1. Introduction
In his letter to Reinhold from 28 December 1787, Kant says that his discovery of an a priori principle for the capacity [Vermögen] of pleasure and displeasure led him to embark on a new project of writing a third Critique. Both the first and second introductions identify this principle with a ‘subjective’ or ‘aesthetic representation’ of the principle governing the reflective power of judgment (reflektierende Urteilskraft) in general: namely, the ‘purposiveness of nature’ for our faculty of cognition (KU 20:239, 5:189).
These remarks have led to a great deal of confusion among interpreters of Kant. A capacity is a capacity for something and is thus directed at its completion. The principle governing a capacity can be understood as a rule that must be followed in order to appropriately exercise the capacity, or to achieve its completion. But how can there be a capacity for pleasure and displeasure? Aren’t pleasure and pain mere sensations that passively happen to us, rather than exercises of a rule-governed capacity? What does it mean to say that pleasure or displeasure can be appropriate or inappropriate? Kant maintains that human feeling is a capacity governed not only by a principle, but by an a priori principle that enables judgments of beauty to lay claim to universal and necessary validity (KU 20:239, 5:190–1). Unlike the non-rational animals, humans are capable of feeling a kind of pleasure that involves a claim to be as it should be, not just for me, but for any rational subject (KU 5:210). The a priori principle of the capacity for feeling thus distinguishes human feeling from feeling in non-human animals: their faculty of feeling is not governed by this a priori principle. So the question about the possibility of an a priori principle of feeling can be reformulated as a question about the possibility of human feeling.
The paper has three parts. I begin (in Section 2) by developing an account of non-human feeling out of Kant’s analysis of organisms, which he refers to as ‘natural ends’. The faculty of pleasure and displeasure in non-human organisms must be understood from within the teleological context of a given natural end. In Section 3, I argue that human feeling must be approached differently, since nature does not give the human being a natural end. Human feeling belongs in this sense not to nature but to spirit, and must be approached through first-personal aesthetic, not third-personal natural-teleological reflective judgments. In Section 4, I show how this approach to human feeling, in contrast to other approaches in the literature, allows us to appreciate how the capacity for pleasure and displeasure is governed by an a priori principle that makes possible the universality and necessity of its exercises.
2. Pleasure and displeasure in non-rational animals
Kant’s discussion of animals is relegated to a footnote in the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment. His focus in this passage is on those features that distinguish animals from plants. In the following, I will first discuss these differentiating features of the animal before turning to the generic features that it shares in common with the plant as a kind of organism or ‘natural end’. As we will see, the differentiating features of animal life are properly understood only within the context of its genus, the ‘natural end’.
In Kant’s perfunctory discussion of non-human animals from the aforementioned footnote, he notes that animals engage in actions that bear similarities to human intentional or ‘artistic actions’: for instance, the beaver constructs a dwelling for itself, or a bird prepares its nest in anticipation of a coming storm. From observations such as these we can infer ‘by means of analogy’ that animals are able to produce things in accordance with representations. That is, we can infer by analogy with human actions that animals have a faculty of desire (KU 5:464n). For Kant, this means that we are entitled to think of animals as living things, since he defines life through the faculty of desire:
Life is the faculty of a being to act in accordance with the laws of the faculty of desire. (KpV 5:9)
Kant thus thinks only of animals, not plants, as living beings (Lebewesen), since plants do not engage in the type of actions that would warrant the conclusion that they maintain themselves through desire.
Since Kant is willing to ascribe life to the non-human animals, we can also assume that he would be willing to ascribe pleasure and displeasure to them. For in Kant’s remarks on feeling throughout his lectures and published works, a recurrent theme is that pleasure and displeasure are not merely passive modifications of a subject’s state, but are ways of being conscious of a representation’s relation to our feeling of life:
[In the sensation of satisfaction] the representation is related entirely to the subject, indeed to its feeling of life, under the name of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure … (my emphasis; KU 5:204)
In other passages, Kant specifies that pleasure is a feeling of the promotion of one’s powers of life, while displeasure is a feeling of their hindrance (KU 5:278; cf. Anth. 7:231). Pleasure represents the ‘agreement of an object or of an action with the subjective conditions of life’ (KpV 5:9n). This sheds light on Kant’s definition of pleasure in §10 of the Analytic of the Beautiful:
The consciousness of the causality of a representation with respect to the state of the subject, for maintaining it in that state, can here designate in general what is called pleasure. (KU 5:220)
To be conscious of the causality of a representation to maintain itself is to be conscious of its agreement with one’s living powers. For to live is to maintain oneself both as an individual and as a species (KU 5:370–1). Living is a self-sustaining, self-reproducing activity. An object or representation thus promotes one’s vital powers when it agrees with the causal capacity of the subject to maintain itself, while it hinders them (and is unpleasant) when it disagrees with this capacity, causing the subject to leave its state. Since agreement/promotion and disagreement/hindrance are relations, pleasure and displeasure must be understood as fundamentally relational. To feel pleasure is to feel that things are ‘right’ or ‘appropriate’ as they are, in the sense that they agree with me or are purposive for my activity of living. Pleasure is in this sense a ‘representation of a subjective purposiveness of an object’ (KU 20:228, 227).
This relational character of pleasure and displeasure situates feeling somewhere between activity and passivity, or spontaneity and receptivity. An object or representation must be passively given to me if I am to feel its effect on me. But its effect in a feeling of pleasure consists in the active engagement of my vital powers. For to feel pleasure is to feel the furtherance of life activities; it is to feel more alive. Even displeasure can be considered a kind of activity, although it is a feeling of diminishing vital activity. Pleasure and displeasure thus are not merely passive sensory impressions; they are felt vital activities, i.e. vital activities that involve an (affective) awareness of themselves as such.
We are now in a position to see how it is possible – through analogy with human faculties – to ascribe both desire and a faculty of pleasure and displeasure to non-human animals. However, these analogical inferences about the animals do not license cognitive, determining judgments – we cannot know that animals have desires or feelings. Instead, they license merely reflective, teleological judgments. Inference by means of analogy, Kant indicates in his logic lectures, is an operation of a merely reflective (not determining) power of judgment (JL 9:132–3). In particular, judgments about animals and animal feeling (as conclusions of such inferences) are a special case of reflective judgments about organic nature. So to understand what it would mean to ascribe pleasure and displeasure to non-rational animals, we must first understand what it means to think of them as the objects of teleological, reflective judgments.
In thinking of animals as objects of teleological judgment, we reflect not on the features that distinguish them from plants (namely, desire and feeling), but on the generic features they share in common as natural ends. For Kant’s analysis of teleological judgment in the Analytic of the Teleological Power of Judgment prescinds from all talk of an organism’s ‘representations’, or of ‘desire’, in order to include plants as natural ends. Kant does consider that the causality or self-organizing power in natural ends might be thought of as ‘an analogue of life’. But he rejects this approach on the grounds that it would require either ‘endow[ing] matter as mere matter with a property (hylozoism) that contradicts its essence, or else associat[ing] it with an alien principle standing in communion with it (a soul), in which case, however, if such a product is to be a product of nature, organized matter as an instrument of that soul is already presupposed’ (5:374–5). The concept of a self-organizing being or ‘natural end’ doesn’t presuppose the concept of life; rather, we must first understand the concept of a mere natural end (plant) before we can understand that of a living natural end (animal). So whereas reflection on the differentiating features of animals presupposes reflection on the human case (since the former are analoga of the latter), the generic features of animals presuppose reflection on the genus itself – as exhibited by the plant.
In the second introduction to the third Critique, Kant defines an end as ‘the concept of an object insofar as it at the same time contains the ground of the reality of this object’ (my emphasis; KU 5:180); later in the Analytic of Beauty, an end is said to be the ‘object of a concept insofar as the latter is regarded as the cause of the former’ (my emphasis; KU 5:220). Both of these notions are operative in Kant’s analysis of natural ends, since a natural end is both ‘cause and effect of itself’ (5:371). That is, we must regard organisms both as universals or ‘concepts’ (like Aristotelian species-forms), and as the objects caused by these universals.Footnote 1 If the organism acts in accordance with its universal nature, its acting in this way can be causally explained by its universal nature. If it fails to act as a being of this species generally ‘acts’, its failure must be explained by external causes. For instance, we regard the apple tree as doing what it does (blooming in the spring, producing fruit, shedding its leaves in fall, etc.) in virtue of its being-an-apple-tree, or because that is what apple trees generally do.Footnote 2 Put differently, this apple tree behaves as it does because this is how it should behave.Footnote 3 The general concept guides and governs the life-processes in the tree, as though these processes were intentionally designed to conform to a general plan (KU 5:374, 227). When the apple tree fails to shed its leaves in the fall, by contrast, and thus fails to behave according to the plan, we must appeal to causes external to the tree to explain this (e.g. environmental factors).
To illustrate the kind of normative-teleological explanation made possible by the species-concept, consider that a natural end relates to its environment through ‘separation and formation’, or by separating out materials that do not contribute to its self-maintenance and assimilating (forming) those that promote its self-organizing powers (5:371). Now, the species-concept of the organism in question both sets a normative standard for acceptance and rejection and explains why certain materials are accepted, others rejected. The apple tree takes in the water and nutrients from the soil, but rejects the dirt, because the former agrees with its species-form, while the latter disagrees with it. That is, the nutrients promote the realization of the species-concept of an apple tree, or help this apple tree behave in accordance with its inner nature (as it should behave), and that is why they are assimilated.
How do these generic features of ‘natural ends’ exhibit themselves in animals? We’ve seen that what is distinctive of living natural ends (animals), in contrast with plants, is that they have desire. Desire, as Kant defines it, is a representation that is efficacious, or that has a causality to bring about what it represents:
The faculty of desire is a being’s faculty to be by means of its representations the cause of the reality of the objects of these representations. (KpV 5:9n)
So to desire an apple is to have a representation of the apple that is productive, or such as to bring about the apple’s presence to the subject (for instance by eating it). Living beings maintain themselves through representations that have a causality with respect to their objects in this sense. And pleasure is a feeling of the agreement of an object with this causality:
Pleasure is the representation of the agreement of an object or of an action with the subjective conditions of life, i.e. with the faculty of the causality of a representation with respect to the reality of its object (or with respect to the determination of the powers of the subject to action in order to produce the object). (ibid.)
To feel pleasure is thus to feel a promotion of desire. For example, when I feel pleasure in the eating of an apple, I am aware of the tendency of a sensation (the taste or texture of the apple) to maintain itself. But since I can be affected by the apple through a sensation of it only if the apple is given to me, the sensation’s tendency to persist depends on the tendency of apples to continue to exist for me as a result of my desire for them. So it is through its promotion of desire that the sensation sustains itself and is felt to be pleasurable (Anth. 7:230).
To live is thus to maintain oneself not simply by separating out and taking in the materials needed for generation and reproduction (as with the plant), but by noticing what is needed through pleasure and pursuing what one needs through desire. To say this is not to say that animals are plants – beings with a nutritive power – that have, in addition, a faculty of desire. It is to say that their nutritive powers are fundamentally different from those of plants, since nutrition is ‘informed’ by desire: desire is a ‘formative power’, or a specific way of being a ‘natural end’ (KU 5:374). Thus, although nutrition for animals involves acceptance and rejection of materials from their environment, just as it did for the plant, acceptance and rejection now take on a new form, appearing as desire and avoidance, and are accompanied by awareness that things agree or disagree with desire through pleasure and pain. As Kant says in the Anthropology, ‘(animal) life, as physicians also have already noted, is a continuous play of the antagonism of both [pleasure and pain]’ (Anth. 7:231).
The animal’s ability to become aware of what agrees or disagrees with it introduces a division within the animal where there was none in the plant: we can distinguish what is universally purposive for the life-form or species-concept of the animal from what the individual animal itself is aware of as purposive or counter-purposive for it through pleasure and pain. What is ‘in itself’ (an sich) agreeable to an animal (i.e. agreeable to its universal life-form) may not – e.g. in conditions of sickness – be felt as agreeable ‘for it’ (für sich, i.e. agreeable to the individual animal) through pleasure. For in addition to the universal ends of its nature, animals can have individual ends that may (in defective cases) or may not (in non-defective cases) oppose the former, namely, when they desire something in particular. When the individual animal desires something particular that (universally) agrees with its species-form, we can – in teleological judgment – explain why the animal feels pleasure by appeal to the species-concept of the animal. (For instance, we can say that a particular lion takes pleasure in eating an antelope because lions desire antelopes.Footnote 4) But it is important to emphasize that the animal itself is not conscious of the universal ground or principle of its individual pleasures and displeasures. Our judgments about the species-universality of animal pleasure are judgments made from the third-personal perspective; they are teleological reflective judgments about animals that employ a general species-concept, but they are not judgments the animal makes about itself.
The natural end or species-concept of the animal thus not only determines what external things universally agree or disagree with animals of its kind; it also provides a normative standard for assessing its feelings as appropriate, or as they ought to be, in an animal of this kind. That is, it supplies a principle for the exercise of its faculty of feeling. The faculty of pleasure and displeasure in the animal thus cannot be understood as the kind of faculty it is outside of the context of the animal’s given natural end. But the animal itself is not aware of this natural end, or of how it enters teleological accounts of why it senses pleasure in certain objects (or representations) and pain in others. Its faculty of feeling is therefore always empirical, based on how a particular object affects it, and is not governed by an a priori principle of the purposiveness of objects for its vital powers. That is, the animal does not feel an object’s agreement with its vital powers from a consciousness of the general principle determining what agrees with it and what does not.
3. Human pleasure and displeasure
We have seen that a non-rational animal must be thought of as capable, through pleasure and displeasure, of becoming aware of how one object, in comparison with another, agrees or disagrees with it. And since the life-form of the animal in question sets a standard for what agrees and disagrees with it, we can say that (in normal conditions) a bonobo feels pleasure in what agrees with its bonobo life-form, while a warthog feels pleasure in what agrees with its warthog life-form. It may seem that our analysis of human pleasure can simply continue in the same fashion: humans feel pleasure in what agrees with our human life-form. But things aren’t quite that simple. Humans aren’t natural beings who come into the world equipped with a life-form in the way that the non-rational animals are. Nature has not already laid out a path for us by giving us a ‘norm’ or ‘standard’ for determining what our mode of life will be, and that would enable us to compare things in our environment with regard to whether they are as they should be (through pleasure), or fail to be as they should be (through displeasure). Humans are called upon to determine for themselves how they ought to live and what they ought to be.
This can be seen from Kant’s discussion of the place of human beings in nature at the end of the third Critique and in his Anthropology lectures. Like any living being, the human being strives for its own fulfillment or happiness, which (in light of our discussion above) can be understood as agreement with its species-concept or life-form. But nothing in our nature determines for us (humans) what our happiness will be: ‘the concept of happiness is not one that the human being has, say, abstracted from his instincts and thus derived from the animality in himself’ (KU 5:430). Instead, man ‘outlines this idea [of happiness] himself’, and in so many ways that we can assume ‘no determinate universal and fixed law at all by means of which to correspond with this unstable concept and thus with the end that each arbitrarily sets for himself’ (ibid.). This is not to deny that there are ‘natural need[s]’ and predispositions in man, ‘concerning which our species is in thoroughgoing self-consensus’ – such as the animal predispositions Kant mentions in the Religion for ‘self-preservation’, for ‘the propagation of the species’, and for ‘community with others’ (ibid., Rel. 6:26). Moreover, as ‘living and at the same time rational being[s]’, all human beings have an ‘inclination to gain worth in the opinion of others’ (Rel. 6:26, 27). But far from coming together to constitute a natural end (species-concept) or purposive unity in the life of the human individual and in the life of the species, these ‘natural predispositions’ create ‘conflict’ and even determine man to work ‘so hard for the destruction of his own species’ (KU 5:430). Our desires for sex or honor may lead to a loss of community and to our own demise; and our desire to preserve ourselves may lead to a life without honor and purpose. Even if a stepmotherly nature were to satisfy all of our desires, we still would not achieve fulfillment, since our ‘nature is not of the sort to call a halt anywhere in possession and enjoyment and to be satisfied’ (ibid.). Nothing given to us by nature suffices to bring our powers, and all our desires, into the purposive unity of a self-maintaining and self-organizing system (or organism) – nothing in nature, that is, gives the human being a life-form.
All that remains to distinguish the human being from other animals and to ‘assign his class in the system of animate nature’ is our aptitude for setting ends for ourselves (Anth. 7:321; KU 5:431). That is, what is distinctive of humans is that they lack a determinate, given natural end and must constitute a life-form for themselves through the use of reason: indeed this indeterminacy in our nature can be taken as a sign of a capacity of reason within us. Even in the ‘form and organization of his hand […] nature has made the human being not suited for one way of manipulating things but undetermined for every way, consequently suited for the use of reason’ (Anth. 7:323). Thus, in contrast with the traditional definition of the human being as a rational animal, Kant says that the human being is ‘an animal endowed with the capacity of reason (animal rationabile) [that] can make out of himself a rational animal (animal rationale) – whereby he first preserves himself and his species; secondly, trains, instructs, and educates his species for domestic society; thirdly, governs it as a systematic whole (arranged according to principles of reason) appropriate for society’ (Anth. 7:321–2). As Kant indicates in this passage, he does not think that we are born as animals who already competently preserve themselves, and then through human development, add knowledge and rationality to our animal formative powers (or enter a ‘space of reasons’; see also MA 8:112).Footnote 5 Rather, he thinks that we begin as beings with the capacity of reason, and must find a way to use this faculty in order to constitute a formative vital power for ourselves, which will include determining how we preserve ourselves and our species.
This open-ended character of human nature does not mean that self-constitution can occur in a completely arbitrary manner. Practical reason supplies us with the idea of our highest good (happiness in proportion to virtue), which ‘can be sufficient for itself independently of nature, which can thus be a final end, which, however, must not be sought in nature at all’ (KU 5:431, see 5:436n).Footnote 6 However, although this final end outside of nature (the highest good) gives humanity a vocation or direction (Bestimmung) for self-constitution, it does not pre-determine what form of life within nature we live by. Whereas nature has already determined that non-rational animals will live in accordance with their vocation, we can only strive to ‘make ourselves worthy of humanity’ by progressively determining a mode of life for ourselves that agrees with the non-natural ends of morality (Anth. 7:324–5): whereas ‘with all other animals left to themselves, each individual reaches its complete vocation […] with the human being only the species, at best, reaches it; so that the human race can work its way up to its vocation only through progress in a series of innumerably many generations. To be sure, the goal always remains in prospect for him […]’ (my emphases; Anth. 7:324, see also 7:329). There is thus no determinate, pre-formed mode of life or being in the human animal, and as Kant suggests in the Anthropology, no definition of human nature (Anth. 7:322, 121). It is up to us to make the transition from nature to freedom, or from animality to morality, and to thereby engage in an eternal process of defining (and re-defining) ourselves. The ‘human being is destined by his reason’ to ‘cultivate’, ‘civilize’, and finally ‘moralize’ himself – or to effect a transition [Übergang] from nature to freedom – whereby he progressively strives to give himself a form of life (Anth. 7:324).
Since Kant identifies ‘spirit [Geist]’ with the ‘animating principle in the human being’, the transition from nature to freedom through which we strive to acquire a life-principle can itself be understood as belonging to spirit rather than to nature (Anth. 7:225, 246; KU 5:313).Footnote 7 Spirit is also defined as a ‘faculty for the presentation of aesthetic ideas’, which are sensible representations (intuitions) for which a determinate thought or concept can never be found adequate (KU 5:314). Since sensible representations are produced by the imagination, spirit can be understood as a talent of the imagination to go beyond concepts of nature and to ‘create as it were, another nature, out of the material one which the real one gives it’; that is, nature can be ‘transformed by us into something entirely different, namely into that which steps beyond nature’ (KU 5:314). This aligns with Kant’s claim in the resolution to the Antinomy of Taste that one is compelled to look ‘beyond the sensible and to seek the unifying point of all our faculties a priori in the supersensible’ (KU 5:341). The unifying point of all our faculties would be the point at which they come together to constitute a teleologically organized whole – what we have called a life-form or species-concept. However, this ‘supersensible substratum of humanity’ must remain an indeterminate concept, because the progress of determining a species-concept for ourselves through human history will never be complete (KU 5:340).Footnote 8
So rather than feeling the agreement of a given representation with a determinate life-form or species-concept I find myself saddled with, pleasure in humans is a feeling of agreement with open-ended and indeterminate capacity to determine our own form of life through reason, broadly understood as a capacity for cognition. It is in this sense a feeling of the purposiveness of nature for our cognitive powers.Footnote 9 Whereas pleasure and displeasure in non-human animals are always species-specific and limited by their natural life-form, humans are (paradoxically) aware of the principle that animates the human animal only by transcending desire and so by transcending the animal life of nature, and all natural species-limitations. This is why the a priori principle of human pleasure isn’t that a particular environment – such as the great plains or the lush Alps – is purposive for our cognitive faculties, but that all of nature is purposive. There are no given limits to the mind’s world or environment [Umwelt], although the mind can draw limits for itself.Footnote 10
The indeterminate character of the human capacity for feeling also reveals it to be an apperceptive or self-conscious faculty. Human pleasure is a feeling of agreement with vital powers I can call ‘mine’ because they are powers that I constitute for myself. This means that I, unlike the non-rational animal, can internally reflect on the a priori principle that gives necessity and universality to feelings of pleasure, from within the first-person perspective of feeling itself. If judgments about my organism, and my feelings, were made from an external, natural-teleological perspective, they would be based on an empirical concept that arises from external comparisons of different mental acts either in me, or in different members of the same species. But in the internal reflection of an aesthetic judgment, I become aware of something universal and necessary in a single act of the mind, by reflecting on its source in me.Footnote 11 For instance, in the aesthetic appreciation of beauty, I do not become aware of my pleasure’s universal communicability by externally comparing this representation’s affect on me now with its affect on me at different times, or by taking a poll on how others feel in response to the same object. There is no need to ‘grope around […] among judgments of others’ (KU 5:282). Instead, I am aware of its universality directly by holding together (combining) this activity of the imagination (in the intuition of this particular object) with my faculty of cognition (understanding), and noticing that they agree – not merely for me, but in themselves (universally). I do not have to await an empirical comparison of an already given pleasure with others to determine its universal validity; the pleasure itself arises from an awareness of the universal agreement or harmony in the free play (holding together) of my cognitive powers, which I share with others.Footnote 12 The pleasure arises from this internal reflecting activity rather than preceding it (5:217ff).Footnote 13
Similarly, the necessity of feeling pleasure is not something I become aware of by externally comparing how I am (or have been) affected by various representations, and noticing that I cannot help but feel pleasure in some of them. It is not an empirical awareness of necessity that arises from being repeatedly affected by objects in a certain way (like the necessity of a habit). Instead, I feel pleasure from an immediate awareness that I ought to feel it with regard to a given object – i.e. from a feeling that there is necessity in the agreement between my cognitive powers. Pleasure in the beautiful is thus (first-personally) felt from an awareness both of its universality and (exemplary) necessity, which awareness therefore is not empirical, or a posteriori, but pure and a priori. But unlike the pure apperception of thought and cognition, pleasure in beauty is a pure consciousness of living powers, or of the self-maintaining ‘causality of a representation’ (5:220). It is thus tied to affection in a way that pure apperception in cognition or reasoning is not. That is, pure pleasure is a consciousness not only of the universality of my inner state (its universal communicability), but also of its singularity (since I am affected), and it is a consciousness not only of its own necessity, but also of its contingency. The capacity for pleasure and displeasure is thus the aesthetic not of reason, but of a power of judgment [Urteilskraft], broadly defined as a power that mediates between the universal and the particular, or between the necessary and the contingent (KrV A132/B172f).Footnote 14 Unlike the brutes, I can feel that an object agrees not just with me individually, but that it at once also agrees with me universally. Human feeling is thus given an a priori principle (purposiveness) by the power of judgment, just as the faculty of cognition is given a priori principles by the understanding (KU 5:196–198).Footnote 15
It is significant that Kant does not restrict the scope of the a priori principle of purposiveness to a certain kind of pleasure and displeasure, although it finds its purest expression with pleasure in beauty. Rather, Kant says that the principle of purposiveness governs the entire human capacity for pleasure and displeasure, and hence all feelings, which include the agreeable (and disagreeable), the good (and bad), and the beautiful (and ugly) (e.g. KU 20:245, 5:205ff). Human feeling is an apperceptive capacity that is exercised from a consciousness of what it is a capacity for (namely, universally and necessarily valid pleasure). Implicit in all human feelings – even in feelings of the agreeable, which bring us closer to our non-human companions – is a consciousness of the purposiveness of nature for indeterminate vital powers. That is, all feeling involves an awareness of the perfectibility of our nature towards a more moral disposition. There are no feelings in humans that are ‘natural’, in the sense that they can be shared by non-rational nature, because feeling in the non-rational animal is not accompanied by a consciousness of the development and perfectibility of its vital powers in this sense.Footnote 16
We can appreciate how this a priori principle governs all human feelings if we return to our characterization of the principle of purposiveness above as an expression of the transition from nature to freedom through the three stages of culture, civilization, and moralization.Footnote 17 Human feelings of the agreeable are peculiarly human in that they express the agreement of an object with a faculty of desire that can be cultivated. This is why our feelings of the agreeable can be refined (unlike those of the non-rational animals). Feelings of pleasure in food, wine, and in easy tasks (such as hunting a fly), do not require ‘exceptional talents’ or the development of skills, but are often short-lived and followed by a hangover (BG 2:207). By contrast, pleasure in ‘resting after work’, which presupposes the cultivation of abilities in a human being, is more refined, and although it is usually preceded by painful effort, is more lasting and enjoyable (Anth. 7:276, 232).Footnote 18 Feelings of pleasure in the good ‘maxims or manners’ of others promote ‘sociability’ at the stage of mankind’s civilization, but they too can be refined and developed through the appreciation of exhibitions of virtue (e.g. in preferring benevolence over mere politeness, or honorableness over mere propriety) (Anth. 7:282; KU 5:210). Finally, the moralization of the human being is promoted through the liberating experience of the ‘play’ of our cognitive powers in the appreciation of beauty, which frees us entirely from the dominance of desire (including the desire to see virtue in others). Each of these stages of feeling pleasure thus indicate that human pleasure is directed not at what sustains the animal life of the individual, but at what sustains the freely self-determining and universally shared life of spirit.Footnote 19
Although from the perspective of (practical) reason the good always takes precedence over the beautiful, from the aesthetic perspective of life, the beautiful takes precedence over the moral sentiments (aesthetic judgments of the good or bad) as an expression of our vocation to become progressively more worthy of our own humanity. It is good to take pleasure in the virtues of others (and in oneself), and to feel an aversion towards vice; but it is even better, with regard to the development of our sentiments towards a more moral disposition, to be able to feel the contemplative pleasures of beauty.Footnote 20 For this disinterested pleasure, even more than evaluative moral sentiments, prepares us for a life of virtue in which we no longer judge others, but live in harmony with them. Kant can thus say that the ‘aesthetic judgment on certain objects (of nature or of art) […] is a constitutive principle with respect to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure’ in general, because judgments of beauty provide an indeterminate telos or goal of completion to all human feelings of pleasure and displeasure (5: 197). In short, pure, disinterested pleasure in beauty (not pleasure in the good) is the highest stage of feeling in a living human being’s transition from nature to freedom, and is thus already implicitly present as a telos in feelings of the agreeable and of the good.Footnote 21
4. The a priori principle of reflective judgment in recent literature
I have argued that reflection on universality and necessity in human feeling must proceed from within the first-personal perspective of feeling in aesthetic judgments, not from outside of the feeling itself, through the naturalistic, third-personal perspective of teleological judgment. What does this tell us about the relation between feeling and the a priori principle of reflective judgment in general? I will now try to profile my answer to this question by comparing it to other proposals that have been made in the literature.
Kant often emphasizes that feeling belongs to a receptive faculty (Empfänglichkeit) of the mind – or to our ability to be ‘affected’ by an object or representation (MS 6:211). Feeling is thus sometimes called an affect or sensation [Empfindung] (KU 5:206; KpV 5:23–4). Like the sensations that constitute the materials of outer sense (e.g. sensations of color or of sound), feeling involves awareness of being affected.Footnote 22 Kant thus classifies ‘sensation’ as a kind of ‘representation with consciousness (perceptio)’ in the famous Stufenleiter-passage of the first Critique (KrV A320/B376). A representation that involves sensation, or that rests on the object’s affecting me, is said to be an ‘empirical’ representation (KrV A20/B34, A29/B44). Yet, Kant also maintains that the feeling of pleasure in a beautiful object is accompanied by an awareness of its own universality and necessity (KU 5:211ff). These are said to be marks of non-empirical, a priori representation (KrV B3). So how can feeling be both an empirical representation, as a kind of sensation, and involve an a priori awareness of its own universal and necessary validity (KU 5:289)?Footnote 23
It is not uncommon in the literature on Kant’s third Critique to answer this question by separating the capacity to feel pleasure and displeasure from the capacity to judge its universal and necessary validity in the appreciation of beauty.Footnote 24 Whereas pleasure and displeasure are exercises of a passive faculty of feeling, the judgment is an exercise of a different, active faculty that is governed by an a priori principle: the reflective power of judgment (reflektierende Urteilskraft). This assumption has two important consequences. First, by detaching the pleasure from the judgment of its necessity and universality, the feeling of pleasure becomes detached from that aspect of it that makes it human. This reading thus gives us no reason to think that the capacity for pleasure and displeasure in humans differs as such from that of non-human animals.Footnote 25 The second consequence of the assumption is that it leads to a distinction, within aesthetic judgments, between two acts of judging. The first judgment is a reflection on the purposiveness of the object or of my representation of it, and is accompanied by pleasure. The second judgment reflects on the subject’s feeling of pleasure, and judges it to be universally and necessarily valid.Footnote 26 Since the pleasure of the first judgment is distinct from the reflection on its validity in the second, these two acts cannot constitute a single act of judging.
In stark contrast to these two-act readings of aesthetic judgments, Hannah Ginsborg has persuasively argued that judgments of beauty consist in one act of reflective judgment that is identical with a feeling of pleasure. According to Ginsborg, human feeling is a capacity not only to feel pleasures that are universally and necessarily valid, but to feel pleasure in such a way that the pleasure itself is conscious of its own universal and necessary validity, and thus constitutes a judgment. To feel pleasure in the beautiful is to feel that my present state is as it should be, both for me, and for any other rational subject (i.e. that it is ‘universally valid’). It is to feel that my response to the object is ‘appropriate’ or ‘necessary’, in the sense that it agrees with how things are, even if I lack a determinate concept for grasping how they are. This is sufficient to distinguish the human from a non-human faculty of feeling, since non-human feeling does not involve consciousness of its own universal and necessary validity, and hence is not a judgment.
Ginsborg links the power of judgment with the faculty of feeling by interpreting ‘reflective judgment’ as ‘the capacity to take one’s mental state in perceiving a particular object, to be universally valid with respect to that object’ (my emphasis; Ginsborg Reference Ginsborg2015, 146). The power of reflective judgment searches for concepts (rules for judging) by reflecting on my behavior of sorting or classifying objects as universally valid or correct even prior to the discovery of a determinate concept. That is, I judge that any other rational subject would classify the objects in the same way. This subjective universality of one’s own mental state is grounded not on any prior recognition that objects are constituted in a particular way, but instead on a ‘primitive’ sense that one’s own mental activities are appropriate or apt (Ginsborg Reference Ginsborg2015, 212). In aesthetic judgments of beauty, the mental activity judged to be appropriate is a feeling of pleasure, which is reflectively aware of itself as appropriate. But pleasure is not a mere consciousness that my state is apt or valid; it also sustains itself because of this consciousness: we ‘linger over the consideration of the beautiful because this consideration strengthens and reproduces itself’ (KU 5:222).Footnote 27
Notice that on Ginsborg’s reading, the normativity of pleasure consists not merely in an awareness that the object is as it should be, but in an awareness that my aesthetic response to it (feeling of pleasure) is as it should be on the occasion of perceiving an object. This suggests that our faculty of pleasure should rest not merely on the purposiveness of nature for our faculties of cognition, but also on the purposiveness of our faculties of cognition for being adequate to the objects of nature.Footnote 28 Indeed, Ginsborg seems to take this appropriateness not of the object, but of my own state of mind in response to the object, to be the source of the universal validity of aesthetic judgments:Footnote 29 ‘to be aware of the appropriateness of my own state of mind under my present circumstances is to be aware that anyone else in the same circumstance ought to be in the same state of mind that I am’ (my emphasis; Ginsborg Reference Ginsborg2015, 30).
How exactly must we understand judgments about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of a feeling? According to Ginsborg, we should understand these judgments to be about the appropriateness of the pleasure in relation to the object; the object thus sets an indeterminate standard for appropriateness and inappropriateness of feeling.Footnote 30 But it is more in line with Kant’s assessment of these judgments as merely subjectively valid to understand them as judgments about the appropriateness of pleasure in relation to the subject. For instance, we may judge that a feeling of the agreeable is inappropriate in certain circumstances because it disagrees not with the object, but with my higher interest in living a moral life; the judgment about my pleasure is thus itself a higher level feeling of displeasure (subjective counter-purposiveness) in my own lower level feeling of pleasure, and can thus be said to express ‘bitter joy’ (Anth. 7:237). Or again, we may judge that a feeling of pain is appropriate for our moral vocation, as when we allow ourselves to grieve the loss of a spouse – this is ‘sweet sorrow’ (ibid.) In these cases, lower level aesthetic judgments of the agreeable (or disagreeable), which express the subjective purposiveness (or counter-purposiveness) of an object merely for me individually (and thus have mere ‘private validity’ [Privatgültigkeit]), are accompanied by higher level, universally valid [allgemeingültig] aesthetic judgments of the goodness (or badness) of these feelings, which express their agreement or disagreement with my higher (moral) self (KU 5:212).Footnote 31 What is distinctive of pleasure in beauty is that it is self-reinforcing and self-approving, and thus does not rest on any higher-level feelings of its own appropriateness. To feel pleasure in beauty is to directly feel that an object is appropriate for me, not just as an individual, but as a universal.
The reading I have proposed agrees with Ginsborg (in contrast, for instance, with Allison and Guyer) that the human capacity for pleasure is identical with a capacity to bring to consciousness its universal and necessary validity. There is a single act of the mind whereby I feel pleasure in the beautiful and am conscious of the universality and necessity in this feeling, which is to say that the faculty of pleasure and displeasure is the aesthetic of a power of judgment. But my reading disagrees with Ginsborg’s understanding of the source of universal and necessary validity. According to Ginsborg, it is because my cognitive faculties are ‘appropriate to the object’ that the pleasure in the purposiveness of the object is universally and necessarily valid (Ginsborg Reference Ginsborg2015, 248).Footnote 32 By contrast, I have argued that it is merely because the object is appropriate or purposive for my cognitive faculties, faculties I share with any other rational subject, that my feeling of its purposiveness is universally and necessarily valid. My reading thus locates the source of the universal and necessary validity in agreement with the principle governing the faculty of pleasure and displeasure, which provides an indeterminate measure or standard for the assessment of all human feelings.
The principle of purposiveness thus enables us to become aware, through the faculty of feeling, that nature, and our own inner feelings, are purposive for our self-determined activity in making a life for ourselves.Footnote 33 It does not tell us that a certain feeling would be fitting with the object (not even in a primitive way that cannot be articulated through rules), but instead tells us that a certain feeling is fitting with ourselves, or that it is worthy of our humanity. Those who fail to appreciate beauty cannot be faulted for responding in the wrong way to the object; but they can be faulted for being less spiritually alive than those who take pleasure in beauty. Insofar as our final end (the highest good) demands that we progress to higher stages of spiritual life (on the path from nature to freedom), there is a normative demand internal to any feeling of pleasure – even if only latent and implicit – that we learn to appreciate beauty. Cultures without an appreciation of beauty in nature and in art witness a slow death of spirit, a symptom of their failure to advance the ends of humanity.
The difference between these readings is significant, because it corresponds to two divergent ways of understanding the place of human beings in nature. Ginsborg’s reading suggests that human life is integrated in, and serves the universal ends of, nature in general; it is as though our cognitive faculties were purposively designed to conform to the nature around us, just as nature is designed to be purposive for our cognitive faculties. There is a reciprocal dependence between nature and the life of the human mind. By contrast, I have suggested that there is an asymmetric dependence of nature on the universal ends of our cognitive powers. Nature serves the ends of cognition, not the other way around – for the final end of our cognitive powers lies not in cognition of nature, but in the fully self-sufficient end of morality (an end that expresses self-cognition), which can be realized only outside of nature.Footnote 34 A non-rational animal may have a life-form that evolves in response to the demands of the nature surrounding it. That is, the standards that determine when objects are purposive or counter-purposive for it, and that give its faculty of pleasure and displeasure a governing principle, may undergo a natural evolution in response to its environment. By contrast, we are the agents, and not mere spectators, of human history. What is universally pleasing to mankind may change over time, giving aesthetic judgments a historical dimension. But insofar as changes in the standards of taste and other pleasures occur, they are due not to processes of adjusting to the nature surrounding us, but rather are due to the struggle we face in adjusting to ourselves by making ourselves worthy of our own humanity.
5. Conclusion
It is often thought that what distinguishes a human faculty of pleasure and displeasure from this faculty in non-human animals is that human emotion is attuned to something indeterminate in nature (beauty) that non-human animals cannot appreciate. If the argument in this paper is correct, the opposite is true: human emotion is attuned to something indeterminate in ourselves that is absent in non-human animals. To feel pleasure in beautiful objects is to feel that nature is as it should be, not for some determinate purpose or end specified by a given human life-form, but for our (indeterminate) faculties of determining for ourselves what our form of life will be. Because we determine what our vital powers are for ourselves, we are capable, as the non-human animals are not, of becoming aware of the universality and necessity of our pleasures from within the feeling of pleasure itself. Our faculty of feeling is governed by an a priori principle because it is an apperceptive faculty that reflects internally on our self-constituted vital powers.
The aesthetic of the power of judgment thus concerns the use of this power in the self-consciousness of human vital powers (the proper topic of the first half of the Critique of the Power of Judgment), while the logic of the power of judgment (the second half of the Critique) concerns its use in reflecting on non-human organic nature. Human life cannot be investigated as belonging to nature (from a logical, third-personal perspective), but must instead be approached from within the engaged, first-personal perspective of human beings who narrate (or invent) a life-form for themselves. In German, this might be expressed by saying that the humanities are Geisteswissenschaften, not Naturwissenschaften – sciences of spirit, not of nature. Perhaps it can be argued that the self-consciousness of spirit, as manifested in aesthetic judgments, is a prerequisite for reflection on non-human organic nature, just as self-consciousness was prioritized and shown to be a condition for the possibility of theoretical and practical cognition in Kant’s first two Critiques. But that is a topic worthy of another paper.
Acknowledgments
For inspiring conversations on topics related to this paper, I wish to express my gratitude to Sebastian Rödl, Matthias Haase, Irad Kimhi, Stephen Engstrom, Ian Blecher, Wolfram Gobsch, Beri Marusic, Doug Lavin, Andrea Kern, Rachel Zuckert, Melissa Zinkin, Hannah Ginsborg, and the audiences of the Midwestern NAKS meeting at Northwestern University, 2015, the Eastern NAKS meeting at Yale University 2015, and at the annual conferences at the University of Leipzig. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and criticisms. I thank the University of Illinois at Urbana/ Champaign for a course release during the completion of this project.
All references to Kant’s writings are cited using the relevant volume and page number from the standard “Akademie” edition of Kant’s works: Kants gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Königlich Preussischen (now Deutschen) Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: G. Reimer [now de Gruyter], 1902–).
The following abbreviations are used:
Anth. Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798). (Ak. 7) Translated by Robert B. Louden, under the title Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
BG Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (1764). (Ak. 2). Translated by Paul Guyer under the title “Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime”. Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
BL Logik Blomberg (from the 1770s). (Ak. 24) Translated by J. Michael Young. Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
FS Die Falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren (1762) (Ak. 2). Translated by D. Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote under the title “The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures”. Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
JL Jäsche Logik (1800). (Ak. 9). Translated by J. Michael Young. Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
KpV Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788). (Ak. 5) Translated by Mary Gregor, under the title Critique of Practical Reason. Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
KrV Kritik der reinen Vernunft (first (A) edition, 1781 (Ak. 4); second (B) edition, 1787 (Ak. 3)). Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood under the title Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
KU Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790). (Ak. 5) Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, under the title Critique of the Power of Judgment. Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
M L 1 Metaphysik Lı (Ak. 28). Translated by Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon. Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
MS Metaphysik der Sitten (1797) (Ak. 6). Translated by Mary Gregor, under the title The Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Ped. Über die Pädagogik (1803). (Ak. 9). Translated by Robert B. Louden, under the title Lectures on Pedagogy. Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
VL Wiener Logik (from the early 1780s). (Ak. 24) Translated by J. Michael Young, under the title “Vienna Logic”. Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
