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Immediate Judgment and Non-Cognitive Ideas: The Pervasive and Persistent in the Misreading of Kant’s Aesthetic Formalism

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The Palgrave Kant Handbook

Part of the book series: Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism ((PHGI))

Abstract

Kant’s aesthetic theory is misinterpreted when understood in terms of uncritical empiricism. By analyzing standard interpretations of Kant’s aesthetic formalism, McMahon argues that the meaning of direct/immediate and non-cognitive judgment is distorted when taken out of the context of Kant’s critical system of the mind. She concludes by drawing out the implications for understanding Kant’s aesthetic theory in the contemporary context.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Clement Greenberg, “Complaints of an Art Critic,” in Modernism, Criticism, Realism: Alternative Contexts for Art, ed. Charles Harrison and Fred Orton (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 4.

  2. 2.

    Roxie Davis Mack, “Modernist Art Criticism: Hegemony and Decline,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 341–48.

  3. 3.

    See Deane W. Curtin, “Varieties of Aesthetic Formalism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 40, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 323.

  4. 4.

    David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste (1757), in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1987), 226–49.

  5. 5.

    Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 49n15 (at CJ 5:208).

  6. 6.

    See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), bk. II, pt. iii, §§ 4–5 (pp. 418–24). See also Paul Guyer’s analysis in “Reason, Desire, and Action,” in Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 173.

  7. 7.

    For Hume’s dialectical approach to arriving at a standard of taste, see his Of the Standard of Taste.

  8. 8.

    For a description of the subjectivism-objectivism debate, see Brian Watkins, “The Subjective Basis of Kant’s Judgment of Taste,” Inquiry 54, no. 4 (Aug. 2011): 315–36.

  9. 9.

    Onora O’Neill, “Vindicating Reason,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 301.

  10. 10.

    Ibid.

  11. 11.

    Ibid., 299.

  12. 12.

    Jane Kneller, “Aesthetic Reflection and Community,” in Kant and the Concept of Community, ed. Charlton Payne and Lucas Thorpe (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2011), 260–83. There is a very helpful discussion of Kant’s conception of a socially grounded reason in Jane Kneller, “Introducing Kantian Social Theory,” in Autonomy and Community: Readings in Contemporary Kantian Social Philosophy, ed. Jane Kneller and Sidney Axinn (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 1–14. See also Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 40–46.

  13. 13.

    Paul Crowther takes the opposite view, arguably because he does not acknowledge the relevance of Kant’s theory of genius to the question of the historicity of aesthetically relevant properties. See Paul Crowther, “Kant and Greenberg’s Varieties of Aesthetic Formalism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 445. For an in-depth analysis of the concept of “aesthetically relevant properties,” see Bence Nanay, Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  14. 14.

    For example, see Roger Fry, Vision and Design (London: Chatto & Windus, 1920).

  15. 15.

    Ibid.

  16. 16.

    Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002).

  17. 17.

    Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (New York: Routledge, 2007), 45–46. Sheila Lintott supports Battersby’s view in “Feminist Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” Environmental Values 19, no. 3 (Aug. 2010): 324.

  18. 18.

    Hannah Arendt discusses the significance of aesthetic judgment for community in a way that resonates with O’Neill’s argument for the significance of the third Critique for understanding Kant’s conception of reason. See Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, esp. 27–40. Battersby dismisses, without justification in my view, Arendt’s well-grounded interpretation of Kant’s aesthetics. See Battersby, Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, ch. 10.

  19. 19.

    Emily Brady, Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 34–35, 72–73, 129.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., 33. For Brady’s analogy between aesthetic disinterest and legal reasoning, see 134–35.

  21. 21.

    See Peter Langland-Hassan, “A Puzzle about Visualization,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10, no. 2 (June 2011): 145–73.

  22. 22.

    Brady, Aesthetics of the Natural Environment, 70–72 and ch. 6.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 140.

  24. 24.

    For example, The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), and “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, But It Is of No Use in Practice” (1793).

  25. 25.

    Paul Guyer, “Kantian Communities: The Realm of Ends, the Ethical Community, and the Highest Good,” in Kant and the Concept of Community, 88–120.

  26. 26.

    See Tomoe Nakamura, “Nishi Amane’s Response to European Dualism,” Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 10, no. 3 (Winter 2013): 24–35; and Tomoe Nakamura, “The Philosophical Structure of the Evaluation of Aisthesis: Comparative Aesthetics between Europe and Japan” (PhD diss., Monash University, 2015).

  27. 27.

    Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2002), 24–26.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 4.

  29. 29.

    Jacques Rancière points out that Kant’s third Critique was written just after the French Revolution. As such, the Critique is an attempt to answer the question “through what means can an equality of sentiments be brought about that gives the proclaimed equality of rights the conditions of their real exercise?” Kant’s answer is: through the formal universality of the judgment of taste. See Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker, ed. Andrew Parker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 198. Arendt also discusses Kant’s intellectual involvement in the French Revolution. See Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 40–46.

  30. 30.

    See Watkins, “Subjective Basis of Kant’s Judgment of Taste.”

  31. 31.

    This chapter was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP150103143).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia

    Jennifer A. McMahon

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  1. Jennifer A. McMahon
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Correspondence to Jennifer A. McMahon .

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  1. Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington, USA

    Matthew C. Altman

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McMahon, J.A. (2017). Immediate Judgment and Non-Cognitive Ideas: The Pervasive and Persistent in the Misreading of Kant’s Aesthetic Formalism. In: Altman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_19

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