because it is the component in any judgment that signals the subject’sactof
judging”^62 as opposed to merely reacting, as in a wince.
Once we see this, Kemal claims, the argument goes through all at once. The
claim that cognitions are communicable is fairly weak, but defensiblea priori.
Subjects need not be able to know all the same things; they must simply have
the same structural kind of judging consciousness–an apperceptively unified
one. This makes them one and all the kinds of being who are capable of using
evidence to distinguish objective successions or causally determined sequences
of events outside their control from subjective successions. This is all premise
(1) claims, and it isa prioriknowable (if anything in Kant is).
Second, we do not need to use premise (2) to get to premise (3); we do not
need to make a causal inference that the relevant subjective conditions in us
are similar. That which is required in any subject to make any genuine
judgment possible–apperceptive unity–must be in any judging subject.
So premise (3) survives asa prioriknowable without relying on premise (2). As
Kemal puts it,“the [necessary, formal] subjective conditions for judging must
be present in all [judging] subjects.”^63 Once we see this, worries about
whether our underlying wiring, hence our propensities to feel pleasure when
estimating or freely reflecting, might be different, even though we could
functionally know the same things, are beside the point. Those worries are
aimed at a causal construal of the role in judging of the subjective formal
conditions of judging, but that construal is mistaken.
So far Kemal’s reconstruction of the argument is both textually faithful to
Kant’s very compressed presentation of it in sections 38 and 39 and to Kant’s
theory of judgmental consciousness and judgmental acts in theCritique of
Pure Reason, and its premises are plausibly knowablea priori. But what about
the identity claim in premise (6)? Can we have that? Kemal argues that we
can. The subjective formal conditions for judging are usedin the very same way
in both cognitive judgments and aesthetic estimations. Subjects must freely
pay attention and in doing so discern order. In Kemal’s words,
If we can judge by discerning order and thereby can gain [cognitive] experience
and communicate knowledge, then we can judge by discerning order and
can gain a harmony of the faculties [in free play]. As Kant describes it, our(^62) Salim Kemal,Kant’s Aesthetic Theory: An Introduction(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992),
p. 82; emphasis added.
(^63) Ibid.
192 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art