So today, we're going to be doing the critique of judgement by manual count.
And as I said yesterday, we're going to be continuing this next week.
So it looks like I'm probably going to drop the electron pictorial representation
because you sort of need more than one lecture to cover the critique of judgement.
The critique of judgement is divided into two big parts. One part is about aesthetics.
The other part is basically about the philosophy of science. The first part is called the critique of aesthetic judgement.
The second part of the critique of Talulah Teleological Judgement.
We're not gonna be talking about the critique of teleological judgement, just a critique of aesthetic judgement.
And within the critique of aesthetic judgement, a great number of issues are dealt with.
We're really only gonna be dealing with the sections one to 40. So that's most of it.
That's the sort of central bits.
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.
But we don't have time to cover that. So if any of you have ever come across Kant before, either in his metaphysics,
victimology, ethics, you'll know that he is a remarkably difficult writer to read.
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.
One thing people often have said about Kant, that he's the least precise of the great philosophers,
and this is largely because he tends to use the same word for a whole variety
of very different things that are only linked by a really tenuous similarity.
But without signalling the differences between all the things that he applies the word to and often without seeming to be aware,
actually, that he's using the word in a rather different sense. Over and over again in various places.
So I think it's helpful to remind yourself of that tendency of his when he when you're reading him.
This is connected with another tendency he has, which is a tendency to, as it's often put,
make architectonic considerations dominant in his presentation of his philosophy.
That means he wants to create very elegant looking system.
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.
He really likes groups of three and four in presenting his views and often in order to get that beautiful structure to his thoughts.
He distorts words, uses them in rather strange ways.
But quite apart from that, he also has an enormous amount of his own technical terminology.
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.
They're not incomprehensible entirely without knowledge of his larger philosophy.
More general views on epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy mind.
But it certainly helps to know a bit about that.
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.
So one of the first things you'll notice when you start the critique of aesthetic
judgement is that he uses this word representation and quite frequently.
And this is, again, one of those technical terms and Kant system is that representations are mental items in his usage.
And there are two main types of representation in his system. The first kind is intuitions.
And the second kind is concepts. And again, the word intuition here has nothing to do with what it normally means in English.
That's the word that's been selected to translate the German word.
He uses intuitions are, with certain, very important exceptions, sense perceptions.
So they're representations of particular objects through the senses.
We don't have to get into the important exceptions here at just this moment.
So for the most part, when he talks about representations in the generic in the critique.
Judgement. He actually has intuitions in mind and intuitions, again, for the most part here.
Our sense, perceptions, representations of particular objects that you encounter and sense perception,
as he puts it, intuitions are representation through which an object is given to us is how he phrases it often.
And the other main kind of representation, which is going to come up a lot in his aesthetics, is the concept.
Now, he's a certain view about the nature of concepts. But he basically means by concept what we mean by concept.
So a general representation as opposed to a particular representation.
So the concept of dog, as opposed to a representation of some particular dog or a sense percent perception of some particular dog.
Nevertheless, for some reason, in the critique of judgement, he usually uses the term representation.
And when he does that, he almost always means a sense perception.
What elsewhere he calls an intuition sometimes uses the word intuition. And the critique of judgement.
But mostly he uses the generic term representation and concepts that other kind of
representation are not the representation through which objects are given to us in experience.
But as he puts it, the representation through which objects, I thought.
So you see a cow. Your sense perception is an intuition of a particular cow.
You identify it as a cow. You apply the concept of a cow to it.
So you have the thought. This is a cow.
Cooperation of intuitions, representation of this cow with the concept by which you identify what it is, namely the concept of a cow.
That is an example of kind of the way that he sees things working.
OK. So that's representations. The other important term she uses everywhere, totally central is a priori.
And some of you may have come across this elsewhere.
And he calls a lot of different things a priori, various representations or a priori intuitions and concepts.
He thinks there are some a priori intuitions and concepts.
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.
Right. But what it means to call knowledge a priori. Right. So a priori knowledge is knowledge that is not justified by experience.
So there's empirical knowledge which is justified by experience.
So the knowledge that it's raining outside you acquire by having a sense experience is justified by having a sense experience.
But it's also quite important for him that we have a priori knowledge, knowledge that's not justified by sense.
Experience and examples include mathematical knowledge.
Certain principles of physics, such as every event has a cause.
Certain principles. As we'll see also a certain claim that aesthetic judgements commit us to.
And that's why it's very important to get a handle on this,
that a priori knowledge or in a prior claim is something that is not justified by experience.
By contrast with empirical knowledge, he thinks there are two marks by which you can identify something as a bit of a priori knowledge.
These are universality and necessity, and these will make their appearance in a big way in the critique of judgement.
So universality just means that if you know that something is always the case without exception, then you can't know it by experience.
So if you know that all bachelors, without exception, are unmarried, that's a prior knowledge reason.
It's a prior knowledge is quite simple. Your experience is limited.
You haven't experienced every bachelor or every event or every group of two and two and verified that they make four.
But if you know it anyway, then you can't know it from experience.
So universality that he takes to be one mark of a priori knowledge.
The other mark, he takes to be a necessity.
So if you know that something must be the case, you can't know that from experience for another simple reason.
Experience only tells you what is the case, doesn't tell you what must be the case.
So those two terms, he says, excuse me, necessity, especially universality, are going to loom large here in the critique of judgement.
So that's just a little bit of background that I think is pretty crucial to understanding what's going on,
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.
So first he's going to identify certain features that what he calls aesthetic judgements have.
And this is what he says he's doing in the bith called the analytic of aesthetic judgements.
And then he is going to point out a very, very puzzling feature of aesthetic judgements so characterised.
So once he's characterised aesthetic judgements, he says there's a real problem here that demands explanation.
And we'll get to that at the end of this lecture.
And the principal question of the aesthetic judge of the critique of aesthetic judgement is the attempt to answer that question.
To solve that puzzle that arises from this characterisation of aesthetic judgements
and that he says he's going to provide in the deduction of pure aesthetic judgements.
So there's the analytic and there's the deduction.
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.
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.
It really seems to have been written in a hurry, actually, a critique of the aesthetic judgement.
Now, as I've tried to illustrate on the little chart on the back of the handout.
When he says aesthetic judgement, he is not only talking about judgements that something as beautiful as you might naturally suppose,
that's boy the way that that term would be used today. But there are at least three kinds of aesthetic judgement for him.
There are what he calls judgements of taste, which are concerned with beauty.
There are judgements of the sublime which he's going to have various things to say about, which we'll discuss next week.
And there are judgements of the agreeable so tasty food, for example.
And what makes these all aesthetic is that they have subjective grounds, as he puts it.
They're based on something about the judge rather than something about the object.
In each of these cases, as it happens, it's a feeling based on a feeling rather than a property of the object.
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.
We'll set up the problem that he wants to solve and the deduction as next week we will discuss that problem.
Characterise it at greater length and go through Kant solution.
And hopefully we'll also go through the analytic of the Cymbeline next week discussing the features that judgements of the sublime have.
As it happens, he thinks that it's really judgements of taste that pose this problem, requiring a separate solution.
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.
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.
So the first feature of judgements of taste. And it's not a tautology given the way he uses the word aesthetic.
It's not trivially true, I should say, is that judgements of taste are aesthetic.
That means judgements of taste are based on pleasure. That's because, rather, judgements of taste are based on pleasure.
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.
Hume gave some argument for it, as we saw, Kent is happy to take it for granted.
Beauty is not a property of the beautiful object.
When we judge something to be beautiful, it's not because we've perceived a property called beauty in the object.
It is on the basis of a feeling the object give us gives us a feeling of pleasure.
And it's for that reason that judgements of taste are aesthetic judgements, they have, as he puts it, subjective grounds.
They're not based on something in the object that makes them different from what he calls variously logical judgements,
theoretical judgements which do attribute a property to the object.
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.
And I think it's a good example of that stretching of words that he's so notorious for.
So the way he puts it there is that in a logical judgement, when you attribute a property to a thing,
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.
So use this word connect to describe the relation between perceptions and concepts.
And then he says. And then the only difference in aesthetic judgements or, you know, the only difference,
but is that you instead of connecting a concept to your perception, you connect a feeling to your perception.
Now, this is just typical of care to imply that it's the just the very same relation between precept as holds,
between perceptions and concepts in logical judgements as holds between perceptions and feelings.
This is what you sort of have to deal with when reading him is that's just not transparent at all.
This doesn't sound remotely plausible that it's the same relation as there is between concepts and perceptions,
whatever that is, whatever that relation is, as there is between feelings and perceptions.
So but that's how he's picturing it. You have your perception. You connect a concept to it when you attribute a property.
And in the case of judgements of tastes, you have your perception and you connect a feeling to it.
Use of the same word connect makes it sound like the same relation. Strange to think that they would be okay.
That's just sort of by the by second key point.
And I think it is worth distinguishing this from. The first one is that not only judgements are judgements of taste based on pleasure.
They're not based on concepts. So this I don't think you can.
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.
So it's not as though they're based in part on pleasure and in part on something else, but only on pleasure.
Now, what does this mean to say that a judgement is based on a concept or to deny it?
Well, I think we have to go back to.
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.
So we don't in particular judge that something is beautiful on the basis of having
applied the concept of squareness or shapelessness or possessing unity and variety.
All these sorts of candidates have been offered as tests for what makes something beautiful.
A judgement of taste is not based on any prior application of a concept.
So not only is there no such concept as beauty, but when you judge that something's beautiful,
you don't make that judgement based on applying any other concept at all.
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.
And he makes very similar claims about both the judgement and the pleasure it's based on.
And you can understand why if there's this intimate connexion between the two.
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.
Is the view that the pleasure they're based on is not itself based on concepts.
So pleasure and beauty is not based on concepts. Judgements of taste are based on pleasure and beauty.
And that's supposed to support the idea that judgements of taste are not based on grounded on concepts.
So as he puts it, or what this amounts to is that you don't get the pleasure in the beautiful from having
identified it as having a certain property or belonging to such and such a kind.
And again, it's worth quoting the way he is imagining it. Pleasure.
And beautiful objects instead, as he puts it immediately, coupled with the representation through which the object is give it.
That is, it's immediately coupled with an intuition, in his terminology,
a sense perception, not the representation through which it is thought, namely our concept.
So you're not pleased at it because you've identified it as shapely, square,
colourful, etc. You are pleased merely because you have the perception of this thing,
not because you've identified it as possessing any particular property or belonging to any particular kind.
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.
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.
Doesn't make his judgements about whether the flower is beautiful.
Based on that knowledge, his pleasure in the flower does not arise because he's identified it as the reproductive organ of a plant.
Not because he's applied the concept of reproductive organ to the plant.
So it is difficult to overemphasise how important this claim is for his view.
The judgements of pleasure, judgements of taste are based on pleasure and not on concepts.
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.
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,
not based on concepts. And I'll get to those in a minute,
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,
he contrasts judgements of taste with pleasure and beauty, I should say, with pleasure in the good.
On the one hand. And pleasure in the agreeable. On the other.
So he says that to judge something, to be good. So a good knife, for example, not his example.
You have to know whether it is what it's supposed to be.
So whether it's an effective cutting implement, for example.
So to judge something good, you have to apply the concept of what it's intended to be cutting implement,
for example, before you can judge it to be good.
If it is what it's intended to be, then it's good of its kind.
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.
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.
It's not as a result of having applied concepts to it.
And again, remember, with the botanist, it's fine if you do know what it is and what it's meant to be.
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,
admiration of a good knife would be based on having applied a concept to it.
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.
So as he puts it, so to judge something agreeable, such as spicy food or even something like health, the agreeableness of health,
we need only consider whether it pleases or at least does not pain our senses when we experience it.
You don't need to recognise some property of spicy food in this view.
Categorise it as a certain type of food in order to find it agreeable.
You just taste it and discern whether it pleases your senses.
By contrast, he says, if you were to judge whether spicy food is good for you,
you would have to apply concepts, namely the concepts of the consequences that it has for you.
Maybe it makes you unhealthy.
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.
It entails that it's not good for you.
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.
And this is typical of camps to try and base a lot of conclusions on a very slender basis.
So first conclusion may not sound all that striking, but it is important in terms of at least understanding his view.
Is this claim that judgements of taste are singular judgements?
So I've said that pleasure and beauty is pleasure and intuition and intuition is a representation of a particular item.
Again, the pleasure is not based on concepts. It's based on an intuition, which is a representation of a particular item.
So the judgement based on that pleasure is going to be a judgement about some
particular item as opposed to a generalisation about all items of that kind.
To give you an example, this tulip is beautiful would be an example of a judgement of taste.
All tulips are beautiful, is not a judgement of taste. In his view, that's a generalisation.
That's not about any particular tulip.
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,
a judgement of taste is not just any judgement in which you call something beautiful.
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.
And the pleasure you get from that, in a sense, perception, rather, it's based on previous judgements of taste.
So the judgement, this tulips, beautiful, that tulips, beautiful cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Therefore, all tulips are beautiful. So it's based on it's not based on the immediate intuition of tulips.
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.
He says even the judgement all tulips are beautiful is a logical or theoretical judgement, not a judgement of taste.
That's really important to understand because he's not saying it's not possible to do that, but to make judgements like that.
He's just saying they're not judgements of taste. They are logical judgements.
They're talking about beauty, but they're still not judgements of taste. OK.
So that's one point.
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.
So yesterday we discussed a bit about how Hume has that quaint passage in which he describes or
assumes at least the possibility of convincing somebody by general principles that they lack taste
about a certain object that some object they didn't like is beautiful by showing them that it
has the properties that general principles have identified as the properties of the beautiful,
i.e. properties that please everyone. In other cases and that please the guy you're arguing with in this case.
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.
OK. I was wrong. It actually is beautiful. Kant is totally opposed to that procedure.
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?
What would it be to support that judgement of taste? Through an argument? Well, it would have to take the form of the following.
Everything with certain property, p. So Kirby Naess or Squareness or Unity in Variety is beautiful.
First premise. Everything with this property is beautiful.
Second premise, this object in front of us has this property squareness, cravenness, unity and variety, whatever.
Therefore, conclusion. This object is beautiful. I think a lot of people,
when they start to studies that kind of hope that this is what is that stations talk
about trying to provide necessary and sufficient conditions of something being beautiful.
They don't really anymore. And it's may have something to do with Kant's influence here.
Is this not possible procedure? Various people have tried it.
So you hear about things like the golden ratio and things that like this that have been proposed
over the years as something that all beautiful objects have in common but can't think.
This is not how you demonstrate a judgement of taste.
And again, for the quite simple reason that to do this would be to base your judgement of tastes on concepts,
namely the concept of whatever property you identified as necessary or sufficient, necessary and sufficient for beauty.
The concept of unity and variety, concept of the golden ratio concept of whatever was identified in the principle.
But if judgements of taste aren't based on concepts and are only based on pleasure, then you can't do that.
And there are no laws of taste where that means something that can function as the first
premise of an argument that supports a judgement of taste proves the judgement of taste.
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.
So the fact that all the experts say that the thing is beautiful provides no support whatsoever for a judgement of taste.
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.
He certainly read the essay The Sceptic. But there are various points that he's addressing, ideas that are certainly quite explicit in him.
Maybe they were just around in the general atmosphere at the time.
But Hume and others who think that the judgements even of very qualified judges support the judgement of taste are wrong.
And once again, this is because judgements of taste are based only on pleasure,
not on concepts, not on anything else, not on the concept of being liked by the true critics.
For example. Now, it's often, I think,
missed in this is he does say something that sounds like he's allowing that you
can make a logical judgement of beauty based on what other people have liked.
So just like that generalisation about tulips that we discussed,
the fact that the true critics are lots of qualified judges have regarded something as beautiful,
does provide some support for the conclusion that it's beautiful. But to draw that conclusion is not to make a judgement of taste.
Again, this despite the fact that it's a conclusion about the things, beauty,
judgements of taste, very special class of judgements about things, beauty.
So these are various points about the nature of the judgement. How can be supported further conclusion he draws?
Beauty is not a kind of perfection. And the reason he says this is because earlier in the century,
a lot of rationalist philosophers such as Christian Volf and a number of others held that when we perceive beauty,
we are sort of dimly or obscurely perceiving perfection, the perfection of an object.
I think perfection of an object, perfection at least.
And Kant says this is not right.
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,
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.
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.
You can't do the judgement of taste. You cannot base judgement of taste on concepts.
You do have to base a judgement of perfection on concepts. Therefore, judgements of taste can't be judgements of perfection.
Therefore, beauty can't be perfection. And the last conclusion that I think he draws from this is that beauty cannot be defined,
at least if you're using concepts of the kinds of properties. Thing has got to have in order to be beautiful.
So this is a generalisation of the point about perfection.
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.
Then you could make a judgement of taste using or you would be making judgements of taste
using concepts of what properties the thing has got to have in order to be beautiful.
Now, he does say it can't be defined by means of concepts.
And I am assuming here he means by means of concepts of properties the thing has to have in order to be beautiful.
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.
So unless he's contradicting himself, which is a distinct possibility a lot of the time with Kant.
What I think we have to assume here is that it's using concepts of this particular kind,
concepts of properties or of kinds to which the object must belong in order to be beautiful,
a definition that implies concepts of that kind can't be found.
So there's great ambition that many people have had over the years, defining beauty in these kinds of terms can't be done.
Now, of course, he says this does not mean that we cannot get empirical evidence of what works or what forms of things.
People of all ages or nations find beautiful.
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.
But no such evidence can be used to make a judgement of tastes because it's only based on pleasure.
OK. Now, having said all this. He then proceeded to make a distinction that seems inconsistent with it.
He then distinguishes between what he calls free beauty and dependent beauty.
Now, dependent beauty, as he puts it, presupposes a concept of what the object should be.
So, for example, beautiful people, men, women, children, beautiful warriors.
So he had apparently read about some warriors in New Zealand who painted their bodies in various warlike ways.
Beautiful horses, beautiful buildings. The beauty of these objects tends to be what he calls dependent beauty,
because these objects are formed in such a way as to match their function, what they're supposed to be.
So warriors are painted in scary ways. Horses are beautiful.
The beauty of a horse is in virtue of properties that make it do what a horse is supposed to do.
Go fast, whatever. And as he puts it, such objects combine are such such objects combined, both beauty and goodness in them.
Remember, the goodness of a thing has to do with what it's supposed to be.
And these objects have a form matching what they're supposed to be. That's dependent beauty.
But free beauty is not like that. It's not base doesn't presuppose concept.
Now, obviously, that seems to pose a problem.
It's seems to suggest that all of a sudden he's allowing that you can make some judgements of taste based on concepts,
namely judgements of dependent beauty.
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,
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.
And he also makes the point that a church, for example, is the way it is because of the function it has.
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.
So this seems to suggest that it's not the judgement of the things beauty that's based on concepts,
but the things beauty itself takes, the form it does because of someone's concepts, the designer, its concepts of the thing.
That's one way out. So and so on. This view, what we do, we judge beauty and just the same way as before.
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.
But the horse is the way it is and the church is the way it is because of the function that they have.
That's one way in which people have thoughts. Defend Kant.
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.
And if there's a different kind of evaluation here at all, it's a sort of complex evaluation,
combining a judgement of taste with a judgement about the things goodness or its fitness to function.
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.
That's one way people have thought of avoiding a contradiction here with Kant.
He doesn't really return to this distinction too much at all, actually, if I am right.
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.
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.
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.
And this would be a hugely influential doctrine.
Now, the English word disinterested is misused a lot. It's often used to mean uninterested.
It actually means something more like impartial. In this context, I can't gives it its own meaning.
So he says that interest is, as he puts it.
Pleasure connected with the representation of the existence of an object, and that arises from a desire for the objects to exist.
So the thought seems to be you desire the object to exist.
You represent an object like that as existing, and that brings you pleasure.
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.
And unfortunately, it's muddied a bit by the fact that in this example, it's an example of displeasure or lack of pleasure.
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,
I don't think there should be palaces with so many people starving or I think palaces are otherwise a waste.
If I had a nice warm home, I wouldn't accept a palace if I could bring one about.
And he says you might rather like Rousseau against the vanity of the great attached to.
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?
And to answer that question, what you've got to consider is not whether you are displeased that such palaces exist,
but whether the mere representation, either perception of the palace pleases you or not,
not whether you are pleased that it exists or whether any desires for that you
have for it to exist leads you to be pleased or displeased that it does exist.
Again, it's worth reminding yourself here of that thing I quoted earlier where he says
question is just whether there's a pleasure coupled with the representation of it.
And I think he also makes the point that if I merely hold it up to my faculty of representation, my senses.
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.
One seems to be I mean,
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.
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.
So you can have those desires and still judge whether it's beautiful.
You just can't base your pleasure and therefore your judgement on those desires and any pleasure or displeasure that they give rise to.
But as I say,
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.
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.
OK. So this is also something that makes pleasure and beauty different from other kinds of pleasure.
So pleasuring the agreeable, again, the spicy food is based on a desire for it to exist.
So it's based on a desire for food, an instinct we have for food.
Likewise, he says, although he doesn't say much more about it than assert it is that pleasure in the good is also interested.
And the thought seems to be that you cannot take pleasure in things goodness without desiring that thing to exist.
Seems plausible enough. OK.
So that's the rather obscure in some ways and on some readings,
controversial doctrine of disinterest oddness now draws one enormously important conclusion from this.
And I'm going to conclude with this and return to a start of the next lecture, because it's really, really important.
And it's the thing that poses the big problem, that it's the main project of the critique to solve.
So a consequence of this, he thinks, is that when you judge something to be beautiful,
you are committed to the claim that everyone else ought to agree with you.
This, he says. Gives judgements of taste.
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.
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.
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,
to be beautiful, you are committed to this view that everyone else ought to agree with.
You ought to agree with you that the thing is beautiful and he provides some
argument for this and he thinks he can derive it from the point about disinterest,
rudeness. And I'll just sort of read out how I've reconstructed this.
It's the first claim seems to be that if you're aware that your pleasure is disinterested,
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.
Second point seems to be, if you're aware of no source of your pleasure, that might be unique to you.
Then you must believe that its source is something about you that you share with everyone.
And third premise seems to be that if you are aware that its source is something about you that you share with everyone,
then you will believe that everyone else ought to agree with your judgement of taste based on that pleasure.
Whose source is some factor about you that you share with everyone?
That's how he gets universality from disinterest, sadness, namely how he gets the claim that everyone ought to agree with you,
and because it's an everyone statement, it's universal as universality.
From the point about the central sickness and loads of ways, that's a terrible argument.
But we're going to leave that aside for the moment.
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,
contrasting agreeableness with beauty.
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.
So we blame people who disagree with us. Remember, this was a point.
Hume was really stressing. He thinks judgements over spicy food, things like this,
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.
That's the claim. And that's supposed to show that when we judge something beautiful.
By contrast with agreeable, we are committing ourselves to the claim that everyone else ought to agree with us.
Otherwise, these arguments, this blame wouldn't make sense.
When something is agreeable, we're happy to qualify it and say it's agreeable to me, though, not to you, I grant.
He says we don't qualify. Beauty in this way. We don't say, well, it's beautiful to me.
That would not make sense. He thinks so.
This point about universality, as I say, credibly important for what he's doing here.
It poses a very strange problem, which I'll elaborate on a bit more next week.
But the thought is that since judgements of taste are based just on your own feeling of pleasure and nothing else,
not the observation that other people are pleased with it or any proof, because proofs of the things beauty are not possible.
Arguments proving that it's beautiful are not possible. And yet you think everybody else ought to agree.
A question arises is by what? Right. Can you expect that?
By what. Right. Can you demand that of other people? And he's well aware that this is very strange.
But this is a very strange feature of judgements of taste, demanding explanation.
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.
And next week, we'll get into that. Along with the analytic of the sublime.
Thank you.