So today, we're going to continue with the critique of judgement,
and in particular we're going to look at cance solution or explanation of the puzzle or the problematic feature of judgements of taste.
That was identified last week in The Analytic of the Beautiful.
So remember, the strategy is that in the analytic certain features, the judgements of taste have are identified and least supposedly in the deduction.
An explanation of how it's possible for them to have those apparently problematic features is given.
As I say, it's just supposedly in this because material relevant to both of these projects is
scattered throughout the critique in both sections entitled The Analytic and the Deduction.
So the big problem or problematic feature of judgements of taste is what Kant describes as their subjective universality,
or as he sometimes puts it, that subjective universalist validity,
their subjective in his sense, in that they're not based on concepts and the perception of a property in the object,
but rather they're based on some fact about the judge. Some feature of the judge.
And in the case of judgements of taste, it's based on pleasure. And the points very much emphasised last week was that it's based only on pleasure.
The pleasure itself is not based on concepts. The judgement is not based on concepts.
Judgement is based only on the pleasure. And the pleasure is a pleasure.
Connected with an intuition of the object, which, remember in his vocabulary, is a sense perception of the object,
which is a representation of a particular rather than a general representation, which is what a concept would be.
So judgements of taste are subjective in this sense, and they also have this feature of universality.
And what that amounts to is that when you make a judgement of taste, you believe that everyone else ought to agree with you.
Universal in the sense of everyone ought to agree.
And as we discussed at the end last time, he get he appears to give at least two reasons why judgements of taste have this feature.
The first is that they're based on disinterested pleasure. And so it seems to you as if your pleasure in it doesn't result from some desire
for the existence or non-existence of the object that might be unique to you.
And second is this point that we argue over whether things are beautiful.
So, as he puts it, we blame others who we just have bad taste.
That implies that we think they ought to agree that everybody ought to agree.
Now, as Kant clarifies in this first quotation on the handout, he says,
the assertion is not that everyone will fall in with our judgement, but rather that everyone ought to agree with it.
Here I put forward my judgement of taste as an example of the judgement of common sense and a tribute to it on that account, exemplary validity.
So that's important. It's not a prediction that everybody who looks at the object will agree with you.
It's a claim that everybody ought to. And in fact, we persist in claiming this, Kant notes, even when we see that other people don't agree.
That's the hope. That's what makes argument possible. We think everybody ought to agree, even though we see they don't.
He thinks this is an interesting contrast of judgements of the agreeable in which even when we see everybody agrees that something's agreeable,
we don't require that everybody ought to agree.
So that he puts it in that somewhat paradoxical seeming way to bring to highlight this feature the judgements of taste.
At one point we didn't mention last week is that Kant thinks this explains this feature of universality,
explains why we talk as though beauty is a property of objects, even though it's not.
So the word beautiful is an adjective, which at least normally is grammatically an adjective,
which at least normally is used to attribute properties to objects in various ways.
We speak as if beauty is the property of the object, and he thinks the reason for this is this feature of thinking.
Everybody ought to agree because this is going to be very important as we go along.
When you judge that something has a property, you also think everybody ought to agree.
So if you're looking at an object and you judge that it is square, you also think everybody ought to agree.
Everybody sees the object. That is odd to agree that the object is square.
So cognitive judgements and not just judgements of taste or whether sometimes self logical
judgements also have this feature of expecting or believing everybody ought to agree.
And that he thinks it's that analogy in virtue of which we talk about beauty as if it's a property of objects,
that what that's what makes that way of speaking appropriate,
because there's that similarity between judgements of taste and judgements attributing a property to the object.
Now, as an interesting aside here, Kant uses this also to defend a kind of formalism about beauty.
So he thinks it follows from this that colours and tones can't be beautiful.
They can only be agreeable. And he has a kind of a funny reason for this.
He thinks it's because we can't be sure that everybody sees the same colours as we do.
The colours look the same way to everybody. So this is a very venerable philosophical question.
How do I know that when I see red, I have the same experience as you do when you see Red Cat?
Thanks. We can't be sure that we do have that same experience.
And so if the redness gives me pleasure, I can't expect you to agree because I can't be sure that you're having the same experience of redness.
So it's a funny worry to kind of insist on as a reason why you're not justified in judging colours to be beautiful.
You can find them agreeable. That's no problem because you're not claiming with judgements to be agreeable that everyone ought to agree.
And he also says that the purity of a colour can be beautiful.
That's OK, because that's a formal feature of the colour.
It's not the quality of redness, but the undifferentiated nature of the redness or the purity of the redness.
And he thinks all colours, insofar as they're pure, are beautiful.
But it's not in virtue of the qualitative character of the colour, but rather in virtue of the purity.
OK. So universality, very important and very puzzling because it seems difficult to explain how you could be
justified going nearly on your own pleasure in believing that everybody ought to agree.
So, for example, you can't be justified by having perceived beauty in the object.
It's not like the judgement that a thing is square. It's not on that basis that you are justified in believing.
Everybody ought to agree because beauty is not a property of the object and you can't be justified in believing.
Everybody ought to agree by having a proof that the thing is beautiful.
Obviously that would would do that would justify you in believing everybody ought to agree.
But as we saw last week, judgements of taste not based on concepts.
And it follows from that, that you can't get a proof showing that something's beautiful.
So that way of justifying the expectation of agreement is not available.
And moreover, you don't make this claim based on evidence that the objects can please everyone.
Empirical evidence, I should say. That's an important qualification.
It's not as a result of checking doing a survey to see if the object pleases everyone.
It's not on that basis that you make this claim that everyone ought to agree.
And once again, we mentioned this last week that one reason why that's so.
Is that that would also base your judgement on concepts, the concepts of being liked by others as one reason.
So cance very typical of his approach to a lot of problems.
Points out a number of features that seem to suggest that some phenomenon or some kind of judgement, some form of knowledge is not possible.
And then he goes on to try and explain how, in fact, it is possible, despite these apparent obstacles to its possibility.
And I think you can understand what he goes on to do as being based on an attempt to show that we are justified,
though not empirically, in believing that everyone can take pleasure in an object that we judged to be beautiful.
So remember, I said that the problematic feature was that we believe everybody ought to agree with our judgement.
Well, connected with that is the belief that everybody can take pleasure in the object.
It's a well-known principle of cance mainly in his moral philosophy that if you ought to do something, then you're capable of doing it.
So this is the principle sometimes summarised as ought implies can.
So if you ought to agree with our judgement of taste, then we are committed to the claim that you're capable of great.
Of agreeing with that judgement of taste.
And if you are capable of agreeing with the judgement of taste, since judgements of taste are based on pleasure,
we're also committed to the view that you are capable of taking pleasure in the object that we are taking pleasure in.
And what he goes on to argue, in effect. Or when he goes on to explain,
is how it's possible to be justified in believing that everybody else is capable of taking pleasure in the object that we are taking pleasure in.
But once again, as I mentioned, if we're justified in believing everybody's capable of taking pleasure in the object,
that can't be based on experience. We have to be to use the term I mentioned last week a priori,
I justified in believing that everyone is capable of taking pleasure in the object that pleases us a priori justified.
Remember, just means justified, but not based on experience.
And I think the reason for this is to go back again to something I mentioned last week, that this is a claim about what is always the case.
So, again, everyone can take pleasure in the object without exception.
The claim is not just so far as we've seen, everyone can take pleasure in the object.
It's a claim that everyone, without exception, can. And one of the marks of a priori judgements, right.
Prior knowledge is that they are in this sense about what is always the case.
Without exception, they have to be a priori justified if they're justified at all.
Because experience only tells you can't tell you what is the case without exception, because it is limited.
So if we're justified at all in believing that everybody, without exception,
can take pleasure in the object, we've got to be a priori justified in believing that.
And since he likes to assimilate various different concepts,
he also thinks you can argue this on the grounds that there's an element of necessity to our judgement.
The necessity comes in and the claim that everyone ought to agree.
This is again typical of Kant of using the very same word as applies to mathematical necessity.
So the claim the two plus two must must equal four to the notion of an obligation or a duty.
He does this in his ethics as well, where it compares moral laws to laws of nature.
Typical of him. But he thinks that the key point here for this is that because necessity is involved in the sense of we ought to agree.
Experience can't justify that belief that everybody ought to agree,
because experience only tells us about what is the case, not about what must be the case.
But here, the must, as I say, is a moral must.
Well, not the case of agreement, but it's certainly not a natural or mathematical must.
OK, so I've summarised this at the bottom there by saying Point D.
We can be justified in believing everyone ought to agree with our judgement of taste.
If and only if we can be a priori justified in believing everyone can take pleasure in the object.
So the question is going to be, how can we be a priori justified in believing everyone can take pleasure in the object?
And this is in quotation number three, the way Kant puts it. It's from Section 36 of the critique of judgement.
How is the judgement possible, which going nearly upon the individual's own feeling of pleasure and an object independent of the concept of it.
Judges this as a pleasure attached to the representation of the same object in every other individual.
And so a priori, i.e. without being allowed to wait and see if other people will be of the same mind.
This is the principle question that the critique of judgement is going to try and answer.
OK, so his answer is incredibly obscure.
And a lot of people have a great deal of difficulty making sense of what he says.
I'm going to present one reading. I don't know if it's right.
And it's worth taking a look at that of the secondary literature on this to get a sense of.
Well, A, the difficulty that even the very best cat scholars have in figuring out what he means, but B,
also the diversity of interpretations offered major work on Kentz Theory of Taste is by Paul Guire, called Kant and the claims of Taste.
Another major work is by Henry Allicin called Cance Theory of Taste.
Gaia has also written an interesting paper on this topic, which surveys a lot of the literature on it called Harmony of the Faculties Revisited.
And that's in a book of his essays called Values of Beauty.
But basically, Kant's answer is that we can be a priori justified in thinking that everyone else can agree
with us or rather a priori justified and thing everyone else can take pleasure in the object.
If and only if we can be justified in believing that our own pleasure arises
from what he calls the harmonious freeplay of imagination and understanding.
That's the bottom line. That's the answer. That's the explanation of how it's possible to be a priori justified,
based only on your own pleasure in believing that everybody else can take pleasure in the object.
Only if you can be justified in thinking that your own pleasure comes from the harmony of the faculties,
the harmonious freeplay of imagination and understanding.
So how does he get there?
Well, one step seems to be that we can only be have this apro or justified belief that everybody else can take pleasure in the object.
If we can be justified in believing that our own pleasure arises from some mental state mental condition,
mental activity, which we can know a priori, Ibe, that everyone else can be in when they perceive what we perceive.
That's the claim about the source of our pleasure.
We can just be justified in believing that our pleasure arises from some source, some mental condition,
which we can also know a priori I everybody else can be in when they're perceiving the object.
Then we can be justified in thinking they will get pleasure to. Our pleasure comes from that source.
They all share that source, that mental condition. Therefore, we can be justified in thinking that they can take pleasure as well.
It seems clear enough. That's one step along the way.
And this also recalled some remarks he made about its disinterest in this last
week regarding our belief that the source of our pleasure can't be unique to us.
The next step is the claim that the only mental condition or kind of mental condition,
which we can know a priori that everyone else can be in when they perceive the thing,
we perceive our mental conditions that enable us to apply concepts to what we perceive.
So two kinds of mental states activities, conditions that enable us to make cognitive judgements.
Those are the only ones we can know a priori. Everyone else can be in when they perceive what we perceive.
And that also seems to be a claim along the way.
And so, again, like I mentioned before, when we do apply a concept to what we perceive, we believe everybody else ought to agree with our judgement.
But moreover, I provided our judgements justified at least.
We're also a priori justified in believing everyone else can be in the same
mental condition that enabled us to apply that concepts to what we perceive.
So there's a parallel here in two respects between cognitive judgements and what's true of judgements of taste.
We expect everybody to agree. We think everybody ought to agree with our judgement when it's a cognitive judgement.
And we can also be a priori justified in believing that everybody can be in the
same mental condition that enabled us to apply the concept to what we perceive.
This is the case of cognitive judgements. The additional step is that these are the only mental conditions that we can be a priori justified
in knowing everybody else can be in when they proceed with the things that we perceive.
And once you have that step, it follows that it's got to be the case, that our pleasure comes in,
beauty comes from some mental state activity condition that enables us to apply concepts to what we perceive as in a cognitive judgement.
I mean, that is a cognitive judgement to apply concepts to what you perceive.
Now, Kent has a theory also very obscure in its own right about what these mental conditions are that he presents in the critique of pure reason.
The first of his three critiques. And just going to go through this a bit.
So in order for us to apply concepts to what we perceive there, to faculty's that for our purposes that are very important.
First is what he calls the imagination. He seems to mean something rather similar to what we mean by imagination, but also rather different.
So he defines the imagination as the faculty of representing an intuition that which is not itself present.
And remembering what he means by intuition is not so different from what we might mean.
But it's also very important for Kant that the imagination has an absolutely fundamental central role in sense experience.
In particular, in order for us to apply concepts to what we perceive in a sense,
experience, the imagination, as he puts it, has to combine or synthesise intuitions.
That's a key point. Imagination combines different perceptual representations in order.
And that's one of the things that is one of the things that makes possible to apply concepts to what we perceive.
So take a look at quotation for on the handout.
This is from the critique of Pure Reason, where he's describing an activity that he calls the synthesis of reproduction in imagination.
And he thinks this is necessary in order for us to be able to apply concepts to what we perceive.
So he says experience as such necessarily presupposes the reproducibility of appearances.
When I seek to draw a line in thought or to think of the time from one noon to another, or even to represents to myself some particular number,
obviously the various manifold representations that are involved must be apprehended by me in thought.
One after the other.
But if I was always to drop out of thought, the preceding representations, the first parts of the line, the antecedent parts of the time period,
or the units in the order represented and did not reproduce them while advancing
to those that follow a complete representation would never be obtained.
Now that's actually reasonably clear. I think what he's talking about,
if in your mind you're drawing a line you can't forget about or delete the first parts of the line as you're going on to the next parts.
You've got to keep them there or as in his vocabulary, reproduce them a moment later when you're drawing the later parts of the line.
Otherwise, you won't be able to represent the whole line.
Imagination has to keep in this picture of things reproducing the earlier parts of the line that you drew in order to complete it,
in order to represent a whole line. It's in this sense,
this is one of the ways an example of one of the ways in which imagination has to combine representations to the
representations of the earlier parts of the line that you drew with representations of the later parts of the line.
Imagination combines these in part by reproducing the earlier ones.
And that's how you get a representation in your mind of one line.
Now, this is an example of drawing something in your head, but he thinks this also happens in sense perception.
You have to remember what you're looking at and that it's the same thing as what you saw before across time as well.
OK. So that's part of what goes on in our experience.
In order for us to be able to apply concepts to what we perceive now, this is by no means.
The suggestion is by no means that this is a conscious thing we're doing all the time.
This is something the mind just naturally does when it receives sensory input.
It combines these things.
The imagination combines the different bits of the input that he puts in the manifold of intuition that we're getting combined.
Certain parts in certain ways. This is one example.
Next thing that happens in ordinary judgements, according to the first edition of a particular reason,
is what he calls the synthesis of recognition in a concept.
So he goes on to say, if we were not conscious that what we think is the same as what we thought a moment before,
all reproduction in the series of representations would be useless.
So that synthesis of reproduction mentioned earlier for it would in its present state be a new representation,
which would not in any way belong to the act whereby it was to be gradually generated.
The manifold of the representation would never therefore form a hole. And he gives an example.
If in counting I forget that the units which now hover before me have been added to one another in succession.
I should never know that its total is being produced through this successive edition of units to unit.
And so I would remain ignorant of the number for the concept of the number is nothing but the consciousness of this unity of synthesis.
So the thought is it's fine for the imagination to combine together various representations,
but you've got to know what unites them before in order to apply concepts to what you're looking at.
Indeed, that's what it is to apply concept to. What you're looking at is to group together the say, the five units as five.
What unites them is that they are a group of five. The thought seems to be into the consciousness of what unites them.
That is what the understanding enables you to do by supplying you with a concept that represents what unites them.
That's the thought in the first Katik. That's what goes on normally in order to be able to apply a concept to what you're perceiving.
Imagination combines different representations.
The understanding supplies a concept that represents the unity that those combined representations possess.
Now, complexity here. One of many is that the imagination and the understanding are working very closely together.
So the imagination combines representing certain representations with these rather than those,
because the imagination is guided by a concept of the understanding.
So it's not as though, although reading out these examples like that might suggested,
the combination happens first and then you just notice, oh, that's what it has in common.
The imagination is guided by concepts in order to make the combinations that it makes.
So this is just an analysis of what's going on. Not a sort of temporal.
Series of stages. OK, this needs to happen in order for experience to be possible.
Kat says, certainly needs to happen in order for us to be able to apply a concept to what we perceive.
So it's going to be some mental condition like that that our pleasure comes from the beauty.
But of course, and this is point D under number two,
it can't actually be a matter of applying a concept to what we perceive because our pleasure is not based on concepts very important for him.
So it's got to be something like I just described.
But delete the bit where you apply the concept to it.
The implication seems to be that it's just the imagination, combining particulars, grouping stuff together,
but without then applying a concept that represents what those things grouped together have in common.
Now, that, as I say, is a bit obscure, but.
Paul Guya, who I mentioned, thinks he's found a passage where I can't actually gives an example of this happening.
Can't hardly ever gives examples to illustrate any of the things he says.
So if this is right, that would be very helpful. And this is the fifth passage on your handout, and it's from Section 53 of the critique of judgement.
So remember, I said, see, the implication seems to be that we get pleasure from the imagination combining perceptual representations together.
Well, in this passage, Cantor's talking about music and our experience of melody and harmony.
And he says, although this mathematical form.
So the mathematical,
mathematically describable relationships between tones arranged in harmonies and melodies is not represented by means of determinate concepts.
As we listen to music to it alone belongs the delight which the mere reflection upon such a number of concomitant or consecutive sensations.
Couples with this their play as the universally valid condition of its beauty.
And it is wet with reference to it alone that tastes can lay claim to a right to anticipate the judgement of every human being.
But mathematics certainly plays not the slightest part in the charm and movement of the mind produced by music.
Rather, is it only the indispensable condition of that proportion of the combining as well as changing impressions,
which makes it possible to grasp them all in one.
And to let them conspire towards the production of a continuous movement and quickening of the mind by affections that are in unison with it.
The basic thought there seems to be that in just the way that when you're listening to a melody, you group certain certain notes together.
That is the sort of thing that's happening whenever we perceive beauty.
The thought seems to be it's that kind of grouping, but without a concept representing what unites them from which our pleasure in beauty arises,
that the fact that there's no concept representing what these combined representations have in common is what counts,
trying to show by talking about mathematics here.
So these things that you grouped together, the tones that you grouped together when you're listening to a melody,
they do stand in certain relations to one another. That can be described.
But his point here is that you're not representing them with a concept as standing in those relations,
as you're listening to the music, or if you are, at least that's not where the pleasure comes from.
Your imagination is grouping them together independently of the concepts that could be applied to it to represent the unity they have.
That seems to be supported by his general model of what goes on when you perceive stuff is that you group things together,
intuitions together with the imagination. And when you perceive something as beautiful, you do that, too.
But you don't apply a concept or at the very least, you don't get pleasure from having a plot, a concept to the intuitions you group together.
As I say, whether this is what Kant means is kind of anyone's guess, but this seems to be as reasonable a reconstruction as many others.
This, it seems to be, is what the harmonious freeplay of imagination and understanding amounts to.
It's play in the first place because you're not using imagination and just understanding to acquire knowledge, as you would if you had a a concept.
So their cognitive faculties, faculties, whose function is to get your knowledge, but you're not using them for that purpose.
You're using them in a kind of play. That's why he describes it as play seems clear enough.
It's free play because the just the imagination is combining various representations but is not guided by concepts.
In so doing so, it's free of concepts.
It's combining these together not because some concept of an object is guiding it to combine them in the way it does.
But it's doing so independently of that. Furthermore, why is it a harmony between imagination and sanding?
Well, guys,
take on this is that it's a harmony because the imagination here satisfies the understanding's usual demand for some combined representations.
Even though the understanding doesn't apply a concept, and it's in that sense that they're in harmony.
So that's what the Bahaman harmonious freeplay of imagination and understanding is.
And we can know that this is a state of mind that anybody can be in when faced with an object, which we can.
The thought seems to be because this is a state of mind that is required in order to apply concepts to the thing.
These are acts of the mind that are required in order to apply a concept to the thing.
Or at least they're of the same kind as those acts, then we can be confident that everybody else can take pleasure in the object.
We're justified thinking. Our pleasure comes from harmonious Freeplay, a priori justified thinking.
Everybody else can be in a state of harmonious Freeplay when they perceive the object.
Therefore, aper are justified in believing that everybody else can take pleasure from the object.
That's how justified judgements of taste are possible. Or rather, how it's possible to be justified in believing everybody ought to agree.
Or maybe not because it's so obscure. But that's one possible way of going.
Now, a number of points here that might arise often in Canada.
At least my experience of reading Kant. It's not always clear whether when he is trying to explain how something's possible,
if his goal is to establish that it is possible or if he's assuming it's possible.
And just explaining how so we know it's possible is one reading a lot of the time.
And he's just trying to explain how.
So when he asks how is synthetic a priori knowledge possible, for example, how is mathematical knowledge possible?
He clearly thinks it is possible. And the goal is just to explain how it's not to establish that it is possible.
Maybe when you get that explanation, you also get considerations that establish that it is possible here to we might ask that same question.
Is he assuming that it is possible to be justified in believing everybody ought to agree?
And he's just trying to explain how that's possible.
Or is he trying to establish as well that it is possible to be justified in believing everybody ought to agree with your judgement of taste.
That's often something that's rather obscure here.
I think at the very least, we can say he's trying to explain how it's possible.
Second issue that arises from this is so I mentioned that provided you can be justified
in knowing that your pleasure comes from the harmonious Freeplay of your faculties,
then your expectation of agreement is justified.
The question arises, how can you be justified in believing that your pleasure comes from that source on any given occasion?
Well, Kant is quite open about the fact that you can't be certain in any given occasion that your pleasure does come from harmonious Freeplay.
And in fact, this is similar to claims he makes in his moral philosophy about how we can never
really be certain that we're acting from duty as opposed to from inclination.
There, he says, there might always be some secret, unacknowledged interest or inclination that is really motivating us.
And it's not our duty. And a similar thought may perhaps be motivating him here that unbeknown to us,
we may still be motivated by interest or our pleasure may still arise from interest rather than from the harmonious Freeplay.
So now saying you can't be certain is now is different from saying you can never be justified in thinking that it comes from the harmonious Freeplay,
you can consider whether there are any interests that you might have and the existence of the object, of course.
And if you can't think of any, then that might give you some grounds or justification,
even if it's not certainty for thinking that your pleasure comes from harmonious Freeplay.
So that concession doesn't sort of leave us in a total state of ignorance or say that we're
in a total state of ignorance about whether our pleasure comes from harmonious Freeplay.
But he does acknowledge that we can't be certain about the sources of our pleasure.
OK, so that is the deduction.
I like to finish by discussing what he says about judgements of the sublime.
So in the 18th century, in addition to the beautiful, the sublime was a very important category of aesthetic property or aesthetic experience.
So it sort of signified a kind of disturbing feeling or rapturous terror of the kind that you get when you enjoy the sight of storms at sea,
ruined castles, volcanoes, waterfalls, hurricanes, all that stuff that the romantics would really enjoy.
A lot of theories about it in the 18th century.
And Burke, Edmund Burke, who's best known as author of Reflections on the Revolution in France and and as a sort
of intellectual ancestor to political conservatives of certain stripe these days,
early in his career wrote work on aesthetics about the beautiful and the sublime, which can't read.
And Burke's basic thought was that we call something sublime if it causes a feeling of delight because it seems painful and dangerous,
but it's perceived from a safe, safe distance. And he is going to have his own take on this category of aesthetic experience.
So he thinks there's a number of similarities between judgements of taste, judgement of the sublime, which I'll just go through quickly to begin.
So they're both based on pleasure, not based on concepts either.
And they're or they're based on pleasure, connected with the intuition of the object.
And not, as I say, based on concepts. Judgements of the sublime are also singular judgements.
And he thinks they also possess that key feature of universality. We think everyone ought to agree.
But lastly, most importantly for his discussion,
he thinks pleasure in the sublime arises from a kind of accord between imagination and a certain faculty of concepts, but not the understanding.
It's a faculty he calls reason and reason in his vocabulary has a certain set of concepts proper to it, which he calls ideas or rational ideas.
And these are concepts of things that it would not be possible to have an intuition.
So the concept of God is an idea, concept of freedom, concept of immortality, concept of infinity.
All of these are ideas, special concepts associated with this other faculty of reason,
not the faculty of understanding that makes helps make experience possible, could never have intuitions of these things.
But we have concepts of them and they play some of them a certain role in various parts of our thinking.
According to Kant, so moral action is only possible on the assumption that we're free to use one of the most important examples for him.
But of course, we have no empirical evidence of our freedom because in the world of experience, everything is governed by causal necessity.
So it's an idea in that sense. So these ideas are going to be important to his explanation of his talk of the sublime two kinds of the sublime.
He talks about versus the mathematically sublime. And these are things that, as he puts it, are absolutely great.
So great without qualification, those things in comparison with which everything else is little.
And then he makes a rather surprising move.
He says nothing we ever see is, strictly speaking, sublime, because everything we can possibly imagine or experience,
we can also imagine being small in comparison with something else regarded in some other relation.
However, sometimes inexperience, we perceive something that our imagination cannot hold in its entirety.
So remember, I mentioned at the example of the line,
you've got to hold the earlier parts in order as you proceed to the later parts of the line in order to represent the whole thing.
Sometimes we can't do that with our imagination when we perceive something.
Some things are just so big. You forget about the earlier parts you looked at as you're surveying the whole thing.
That seems to be the thought. And it gives an interesting example of a travel writer who describes the pyramids and he
thinks this is the reason this guy suggests that you stand neither too close to the pyramids,
not too far away to appreciate them close enough so that as you survey them, you can't hold the whole thing in your mind.
So you're near enough to it that it's just so vast that you can't get a representation of the whole thing by surveying it in your mind.
That seems to be the basic thought. Now, these things are not, of course, absolutely great, as he puts it.
But what they do is bring to our minds the idea of infinity, of what is, properly speaking, sublime.
And the fact that we can think of it, think of infinity indicates to us that we have a faculty in us that is not limited to sensation.
As he puts it, a faculty of mine transcending every standard of sense, namely reason, and that gives us pleasure.
But we can only get that pleasure through a kind of displeasure at our imaginations, inability to contain the whole thing.
Similar strategy goes with the dynamically sublime, which I'll just go through quickly,
dynamically sublime is nature seen as something mighty and fearful, but which has no dominion over us and which we are therefore not afraid of.
So once again, similar to Burke, we see nature as dynamically sublime when we see something extremely powerful from a position of safety.
And this cat thinks brings to our mind the thought of our ability to overcome nature.
Where do we have the ability to overcome nature? Well, in moral action, we can overcome our inclinations.
And he doesn't. I don't think say this explicitly, but it seems to be invited.
Is the thought that we can overcome the order of causal necessity because we have freedom or at least we must presuppose freedom.
In the case of moral action and the site of some really powerful nature over there that
can't hurt us brings to mind this fact about us or this idea within us of moral agency,
of overcoming nature within us and nature outside.
And that, he says, is pleasurable, even though what we're looking at, it's fearful that thought of our moral vocation.
And he puts it is a pleasurable experience. And that's why with the sublime, you have this combination of displeasure and pleasure and why,
properly speaking, only the human mind is sublime, not nature.
And it's because of this moral element that we can expect everybody to agree with judgements of the sublime.
And that's because we can expect on moral grounds everybody to be capable of feeling for the sublime,
because we can expect them to be capable of moral feeling.
Thanks so much.