kant on reconognizing beauty (makkai)

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2009.00356.x

Kant on Recognizing Beauty

Katalin Makkai

Abstract: Kant declares the judgment of beauty to be neither ‘objective’ nor‘merely subjective’. This essay takes up the question of what this might mean andwhether it can be taken seriously. It is often supposed that Kant’s denials of‘objectivity’ to the judgment of beauty express a rejection of realism about beauty.I suggest that Kant’s thought is not to be understood in these terms—that it doesnot properly belong in the arena of debates about the constituents of ‘reality’—motivating the suggestion by first considering a pair of opposing views on thequestion of whether Kant can be understood to develop a real alternative torealism about beauty at all.

And yet a piece of music comes very close to being no more than amedley of sound sensations: from among these sounds we discern theappearance of a phrase and, as phrase follows phrase, a whole and,finally, as Proust put it, a world. (Merleau-Ponty 2004: 99)

1. Kant and Ameriks’s ‘Revisionism’

The distinctive nature of the judgment of beauty is a guiding idea of Kant’sCritique of Judgment.1 But it is also a radical idea, given Kant’s own critical project.For as Kant tells us in his elaboration of its ‘twofold peculiarity’, the judgment ofbeauty is neither ‘objective’ judgment nor ‘merely subjective’ (KU 31: 281, 32: 281and 33: 284). Kant thus appears to be introducing something which, from thepoint of view of the first Critique, ought to be unintelligible: a region of experiencelying somehow between the poles—as they now turn out to be—of objectivityand subjectivity.

The claim that the judgment of beauty is not objective seems to beinterchangeable, for Kant, with the claim that beauty is not ‘a property of theobject’,2 and is closely linked with the thought that as the judgment is ‘neithergrounded on concepts nor aimed at them’ it does not constitute knowledge(cognition) of the object (KU 5: 209). Kant thus contrasts the judgment of beautywith theoretical judgments, including ordinary empirical judgments, as well aspractical judgments. What is ‘connected with the representation’ of the object inthe judging of its beauty is (not a concept, but) pleasure, the only ‘so-calledsensation that can never become a concept of an object’, and through whichtherefore ‘I cognize nothing in the object of the representation’.3 Yet for all that

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the judgment of beauty is not ‘merely subjective’, for it involves a claim to speakwith a ‘universal voice’ (KU 8: 216). Again Kant makes his point by way of acontrast, now with another way of judging aesthetically.

With regard to the agreeable, everyone is content that his judgment, whichhe grounds on a private feeling, and in which he says of an object that itpleases him [dab er ihm gefalle], be restricted merely to his own person.Hence he is perfectly happy if, when he says that sparkling wine fromthe Canaries is agreeable, someone else should improve his expressionand remind him that he should say ‘It is agreeable to me’ . . . . (KU 7: 212)

Kant here ties the agreeable or pleasant—‘that which pleases the senses insensation’ (KU 3: 91)—to a certain spirit of judgment, one in which I take myliking for an object to carry no implication concerning how it will (much lessought to) strike others. The object agrees with me (so to speak); I happen to likeit—this is all I am in a position to say. The judgment of the agreeable is so‘modest’ that it doesn’t even anticipate the agreement of others despite the factthat ‘a quite extensive unanimity is often to be found’. It is in this sense that theground of my judgment is a ‘private feeling’, and that the judgment itself is‘merely private’ (KU 8: 214). Others might be pleased in the same way by thesame thing, but this would not render my feeling any less ‘private’. It is ‘private’not because it cannot be shared, but because its being shared is a matter ofcontingent congruence: how it is with you when you sip this wine is, it turns out,how it is with me too. So ‘[i]t would be folly to dispute the judgment of anotherthat is different from our own in such a matter, with the aim of condemning it asincorrect, as if it were logically opposed to our own’ (KU 7: 97); likewise, anotherjudgment of the object as agreeable would not ‘logically agree’ with our own.

The judgment of beauty, however, is entered as ‘public’:4

It would be ridiculous if (the precise converse) someone who pridedhimself on his taste thought to justify himself thus: ‘This object (thebuilding we are looking at, the clothing someone is wearing, the poemthat is presented for judging) is beautiful for me.’ For he must not call itbeautiful if it merely pleases him. [. . .I]f he pronounces something to bebeautiful, then he expects the very same liking of others; he judges notmerely for himself, but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were aproperty of things. That is why he says: The thing is beautiful, and doesnot count on the agreement of others with his judgment of liking becausehe has frequently found them to be agreeable with his own, but ratherdemands it from them. (KU 7: 212–13)5

In my judgment of beauty, I do not regard agreement as likely. I regard it asnecessary, and I point to the object—‘the thing’ itself—as that which makes itnecessary.6

Insofar as it demands agreement, the judgment of beauty is ‘similar’ toobjective judgments (cognition), and to empirical judgments in particular. For

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ordinary empirical judgments demand agreement, as Kant illustrates with anexample: ‘A singular judgment of experience, e.g., one made by someone whoperceives a mobile droplet of water in a rock crystal, rightly demands that anyoneelse must also find it so’.7 That’s why Kant says that we treat the judgment ofbeauty as if it were objective, and as if beauty were a property of the object.8 Butwe don’t treat the judgment as if it were objective (and beauty as if it were aproperty) in every respect. While we accept perceptual judgments based on whatothers see, we do not allow that a judgment of beauty can be founded on thepleasure of others, much less on would-be rules of beauty: neither offers asubstitute (or a basis) for one’s own pleasure in the object. On this front, Kantsays, the judgment behaves as if it were ‘merely subjective’.9

Kant’s example of the rock crystal is meant to bring into sharp focus a crucialpoint. In the case of the judgment about the rock crystal, what is demanded is the‘connection’ of a concept with the representation of the object: others are torecognize the concept ‘contains a mobile droplet of water’ as applying to this rockcrystal. But ‘what is strange and anomalous’ about the judgment of beauty is:

. . . that it is not an empirical concept, but rather a feeling of pleasure(consequently not a concept at all) which, through the judgment of taste,is nevertheless to be required of everyone and combined with itsrepresentation, just as if it were a predicate connected with the cognitionof the object. (KU VII: 191)

How could such a demand—a demand for pleasure—be anything other thansheer presumption? Answering this question means, for Kant, providing thejudgment of beauty with a deduction of its own. Both valences of ‘peculiarity’(Eigentumlichkeit) are therefore apt: what is peculiar about the judgment of beautyis precisely what is peculiar to it.

But does Kant succeed in establishing that the judgment of beauty has thedistinctive character he claims for it, and, specifically, that it should beunderstood as not ‘objective’? Karl Ameriks develops an impressive argumentfor concluding that Kant does not. In Ameriks’s view, the considerations thatKant adduces in support of denying objectivity to the judgment of beauty fail tomake the case: in no substantive sense of ‘objectivity’ does he give us reason towithhold the title from the judgment of beauty. Consider, first, the claim that thejudgment of beauty does not proceed by applying a concept. Ameriks argues thatit is at most in a merely stipulative sense of ‘concept’ that the judgment of beautycan be construed as distinct from concept application, much less as devoid ofconcepts at all. At best, what Kant shows is just that certain kinds or uses ofconcepts are not involved, or that beauty cannot be determined from conceptsalone but also requires particular sensory input. But such features are hardlyrestricted to the judgment of beauty: the latter is true of empirical judgments,which Kant himself calls ‘objective’.10 Regarding the supposedly special status ofpleasure, Ameriks objects that Kant simply assumes without warrant thatpleasure ‘cannot have an objective reference’, that (in other words) it cannot

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constitute a mode of awareness of a feature belonging to an object (Ameriks2003a: 303). And while we can grant that pleasure is ‘subjective’ if by this wemean that it ‘exists in us’, the concession is harmless, since on the Kantian viewall empirical judgments involve elements that are ‘subjective’ in this sense.Ameriks rejects two further kinds of considerations on the grounds that they tooare not unique to the judgment of beauty. Kant notes that we don’t make aestheticjudgments by surveying and comparing the opinions of others, but ‘one couldargue similarly that there are some non-aesthetic judgments (e.g. immediateobservation reports) where non-reliance on a comparison of others’ reports is alsoguaranteed as a matter of meaning’ (Ameriks 2003a: 300–1). And the apparentnon-measurability of beauty and absence of laws of beauty which Kant citesattach to so-called secondary qualities as well (Ameriks 2003a: 300–2).

For all that Kant says (or that one could say on his behalf), Ameriks concludes,beauty—and aesthetic qualities more generally—can be taken to be ‘objective’ and‘conceptual’. Indeed, Ameriks calls for a ‘mild revisionism’ in our reading of Kantwhich involves conceding that ‘precisely for Kant’s own purposes it wouldultimately be better to say that taste is conceptual and objective’, despite Kant’sfrequent remarks to the contrary.11 While this approach foregoes taking the text at itsletter, according to Ameriks it is nevertheless more faithful than its main alternativescan be to some of Kant’s own deepest commitments. Thus mild revisionismstraightforwardly upholds the basic tenet of the first Critique that judgment requiresconcepts, unlike the ‘orthodox’ approach which ‘holds on to the language of non-conceptuality and non-objectivity, but at the price of making the nature of Kantiantaste unduly mysterious’.12 And by contrast with a ‘strong’ revisionism that beginsby abandoning Kant’s idea of the judgment of beauty as laying claim to universalvalidity and hence forfeits the motivation for the deduction of the judgment ofbeauty, mild revisionism preserves both (Ameriks 2003b: 308–9).

Now because the term ‘objective’ is hardly transparent, it is not immediatelyobvious what we commit ourselves to if we heed Ameriks’s call.13 Ameriks’sown glosses are compatible with understanding the judgment of beauty’s‘objectivity’ to consist in its being subject to a standard of appropriateness ofsome sort (other than that of truth).14 But Ameriks might have in mind the morerobust notion of aptness for truth. Then accepting beauty to be ‘objective’ meansgranting that it is ‘part of the fabric of the world’, available to be encountered byus.15 That Ameriks intends the more robust notion is suggested by his remarksthat ‘a Kantian ought to acknowledge the objectivity of taste (which, in thiscontext, means that it rests on objectively beautiful and immediately perceivablenatural forms)’ and that taste involves the perception of aesthetic form (Ameriks2003c: 293 and 2003b: 318).

2. Ginsborg’s Defense of Kant

Hannah Ginsborg has challenged Ameriks’s assessment as failing to appreciatethe ‘powerful reasons’ for denying the objectivity of beauty that flow from the

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autonomy of the judgment of beauty.16 It is a central insight of Kant’s thatautonomy is a condition of the judgment of beauty, Ginsborg argues, but‘objectivism’ or ‘realism’ about beauty—the contention that beauty resides in theworld—cannot explain this condition, and so Kant has (and gives us) seriousgrounds for rejecting it.17

The condition of autonomy received brief mention above. It is the requirementthat one judge of beauty for oneself, on the basis of one’s own pleasure in theobject and not on the basis of what others say or feel about it. Take someone whodoes not find ‘a building, a view, or a poem beautiful’ although ‘a hundred voices. . . all praise it highly’.18 He can, of course, pretend to like the object. He ‘can evenbegin to doubt whether he has adequately formed his taste by acquaintance witha sufficient number of objects of a certain kind (just as one who believes himselfto recognize something in the distance as a forest, which everyone else regards asa town, doubts the judgment of his own eyes).’ But the person seeking to identifywhat lies in the distance can rationally take the fact that everyone—or manyothers—see a town as grounds for adopting their judgment and abandoning ‘thejudgment of his own eyes’. He can discount his own experience. This is what theperson judging of beauty cannot do.

[W]hat he does see clearly is this: that the approval of others provides novalid proof for the judging of beauty, that others may perhaps see andobserve for him, and that what many have seen in one way what hebelieves himself to have seen otherwise, may serve him as a sufficientground of proof for a theoretical, hence a logical judgment, but that whathas pleased others can never serve as the ground of aesthetic judgment.(KU 33: 284)

When judging of beauty we are bound to our own experience.Ginsborg reads Ameriks as arguing not merely for objectivism about beauty,

but also for a particular substantive account of beauty. Pairing a construal ofsecondary qualities as ‘simply a particular complex of primary qualities’19 withthe thought that beauty can be understood on analogy with secondary qualities,this account takes beauty to be a complex of primary qualities that causes us toexperience ‘impressions of beauty, that is, feelings of pleasure of a certain kind’.20

But this account, Ginsborg argues, cannot uphold the condition of autonomy. Forit must allow that ‘the feelings of other people would provide reasons for me tojudge one way or the other on the question of an object’s beauty. This is becausethey would serve as evidence for the presence or absence of the pleasure-causingproperty’.21 The fact that so many others find (say) the building before us to bebeautiful would give me reason to accede to their judgment, just as would thefact that they all see it as red (rather than golden), or as a church (rather than alibrary).

For a version of objectivism that looks better suited to deal with the autonomychallenge, Ginsborg turns to the theory of aesthetic value—and of value moregenerally—elaborated (without explicit reference to Kant’s aesthetics) in the



work of John McDowell and David Wiggins.22 As does Ameriks, McDowell andWiggins appeal to an analogy with secondary qualities in thinking aboutbeauty—values more generally—as ‘part of the fabric of the world’. But theydeny something which the identification of beauty with a complex of primaryqualities entails: that secondary qualities and values ‘can in principle becharacterized in a way that makes no reference to sensation or feeling’ (Ginsborg1998: 455). On the contrary, for secondary qualities as for values ‘no adequateconception of what it is for a thing to possess it is available except in terms of howthe thing would, in suitable circumstances, affect a subject—a sentient being’(McDowell 1998a: 113). For example, what it is for an object to be red—an object’sbeing red—is understood in terms of its being such as to look red in certaincircumstances. Values and secondary qualities thus stand in an essential orinternal relation to our sensibility.

While they are internal to our sensibility, on this approach, values andsecondary qualities are nevertheless real (part of the world) in their own right.The core of the approach is its call for the reconception (or the recovery of aconception) of the mind-independence which characterizes reality. For (so itargues) on the orthodox conception of reality—on which what is real would haveto be ‘like a primary quality in being simply there, independently of humansensibility’ or ‘brutely and absolutely there’ (McDowell 1998b: 132 and 133)—thereality of a quality will seem impossible to reconcile with its internality tosensibility except by postulating mysterious entities together with a mysteriousfaculty whereby we know of them (‘an unattractive intuitionistic realism’)(McDowell 1998c: 157). The thought is that this underlying and fateful ‘primaryquality model for reality’ (McDowell 1998b: 147) is all but pervasively taken forgranted, as though it required no justification, and so must be brought to light,exposed (in the first place) as a model. We are to recognize that it is notcompulsory, that it can (and indeed should) be given up.23 The spirit of theenterprise is to recover the richer conception of reality revealed as available whenwe abandon the artificial constraints imposed through the impoverishing model.

The upshot (for our purposes) can be specified by drawing a distinctionbetween two senses of ‘objectivity’ and hence of ‘subjectivity’. The first hasalready been mentioned: a quality is subjective in the first sense insofar as it isinternally related to our sensibility as described above (and objective otherwise).A quality is objective in the second sense insofar as it is ‘there’ independently ofany particular apparent experience of it or ‘there to be experienced, as opposed tobeing a mere figment of the subjective state that purports to be an experience ofit’ (McDowell 1998b: 136). ‘An object’s being such as to look red is independent ofits actually looking red to anyone on any particular occasion’ (McDowell 1998b:134), and so redness is objective in this second sense. The fact that secondaryqualities and values are subjective in the first sense (sensibility-internal) isperfectly compatible with their being objective in the second (individual-independent); objectivity in the first sense is not a condition of objectivity in thesecond. And the central proposal is that objectivity in the second sense capturesall that we genuinely need or should want—all that bears wanting—in a notion of

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reality. An experience is ‘of an objective reality’ when its object is independent ofany particular purported experience of it.24

Recall that the point of Ginsborg’s introduction of the McDowell and Wigginsapproach was to develop an aesthetic objectivism or realism that is notvulnerable, as the version Ginsborg attributes to Ameriks is, to allowing apreponderance of disagreement to give me reason to discount my ownexperience. Now the proposal as sketched thus far will not accomplish thisend. After all, like that earlier version it has pressed the idea of construing beautyon analogy with secondary qualities, and no one would deny that others canjudge for me in the case of secondary qualities. The viability of this proposal as anadvance over the version Ginsborg attributes to Ameriks depends on locating arelevant disanalogy between secondary qualities and beauty. And the McDowelland Wiggins approach highlights a disanalogy that appears to fit the bill. Tomake a secondary quality judgment is to judge the object to be such as to elicit acertain response. But to judge something to be beautiful is to judge it to be such asto merit or make appropriate a certain response, specifically a certain feeling ofpleasure (McDowell 1998b: 143). This disanalogy reflects the special way inwhich value judgments are regarded as open to criticism. One might be faultedfor failing to appreciate an object’s beauty (or a person’s bravery), for failing (thatis) to meet it with the response it merits. There is no correlate to this whensomeone is taken to fail to see something as red; at most we will say, rather, thatshe would see it as red if her color perception were normal. The disanalogyblocks the challenge, Ginsborg argues, to which the account she attributes toAmeriks is vulnerable. It is not irrational for me to remain unmoved by the factthat many (even all) others do not find beautiful what I find beautiful: I mightbelieve that they are all failing to give the object the response it merits.

But while Ginsborg points out that this revised objectivism is an improvementover its predecessor, her real aim is to show that even so it—and indeed anyobjectivism—cannot contend with an implication of the condition of autonomythat Kant does not mention explicitly: that I am barred from judging to bebeautiful (or not beautiful) something which I do not myself experience. SupposeI am told by many maximally reliable sources that an object I have not seen isbeautiful. In terms of the approach we are now considering, what I am being toldis that the object merits a certain kind of pleasure. Why should this not constituterational grounds for me to judge that it does indeed merit that pleasure, eventhough I have not seen it myself? The route to discounting the responses of othersthat was available in the case in which I met with disagreement is no longeravailable, for now I do not have a countervailing response of my own on which torely. So I ‘would seem to have no reason not to concur—at least provisionally—with the general verdict’ (Ginsborg 1998: 462).

In Ginsborg’s view, this condition—that I must experience the object in orderto judge of its beauty—poses a serious problem for objectivism about beauty ingeneral. Ginsborg endorses McDowell’s specification of independence fromindividual experience as a requirement of a quality’s objectivity (objectivity asreality): a quality that is part of the world must be independent of each particular



apparent experience of it. But it is just because of this requirement that anyvariety of objectivism will be at a loss to account for autonomy’s condition ofexperience: ‘If the quality were genuinely independent of the experience, thenthere would be no reason, at least in principle, why someone should not assertthe presence of the quality itself without herself having had the experience’(Ginsborg 1998: 461). Kant (as Ginsborg reads him) denies that beauty meets thisrequirement of independence, and that is why he denies objectivity to beauty andits judgment (Ginsborg 1998: 458–9). While the experience of beauty presentsitself to us ‘as awareness of some quality in the object that is independent of theexperience’, the matter is not as the phenomenology would have it: ‘the qualityapparently perceived in the experience is not in fact independent of it’ (Ginsborg1998: 461). The negation of the independence claim is the claim that beauty—anobject’s being beautiful—depends on some particular experience through whichit is apparently perceived. It should be noted that Ginsborg takes a further step,for she holds that beauty is dependent on each particular apparent experienceof it.25

This is a surprising proposal. There is reason to believe that it cannot pair withallowing the judgment of beauty to make a full-blooded claim to universalvalidity. For what Ginsborg denies to beauty seems to be a condition that aquality must meet not merely if it is to be real, but if its judgment is to be so muchas open to criticism. Thus an antirealist account which acknowledges thejudgment of beauty to be assessable as better or worse must (so it would seem)suppose that an object’s being beautiful—that is, its being appropriately or aptlyjudged beautiful—is independent of any particular experience of it as beautiful.26

In other words, denying beauty’s independence from individual experiencewould apparently preclude a conception of its judgment as subject to any sort ofstandard (e.g., appropriateness), not merely a standard of correctness (truth).Contrast Ginsborg’s objection to the McDowell and Wiggins approach with theline of criticism that the approach could be said most naturally to invite, and thattends in fact to orient its critics of either antirealist or realist persuasion. On thatline—which the McDowell and Wiggins approach would regard as internal to itspoint to anticipate and defuse—the view of value as independent of theindividual’s experience is unproblematic; what is balked at is the unfoundedinsistence (so goes the charge) that this condition of appropriateness orcorrectness can do, or replace, the metaphysical work required of a genuinealternative to antirealism.

The puzzle concerns how beauty could be denied to be independent of theindividual’s experience without forfeiting its judgment’s claim to speak with auniversal voice. After all, McDowell (as we saw) aligns what lacks suchindependence with the ‘mere figment’ of a subjective state purporting to be anexperience of it (a hallucination, for example). What Kant calls pleasure in theagreeable does not purport to be an experience of a feature of the world, so in thisregard it is unlike the hallucination. Still, on a narrow construal of the agreeablean object’s being agreeable (to S) means, simply, that it is experienced asagreeable by S. Then the agreeable depends on a particular experience of it as

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agreeable: the object is agreeable (to me) only in virtue of my experiencing it asagreeable, that is, my receiving pleasure in my perception of it.27 Like ahallucination or an after-image, agreeableness does not exist apart from beingexperienced. If I don’t find an object to be agreeable (to me), it isn’t; my finding itagreeable makes it agreeable (that is, agreeable to me). The judgment of theagreeable is always (properly speaking) the judgment that something is agreeable‘to me’, the spirit of judgment which Kant says would be ‘ridiculous’ with respectto the beautiful. The question, then, is whether Ginsborg’s proposal can escapefolding the beautiful in with the agreeable, so that a beautiful object is, properly,beautiful ’for’ me or ’for’ us (who find it so).

Ginsborg does not explain how her account bears out the claim that beauty isnot independent of each apparent experience of it (or the stronger claim that it isdependent on each apparent experience of it). In the following section, I considerGinsborg’s account in some detail with an eye to this question. (There I arguefrom grounds internal to that account that it does not succeed in making goodeither claim, and—furthermore—that it does not succeed in making good eitherclaim, and—furthermore—that it does not succeed in avoiding objectivism.). FirstI want to return to her thought that objectivism is, after all, vulnerable to theautonomy challenge, since it is unable to explain why someone requiresexperience of an object in order to judge of its beauty (or lack thereof). Ginsborgsimply asserts, as though it required no defense, that the objectivist—that is, thetheorist who thinks of beauty as in the world—‘cannot explain why an individualhuman being should be limited to his or her own experience as a basis for judgingthat beauty is present’, and specifically can have ‘no reason’ for barring someonefrom asserting something to be beautiful without experiencing it for herself.28 Butis it obvious that the objectivist is empty-handed?

Consider the following outline of a defense of autonomy, which I think has atleast a claim to plausibility, and which is open to (but not restricted to) theobjectivist. Value judgment in general is a matter of assessment or appraisal.When it is voiced, a value judgment is a proclamation or pronouncementconcerning its object. Value judgment, in short, involves passing judgment, aposition one can be entitled to take only if one understands oneself to havereasons for one’s judgment.29 This rules out value judgment on the basis oftestimony. Specifically, testimony is not a basis for judging beauty, because it doesnot transmit reasons for finding the thing to be beautiful. If I do not have reasonsfor finding a speech to be cowardly or a painting to be beautiful, then I am not ina position to judge the speech to be cowardly or the painting to be beautiful;indeed I cannot be said to find it cowardly (beautiful).30 Then might not someoneoffer me a description of the object—one that does not invoke beauty (or otherqualities that I cannot judge on the basis of testimony)—that provides me withthe reasons I would need to judge of its beauty? What rules this out is that onecannot understand any such description apart from experience of the object;apart from experience of the object one does not know what those descriptionsmean. The idea has, I think, some intuitive appeal. There is a sequence in TheGeneral in which a rebuffed Buster Keaton sits on a nearby standing train’s drive-



rod to give himself over to a state of sorrowful absorption so deep that he thenfails to notice the sharp rise and fall of his perch as the train is set into motion. Iwould call this a sequence of beauty; there are others. But if I try to imagine thatI’ve not seen the film, and that someone describes the sequence to me in greatdetail—adducing (say) Keaton’s forlorn unseeing gaze, or the toy-likeness withwhich he is hoisted—I feel that apart from having seen it for myself I can’t knowwhat she means by ‘the forlornness of his gaze’, ‘the toy-like motion’, and so on. Idon’t know what those words pick out unless I’ve seen Keaton’s forlornnessmyself. I would, of course, understand the words. I know what toy-likeness andexpressions of forlornness are. To possess such understanding is not tounderstanding the description I’m offered, although it is a condition of that.Arnold Isenberg offers a way of spelling this out. By contrast with ‘ordinary’communication, critical description—the description the critic proffers in supportof her judgment—does not designate the quality it communicates (or is meant tocommunicate). Its point, rather, is to get us to see—to give us directions forperceiving—a quality (Isenberg 1973: 162). We do see the quality by means ofunderstanding the quality that the words designate, but the two are not the same;one may grasp what the words designate (what a forlorn face is) and perhapseven see that they fit the object (see that this is a forlorn face) without graspingthe quality the critic seeks to communicate. ‘[T]he critic’s meaning is ‘‘filled in,’’‘‘rounded out,’’ or ‘‘completed’’ by the act of perception, which is performed notto judge the truth of the description but, in a certain sense, to understand it’(Isenberg 1973: 163). Her words need to be filled in not because critical languageis (either contingently or inherently) inadequate to the task of meaning and so ofcommunication but because this is what meaning and communication are in thisrealm; this is how the critical (‘aesthetic’) meaning of words is determined. Thecritical meaning of the words is a matter of ‘experienced contents’ or ‘sensorycontents’.31 On this view, if I do not have experience of an object at all, then in animportant sense I cannot understand the reasons someone might advance forjudging it to be beautiful.

3. Ginsborg’s Account: A Closer Look

How can Ginsborg deny (on Kant’s behalf) that beauty is independent ofindividual experience, while maintaining that the judgment of beauty makes aclaim to universal validity? Her initial specifications of her interpretation fuelrather than answer the question, since (at first glance) they seem to place itdecidedly on the side of what Ginsborg calls ‘objectivism’. Indeed, Ginsborg’sreading of Kant shares a number of important features with the accountsuggested by McDowell and Wiggins. Not merely does Kant’s judgment ofbeauty represent something as being the case, according to Ginsborg. ForGinsborg’s Kant as for McDowell and Wiggins, to experience an object asbeautiful is to be aware of something about it, where this awareness takes theform of a feeling of pleasure. And there are more specific points of similarity. As

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Ginsborg reads Kant, what I am aware of through the feeling of pleasure is thatthe object merits that feeling of pleasure (or, equivalently, that the pleasure isappropriate to the object).32

In fact, for Ginsborg the experience of an object as beautiful ‘qualif[ies] as aperception’ of the object.33 But the construal of the experience of beauty asawareness or perception seems impossible to square with the denial that beautyis a feature of objects (much less with the denial that it is independent of theindividual’s experience): surely it entails that the object’s beauty is there to beperceived? What is supposed to block this consequence—and more generally toseparate her approach from that of McDowell and Wiggins—is the ‘self-referential character’ of the awareness which, on Ginsborg’s reading, constitutesthe experience of beauty (Ginsborg 1998: 465).

Within a discussion that he declares to hold the ‘key to the critique of taste’,Kant suggests that the experience of beauty involves a distinctive mutualengagement—a harmonious free play—of the cognitive faculties of imaginationand understanding (KU 9: 216). It is this notion of free play that Ginsborginterprets as a self-referential state of mind, wherein one is ‘aware that one’spresent state of awareness is appropriate given one’s current objectiveenvironment’ (or, simply, ‘appropriate to the object’).34 This state of mind‘consists, phenomenologically, in a feeling of pleasure in’ the object (Ginsborg1991: 299). The identification of the state with pleasure, together with the fact thatit is awareness of its own appropriateness, allows us to put it this way: pleasurein the beautiful ‘consists in a reflective awareness of its own appropriateness orlegitimacy with respect to the object’ (Ginsborg 1998: 463). The claim ofappropriateness (or legitimacy) is meant to capture what Kant figures as thejudgment of beauty’s claim to universal validity: when I feel pleasure in thebeautiful with respect to an object, what I am aware of is that anyone whoperceives the object ‘ought to experience the same pleasure as I do’ (Ginsborg1998: 463).

The idea that the awareness constituting the experience of beauty refers toitself does not yet distinguish this account from the McDowell and Wigginsapproach. What does single it out is its construal of the awareness as ‘purely’ self-referential (Ginsborg 1998: 306). The state of mind does not simply involve orconstitute awareness of its own appropriateness: it consists in this awareness.35

We are not to imagine a state of mind directed to an object which represents thatobject in some particular way or which manifests some particular feeling ofpleasure in addition to making a claim to its own appropriateness to the object.There is nothing more to the state of mind—or the pleasure that it is experiencedas—than the claim to its own legitimacy: ‘I take my mental state in perceiving anobject to be universally [valid], where my mental state is nothing more than themental state of performing that very act of judgment, that is, of taking my mentalstate in the object to be universally [valid]’.36 The judgment of beauty, or theexperience of beauty—these are one and the same; they do not come apart, forGinsborg— is ‘a judgment which, in effect, claims nothing but its own universalvalidity’ (Ginsborg 1991: 300; emphasis added).



Although the fundamental position remains the same, some of its elements aremodified in Ginsborg 1997. Here the self-referential act of judging is elaborated interms which explicitly invoke the imagination. When I make a judgment ofbeauty, I take my imaginative activity to be appropriate to (universally valid withrespect to) the object.37 More specifically, I take the activity of my imagination tobe as it ought to be ‘in the primitive sense’, that is ‘to set a standard for how myor anyone else’s imagination ought to function with respect to the object whichelicits it’ rather than to conform to some antecedent standard (Ginsborg 1997: 70).

Ginsborg’s account is evidently intended to accommodate Kant’s separation ofthe judgment of beauty from the ‘merely subjective’ judgment of the agreeable(since it builds the claim to universal validity into the judgment of beauty, as itscontent). But it is as yet unclear why Ginsborg is entitled to say either that thejudgment of beauty is not the claim that ‘beauty is present’, or that althoughpleasure in the beautiful consists in awareness it ‘does not constitute awarenessof any feature of the object’.38 It is worth noting that elsewhere Ginsborg’sdefense (on Kant’s behalf) of the judgment’s lack of objectivity does not invokethe denial of beauty’s independence from the individual’s experience. Instead itproceeds by way of an interpretation of Kant’s argument from the absence ofconcepts, which takes the following shape in Ginsborg 1997.39 As we’ve seen, forGinsborg my experience of an object as beautiful consists in my taking theimaginative activity the object elicits in me to set a standard for how it, and theimaginative activity of anyone else perceiving the object, ought to be. Nowaccording to Ginsborg I don’t have a ‘determinate’ conception of how myimaginative activity ought to be, and that just means that I don’t have a conceptof how it ought to be. Consequently I don’t perceive the object as having ‘anydeterminate property’. Hence my experience ‘can yield no objective cognition’ ofthe object.

It is not that I don’t have any conception at all of how my imaginative activityought to be; the point, rather, is that I have merely an ‘indeterminate conception’:‘I have no conception of how it ought to be except that afforded by the example ofmy activity itself: namely, the indeterminate conception that it ought to be thisway’ (1997: 70). What makes this conception ‘indeterminate’? The key seems to bethat it is wholly dependent on my ‘pointing’ to my instance of it. I have no graspof how my imaginative activity ought to be—no grasp of the appropriate kind ofimaginative activity—that is independent of my pointing to my instance of it.This is not because (say) the content to be picked out is too rich to be otherwiseconveyed. Something like the contrary: there is no determinate content to thestandard I am invoking, because there is no determinate content to the way myimaginative activity ought to be.40 The absence of any determinate content stemsfrom the ‘purely self-referential’ nature of the claim. Perhaps the point could beput this way: there is no determinate content to how my imaginative activityought to be because there is no determinate content to how it is, inasmuch as itconsists in the purely self-referential claim.

The argument turns on the idea that the content of my claim has to bespecifiable or graspable otherwise than self-referentially if it is to count as

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‘determinate’, and hence as the use of a concept. But the justification for this ideais missing.41 (Ginsborg sometimes says something stronger about the claim Imake in my judgment of beauty: not just that it lacks determinate content, butthat it lacks content altogether. This, however, seems misleading. After all, it doessay something about the object and about the kind of feeling it merits, and so (atleast in this sense) has content. Content that is grasped or specified self-referentially is not the same as sheer lack of content: only in the former case is aclaim—a judgment—made at all.42) And even if we admit that Ginsborg hascaptured a sense of ‘concept’ in which the judgment of beauty lacks a concept, itis not obvious that this is the sense of ‘concept’ that is relevant to settling thequestion of whether or not the experience of beauty ascribes a property to theobject. It is, of course, a fundamental Kantian tenet that a quality’s being part ofthe fabric of the world—its being objective in that sense—requires that it beascribed by way of a concept. But it is not self-evident that the sense of ‘concept’on which this tenet rests corresponds to that which Ginsborg employs.Ginsborg’s sense might well be more stringent than Kant’s tenet requires.

Let’s return to the concern which most directly motivated this closer look atGinsborg’s account, Ginsborg’s claim that an object’s being beautiful is notindependent of each apparent experience of it as beautiful. As I mentioned above,Ginsborg does not specify how this claim is to be borne out. Note that theconsiderations just canvassed do not help in this regard. Suppose that I cannotgrasp or specify the imaginative activity the object merits except by pointingpurely self-referentially to my instance of it: it does not follow that its being themerited activity is dependent on my, or any, particular experience.43 Nor doesGinsborg explain how the claim can be advanced without conceding thebeautiful to be, properly, beautiful ‘for’ those who find it so. But we can perhapsreconstruct the approach she might take to these questions by drawing on herremarks regarding the judgment of beauty’s title to correctness.

According to Ginsborg, a judgment of beauty is always correct.44 To findsomething to be beautiful (to make a judgment of beauty) is ipso facto to judgecorrectly. To ‘apparently’ perceive something as beautiful is to perceive it asbeautiful—which is to say that there is no such thing as merely ‘apparently’perceiving something as beautiful.45 Crucially, the notion of correctness invokedhere is full-blown. That is, the point is not that being found to be beautiful is allthat is required for what counts as ’correctness’ in this region (so that thejudgment is correct ’for’ the judge). If someone finds an object to be beautifulthen it is correctly found beautiful, which is to say that it is beautiful not ‘for’ thatparticular judge but tout court. It is then a sufficient condition of an object’s beingbeautiful (tout court) that it be judged to be beautiful. And to deny that an object’sbeing beautiful is independent of each apparent experience of it as beautiful is tosay that it is a necessary condition of an object’s being beautiful—where, again,this means beautiful tout court—that it be apparently experienced, hence (we cannow say) genuinely experienced, as beautiful. In other words, an object isbeautiful when and only when it is experienced or (equivalently, for Ginsborg)judged to be beautiful.46



My sense is that Ginsborg wants to say, further, that what makes somethingbeautiful is its being judged to be beautiful. So I gather from the stretch ofreasoning in which Ginsborg ascribes to Kant the view that there is afundamental principle of judgment (the principle that we are licensed to takeour imaginative activity in general to set a normative standard) and that to makea judgment of beauty is to realize an activity of judgment which is such as toconstitute an ’application’ of that principle.47 For reasons related to a worry Idiscuss below, I don’t know how to fill in the details, but the general idea (if Iunderstand) is that the principle of judgment somehow confers validity on theactivity which corresponds to the (to any) judgment of beauty. Given that anobject’s being beautiful depends on its being judged to be beautiful, thesuggestion seems to be that it is the very making or performance of the judgmentof beauty which—thanks to a fundamental principle—makes it correct, makes(that is) the object beautiful. Contrast the sense of ‘finding it so is what makes itso’ that applies to the agreeable (narrowly construed). There my finding it so issimply what it means for it to be so (which is why it is so only ‘for me’). Whethersomething is agreeable is determined by the experience of the individual askingthe question. Whether it is beautiful is not determined by, and in particular doesnot depend upon, the experience of the individual asking the question. One canfail to find beautiful something that is beautiful, something, in other words, thatone ought to find beautiful.

Such considerations begin to address our second question (How is Ginsborg’saccount supposed to prevent beauty from being ’for’ its judges?). While theyspeak to our leading question (How is the account supposed to substantiate theclaim that beauty is not independent of the experience of it?), it is less clear thatthey support the stronger claim which, as we’ve seen, Ginsborg enters: thatbeauty is dependent on the experience of each individual who makes a judgmentof beauty. Suppose that you make a judgment of beauty with respect tosomething. On this picture, it is then correctly judged beautiful: it is beautiful.Suppose that I, in turn, also find it to be beautiful. It is hard to see why its beingbeautiful would depend on my particular experience as well as yours. After all, Imight not have judged it beautiful; I might not even have had a chance toexperience it—yet for all that it is beautiful. So perhaps it would be more accurateto this picture to say that an object’s being beautiful depends on someone’sexperience of it as beautiful (the first one to judge it to be beautiful), or that itdepends on that kind of experience.

Clearly it won’t suit Ginsborg’s aims if a condition of the possibility ofperforming a judgment of beauty is a prior fact of the object’s being beautiful:that would short-circuit the attempt to ground the object’s being beautiful on themaking of the judgment, and it would convert the account into a version of whatGinsborg calls ’objectivism’. The more serious problem I now want to consider isthat such short-circuiting seems unavoidable. Whether I make a judgment ofbeauty about a given object is not just up to me.48 I cannot make the judgment ofbeauty about whatever object I choose. As Ginsborg allows, if I am to judge anobject to be beautiful it must in fact elicit in me the self-reflective imaginative

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activity—the imaginative activity that constitutes the judgment of beauty. But ifthat is so, then, furthermore, its eliciting that imaginative activity in me has toreflect its being such as to (or disposed to) elicit it in me, and in any perceiver,given the right conditions. For it is not enough that my judging something to bebeautiful be (at least in part) out of my hands; what’s also needed is that it be (inpart) up to the object and not, say, a matter of chance. After all, my judgment ofbeauty demands of any perceiver of that object that she respond with myimaginative activity. Unless the object plays its part in allowing the perceiver tosatisfy that demand, neither the demand nor the judgment will be well-grounded. The judgment must be arbitrary neither on my end nor on the world’s.

The ‘right conditions’ just mentioned include the obvious conditions ofperception: adequate lighting, and so on. But they must also include theperceiver’s doing her part. The perceiver must have a ‘part’ of her own to carryout, some work to do beyond getting in the line of fire. Otherwise there won’t beany sense in which her imaginative activity is a response that reflects the exerciseof her powers of discernment (‘taste’), as opposed to a reaction merely wrestedfrom her. So, putting all of this together: if I am to judge an object to be beautiful,it must be such as to elicit that imaginative activity in any perceiver who does herpart, who observes it discerningly (and in conditions adequate to perception; Ileave this sort of qualifier implicit from now on). Now that place for theperceiver’s part is precisely what ‘merits’ records: the object’s being such as toelicit that imaginative activity in an observer who does her part is its meriting it.And (on Ginsborg’s account) an object’s meriting that imaginative activity is itsbeing beautiful. The possibility of judging something to be beautiful has thusturned out to depend on the object’s being beautiful, so the object’s beingbeautiful cannot be grounded on the performance of the judgment of beauty.Furthermore, since it is (in Ginsborg’s words) ‘as a matter of empirical fact’ thatthe object elicits the relevant imaginative activity, if it does, its being such as toelicit the activity—that is, its meriting it—is an empirical feature. So beautyemerges as ‘objective’ in Ginsborg’s terms, a feature in the world andindependent of individual experience. The judgment of beauty, which onGinsborg’s construal is the claim that the object merits the relevant imaginativeactivity, is then an objective judgment in those terms, a judgment that ascribes anempirical feature to an object.49

4. Recognizing Beauty

[P]urposiveness is a lawfulness of the contingent as such. (KU EE VI: 217)

I’ve argued that Ginsborg’s reading of Kant does not meet Ameriks’s challenge inthe way it claims: by bringing to light good grounds for denying that beauty is afeature of objects belonging to an ‘objective reality’. Yet one might feel thatrevision along the lines Ameriks suggests requires us to abandon much of whatpromises to be of interest in Kant’s critical aesthetics. Where does this leave us?



It is worth considering the possibility that what Kant has in mind when hedenies objectivity to the judgment of beauty has little to do, at least in principle,with the question that is at issue between antirealists about beauty and theiropponents, namely whether or not beauty is part of the fabric of the world. Theproposal I want to sketch is that in this context Kant means by ‘objective’something which is (in principle) orthogonal to that debate, although thejudgment of beauty’s lack of objectivity in this sense might fit most naturally withan understanding of Kantian beauty as in the world. We saw that the approach ofMcDowell and Wiggins grants that value (aesthetic or ethical) is not objective in asense that does not compete with its being in the world. My proposal is similar instructure, though it invokes a new sense of ‘objectivity’ (in which it is indeeddistinctive of aesthetic judgments that they are not objective).

It might be thought that there can be no question about the basic meaning ofKant’s denial of objectivity to the judgment of beauty. As we saw, Kant glossesthat denial in terms characteristic of (noncognitivist) antirealism. He cites theobjectivity of empirical judgments, and the objectivity that the first Critique claimsfor empirical judgments is of a piece with Kant’s (‘empirical’) realism. Kant neverindicates that he is introducing a new sense of objectivity in the Critique ofJudgment. Just the contrary, apparently: he seems to think that the judgment ofbeauty’s lack of objectivity follows from its lack of a basis in a concept, whichsuggests that he is drawing on the tenet, mentioned earlier, that a claim about theworld requires the use of (empirical and pure) concepts.

Kant’s idea that ‘beauty is not a concept of the object’50 does, in my view, drivehis argument, but in a different direction. It articulates a dimension of what hecalls the essential ‘singularity’ of the judgment of beauty, an upshot of which isthat (in a sense to be specified) one object’s beauty has nothing in common withthat of another—except, of course, for the bare fact of exemplifying beauty. Theantirealist declares that beauty is not a property of the object; by contrast, thethought I am drawing from Kant is that although beauty is (or at least may be)‘of’ the object—part of the world—it is not a property of the object. Now thethought has to be ‘drawn from’ Kant because he does not explicitly carve out thenotion of a property on which it relies. I am suggesting that there is a strand of histhought that is worth isolating—though Kant does not do so—as independent ofany denial (or endorsement) of realism. So there is an element of critique in myproposal: appreciating the force of Kant’s insight requires separating strands thathe takes as one.

Kant frames the Critique of Judgment in terms of an evocative, if abstract,distinction between ‘reflective’ and ‘determinative’ judgment. In the ‘determi-native’ case ‘the universal’ (a rule or concept) is ‘given’ and judgment ‘subsumesthe particular under it’, but in the ‘reflective’ case ‘only the particular is given, forwhich the universal is to be found’ (KU IV: 179). Judgment’s move from theparticular to the universal can take two forms: ‘To reflect (to consider) [. . .] is tocompare and to hold together given representations either with others or withone’s faculty of cognition, in relation to a concept thereby made possible.51 In thejudgment of beauty, the given representations are not compared with other

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representations, which is to say that the given object is not compared with otherobjects.52 Instead the given representations are compared ‘with one’s faculty ofcognition’. The point is elaborated through the notion of the free play of thecognitive faculties. The free play arises when ‘[a] representation which, thoughsingular and without comparison to others, nevertheless is in agreement with theconditions of universality, which constitutes the business of the understanding ingeneral’ (KU 9: 219).53 Understanding conducts its business by unifying therepresentations given in the manifold of intuition. In empirical cognition, themanifold of intuition is found to have unity as an instantiation of some empiricalconcept. This depends on comparison of the object with others since it meansidentifying the object as like other (actual or possible) objects in the relevantrespects. In the judgment of beauty’s free play, however, the manifold is found tobe unified (not as the instantiation of some empirical concept, but) in itself. It isfound to cohere as such.

Clearly this sketch requires development. It will be useful to begin byaddressing a natural worry: that it is by no means clear that anything along suchlines (however developed) will allow us to deny that judging beauty is a matterof deploying the concept ‘beauty’ and ascribing the property of beauty (except insome merely stipulative, hence uninteresting, sense). Indeed the attempt mightappear to be hopeless, on the following grounds. To accept the bare possibility ofmultiple beautiful things—things which may all legitimately be counted asbeautiful—just is to admit the property of beauty (what they have in common)and the concept ‘beauty’ (what the judgments of them as beautiful share).54 Onecould hardly withhold this minimal concession, which does not entail taking astand on either the metaphysical status of the property or the nature of thecommitment the judgment consists in. In this light, what Kant’s view (as I’vesketched it) appears to yield is an analysis of the concept ‘beauty’, in terms of‘unity as such’ or even ‘unity apart from a concept’, rather than a demonstrationof its absence.

But Kant contests this minimal construal of concepts (and properties). The rolefor ‘comparison’ with other objects issues in a more robust requirement forempirical concepts which is not met in the case of judgments of beauty. Therequirement can be elaborated by setting Kant’s view against a line of thought towhich it seems (and is, up to a point) akin. The emphasis in Kant’s aesthetictheory on attending to and appreciating the object as a particular might call tomind the so-called moral ‘particularism’ championed by a range of contemporaryphilosophers (among them McDowell). While the affinities between the Kant ofthe Critique of Judgment and the moral particularist merit consideration, it is whatseparates them which is most illuminating.55

The moral particularist disavows would-be moral rules or principles. There isdisagreement with regard to how this disavowal is to be specified, but acharacteristic central claim concerns the holism of reasons. A strong moralparticularism takes the moral significance of nonmoral features to be context-dependent, even with regard to their valence: ‘whether a given such featurecounts as any moral reason at all—and if so, in which direction—is itself



dependent on the background context’ (Little 2000: 288–9). Moral knowledgetherefore does not rest on the inference of moral conclusions from generalizations(however complicated), and the grasp of moral concepts does not reduce to thegrasp of such generalizations.56 However, even the strictest proponent of moralparticularism concedes—or (I would argue) should concede—that moralcompetence requires a certain capacity for the comparison of cases. What I havein mind is an essential component of ordinary moral thinking, often explicitwhen one wonders whether the attitude or feeling with which one is respondingto a person or act is well-placed. Finding myself angered by something someonehas done, it might be in order for me to ask myself how I would feel—and whatfeeling the situation would merit—if it had been different in some specific andrelevant respect: If she had asked my permission in advance; if she had gonethrough with it more discreetly; if I hadn’t been so tired to begin with—would Istill be angry? Would there be something to be angry about? Considering suchquestions allows me to see more clearly what it was that she did (what to call theact) and so what attitude it calls for. By no means is this all that moral thinkingrequires; but it is an important aspect of reflecting on what response a situationgives me reason to have, so of shaping how I see it and the people it involves,myself included. In short: In the moral realm, competence requires the ability tothink about what moral difference, if any, specific (nonmoral) differences mightmake.57 Now part of Kant’s idea, I suggest, is that there is no analogue of this inthe aesthetic case. Indeed, there could be no aesthetic analogue, because in thiscase nonaesthetic parts cannot be separated from the whole so as to make itpossible to identify the part of one whole as the same as that of another (muchless to isolate its aesthetic contribution to the whole).

The suggestion does not ignore the practices of comparison which areindispensable to our contemplation of aesthetic matters: we compare differentphotographs and notice how the lack of contrast ‘works’ in one case but isinsignificant, or is a weakness, in the other; we imagine how the poem could beimproved by making it leaner and more terse. Kant is denying not that we makesuch comparisons, but rather a certain understanding of what making suchcomparisons involves. When we make aesthetic comparisons (between one objectand another, real or imagined) we are not considering variations against a sharedcontext, or shared parts against varying contexts. We are comparing, rather, twowholes which (in the nature of the case) share no parts—two ‘worlds’.58

The difference stems from a more general difference, in connection with whichthe motivation for denying a concept ‘beauty’ emerges. The moral particularistallows—indeed insists—that if my saying of an act that it was kind or cruel is toconstitute a genuine judgment or assessment of kindness or cruelty, it must flowfrom my capacity to reliably detect and appreciate—as kind or cruel—instancesof kindness or cruelty. If I lack such a capacity, it is not merely that my words willhave hit their mark only ‘accidentally’ (supposing that the case is one of kindnessor cruelty): they will not be regarded as amounting to an assessment of kindnessor cruelty at all. In that sense, my words will be empty. For my words will fail toreflect an understanding of kindness or cruelty—a grasp of the concept—which

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would be required for them to express an appraisal. But it is an interestingupshot of Kant’s account of beauty, if one that remains implicit in hisdevelopment of it, that nothing of this sort obtains. My failure to appreciatebeauty in a range of cases, however vast or varied, does not stand in the way ofallowing this instance of finding something to be beautiful to be, fully, what itclaims to be: an appreciation of beauty. I needn’t possess the capacity to reliablydiscern beauty in order to count as genuinely and fully appreciating beauty insome given instance.

Consideration of this feature brings to life Kant’s remark that one puts one’sjudgment of beauty forward as an ‘example of a universal rule that one cannotproduce’ (KU 18: 237). When this remark is discussed, it is generally the thoughtthat the rule cannot be ‘produced’ (or cited or adduced) which is emphasized.What also deserves notice is that it is as an example of the rule—not an instance orcase of it—that, according to Kant, I present my judgment: as thoughunderscoring the point that particular judgments of beauty neither express noryield any grasp of a rule which would guide me in projecting into furtherjudgments of beauty. The Kantian picture excludes any such form of mastery orexpertise in aesthetic judgment.59

One might comprehensibly hope to capture this feature—perhaps it is not thebest way—by saying that appreciating something as beautiful does not dependon the grasp of a would-be concept ‘beauty’. Yet there would remain a point tosaying that beauty is recognized—a point that does not depend on realistambitions. Judging something new to be beautiful is finding that ‘here too isbeauty’ (recall the minimal criterion of multiplicity). And ‘recognition’ recordsthe bringing to bear of an exercise of sensitivity or discernment on a matter whichis independent of the individual’s experience (as, I’ve suggested, is required forjudgment to be open to criticism and subject to a standard of appropriateness orcorrectness). But since these linked requirements are not enough for conceptapplication, there is also a point to saying that in the case of beauty recognitiontakes place without a concept.

By now I might appear to have wandered far from Kant’s text. Not merely aremy suggestions about fleshing out the absence, in the judging of beauty, ofcomparison with other objects (the absence of a concept) not explicitly pursuedby Kant. But this last thought, about recognition without a concept, sounds aliento Kant’s thinking. It hardly seems imaginable that Kant could be found even tocountenance talk of recognition without a concept. Yet as I hope now to show,Kant can—and should—be read as characterizing the judgment of beauty in justthis way: as a matter of recognition without a concept. And as indirect supportfor my proposal I enlist the fact that it allows us to make good sense of this talk.

Kant’s ‘definition of the beautiful drawn from the fourth moment’ of theanalytic of the beautiful is this: ‘Schon ist, was ohne Begriff als Gegenstand einesnotwendigen Wohlgefallens erkannt wird.’60 The published English translationsgive ‘cognized’ for this ‘erkannt’: ‘That is beautiful which is cognized without aconcept as the object of a necessary liking.’61 In the first Critique and elsewhere,Kant is centrally concerned with the notion of ’erkennen’, which (for various



reasons I won’t discuss) is often rendered not as ’know’ but as ’cognize’.(Correspondingly ’Erkenntnis’ becomes ’cognition’, and so on.). The translators ofthe Critique of Judgment follow this practice—as, for the sake of simplicity, I do inthis essay—and evidently take this appearance of ‘erkannt’ to be of a piece with thenotion that practice is meant to track. But it is worth registering how plainlybizarre it would be if Kant were indeed speaking of (defining) our relation to thebeautiful as one of cognizing without a concept. As we’ve seen, Kant does not tireof flatly denying the judgment of beauty to be a matter of cognition. And Kant’scontention that cognition without a concept is not a possibility for us could not beclearer or more uncompromising. Kant would be advancing a claim that undercutsboth of these basic commitments, and doing so blithely—without explanation or somuch as the acknowledgement that explanation of some kind might be expected.Moreover, the remark is presented with deliberate prominence—each of the four‘definitions’ is set apart at the end of the moment from which it is ‘drawn’—making it a most unlikely site for a slip or for informal shorthand.

There is an alternative. Notice, first, that a natural translation of this use of‘erkennen’—especially given the construction ‘erkennen als’—is ‘recognize’: ‘Thatis beautiful which is recognized without a concept as the object of a necessaryliking’.62 By itself, of course, this settles nothing. It might well be granted that thetranslation is available but constitutes no advance. For the obvious reply is thatthe terms are effectively equivalent for Kant: Kant thinks of cognition asrecognition, which is to say the application of concepts (the (re)cognition of anobject as x). Then this translation would simply inherit the difficulties which besetthe standard choice. But it would promise an escape from those difficulties if itwere backed by a basis for distinguishing recognition from cognition (in thiscontext) such that recognition may occur—as cognition may not—without aconcept. My proposal regarding Kant’s construal of concepts provides such abasis, for while it makes plausible sense of the idea that the judgment of beauty isfree of a would-be concept ‘beauty’, it leaves room for (and indeed requires)something that deserves to be called the recognition of beauty.63

If I am right, Kant is appealing (here) to a notion of recognition that is widerthan that of cognition. This notion is not technical or artificial; it is perfectlyordinary. Recall the aspects of recognition I mentioned four paragraphs ago. Weare concerned with recognition as the identification of an object: making out—discerning or comprehending, appreciating, taking the measure of—the properidentity of something or someone. Such recognizing is naturally glossed in termsof seeing or perceiving (how matters stand or how things (really) are).64 Think ofrecognizing a facial expression as one of amusement, recognizing a situation to beperilous or a person to be in need of assistance, or recognizing someone as one’sneighbor or soulmate. The central point is that recognition (so construed) neednot be cognition, for cognition requires a concept, whereas recognition does not.This would explain why pleasure is integral to the judging of beauty: it steps in,as it were, to do what the application of concepts cannot. Beauty is not recognizedby way of a concept ‘beauty’—it must, then, be recognized by way of a feelingof pleasure.65

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As I have intimated, we might have reservations about casting the dimensionof singularity that I’ve been discussing as a matter of the absence of a concept.(We might find the underlying construal of concepts to be too strict.)66 Evenputting such reservations aside, however, we might feel that it is unnecessary,and perhaps distorting, to oppose recognition without a concept to cognition. Theproblem (it would be argued) is the excessively narrow idea of cognitionproduced by Kant’s insistence on tying cognition to conceptuality. If we severthat tie, we can take the more compelling view of recognition and cognition as ofa piece. Then judging something to be beautiful can be allowed to be cognizing(recognizing) without a concept. I close by suggesting that Kant’s awkwardattempt to maintain that the judgment of beauty is recognition yet not cognitioncan be seen as hinting at a further, and provocative, thought which we might finduseful even if we reject the framework in terms of which it is formulated.

In his specification of the claim that it is the form of the object which pleases inthe experience of beauty, Kant says that colors ‘can of course enliven the object initself for sensation, but they cannot make it worthy of being intuited andbeautiful’ (KU 14: 225). The implication that is relevant now is that the beautifulobject—the object of ‘beautiful form’—is worthy of being intuited. This opens up afurther way to develop the idea that in the judgment of beauty’s free play onefinds the given representations to manifest a unity or coherence as such. To findthe manifold to be unified as such is to find it to be worthy of being intuited,and so to find the object to be worthy of being perceived. In the case of judging anobject to be a bounding dog the manifold is as it ought to be if I am thereby torepresent (perceive) the object as a bounding dog. But if the bounding dog isbeautiful, the manifold is worthy of being intuited and the bounding dog isworthy of being perceived; we could say that the manifold is as it ought to beas such.

I take this to mean that recognizing something to be beautiful involves notmerely identifying what sort of thing it is, but finding it to deserve or to call forrecognition as beautiful.67 Perhaps, then, we can hear in Kant’s refusal to allowthe judgment of beauty to be cognition the thought that the position that I therebytake with respect to the object is less squarely epistemological than it is akin to arelation I might take to another subject. In the case of the beautiful, recognizing—‘erkennen’—is close to ‘anerkennen’ (which corresponds to another sense ofEnglish ‘recognize’, one related to ‘acknowledge’). To the extent that this is so,Kant can be said to cast the beautiful object as laying claim to something likeacknowledgment.68 Then we can think of Kant’s rejection of aesthetic cognitionas distancing the judgment of beauty from recognition as identification andaligning it with recognition as acknowledgment.69

Katalin MakkaiBarnard CollegeColumbia [email protected]



mailto:[email protected]

NOTES

1 References to the Introduction and body of the Critique of Judgment (KU) are bysection number followed by page number in volume 5 of the Akademie edition.References to the ‘First Introduction’ are abbreviated ‘EE’ and are by section numberfollowed by page number in volume 20 of the Akademie edition. I have followed, butsometimes emended, the Guyer and Matthews translation (Kant 2000). The judgments ofbeauty I discuss throughout this essay are what Kant calls ‘pure’ judgments of beauty.Following Kant’s practice, I leave the qualifier implicit.

2 See, for example, KU 6: 211, 7: 212 and 32: 282.3 KU EE VIII: 224 and VII: 189. It is by virtue of this ground in pleasure that the

judgment is ‘aesthetic’, as opposed to ‘logical’. (Kant’s remarks are actually about pleasureas well as displeasure; in this essay I ignore displeasure.)

4 See KU 8: 214.5 Translation modified.6 The German here is ‘die Sache’. According to Kant, one claims universal validity as

well as necessity for one’s judgment of beauty. (I leave aside the question of whatdifference, if any, there is between the two.)

7 KU VII: 191. See 6: 211 on the ‘similarity’.8 See KU 32: 282 on ‘as if objective’.9 See KU §33.

10 See Ameriks 2003a: 296–7 and 2003b: 313–18.11 Ameriks 2003b: 308. See also 2003a: 293 and 2003a: 305.12 Ameriks 2003b: 308. Citing Kant’s remark at KU 21: 238 (Ameriks uses Ginsborg’s

translation) that ‘judgments must [. . .] allow of being universally communicated, forotherwise they would not be entitled to any agreement with the object’, Ameriks contendsthat ‘[s]uch ‘‘agreement’’ is precisely what one ordinarily understands by objectivity, andKant’s statement here is meant explicitly as both a general claim about judgment as suchand a specific claim about aesthetic judgment’ (Ameriks 2003b: 309). Mild revisionism hasthe advantage (Ameriks argues) of upholding both claims.

13 Ameriks says that ‘Kant is best understood as presenting what ‘‘we’’—that is, currenttheoreticians using the standard terminology of our own era—should rather term anobjective account of taste’ (Ameriks 2003c: 326), but the term is used less univocally thanthis remark suggests.

14 Cf. Ameriks’s remark that the need for a deduction ‘is lost if the relevant judgmentsare not even thought of as valid, as ‘‘holding for all’’ in the proper context, and as being inthis core sense objective and not merely subjective’ (Ameriks 2003c: 335).

14 The phrase is Mackie’s (Mackie 1977: 15).16 Ginsborg 1998: 449.17 As Ginsborg uses the term, an ‘objectivism’ about beauty holds that beauty is in the

world, there to be encountered by us—the basic commitment of what goes by the name of‘realism’ about beauty. I will therefore speak of ‘objectivism’ and ‘realism’ interchangeablyin describing her argument (although Ginsborg does not use the latter term). Just what‘objectivism’ or ‘realism’ entails—and what Ginsborg in particular takes it to entail—willshortly become my main focus.

18 All quotes in this paragraph are from KU 33: 284. Kant discusses the condition ofautonomy under that name in §32, but the line of thought opened with this example (from§33) is clearly connected.

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19 Ameriks 2003a: 302. As Ameriks points out, Kant’s texts do not present anunequivocal view of secondary qualities. Some remarks in the first Critique indicate thatcolors (for example) ‘cannot rightly be regarded as properties of things’: see A 28–9 and B45. But in the third Critique Kant speaks of color in terms of ‘objective sensation’, throughwhich an object is represented (KU 3: 206).

20 This is Ginsborg’s gloss at 1998: 452. Ameriks objects that his proposal wasadvanced not in full voice but rather as part of a ‘dialectical strategy’ aimed at establishingthat ‘aesthetic features can still be said to be at least as objective as typical secondary ones,for all that Kant’s arguments show’ (Ameriks 2003b: 320).

21 Ginsborg 1998: 453. See Ameriks 2003b: 322–3 for Ameriks’s reply: Amerikseffectively calls for revision with regard to the condition of autonomy as well (‘How couldit be in principle impossible to say that if a certain ‘‘objective environment’’ is there then acertain aesthetic judgment is appropriate?’).

22 See McDowell 1998a and 1998b and Wiggins 1998. In what follows I focus onMcDowell’s texts.

23 As should the idea that keeps it in place, that the question of the relation to reality ofan area of our thought and language (in this case, the evaluative aspects of our lives)would have to be addressed from an ‘external standpoint’, outside of our evaluative andother standpoints.

24 McDowell 1998a: 129 n. 22. See also 1998b: 136 and 146.25 See Ginsborg 1998: 460 ‘[B]eauty is subjective not only in [the sense in which

McDowell and Wiggins grant that it is subjective, viz. internality to sensibility], but also ina deeper sense. It is subjective because its ascription to an object in any particular casedepends on the sentiments of the particular human being making the ascription. Thus thesubjectivity of beauty is a matter, not only of its relation to human sensibility in general,but also of its relation to the sensibility of each particular individual who makes ajudgment of beauty.’ Since Ginsborg holds that someone who makes a judgment of beautythereby actually and not merely ‘apparently’ perceives beauty, she drops the qualifier: ‘Thebeauty perceived in an object is not independent of the experience through which it isperceived’ (1998: 461 n. 8). See my section 3 below.

26 Hume 1985 might be read as offering such an account. The ‘quasi-realist’ form ofethical expressivism developed by Simon Blackburn is presented as an antirealist accounton which our practices of assessing ethical judgments are well-grounded (Blackburn 1984and 1993). See Hopkins 2001 on the attempt to read Kant’s theory of beauty as quasi-realist. Note that expressivism is often credited with having to hand a particularly clearexplanation of autonomy: without my own response (here that of a certain pleasure), I donot have the attitude it is the business of judgment to express. Ginsborg’s move from theclaim that realism cannot account for autonomy to the denial of beauty’s independence ofindividual experience might seem to neglect the alternative of an expressivist antirealism.But expressivism is not a candidate for Ginsborg for reasons that are internal to heraccount: as we will shortly see, she construes the judgment of beauty as an assertion.

27 On the narrow construal of the agreeable, the judgment is always of an individualobject on a particular occasion. Kant perhaps thinks of the judgment of the agreeable morewidely, so that it is wine from the Canaries (that kind of object) that I enjoy and for which Iexpress my liking. On the wider construal, an object’s agreeableness to me is a matter of itsbeing such as to be experienced by me as agreeable, which is independent of anyparticular experience of it as agreeable (as a bottle of wine I haven’t yet sampled may be ofjust the sort I’d like). On neither the narrow nor the wide construal do I judge with auniversal voice (that is, lay claim—on the object’s behalf—to the pleasure of others).



28 Note that what would be needed is not simply a reason why it’s unwise orirresponsible to judge aesthetically based on what others tell us (say because taste varies sounpredictably—not just by person but even by occasion—that one really can’t rely even onthose who have hitherto proved to be impeccable judges): on Ginsborg’s interpretation ofthe condition of autonomy, which I am granting for the purposes of this paper, to judge ofbeauty ‘heteronomously’ is to fail genuinely to judge of beauty at all.

29 These features do not distinguish value judgment from some judgments of fact: seeAustin on verdictives (Austin 1962: 151ff).

30 An effort to flesh out this outline would have to address the question of whether Ineed to be able to articulate my reasons (and if so, how fully) in order to count as‘possessing’ them.

31 Isenberg 1973: 163 and 166. A consequence that Isenberg draws is that there can beno general norms of the form ‘any work that has such-and-such quality is pro tanto good’.

32 See 1998: 465, where Ginsborg calls attention to a central aspect of this similarity.33 Ginsborg 1997: 70. See also n. 47: the experience of beauty is ‘the perception of the

object as appropriate to [. . .] my present imaginative activity. This perception, as in thecognitive case, is at the same time a judgment’.

34 Ginsborg 1998: 463 and Ginsborg 1997: 72. See, for example, Ginsborg 1991: 300: ‘[T]hisself-referential act of judging is the same activity which Kant describes as the free andharmonious play of imagination and understanding.’ See also Ginsborg 1997: 80–1 n. 47.

35 Pleasure in the beautiful is ‘a state of mind which consists in the awareness of itsown appropriateness with respect to an object’ (Ginsborg 1998: 464).

36 Ginsborg 1991: 299. Pleasure in the beautiful ‘consists in the awareness of one’spresent state of mind (with respect to a given object) as one which anyone else perceivingthat object ought to share, and hence as one which is universally [valid]: where one’spresent state of mind is, of course, that very awareness mentioned earlier in the sentence’(Ginsborg 1989: 24). In both quotes I have substituted ‘valid’ for ‘communicable’, asGinsborg treats the terms as synonyms (in this context): see Ginsborg 1991: 313 n. 12 andGinsborg 1989: 43 n. 18.

37 But ‘the judgment is still self-referential. This is because the imaginative activity inquestion can be characterized only by saying that it is the imaginative activity taking placein my very act of judging the object: to put the point more strongly, the imaginative activityis the judging’ (Ginsborg 1997: 80 n. 47).

38 Ginsborg 1998: 463. Earlier on the same page: this pleasure ‘does not consist forKant in the awareness of an objective feature’.

39 The quotes that follow are from page 70.40 See Ginsborg 1991: 305–6.41 Ameriks contests the idea, I think: see Ameriks 2003b: 312 (‘To employ such a

‘‘certain way’’ is precisely what is commonly called using a concept.’). Another worryworth mentioning (although I do not pursue it) is that the ‘way’ one’s imaginative activityought to be appears to be (at least in some sense) specifiable otherwise than purely self-referentially, given how as Ginsborg and I have both been specifying it (viz., as the self-referential act of imagination consisting of the claim to its own appropriateness).

42 Denying content altogether might yield the conclusion that beauty is not a feature ofobjects, but at a cost that seems prohibitively high. In her earlier work Ginsborg appears toregard Kant as accepting, or anyway saddled with, the cost. ‘[I]t seems as though I cannotbe making any claim about the object at all. Accordingly, it seems as though the object isirrelevant to the act of judging: any object is equally suitable as a candidate for such ajudgment, since the judgment does not say anything about the object which might turn out

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to be false [or, it should be added, true]. What, then, is to prevent me from engaging in this‘‘empty act’’ of judgment with respect to every object, and hence judging that every objectis beautiful? While this might be the basis of a legitimate complaint against Kant’saesthetic theory, it is not an objection to my interpretation of that theory. [. . .] It follows,then, that from an objective standpoint, there is indeed nothing to prevent me fromjudging each and every object to be beautiful. If judgments of taste are not based onobjective grounds, then there can be no fact about any object which rules it out as acandidate for being regarded as beautiful’ (Ginsborg 1991: 309–10).

In the more recent Ginsborg 1997, Ginsborg seems to want to be able to say that thejudgment lacks content without allowing that it makes no claim. She points out that theexperience of beauty is ‘the experience of something about the object: namely, the object’sappropriateness or suitability to the imaginative activity through which it is perceived’ (1997:71) and remarks that ’even though the act of judging lacks content, in that it does not bring theobject under a specific concept, it still has reality insofar as it can be identified with a particularimaginative response that I have to the object’ (1997: 81 n. 47). But this leaves it quite unclear inwhat sense the judgment ‘lacks content’. The last quote suggests that the judgment’s lack ofcontent is explained by the lack of a concept, but this doesn’t help, since (absent furtherdiscussion of the matter) so far as we’ve been given a purchase on the judgment’s lack of aconcept that came precisely from the idea of its lack of (determinate) content.

43 And it is worth noting that even if the argument just examined were accepted asestablishing that beauty is not a feature of objects, it would not thereby establish thatbeauty is not independent of the individual’s experience, since (as I suggested earlier)independence from individual experience does not entail objectivity.

44 Ginsborg 1989: 89. See 93: The judgment of beauty is ’an activity whose"performance" ensures that’ it is valid or correct. Ginsborg remarks that there is stillroom for error: I can misidentify my pleasure as pleasure constitutive of a judgment ofbeauty when in fact it is pleasure in the good or in the agreeable. In either case I fail tomake a judgment of beauty at all (1989: 101 n. 53).

45 One might worry that there is then, properly, neither apparent nor genuineperception of beauty, that unless a (synthetic a posteriori) judgment can be incorrect itcannot be correct. (Could the idea be that the judgment of beauty is a priori? That would bea counterintuitive claim for various reasons, not least of which is that it appears to cutagainst the essential singularity of the judgment of beauty. Still, it is a claim that some ofKant’s remarks could be argued to express (see KU §§36 and 37), although I would argueKant’s point there to be that the judgment of beauty’s demand for agreement depends onan a priori ground.)

46 Then an object that is not judged beautiful is, by these lights, not beautiful. (There isno such thing as a an object that is beautiful though its beauty has yet to be appreciated.)

47 See Ginsborg 1997: 64ff. and especially 74.48 ‘[W]hether I make a judgment of this kind about a given object is not just up to me,

but depends on the imaginative activity which—as a matter of empirical fact—the objectelicits. I cannot arbitrarily choose to engage in this kind of judgment with respect to agiven object, any more than I can arbitrarily choose to perceive a given object as a dog’(Ginsborg 1997: 81 n. 47). Cp. Ginsborg 1991 (see my note 42).

49 In the judgment of beauty ‘we regard our imaginative activity with respect to someparticular object in the same way that we must regard it with respect to objects in general ifcognition is to be possible. Thus we may take it, as we may [ 5 are entitled to] take ourimaginative activity in general, to exemplify a normative standard and hence to beuniversally valid’ (Ginsborg 1997: 74). The ‘thus’ in this last sentence (which closes the



paper) has yet to be secured: Ginsborg explains that what we do in a particular judgmentof beauty is what we are entitled to do in general, but not why we are entitled to do it inthat particular case. For the general entitlement Ginsborg has in view does not translateinto entitlement with respect to particular cases, even where those cases are—as thejudgment of beauty is supposed to be—‘indeterminate’ or (as Ginsborg also puts it)‘general’. The worry is that my being entitled to make a particular judgment of beauty willturn out to require the fact that the object merits my imaginative activity—the fact that it isbeautiful.

50 KU 38: 290 (‘Remark’ to the ‘deduction of judgments of taste’). The point is not thatthe judgment of beauty involves no concepts at all, but that it does not involve a would-beconcept ‘beauty’.

51 KU EE V: 211. Kant emphasizes ‘to reflect’; remaining emphases are added.52 The judgment of beauty ‘about a given individual object’ considers it ‘before its

comparison with others is looked at’ (KU EE VIII: 223).53 Translation modified.54 See Ameriks 2003c: 339.55 It is often pointed out that Kant understands concepts in terms of rules. Too often

this is interpreted fairly crudely, as though Kant’s idea were that the application ofconcepts involved the use of a decision procedure or formula. (Cp., for example, Allison2001: 239: Kant’s is ‘a natural understanding of what is meant by a concept, namely, adeterminate set of marks that provides a rule or decision procedure for the recognition ofwhat falls under it’.) Then Kant’s target in denying a role for a concept ‘beauty’ in thejudging of beauty would be little more than a straw man. Against this, I claim—although Icannot argue for it here—that Kant’s denial is more defensibly interpreted as akin to whatI am describing as particularist thinking. (When Kant is invoked by particularists he istypically cast as a moral generalist; his third Critique tends to be ignored by defenders ofparticularism rather than recognized as a potential ally.) As I argue below, however, Kant’spoint goes further than does the particularist’s, and this is reflected in the fact that theparticularist (qua particularist) has no reason to deny a role for concepts in the judgment ofbeauty or of anything else (just the contrary). I am agreeing with Ameriks in rejectingcrude readings of Kant on concepts as rules (see Ameriks 2003b: 312–13 and 2003c: 339).Contra Ameriks, however, I think that sense can profitably be made of Kant’s claim that thejudging of beauty is undetermined by a concept (or rule). But see my note 66.

56 Instead of inferring moral conclusions from the details of the particular to which weattend, moral knowledge involves ‘seeing what moral properties such details togetherground’ (Little 2000: 292).

57 According to the particularist, this ability does not depend on the ability to makeceteris paribus (‘all else equal’) judgments.

58 Cp. Isenberg 1973: 165: ‘[T]he meaning of a word like ‘‘assonance’’—the qualitywhich it leads our perception to discriminate in one poem or another—is in critical usagenever twice the same’.

59 Taste is the capacity to reliably discern beauty; it is independent of any grasp of awould-be concept ‘beauty’. Thus the aesthetic power of judgment is indeed ‘a specialfaculty for judging things in accordance with a rule but not in accordance with concepts’(KU VIII: 194). Cp. Little 2000: 304 (and 297 n. 35, citing the work of Dreyfus and Dreyfus)on the ‘moral expert’. I don’t mean to deny the importance that Kant places on thedevelopment or cultivation of taste (see, e.g., KU 32: 282–3). On the contrary: my claim isabout what the cultivation of taste involves (and excludes), for Kant.

60 See the ‘definition’ following KU 22: 240.

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61 This is a modified version of the Guyer and Matthews translation (Kant 2000). TheBernard, Meredith, and Pluhar translations of this ’definition’ vary in respects which forpresent purposes are unimportant (Kant 1970, 1952, 1987). The English-languagecommentary on this ‘definition’ with which I am familiar likewise employs ‘cognized’.Translators and commentators alike pass over in silence the problems raised by this choice,which I discuss below.

62 Note that standard French translations offer ‘reconnu’ (recognized): see the Renautand Philonenko editions (Kant 1995, 1968).

63 (By contrast, the minimal construal of concepts in terms of multiplicity (whichAmeriks endorses) leaves no such room.) See also KU VII: 191: For similar reasons, I thinkKant should there be read as saying that the judgment of beauty’s pleasure ‘can never beunderstood through concepts to be necessarily combined with the representation of anobject, but must always be recognized [erkannt] to be connected with this only throughreflected perception’.

In neither quote, it is true, is what Kant says strictly that beauty is recognized without aconcept. Mightn’t it be argued that while the necessity of the liking is recognized, thebeauty is not (in Kant’s view)? The problem with this is that it is quite unclear that thejudgment of beauty can be drawn apart from the claim to the necessity of one’s liking inthe object in the way that would be required. (To say that something is the object of anecessary liking is to say that the liking is not contingently produced by it, that it meritsthe liking. There is perhaps space between this and the judgment of beauty itself, but notmuch. Of course, further argument would be needed to establish that the available space isnot enough.)

64 This perhaps illuminates Kant’s description of the recognition of beauty asperception. See, for example, the ‘definition’ drawn from the third moment and thequote in the previous note.

65 Cf. KU EE VIII: 228: ‘[T]he representation of a subjective purposiveness of an objectis even identical with the feeling of pleasure (without even involving an abstract conceptof a purposive relation)’.

66 My overall aim is to show that the recognition of beauty (aesthetic recognition moregenerally) is genuinely distinctive and that the denial that there is a concept ‘beauty’ and acorresponding property can be appreciated as an attempt to record its distinctiveness. I amnot endorsing the denial, for I am sympathetic to the point of view (represented byAmeriks) which would ask: Couldn’t (shouldn’t) we grant its distinctiveness withouttaking on board the awkward claim that ‘beauty’ is not a concept? Why not say insteadthat ‘beauty’ is a concept, if a special one? (Similarly for the property claim.) But this pointof view will do justice to Kant only if it undertakes to spell out what the concept’sspecialness consists in. Apart from such an undertaking we will not see how Kant’sformulation is motivated, even in its own way natural, if not ideal.

67 One’s response is ‘merited’ by the object in a stronger sense than Ginsborg has inmind (and perhaps than McDowell and Wiggins have in mind): the response is owed to(deserved by) the object, so that failure here is a matter of something like doing wrong byit.

68 As I’ve just indicated, the duality of English ‘recognition’ is not matched in German,which divides the labour between ‘erkennen’ and ‘anerkennen’. But Kant uses the latter atleast once: ‘Thus there can also be no rule in accordance with which someone could becompelled to acknowledge [anerkennen] something as beautiful.’ (KU 8: 215–16) Pleasure inthe beautiful bears comparison with respect as acknowledgment of the authority of themoral law. On my reading, the experience (what I recognize in pleasure) is of a kind of



necessity: I am bound by the object as I experience it. Cp. Paul Guyer’s reading, whichtakes the source of my pleasure to be the (felt) contingency of the felt unity (Guyer 1997:74–6).

69 The implied restriction of knowledge (cognition) to recognition as identificationshould perhaps itself be questioned: it might be better to allow that recognition asacknowledgment is (a form of) knowledge.

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Little, M. (2000), ‘Moral Generalities Revisited’, in B. Hooker and M. Little (eds), MoralParticularism. Oxford: Oxford University.

Mackie, J. L. (1977), Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. New York: Penguin.McDowell, J. (1998a), ‘Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World’, in J.

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kant on reconognizing beauty (makkai)

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