Jennifer McMahon’s new book offers an insightful and engaging defence of a pragmatist aesthetics that centres largely on the integration of Kantian aesthetics and Habermasian pragmatism. I take her aim to be two-fold: first, to inform the latter with the former by showing how aesthetic reflective judgement is an act of judgement par excellence, which integrates sentiment and reason, makes us aware of the communal origin of normativity and ‘calibrates’ subjectivity with community norms; second, to uncover in Kant’s aesthetics (as well as his theoretical and practical philosophy) the framework for a pragmatist cultural pluralism and theory of meaning, as conceived (largely) by Habermas. This project is bolstered by McMahon’s extended analyses of contemporary art (Eliasson, von Sturmer, Henson, Kuball, among others) and her interpretative work showing the connections among later Stoicism, Kant, Emerson, Wordsworth, critical theory (Adorno), Sellars, Cavell and American pragmatism (from Dewey to Putnam). She also engages in examination of recent theories of perception (O’Callaghan, Seagel, Matthen) that provide evidence for internal realism by showing, for instance, that there is no raw given, no cognitively unmediated sensation, and that even our most basic perceptions are constituted in part by communally derived norms. The result is a rich and multidimensional conception of aesthetic reflective judgement, something more akin to an ideal speech act than a peripheral activity reserved for the privileged and remote aesthete.
Given the book’s wide-ranging and complex argument, I must narrow my focus to a few of the most central facets of McMahon’s position: her characterization of aesthetic reflective judgement, its relation to freedom/autonomy and morality, and her claim of pragmatist normativity in Kant.
According to McMahon, Kant’s Deduction of Judgements of Taste identifies a condition of community that is prior to any shared system of belief: ‘the capacity to communicate feelings and attitudes’ and thus to ‘cultivate’ subjectivity intersubjectively (p. 27). She argues that aesthetic reflective judgement reveals that all concepts (not merely evaluative concepts pace Habermas) are indeterminate in virtue of evaluative and motivational content that constitutes our attitude toward objects (p. 22) and forms the basis of moral judgement (pp. 2–3): ‘feeling and its imaginative instantiation in images, configurations or constructs’ (p. 65) are inextricable features of our concepts which have been ‘accumulated as part of each evolving concept as we learn to use the concept to make ourselves understood’ (p. 108). Aesthetic reflective judgement detaches us from the attitude’s motivational content, allowing us to reflect upon our feelings and attitudes towards objects and thereby to ‘calibrate’ them with the values and norms of our community (p. 25). Motivational content, and thus feeling, can be revised in accordance with reason (p. 10): ‘Aesthetic reflective judgment reveals the extent to which cultivated feelings play a role in what we consider worthy of attention and in turn the meaning we attribute to objects’ (p. 63).
McMahon identifies Kant’s common sense as the ‘natural sense’ (196) responsible for such culturally specific calibration (p. 6). Indeed, McMahon’s Kant is a progressive pragmatist who ‘presents us with a concept of aesthetic reception that is fluid and relative to the community in which it is formed’ (p. 8). This view of Kant as providing the ‘framework’ for a ‘pragmatic cultural pluralism’ (p. 27) extends to his moral theory: like aesthetic values, moral values are not ‘absolute’ but ‘evolve under community constraints and can be said to be objective in virtue thereof’ (p. 13). Likewise, even Kant’s a priori principles of sensibility are presented by McMahon ‘as formal rather than substantive principles … [that] could manifest in various ways between different individuals and across different cultural contexts’ (pp. 26–7).
According to McMahon, we are driven towards consensus because, as social animals, our community’s approval gives us pleasure (p. 8). In order to address the worry that this drive undermines art’s ‘critical edge’, she argues that it leads us to view the object from others’ perspectives (and thus to calibrate our subjectivity with that of others) even if we do not, in the end, come to agreement. Thus she endorses Eliasson’s claim that aesthetic reflective judgement ‘enfranchises’ non-mainstream perspectives and attitudes (p. 22). Contemporary installation art is especially good at promoting this sort of reflection (as compared with the works of the ‘old Masters’) because ‘the viewer is reminded that her perspective is a part of what the work means, she participates in the construction of meaning’ (p. 20). Still, without our ‘psychological tendency’ to treat aesthetic judgement ‘as if it were objective’, we would not be drawn into the intersubjective construction of meaning. McMahon claims that the aesthetic case is indicative of how the ‘objectification’ of value and convention functions more generally in the formation and preservation of a community (p. 9).
What sets ‘novel’, ‘challenging’ art apart is its indeterminate yet communicable form. Though the artist’s intended meaning is not straightforward or accessible by way of inference, the viewer nonetheless presumes ‘intention-in-order’ (the ‘principle of aesthetic form’ (p. 30) as well as of perception in general (pp. 36, 38)) and is prompted by the work to reflect on what the artist is trying to communicate. The viewer brings her experience into relation with other viewers and, without explicit and determinate principles to follow, ‘models’ or ‘emulates’ others’ judgements by finding the indeterminate ‘principles’ for judgement within herself.
McMahon returns again and again to the question of how to account for ‘conceptual renewal’, aligning herself with those who affirm human agency, plasticity and creativity (Habermas, Adorno, Dewey, Cavell, Putnam) against those who do not (Brandom, Rorty). Given her alliance with Kant, it is surprising that she does not engage with Kant’s Critique of Teleological Judgement, his most sustained account of the production of empirical concepts. For McMahon, modelling, which is a process grounded in the principle of reading intention-in-order, is offered as a mechanism for the evolution of concepts (p. 47). Thus conceptual renewal and aesthetic reflective judgement rely upon the same cognitive processes. Even more than this, however, aesthetic autonomy turns out to be the very process of conceptual renewal and ‘a core feature of our communicative capacity’ (p. 49). Aesthetic autonomy is achieved in aesthetic reflective judgement because of its ‘independence from determinate concepts and inclination’ (its being ‘outside the means-ends dynamic of our lives’ (p. 11)) as well as its rational engagement with ‘the structured and communicable nature of [the artwork’s] reflective content’ (p. 33). Aesthetic autonomy, and thus conceptual evolution, depends upon there being an ‘indeterminate aspect to concepts, susceptible to culturally specific interpretations’ (p. 49). The indeterminate content (feelings, attitudes and their concomitant images/constructs) is the material from which a community can be forged (p. 25) and the potential object of critique in art, which ‘provides insight into the perspectival nature of understanding’ (p. 43).
Aligning herself with Kant’s later writings in moral philosophy as well as pragmatists such as Dewey, McMahon defends a ‘broad’ notion of rationality that reconciles feeling and reason (pp. 68–9). Such reconciliation has to do not only with the integral role that feeling plays in moral motivation but also with the susceptibility of feeling (including aesthetic and moral feeling) to cultivation. In order to be motivated, she argues, we need models to emulate (p. 129), and emulation (unlike copying) ‘engages feeling’ (p. 55). In both the moral and the aesthetic cases, we must try to ‘re-perceive’ the object or action in an exemplary way by using ‘metaphor, analogy and prior example to prompt re-perception of the object’ (p. 108). Imagination, it turns out, plays a crucial and active role in cognition by eliciting patterns of inference (p. 114) and is therefore a key to settling disagreements and recasting our attitudes in accordance with more just and equitable ideals (p. 135). Artistic genius is then to be understood (following Emerson and Wordsworth) as the capacity to ‘generat[e] new communicable forms for newly emerging concepts in the life of a community’ (p. 97).
McMahon’s view of aesthetic reflective judgement and its relation to morality and autonomy/freedom is intimately connected to her characterization of normativity in Kant. She clearly has a strong stake in understanding Kantian apriority as normativity that is communally derived through deliberation. This, it seems to me, is a provocative though questionable claim, Kant’s conceptions of public reason and the common sense notwithstanding. For instance, Kant’s attempts to justify the a priori principles of the understanding, as set forth in the first Critique, appear to make no appeal to universal communicability and seem rather to focus strictly on the relation between the (solipsistic) subject and object. Even if we take into consideration her defence of internal realism, the underlying conception of validity is simply not strong enough for Kant, who wanted to secure the universality and apriority of constitutive principles and not merely regulative ones. Nor is the direction of ‘fit’ between a priori concept and object as Kant saw it, namely, from the former to the latter and not the other way around. Just how far McMahon’s view is from the standard Kantian account becomes clear in her discussion of Sellars’s Myth of Jones in which she introduces the process of picturing, or mapping, of the ‘external’ world as the result of natural structures that have impressed themselves upon us ‘under adaptive pressure’; it is for this reason that there is an isomorphism among language (normative discourse), social relations and physical processes (p. 114). These processes and their results are neither fixed nor determinate: for instance, ‘the terms with which one reasons, the very process of judgment, implicate a continual process of approximation to norms and a calibration of values’ (p. 115). These processes are considered ‘rational’ only insofar as ‘they involve a self-correcting system relative to effectiveness of outcomes’ (p. 115).
Her view of normativity in Kant implicates her reading of the third Critique as well. According to McMahon, the third Critique shows that all of our concepts are embedded with motivational content, and thus that the communicable feeling Kant refers to includes all feelings that others can be encouraged to feel if they consider objects in the ways that we do (through metaphor, etc.). But Kant’s concern is rather to identify a single feeling, namely, pleasure, that we are justified in claiming is universally communicable in aesthetic judgement. For McMahon, the viewer’s aesthetic experience is governed from beginning to end by the ‘a priori of communicability’ (p. 95), otherwise the aesthetic reflective judgement would never get off the ground, for we would never consider our feeling of pleasure to be part of a judgement about an object at all. But even if she is right that objectivity rests on communicability, this is not necessarily Kant’s view. Just as communicability seems to follow from objectivity in Kant’s first Critique, so too in his third Critique, at least phenomenologically speaking: the viewer experiences a feeling of pleasure in which she senses that she is elevated above mere personal gratification and that her judgement is objective even if not based on concepts per se, and because of this she claims it is communicable. The question for Kant is then: is her claim that the feeling is communicable justified? Kant’s answer in the Deduction of Judgements of Taste seems to be: since we cannot defend the judgement’s validity by appeal to objectively valid concepts, we must do so by appeal to universally shared capacities. Kant wants to identify this pleasure’s basis as the harmonious play of shared, basic conceptual capacities upon which cognition also depends. In other words, Kant’s strategy is not to identify communicability as a ‘necessary constraint on practice’ (p. 95) and thus as an a priori regulative principle in aesthetic judgement, but rather to ground communicability in shared cognitive capacities. Ultimately, it is because we can communicate our cognitions with one another that we are justified in expecting others to feel this feeling of pleasure in response to the same object.
Though McMahon may not be able to draw as much as she would like from Kant, the fact remains that her contribution of a pragmatist theory of meaning and cultural pluralism grounded in a rich and nuanced view of aesthetic reflective judgement is important, challenging and exhilarating. The reader is rewarded with a novel integration of wide-ranging influences that constitutes not only an attractive view in its own right but also a productive and provocative lens through which to view Kant’s legacy.
