The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited

Abstract

1. The concept of the free yet harmonious play between the cognitive powers of imagination and understanding is the central concept in Kant's explanation of the experience of beauty and his analysis of the judgment of taste. In Kant's view, when I make a judgment of taste, I assert that the pleasure I take in a particular object is one that under ideal circumstances should be felt by any other observer of the object as well. Such a judgment therefore asserts the “subjectively universal validity” of my pleasure in the object ( CPJ , §8, 5:215), thus making a claim about that pleasure; but it also makes this claim on the basis of the feeling of pleasure itself rather than on the basis of the subsumption of its object under any determinate concept – this is indeed what makes the judgment an “aesthetic” judgment ( CPJ , §1, 5:203–4; FI , VIII, 20:229). In order for me justifiably to claim subjectively universal validity for my feeling of pleasure, Kant supposes, that pleasure must be based in some condition of cognitive powers that are themselves common to all human beings; but since, as Kant assumes, the judgment of taste and the feeling of pleasure that grounds it cannot be determined by the subsumption of its object under any determinate concept, that pleasure cannot be due to the ordinary cognition of an object, which consists precisely in the subsumption of the manifold of sensibility induced by the object and presented to the understanding by the imagination under a determinate concept, but must instead arise from some relation of the imagination and understanding that does not depend upon such a subsumption.

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