Aesthetics and subjectivity

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Modern philosophy and the emergence of aesthetic theory: Kant

Self-consciousness, knowledge and freedom

The importance attributed to aesthetic questions in recent philosophy becomes easier to grasp if one considers the reasons for the emergence of modern aesthetic theory. Kant’s main work on aesthetics, the ‘third Critique’, the Critique of Judgement (CJ) (1790), forms part of his response to unresolved questions which emerge from his Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) (1781) and Critique of Practical Reason (1787).¹ In order to understand the significance of the CJ one needs therefore to begin by looking at the first two Kantian Critiques.² The essential problem they entail, which formed the focus of reactions to Kant’s work at the time, lies in establishing how the deterministic natural world, whose mechanisms are becoming more and more accessible to the methods of the natural sciences, relates to the world in which we understand ourselves as autonomous beings. The third Critique tries to suggest ways of bridging the divide between these apparently separate worlds by giving an account of natural and artistic beauty, relating beauty to natural teleology, the purposiveness of individual organisms and the possible purposiveness of nature as a whole. In doing so, however, it threatens to undermine essential tenets of the first two Critiques. The third Critique is not least significant because of the ways in which it informs subsequent attempts in German Idealism to integrate Kant’s philosophy into an overall system, some of which give a major role to aesthetics. The CJ has, furthermore, become increasingly important in contemporary discussions of Kant’s work, appealing on the one hand to those who wish to question the perception of Kant’s enterprise as merely an exercise in legitimating the natural sciences, and on the other to those who see the need to extend the scope of epistemology if it is not to founder on the problems that become apparent in the first two Critiques.

Dieter Henrich regards the crux of Kant’s epistemology as the justification of ‘forms of cognition from the form and nature of self-consciousness’ (Henrich 1982 p. 176). The philosophical problem is therefore how the form and nature of self-consciousness are to be described. Descartes had famously located the certainty which warded off the scepticism generated by the unreliability of empirical perception in the thought that even if I doubt everything I think I know about the world I must exist qua doubter. Doubting the thought of my existence involved an undeniable existential relationship of the doubter to the thought that is being doubted, which therefore provided a minimal point of certainty: I must at least exist as a thinking being. However, Descartes provided very little else by this argument, and he needed God to establish the bridge back to a reliably knowable world outside self-consciousness. Kant tries to extend the certainty about the world to be derived from self-consciousness without using this theological support. How, though, can subjectivity be its own foundation? How can subjectivity itself give rise to objective certainty without relying upon the ‘dogmatic’ assumption of a pre-existing objectivity of the world of nature which the arguments of David Hume about the contingency of our knowledge of causal connections had rendered untenable for Kant?

Kant argues that any linking of perceptions from the multiplicity of what is given to us from the world in ‘intuition’ (the term is discussed below) requires a synthesis, which creates identity from inherent difference. Given that we arguably never receive the same input of perceptual data at any two moments of our lives, and yet are able to establish testable laws of nature, repeatable knowledge must, Kant maintains, rely on identities provided by the continuity of self-consciousness. What we know by synthesis therefore cannot be wholly derived from our receptive, sensuous experience of nature, which, without the forms of identity involved in synthesis, just consists in endless particularity. The crucial issue therefore becomes the nature of the identity of that which synthesises, the identity of the ‘subject’. As Henrich shows (pp. 179–83), Kant shifts Descartes’s emphasis on the existence of self-consciousness, which is only ever certain at the moment of its reflection upon itself, on to the relationship of the thinker to every thought that the thinker could have, believing that if one can show that this relationship itself requires a binding identity there will then be a way of maintaining a cohesion in philosophy which is not derived from an external source. The ability to describe the rules which allow one to move from one case of ‘I think’ to the next thus becomes decisive. Unless philosophy can give an account of the ways in which self-consciousness is sustained between different cases of ‘I think’, it will be forced to abandon the only certain foundation it can now have.

Kant is insistent, then, that we can only know the world as it appears to us via the constitutive a priori ‘categories’ of subjectivity which synthesise intuitions into cognisable forms. The world as an object of truth is therefore actively constituted by the structures of the consciousness we have of it, which means that we cannot know how the world is ‘in itself’. Instead of cognition following the object, the object comes to depend upon the subject’s constitution of it as an object by giving it a repeatable identity in a predicative judgement. However, Kant’s investment in the distinction between appearances and things in themselves has a further motivation, which does not just derive from his epistemological arguments: the distinction is meant to establish the role of freedom in his philosophy.

Nature, for the Kant of the first Critique, is generally defined ‘formally’, as that which is bound by necessary laws constituted by the subject. If the laws of nature were properties of the object world ‘in itself’ they would also apply to ourselves in every respect. In such a view the world, including ourselves, would become a deterministic machine and human responsibility would be an illusion. As a follower of Rousseau and the Enlightenment Kant is, though, most concerned with the fact that human agency involves the ability to follow moral imperatives which cannot be explained in terms of causal laws. His idea is that if I too am subject to the division between how things appear to consciousness and how they are in themselves, my action can be subject to causality as an event in the world of appearing nature but free as something in itself. The will which determines my action is thus inaccessible to cognition – if cognition is understood in Kant’s sense of the synthesising of appearances by categories and concepts – in the same way as the thing in itself is inaccessible. We only have cognitive access to effects of the will, not to the will itself. As a consequence, we seem to exist in two distinct realms. We are determined by the laws of nature as sensuous beings in the realm of appearance, even though these are laws which are ‘given to nature’ by us. At the same time we are also free agents, who can be held to account for our deeds by other free agents.

Such a division raises fundamental problems with regard both to the access we have to our own capacity for cognition and to the capacity of our will to transcend determination by natural laws. The basic question here is: what sort of ‘object’ is this subject when it wishes to ‘intuit’ itself? The difficulty is actually very simple: what Kant wants to describe is not empirical, and what is not empirical is, for Kant, not a possible object of knowledge, in the sense of that which is arrived at by the application of concepts to intuitions, at all.³ However, Kant is convinced that we have sufficient warranted knowledge available to us – Newton’s laws, for example – to be able to attempt to see why that knowledge is warrantable, without invoking theology or unquestioningly accepting that science represents a pre-existing reality. There can be no doubt about the truth of the propositions of mathematics and their capacity to generate potentially valid scientific knowledge. Neither does Kant doubt the existence of binding moral imperatives. What he wishes to establish is what in us makes them possible.

It should already be clear, however, that the explanation of what makes cognition and morality possible will have to be achieved in Kant’s theory at the expense of everything individual in the subject. The point is to establish what is necessarily the case for everyone who counts as a rational being, now that theological foundations can no longer be invoked. What, though, of the new insistence by Baumgarten and Hamann on the value of the particularity of individual experience of the world we observed in the Introduction, which is essential to aesthetic theory? At the beginning of the main text of the second edition of the CPR (B p. 36), the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’, Kant adds a footnote about Baumgarten’s new use of the word ‘aesthetics’ to designate the ‘critique of taste’. He suggests that the attempt to bring judgements of beauty into philosophy will be in vain because such judgements are always based on empirical rules which cannot have the binding force of the rules of a science. In the CPR Kant prefers to reserve the use of the word aesthetic for its old meaning of the ‘science of all principles of sensuousness’ (B p. 35, A p. 21). By the time of the CJ, however, Kant will have overtly taken on more of what motivates Baumgarten’s conception (in his unpublished ‘Reflections’ he had already concerned himself more seriously with aesthetics in the new sense). He writes a complex philosophy of aesthetic judgements which aims to establish links between nature in itself and the freedom of rational beings. The reasons for his desire to establish these links relate to difficulties that become apparent in the first Critique.

The unity of the subject

The success of Kant’s philosophy depends upon the legitimacy of certain distinctions. However, these distinctions turn out to be hard to sustain. The ‘transcendental aesthetic’, the account of the conditions of perception, relies, for example, on the difference between ‘empirical intuition’, and the concepts which judge it. English-language philosophy has come to use the technical term ‘intuition’ to translate the German word Anschauung, which plays a decisive role in the philosophy of the period. The word has several senses, which are not always clear. In everyday usage anschauen simply means to ‘look at’, but in philosophy it is often used to designate various kinds of contact between a subject and its ‘other’. Kant regards intuition as the most immediate form of relation of the subject’s cognition to an object, which ‘only takes place to the extent that the object is given to us’ (CPR B p. 33, A p. 19), and he equates this with anything being ‘real’. As he puts it in the ‘Postulates of Empirical Thought’:

existence has … to do … only with the question: whether such a thing is given to us in such a way that the perception of the thing could always precede the concept. For the concept’s going before the perception means only its mere possibility; but perception, which gives the material to the concept, is the only character of reality. (B p. 273, A p. 225)⁴

This lays the ground for the distinction between appearances, objects as given to us, and things in themselves, which are not given to us as appearances. The question is how ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ relate to each other, and here everything turns on the status of ‘intuition’.

A basic example of intuition is the sensation of the hardness of a piece of rock. However, Kant separates empirical intuitions like this from what he terms ‘pure intuition’, which is concerned with ‘extension and form’ of the object and is the foundation of geometry. ‘Pure intuition’ refers to the framework within which we necessarily apprehend things. There are two forms of pure intuition: space and time. We cannot conceive of an object of the senses which would exist in a non-spatial and non-temporal form: we can never apprehend all of an object at once, even though we assume that all the object’s aspects do exist at a particular time. We can, though, conceive of functions of thinking which are non-spatial and non-temporal, namely those aspects of thought which are wholly non-empirical, including the categories. Categories are forms of judgement, of synthesis, which are universally applicable to anything that can count as an object (which must be one or many, of a certain size, standing in a certain relationship to other objects, caused by something, etc.). To apprehend a sequence of events as causal, for example, one requires the particular form of synthesis that is designated by the category of causality. One can see b follow a in time (on the basis of the continuity of the I between the two events), but one cannot see the necessity of this occurrence that makes it a causal occurrence rather than a random connection of contingently related events. Categories, then, make possible the syntheses of intuitions which turn intuitions into reliable cognitions. Cognition has two distinct sources: ‘receptive’ sensuousness, which provides intuitions, and ‘spontaneous’ understanding, which can think objects as objects of knowledge by applying iterable categories, such as causality, and concepts to different intuitions.

The first stage of making coherence out of the multiplicity of sensuous intuitions is the effect of Einbildungskraft (‘imagination’). Imagination is the power to organise images (Bilder) given in intuition into what Kant terms ‘schemata’ which can then be subsumed under categories and concepts. In version ‘A’ of the CPR the ‘imagination’ both produces associations which cohere into something cognisable and is able to reproduce intuitions without the object of intuition being present. The imagination in this version seems both productive and receptive, which already suggests an ambiguity concerning the fundamental distinction between intuitions and concepts. Productivity is a function of the understanding, which is necessary for any synthesis of intuitions; receptivity is the characteristic of sensuousness. In the ‘B’ version of the CPR (1787) Kant changes the role of the imagination, in order to sustain the boundary between what we contribute to the world’s intelligibility and what the world contributes, by subordinating the reproductive imagination to the functioning of the categories of the understanding. He therefore planned (but did not actually do so) to remove the famous description of the imagination as a ‘blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we would have no knowledge’ (B p. 103, A p. 78) and replace it with the assertion that all synthesis is based on the understanding.⁵ The problems lurking in the idea of a boundary between spontaneity and receptivity become most apparent in the decisive part of Kant’s account of the structure of our subjectivity, the attempt of the I to describe itself.⁶ It is this account, the ‘transcendental deduction of the categories’,⁷ which will have a major effect on German Idealism and early Romanticism, and thus upon the history of aesthetics.

The problem is that the highest principle of philosophy, the I, cannot be available as an ‘intuition’ in the sense Kant has so far employed in the CPR, for the following reasons. In order to overcome the key problem in Descartes Kant introduces the idea that ‘The I think must be able to accompany all my representations’ (B p. 132). This idea Kant terms the ‘synthetic unity of self-consciousness’, because different moments of consciousness are unified by the essential principle. He opposes this synthetic unity to Descartes’s cogito, the ‘analytical unity of self-consciousness’, in which the thinking and the being of the subject are immediately identical, albeit only at the moment when I doubt my existence. The immediate ‘Cartesian’ consciousness of myself which can accompany each thought, and which makes it my thought, does not link this particular ‘I think’ to any other case of ‘I think’. It is only through a synthesis of different moments of such consciousness that I can become aware of the identity of my own self-consciousness across time and can have a principle of unity for my representations. Synthesis is dependent upon an act of ‘spontaneity’ (B p. 133): it is ‘self-caused’, rather than being caused by something else. If it were the result of something else the task would then be to ground that something else in something else as its cause, and so on, either until one found a first cause, or ad infinitum, in which case the synthesis would never happen, and self-consciousness – and knowledge – would become impossible.

The spontaneity in question therefore cannot itself be part of sensuousness, because everything sensuous is part of the causally determined world given in intuition. What is given in sensuous intuition is synthesised by the understanding, according to the rules of judgement – the categories – whose employment Kant is trying to legitimate in the transcendental deduction. This means, though, that the identity of consciousness actually seems to depend upon the multiplicity of intuitions which it synthesises according to the prior rules of the understanding. In the later-added passage on the ‘refutation of idealism’ Kant claims that ‘even our inner experience, which was indubitable for Cartesius, is only possible under the presupposition of external experience’ (B p. 275). However, Kant also claims in the Deduction that the synthesising process itself is what enables me to identify myself: ‘only via the fact that I can grasp the man-fold [of representations] in one consciousness do I call them all my representations, for otherwise I would have a self which is as differently multi-coloured as I have ideas of which I am conscious’ (B p. 134). The problem is, of course, that there is no explanation here of what makes these representations mine. The identity of the I must, however, surely be established independently of the endless difference of what is given to it. The I, in Kant’s terms, is a set of linked cognitive rules that process intuitions into the unity of experience and has a ‘synthetic unity’. But what sort of awareness do I have of this self, according to Kant?

Kant’s answer seems to boil down to the fact that access to our self-awareness can only be of the same order as our intuition of objects: ‘Not the consciousness of the determining, but rather only that of the self that can be determined, i.e. of my inner intuition (to the extent to which its manifold can be connected in accordance with the general condition of the unity of apperception in thinking), is the object’ (B p. 407). But this leads to much the same problem as the one just mentioned. The synthetic unity of the I is not guaranteed by our empirical perception because it is self-caused, although Kant claims empirical perception is a necessary condition of it. Kant talks of the ‘pure synthesis of the understanding which is the a priori foundation of the empirical synthesis’ (B p. 140) – meaning the I which, even though I am not aware of it in the sequence of differing experiences, must be there to accompany my experiences, thus making them mine – but then does not give any further account of this pure spontaneity. Manfred Frank points out what is lacking in Kant’s account: ‘In order to be aware of its own appearance (in time) the simple being of self-consciousness must always already be pre-supposed – otherwise it is as if the self-awareness were to lose its eye’ (Frank 1985 p. 39), because it would not have any grounds for seeing representations in time as its representations. This consciousness must already exist in some way if it is to be aware of the series of intuitions which constitute its appearance as object to itself as its own intuitions.

Kant acknowledges this problem, but does nothing to solve it:

I am conscious of myself in general in the synthesis of the multiplicity of representations, therefore in the synthetic original unity of apperception, not as I appear to myself, neither as I am in myself, but only to the extent that I am. This representation is thinking, not intuition. (CPR B p. 157)

The I must, then, have some kind of ontological status which is not exhausted by what can be said about it as appearance in ‘inner sense’. However, nothing can be said about the manner of its existence because it cannot be given in intuition, which, as we saw, is Kant’s criterion for objective existence. Kant later expends considerable effort in refuting the argument that the I is to be regarded as any kind of persistent ‘substance’ to which attributes are attached, but does not get any further with the basic problem.⁸ His problem is acutely summed up by Novalis in 1796: ‘I is basically nothing – Everything has to be given to it – But it is to it alone that something can be given and the given only becomes something [i.e. an object in Kant’s sense] via the I’ (Novalis 1978 p. 185). How, though, is the I given to itself? As Novalis puts it: ‘Can I look for a schema for myself, if I am that which schematises?’ (p. 162).

If I wish to know myself I need to use the condition of knowing itself, which is self-caused, but I can only use it in relation to my appearing self, to the representations I have of myself and the world, which Kant insists I do not create. Self-consciousness is not ultimately a cognition of oneself, because cognition is only possible in relation to what is given as appearance. Even for Kant, then, ‘reflecting’ upon oneself as an object, splitting oneself into subject and object, cannot give a complete account of the nature of self-consciousness. A full ‘cognition’ of oneself would have to be an intuition of something which is wholly in the realm of the ‘intelligible’, the realm of spontaneity. This would entail a self-caused intuition of the self-caused synthesiser of intuitions, which requires an ‘intellectual intuition’. Kant rejects this notion as applied to the self because it contradicts his argument that intuitions without concepts are blind and concepts without intuitions are empty, which means that the identity of the I depends upon its having intuitions given to it to synthesise. Kant sees intellectual intuition as the mode of awareness of a deity which creates the objects of its thought, rather than relying on input from outside itself for the material of its thought. Frank sums up Kant’s objection to intellectual intuition as follows: ‘The whole deduction of the possibility of an objective cognition would become redundant if Kant were to have assumed an intelligence which creates its object from its own powers’ (Frank 1985 p. 43). The intelligence Kant thinks he can describe constitutes the objective truth, not the existence, of the object, via the use of its synthetic powers in relation to the appearing spatio-temporal world. However, the truth of the subject is not adequately articulated in such an account. The highest cognitive point of philosophy cannot know itself, even if it must assume the necessity of its own existence. In the Paralogisms Kant claims that the ‘The proposition, I think, or I exist as thinking is an empirical proposition’.⁹ Empirical propositions require intuitions if what they express is to be real, but what kind of intuition does the I have of itself? In a remark whose implications will, as we shall see, be echoed and expanded in key aspects of Romantic philosophy, such as the work of Schlegel and Schleiermacher, Kant claims in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that the ‘representation of apperception, the I’, is in fact ‘nothing more than the feeling of an existence without the least concept and only a representation of that to which all thinking relates’ (Kant 1989 p. 106; p. 136 of original edition). As we shall see in relation to the CJ, this invocation of ‘feeling’, which probably has its source in Rousseau’s ‘Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar’ from Émile, will come to have very significant ramifications.

Kant faces a serious problem in using self-consciousness as the highest principle of epistemology, and the same problem recurs in his moral philosophy. When considering the reasons for the separation of law-bound appearances and freedom, we saw that there can be no evidence of freedom, because it cannot be an object of the understanding identifiable by a concept. Freedom is, though, the centre of Kant’s enterprise. He talks of a ‘causality through freedom’ which brings about new states of the world via our ideas of what should be the case. Reason, the ‘capacity for purposes’, therefore realises something which cannot be empirical – freedom – in the world. But how are we to know this? We shall see in a moment how Kant’s aesthetics later tries to respond to the difficulties inherent in the appeal to non-empirical freedom. Reason itself is in one sense ‘infinite’, because it cannot be determined by anything finite we know about the world. It ‘shows a spontaneity so pure that it goes far beyond everything with which sensuousness can provide it’ (Kant 1974 BA p. 109). The recurrence of the term ‘spontaneity’ here is important, because it links the problem of our free will to the problem of describing the existence of our cognitive self-consciousness in a manner which, via Fichte, will be crucial for the whole of German Idealism.

Kant is, as it were, in the position of Moses in Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron: the most fundamental part of his philosophy cannot be explained, just as Moses is faced with the unenviable task of persuading people to believe in a God they cannot see. As Kant puts it:

For we can explain nothing except what we can reduce to laws whose object is given in some possible experience. But freedom is a mere idea, whose objective reality cannot be shown either according to laws of nature and thus also not in any possible experience. (BA p. 120)

Our will can seem to be motivated by natural drives, which are explicable in terms of the understanding because they are based on biological laws. However, the will can also be seen as motivated by something in the realm of the intelligible, which cannot be explained. We can exercise our rational will in order to bring about changes in the world which are guided by ideas of what ought to be the case and which would not occur if all were ruled by natural determinism. Kant thinks the fact that we can act in ways which are not in accordance with our appetites and which are in accordance with our moral duty reveals a potential for universally binding laws that point to a higher purpose in existence. In his moral philosophy Kant is, however, left once again with the problem that the fundamental principle cannot be articulated. As he does in the first Critique, Kant more than once invokes the spectre of ‘intellectual intuition’. Discussing the categorical imperative – ‘Act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it becomes a universal law’ (BA p. 52) – he says that our consciousness of the imperative is a ‘fact of reason’. Evidence for this fact would, though, require access to freedom, which would entail ‘an intellectual intuition which one cannot in any way accept here’ (A p. 57). In both the theoretical and the practical parts of his philosophy, then, Kant leaves a gap where the articulation of the highest principle should be located.

The unification of nature

The first two Critiques leave open how the new focus of philosophy, the subject, could give a grounding explanation of its activities in a non-circular, non-theological fashion. Furthermore, Kant’s account of the understanding only explains how it is that we can generate a potentially infinite number of laws of nature. When it comes to the question of whether these laws constitute an overall system Kant claims we can only assert that they do so as a ‘regulative idea’ of reason. He thus acknowledges the need for the idea of the universe as a unified totality if the products of the understanding are not to be a merely random series of laws, but he is aware that this does not prove in any way that the universe is in fact such a totality. But without such proof there is no philosophical answer to the questions of why we are able to synthesise intuitions in a law-bound manner, or why we have a capacity for choosing to act contrary to natural inclination. Has this latter ability a goal which is linked to the ways in which we see nature functioning, or is it completely independent of what we know about nature?

It would seem strange if there were no connection at all, because, for Kant, our cognitive faculty and our freedom are both self-caused and yet can have effects on the natural world. If one cannot find a way beyond this account of our relationship to internal and external nature the consequences can look disturbing. Is our capacity for reason, for example, as Hobbes and La Rochefoucauld had argued, actually just a form of self-interest based on self-preservation? This is, of course, not just a theoretical problem. Kant’s separation of the spheres of epistemology and ethics into different aspects of ourselves mirrors the ways in which the spheres of science and technology become separated from the sphere of law and morality in modernity. As the new forms of cognitive relationship to nature produce the ability to manipulate nature to an ever greater extent, nature comes to be seen in terms of regulation and classification, making it primarily into an object which the subject determines. Grounding decisions about what ought to be done with the limitless capacity of the understanding to generate new knowledge thus becomes an unavoidable problem because the understanding itself can offer no indications concerning the desirability of using what it can produce.

The last thing Kant would have wanted are the concrete consequences of the division between what will become reduced in much of the philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to ‘fact’ and ‘value’. What he sought were ways of unifying understanding and reason without falling back into ‘dogmatic’ rationalism. The actual historical result of the divisions Kant reveals can be seen in terms of the separation of a world of cold scientific objectivity from a world lacking in ethical certainty and intrinsic meaning. However, this separation suggests a way of understanding the importance of a further dimension of modernity, namely the complex and diverse development of modern art, and the development of new philosophical ways of understanding art. Art is often seen as the location where those aspects of the self and the world, which are excluded by the dominant processes of modernity, can find their articulation. It is for this reason that the emergence of aesthetics is an important disruptive factor in the development of modern philosophy. Baumgarten and Hamann had already suggested why: aesthetics attends to that which is not reducible to scientific cognition and is yet undeniably a part of our world. Despite the strictures of the first Critique, Kant himself acknowledges the vital importance of this aspect of philosophy, even at the cost of putting some of his most fundamental ideas into question.

The CJ attempts to show that the kind of consensus achievable via the compelling results of the activity of the understanding may be present, at least as a possible aim, in realms in which the understanding has no right of legislation. The need for the results of activity of the understanding to be integrated into the aims of reason becomes urgent when it becomes clear that the rules of the understanding can be applied to anything at all, because traditional constraints on what can or should be known no longer apply. It is no coincidence that attention to the Faust story in this period is so widespread. Divorced from any sense of the possibility of its goals being integrated into a meaningful whole, the sort of science which reduces nature to being a rule-governed machine can be seen as leading to what Horkheimer and Adorno will term a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’, in which liberation from theological tutelage creates new forms of imprisonment, despite the massive increase in technical control over nature. Kant’s text may seem initially far from such wider concerns, but attention to the detail of his conception can show that it is not.

The basis of the third Critique, the ‘power of judgement’ – Urteilskraft – is the synthesising capacity which connects the particular to the general. This can happen in two ways. The first is when the understanding subsumes the particular intuition under a general category or concept. Kant terms this ‘determinant’ or ‘determining’ judgement. The law exists prior to the individual case and is to be applied to it. It is, though, anything but self-evident how one decides which law is applicable in any empirical case without getting into a regress of laws for the application of laws. Kant tried to address this regress in the CPR via the schema, which creates empirical equivalents of a priori categories: perceivable existence at all times is, for example, the schema of necessity. The schema also makes concepts sensuous by immediately apprehending different parts of the otherwise inherently particular sensuous manifold as coherent entities of the same kind. In order to see the chihuahua and the Great Dane both as dogs, for example, one needs something which reduces their empirical difference to what can be subsumed into a general concept. The schema therefore connects the two sources of knowledge, sensibility and understanding. The problem of judgement underlying the notion of the schema, which Kant addresses in the CJ in the account of the second kind of judgement, ‘reflective judgement’, will turn out to be one of the most durable in modern philosophy (see Bowie 1997). As we saw with regard to the understanding’s relation to reason, no amount of applying determining judgement to nature will demonstrate that the multiplicity to which it applies has any kind of ultimate unity. The establishing of natural laws cannot in any way guarantee a systematic relationship between such laws, because that would require a higher principle which demonstrated that they fitted together. A principle of this kind would reintroduce ‘dogmatic’ metaphysics because it would cross the boundary of sensuous and intelligible by presupposing that nature is inherently intelligible. How are we to know that those parts of nature for which we as yet have no laws are subject to laws at all?

All the laws of nature we think we possess are based on intuitions which fill concepts, thus on what Kant means by ‘reality’, in the particular sense we examined above, and reality is contingent. We therefore have no cognitive grounds in Kant’s terms for regarding nature as a unified system. In order to confront this problem Kant introduces the second form of judgement, ‘reflective’ judgement, whose task is to move from the particular to the general. This entails presupposing a higher principle inherent in nature, as otherwise nature becomes merely a ‘labyrinth of the multiplicity of possible particular laws’ (CJ p. 26). However, the principle is a necessary fiction, which assumes that nature in fact does function in a purposive way, ‘as if an understanding contained the basis of the unity of the multiplicity of its empirical laws’ (B p. XVIII, A p. XXVI). Kant underpins this position with the crucial claim that natural products are on the one hand mechanical, in terms of the laws which apply to them, but, on the other hand, when seen as ‘systems, e.g. formations of crystals, all sorts of forms of flowers, or in the inner construction of plants and animals’ they behave ‘technically, i.e. at the same time as art’ (p. 30). ‘Art’ here has the Greek sense of ‘techne’, the capacity to produce in a purposive way. Natural products appear to contain an ‘idea’ which makes them take the form they do, in the way an artist can realise an idea by making a work of art. It is as if the whole of an organism preceded the parts which we can analyse in the terms of the understanding: ‘An organised product of nature is that in which everything is an end and on the other hand also a means. Nothing in it is in vain, pointless, or to be attributed to a blind mechanism of nature’ (B p. 296, A p. 292). Kant here adverts to forms of intelligibility which scientific knowledge can never make accessible and which are fundamental to our comprehension of our own existence.

Although the problems addressed here begin as epistemological ones, it is important to see how they also lead in other directions which are central to the issues of this book. Kant’s claims about organisms, for example, echo the second Critique’s concern that rational beings should always be ends in themselves, and not just the means for the ends of other beings. If rational beings were solely means and not also ends the result would be a regress in which each being is just the means for another being, and so on, which would mean no being had any purpose in itself at all. The idea of the natural organism, in which nature is purposeful in a manner which scientific knowledge cannot grasp, relates to an analogous problem. In the CPR Kant claims that the regress which results from each natural thing simply being conditioned by another thing that had in turn been conditioned by something else, etc., can be circumvented. While reason must postulate the ‘unconditioned … in all things in themselves for everything conditioned, so that the series of conditions should thus become complete’ (CPR B p. XX), because the understanding restricts knowledge to judgements of appearances, rather than trying to gain access to ‘things in themselves’, the contradiction of seeking what the contemporary writer and critic of Kant, F.H. Jacobi, termed ‘conditions of the unconditioned’ can be avoided.¹⁰ However, the subject’s very ability to stop the regress in judging anything particular (which is the function of schematism) seems, as Fichte would soon argue, to give the subject itself the ‘unconditioned’ role in determining how nature is to be understood. This seems to be the case even though the ultimate nature of ‘things in themselves’ involves the whole grounding dimension of nature which is not accessible to our knowledge and though the nature of this subject is opaque in certain key respects.

A significant worry therefore arises here with regard to the status of the subject, which we shall later encounter in Schelling’s criticisms of Fichte, and which now plays a role in contemporary ecological debates. When the subject analyses an organism it usually destroys the integrity of what it analyses. The plant which has become an object of scientific dissection can cease to exist as an organism because it has been taken apart. There is, of course, no inherent limit to how far such destruction can go, as the twentieth century has taught us. Furthermore, scientific analysis of nature cannot make nature into a coherent whole because of the regress we have just encountered. Nature seems therefore to be threatened in two ways, both of which have to do with the lack of a holistic conception of its relationship to our cognitive activity. On the one hand, the cognitive approach to nature threatens to disintegrate it into the endless multiplicity which results from the analytical functioning of the understanding. On the other, for the understanding to do its work, nature must be reduced to general principles based on the subject’s capacity for abstraction. These principles enable the workings of nature to be predicted and controlled more effectively, but they have no necessary concern with the particularity of their object, and each principle’s relationship to all the others is of no concern to the functioning of the understanding itself. The need to establish holistic conceptions that result from awareness of the limitations of cognition is what connects ideas about the organism to theories of society. The highest goals of a society, it is argued, can only be legitimate if they sustain the individual integrity of all their members of as ends in themselves, even as they are incorporated into the whole of society. Analogies between Kant’s approaches to the organism and theories of the social world will play a major role in Idealist aesthetics, and the tension between science’s need for analysis if knowledge is to increase, and the desire for an integrated relationship with the natural world which is often at odds with such analysis is crucial to the thought of this period, most notably in the work of Schelling and Goethe.

If Kant had continued to work solely within the terms of the CPR the idea of an object as an integral organism would not have become a major philosophical issue. One reason it does has to do with the conception of the subject in that text. As we have seen, in the CPR the world did not just consist in chains of endless random differences precisely because the subject is supposed to establish its own identity by the way in which it synthesises the ‘sensuous manifold’ into something reliably knowable. At this level the later Heidegger’s critique of Kantian philosophy’s ‘subjectification of being’, the making of the truth of being into a function of the subject, seems appropriate in certain respects. However, the purpose of the subject’s syntheses could not be established in the terms of the understanding. The ‘spontaneity’ which produced the syntheses takes one beyond the syntheses to the founding principle of our capacity for cognition. If we were to have philosophical access to this principle we would know the value of knowledge. The second Critique introduced a further spontaneity, which again pointed, beyond anything we can know, to a higher purpose than can be described in terms of a nature legislated by the understanding: why is it that we can contradict natural causation in ourselves in the name of ‘ideas’ and of the moral law? The third Critique tries to link this sense of the higher purpose of rational beings to the sensuously based experience of both natural and artistic beauty. Such experience is grounded in the pleasure derived from contemplating how each part of the object contributes to the whole of that object without losing its own value – how each part can be both a means and an end in itself. This contemplation involves both intuition of the object and a relationship to the object which is not based upon reducing the intuition to what it has in common with other intuitions. The coherence of a particular object cannot be reduced to a general law of how things cohere and thus depends upon the integrity of that object in relation to the subject’s capacity for judgement.

In Schopenhauer’s words, the CJ consists of the attempt at the ‘baroque unification of cognition of the beautiful with cognition of the purposiveness of natural bodies in one capacity for cognition’ (Schopenhauer 1986 p. 711), namely judgement. Judgement, Kant asserts, is to function here ‘according to the principle of the appropriateness of nature to our capacity for cognition’ (CJ B p. XLII, A p. XXXIX). This appropriateness cannot be definitively legitimated in philosophy, because proof of it would again entail access to the non-appearing intelligible realm. What is required is an account of why there is a congruence between the way we necessarily synthesise intuitions via the understanding and some immanent coherence of nature that gives pleasure in aesthetic judgement. Although Kant generally rejects positive answers to this question, he is aware that without some more developed position than that offered in the CPR his philosophy cannot achieve its final aims. Why exactly, then, does the aesthetic become so important in this context?

Aesthetic judgement connects the capacity for cognition and the ‘capacity for desire’ (which is how Kant describes the will) by judging which objects give pleasure and which do not. The ground of aesthetic judgement is therefore the distinction between feelings of pleasure and non-pleasure. This division is, though, not based on a cognition of the object – which entails the subsuming of it under a rule – but precisely upon whether the object gives the subject pleasure or not. The object of the judgement is therefore not conceptual: it cannot be classified in terms of an identifying rule. What is in question is the ‘immediate’ feeling of the subject which does not rely on a ‘mediated’ synthesis of intuitions of the object.¹¹ Even in his writings well before the first Critique, Kant thinks it vital to stress that ‘sensation’ differs from ‘feeling’. The former is the sensuous material of cognition which is subsumed under the categories and classified by concepts, and Kant sometimes prefers to term it ‘appearance’; the latter is the result of the relation of the object to the subject’s pleasure or displeasure. Taste itself ‘is not a mere [receptive] sensation but what arises from sensations which have been compared’ (Kant 1996 p. 100): it therefore involves judgement, the activity of the understanding. Now this might seem to make aesthetic judgement ‘merely subjective’ in the manner referred to by Gadamer in Truth and Method, where he talks of Kant’s ‘subjectification’ of aesthetics. However, Kant’s argument cannot be seen in this manner, not least because he will come to regard the role of feeling as ineliminable even from the theory of knowledge. Objectivity itself, he argues in the CJ, must have some kind of ground in feeling. Although we now derive no pleasure from the synthesising activity of the understanding: ‘in its time there must have been some, and only because the most common experience would not be possible without it did it gradually mix with simple cognition and was no longer particularly noticed any more’ (CJ B p. XL, A p. XXXVIII). The activity of cognition therefore has a history in which it is motivated by pleasure, and pleasure is not something within the cognitive control of the subject.

It is not surprising, then, as we shall see in a moment, that the pleasure occasioned by the aesthetic object derives precisely from its allowing our cognitive faculties to play in a manner that does not entail determination by concepts, thus suggesting that the ground of cognition is an activity which, like play, can take place for its own sake. In a further striking claim, Kant even maintains that a ‘common sense’, of the kind ‘required for the universal communicability of a feeling’, is ‘the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our cognition’ (B p. 66).¹² He connects this idea by analogy to music, for which he otherwise does not have a great deal of philosophical time, talking of the ‘tuning/attunement’ (Stimmung) of the cognitive powers, which is differently ‘proportioned’, depending on the object in question, and which ‘can only be determined by feeling (not by concepts)’ (B p. 66). Whether this ‘common sense’ is a ‘constitutive principle of the possibility of experience’ or only a ‘regulative principle’, for creating ‘a common sense for higher purposes’ (B p. 68), Kant leaves open. However, he does insist that we necessarily presuppose such a norm if we wish to make valid claims about taste, because such claims depend upon a difference between mere contingent individual pleasure and what we think everyone ought to be able to agree about. As he already claimed in 1769–70: ‘Contemplation of beauty is a judgement, and not a pleasure’ (Kant 1996 p. 109). Kant therefore seems to suggest both that our most fundamental relationship to the world and each other is at the level of the immediate ‘feeling’ which is the basis of the postulate of a ‘common sense’, and that there is a purposive sense in our cognitive capacity which goes beyond its subsumption of intuitions under rules. Given that he also suggests that our representation of ourselves is ‘nothing more than the feeling of an existence without the least concept’, the role of the non-conceptual aspects of the subject in central parts of his philosophy becomes inescapable, and this is why the aesthetic becomes so significant.

There is, however, an important potential danger here, which lies in how one understands the nature of feeling. If feeling is regarded as grounded in libido, for example, cognition can easily come to be seen as essentially motivated by interest in domination, because feeling is conceived of as a lack that must be overcome by bringing the lacking object under the subject’s power. The object thus becomes a source of self-aggrandisement for the subject: as we shall see in Chapter 8, Nietzsche will later draw such a consequence when he claims that the intelligible basis of ourselves is in fact the ‘will to power’, and Heidegger will stylise such views into a verdict on subjectivity as a whole in Western metaphysics. Kant, on the other hand, is concerned with a kind of pleasure which cannot be reduced to self-interest because its significance lies, as the notion of the ‘common sense’ suggests, in its potential for being universally shared across social divisions, without it leading to an appropriative relationship to the object. In this sense the aesthetic relates to Kantian ‘reason’. Although aesthetic pleasure is based on the capacity for desire, which does link it to volition, the crucial fact about the will for Kant is, as we saw, that rational beings can desire against their natural inclinations in the name of a higher purpose. The feeling of pleasure upon which judgement is founded derives from the sense of a harmony in nature which the understanding, that activity of the subject which can be seen as in some sense dominating the object, cannot establish. When I see a green meadow the understanding can invoke Newton to tell me about green as a property of refracted light, but I can also derive immediate pleasure from its green aspect. The pleasure in question, Kant repeatedly insists, is solely that of the subject, and provides no knowledge of the object: the capacity to evoke a harmonious play of the (subjective) faculties is not a property of the object because the basis of this judgement is not necessitated in the way judgements based on categories and concepts (as rules for identifying objects) are. This pleasure must, though, involve some sort of effect of the object on the subject (not just any object will occasion it, although the context in which the object is encountered can be decisive), rather than a rule-bound synthesis by the subject, and it does not rely on the subject appropriating the object. Kant’s limitation of aesthetic pleasure to the subjective does seem, therefore, to conceal a more extended sense of how subject and object relate, which is linked to the nature of the will.

Despite his repeated insistence upon the subjective basis of aesthetic pleasure Kant himself returns on occasion to the idea that nature may give an indication that ‘it contains in itself some basis, a law-bound correspondence of its products to our pleasure which is independent of all interest’ (CJ B p. 169, A p. 167), and he talks of a ‘code through which nature talks to us figuratively in its beautiful forms’ (B p. 170, A p. 168). Given our own status as part of nature, the idea of a deeper harmony between ourselves and nature is tempting, especially as Kant sees the fact of agreement over judgements of taste as testifying to the possibility of the sensus communis. Saying something is beautiful involves, as we have seen, a judgement which can command general assent that perhaps results – and Kant is emphatic about the ‘perhaps’ – from ‘what can be regarded as the supersensuous substrate of mankind’ (B p. 237, A p. 234). For the Kant of the CPR, remember, nature was almost exclusively that which appears to us in terms of necessary laws, not what will become the living nature of German Idealism and Romanticism. The laws sustained their general validity because they were based on the very conditions of our thinking intelligibly at all, which did not have to be tested every time to see if they were inherent in the endless multiplicity of things. The CJ begins to undermine this view of nature by its attention to the other ways in which the subject can relate to it. The idea of the postulated ‘supersensuous substrate’, in which freedom and necessity harmonise, relies on the possibility, based on feeling, of the ‘subjective purposiveness of nature for the power of judgement’ (B p. 237, A p. 234). What Kant is looking for, then, is an indication of the role of the freedom of rational beings in the system of nature.

The purpose of beauty

Kant’s attempts to come to terms with the ‘supersensuous substrate’ of the subject’s relationship to the object threaten to invalidate the boundary between law-bound nature and the autonomy of rational beings which was essential to the CPR. However, a philosophy which aspires to grounding our place in the world via the principle of subjectivity clearly must do more than describe the subject’s ability to legislate nature in terms of regularities and to prescribe ethical limitations to itself. Kant’s problem in extending his conception is that he would seem to need a positive account of the spontaneity involved both in our knowledge and in our ethical self-determination. If he wished to establish a purpose in nature as a whole, any such postulate would have to include ourselves in the purpose of nature, which would make our spontaneity an aspect of nature in itself, our purposive productivity being of the same kind as that which results in natural organisms.¹³ Kant’s aim, then, is to link the harmony manifest in aesthetic apprehension of natural objects with the idea of natural teleology, thereby revealing the ultimate connection of nature as a whole to the ways in which we think about it and relate to it. He remains ambiguous as to whether such a link is merely a regulative idea or could actually be constitutive, tending more to the former conception. Subsequent thinkers, like Schelling, will, as we shall see, try to make the link constitutive. Such a strong conception of natural teleology may be hard to defend, but what interests Kant in this question will not simply go away, even if one rejects teleology out of hand as inappropriate for the explanation of natural products.

What is most significant here is the fact that in aesthetic contemplation of nature the object can be said to affect us, instead of our determining it in terms of general rules. This does seems to point, as Hartmut Scheible indicates, in the wake of Adorno, to a ‘mimetic’ side to the imagination which suggests we can indeed in some sense harmonise with nature. We do not in this case wish to order nature in any other way than it is already