a “raw feel” (p. 122), the pleasureinvolved in a judgment of beauty constitutes intentional awareness of theactivity of the faculties (p. 54). Relatedly, the faculty of feeling is not a merereceptivity, but an “active faculty, indeed a faculty of appraisal”: in so far asfeeling makes one aware of the interplay of imagination and understanding, it“judges” or “appraises” the “capacity of a representation to occasion anenhancement or diminution of one’s cognitive faculties” (p. 69).

Allison’s commitment to the intentionality of the pleasure might be takento signal a more radical disagreement with Guyer, in that it might be taken tochallenge Guyer’s fundamental distinction between the pleasure occasionedby the object, and the judgment that the object is beautiful. Richard Aquilaand I have both argued for the intentionality of the pleasure in the context ofjust such a challenge: to feel pleasure in an object’s beauty just is to take it tobe beautiful, that is, to make a judgment of beauty about it.2 Given Kant’sunambiguous claim that the judgment of beauty claims the universal validityof one’s feeling of pleasure, this has the apparently paradoxical consequencethat the pleasure embodies a claim to its own universal validity, but this is aconsequence which Aquila and I are willing to accept, and on my own versionof the view it plays a crucial role in explaining how judgments of beauty arepossible. However, Allison does not seem to want to endorse a view of thiskind. One reason he gives for rejecting at least my own version of such a viewis its “inherent implausibility” (p. 114). Another is that he wants Kant’stheory to accommodate negative as well as positive judgments of beauty, andhe takes this to require the possibility of claiming universal validity forfeelings of displeasure as well as for feelings of pleasure. But this possibilityis ruled out if the pleasure is identified with the judgment that one’s feeling inan object is universally valid, since this identification leaves no room for ananalogous feeling of displeasure: as long as a feeling claims its own universalvalidity, then it must be a feeling of pleasure. For these and other reasons,Allison combines his view that the pleasure or other feeling in a judgment ofbeauty is intentional, with an endorsement of Guyer’s view that the feeling isdistinct from, and precedes, the judgment that the object is (or, as Allisonwould also allow, is not) beautiful.

On the face of it, Allison’s view might seem to offer an attractivecompromise between Guyer’s position and the kind of position that Aquila

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and I have defended, in that it appears to do justice to Kant’s suggestions thatthe pleasure or other feeling is intentional, while avoiding the apparentlyparadoxical consequences of identifying the pleasure with the judgment ofbeauty. But is the resulting model satisfactory? By way of approaching thisquestion, I want to look more closely at Allison’s account of the activity ofimagination and understanding – the activity of “mere reflection” or “freeplay” – which underlies the feeling, and of which the feeling makes us aware.Allison has a lot to say, much of it suggestive and helpful, about this centraland difficult notion. But his account is unclear on at least two crucial points,and these unclarities in turn cast doubt on the plausibility of his overall view.The first point of unclarity stems from an apparent paradox implicit in Kant’sown characterizations of the free play. On the one hand, Kant describes theactivity of the imagination and understanding in free play, or mere reflection,as the same as the cognitive activity performed when a given manifold isconceptualized in perception. Kant identifies it with the activity ofschematism or exhibition [Darstellung], in which a perceptual image isformed corresponding to a concept. On the other hand, this activity issupposed to take place without being guided by, or resulting in the applicationof, any particular concept. Kant thus characterizes it as involving the“exhibition of a concept of understanding (undetermined which concept)[unbestimmt welches Begriffs]” (First Introduction VII, p. 221), or as anactivity in which imagination “schematizes without a concept” (Critique ofJudgment §35, p. 287).3 This raises a fundamental question: given that thevery notion of schematism or exhibition appears to presuppose a conceptwhich is schematized or exhibited, how can we make sense of an activity ofschematism or exhibition which does not involve a concept, or at least noconcept in particular?4

In common with many other interpretations, Allison’s account fails to yielda clear answer to this question.5 One answer that is suggested by some ofAllison’s formulations is that the activity resembles, without in factconsisting in, the schematism or exhibition of a concept. He says, forexample, that in the free play “imagination provides a content which presentsitself as containing something universal in itself, i.e. something whichappears as if it were a schema of an undetermined concept, but none inparticular” (p. 50). The sensible data . . . as synthesized by imagination,simulate the exhibition of a concept” (ibid.); imagination produces a“schema-like pattern” (ibid.) (my emphasis throughout). These formulationsall suggest that the activity produces an outcome which is like the outcome ofcognitive activity (a conceptualized manifold), but with the difference that itis non-conceptual. But the appeal to resemblance risks being empty unlesssomething can be said about the respect in which the activity and its outcomeresemble their cognitive counterparts. What is it for a pattern to be schema-like, that is to say, as if rule-governed, without actually being a schema, that is

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the actual exemplification of a rule? The difficulty of the question is increasedby Allison’s suggestion that we might think of understanding as “‘energized’to grasp the rule that seems to underlie [the] . . . apprehended content, whichin turn ‘inspires’ the imagination to exhibit it as fully as possible” (ibid.). Ifthere is no rule, but merely the appearance or simulation of rule-governedness, then how can there be anything for the understanding to graspor for the imagination to exhibit? The situation as Allison describes it seemsno less paradoxical than in Kant’s own formulations.

Another possible response to the question of how it is possible to“schematize without a concept” is suggested by Allison’s claim that theimagination in the free play “exhibits a pattern or order . . . which suggests anindeterminate number of possible schematizations or conceptualizations,none of which is fully adequate, thereby occasioning further reflection orengagement with the object” (p. 51). On this characterization, the non-conceptuality of the free play appears to be a consequence of the failure of ourcognitive faculties to arrive at an adequate conceptualization. We arepresented with an indeterminate number of apparent ways of conceptualizingthe manifold, but each one, when attempted, turns out to be unsuccessful:what Kant describes as our “lingering” in our contemplation of the beautiful(§12, p. 222) is the result of our continually renewed efforts to arrive at aconceptualization which is, in Allison’s terms “fully adequate.” But a naturalquestion here is why, on this account, the free play of the faculties should beexperienced through a feeling of pleasure as opposed to displeasure. Allison’scharacterization is supposed to capture the kind of free play that isharmonious, that is, the kind which gives rise to pleasure and correspondinglyto a judgment that the object is beautiful rather than ugly. But it would seembetter suited to characterize a state of displeasure arising from the perceptionof a lack of harmony in the workings of imagination and understanding.

This objection might appear to miss the point that the free play involves amutual stimulation (as Kant puts it at §35, p. 287, a “reciprocal quickening”)of imagination and understanding; this might be seen as beneficial, and hencepotentially pleasurable, in so far as each one, in Allison’s terms, “sponta-neously promotes the activity of other” (p. 171). Thus, as Allison puts it,“imagination in its free play stimulates the understanding by occasioning it toentertain fresh conceptual possibilities, while, conversely, the imagination,under the general direction of understanding, strives to conceive new patternsof order” (ibid.). This characterization makes no reference to any inadequacyof the conceptual possibilities or patterns of order that are entertained in thisactivity. But it is hard to see what could drive this activity, other than thefailure of imagination and understanding to accord in some stable anddeterminate conceptualization of the manifold; and such failure would seemon the face of it to be associated with disharmony and consequent displeasure.We can put the point in terms of another formulation Allison uses to describe

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the free play: borrowing a phrase from Carl Posy, he says that the experienceof the object “‘invites the application of a concept’ (though . . . no concept inparticular)” (p. 188). Given that the invitation is, it would seem, perpetuallybeing rescinded, we would expect the experience to be one of frustrationrather than pleasure.

As I noted, this first point of unclarity is one which is common to manyinterpretations of Kant’s aesthetic theory. The second point I want to discuss,however, is more specific to Allison’s view, and more relevant to the centralconcerns of the present discussion. I want to introduce it by noting thatAllison’s characterizations of the free play, following Kant’s own, are of twoapparently distinct kinds which we might call, respectively, “first-order” and“second-order” characterizations. The descriptions I have quoted so far are allfirst-order characterizations: they characterize the free play as an activitywhich is engaged with the object or with the given sensory manifold, butwhich does not engage with, or reflect on, the activity of the cognitivefaculties themselves. The same is true of Guyer’s characterization of the freeplay as an activity of non-conceptual synthesis or unification of the manifold.But Allison also follows Kant in offering what I am calling a second-ordercharacterization of the free play, one on which the free play involvesreflection on the activity of the faculties themselves as they engage with theobject. Drawing on a passage from section VII of the First Introduction(p. 220), Allison says that in the activity of aesthetic reflection (which is tosay, the free play) “a comparison is made between the actual relationship ofthe faculties in question in the perception of a given object and their maximalor ideal relationship in which [imagination and understanding] . . . worktogether in a frictionless manner” (p. 49). Or as he puts it later, this reflection“consists in a comparison between the relation of the cognitive faculties intheir free engagement with a given object or its representation and the idealfrictionless harmony which maximally facilitates cognition.” (p. 75).

This conception of the free play as an activity of comparison, where theactual relation of the faculties in the apprehension of an object is compared toan ideal relationship, is closely connected to Allison’s view of the feeling asintentional, and more specifically of the feeling of pleasure and displeasure asa “faculty of appraisal” (p. 69). As we have seen, this faculty judges orappraises “the capacity of a representation to occasion an enhancement ordiminution of one’s cognitive faculties in their cooperative activity” (p. 69).Relatedly, the feeling “serves as the vehicle through which we perceive theaptness or subjective purposiveness (or lack thereof) of a given representationfor the proper exercise of our cognitive faculties” (p. 71). A feeling ofpleasure or displeasure can play this role, it would seem, only in so far as itresults not merely from a first-order activity of imagination and understandingin response to the object, but also (or alternatively) from a second-order

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assessment of how the actual activity of our faculties compares to an ideal oftheir “proper” or indeed maximally “enhanced” activity.

Allison’s attention to Kant’s second-order characterizations of the freeplay, and, relatedly, his emphasis on the judgmental character of thecorresponding feeling, are, to my mind, attractive features of his account. Butit remains unclear how Allison views the connection between the two kinds ofcharacterizations. He appears to endorse both of them, but it is not clear howhe intends them to be reconciled. More fundamentally, it is not clear how heunderstands the activity of the free play on its second-order construal. Thisactivity is supposed to compare the “actual” relationship of the faculties withtheir “maximal” or “ideal” relationship. But to understand this activity ofcomparison we need to identify the “actual” relationship which is one of theterms of the comparison. Is it a relationship holding between the facultiesprior to, and independently of, the activity of comparison which constitutesthe free play itself? Or is it the relationship between the faculties which holdsin the very act of comparison itself, so that the comparison is not after all“second-order” but rather a self-referential activity in which the facultiesreflect on their own relationship in that very activity?

My own preference is for the second of these alternatives. As I see it, thecoexistence of what I have been calling Kant’s first-order and second-ordercharacterizations of the free play indicates his commitment to a conception ofthe free play as reflecting on itself. Only by assuming such a commitment dowe seem to be able to account for how the free play can be both an activity inwhich we engage with an object, and an activity in which we reflect on therelationship of our faculties in their engagement with the object. But Allisongives little indication of wanting to adopt a self-referential view of the freeplay. Some passages, it is true, hint at it, for example when he characterizesthe activity of free play as one of “ascertaining through feeling whether or notthe form of an object reflected upon occasions a free harmony in merereflection” (p. 49). Since what is being described here is itself the activity of“mere reflection,” it appears from the mention of “mere reflection” at the endof the quotation that the activity must involve a reference to itself.6 However,the fact that Allison does not draw attention to this self-referential elementsuggests that he does not want to be committed to this kind of account; and inany case, if this is the kind of account he has in mind, more must be said if it isto be reconciled with the “first-order” characterizations mentioned inconnection with the previous point.

We might, then, conclude that Allison endorses the other alternative, onwhich the relationship of the faculties which serves as one of the terms of thecomparison corresponds to an activity which is distinct from the comparisonitself. According to this alternative, the free play in its second-order construalinvolves two different activities of imagination and understanding: an initialfirst-order apprehension of the object which does not involve comparison, and

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then an act of reflecting on that apprehension to determine whether or not therelationship of the faculties in that apprehension accords with an ideal. On theversion of this approach which it seems most reasonable to ascribe to Allison,the object brings the faculties into a certain relation of which is eitherharmonious, in which case it accords with the ideal of maximal suitability forcognition, or disharmonious, in which case it fails to accord with that ideal.The free play proper then consists in an act of reflection which determineswhether or not this relation of faculties is harmonious by comparing it withthe ideal: the results of this reflection are experienced in a feeling of pleasureif the relation is harmonious, or displeasure otherwise. The question of how toreconcile Kant’s two kinds of characterizations might be answered, on thisapproach, by saying that they correspond respectively to the two differentactivities mentioned. The first-order characterizations correspond to theinitial apprehension, in which imagination and understanding come to standin a harmonious or disharmonious relation; whereas the second-ordercharacterizations pick out the act of reflection through which the relationcomes to be recognized – through a feeling of pleasure or displeasure – asharmonious or disharmonious.

But the issue of whether Allison endorses this model is no clearer than itwas in the case of the other alternative. One aspect of his view which mightsuggest his endorsement of it is that he makes a point of distinguishing theharmony of the faculties from their free play. Such a distinction lends itselfwell to the kind of model in question, in that it allows the possibility ofidentifying the harmony (or correlative disharmony) with the relation offaculties in the initial activity of apprehending the object, and the free playwith the activity through which this relation of faculties is compared with theideal. But Allison’s own gloss on the relation between the harmony and thefree play appears to contradict this use of the distinction. In his reading of §9,he characterizes the free play as the “relation between the imagination andunderstanding in the act of ‘mere reflection’ which . . . can issue in either adisinterested liking or disliking” (p. 116). But he then goes on to say that“these two possibilities stem from the fact that such reflection can eithersucceed or fail to produce a harmonious relation of the faculties” (p. 116).This makes it look as though the harmony does not precede the free play, ason the model we are considering, but is rather a consequence of it. Relatedly,his references to it as a harmony “in mere reflection” (p. 136) and as a “freeharmony” (pp. 49, 54, 137), again suggest that he does not want to understandthe free play as reflecting on an antecedent relation of faculties which isharmonious or disharmonious, but instead sees the free play itself as being, orfailing to be, harmonious. If we take seriously these suggestions that theharmonious or disharmonious relation of the faculties results from, or holds invirtue of, the activity of the faculties in their free play, then it is hard to seehow the free play can be an activity of comparing the relation of faculties to

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an ideal of harmoniousness; unless, as on the alternative canvassed earlier, thefree play is understood as reflecting on itself.

So far I have discussed two points of unclarity in Allison’s account of thefree play of the faculties, corresponding respectively to two general ways –“first-order” and “second-order” – in which, following Kant, he characterizesit. I raised these points in the context of the question whether Allison cansuccessfully combine his view that the pleasure or other feeling in a judgmentof beauty is intentional or judgmental, with the view that the pleasure isdistinct from the judgment of beauty. The second point in particular bears onthis question because Allison’s view of the pleasure as intentional seems torest on his endorsement of Kant’s “second-order” characterizations of the freeplay. I now want to pursue the central question more directly by focusing onAllison’s conception of how the pleasure or other feeling is connected withthe judgment of beauty proper. As already noted, Allison describes feeling asa “faculty of appraisal,” where what it “appraises” or “judges” is “the capacityof a representation to occasion an enhancement or diminution of one’scognitive faculties in their cooperative activity” (p. 69). Relatedly, the feeling“serves as the vehicle through which we perceive the aptness or subjectivepurposiveness (or lack thereof) of a given representation for the properexercise of our cognitive faculties” (p. 71). At the same time, however, as wehave also noted, Allison follows Guyer in denying that we can equate thefeeling with the judgment of beauty proper. Correspondingly, he denies thatthe free play can be equated with the act of judging the object to be beautiful(or not beautiful): thus he endorses the distinction between the “supposedlydisinterested act of reflection or contemplation [which] precedes thepleasure,” and the “actual judgment or verdict” for which the pleasure inturn provides a basis (p. 112).7 However, if the pleasure indeed amounts to theperception (judgment, appraisal) of the representation’s subjective purpo-siveness for our cognitive faculties, then how is it distinct from the judgmentthat the object is beautiful? As Allison himself says, “in claiming that x isbeautiful, I am claiming that my representation of x is purposive for judgment. . . so the judgment is about the suitability for judgment of a given object andits representation” (p. 173). There seems to be no difference between thejudgment of beauty, so construed, and the claim that is implicit in the pleasureitself.

Allison might reply that we are required to distinguish the pleasure fromthe judgment of beauty proper because we cannot otherwise accommodateKant’s view that the judgment of beauty claims the universal validity of afeeling of pleasure. But the distinction is not required if we allow (as on thekind of view defended by Aquila and myself) that a feeling of pleasure canembody a claim to its own universal validity. And if the distinction isnonetheless maintained, then we are forced to understand Kant as holding thata judgment of beauty consists in fact of two judgments: one in which we

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appraise the capacity of the representation to produce the free play of thefaculties, that is, its purposiveness for judgment or for our cognitive faculties;and another in which we claim that that appraisal is in turn one whicheveryone else ought to share. Moreover both of these judgments have a claimto qualify as the judgment of beauty proper, one of them on the grounds that itassesses the subjective purposiveness of the representation of the object, andthe other on the grounds that it claims the universal validity of the feeling ofpleasure. But this seems implausible given that Kant gives no indication thatthe judgment of beauty corresponds to two distinct judgments along theselines: rather, saying that we judge the subjective purposiveness of arepresentation for our cognitive faculties, and saying that we judge that ourpleasure in an object is universally valid, are just two different ways of sayingthat we judge the object to be beautiful.

The question of how Allison understands the relation between the pleasure(or displeasure) and the judgment is further complicated by his holding thatwe can never be certain that we have made a pure judgment of taste and that itis on account of this lack of certainty that the possibility of disagreementabout taste depends. A pure judgment of taste, he says, cannot be in error(pp. 107–110, 189–190); disagreement about beauty can arise only in so far asone party to the disagreement makes an impure judgment of taste andmistakes it for a pure one. But such disagreement can never be definitivelyresolved, because we can never be certain about the purity of our judgment:we must always allow the possibility that our judgment has been “corruptedby some quirky or unnoticed liking” (p. 109) or that, in spite of our bestefforts, we have “failed to abstract completely” from factors pertaining to theagreeableness or goodness of the object perceived (ibid.). It follows from thisthat a judgment of taste, pure or impure, does not itself carry a demand foruniversal agreement. As Allison puts it, “I cannot say that others ought toagree with my aesthetic assessment of an object . . . because I cannot be surein any given case that my judgment of taste is pure” (p. 189). This implies thatthe claim to universal agreement is made, not in the judgment of taste itself,but rather in a higher-order judgment about the judgment of taste: namely thatthe judgment of taste is pure, and hence universally valid. The implication isclear in Allison’s gloss on Kant’s notion of exemplary necessity: “when I takemyself to be making a pure judgment of taste . . . I am claiming to havejudged an object as it ought to be judged, and this is the basis for my demandfor the agreement of others” (p. 146; my emphasis). My claim that my judgingis as it ought to be with respect to the object, and hence that it is universallyvalid, is not, it appears, part and parcel of my pure judgment of taste. Rather itis a claim I make only in judging or “taking myself” to make a pure judgmentof taste.

Putting this together with Allison’s distinction between the pleasure andthe judgment, we end up with a model on which there are no less than three

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judgments involved in ascribing beauty to an object: first the feeling ofpleasure, which judges the subjective purposiveness of the object or itsrepresentation for our cognitive faculties; second, the judgment whichascribes universal validity to the pleasure; and third, the still higher-orderjudgment which claims that the previously mentioned judgment is pure andhence, itself, universally valid. This multiplication of judgments is especiallyproblematic in that each of them accords with one or other of Kant’scharacterizations of a judgment of beauty, so that we cannot easily point tojust one of them as the judgment of beauty proper. As we have already seen,Kant describes the judgment of beauty both as claiming the subjectivepurposiveness of an object or its representation for our cognitive faculties(that is, as equivalent to the first judgment on Allison’s model) and asclaiming the universal validity of the subject’s feeling of pleasure (that is, asequivalent to the second of the three judgments). But in addition, thejudgment of beauty is described by Kant as claiming its own universalvalidity: in taking an object to be beautiful, I take it that everyone should notonly share my pleasure, but that they should also agree with me in judgingthat the object is beautiful. This point, which is implicit in Kant’s frequentcharacterizations of the judgment of beauty as making a claim to universalassent, is brought out explicitly at §19: “the judgment of taste requires[ansinnen] assent of everyone, and whoever declares something to bebeautiful insists [wollen] that everyone ought to approve of the object inquestion and likewise to declare it to be beautiful” (p. 238; first emphasisKant’s, second emphasis mine). For Kant, then, the judgment that one’sjudgment of beauty is universally valid appears to be of a piece with thejudgment of beauty itself, rather than being a higher-order judgment based onthe claim that one’s judgment of beauty is pure. And while it is of course opento Allison to maintain on interpretative grounds that these judgments need tobe distinguished both from each other, and from the judgment of pur-posiveness embodied in the feeling of pleasure, this has the disadvantage ofrendering the notion of a judgment of beauty multiply ambiguous.

The considerations I have raised suggest that Allison’s view on the issuesunder discussion stands in need of clarification. More pointedly, they suggesta tension between, on the one hand, his view that the feeling involved in tasteis intentional or judgmental, a view which is associated with his emphasis onKant’s second-order characterizations of the free play, and, on the other, hiscommitment to a distinction between the feeling and the judgment of beautyproper. If the feeling in taste is intentional, then why does it not, on its own,amount to a judgment of beauty? One response to this tension might be toabandon the claim that the pleasure or other feeling is intentional and thus toadopt a view which is closer to Guyer’s.8 But this, as Allison recognizes, hasconsiderable disadvantages. In particular, if the intentionality of the pleasureis denied, then the pleasure in and of itself can tell us nothing about its status

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which would license a claim to its universal communicability. To make such aclaim, we need to rely on our knowledge of the cause of the pleasure – inparticular, that it is caused by the free play of the faculties rather than byfactors relating to the object’s goodness or agreeableness – and suchknowledge, it would seem, can be arrived at only by empirical means. As aresult, Allison points out, “the judgment of taste loses the very aestheticcharacter on which Kant insists so strongly, becoming instead an empiricalcausal claim, and a rather problematic one at that” (p. 54).

A better response, as I see it, is to retain the intentionality of the pleasure andto abandon the distinction between the pleasure and the judgment. This lastmove requires, as I have already mentioned, that we understand the pleasureas making a claim to its own universal validity. It also requires that weidentify the activity of free play which underlies the feeling of pleasure, withthe very judgment through which the pleasure is claimed to be universallyvalid. Judging an object to be beautiful consists in a single act of taking one’sstate of mind, in that very act of judging, to be universally valid; and it is thisact of judging – an act which is manifested in a feeling of disinterestedpleasure – to which Kant refers when he describes the faculties as engaging in“mere reflection” or free play. Such a view, I believe, is required if we are todo full justice to the intentionality of the pleasure. Moreover, as suggestedabove, the consequent understanding of the free play as a self-referentialactivity allows us to reconcile Kant’s “first-order” and “second-order”characterizations of the free play. And I have argued elsewhere that it is alsocompatible with Kant’s “first-order” characterizations of the free play in thatit allows us to explain what Kant means by “schematizing without a concept”or “exhibiting a concept (undetermined which concept)” in a way that avoidsthe kinds of difficulties discussed earlier in this paper.9

As already noted, however, Allison rejects this approach, in part on theground of its “inherent implausibility” and in part on the ground that “itprecludes the possibility of negative judgments of taste” (p. 131).10 Becausethere are many ways in which my approach might be accused ofimplausibility, and I do not know which particular ways Allison has inmind, I will not attempt to address the first of these points. But I do want tosay something about the second. According to Allison, my account fails toaccommodate negative judgments of taste because it does not allow thepossibility of a universally communicable feeling of displeasure. As he pointsout, “if the pleasure of taste is literally in the universal communicability ofone’s pleasure,” as it is on my view, “then there is no place for an analogousuniversally communicable displeasure” (p. 115). But his own view, he says,does allow for a universally communicable displeasure because it allows thepossibility of claiming universal agreement for a disharmonious, as well asfor a harmonious, relation of imagination and understanding. Imagination andunderstanding are capable not only of furthering one another’s activity, but

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also of “harming” one another in so far as they work at cross purposes (p. 48),and when this happens it can be “felt . . . with a sense of displeasure” (p. 54).It is this “disinterested displeasure” which makes possible negative judgmentsof taste (p. 117).

Allison is quite right that my account fails to accommodate universallycommunicable feelings of displeasure. He is also right, I think, to take it as a“reasonable criterion of any interpretation of Kant’s theory of taste that it beable to account for the possibility of negative judgments of taste” (p. 72). Inparticular, as he points out, we cannot make sense of the idea of disagreementabout taste – an idea which is central to Kant’s account of judgments of taste –if we do not allow the possibility of the judgment that a thing is not beautiful(p. 71). However, it is not obvious that the right way to account for negativejudgments of beauty is by appeal to a feeling of displeasure arising fromdisharmony in the faculties. In the first place, I do not see why such a feelingof displeasure should be – as Allison’s theory requires – universallycommunicable. In his account of §9, Allison interprets Kant as arguing thatthe feeling of pleasure in a positive judgment of taste is universallycommunicable because the pleasure “pertains to cognition”; and this in turn isso because “the harmonious interworking of imagination and understanding isa necessary condition of it [viz. cognition]” (p. 116). Relatedly, in his accountof the deduction of taste he says that we are entitled to claim universalagreement for the pleasure in taste because of its conformity to the“subjective condition (or conditions) of judgment” (p. 176), where thesubjective condition of judgment is in turn explicated as the “harmoniousinterplay of the imagination and the understanding” (p. 170). On the face of it,then, it would seem that the entitlement to claim universal validity for ourfeeling holds only in the case of a feeling which conforms to the subjectivecondition of judgment, that is, a feeling which results from a harmonious,rather than a disharmonious, interplay of the faculties. But Allison takes theentitlement to extend also to the feeling of displeasure associated withdisharmony in the workings of the faculties: the entitlement holds not only forthe pleasure through which we feel conformity to the subjective conditions ofjudgment but also applies “to the displeasure through which a lack ofconformity is felt” (p. 176). And it is not clear why this should be so. How isthe entitlement here supposed to carry over from the harmonious to thedisharmonious case?

Perhaps what Allison has in mind is the following line of argument: if I amentitled to claim universal agreement for the judgment that the activity of myfaculties conforms to the subjective conditions of cognition, then I am, by thesame token, entitled to claim universal agreement for the judgment that theactivity of my faculties fails to conform to those conditions. But on the face ofit, this argument shows only that I am entitled to claim universal agreementfor the judgment that my displeasure results from a disharmonious relation of

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the faculties. It does not show what Allison needs to show, namely that I amentitled to claim universal agreement for the feeling of displeasure itself. Nowthe situation with respect to this argument is different if we assume, as on the“second-order” construal of the free play discussed earlier, that the feelingresults not from the harmony or disharmony in the activity or relationship ofone’s faculties, but rather from the judgment that the activity or relationshipof one’s faculties is harmonious or disharmonious. If we take the pleasure asarising from the recognition that one’s faculties are in harmonious play, ratherthan from the harmonious play itself, then it would seem legitimate tosuppose that the universal communicability of the pleasure extends to thecorresponding displeasure arising from the recognition of disharmoniousplay. But Allison’s argument for the universal communicability of thepleasure seems to assume a first-order, not a second-order construal of the freeplay. The pleasure is universally communicable because it results from aharmonious interworking or interplay of the faculties, and hence “pertains tocognition” or “conforms to the subjective condition of judgment.” There doesnot seem to be any room here for an understanding of the pleasure as due,instead, to the higher-order judgment that one’s faculties are in a harmoniousrelation or that they conform to the subjective condition of cognition.

In the second place, even though Allison is quite right that the kind ofaccount I have defended does not leave room for a universally communicablefeeling of disinterested displeasure, this does not mean that it cannotaccommodate negative judgments of taste. To try to show this, I want toconsider separately the two kinds of negative judgment which Allisonmentions: judgments that an object is ugly, and judgments that an object is notbeautiful. With respect to the first kind of judgment, I would argue that thereis no such thing, for Kant, as a pure judgment of ugliness. The only examplesof ugliness that we find in the Critique of Judgment are of what Kant calls“harmful things” [Schadlichkeiten], for example “the Furies, diseases,devastations of war” (§48, p. 312), where the displeasure involved is clearlyconnected with an interest. Kant also mentions, as a class of ugly things, thosewhich arouse “disgust” [Ekel] (ibid.); here the displeasure would seem to bethe counterpart to pleasure in the agreeable rather than to pleasure in thebeautiful.

Now this does not imply that Kant should not have accommodated, noreven that he did not intend to accommodate, cases of ugliness that do notinvolve reference to an interest. For of course we frequently do judge things tobe ugly without regarding them as bad or harmful, or without their arousingdisgust: we often dislike a pair of shoes, or a dress, or a sofa, even though it iscomfortable, durable, practical, inexpensive and a good match with the colourscheme we have in mind. But such judgments, I want to suggest, aredisanalogous to judgments of beauty because of their context-dependence.Things strike us as ugly, I want to suggest, only because they fail to strike us

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as beautiful in situations where we take a certain degree of beauty to be calledfor (as is generally the case when we are looking for shoes or clothes or homefurnishings). We might be struck by the ugliness of, say, a piece of gravelworn as an earring, or of the institutional-style folding metal chairs a friendhas chosen to put in her newly decorated living-room, or of a sudden episodeof cacophony in a piece of otherwise tonal music. But we are likely to beindifferent to the same thing in contexts where beauty is not expected orrequired: for example when the piece of gravel is part of a gravel path, or themetal chairs are in the school auditorium, or the cacophony is the sound of theorchestra tuning up. There is no positive displeasure associated with theperception of these objects as such. The displeasure arises only when we aredisappointed in our expectations of what, say, jewelry or home furnishings ormusic of a certain kind ought to look or sound like, and in particular whenthey fail to satisfy those expectations by failing to strike us as beautiful.11

If I am right about this disanalogy, then it would seem that judgments of theugly do not need to be considered separately from judgments that a thing isnot beautiful. They simply ascribe the absence of beauty in a situation wherebeauty is required or expected. But this still leaves us with the question ofhow to account for the broader class of judgments that something is notbeautiful. I want to address this question by relating it in turn to a moregeneral difficulty for Kant’s theory of taste. Given Kant’s view thatjudgments of beauty are “subjectively grounded,” and his correlative denialthat beauty is an objective property of things, how can he account for theoccurrence of the predicate “beauty” in contexts where the subject is notexpressing his or her feeling in an immediately given object? For example,how do we make sense of judgments where “beautiful” occurs in theantecedent of a conditional, as in “if the Taj Mahal is beautiful, then I wouldlike to visit it,” or in a comparative judgment, such as “old roses are morebeautiful than hybrid tea roses,” or, to take an even more basic case discussedby Kant himself, in a universal judgment such as “all tulips are beautiful?”12

It seems to me that the problem of judgments of the non-beautiful is bestviewed, not as a sui generis problem requiring appeal to a special feeling ofdispleasure or indifference, but as an example of this more general problem. Ifthe predicate “beauty” is to be understood solely in terms of its role injudgments based on feeling, as Kant’s analysis of it appears to suggest, thenhow can we make sense of its use in a judgment which is not based on feeling,but rather on its absence?

This question is too large to be discussed properly here, but I will try tosketch the outline of a possible answer. This is that, even though the primaryuse of the predicate “beautiful” is in the judgment that a presently givenobject is beautiful, which in turn can be analyzed as based on (or in my view,as identical with) a feeling of disinterested pleasure in an immediately givenobject, we can also employ a derivative concept of beauty which applies to

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just those things to which a judgment of beauty, on its original construal, isappropriate. To say that I would like to visit the Taj Mahal if it is beautiful, isto say that I would like to visit it if it is the kind of thing about which ajudgment of beauty can properly be made. To say that old roses are morebeautiful than hybrid tea roses is to say that a judgment of beauty is moreappropriate, or more likely to be appropriate, to an old rose than to a hybridtea rose. Applying the point to the case with which we are concerned, to saythat something is not beautiful is to say that it is not appropriate to judge it tobe beautiful. It is not to make an aesthetic judgment proper, but rather to makea conceptual or cognitive judgment which denies that the object is one withrespect to which a judgment of beauty, or a feeling of disinterested pleasure,is appropriate.

The answer I am proposing derives some support, albeit very indirect, fromKant’s discussion of “logically universal” judgments of beauty. An aestheticjudgment proper, Kant says, is always singular; the judgment “Roses ingeneral are beautiful” is thus not an aesthetic judgment but an “aestheticallygrounded logical (i.e. cognitive) judgment” (§8, p. 215). Such a judgment canbe made “if the singular representation of the object of the judgment of taste istransformed through comparison into a concept in accordance with theconditions which determine the judgment of taste” (ibid.). Similarly, “alltulips are beautiful” is “not a judgment of taste, but a logical judgment whichmakes the relation of an object to taste into a predicate of things of a certainkind” (§33, p. 285). This discussion suggests that, even though the singularjudgment that something is beautiful must be analyzed as aesthetic and as notinvolving any concept, the possibility of such a judgment allows us to form aderivative concept of beauty which expresses the “relation of an object totaste,” a relation which I take to amount to the appropriateness of a judgmentof beauty with respect to the object. It is this concept which corresponds to thepredicate “beautiful” in logically universal judgments of the kind described inthe passage. But it is not hard to see how we might also invoke this concept toaccount for the other cases we have been discussing, and in particular for thecase where we judge that an object is not beautiful. Such a judgment, wemight likewise say, is not aesthetic because, unlike a judgment of beautyproper, it is not made through feeling. However, it is still “aestheticallygrounded” in that it reflects something about the subject’s feeling:specifically, the absence of the kind of feeling corresponding to a judgmentof beauty proper.

I have attempted in this discussion to bring out some areas of unclarity inAllison’s account of pure judgments of taste. I have argued, more specifically,that there is a tension between two aspects of Allison’s account: hiscommitment to the intentionality of the pleasure involved in a judgment ofbeauty, and his commitment to a distinction between the feeling of pleasureand the judgment of beauty itself. I have suggested that the tension should be

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resolved by abandoning the second commitment, and I have defended myown version of this approach against one of the objections raised against it byAllison, namely that it fails to accommodate negative judgments of taste.There is a great deal more to be said about Allison’s rich and thought-provoking treatment of this area of Kant’s aesthetics, not to mention the manyother issues covered in his book, but it will have to wait for another occasion.

NOTES

1 Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1979), chapter three.

2 See Richard Aquila, “A New Look at Kant’s Aesthetic Judgments,” Essays in Kant’sAesthetics, Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer, eds. (Chicago and London: University of ChicagoPress, 1982). I have argued for a view of this kind in The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory ofCognition (New York and London: Garland Publishing Company, 1990) and in subsequentarticles, in particular “On the Key to Kant’s Critique of Taste,” Pacific PhilosophicalQuarterly 72 (1991) and “Lawfulness without a Law: Kant on the Free Play of Imaginationand Understanding,” Philosophical Topics 25 (1997).

3 References to the Critique of Judgment and to the First Introduction cite the section numberwhere appropriate and the page number according to the pagination of the correspondingvolume of the Akademie edition (volumes 5 and 20 respectively).

4 Allison addresses this question in part by arguing that “if the imagination could not‘schematize without a concept,’ it could not schematize at all” (p. 171), and, relatedly, thatall apprehension must exhibit “an as yet undetermined concept” (pp. 28, 41). Thus allschematism involved in cognition takes place, in a sense, “without a concept.” However, asAllison points out, the schematism without a concept which takes place in the free playdiffers from that required for cognition because it does not “issue in the exhibition of adeterminate concept” but rather in “the exhibition of the form of a concept in general”(p. 171). The possibility of this latter kind of schematism or exhibition remains to beexplained.

5 I have objected along similar lines to accounts of the free play provided by Dieter Henrichand by Paul Crowther; see section I of “Lawfulness Without a Law.”

6 See also Allison’s characterization of the reflection as consisting in “a comparison betweenthe relation of the faculties in their free engagement with a given object or its representationand the ideal frictionless harmony, which maximally facilitates cognition” (p. 75); since thereflection is itself a “free engagement,” this again suggests a self-referential view.

7 See also p. 170, where he distinguishes the verdict from the “act of aesthetic estimation thatissues in the verdict” (although here it is not clear whether the “aesthetic estimation”corresponds to the free play or to some subsequent act of judging). The point is made mostclearly in his “Pleasure and Harmony in Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Critique of the CausalReading” (Kants Aesthetik, Kant’s Aesthetics, L’esthetique de Kant, ed. Herman Parret[Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998]): “it remains necessary to distinguishbetween the feeling (the aesthetic response) and its affirmation in an explicit judgmentclaiming universal validity” (p. 477).

8 Another way to resolve the tension might be to reconstrue the intentionality of the pleasureso that it does not, after all, involve the perception of subjective purposiveness. Perhaps thepleasure might be taken to be an intentional awareness of the activity of one’s faculties inwhich one takes that activity to be freely harmonious, yet without that awareness amountingto an awareness of the representation’s suitability for producing the free harmony; so that afurther act of judgment is required to move from one’s experience of this pleasure to theclaim that the representation of the object is purposive for one’s cognitive faculties or thatthe pleasure is universally valid. But it is hard to see how one could be aware, or judge, thatone’s faculties are in harmonious free play, without being aware, or judging, that they areengaged in an activity which is universally communicable, and hence that the pleasure itself

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is one which everyone ought to share. So, even on this apparently more minimal construal ofthe intentionality of the pleasure, it remains difficult to draw a principled distinction betweenthe pleasure and the judgment.

9 See “Lawfulness without a Law,” op. cit.10 Allison also offers a series of objections to the reading of §9 which I have offered in support

of this view. In particular, he argues: (1) that this reading commits Kant to a non sequitur; (2)that it fails to accord with the drift of the argument at §9; and (3) that, by characterizingpleasure in the beautiful as a pleasure in the universal communicability of one’s mental state,it deprives it of its disinterested nature (p. 114). (1) and (2) cannot be addressed without adetailed examination of the text at §9, which I do not have space for here. To address (3) verybriefly: Allison seems to think that the pleasure, as I have characterized it, is the same as the(interested) pleasure which Kant alludes to at §9 as associated with “our being able tocommunicate” our mental states and as due to man’s “predisposition to society” (§9, p. 218;see also §41). But this is not the case. Pleasure in the beautiful, on my view, is pleasure in the“universal communicability” of one’s state of mind in the sense that it consists in theawareness that everyone ought to share one’s state of mind; whereas the interested pleasureassociated with the predisposition to society is due to the recognition that others do shareone’s state of mind.

11 It might be noted that most of the examples I have given relate to what Kant calls “adherent”or “dependent” beauty as opposed to “free” beauty. But since, as Allison points out, there is apure or disinterested component even in the pleasure associated with dependent beauty, thisdoes not affect the issue under discussion.

12 This is related to a well-known difficulty raised by P.T. Geach for non-descriptivist views inethics; see “Assertion,” Philosophical Review 74 (1965), especially 461ff.

Received 8 December 2002

Hannah Ginsborg, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720-2390, USA. E-mail: ginsborg@socrates.berkeley.edu

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