Intensive Magnitudes and the Normativity of Taste
Melissa Zinkin · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2006
What distinguishes a judgment of taste from a cognitive judgment? According to Kant, both forms of judgment are normative and both rely upon the transcendental faculties of imagination and understanding for their normativity. Yet one refers to a subjective feeling of pleasure, while the other refers to an object. In Kant's account, it is the role of the imagination that differs in aesthetic judgments and cognitive judgments. In cognition, the imagination is subject to the rules of the understanding with which its relation is “objective” (XX:223). In a judgment of taste, the imagination's relation to the understanding is “subjective” (XX:223) because the imagination is not referred to a concept of the understanding, but to the subject and his or her feeling of pleasure or displeasure (V:204). It is also a relation of “free lawfulness” (V:240). But why is the imagination is subject to the understanding in one instance and not in the other? Many commentators have attempted to explain the freedom of the imagination from concepts in judgments of taste by finding places in Kant's theoretical philosophy that indicate that there could be a form of synthesis without a concept. They point to Kant's discussion of the “threefold synthesis” in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason , where it is only by the last of these syntheses, “the synthesis of recognition in the concept,” that the manifold is unified by a concept.