How to save Kant's deduction of taste

✍ Scribed by Karl Ameriks

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1982
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 530 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5363
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00137167

✦ Synopsis

Kant has been taken to argue in his deduction of taste that aesthetic response is grounded in a perception of form that engenders a feeling of proportion which is a "subjective state" necessary for all cognition. He then seems caught in being able to preserve the necessity of taste only by holding the quite non-Kantian principle that all objects are beautiful, t Those who recognize this difficulty think the only way out is to take aesthetic response rather to involve a special kind of sensitivity in particular people that would avoid making all objects beautiful only at the cost of not allowing a ground for the claim that aesthetic judgments are universal and necessary. 2 I shall argue that there is a better way to escape this difficulty, one that allows for Kant's claim of the universal validity of taste to be maintained. I shall also note that the price of saving Kant's argument here is to restrict its significance, but this is a fact Kant can and does accept.

Locating Kant's deduction of taste is no easy matter, for the text contains two widely separated passages, viz., w and w which have been taken to be distinct and full arguments. 3 There are also earlier passages (Introduction, w that can be read as sketches of a deduction, as well as later passages (in the "Dialectic") that appear to be presented as new essential stages of one. I will have to minimize this problem here and will focus on what all would agree at least looks like the first thorough (even if not quite complete) presentation of a deduction of taste, namely the discussion around w Kant's argument here can be reconstructed in the following steps:4 1) Cognitive judgments are communicable (sentence 1). 2) Each cognition has an accompanying subjective state (sentence 2).

3. If cognitions are communicable, then so are their accompanying subjective states (sentences 2 and 3). 4) These subjective states involve various proportions in the activities of our