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June 26, 2006
As is well known Kant's conception of the subjective universality of taste lies at the heart of his account of in the way the Critique of Judgement constructs the relationships between taste and cognition, aesthetics and subjectivity. What underpins this is the relationship between aesthetic experience and the objective universality of cognition:
Without being guided by any purpose or principle whatever, this pleasure [of taste] accompanies our ordinary apprehension of an object by means of the imagination, our power of intuition, in relation to the understanding, our power of concepts. This apprehension occurs by means of a procedure that judgement has to carry out to give rise to even the most ordinary experience .... pleasure must of necessity rest on the same conditions in everyone, because they are subjective conditions for the possibility of cognition as such, and because the proportion between these cognitive powers that is required for taste is also required for the sound and common understanding that we may presuppose in everyone. (CJ, §39, p. 158-59)
In Kant's formulation, judgements of taste can claim universality because they rest on the same conditions as cognitive judgements: "because the proportion between these cognitive powers that is required for taste is also required for ... understanding". Taste is thus based on the same conditions as knowledge, but occurs only if the procedure is interrupted before knowledge can arise (or else there would be a "science of the beautiful" and aesthetics would cease to be a separate sphere).
This means that the deduction of aesthetic judgement's universality is achieved only at the cost of a negative definition that posits taste as incomplete knowledge, as a lack in and of knowledge. The conclusion of Kant's deduction in a negative definition of the conditions of aesthetic judgement with respect to cognitive knowledge constructs taste in such a way that it will be irreducible to the systematic knowledge-based thought of modernity, irreducible to questions of truth and falsity.
What we have is a lack-in-knowledge: on the way to knowledge there is a nonknowledge which opens the possibility for knowledge without being reducible to it. The aesthetic provides the subjective conditions of possibility for cognitive knowledge; it shows the way to knowledge, without being knowledge itself.
Puzzling isn't it. Well, I've always been puzzled by it. It is 'sensus communis' - what Kant posits as the common sense ---which grounds the universality of an aesthetic judgement .
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