Kant’s Critique of Judgement: Lecture 1

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So today, we're going to be doing the critique of judgement by manual count.

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And as I said yesterday, we're going to be continuing this next week.

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So it looks like I'm probably going to drop the electron pictorial representation

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because you sort of need more than one lecture to cover the critique of judgement.

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The critique of judgement is divided into two big parts. One part is about aesthetics.

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The other part is basically about the philosophy of science. The first part is called the critique of aesthetic judgement.

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The second part of the critique of Talulah Teleological Judgement.

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We're not gonna be talking about the critique of teleological judgement, just a critique of aesthetic judgement.

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And within the critique of aesthetic judgement, a great number of issues are dealt with.

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We're really only gonna be dealing with the sections one to 40. So that's most of it.

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That's the sort of central bits.

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But there's more to it than that, where he talks about topics like the fine arts and genius, which are interesting in their own right.

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But we don't have time to cover that. So if any of you have ever come across Kant before, either in his metaphysics,

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victimology, ethics, you'll know that he is a remarkably difficult writer to read.

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And there are a couple of reasons for this. And it's actually worth being kind of aware of the things he does that makes him so difficult.

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One thing people often have said about Kant, that he's the least precise of the great philosophers,

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and this is largely because he tends to use the same word for a whole variety

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of very different things that are only linked by a really tenuous similarity.

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But without signalling the differences between all the things that he applies the word to and often without seeming to be aware,

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actually, that he's using the word in a rather different sense. Over and over again in various places.

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So I think it's helpful to remind yourself of that tendency of his when he when you're reading him.

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This is connected with another tendency he has, which is a tendency to, as it's often put,

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make architectonic considerations dominant in his presentation of his philosophy.

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That means he wants to create very elegant looking system.

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So he's put a lot of work into his table of contents in his various books to make sure that everything is a nice symmetrical groups of three and four.

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He really likes groups of three and four in presenting his views and often in order to get that beautiful structure to his thoughts.

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He distorts words, uses them in rather strange ways.

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But quite apart from that, he also has an enormous amount of his own technical terminology.

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And it did. And we're going to discuss some of that. And in addition to that, his views on aesthetics are embedded in his larger philosophy.

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They're not incomprehensible entirely without knowledge of his larger philosophy.

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More general views on epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy mind.

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But it certainly helps to know a bit about that.

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So I'm going to begin today by just selecting a very few bits of background information about Kant that I think will be helpful when reading him.

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So one of the first things you'll notice when you start the critique of aesthetic

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judgement is that he uses this word representation and quite frequently.

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And this is, again, one of those technical terms and Kant system is that representations are mental items in his usage.

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And there are two main types of representation in his system. The first kind is intuitions.

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And the second kind is concepts. And again, the word intuition here has nothing to do with what it normally means in English.

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That's the word that's been selected to translate the German word.

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He uses intuitions are, with certain, very important exceptions, sense perceptions.

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So they're representations of particular objects through the senses.

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We don't have to get into the important exceptions here at just this moment.

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So for the most part, when he talks about representations in the generic in the critique.

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Judgement. He actually has intuitions in mind and intuitions, again, for the most part here.

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Our sense, perceptions, representations of particular objects that you encounter and sense perception,

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as he puts it, intuitions are representation through which an object is given to us is how he phrases it often.

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And the other main kind of representation, which is going to come up a lot in his aesthetics, is the concept.

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Now, he's a certain view about the nature of concepts. But he basically means by concept what we mean by concept.

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So a general representation as opposed to a particular representation.

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So the concept of dog, as opposed to a representation of some particular dog or a sense percent perception of some particular dog.

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Nevertheless, for some reason, in the critique of judgement, he usually uses the term representation.

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And when he does that, he almost always means a sense perception.

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What elsewhere he calls an intuition sometimes uses the word intuition. And the critique of judgement.

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But mostly he uses the generic term representation and concepts that other kind of

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representation are not the representation through which objects are given to us in experience.

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But as he puts it, the representation through which objects, I thought.

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So you see a cow. Your sense perception is an intuition of a particular cow.

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You identify it as a cow. You apply the concept of a cow to it.

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So you have the thought. This is a cow.

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Cooperation of intuitions, representation of this cow with the concept by which you identify what it is, namely the concept of a cow.

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That is an example of kind of the way that he sees things working.

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OK. So that's representations. The other important term she uses everywhere, totally central is a priori.

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And some of you may have come across this elsewhere.

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And he calls a lot of different things a priori, various representations or a priori intuitions and concepts.

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He thinks there are some a priori intuitions and concepts.

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But the key notion of a priori, I think they need to be aware of is not what it means to call them a priori.

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Right. But what it means to call knowledge a priori. Right. So a priori knowledge is knowledge that is not justified by experience.

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So there's empirical knowledge which is justified by experience.

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So the knowledge that it's raining outside you acquire by having a sense experience is justified by having a sense experience.

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But it's also quite important for him that we have a priori knowledge, knowledge that's not justified by sense.

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Experience and examples include mathematical knowledge.

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Certain principles of physics, such as every event has a cause.

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Certain principles. As we'll see also a certain claim that aesthetic judgements commit us to.

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And that's why it's very important to get a handle on this,

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that a priori knowledge or in a prior claim is something that is not justified by experience.

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By contrast with empirical knowledge, he thinks there are two marks by which you can identify something as a bit of a priori knowledge.

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These are universality and necessity, and these will make their appearance in a big way in the critique of judgement.

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So universality just means that if you know that something is always the case without exception, then you can't know it by experience.

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So if you know that all bachelors, without exception, are unmarried, that's a prior knowledge reason.

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It's a prior knowledge is quite simple. Your experience is limited.

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You haven't experienced every bachelor or every event or every group of two and two and verified that they make four.

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But if you know it anyway, then you can't know it from experience.

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So universality that he takes to be one mark of a priori knowledge.

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The other mark, he takes to be a necessity.

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So if you know that something must be the case, you can't know that from experience for another simple reason.

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Experience only tells you what is the case, doesn't tell you what must be the case.

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So those two terms, he says, excuse me, necessity, especially universality, are going to loom large here in the critique of judgement.

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So that's just a little bit of background that I think is pretty crucial to understanding what's going on,

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what he's doing now in the bits of the critique of aesthetic judgement that we're going to look at cats basic strategy is this.

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So first he's going to identify certain features that what he calls aesthetic judgements have.

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And this is what he says he's doing in the bith called the analytic of aesthetic judgements.

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And then he is going to point out a very, very puzzling feature of aesthetic judgements so characterised.

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So once he's characterised aesthetic judgements, he says there's a real problem here that demands explanation.

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And we'll get to that at the end of this lecture.

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And the principal question of the aesthetic judge of the critique of aesthetic judgement is the attempt to answer that question.

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To solve that puzzle that arises from this characterisation of aesthetic judgements

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and that he says he's going to provide in the deduction of pure aesthetic judgements.

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So there's the analytic and there's the deduction.

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Now, I say this is what he says he's going to do, because material relevance to both of these is mix all through the critique of aesthetic judgement.

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There's bits that are relevant to the deduction in the analytic and there's bits that are relevant to these analytic repeated in the deduction.

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It really seems to have been written in a hurry, actually, a critique of the aesthetic judgement.

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Now, as I've tried to illustrate on the little chart on the back of the handout.

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When he says aesthetic judgement, he is not only talking about judgements that something as beautiful as you might naturally suppose,

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that's boy the way that that term would be used today. But there are at least three kinds of aesthetic judgement for him.

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There are what he calls judgements of taste, which are concerned with beauty.

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There are judgements of the sublime which he's going to have various things to say about, which we'll discuss next week.

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And there are judgements of the agreeable so tasty food, for example.

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And what makes these all aesthetic is that they have subjective grounds, as he puts it.

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They're based on something about the judge rather than something about the object.

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In each of these cases, as it happens, it's a feeling based on a feeling rather than a property of the object.

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So what I'd like to focus on today is a few features of judgements of taste, judgements concerned with beauty and putting these features together.

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We'll set up the problem that he wants to solve and the deduction as next week we will discuss that problem.

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Characterise it at greater length and go through Kant solution.

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And hopefully we'll also go through the analytic of the Cymbeline next week discussing the features that judgements of the sublime have.

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As it happens, he thinks that it's really judgements of taste that pose this problem, requiring a separate solution.

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So that's really going to be the focus judgements of the sublime. He thinks don't require a separate deduction for reasons we can discuss next week.

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OK. So this week is going to be focussed on these key features of the analytic of the beautiful, whose focus is judgements of taste.

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So the first feature of judgements of taste. And it's not a tautology given the way he uses the word aesthetic.

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It's not trivially true, I should say, is that judgements of taste are aesthetic.

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That means judgements of taste are based on pleasure. That's because, rather, judgements of taste are based on pleasure.

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Now, as we discussed with him, a very common view and can't doesn't even argue for it, that beauty is not a property of the beautiful object.

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Hume gave some argument for it, as we saw, Kent is happy to take it for granted.

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Beauty is not a property of the beautiful object.

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When we judge something to be beautiful, it's not because we've perceived a property called beauty in the object.

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It is on the basis of a feeling the object give us gives us a feeling of pleasure.

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And it's for that reason that judgements of taste are aesthetic judgements, they have, as he puts it, subjective grounds.

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They're not based on something in the object that makes them different from what he calls variously logical judgements,

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theoretical judgements which do attribute a property to the object.

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Now, it's worth taking a look at Section 36 here to give yourself a bit of an idea of how Kant imagines this relation between judgement and pleasure.

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And I think it's a good example of that stretching of words that he's so notorious for.

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So the way he puts it there is that in a logical judgement, when you attribute a property to a thing,

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you connect your perception of the particular thing to a concept that you classify the thing under our concept of a property that you attribute to it.

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So use this word connect to describe the relation between perceptions and concepts.

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And then he says. And then the only difference in aesthetic judgements or, you know, the only difference,

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but is that you instead of connecting a concept to your perception, you connect a feeling to your perception.

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Now, this is just typical of care to imply that it's the just the very same relation between precept as holds,

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between perceptions and concepts in logical judgements as holds between perceptions and feelings.

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This is what you sort of have to deal with when reading him is that's just not transparent at all.

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This doesn't sound remotely plausible that it's the same relation as there is between concepts and perceptions,

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whatever that is, whatever that relation is, as there is between feelings and perceptions.

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So but that's how he's picturing it. You have your perception. You connect a concept to it when you attribute a property.

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And in the case of judgements of tastes, you have your perception and you connect a feeling to it.

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Use of the same word connect makes it sound like the same relation. Strange to think that they would be okay.

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That's just sort of by the by second key point.

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And I think it is worth distinguishing this from. The first one is that not only judgements are judgements of taste based on pleasure.

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They're not based on concepts. So this I don't think you can.

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I don't think I would be too much representation to say that. The second point is that judgements of taste are based only on pleasure.

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So it's not as though they're based in part on pleasure and in part on something else, but only on pleasure.

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Now, what does this mean to say that a judgement is based on a concept or to deny it?

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Well, I think we have to go back to.

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From before is that we do not make this judgement based on applying a concept of a property or of a kind of thing to what we see.

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So we don't in particular judge that something is beautiful on the basis of having

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applied the concept of squareness or shapelessness or possessing unity and variety.

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All these sorts of candidates have been offered as tests for what makes something beautiful.

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A judgement of taste is not based on any prior application of a concept.

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So not only is there no such concept as beauty, but when you judge that something's beautiful,

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you don't make that judgement based on applying any other concept at all.

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It's only based on the feeling of pleasure. Now, he makes a lot of claims about judgements and about the pleasure they're based on.

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And he makes very similar claims about both the judgement and the pleasure it's based on.

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And you can understand why if there's this intimate connexion between the two.

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But I think that's basically his argument for all the considerations he advances in support of the view that judgements aren't based on concepts.

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Is the view that the pleasure they're based on is not itself based on concepts.

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So pleasure and beauty is not based on concepts. Judgements of taste are based on pleasure and beauty.

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And that's supposed to support the idea that judgements of taste are not based on grounded on concepts.

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So as he puts it, or what this amounts to is that you don't get the pleasure in the beautiful from having

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identified it as having a certain property or belonging to such and such a kind.

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And again, it's worth quoting the way he is imagining it. Pleasure.

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And beautiful objects instead, as he puts it immediately, coupled with the representation through which the object is give it.

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That is, it's immediately coupled with an intuition, in his terminology,

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a sense perception, not the representation through which it is thought, namely our concept.

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So you're not pleased at it because you've identified it as shapely, square,

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colourful, etc. You are pleased merely because you have the perception of this thing,

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not because you've identified it as possessing any particular property or belonging to any particular kind.

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And in fact, he says, even if you know what kind of thing it is to make a judgement of taste, you've got to leave that knowledge aside.

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So not base it on what you know. So in his example, a botanist who knows that a flower is the reproductive organ of a plant.

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Doesn't make his judgements about whether the flower is beautiful.

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Based on that knowledge, his pleasure in the flower does not arise because he's identified it as the reproductive organ of a plant.

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Not because he's applied the concept of reproductive organ to the plant.

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So it is difficult to overemphasise how important this claim is for his view.

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The judgements of pleasure, judgements of taste are based on pleasure and not on concepts.

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Because I think that a huge number of other things he says, and it's not always transparent that they're connected to this claim in this way.

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But I think a huge number of claims he makes are actually more or less derived from this one claim that judgements of taste based on pleasure,

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not based on concepts. And I'll get to those in a minute,

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but to give you a sense of what more of what it would mean for pleasure to be based on concepts or for judgements to be based on concepts,

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he contrasts judgements of taste with pleasure and beauty, I should say, with pleasure in the good.

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On the one hand. And pleasure in the agreeable. On the other.

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So he says that to judge something, to be good. So a good knife, for example, not his example.

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You have to know whether it is what it's supposed to be.

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So whether it's an effective cutting implement, for example.

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So to judge something good, you have to apply the concept of what it's intended to be cutting implement,

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for example, before you can judge it to be good.

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If it is what it's intended to be, then it's good of its kind.

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And so if you take pleasure in its being good of its kind, your pleasure is in this sense based on the concept you apply to it.

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That's an example of what it would be for pleasure to be based on concepts. And that's exactly not what pleasure and beauty is like.

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It's not as a result of having applied concepts to it.

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And again, remember, with the botanist, it's fine if you do know what it is and what it's meant to be.

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It's just not that your pleasure is based on it. It's not that your pleasure is based on that knowledge in the way that your pleasure in a good knife,

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admiration of a good knife would be based on having applied a concept to it.

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So this freedom from concept makes it different from pleasure in the good, does make it similar to pleasure in what he calls the agreeable.

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So as he puts it, so to judge something agreeable, such as spicy food or even something like health, the agreeableness of health,

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we need only consider whether it pleases or at least does not pain our senses when we experience it.

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You don't need to recognise some property of spicy food in this view.

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Categorise it as a certain type of food in order to find it agreeable.

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You just taste it and discern whether it pleases your senses.

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By contrast, he says, if you were to judge whether spicy food is good for you,

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you would have to apply concepts, namely the concepts of the consequences that it has for you.

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Maybe it makes you unhealthy.

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And you, while judging the spicy food very agreeable, you might judge that it is not good because the concept, what you recognise is true.

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It entails that it's not good for you.

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OK. So this key claim, judgement of taste and pleasure and beauty, not based on concepts, is something that he gets a lot of traction out of.

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And this is typical of camps to try and base a lot of conclusions on a very slender basis.

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So first conclusion may not sound all that striking, but it is important in terms of at least understanding his view.

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Is this claim that judgements of taste are singular judgements?

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So I've said that pleasure and beauty is pleasure and intuition and intuition is a representation of a particular item.

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Again, the pleasure is not based on concepts. It's based on an intuition, which is a representation of a particular item.

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So the judgement based on that pleasure is going to be a judgement about some

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particular item as opposed to a generalisation about all items of that kind.

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To give you an example, this tulip is beautiful would be an example of a judgement of taste.

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All tulips are beautiful, is not a judgement of taste. In his view, that's a generalisation.

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That's not about any particular tulip.

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So that's a really important thing to observe here that I don't think people often enough take note of is that in Kant's vocabulary,

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a judgement of taste is not just any judgement in which you call something beautiful.

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It's got to have the right basis. So the judgement that all tulips are beautiful is not based on the immediate presentation to you of all tulips.

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And the pleasure you get from that, in a sense, perception, rather, it's based on previous judgements of taste.

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So the judgement, this tulips, beautiful, that tulips, beautiful cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

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Therefore, all tulips are beautiful. So it's based on it's not based on the immediate intuition of tulips.

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It's based on prior judgements of taste. But the fact that it's based on judgements of tastes does not make it a judgement of taste.

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He says even the judgement all tulips are beautiful is a logical or theoretical judgement, not a judgement of taste.

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That's really important to understand because he's not saying it's not possible to do that, but to make judgements like that.

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He's just saying they're not judgements of taste. They are logical judgements.

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They're talking about beauty, but they're still not judgements of taste. OK.

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So that's one point.

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Second point, he thinks and this is directed against Hume, I think, and a lot of other people is the judgements of taste cannot be proven by argument.

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So yesterday we discussed a bit about how Hume has that quaint passage in which he describes or

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assumes at least the possibility of convincing somebody by general principles that they lack taste

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about a certain object that some object they didn't like is beautiful by showing them that it

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has the properties that general principles have identified as the properties of the beautiful,

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i.e. properties that please everyone. In other cases and that please the guy you're arguing with in this case.

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And if you show him that the case he doesn't like has those properties, then Hume says you'd have to agree with us.

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OK. I was wrong. It actually is beautiful. Kant is totally opposed to that procedure.

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That's not the way it works at all. So he said what it what would it be to provide an argument to the effect that something is beautiful?

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What would it be to support that judgement of taste? Through an argument? Well, it would have to take the form of the following.

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Everything with certain property, p. So Kirby Naess or Squareness or Unity in Variety is beautiful.

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First premise. Everything with this property is beautiful.

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Second premise, this object in front of us has this property squareness, cravenness, unity and variety, whatever.

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Therefore, conclusion. This object is beautiful. I think a lot of people,

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when they start to studies that kind of hope that this is what is that stations talk

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about trying to provide necessary and sufficient conditions of something being beautiful.

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They don't really anymore. And it's may have something to do with Kant's influence here.

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Is this not possible procedure? Various people have tried it.

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So you hear about things like the golden ratio and things that like this that have been proposed

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over the years as something that all beautiful objects have in common but can't think.

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This is not how you demonstrate a judgement of taste.

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And again, for the quite simple reason that to do this would be to base your judgement of tastes on concepts,

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namely the concept of whatever property you identified as necessary or sufficient, necessary and sufficient for beauty.

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The concept of unity and variety, concept of the golden ratio concept of whatever was identified in the principle.

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But if judgements of taste aren't based on concepts and are only based on pleasure, then you can't do that.

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And there are no laws of taste where that means something that can function as the first

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premise of an argument that supports a judgement of taste proves the judgement of taste.

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Furthermore, and this has also caused a lot of controversy, is that judgements of taste can't be supported by other people's judgements of taste.

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So the fact that all the experts say that the thing is beautiful provides no support whatsoever for a judgement of taste.

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And again, I can't help but think that this is a dig at him. I don't know if people know whether can't read the standard of taste.

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He certainly read the essay The Sceptic. But there are various points that he's addressing, ideas that are certainly quite explicit in him.

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Maybe they were just around in the general atmosphere at the time.

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But Hume and others who think that the judgements even of very qualified judges support the judgement of taste are wrong.

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And once again, this is because judgements of taste are based only on pleasure,

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not on concepts, not on anything else, not on the concept of being liked by the true critics.

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For example. Now, it's often, I think,

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missed in this is he does say something that sounds like he's allowing that you

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can make a logical judgement of beauty based on what other people have liked.

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So just like that generalisation about tulips that we discussed,

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the fact that the true critics are lots of qualified judges have regarded something as beautiful,

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does provide some support for the conclusion that it's beautiful. But to draw that conclusion is not to make a judgement of taste.

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Again, this despite the fact that it's a conclusion about the things, beauty,

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judgements of taste, very special class of judgements about things, beauty.

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So these are various points about the nature of the judgement. How can be supported further conclusion he draws?

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Beauty is not a kind of perfection. And the reason he says this is because earlier in the century,

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a lot of rationalist philosophers such as Christian Volf and a number of others held that when we perceive beauty,

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we are sort of dimly or obscurely perceiving perfection, the perfection of an object.

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I think perfection of an object, perfection at least.

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And Kant says this is not right.

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Beauty cannot be a kind of perfection argument, being that in order to judge that something is perfect or has is perfect in some respects,

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we have to know what kind of thing the object is and what its perfect purposes in order to see if it fulfils that purpose perfectly.

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So we have to apply the concept of what kind of thing it is and what its purpose is, and that, as we'll be familiar by now.

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You can't do the judgement of taste. You cannot base judgement of taste on concepts.

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You do have to base a judgement of perfection on concepts. Therefore, judgements of taste can't be judgements of perfection.

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Therefore, beauty can't be perfection. And the last conclusion that I think he draws from this is that beauty cannot be defined,

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at least if you're using concepts of the kinds of properties. Thing has got to have in order to be beautiful.

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So this is a generalisation of the point about perfection.

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And the implication seems to be that if it could be defined using concepts of properties, the thing has got to have to be beautiful.

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Then you could make a judgement of taste using or you would be making judgements of taste

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using concepts of what properties the thing has got to have in order to be beautiful.

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Now, he does say it can't be defined by means of concepts.

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And I am assuming here he means by means of concepts of properties the thing has to have in order to be beautiful.

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The reason I say that is that there are several points in the critique of judgement where he presents what he calls a definition of beauty.

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So unless he's contradicting himself, which is a distinct possibility a lot of the time with Kant.

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What I think we have to assume here is that it's using concepts of this particular kind,

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concepts of properties or of kinds to which the object must belong in order to be beautiful,

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a definition that implies concepts of that kind can't be found.

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So there's great ambition that many people have had over the years, defining beauty in these kinds of terms can't be done.

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Now, of course, he says this does not mean that we cannot get empirical evidence of what works or what forms of things.

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People of all ages or nations find beautiful.

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And this, again, I think has got to be some sort of reference to him or at least people with obviously at least people with that kind of view.

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But no such evidence can be used to make a judgement of tastes because it's only based on pleasure.

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OK. Now, having said all this. He then proceeded to make a distinction that seems inconsistent with it.

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He then distinguishes between what he calls free beauty and dependent beauty.

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Now, dependent beauty, as he puts it, presupposes a concept of what the object should be.

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So, for example, beautiful people, men, women, children, beautiful warriors.

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So he had apparently read about some warriors in New Zealand who painted their bodies in various warlike ways.

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Beautiful horses, beautiful buildings. The beauty of these objects tends to be what he calls dependent beauty,

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because these objects are formed in such a way as to match their function, what they're supposed to be.

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So warriors are painted in scary ways. Horses are beautiful.

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The beauty of a horse is in virtue of properties that make it do what a horse is supposed to do.

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Go fast, whatever. And as he puts it, such objects combine are such such objects combined, both beauty and goodness in them.

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Remember, the goodness of a thing has to do with what it's supposed to be.

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And these objects have a form matching what they're supposed to be. That's dependent beauty.

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But free beauty is not like that. It's not base doesn't presuppose concept.

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Now, obviously, that seems to pose a problem.

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It's seems to suggest that all of a sudden he's allowing that you can make some judgements of taste based on concepts,

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namely judgements of dependent beauty.

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And there are various ways people have tried to get him out of this one way, which seems kind of promising, actually, when you read Section 16,

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where he makes this distinction is to point out that while what he says is what he says presupposes the concept is the beauty, not the judgement.

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And he also makes the point that a church, for example, is the way it is because of the function it has.

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So there might be lots of ways of making it beautiful that you can't do to a church because of the function that it has.

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So this seems to suggest that it's not the judgement of the things beauty that's based on concepts,

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but the things beauty itself takes, the form it does because of someone's concepts, the designer, its concepts of the thing.

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That's one way out. So and so on. This view, what we do, we judge beauty and just the same way as before.

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Not based on concepts. Just based on pleasure. It's not based on the concept of the function of the church or the function of the horse, etc.

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But the horse is the way it is and the church is the way it is because of the function that they have.

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That's one way in which people have thoughts. Defend Kant.

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And what's misleading here is that it makes it look like these two kinds of judgements of taste when actually it's two kinds of beauty.

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And if there's a different kind of evaluation here at all, it's a sort of complex evaluation,

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combining a judgement of taste with a judgement about the things goodness or its fitness to function.

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So the judgement of taste not based on concepts, but the complex judgement that has a judgement of taste as a component is based on concepts.

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That's one way people have thought of avoiding a contradiction here with Kant.

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He doesn't really return to this distinction too much at all, actually, if I am right.

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And that's one way people have tried to explain why he makes it or how it's consistent with the other stuff that he says.

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OK. So, as I say, I really can't stress enough this point about the judgements of taste are aesthetic in no way based and in no way based on concepts.

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Next point, which is one of the earliest points he makes in the critique, is that the pleasure judgements of taste are based on is disinterested.

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And this would be a hugely influential doctrine.

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Now, the English word disinterested is misused a lot. It's often used to mean uninterested.

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It actually means something more like impartial. In this context, I can't gives it its own meaning.

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So he says that interest is, as he puts it.

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Pleasure connected with the representation of the existence of an object, and that arises from a desire for the objects to exist.

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So the thought seems to be you desire the object to exist.

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You represent an object like that as existing, and that brings you pleasure.

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That's not what pleasure and beauty is like, he says and what he says to support that is based on an example of a palace.

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And unfortunately, it's muddied a bit by the fact that in this example, it's an example of displeasure or lack of pleasure.

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But I think we can sort of see what he means. So he says, if I ask you whether a palace is beautiful and you say,

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I don't think there should be palaces with so many people starving or I think palaces are otherwise a waste.

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If I had a nice warm home, I wouldn't accept a palace if I could bring one about.

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And he says you might rather like Rousseau against the vanity of the great attached to.

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That's manifested in palaces. Kent says all this might be very admirable, but it would not answer my question, which was, is the thing beautiful?

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And to answer that question, what you've got to consider is not whether you are displeased that such palaces exist,

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but whether the mere representation, either perception of the palace pleases you or not,

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not whether you are pleased that it exists or whether any desires for that you

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have for it to exist leads you to be pleased or displeased that it does exist.

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Again, it's worth reminding yourself here of that thing I quoted earlier where he says

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question is just whether there's a pleasure coupled with the representation of it.

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And I think he also makes the point that if I merely hold it up to my faculty of representation, my senses.

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Do I get pleasure from that? Yes or no? That's the thought. Now, actually, there's sort of two ways of reading what he says here.

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One seems to be I mean,

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one thing he says seems to suggest that you have to be indifferent to the things existence in order to judge whether it's beautiful.

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Another way of taking what he says is the more plausible claim that you can't base your pleasure on any desire you have for it to exist or not.

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So you can have those desires and still judge whether it's beautiful.

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You just can't base your pleasure and therefore your judgement on those desires and any pleasure or displeasure that they give rise to.

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But as I say,

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there's something he definitely says that makes it sound like you have to remove all desire for its existence to judge whether it's beautiful.

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And that sort of claim is what a lot of people have attacked. And it does sound like he's saying that at one point.

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OK. So this is also something that makes pleasure and beauty different from other kinds of pleasure.

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So pleasuring the agreeable, again, the spicy food is based on a desire for it to exist.

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So it's based on a desire for food, an instinct we have for food.

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Likewise, he says, although he doesn't say much more about it than assert it is that pleasure in the good is also interested.

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And the thought seems to be that you cannot take pleasure in things goodness without desiring that thing to exist.

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Seems plausible enough. OK.

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So that's the rather obscure in some ways and on some readings,

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controversial doctrine of disinterest oddness now draws one enormously important conclusion from this.

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And I'm going to conclude with this and return to a start of the next lecture, because it's really, really important.

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And it's the thing that poses the big problem, that it's the main project of the critique to solve.

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So a consequence of this, he thinks, is that when you judge something to be beautiful,

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you are committed to the claim that everyone else ought to agree with you.

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This, he says. Gives judgements of taste.

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That quality of universality that we talked about at the very start, which was one of the marks of a priori a priori knowledge, a priori judgements.

384
00:50:42,370 --> 00:50:47,770
That's not quite clear whether this is something that's implied by what you say or whether it's the content of what you say.

385
00:50:47,770 --> 00:50:55,290
He doesn't really make those distinctions very clearly. But what's at least clear is that when you judge something to BBB excuse me,

386
00:50:55,290 --> 00:51:00,990
to be beautiful, you are committed to this view that everyone else ought to agree with.

387
00:51:00,990 --> 00:51:08,340
You ought to agree with you that the thing is beautiful and he provides some

388
00:51:08,340 --> 00:51:12,090
argument for this and he thinks he can derive it from the point about disinterest,

389
00:51:12,090 --> 00:51:18,690
rudeness. And I'll just sort of read out how I've reconstructed this.

390
00:51:18,690 --> 00:51:23,220
It's the first claim seems to be that if you're aware that your pleasure is disinterested,

391
00:51:23,220 --> 00:51:41,560
then you're aware of no source of your pleasure that might be unique to you, such as a desire for something that others might not share.

392
00:51:41,560 --> 00:51:50,440
Second point seems to be, if you're aware of no source of your pleasure, that might be unique to you.

393
00:51:50,440 --> 00:52:02,560
Then you must believe that its source is something about you that you share with everyone.

394
00:52:02,560 --> 00:52:11,220
And third premise seems to be that if you are aware that its source is something about you that you share with everyone,

395
00:52:11,220 --> 00:52:17,840
then you will believe that everyone else ought to agree with your judgement of taste based on that pleasure.

396
00:52:17,840 --> 00:52:28,010
Whose source is some factor about you that you share with everyone?

397
00:52:28,010 --> 00:52:36,780
That's how he gets universality from disinterest, sadness, namely how he gets the claim that everyone ought to agree with you,

398
00:52:36,780 --> 00:52:42,020
and because it's an everyone statement, it's universal as universality.

399
00:52:42,020 --> 00:52:48,260
From the point about the central sickness and loads of ways, that's a terrible argument.

400
00:52:48,260 --> 00:52:51,370
But we're going to leave that aside for the moment.

401
00:52:51,370 --> 00:53:00,080
The somewhat more plausible thing and the thing that people tend to point to who think he's onto something here occurs in his further discussion,

402
00:53:00,080 --> 00:53:05,210
contrasting agreeableness with beauty.

403
00:53:05,210 --> 00:53:15,290
And this is simply the point and the observation that we argue with people over judgements of taste, but not over judgements of the agreeable.

404
00:53:15,290 --> 00:53:19,450
So we blame people who disagree with us. Remember, this was a point.

405
00:53:19,450 --> 00:53:29,840
Hume was really stressing. He thinks judgements over spicy food, things like this,

406
00:53:29,840 --> 00:53:43,550
do not give rise to these arguments would not make sense to blame people for disagreeing that the food is tasty or disgusting, things like that.

407
00:53:43,550 --> 00:53:50,180
That's the claim. And that's supposed to show that when we judge something beautiful.

408
00:53:50,180 --> 00:53:56,510
By contrast with agreeable, we are committing ourselves to the claim that everyone else ought to agree with us.

409
00:53:56,510 --> 00:54:05,970
Otherwise, these arguments, this blame wouldn't make sense.

410
00:54:05,970 --> 00:54:12,600
When something is agreeable, we're happy to qualify it and say it's agreeable to me, though, not to you, I grant.

411
00:54:12,600 --> 00:54:19,110
He says we don't qualify. Beauty in this way. We don't say, well, it's beautiful to me.

412
00:54:19,110 --> 00:54:23,010
That would not make sense. He thinks so.

413
00:54:23,010 --> 00:54:29,280
This point about universality, as I say, credibly important for what he's doing here.

414
00:54:29,280 --> 00:54:35,970
It poses a very strange problem, which I'll elaborate on a bit more next week.

415
00:54:35,970 --> 00:54:42,690
But the thought is that since judgements of taste are based just on your own feeling of pleasure and nothing else,

416
00:54:42,690 --> 00:54:50,310
not the observation that other people are pleased with it or any proof, because proofs of the things beauty are not possible.

417
00:54:50,310 --> 00:54:56,940
Arguments proving that it's beautiful are not possible. And yet you think everybody else ought to agree.

418
00:54:56,940 --> 00:55:02,230
A question arises is by what? Right. Can you expect that?

419
00:55:02,230 --> 00:55:10,320
By what. Right. Can you demand that of other people? And he's well aware that this is very strange.

420
00:55:10,320 --> 00:55:15,340
But this is a very strange feature of judgements of taste, demanding explanation.

421
00:55:15,340 --> 00:55:24,150
He doesn't just assert that you have the right to do this. He tries to show that you have the right to expect other people to agree.

422
00:55:24,150 --> 00:55:29,570
And next week, we'll get into that. Along with the analytic of the sublime.

423
00:55:29,570 --> 00:55:36,665
Thank you.