Discussion Special Contribution to the Debate

Abstract

In a rather informal manner I would like to reflect on the phenomenological aspect of Kant’s a priori of taste. It seems to me that, when Kant is talking of the a priori of taste in the third Critique, he is talking really about his sytematic presentation of cognitive materials. He is not talking about beauty at all, as he affirms he does. His real concern is with the nature of representation which seems to be at the core of this thinking, what he calls in the first Critique: ‘the matrix of representation’. I will limit myself to a few quotations in his presentation of the a priori of taste in the third Critique and will attempt to show how these ideas have to do with the phenomenological nature, so to say, of representation. Before I do that, let me briefly remind you what Kant claims to be doing in his discussion of the a priori of taste. Firstly, he defines taste in general as “an examination of what is required to call an object beautiful”. Throughout his discussion, he emphasizes constantly the contemplative nature of what he calls ‘the judgment of taste’. He repeats this again in the introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals, where he emphasizes, for example, that the judgment of taste is ‘passive’, it is ‘contemplative’, and he insists that it involves a kind of elimination of the outflow of vital force. Secondly, he indicates that eventually it is insignificant whether or not the object of the representation, that we obtain in the judgment of taste, exists or not.