348 Kant: A Biographyheaven or on earth, or under the earth.... This commandment can alone explain the
enthusiasm which the Jewish people, in their moral period, felt for their religion....
The same holds good of our representation of the moral law and our native capacity
for morality.^67
Whatever the feeling of the sublime contributes to the ideas, it does not pro¬
vide them with graven images.
Kant compares his "transcendental exposition" of aesthetic judgment
to Burke's "physiological" account of it, just as he had compared his Meta¬
physical Deduction in the first Critique to the physiological account given
by Locke; and he is quick to point out that such an empirical deduction
may be a first step toward a critique of taste, but that is not sufficient. Only
if we assume that there is an a priori component to judgments of taste, can
we really pass judgment on the judgment of others about what is beautiful
or sublime.
If there is such an a priori component, then, in the Kantian scheme of
things, we also need a deduction of some sort. But he makes short shrift of
this demand, claiming that the exposition already given of the judgments
of the sublime in nature "was at the same time their Deduction."^68 Only
the judgments of taste need a deduction. Since an objective principle of taste
is impossible, given the peculiarities of judgments of taste, this deduction
cannot be objective either. "Although critics, as Hume says, are able to rea¬
son more plausibly than cooks, they must still share the same fate."^69 What
can be proved is subjective necessity, no more but also no less. We must show
how a judgment is possible which, on the one hand, is based exclusively
on an individual's own feeling of pleasure in some object but which is, on
the other hand, imputed to every possible observer of the object as a nec¬
essary attendant to it. This necessity can only be based on "that subjective
factor which we must presuppose in all men (as requisite for a possible ex¬
perience in general)."^70 This is to be found in the communicability of all
sensations, and thus in the sensus communis.
Kant elucidates what the fundamental propositions of this sensus com¬
munis are by referring his readers to three maxims of the common human
understanding (or common sense), namely (1) to think for oneself, (2) to
think from the standpoint of everyone else, and (3) always to think con¬
sistently. While it is not clear whether the remarks on nature and art that
follow and round out Kant's discussion in the Analytic are helpful to
critics, the critics certainly would be better off today, if they followed these
principles.
The Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment is very short (just five paragraphs).