A Kantian judgement of taste models the sort of claim about perception and cognition made by ordinary language philosophers, or so suggests Stanley Cavell (Reference Cavell2002: 86). It mis-states the point of Katalin Makkai’s careful and sagacious book to say that it aims to prove a connection between the interpretive debates about Kant’s aesthetics and the concerns in ordinary language philosophy about how ‘we mean what we say’ (p. 24, n. 65). It comes closer to the animating spirit of the project to say that it puts the two philosophical traditions into a harmonious play in order to draw fresh insights out of the Critique of Judgement and to show why such insights matter in philosophy and our own ordinary lives. The result is an animating and original account not just of what Kant’s critique of taste is about but why we should care.

An early sign that there is something new and challenging in Makkai’s take on an established theme in Kant’s Critique of Taste comes at the end of the ‘Introduction: A Twofold Peculiarity’. Makkai defines ‘the critic’ as someone ‘who makes their experience available to others’ (p. 31). It is in this sense of criticism that the Kantian Critical project responds to the fundamental paradox or ‘twofold peculiarity’ of judgements of taste: how can judgements which are essentially autonomous (reflecting one’s own experience) ever be normative (place demands on the experience of others)? The closing pages of the book again return to the theme that criticism is a distinctive speech act whereby one communicates not by proving or imparting a belief but by inviting (even ‘wooing’) others to have an experience for themselves (p. 188). By carving out a distinctively aesthetic mode of communication, Makkai is not only signalling her own unique voice and method, but she gets readers to see for themselves that Kant’s Critique of Judgement is not just a work about criticism but is a work of criticism. What is distinctive and daring about Makkai’s project is to turn the major philosophical innovations of the third Critique back upon themselves, making readers feel the force of the claim that they ought to judge for themselves.

While the interplay with ordinary language philosophy is a powerful undercurrent of Makkai’s project, at the surface level the book proceeds in fairly conventional fashion, covering, as it were, the greatest hits of Kantian aesthetics: the relation of aesthetics to the very notion of judgement (Introduction and chapters 1 and 3); §9 as the ‘key to taste’ (chapter 2); §21 and the sensus communis (chapter 4); the antinomy and the role of concepts in judgements of taste (chapter 5). While Kant famously states that the art of judgement is ‘hidden in the depths of the human soul’ (A141/B180–1), for Makkai Kant’s considered views on the relation between art and judgement are hidden in plain sight. What keeps us from resolving the paradox of taste is not a scholarly insertion of a missing premise or yet another cross-reference to the Reflexionen but our own incredulity that Kant could mean what he says, for example, that judgement is an art. In this vein chapter 1, ‘The Art of Judgment’, links interpretive debates about the status of judgement in Kant to analogous debates about rule following in ordinary language philosophy, especially in Wittgenstein. The convergence of the two traditions points to a shared error in responding to the paradoxes of judgement. Unlike many readers of Kant and Wittgenstein, Makkai rejects the idea that ‘there must be acts of applying rules that are not themselves acts of judging’ (p. 60). No ground-level rule can replace the necessity (and alleviate the anxiety) that ‘I must judge for myself’ (p. 61).

Chapter 2, ‘Communication and Animation in the Judgment of Taste’, begins with the wide range of terms in Kant’s aesthetics evoking voice (e.g. Stimme, Einstimmung, bestimmt) in order to resolve one of the greatest interpretive puzzles of the third Critique, the relation between pleasure and communicability in §9, the ‘key to taste’. On Makkai’s fine-tuned interpretation, pleasure in the harmony (Zusammenstimmung) between one’s state of mind and the object can itself be communicated, for example, by a skilful critic. ‘If I have communicated my pleasure to you in the rich sense, you now feel that pleasure too. Or you now “get” what the pleasure is all about, and how one could feel it. You can appreciate it’ (p. 81). This distinctive kind of communication is further elaborated in chapter 5, ‘Aesthetic Liking’. Makkai locates in the antinomy the difference between ‘proving’ (disputieren) through concepts and a unique speech act called ‘arguing’ (streiten). A critic communicates through ‘aesthetic arguing’ which does not issue ‘directions for perceiving’ but is rather ‘undertaken with the … hope of opening the way for the other person’s animation: helping the object bring the other person to life’ (p. 180).

The distinction between proving and arguing draws heavily on the analysis of the role of concepts in taste analysed in detail in the previous two chapters. It is here that the strands of language and taste are most at risk of becoming knotted. Chapter 3, ‘Subjectivity and Recognition in the Judgment of Taste’ treats the central Kantian (or ‘Copernican’) question of how a judgement which involves subjectivity could make any claim to objectivity. This fraught question is even more challenging in the third Critique because aesthetic judgements, unlike cognitive ones, are said not to be based on concepts. The interpretive debates in the scholarship on this issue are daunting, and Makkai is as adept a guide through them as one can find. But by drawing on the sensibilities of another philosophical tradition Makkai hopes ‘to have prepared the ground for a possibility to come into view … that Kant’s commitment to the condition of autonomy is likewise tied to a concept of the judgment of taste as not a belief or assertion, but as an act of a different kind’ (p. 119). What that different kind of act would be is fleshed out further in chapter 4, ‘Modes of Attunement’, which is centred on a close reading of the notion of ‘common sense’ in §21. By the end of chapter 4 Makkai is ready to show that there is a reflective sense common to both aesthetics and cognition, but this commonality can be understood only after chapter 3 carefully separates out two different modes of recognition.

The key distinction is between ‘identification’ and ‘acknowledgement’, and the question of what it means to judge ‘without a concept’ is very much at issue.

The importance of ‘acknowledgement’ and its relationship to speech, brought to the fore by ordinary language philosophy, is arguably Makkai’s central contribution to Kantian aesthetics. It is against a wide background of sympathy and admiration for this project that I raise two issues which elicit further discussion. Roughly speaking, the first issue is epistemological and the second is metaphysical or existential.

To contrast ‘aesthetic acknowledgement’ with ‘cognitive identification’ does as much to conceal as to reveal what is productive in the free play between Kantian aesthetics and ordinary language philosophy. It is surely important to draw a contrast between judgements of taste and cognition, despite their common grounding in reflective judgement. And it is also right that for Kant the difference between taste and cognition includes consideration of how concepts factor into each. The paradox and promise of taste lie in acknowledging that objects have a normative status (they matter) which concepts (words or speech) cannot guarantee. Our words can fall dead, and yet our aesthetic judgements remain alive. But separating identification and acknowledgement according to the presence or absence of concepts misidentifies cognitive identification, disfigures aesthetic acknowledgement and retreats from Makkai’s own considered view.

But of course it is. There is no need to deny the obvious and unobjectionable way aesthetic acknowledgement draws on conceptual capacities for comparisons and future reidentification. Imagine a groom cavorting with the matron of honour shortly after exchanging wedding vows with his soul mate. It simply would not do for him to defend himself by clarifying that when he said ‘I do’ he was only referring to the present moment but was not to be understood as projecting into the future. ‘I do’ in this case just means ‘I will’. Nor could he get far by saying that when he acknowledged his soul mate he was unable to make relevant comparisons with others. What it means to say ‘I do’ acknowledge you as my soul mate is to say ‘I do not’ so acknowledge others.

There would not even be a temptation to deny the routine observation that aesthetic acknowledgement draws on cognitive identification unless one were captivated by a misleading picture of concepts. Although at times pressured into such a picture, Makkai is not in fact so captivated. The nuanced view on the nature of concepts developed over the course of the book does more to overcome than reinforce this ‘caricature of cognition’ (pp. 173–4), and she offers a compelling account of the difference between taste and cognition which turns not on the presence or absence of concepts but on the ability of an object or a scene to sustain or animate an enlivening play between the conceptual and perceptual capacities.

Makkai should be able to acknowledge the role of conceptuality (minimally, comparability and reiterability) in judgements of taste as a friendly amendment to the overarching project. The same may not be true for the second, metaphysical or existential, concern. The widest and most unwieldy issue at the core of Makkai’s engagement with Kant’s Critique of Judgement concerns the grounds and authority of judgement. What does it ultimately mean to give judgement its own ground of authority, and just how deep does such authority go? What is the nature of the imperative that places demands upon the judgements of others?

To situate Makkai’s answers to these questions, consider an analogue to a more familiar modal question about moral imperatives: are they merely hypothetical (if one wants to be moral, then one must do X) or are they instead categorical (one must be moral, full stop)? Makkai opts for the stronger interpretation of judgement’s demand. Like pure practical reason, judgement too issues categorical imperatives. That is, the imperative concerns not just how to judge but that one must judge. In judging, one is supposed to find out not just that the world does matter but that it must matter – it responds to the judger’s need for it to matter. The notion that the objects of judgement necessarily matter is a theme Makkai invokes, often at the conclusion of a chapter:

It is in this modal modulation from actuality (the world mattering) to necessity (needing to matter, necessarily mattering) that Makkai is most philosophically ambitious, and it may well be that here the project is most deeply Kantian. But it may also well be that when Makkai’s project is closest to Kant it is furthest away from the ordinary.

‘Does the world matter?’ is a generalization from the ordinary question ‘Does this particular thing matter?’ Perhaps the question extends too far (overgeneralizing from parts to whole), but the question it extends from is a perfectly ordinary one. There is, however, no ordinary question ‘Does this thing need to matter?’ The queerness of this modal shift from actually mattering to necessarily mattering, to allude to a Cavellian theme, is felt in the unfairness of the question Othello puts to Desdemona (Cavell Reference Cavell1987). Othello’s question is not, ‘Do you love me?’ (a matter of actuality) but ‘Do you have to love me?’ (a matter of necessity). That is an extraordinary thing to ask, and Desdemona appears unable to make sense of the demand that she somehow assure Othello not simply that he matters to her but that he necessarily matters – that she demonstrate the impossibility of his not mattering. I too am not sure we can make sense of such a demand, and I doubt whether we should.

Consider, for example, the difference between the following commendations to a reader. ‘The more you read Makkai’s book, the more you will find that it matters to you.’ Compare that with a different claim. ‘The more you read Makkai’s book, the more you will find that it needs to matter to you.’ (Or: ‘The longer you read Makkai’s book, the closer it comes to satisfying your need for it to matter.’) To say that it does matter sounds to me like a higher compliment than saying that it needs to matter. Should we not extend to the world the same compliment we would extend to Makkai’s book?

Makkai’s book matters, not because it needs to but because it enlivens and equips readers to judge Kant’s aesthetics, and the world, for themselves.