The Art of Judgement

David Bell

Mind, New Series, Vol. 96, No. 382. (Apr., 1987), pp. 221-244.

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The Art ofyudgement*

DAVID BELL

We are probably best in accord with ordinary usage if we take a judgement to be an act of judging, as a leap is an act of leaping. . . . With an act there also belongs an agent, and we do not know the act completely if we do not know the agent. (Gottlob Frege.)

T h e chapter entitled 'The Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Under- standing' is the opening chapter of The Analytic of Principles, a book which Kant sometimes also calls The Transcendental Doctrine of Judgement. H e explains this ambivalence as to its precise title when he writes:

The Analytic ofPrinciples will . . . be a canon solely forjudgement, instructing it how to apply to appearances the concepts of understanding, which contain the condition for a priori rules. For this reson, while adopting as my theme the principles of the understanding, strictly so called, I shall employ the title doctrine of judgement, as more accurately indicating the nature of our task.'

In what follows I, too, will be concerned with the doctrine of judgement, both generally and from within a specifically Kantian framework. More precisely, I shall like Kant be concerned to investigate the important but perplexing notion of an instruction as to how to apply to appearances the concepts of the understanding.

T h e chapter on Schematism is just seven pages long, but has been the object of more critical obloquy than virtually anything else Kant wrote. Early critics spoke of its obscurity with something approaching awe: 'the most wonderful and most mysterious of all unfathomable mysteries and wonders', according to Jacobi.= More recently, however, commentators have been markedly less reverential. Wilkerson, for example, says 'the Schematism serves no useful purpose and can be ignored without loss', for the problem it addresses is 'entirely s p u r i ~ u s ' . ~ And according to Bennett,

* Correspondence and conversations on Kantian themes over a number of years with Peter Leech have resulted in my now being unable to identify with any certainty what is his and what is mine in this paper. In any event, I am greatly indebted to him for provocation, criticism, and an indeterminate (but, I believe, large) number of ideas. My thanks also to Mark Sacks and John Skorupski for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Immanuel Kant 's Crittque o f p u r e Reason, trans. N . Kemp Smith. London, Macmillan, 1933, p. 177 (B. 171). Henceforth references to Kant's first Crittque will be to the original pagination of the second (B.) edition.

F. H. Jacobi, Werke, Leipzig, 1812-25, Val. 111, p. 96; quoted in E. Schaper, 'Kant's Schematism Reconsidered', Review o f Metaphysics, 1964, p. 270.

T. E. Wilkerson, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Oxford, OUP, 1976, p. 9 j .

222 D a ~ i dBell

'the incoherence of Kant's problem . . . is matched by the vacuity of its supposed ~o lu t ion . '~ Now, as against this, I want to argue two things. Firstly, that Kant is exercised by a genuine, indeed fundamental, philo- sophical problem: he is confronting the apparent incoherence of a claim to which, however, it seems that we are committed if the possibility of thought and judgement is not to be rendered unintelligible. T o anticipate-the -notion that lies at the basis of this apparent paradox is that of a rule- determined spontaneity. And, more generally, the philosophical problem here concerns the seeming impossibility of ascribing to subjectivity an inelimin- able role in judging, without thereby imperilling the very possibility of judgements that are objective. Secondly, I shall argue that Kant's own solution to this problem is defensible, indeed exciting. Put in the crudest terms, the solution of the problem will lie in an appeal to the workings of the productive imagination, and to the nature of aesthetic experience and creativity. Only a being possessed of imagination, and of something like an aesthetic response to his experience, I shall suggest, can possibly think coherently about, or pass judgement on, either himself or his environment. The third Critique, of course, is where Kant provides his final and most detailed account of creativity, imagination, and aesthetic response. So part of the case that I will be concerned to make in what follows is that it is in fact in the Critique ofgudgement that Kant explicitly addresses, and solves, a problem that first surfaces in the 'Doctrine of Judgement' of the Critique of Pure Reason. The title of Kant's third Critique, in other words, is to be taken literally, as a precise indication of its content and, indeed, of its raison d'ttre.

I have alluded to the widespread consensus that the schematism is at best apallingly obscure and at worst downright incoherent, solely in order to justify adoption of an oblique approach to the topic. Nothing but confusion is to be gained, I believe, by an initial narrow focus on the ipsissima verba of Kant's text. Instead we can proceed more usefully by standing back for a moment and trying to get a bird's eye view of the terrain-and to this end I shall try to map out, briefly, some of the most general and most pressing requirements which an acceptable theory of judgement must satisfy. This approach is pertinent because, as we shall see, the problem I wish to introduce first emerges as the apparent irreconcilability of some with others of these requirements.

I . Theories ofjudgement: an overview

As a rough initial approximation we can distinguish four central, prob- lematic areas associated with the notions of thought and judgement. They concern subjecticity, objectiz:ity, rejexizity, and rationality. Taken together

" J. Bennett, Kant's Analytic, Cambridge, CUP, 1966, p. 1 5 1 .

The A r t ofJudgement 223

they broadly determine, I believe, the content of an adequate theory of judgement.

First, then, subjectivity. Whatever else we might want to say about thoughts, and regardless of the subsequent demands we may wish to make of them, one thing is surely clear: thoughts can be grasped, apprehended, entertained, understood, inwardly digested, or had. And in addition to such non-commital attitudes or acts, those, in other words, which are without prejudice as to the truth or falsity of what is thought, there are also such attitudes and acts as asserting, denying, agreeing, accepting, judging, and the like, which do involve some commitment to truth or falsity. Moreover, as Frege often reminds us, one and the same content may not only be entertained on a number of different occasions, but may also be the content of acts of different types: the thought I at first merely entertain I later come to assert, and later still to deny. I shall follow Frege, however, in allowing only two fundamental types of propositional attitude, namely non-commital and assertoric-or in Frege's preferred terminology, acts of thinking and acts of judging. (Acts of denial are thus assertoric acts with a negative content; to deny that p is just to judge that not-P).~

This is all I intend to say, for the moment, about the subjective or interior aspects of thinking and judging-except to note, firstly, that as a philosophical topic its absence from twentieth-century analytic or Anglo- American philosophy has been conspicuous. This absence might be attributed to the influence of-it has certainly been symptomatized by- the anti-psychologism of both Frege and the author of the Tractatus, the behaviourism of Skinner and Quine, the positivism of the Vienna Circle, the pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey, and the widespread belief in Wittgenstein's antipathy to all that is private or interior. Suspicion of the subjective has led contemporary philosophers to approach notions like thought, understanding, meaning, and judgement as though objectivity, reflexivity, and rationality were the sole areas of legitimate philosophical concern. As for the rest, well, as Wittgenstein once dismissively remarked, 'it would be a matter of psychology to find And I would note, secondly, that one of the considerations which motivates suspicion of the subjective is that nicely expressed by Dummett in the following passage (to which I shall return):

Thought differs from other things also said to be objects o f the mind, for instance pains or mental images, in not being essentially private. . . . I t is of the essence of

For expansion and justification of some of the more dogmatic of these remarks, see my 'Thoughts', Notre DameJournal of Formal Logtc (forthcoming).

This classification admittedly rides roughshod over the manifest phenomenological differences between, say, denying, doubting, being unsure, suspecting, judging, and being certain that p. But although subjectivity is to be our topic, it is not with its phenomenology that we shall be concerned (except, perhaps, in section 5 belou).

L. UTittgenstein,Notebooks, 1914-1916, edited by G.H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1969, p. 129.

224 David Bell

thought that it is transferable, that I can convey to you exactly what I am think- ing. . . . [In which case] I do more than tell you what my thought is like-I communicate to you that very thought. Hence any attempt to investigate thoughts which culminates in a study of what is in essence private, that is, of inner mental experience, must have missed its mark.8

I turn now to those requirements concerning objectivity that an -acceptable doctrine of judgement might be expected to meet. There are fundamentally three, and they concern the intersubjectivity, the expressi- bility, and the truth of thoughts. Dummett alludes to two of these in the above passage. In the first place, that is, thoughts are intersubjective in the precise sense that two or more people can have one and the same thought: unlike pains or mental images, say, thoughts typically have identity conditions which involve no specification of the person who has or thinks them.9And in the second place, thoughts are essentially expressible. When I communicate a thought I do not merely describe it, from the outside, so to speak; I do not merely tell you what it is like; rather, I put the thought into words, so that if you understand what I say, you therewith know what my thought is. The relation between a thought and the sentence that expresses it is not an external but an internal relation-a truth that both Frege and Wittgenstein tried to capture by identifying a thought with the sense of the sentence that expresses it.

Under the general rubric of the objectivity of thoughts, however, there is a further and vitally important issue, or whole family of issues, which will need to be taken into account: What we think may be true, and what we think about may exist-and conversely, as Prior puts it, 'what we think may be false; and what we think about, may be non-existent'.1° Fortunately, we do not need to dwell here on such matters as these; for I shall simply take it as a prima facie unobjectionable demand that an adequate theory of judgement should allow the possibility of our thinking not only that three is an odd number, but equally that three is an even number, as of our thinking not only about Saint Nicholas, but, equally, about Santa Claus.

The third category of requirements, concerning reflexivity, can again be dealt with fairly briefly. Amongst those things about which we can think and judge are, of course, thoughts and judgements. This simple observation creates a number of intractable problems concerning intentional objects, referential opacity, the provision of a semantics for indirect discourse, and so on-but fortunately such problems are not of present concern. One point, however, is worth noting in passing: we must keep sharply distinct the hazing of a thought, and the thinking about a thought. Although a thought

YM. A. E. Dummett, 'Frege's Distinction between Sense and Reference', in Truth and Other Enigmas, London, Duckworth, 1978,pp. I 16-17.

The existence of certain essentially indexical thoughts constitutes an exception that can be ignored in the present context. (Cf. J. Perry, 'Frege on Demonstratives', Philosophical Reniew, 1977,pp. 474-97; and 'The Problem of the Essential Indexical', Nous, 1979, pp. 3-21).

lo A. N. Prior, in P. T . Geach and A. J. P. Kenny, eds., Objects of Thought, Oxford, OUP, 1971, p. 4.

The Art ofJudgement 22j

can indeed be an 'object of thought' in both senses of that ambiguous phrase-it can be what we think, and it can be what we think about-no acceptable theory of judgement can construe thought as essentially reflexive: a thought cannot be in the first instance what we think about, or what we judge to be true. I shall return to this point later.

- Finally, I come to those constraints on a theory of judgement that have to do with rationality. Thoughts are gregarious things; they come in trains, they get together to form arguments, they stand to one another in relations of compatibility, incompatibility, relevance, and entailment, and if one accepts certain of them then, on pain of irrationality, one must also accept certain others. In general, of course, it is to their structure that we look for an account of such phenomena. And an important ingredient in any philo- sophical doctrine of judgement will be the provision and justification of a procedure of analysis, which will enable us to recognize such structures and to isolate the repeatable elements which go to make up thoughts. Schematically, then, we shall require a procedure for carving up compound thoughts into their component thoughts, and for carving up atomic thoughts into their component concepts.

T o summarize, then, I have suggested that it is reasonable to require of an adequate theory of judgement that, minimally, it be compatible with the possibility and, more substantially, that it provide an account of the fact that thoughts can sometimes be

I ) had (in thinking) [ [Subjectivity] 2) taken to be true (in judging)

3) intersubjective 1 4) expressed in language I [Objectivity]

6) about thoughts 1 [Reflexivity]7) about judgements 1

8) complex-containing component thoughts 1 g) complex-containing component concepts [Rationality]

10) logically related one to another. 1 So much for the content of the theory of judgement. I want now to

introduce a general principle which governs, rather, certain formal aspects of the theory. I have called it, in deference to Kant, the Principle of Spontaneity:

If the performance of an act of type 4is learned, or rule-governed, then it cannot be a general requirement of my performing an arbitrary act of type 4 that I have already performed an act of that type or, indeed, of any other type that in its turn requires the prior performance of an act of type 4.

226 David Bell

Negatively, the Principle of Spontaneity amounts to no more than an insistence that the theory shall not generate a vicious regressive infinity of conditions on the successful performance of an act. It outlaws, in other words, any theory according to which, in general, criteria are applied on the basis of the application of criteria, judgements are made in accordance with prior judgements, rules are followed on the basis of prior rules, and so on. -Crass infringements, needless to say, are rare. But Wittgenstein, for one, was adept at uncovering the incoherence of views whose contravention of the principle is very far from obvious." And the list of philosophers whose account of thought and judgement is vitiated precisely because of their (usually tacit) infringement of the principle is, moreover, both long and distinguished. l2

The principle is not, however, entirely negative in import. I t requires, more positively, that if thought and judgement are to be possible, then the relation in which we stand to what we think or mean must be immediate and direct.13 If we are to avoid the incoherence of a regressive infinity of acts of judgement, or identification, interpretation, understanding, or thought, then at some point we must judge immediately, spontaneously-and this means without having already judged, identified, understood, or grasped a thought on the basis of any prior such act. There is simply no room here for an irremovable intermediary. And this I take it is, at least in part, not only what Kant intended by his doctrine of 'the spontaneity of thought',14 but is also what lies behind Wittgenstein's claims that 'If I have exhausted the justifications [i.e. for following a rule in the way that I do] I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do"',15and that 'When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly.'16The disturbing conclusion to which Wittgenstein would force us, then, is that an inescapable blindness lies at the very centre of our rational and cognitive capacities. It is worth recalling, moreover, that Kant, too, concluded that our understanding rests ultimately upon 'a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever' (B. 103). And as we know from his famous slogan that 'intuitions without concepts are blind', the blindness that Kant refers to is precisely that which is invoked by Wittgenstein: a state or act is 'blind' in so far as it remains necessarily inaccessible to prior rational and objective

" See, for example, L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophzcus, transl. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, 2.0211-12 and 3.263; also Philosophzcal Investzgations, trans. G. E . M. Anscombe, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1974,passzm, esp. $5 32,217,and 228.

l2 It includes, I believe, Frege, Russell, Moore, and Husserl-though I cannot substantiate this claim here.

l3 Cf. Wittgenstein's admittedly gnomic remark, that 'Meaning something is like going up to someone', Phzlosophical Investigations, $5 45 5 and 457; also Philosophzcal Grammar, edited by R. Rhees, trans. A. J. P. Kenny, Basil Blackw-ell, Oxford, 1974,p. 157.

l4 B. 93; cf. also B. 75, 130, 152, etc. l5 Philosophical Innestzgations, 5 217. l6 Ibid. $ 219.

The Art ofJudgement 22j

justification. In this sense, then, an act is blind if it is spontaneous. Kant's clearest statement of the argument to this conclusion is the following:

If understanding in general is to be viewed as the faculty of rules, judgement will be the faculty of subsuming under rules; that is, of distinguishing whether something does or does not stand under a given rule. General logic contains, and can contain, no rules for judgement. [For] if it sought to give general instructions how we are to subsume under these rules, that is, to distinguish whether something does or does not come under them, that could only be by means of another rule. This in turn, for the very reason that it is a rule, again demands guidance from judgement. And thus it appears that, though understanding is capable of being instructed, and of being equipped with rules, judgement is a peculiar talent which can be practised only, and cannot be taught (B. 171-2).

And, like Wittgenstein, Kant concludes that not rules but, rather, 'examples are thus the go-cart of judgement.'

So much, then, for the bird's-eye view. One result which seems to have emerged is this: it is in terms of their conformity to rules that we are to account for those aspects of judgement and thought mentioned above under the heads of objectivity, reflexivity, and rationality; and it is a consequence of the principle of spontaneity that in the last analysis our discursive mental acts are performed blindly. Our problem now, and the problem to which the rest of this paper is addressed, is simply this: How are we to reconcile these two demands? How can I perform an act that is quite undetermined by the rules in question, but that somehow manages to conform to them? How can my discursive mental acts be characterized by a rule-gozerned spontaneity, that is, in Kant's terms, by a 'conformity to law without a law'? Tha t sounds like an oxymoron. When I follow a rule I may do so blindly-but that does not mean that I do so mindlessly. But, then, what role are we to ascribe to the mind at precisely this point? That, I believe, is the question to which the Schematism chapter is addressed.

2. Kant 's Doctrine of Schematism

After having argued that there can finally be no rules for the application of rules, and having concluded that examples are the go-cart of judgement, Kant then writes that, unlike general logic,

Transcendental philosophy has the peculiarity that besides the rule (or rather the universal condition of rules), which is given in the pure concept of understanding, it can also specify a priori the instance to which the rule is to be applied. . . . It must formulate . . . the conditions under which objects can be given in harmony with these concepts (B. 174).

T h e crucial phrase here is the last: our task will be to formulate conditions under which objects can be given in harmony with these concepts-a phrase which recalls one we noted earlier, concerning the need for 'an instruction

228 David Bell

how to apply to appearances the concepts of the understanding'. Un-fortunately, it must be said, both of Kant's phrases are seriously misleading, the first because it suggests that the problem concerns the application of concepts to objects determinately given as such in experience. The Transcendental Deduction, however, is devoted to showing that the most fundamental rules at work in the synthesis of experience are those -constitutive of the concept of an object in general (i.e. the categories). But 'if we enquire what new character relation to an object confers upon our representations, what dignity they thereby acquire, we find that it results only in subjecting the representations to a rule' (B. 243). And an object is that in the concept of which 'the manifold of a given intuition is united' (B. 137). So if at this point we allow ourselves a notion of experience such that objects can be presented as such within it, we are already allowing ourselves appeal to experience which has been brought under the concept of an object in general, i.e. the categories, and the question is begged. The second phrase is equally misleading in suggesting that we require 'an instruction' as to how to bring experience under concepts; for that, too, implies that our problem can be solved by the provision of yet more rules, concepts, or judgements.

The passage whose implications I have been examining (B. 171-5) immediately precedes the chapter on the Schematism, and it provides, I believe, the problematic background against which the Schematism stands out as an attempted solution. If this is right, then we can say, in advance:

I. Schematism can involve no explanatory appeal to rules or concepts. T o do so would contravene the principle of spontaneity.

2. I t cannot assume that objects are given as such in experience; for the possibility of the application of the concept of an object in general is precisely what requires explanation.

3. Schematism, in so far as it is necessarily independent of the machinery of objectivity-rules, concepts, objects, and so on-must be an entirely subjective procedure.

4. If successful, it should generate an account of the subjective conditions of thought and judgement, an account that contributes to our understanding of their spontaneity without thereby jeopardizing the possibility of their objectivity and rationality.

The general outlines of Kant's doctrine, I suggest, conform to these expectations. Unfortunately, a considerable amount of charity is needed in interpreting the Schematism chapter: the number of obscurities, reversals, and straightforward contradictions in the text make it clear that, to put it mildly, Kant's thought had not yet attained full clarity or stability. The procedure of schematization, for example, is variously ascribed to sensibility (B. 186),to understanding (B. 179), to empirical, reproductive imagination

The Art ofJudgement 229

(B. I ~ o ) ,and to a priori productive imagination (B. 181). Schemata are distinguished from concepts (B. I ~ o ) , and then identified with them (ibid.); they are said to be determinate (B. 179), and also indeterminate (B. 180); and it is in one place implied that empirical concepts do not require schemata (B. 176), but in another that they do (B. 180). And at B. 186 Kant calls schemata 'sensible concepts'-though from the critical standpoint -such things ought to be as irrelevant to us as 'intellectual intuitions'. Yet in a sense these very contradictions and equivocations are themselves indicative of the target Kant was aiming for. Clearly if, as I've suggested, schemata are to explain how it is possible to act spontaneously, blindly, and yet in conformity with the rules constitutive of rationality and objectivity, schemata will inevitably inhabit a no man's land between subjectivity and objectivity, between sensibility and understanding, between determinacy and indeterminacy, between passivity and creativity, and so on.

Now, in so far as the doctrine of schematism charts an intelligible course across this quagmire, the route it takes is essentially this: if objectivity is to be possible, then the concept of an object in general must find application in sensory experience. This would be impossible were we incapable of discovering, or being aware of, a minimal necessary unity and coherence in that experience. This awareness itself cannot, however, be already con- ceptually articulated: what is required here is an awareness of unity that grounds the possibility of judgement, and thus that cannot itself be the result of judgement. Schematism, it turns out, is precisely this process of introducing into the diversity of sensory experience a unity that is not conceptually determined, but that makes possible the subsequent applica- tion of concepts to it. 'It is evident', Kant writes, 'that what the schematism of understanding effects by means of the transcendental synthesis of imagination is simply the unity of all the manifold of intuition in inner sense' (B. 185). The activity of the productive imagination 'aims at no individual (einzelne) intuition, but only at unity in the determination of sensibility' (B. 179). And Kant states explicitly that this conceptually indeterminate unity is purely formal: 'These conditions of sensibility constitute the uni- versal condition under which alone the category can be applied to any object. This formal and pure condition of sensibility . . . we shall entitle the schema of the concept' (ibid.). Kant is moreover, as we would expect, quite clear that while the procedure of schematism is 'universal', l7it is at the same

l7 Kant calls a schema 'the representation of a universal procedure of imagination' (B. 180). Bennett writes: 'The nasty phrase "representation of a universal procedure" just means "rule".' And Chipman agrees: 'A schema is a rule or set of rules. . . employed by the imagination in combining or synthesizing sensory data.' There is, however, a more literal, and indeed a philosophically more coherent reading of Kant's phrase, namely, as alluding to what he calls 'subjective universality', i.e. to that which is 'valid for all men', but which nevertheless possesses a 'universality which cannot spring from concepts'. (Kant, Critrque ofj'udgemenr, trans. J . C. Meredith, Oxford, OUP, 1928, p. 51; J. Bennett, op. cit. n. 4, p. 141; L. Chipman, 'Kant's Categories and their Schematism', in R. C. S. Walker, ed., Kanr on Pure Reason, Oxford, OUP, 1982, p. 107).

230 David Bell

time ineluctably subjective: 'This schematism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art (eke Kunst) con- cealed in the depths of the human soul' (B. 181).

What I am suggesting, to summarize, is that the Schematism chapter concludes that the productive imagination can discover in the diversity of sensory experience a formal unity that is not grounded in rules, that cannot be explained by appeal to objects, images, or other determinate particulars, but that is a subjective yet universal condition of the applicability of the concept of an object in general-and hence a necessary condition of the objectivity and rationality of judgement. And if this is right, then the concerns of the schematism doctrine turn out to be identical with those of the Critique ofJudgement, and especially those of Part I, 'The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement'. It is here that we find Kant's explicit and extended treatment of the topics so briefly-and it must be said, unsatisfactorily- dealt with in the Schematism chapter: pure productive imagination; spontaneity; subjective universality; and the non-cognitive experience of a purely formal, indeterminate unity that is not grounded in the conformity of that experience to any rules whatsoever, but that is nevertheless, as Kant says, 'required for every empirical cognition' (p. 32). la

3. The a r t ofjudgement, and the judgement of a r t

Part I of the Critique ofJudgement is widely taken to be a work whose subject matter belongs primarily, if not exclusively, within the discipline of aesthetics-as, indeed, its title would seem to confirm. Kant, it is claimed, is exercised by problems to do with beauty, sublimity, artistic creativity, and the character of our aesthetic response both to nature and to works of art. And in so far as he seems inclined to make grandiose claims about the crucial importance of these investigations for his 'entire critical undertaking', these are taken to be symptomatic merely of an old man's increasing inability to resist 'indulging in his favourite hobby',lg the elaboration of architectonic.

Construed along these lines, Kant's endeavours inevitably appear not merely peripheral, perhaps even redundant to the critical enterprise as a whole, but also intrinsically opaque. Why, for example, did Kant call his work the Critique ofJudgement? And, indeed, why did he feel compelled to write about aesthetics at all? For it is surely clear that Kant was anything but an aesthete, and had little knowledge of, and no passion for, beauty in either nature or art. The examples he provides of objects for aesthetic contempla- tion are, at the very least, bizarre: crustaceans, New Zealanders with their tattooing, crystals, wallpaper patterns, ornamental gardens, such buildings

l8 Henceforth reference by unqualified page number will be to Kant's Critique ofJudgement, in the Meredith edition cited above. I have not, however, refrained from altering Meredith's translation.

l9 E. Adickes, ed., Kri t ikder reinen Vernunfr, 1889, p. 633n.; quoted by Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kanr's 'Critique o f Pure Reason', London, Macmillan, 1923, p. 579.

The Art ofJudgernent 23 I

as arsenals and summer-houses, and so on. As Lewis White Beck says: 'Kant probably never saw a beautiful painting or a fine statue . . . and his taste in music seems to have been utterly p h i l i ~ t i n e ' . ~ ~ His home was devoid of decoration and contained no works of art (with the sole exception, that is, of a portrait of Rousseau). Kant seems, moreover, to have been fastidious in

,_ avoiding exposure either to the beauty or (especially) to the sublimity of nature.

There seems, then, little hope of a merely biographical or psychological explanation of Kant's motive in writing the third Critique, yet it is widely agreed that philosophically its existence is also something of a mystery. On the normal reading of Kant's intentions in the third Critique, the claims that the author himself makes on behalf of his subject matter become preposterous, if not unintelligible. Why, for example, should aesthetics be said to be 'the propaedeutic of all philosophy' (p. 36)?Why is the search for a principle of aesthetic judgement said to be 'the most important item' in a philosophical critique of the power of judgement uberhaupt (p. j)? Or again, what are we to make of Kant's assertion that every objective judgement must at the same time possess 'aesthetic universality', and that this condition is requisite 'for the possibility of cognition in general' (p. j j )?

Now much of this oddity disappears, I suggest, if we see the Critique of Judgement as motivated by the need to complete the doctrine of judgement of the first Critique, a doctrine that failed adequately to address the problems raised by what I have called 'subjectivity'. If Kant's topic in the third Critique is in fact the possibility of, and the apparent impediments to, one's performing the act of judging, then he would be quite right to call it 'the propaedeutic of all philosophy' and to maintain that his entire critical enterprise would be essentially incomplete without it. Put in the starkest terms, my claim is that the Critique ofpure Reason comprises Kant's attempt to account for the objectivity and rationality of human thought, and the model that he adopts for this purpose is articulated in terms of a complex hierarchy of syntactic, semantic, and logical rules. As a 'transcendental doctrine of judgement', however, this account is merely partial: it leaves untreated what I have called the subjective aspects of thought-and in particular it leaves unsolved the problem, introduced above, as to how it is possible that one's discursive mental life should proceed in conformity with such rules; for clearly there can be no rules for this. We require a radically different model at this point; one which is not couched in terms of rules, but which, rather, makes the very possibility of the performance of such rule- governed acts itself intelligible. We need an account of the art of judgement, and the Critique of AestheticJudgement, I suggest, comprises Kant's attempt to provide this. It does so by elaborating an account of our subjective, non- cognitive, spontaneous response to experience; and a model for this is to be

20 L. W. Beck, Early GermanPhilosophjt: Kanr and his Predecessors, Harvard University Press, 1969, P.49%

232 David Bell

found in the nature of aesthetic experience. Paradoxically, then, this work is not primarily or fundamentally a work in aesthetics at all.

One trivial but widespread misunderstanding can perhaps be appro- priately confronted at this point. I t is, in Walsh's words, that 'the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgement" uses the term "aesthetic" in what has become its modern sense'.21 But this is simply not so. Kant's use of the term 'asthetisch' -in the third Critique is entirely consonant with his use of it in the other two: it means simply 'belonging to sensibility'. For Kant, that is, throughout his career, aesthetics comprised 'the [part of] philosophy which deals with sensibility, either of cognition or of feeling.'22 This is how he puts it in the Critique of Practical Reason:

The Analytic of theoretical pure reason was divided into Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Logic; that of practical reason is divided, conversely, into Logic and Aesthetic of pure practical reason. . . . The Aesthetic [of the former] had two parts, because of the dual nature of sensuous intuition; [in the latter] sensibility is regarded, not as a faculty of intuition, but merely as feeling.23

The important point is that human sensibility has for Kant two modes, intuition and feeling-intuition comprises those sensations that 'are capable of forming a representation of an object', but 'to avoid continually running the risk of misinterpretation, we shall call that which must always remain purely subjective . . . by the familiar name of feeling' (p. 45). Those who believe that in the Critique ofJudgement Kant employs the term 'aesthetic' in its modern sense will need to explain, amongst other things, why he devotes the very first section of the work to arguing that 'the judgement of taste is asthetisch'. Or again, why he should claim that 'all estimation of the magni- tude of objects of nature is in the last resort asthetisch (i.e. subjectively, not objectively, determined)'-for he certainly had no intention of arguing that all judgements of taste are judgements of taste, nor that all estimations of a thing's magnitude involve consideration of its beauty.%I suggest, then, that the title of the Kritik der asthetischen Urteilskraft can be taken literally, though not in the modern sense, but in Kant's; for the work is devoted to a philosophical investigation of the relation between judgement and sensi- bility, and in particular to the relation between judgement and feeling, that is, between what is potentially objective and what is necessarily only subjective in our discursive mental abilities.

21 W. H. Walsh, 'Kant', in P. Edwards, ed. The Encyclopaedia o f Philosophy, London, Macmillan, 1967, Val. 4, P. 319.

22 I. Kant, Der handschriftliche Nachlass, in the Akademie edition, Kantsgesammelte Schrifien, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, rgozf., No. 4276.

23 I. Kant, Critique ofpractical Reason, trans. L. W. Beck, New York, Liberal Arts Press, 1956, p. 93. 24 TOavoid confusion I shall continue to employ the English word 'aesthetic' and its cognates in their

normal, contemporary sense. When quoting from Kant's works, however, I shall indicate that his understanding of the notion was quite different from ours by the ugly expedient of leaving the term 'asthetisch' untranslated. The matter is complex, however, in that Kant claims that aesthetic judgements provide a model for asthetisch judgements; and it is the latter that comprise an essential component of the theory of judgement in general.

The Art ofJudgement 233

4. Kr i t i k der asthetischen U r t e i l ~ k r a f t ~ ~

In his short Preface to the third Critique Kant himself introduces, with admirable clarity, his motives for undertaking the investigations which it contains. He states in quite general terms the topic to which it is addressed; he then specifies the particular problem which it attempts to solve; and he

-- clarifies the relation in which the latter stands to the work already accomplished in the first Critique. The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says, 'makes our cognitive faculties its sole concern . . . and amongst the cognitive faculties it confines its attention to understanding and its a priori principles, to the exclusion of judgement and reason.' This is because 'only understanding can furnish constitutive principles a priori of knowledge.' Reason, the earlier work had established, can provide no constitutive principles, merely regulative ideas. 'But now comes judgement. . . . Has it also got independent a priori principles? If so, are they constitutive or merely regulative?'

A critique of pure reason, i.e. of our power of judging on a priori principles, would be incomplete if the ability to judge, which is a cognitive ability and as such lays claim to independent principles, were not dealt with in its own right (p. 4).

And yet, as Kant immediately points out, the very nature of judgement itself entails that 'the discovery of a principle peculiar to judgement . . . must be a task involving considerable difficulties'; for the very notion of a principle of judgement as such, in so far as it suggests the possibility in general of rules for the application of rules, remains at this point unintelligible. In terms identical with those he used in introducing the doctrine of schematism, Kant then specifies the problem to which a critique of judgement must address itself:

This principle is one which must not be derived a priori from concepts, for these belong to understanding, judgement being concerned only with their application. I t must therefore itself furnish a concept-one through which, properly speaking, no thing is known, and yet one which serves as a rule. This cannot, however, be an objective rule to which it can adapt its particular judgements, for this would again require another judgement in order to decide whether the rule applied or not (p. 5 ) .

T o this Kant then adds:

This difficulty about a principle [of judgement], whether it be subjective or objective, is most pressing in the case of those asthetisch judgements which concern the beautiful and sublime. And yet the most important part of a critique of the faculty of judgement is nevertheless the search for a principle of judgement in their case (ibid.).

25 For alternative accounts of the nature and importance of Kant's aesthetic theory, see P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1979; and M. Mothersill, Beauty Restored, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984.

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The points that Kant makes so tersely in this last quoted passage stand perhaps in need of some expansion and elucidation. I take it, firstly, that judgements of taste are especially problematic because, on the one hand, they are so clearly without a 'definite objective principle': 'The concept of fine art does not permit of the judgement upon the beauty of its product being derived from any rule that has a concept for its determining ground' (p. 168); in other words aesthetic judgements 'cannot be brought about by any observance of rules', (p. I ~ I ) , while, on the other hand, aesthetic judgements are by no means random, private, or arbitrary. According to Kant, 'where anyone is conscious that his delight in an object is with him independent of interest, it is inevitable that he should look on the object as containing a ground of delight for all men' (p. 50); and in this sense a person's aesthetic response 'must be regarded as resting upon what he may also presuppose in every other person' (p. 51). The problem, then, is to account for this claim to universality, in the absence of any objective rules or criteria: aesthetic judgements 'lay claim to subjective unicersality', and this notion needs to be made intelligible. Kant's second point, that the search for the principle of aesthetic judgement is the most important task for a philosophical theory of judgement as such, is justified by the fact that the notion of 'subjective universality' is the very notion we require in order to explain how thinking can be at once spontaneous and yet rational, blind and yet objective. What account, then, are we to give of the subjective, non- conceptual, spontaneous sense that experience must make to anyone capable of objective thought?

Kant's answer to this question, I believe, is the provision, in the analysis that he offers of the nature of pure aesthetic response, of a fully articulated model. All told, there are some ten distinguishable elements to this model, corresponding to the ten characteristics that he identifies as necessarily possessed by any 'pure judgement of taste'. (As my concern here is not with the subtleties of Kant's theory as a contribution to aesthetics, but only as a model in the Doctrine of Judgement, I will be brief).

(i) A pure aesthetic judgement is criterialess: 'the judgement of taste is distinguished from logical judgement by the fact that, whereas the latter subsumes a representation under a concept of the object, the judgement of taste does not subsume under a concept at all. . . . The judgement of taste is not determinable by concepts' (pp. 142-3).

(ii) Aesthetic judgements are immediate or spontaneous (pp. 55, 244, etc.). This is a consequence of (i), in that if an assertion is criterialess then, trivially, it is made without mediation of rules, principles, or judgements. And this is exactly what is meant by 'spontaneous'.

(iii) A pure judgement of taste is 'asthetisch' rather than 'logical'. In other words, despite its apparent form, the judgement 'That is beautiful' does not predicate a property of an object, but merely serves to express a response to

The Art ofJudgement 23j

it on the part of the subject.26 The response, as a feeling, is accordingly assigned to sensibility rather than understanding: 'it is not an empirical concept, but a feeling of pleasure (and so not a concept at all) that is attributed to every one by a judgement of taste' (p. 32).

(iv) As a consequence of (i) and (iii), aesthetic judgements are essentially non-cognitive: 'They do not of themselves contribute a whit to the knowledge of things.' (p. 5).

(v) That a pure judgement of taste is disinterested again follows from (i): if it is not determinable by any concepts, then a fortiori it is determinable neither by any concept of a goal or end, nor by any beliefs or thoughts peculiar to the judging subject (cf. pp. 42-50).

(vi) An aesthetic judgement is presumptively universal, in that it implicitly claims validity for all persons. Kant is usually quite clear that he intends this as a characterization of the content of the judgement: 'the beautiful is that which, apart from concepts, is represented as the object of a universal delight' (p. 50). I t is this characteristic, of course, which enables Kant to distinguish the content of a genuine aesthetic judgement ('That is beautiful') from that of a mere expression of personal feeling ('That is agreeable to me'): 'It would be ridiculous if one who plumed himself on his taste were to think of justifying himself by saying: This object . . . is beautiful for me. For if it merely pleases him, he must not call it beautiful' ( P 52).

(vii) Aesthetic judgements are also, if valid, universally valid. Kant believes that in so far as a genuinely aesthetic response is independent not only of any concept of the object, but also of 'any inclination of the subject (or any other deliberate interest)', it can, in the last analysis, depend only upon what is common to all who are capable of such a response. In which case, according to Kant, there is no possibility of a genuine aesthetic disagreement, and the claim to universal validity implicit in an aesthetic judgement is not merely presumptive, but is, in fact, warranted if the judge- ment is correct. This is why a judgement of taste 'looks for confirmation, not from concepts, but from the concurrence of others' (p. 56).

(viii) Beauty, according to Kant, is 'ascribed to the object on account of its form' (p. 67). Now judgements of taste are 'asthetisch', and we know from the Transcendental Aesthetic of the first Critique that a representation of sensibility, a perception, has both matter (the sensations which it comprises) and a form (the spatial and temporal relations in which those material elements stand to one another). Mere sensations, however, can never be

26 The comparison, hinted at here, between judgements of taste and what Kant in the Prolegomma calls 'judgements of perception' has been investigated by L. W. Beck in 'Kritische Bemcrkungen zur vcrmcintlichen Aprioritat der Geschmacksurteile', Bewusst Sein: Gerhard Funke z u eigrn, Bonn, Bouvier, 1975, pp. 369-72, and by E. Schaper in 'Epistemological Claims and Judgements of Taste', Studies in Kant 's Aesthetics, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1979,pp. 18-52.

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properly called beautiful; at best they can be agreeable. This is because, Kant argues, we have no right 'to assume that the quality of sensations is the same in all subjects' (p. 66); and so if pure judgements of taste are presumptively universal they cannot concern the matter of perception, but only its formal determination, 'which is the only determination these representations possess which admits with certainty of universal com-municability' (ibid.). And so Kant concludes, rather austerely, that the only

w

appropriate grounds for pure aesthetic pleasure are 'either figure or play. I n the latter case it is either play of figures (in space . . .), or the mere play of sensations (in time)' (ibid.).27

(ix) Aesthetic judgements are synthetic, firstly and trivially, in that they are non-analytic: that the predicate concept is not contained in the concept of the subject of such a judgement follows of course from the fact that in such a judgement the predicate is not a concept at all (cf. (iii) above). And, secondly, aesthetic judgements are synthetic in the stronger sense that they involve synthesis: 'for they go beyond the concept and even the intuition of the object, and join as predicate to that intuition . . . the feeling of pleasure (or displeasure)' (p. 145).

(x) Pure aesthetic judgements are, finally, rejective rather than deter- minative: 'If the universal (the rule, principle, or law) is given, then the judgement which subsumes the particular under it is determinative. . . . If, however, only the particular is given and the universal has to be found for it, then the judgement is simply rejectice' (p. 18).

5 . 'Lavender Mist'

As I walk into the gallery, my attention is caught by a particularly large canvas, a work of abstract expressionism, a Jackson Pollock, for example. I walk over and stand before it at what I take to be something like the optimal distance; and I look. But it remains stubbornly problematic, obstinately refusing to yield whatever sense it may have. Moving closer, or back, screwing up my eyes, tilting my head to one side or the other, attending specifically to tone, or line, movement, texture, density, or depth-none of this seems to help. I persist, however, and after a while I begin to find a pleasure in the painting that causes me to smile: it has begun to work for me-on me. And in the pleasure I feel in contemplating it, I approach, I believe, as closely as I know how to an exclusively aesthetic response.28 Ironically, it is likely to be the very things that I at first found perplexing and

27 Although austere, this doctrine is not, I shall suggest, without merit (see below, section 5 ) . 28 I t is, of course, no part of my claim that all properly so-called 'aesthetic experiences' conform to

this admittedly austere and abstract pattern. If I am right about the philosophical motivation for Kant's incursion into aesthetics, then it is quite sufficient if he has successfully characterized just one such kind of experience, however rare or untypical; for it is exclusively that kind to which his doctrine of judgement assigns a crucial role.

The Art ofJudgement 237

problematic which I now find aesthetically rewarding: tone, texture, line, movement, and so on.

But in what does this response consist? What have I now got that at first eluded me? Well, one wants to say that the painting has begun to make sense to me, or perhaps that I have begun to make sense of it. Of course it is not an interpretation, a reading, that I have achieved-and in so far as one can talk of understanding here at all, mine is certainly neither conceptual nor articulable. On the other hand, however, it seems wrong to think of my achievement, or of the change which I have undergone, as an exclusively visual or sensory one: partly because there is nothing that now strikes my eye that was not initially accessible to it; and partly because one wants to retain the crucial relevance of the very great deal of thought that was part and parcel of my coming to terms with the work. I t is often a struggle to come to terms with, say, a Pollock, and in this struggle it is by no means clear that any aspect of one's conceptual, discursive mental ability can be deemed in principle irrelevant. My contemplation has not been mindless, and yet it is notoriously difficult to characterize its product p o ~ i t i v e l y . ~ ~ Certainly that product does not seem to be a conclusion-a judgement or a thought. And if it is a feeling, it is an immensely complex one: at the most general level it has to do, for example, with the relation of parts to whole, and involves the feeling that the whole has an integrity, a point, in other words that its elements and limits are not arbitrary but comprise a mutually and internally self-determining unity. And conversely, my initial perplexity might, perhaps, be expressed by allusion to the fact that the painting's boundaries struck me as merely de facto, that its tonal vocabulary, the quality of its line, the modelling of its surface, perhaps even its sheer size, seemed to be at best externally, fortuitously related one to another. T o come to feel that such aspects are not merely co-present but belong indissoluably together, for them to strike one as, in a quite particular way, right, is the beginning of a genuinely aesthetic response to the whole which embodies them.

6. Schematizing without a concept

According to the Critique of Pure Reason, if human thought and judgement are to be capable of objectivity, then our experience must conform to the rules constitutive of the concept of an object in general. In other words, the variety of sensory states we undergo must be such as to present us with something, our understanding of which can be articulated in terms of concepts like identity, causality, substance, and the like. But if, as Hume and Kant agree, there can be no sensory state, no impression or intuition of

2g Cf. Kant's apt characterization of an aesthetic idea as 'that representation which induces much thought, yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatsoever, i.e. concept, being adequate to it, and which language, consequently, can never get quite on level terms with or render completely intelligible' (p. 176).

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identity, causality, or substance, then the question remains: what must our sensory experience be like in order for our understanding of it to be couched in terms of the concept of an object in general? What precisely is the nature of this something that we are presented with?

In the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement Kant writes: 'The regularity that conduces to the concept of an object is in fact the indispensible condition . (conditio sine qua non) of our grasping the object as a single representation and giving the manifold its determinate form' (p. 87). Of course, the claim that objectivity and rationality would be impossible if our experience failed to possess a sufficient degree of 'regularity' is hardly contentious. But it is worth considering in slightly more detail in what this regularity can consist. It cannot, for example, be taken to be an objective regularity which characterizes our sensory states, whether we know it or not. I t is not enough that my subjective experiences as a matter of fact make sense; if I am to pass judgement on them they must make sense to me. Suppose, to put it picturesquely, that God had so created my subjective states that they manifested a perfect order and coherence, but one that it quite transcended my powers to comprehend-in that case such experiences would mean nothing to me. In the last analysis it is I who must apply or withhold concepts, and if this is not to be a totally mysterious procedure, I must do so on the basis of the sense which my experience makes to me. The sense it makes is thus an ineluctably subjective sense: the significance it possesses must be essentially one of which I am aware; and yet the principle of spontaneity implies that this significance cannot be the product of conceptual determination or conformity to objective rules. It is at precisely this point that we require a new model. Its primary task will be to provide an account of subjective, non-conceptual, spontaneous significance, while none the less remaining fully compatible with the account of objectivity which (I am supposing) we already possess.

Kant is explicit about the form which this model shall take: 'The principle of taste', he writes, 'is the subjective principle of the ability to judge as such' ( P 142):

The result to be extracted from the foregoing analysis is in effect this: that everything runs up into the concept of taste as a critical faculty by which an object is estimated in reference to the free conformity to law of the imagination . . . as productive and exerting an activity of its own (as originator of arbitrary forms of possible intuitions)' (pp. 85-6).

Of course, as Kant immediately observes, 'that the imagination should be both free and of itself conformable to law, i.e. carry autonomy with it, is a contradiction'-it is, indeed, the very paradox with which we started, that of a blind rationality or objective spontaneity.

The freedom of the productive imagination, according to Kant, 'consists precisely in the fact that it schematixes without a concept' (p. 143). T o

The A r t ofyudgement 239

schematize without a concept is to discover in the diversity of sensory experience a felt unity, coherence, or order, which is non-cognitive and non- conceptual, but which is a necessary condition of the possibility of all rule-governed thought and judgement. One intuitive and accessible analogy for schematizing without a concept, I have suggested, is the successful coming to terms with a work of abstract expressionism; but the fully articulated model is couched in terms of our ability to enjoy a spontaneous, criterialess, disinterested, presumptively universal, non-cognitive, reflective feeling that certain diverse elements of experience as such belong together, that they comprise an intrinsically satisfying whole in virtue of their seeming to have a point (though without it being the case that there is some specific point which they are judged to have).30 And it is just such conceptually indeterminate, but intrinsically significant, wholes with which we must be presented if the concept of an object, indeed the whole paraphernalia of objectivity, is to be capable of application. Kant writes:

In a critique of judgement [in general], the part dealing with asthetische judgement is essentially relevant, as it alone contains a principle . . . without which the understanding could notfeel a t home in nature (p. 35).

That one should spontaneously 'feel at home in nature' is a necessary, though, indeed, subjective condition of the possibility of objective know- ledge; for it is only if I feel at home in this sense that I come into contact with phenomena that are not, so to speak, opaque or problematic for me, and which do not, therefore, require conceptualization, thought, judgement, or inference in order for me to grasp them. If this condition were not met, if, that is, phenomena were in the first instance always problematic, then the performance of some arbitrary judgement would always require the performance of some prior judgement as to its appropriateness, relevance, or warrantability. That the regressive infinity of judgements on judgements, of rules for the following of rules, can be stopped, without thereby making a mystery of my ability to judge at all, is due to the fact that at a certain point I am directly aware of an intrinsic coherence, or unity, or significance in my experience. It is because of this felt unity that the concept of an object in general can so much as find a foothold in experience. And the vicious regress is avoided because this feeling owes nothing to concepts, judge- ments, criteria, or rules.

7. A Wittgensteinzan postscript

Something more needs to be said at this point about the notion of 'intrinsic significance' we have been employing, and about the related use we have

30 According to Kant: 'We are thus left with the subjective purposiveness in the representation of an object, exclusive of an!- end (objectite or subjective), and consequentll- with the bare form of purposiveness in the representation wherebl- an object is given to us, as that which alone is capable. . . of forming the determining ground of the judgement of taste' (pp. 62-3).

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made of a species of subjective, non-discursive mental experience. Indeed, we must ask, is there even a sense in which we can legitimately talk of such things-in particular of what looks very much like a subjective experience of a meaning or significance which cannot be put into words. Isn't this the very sort of nonsense that Wittgenstein has taught us to recognize and avoid? Isn't the very notion of a 'private meaning' incoherent, the explanatory , appeal to subjective mental acts and states bankrupt? Earlier I quoted Dummett's conclusion to the effect that, because they are by nature intersubjective, 'any attempt to investigate thoughts which culminates in a study of what is in essence private, that is, of inner mental experience, must have missed its mark.' Are the Kantian considerations I have advanced in this paper susceptible to objection along such supposedly Wittgensteinian lines as these? I will conclude by suggesting, briefly, why an objection along these lines poses no threat, and why, moreover, such an objection is very far from being one to which Wittgenstein himself would have subscribed. Indeed, I shall argue to the contrary that the conclusion reached here has as much right to be called Wittgensteinian as it has Kantian.

Dummett's point may be read in two ways. On the one hand it can be construed as making the rather weak claim that an attempt to account for the objectivity (the intersubjectivity, the expressability, or the rationality) of thought which makes ineliminable appeal to subjective, private, incom- municable mental experience cannot possibly be successful. This seems uncontentious; but it poses no threat to the doctrine advanced here, which makes no claim whatsoever to account for the specifically objective aspects of thought. On the contrary, our investigation has comprised what Kant called 'a critique of the judging subject', and its result was that a quite different model is required when we turn away from the objectivity of thoughts to consider the philosophical problems associated with the possibility of acts of thinking and judging.

On the other hand, however, it is possible to read Dummett's argument as reaching a much stronger conclusion, namely that any philosophically permissible investigation of thought-whether into its objective or its subjective aspects-must eschew all reference to inner states and mental experiences. But such a conclusion would be unwarranted and, moreover, entirely implausible. And that this has seemed plausible to some is, I suggest, merely one more reflection of how a baseless 'suspicion of the subjective' has come to characterize the standpoint of much contemporary analytic philosophy.

Inner, mental experience can be assigned its own sphere in a theory of judgement-that is, without this leading to an inevitable contamination of the whole, and the consequent (incoherent) reduction of thoughts to mere 'private', solipsistic episodes internal to one consciousness. In other words, there seems no good reason why philosophical problems concerning the subjective aspects of thought cannot be investigated in their own right, why

The Art ofyudgement 24I

the resulting theory cannot be compatible with the account provided of objectivity, rationality, and the like, or why the former should not employ a fundamentally different model from the latter. That our thought conform to the rules, principles, concepts, and criteria constitutive of objectivity, but that it also be grounded in a spontaneous, blind, subjective awareness of intrinsic but inarticulable meaning-these are not conflicting requirements. On the contrary the one is a necessary condition of the other; for when I follow a rule, although ultimately I do so blindly, I do not do so mind- lessly, or merely mechanically. A middle path needs to be charted between the pessimism of the belief that all human thought is ultimately ungrounded and arbitrary, and the incoherence of the belief that it can be given a final justification in terms of the existence of objective rules for application of which we would require still further rules, and so on. This middle path avoids the mindlessness of a mechanical following of rules by taking seriously the idea that there is an art of judgement and thought; and it avoids the regressive infinity of rules by introducing the notion of an awareness of 'intrinsic', 'intransitive', or 'immediate' significance or sense. The model for this awareness is the purely aesthetic response to a work of art or other aesthetic object.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the claim that '"The sense of a proposition" is very similar to the business of "an appreciation of art"'31 is central, also, to the account that Wittgenstein provides of human thought, understanding, and meaning. Moreover, this appeal to an aesthetic model is articulated, elucidated, and justified in terms of the very notions that we have already examined in a Kantian context: spontaneity; blindness; 'feeling at home in one's experience'; subjective universality; the awareness of an intrinsic, non-conceptual, and hence inarticulable meaning; and so on. I do. not intend, within the confines of the present paper, to substantiate in detail the attribution to Wittgenstein of this admittedly somewhat unwittgensteinian- sounding constellation of ideas; instead I will trace just one line of thought that leads to the desired conclusion, that employs most of the notions referred to above, and the attribution of which to Wittgenstein is relatively unproblematic (in that it can be presented very largely in his own words).

Let us suppose that we already understand the considerations which lead Wittgenstein to conclude that, to the question 'How am I able to follow a rule?' it is right to respond: 'If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do".'32 And so, 'When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule Now in so far as one has reached bedrock, one would clearly be well advised to stop digging; and in an obvious sense these remarks signal a point beyond which, Wittgenstein believes, it is necessarily

31 L. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conrersations on Aesthetics, Psycho lo~y and Religious Belief; edited by C. Barrett, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972, p. 29.

32 Philosophtcal Inrestigations, $ 2 17. 33 Ibid. $219.

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futile to enquire. It is important to note, however, that this point is determined in part by the specific nature of the problems addressed, in other words, that the futility of further enquiry is a futility relative to the particular phenomena about which we seek an increased understanding. In the present case the phenomena in question are the intersubje~tivi ty,~~ the expressi- b i l i t ~ , ~ ~ - -and the justifiability3'j of our linguistic and conceptual acts-and it is with respect to them that at a certain point our philosophical spade is turned. This is where our account of objectivity terminates.

That this is not, for Wittgenstein, the terminus of all philosophical investigation into the nature of human thought and understanding is indicated, for example, by his observation that in understanding the symbolic expression of a thought, 'what happens is not that this symbol cannot be further interpreted, but: I do no interpreting. I do not interpret, because Ifeel at home in the present picture. . . If I see the thought symbol "from outside", I become conscious that it could be interpreted thus or thus; if it is a step in the course of my thoughts, then it is a stopping-place that is natural to me.'37

What are we to make of, and how are we to fill out, this talk of 'feeling at home', of grasping something, so to speak 'from the inside'?38 Wittgenstein himself provides a host of examples of such 'intransitive' understanding- understanding a picture, a face, a pattern, a piece of music, a poem, an attitude or posture-and his conclusion is always this: it is legitimate to talk here, non-metaphorically, of meaning and understanding; but these notions must be distinguished from the corresponding transitive ones, where something is understood in terms of something else, where one thing means another. Take, for instance, the case in which the drawing of a face strikes me as having a quite particular expression:

What goes on here is an act, as it were, of digesting it, getting hold of it, and the phrase 'getting hold of the expression of this face' suggests that we are getting hold of a thing which is in the face and different from it. I t seems we are looking for something, but we don't do so in the sense of looking for a model of the expression outside the face we see, but in the sense of sounding the thing without attention.39

This temptation to ascribe an extrinsic meaning, a transitive understanding, Wittgenstein suggests, is even stronger when,

repeating a tune to ourselves and letting it make its full impression on us, we say 'This tune says somethzng', and it is as though I had to find what it says. And yet I know that it doesn't say anything such that I might express in words or pictures

21 Phrlosophtcal Inz,esttgatrons, $5 199, 201-2, etc. Ibid. §§206,210, etc. 36 Ibid. Q Z I 7-232,etc.

37 L. Wittgenstein, Zettel, edited by G. E. A I . .4nscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. A I . .4nscombe. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1967, $5234-5 (my italics).

38 For more of this talk, see, for example, Phtlosophical Grammar, pp. 79, 165-6, and 174; The Bltre and Brown Books, pp. 158-67, 178-82; Phrlosophtcal Inz,esttgatrons, §§jzz-3 7.

39 The Bltre und Brolnn Books, p. 162.

3j

The Art ofJudgement 243

what it says. And if, recognizing this, I resign myself to saying 'It just expresses a musical thought', this would mean no more than saying 'It just expresses itself .40

Wittgenstein is quite clear that the sense or meaning, grasped non-conceptually in the case of such an intransitive understanding, cannot be put into words; and it is this aspect above all others which is likeliest to occasion suspicion that what we have here, in contravention of the constraints laid down by the private language argument, is simply nonsensical talk about 'private and incommunicable meaning'. But crucial to Wittgenstein's discussion of the incoherence of a 'private language' is the distinction between, on the one hand, declarative, descriptive uses of language and, on the other, uses of language that are merely expressive. And his conclusion is not that an experience or sensation is private if it cannot be 'put into words' or accurately described, but only if it is incapable of being expressed. If we distinguish between what can be articulated, that is, said in assertoric, descriptive language, and what can merely be expressed, in the sense in which gestures, facial expressions, and forms of behaviour can be said to express feelings and emotions, then intrinsic meaning and intransitive or aesthetic understanding will be inarticulable, certainly, but not in- expressible. They will be subjective, but by no means 'private'.41

There are those who believe that Wittgenstein's later writings manifest a suspicion of subjectivity, an exclusive concentration on rules, 'outer criteria', and objectivity, and an emphasis on what can be put into words; such people are likely to feel the attraction of Ramsey's remark: 'What you can't say you can't say-and you can't whistle it either!' I t is worth noting, however, that there exists a Wittgensteinian counter to precisely this sentiment, for he writes 'Understanding a sentence of language is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one might think.' He goes on:

What I mean is that understanding a sentence lies nearer than one thinks to what is ordinarily called understanding a musical theme. Why is just this the pattern of variation in loudness and tempo? One would like to say 'Because I know what it's all about'. But what is it all about? I should not be able to say.42

Like Kant, Wittgenstein acknowledges two kinds of understanding, the understanding whose nature is to be elucidated by what we call 'obeying a rule', and 'intransitive' understanding, the model for which is our grasp of aesthetic significance. 'Then has "understanding" two different meanings

40 Ibid., p. 166. 41 I thus reject the identification, implicit in the earlier quotation from Dummett, of 'inner, mental

experience' with what is 'prirate'. 42 Philosophical Inz~estigations, $ j27. Interestingly, this comparison between aesthetic and linguistic

understanding appears also in virtually every one of Wittgenstein's main works, see, for example, Notebooks 1914-1916, pp. 40f.; Tractatus, 3.141; Phdosophical Grammar, pp. 41, 72, and j8f.; Lectures and Conrersations on Aesthetics (etc). p. 29; The Blue and Brolnn Books, pp. 166f., 178, and 184; and Zet te l ,$$zg f . , 156ff., 161f.,and 152.

244 David Bell

here?-I would rather say that these two kinds of use of "understanding" make up its meaning, make up my concept of ~ n d e r s t a n d i n g . ' ~ ~ Both Kant and Wittgenstein, I have suggested, recognize that an essential component of an adequate philosophical account of understanding, thought, and judgement is an account of what I have called the 'subjective' aspects of our cognitive capacities. And for both philosophers, it is to our criterialess, . spontaneous, and 'blind' awareness of an intrinsic but inarticulable meaning that we must look for an understanding of the art, rather than the science, of judgement .&

Department ofPhilosophy D A V I D B E L L

University of Shefield

43 Philosophical Inrestigattons, 4 532. 44 T h e distinction between, and the need for both an (objective) science and a (subjective) art of

judgement are in fact the themes of the original introduction to the third Critique. See Kant, Ftrst Introductton to the Critique ofyudgement, trans. J . Haden, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Aterrill, 1965, passim.