apprehension of the harmony of the faculties“occurs by means of a procedure
that judgment has to carry out to give rise to even the most ordinary
experience...[The resulting] pleasure must of necessity rest on the same
conditions in everyone, because they are subjective conditions for the
possibility of cognition as such.”^64In short, same procedure of using the same structure in both cognition and
estimation, so same universality. Kant has showna priori“that aesthetic
judgments are possible,”^65 that is, that any reflective report [Urteil] that one
has found pleasure due to the harmonious free play of the cognitive faculties
in the estimation [Beurtheilung] of the object will be true or false for everyone–
intersubjectively valid–though it remains to be established whether any
particular such reportistrue or false.
This defense of premise (6) begs the question, however, in Kemal and in
Kant. It is true that only creatures who are capable of cognitive judgments
are capable of aesthetic judgments. My dog has neither a nose for beauty nor
a taste for art. But to some considerable extent, inquiry and aesthetic reflec-
tion are different activities. Seeking knowledge and freely estimating or
attentively opening oneself to the uncognized intelligibility of objects are
not the same thing. Even if these activities require the use of the same
powers of imagination and understanding, it does not follow that these
powers are usedin the same wayin these distinct activities.ContraKemal,
then, the argument does not go through; premise (6) remains dubitable.
Even if, however, he fails to establish that the transcendental deduction is
sound, Kemal does manage to point toward rich accounts of the roles of art
and art criticism in culture. After claiming (mistakenly) that the deduction is
sound and that Kant has shown that intersubjectively valid judgments of
taste“are transcendentally possible,”^66 Kemal further notes that“we do not
as yet know how to confirm in any actual instance that ours is an aesthetic
judgment.”^67 This is exactly right. I can be wrong in claiming (overtly) that
I have freely estimated the object. That is, when I report that I have experi-
enced pleasure due to the harmonious free play of the cognitive faculties in
my estimation of an object, I may be wrong. I experienced pleasure, but it did
not have that cause. I might rather have taken pleasure in the fact that my
(^64) Ibid., p. 86, citingCritique of the Power of Judgment, §39.
(^65) Ibid. (^66) Ibid., p. 88. (^67) Ibid.
Identifying and evaluating art 193