Guyer’s Interpretation of Free Harmony in Kant

Kant interpreters are divided on the question of whether determinate cognition plays a role in the harmony of the faculties in aesthetic judgement. I provide a 'non-cognitive' interpretation that allows Kant's statements regarding judgements of natural beauty to cohere such that determinate cognition need not be taken to perform any role in such judgements. I argue that, in aesthetic harmony, judgement privileges the free activity of the imagination over the cognizing function of the understanding for the purpose of unifying the object, although the free imagination cannot violate the obscure concepts and principles of ordinary common sense.

European Journal of Philosophy, 2009

1998

Kant holds that when we judge a thing beautiful, we do so on no other basis than our pleasure in the contemplation of it, while at the same time, we presume to judge with validity for everyone. To explain how this is possible is the task of what he calls the critique of taste. Such a task has three main parts. The first is to describe and analyze the essential characteristics of judgments of this kind. The second is to identify the state of mind from which such judgments take rise, this being, according to Kant, a state of harmonious free play between the cognitive faculties. The third part is the “deduction,” or proof of our right to make judgments of taste. I argue that Kant is unsuccessful in the second and third parts of this task. The main interest of his critical effort, I find, lies in his descriptive and analytical account of judgments of taste, specifically in his attempt to comprehend both their subjective character and their claim to universal validity. The first of these he understands as consisting in the judgment’s being based in feeling; the universality claim he understands as a normative requirement. I argue that no interpretation can be faithful to these basic tenets of Kant’s analysis without also accepting his conclusion that the act of judging in some sense “precedes” the very feeling of pleasure on which it is said to be based. I attempt to make sense of this conclusion in terms of the peculiar kind of consciousness of pleasure involved in such a judgment.

Revista de Estudios Kantianos, 2024

While in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” of the third Critique Kant establishes an unequivocal distinction between aesthetic and cognitive judgments, in the context of the theory of Genius we find new elements that will enable us to discuss such antagonism between both type of judgments. As a matter of fact, Kant defines genius as the one possessing the “vivifying principle in the mind” which—by setting our cognitive faculties in motion—succeeds in exhibiting certain intuitive representations called “aesthetic ideas”. The latter are intuitions of the imagination that give much to think about, but against which no particular thought seems adequate. In this sense, after analyzing the four moments of the pure judgment of taste, we will develop the notion of “aesthetic idea” within the framework of the Kantian theory of genius, drawing on the most recent interpretations of the subject. Ultimately, we will attempt to show that—although judgments of taste are not cognitive judgments—the third Critique presents important elements in order to evaluate to what extent aesthetic judgments contribute to cognition.

2016

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2018

Two dominant interpretations of Kant's notion of adherent beauty, the conjunctive view and the incorporation view, provide an account of how to form informed aesthetic assessments concerning artworks. According to both accounts, judgments of perfection play a crucial role in making informed, although impure, judgments of taste. These accounts only examine aesthetic responses to objects that meet or fail to meet the expectations we have regarding what they ought to be. I demonstrate that Kant's works of genius do not fall within either of these categories. The distinguishing features of these works, namely, originality and exemplarity, become unrecognizable on these interpretations because originality and exemplarity lie in the work's ability to exceed one's expectations concerning its form and content. They contribute to artistic beauty through alternative transformation methods distinct from that of abstraction, namely, concept expansion and repudiation. These additional accounts of transformation lead to a rather surprising outcome: works of genius turn out to be paradigm cases where one can and indeed ought to form informed pure judgments of taste.

In this paper, I would like to investigate how Gadamer explores the hermeneutic potential of Kant's aesthetic theory in the third Critique with regard to the notion of imagination. For the first time, by making some references, Gadamer discussed the question of imagination in his Truth and Method of 1960, and we can read as a further substantial contribution his essay entitled " Anschauung und Anschaulichkeit " (Intuition and Intuitiveness) published in 1980. Although Gadamer's approach was influenced by some Heideggerian impulses, he offered another alternative that is completely different from Heidegger's one. I shall argue that even if the question of imagination is not so much stressed by Gadamer, it proves important to the development and ontological basis of the Gadamerian hermeneutics in Wahrheit und Methode. My hypothesis is that through the themes of intuition and education (Bildung), the imagination is concerned with the human understanding and our interpreting work, thus, its significance transcends the scope of aesthetics.

The third critique by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, entitled Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), is divided into two books, one about teleological judgment and the other about aesthetic judgment. The aesthetic judgment is the faculty of judging with the ability to subsume the particular under the universal, and in turn, subsume the universal under the concept of nature where it is possible to know it. However this faculty is not given in all the objects of reality but only in the fine art objects. In order for the cognoscent subject to know the concept of taste and through it, to the metaphysical nature is given an aesthetic process in mind which is possible to vivify through the work of art. In my reading, an epistemic view at the metaphysical-aesthetic process allows us to understand the knowledge in three aspects, i) What is the sensitive knowledge that is given through the aesthetic judgment, ii) How it works among the epistemic framework of apriorism and finally, iii) An epistemic view at the aesthetic judgments. For this, the article is composed by three parts, the reconstruction of the judgment of taste and the knowledge of the sensus communis, aspects to be taken into account when understanding the judgment [of taste] as aesthetic knowledge and its relationship with theoretical and practical knowledge, and finally, an epistemic view at aesthetic judgment.