The Lie of Time: Genuine Aesthetic Disagreement in Kant's Critical Philosophy Público
Slover, Christopher (Spring 2021)
Abstract
My dissertation explores the possibility of “genuine aesthetic disagreement” in Kant’s critical philosophy. Genuine aesthetic disagreement occurs when two individuals issue opposing but equally authoritative evaluations of the same object, one calling it beautiful, the other ugly, but both possessing a transcendental right to demand the assent of the other. After showing Kant’s aesthetics to presuppose the possibility of this sort of conflict, I unravel its surprising consequences for human experience. For Kant, judgments about beauty and ugliness are grounded in the feeling of the very cognitive processes by which each individual gives transcendental structure to her objective world. The possibility that two people could ever genuinely disagree about what is and is not beautiful indicates a catastrophic schism in cognition and so in the objective world itself: the way the world is from one subjective standpoint is incompatible with the way it is from another. My dissertation exposes this schism and elaborates its ramifications.
I begin by proving the apparently trivial conditional that, if it is possible to judge objects beautiful or ugly at all, then genuine disagreement about these judgments must also be possible. To establish this point, I pit the constraints objective validity against those of what Kant calls “subjective” validity. According to Kant, while judgments of taste (claims about beauty or ugliness) demand agreement from everyone, they do not identify cognitive traits of their objects. Beauty is never an objective property, as, say, ‘redness’ sometimes is, but we still insist on the agreement of everyone when we attribute it. Examining the conditions of objective validity laid out in the Critique of Pure Reason, I establish that, under normal circumstances, any judgment with a legitimate claim to subjective validity would have to be objectively valid as well. It is a downstream consequence of Kant’s famous subordination of objectivity to normativity that a subjectively valid judgment escapes objective validity only if an incompatible, but equally authoritative, judgment on the same topic may be made from a different subjective standpoint. I may legitimately demand your agreement when I call an object beautiful, without inadvertently attributing beauty to that object as a property, only if you may call it ugly with an equal right to demand agreement from me.
The possibility of genuine aesthetic disagreement, I go on show, requires cognition to structure experience in different and even incompatible ways from different subjective standpoints, indicating a transcendental schism dividing each of us from the others. I devote the rest of the dissertation to the study of this divide, ultimately locating its source in the fine-grained structure of “aesthetic ideas”—the representations that ground all judgments of taste. Just like their more widely discussed counterparts, ideas of reason, aesthetic ideas are necessary to the transcendental picture, even though they do not provide cognition: if we did not represent aesthetic ideas in some way, then experience itself would cease to be possible. Whereas representing a given object under an idea of reason involves conceiving it as a noumenal unity to which its sensible appearance will never be adequate, I argue that representing that same object under an aesthetic idea involves taking it as a sensible manifold whose multiplicity may never be consolidated under a concept.
The contrary interpretations that arise with respect to aesthetic objects, I go on to contend, constitute baseline subject-perspectives on the world from which distinct individuals originally gain the capacity to dispute with one another rationally. It is an essential, and not an accidental, fact about subjectivity that distinct individuals hold at least some commitments that are incompatible with those of everyone else. This transcendental schism of each with all the others is not only what first gives rise to “others” worthy of the name; it is also part of what makes the cognitive game of giving and asking for reasons originally possible (to borrow Sellars’s famous phrase). If individuals were not transcendentally incompatible with one another, each making claims the others at least implicitly deny, then the very idea of a “reason,” and so ultimately of an “object,” would never be possible. Hence, I conclude, genuine aesthetic disagreement plays a necessary role in the transcendental structure of objective, rational, conceptually contentful experience.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction
I. Overview: Genuine Aesthetic Disagreement 1
II. Taste, Aesthetic Conflict, and Transcendental Idealism 2
III. The Reason for Rational Reconstruction: A Spirit of Respect 3
IV. The Necessity of Taste: What is Cognitive Free Play? 5
V. Transcendental Mythology: The Plunge into Time-Difference 7
VI. Chapter Summary 10
Part One. Aesthetic Conflict and Cognition: Reconstructing Self-Consciousness
Chapter One. Taste and Genuine Aesthetic Disagreement:
The Cost of Transcendental Idealism 12
I. The Taxonomy of Taste 16
1. Two Judgments on a Painting 16
2. The Logical Forms of CJ and JT: Affirmative, Singular, Categorical, Assertoric 18
3. Quality: Disinterested (CJ), Disinterested (JT) 20
4. Quantity: Subjectively Universal (CJ), Subjectively Universal (JT) 22
5. Relation: Purposiveness With a Purpose (CJ), Purposiveness of Without a Purpose (JT) 25
6. Modality: Necessary (CJ), Necessary (JT) 27
7. Results of the Structure 28
II. Transcendental Idealism: The Priority of Normative Attitudes 29
1. The Bridge to Transcendental Idealism 30
2. Transcendental Idealism: The Basic Position 30
3. The Conceptuality of Normativity 32
4. All Subjectively Universal Norms are (Ought to Be) Concepts 35
5. Subjective Universality is Instituted by a Normative Attitude 40
III. The Necessary Possibility of Genuine Aesthetic Disagreement 44
1. The Attitude of Subjective Universality vs. The Status of Conceptuality 45
2. Inhibiting the Institution of Concepts 48
3. The Necessary Possibility of Genuine Aesthetic Disagreement 51
IV. Conclusion: Genuine Aesthetic Disagreement and the Differend 53
1. The Danger of Taste, the Range of ‘Us’ 53
2. The Differend and the Undecidability of Genuine Aesthetic Disagreements 56
Chapter Two. Apperception and the Understanding: The Semantogenic Process of Inferential Synthesis 59
I. The Problem of a priori Synthesis and the Deduction of the Categories 61
1. The Real Problem of Pure Reason 61
2. The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories 65
II. An Inferentialist Semantics: What Do We Understand When We Understand? 74
1. The Priority of the Propositional: Action and Responsibility 74
2. From Responsibility to Inferential Unity: How We Differ from Parrots 77
3. The Inferential Role of Apperception 81
4. Conceptual Correctness and the Categories as Metalogical Rules of Inference in General 84
III. The Semantogenic Force of Inference and Apperception 86
1. The Inferential Articulation of the Sensible 87
2. Sellars and Material Inference 89
3. The Semantogenic Force of Material Inference 93
IV. Conclusion: What is Apperception? 95
Chapter Three. Material Incompatibility, Sensible Contents,
and the Faculty of the Imagination 98
I. The Inferential Force of Sensible Contents 99
1. The Problem of Material Inference 100
2. Space, Time, and Contrariety: What are Sensible Contents? 101
3. Material Incompatibility and the Quasi-Semantogenic Force of Contrariety 105
4. Incompatibility and Inference: The Inferential Force of Sensible Contents 108
II. Imagination and Material Incompatibility 110
1. The Necessity of a Faculty of Imagination 110
2. Imagination in the A Deduction 112
3. The Reproductive Primacy of Contrariety 115
4. Images and the Movement of Repulsion and Attraction 117
5. Imagination Bridges and the Reproduction of Compatibles 119
III. Conclusion: What is Cognition? 125
Chapter Four. Reality and the Material Supplement: What are Judgments of Taste? 129
I. Error and Reality: The Transcendental Solution 130
1. Transcendental Idealism and the Problem of Reality 131
2. The Experience of Error: A Hegelian Account 133
3. From Hegel to Kant: Error as the Path to Transcendence 135
II. The Transcendental Ground of Error: The Ideal and Material Supplements 138
1. The Byproducts of Experience 139
2. How do the Supplements Ground Error and Reality? 143
III. From Error to Beauty: Representing the Supplements 146
1. Reason and the Ideal Supplement 146
2. Taste and the Material Supplement 147
3. Decentralization, Dissemination, and Harmonization 152
4. The Pleasure of Cognitive Free Play 157
IV. Conclusion: Taste and the Irreducibility of Genuine Aesthetic Disagreement 160
Part Two. Transcendental Mythology: Time-Difference and the Simulation of Subjectivity
Chapter Five. Aesthetic Ideas and The Deschematism: The Derivation of Time-Difference 164
I. Aesthetic Ideas and the Supersensible Ground of the Subject 165
1. The Three Defenses of Subjective Universality 165
2. The Antinomy of Taste 166
3. Aesthetic Ideas 170
4. Two Peculiarities 172
II. From Aesthetic Ideas to Absolute Time: The Taxonomy of Absolute Intuition 174
1. Is an Absolute Intuition Mortal or Divine? 174
2. Is Absolute Intuition Pure or Empirical? 176
3. Is Absolute Intuition Spatiotemporal or Purely Temporal? 177
III. The Deschematism: From Time-Determinations to Time-Differences 179
1. Kant is Not Serious: Preparing the Deschematism 179
2. The General Procedure of the Deschematism 181
3. Deschematizing Quantity 181
4. Deschematizing Quality 182
5. Deschematizing Relation 183
6. Deschematizing Modality 185
IV. The Derivation of Time-Difference 186
1. The Manifold as Manifold 186
2. Absolute Intuition as the “Element” of an Absolute Manifold 188
3. Time-Difference 190
V. Conclusion: The Mythic Ground of Subjectivity 192
Chapter Six. The First Potency: The Essence and Expression of Time-Difference 196
I. From Absolute Difference to Other-Positing: The Essence of Time-Difference 198
1. Time-Differences are Absolute Differences 199
2. From the Absolute to the Essential: The Aporia of Time-Difference 200
3. Other-Positing and the Being-of-Itself of Time-Difference 202
4. Fichte and the Ontological Character of Other-Positing 206
5. Heidegger and the Appropriative Character of Other-Positing 208
6. Three Peculiarities: Other Time-Differences, Manifoldness, and Intensity 209
II. From Other- to Self-Positing: Transitivity, Reciprocity, Reflexivity 212
1. The Transitivity of Other-Positing 213
2. The Reciprocity of Other-Positing 214
3. The Reflexivity of Other-Positing 219
III. Absolute Positing: The Adequation of the Essence 220
1. The Fractal Structure of Time-Difference: Self-Positing Entails Other-Positing 221
2. The Structure of Absolute Positing 222
3. The Five Traits of Absolute Positing 226
IV. Conclusion: The Definition and Fourfoldness of Absolute Positing 230
Chapter Seven. The Chronicle of Sensibility:
Meat, Eternal Return, and Ontological Laughter 233
I. From Positing to Givenness: Rethinking the Essence and its Expression 234
1. On Sensibility as a Faculty: What is Material Expression? 234
2. Fore-Positing and Making-Past: From Essence as Form to the History of Beyng 238
3. Expropriation: Essential Expression as the Expression of Material History 240
4. Aristophanes and Ontological Laughter: From Positing to Givenness 243
II. Eternal Return and Meat: Thinking the Aesthetic Thought 249
1. Eternal Return: The Material Expression of an “Object” 249
2. Meat: The Perfection of Eternal Return 257
3. Laughter and the Aesthetic Thought 261
Chapter Eight. The Second Potency: Permanent Revolution and the Imagination 267
I. From Adequation to Alienation: The Other Side of the Absolute 268
1. Review of the First Potency 268
2. The Birth of Matter: Equivalence and Indifference 271
3. Alienation: From Essence to Form 273
4. Reflection: The Performance of the Form 275
5. Components of Reflection: Reflecting-for-Self, Being Reflected-for-Other 276
II. The Dialectic of Reflection: Permanent Revolution 278
1. The Basic Structure of Reflection 279
2. The Ontological Sink: Annihilation and Reproduction 283
3. Permanent Revolution: The Process of the Second Potency 286
III. Imagination: The Performative Universal, the Origin of Law 291
1. Trotsky and Permanent Revolution 291
2. Time-Difference and the Reproductive Function of the Imagination 293
3. Time-Difference and the Reflective Function of the Imagination 294
4. Time-Difference and Purposiveness: The Performative Universal 296
5. Conclusion: Time-Difference and the Origin of Law 300
Chapter Nine. The Third Potency:
(De)construction and the Understanding (The Lie of Time) 302
I. Transition to the Third Potency: From Reflection to Construction 304
1. Review of the Second Potency 304
2. Two Standpoints: Universal and Singular 306
3. From Reflection to Construction: Why is a Third Potency Necessary? 308
II. The Construction of Hierarchy: The Regime of the Rule 311
1. Five Traits of Asymmetric Reflection: The Conditional Revolution 311
2. The Origin of Hierarchy 313
3. Iteration and the Definition of the Third Potency 317
III. (De)construction: The End of Time 319
1. The Mutual Incompatibility of All Time-Differential Hierarchies 319
2. The Relation of Mutual Instigation 321
3. The Five Stages of Counter-Construction: Redescribing the Universal 323
4. Derrida, De(construction), and the Feeling of Moral Threat 327
IV. The Lie of Time: Undecidability and the Stratagem of Subjectivity 333
1. Freud, Kafka, and the Point of Undecidability 334
2. The Simulation of Subjectivity 337
Chapter Ten. A Sketch of Subjectivity:
Politics, Reason, and Genuine Aesthetic Disagreement 341
I. The Faculties of a Subject-Perspective: Understanding, Imagination, and Sensibility 342
1. Reviewing the Processes of Simulation 342
2. Transcendental Faculties 346
II. Politics and Paranoia: The Sociality of Subjectivity 347
1. Disinterestedness, Exposure, and Paranoia: Why are there Other Subject-Perspectives? 348
2. Proverbs for Paranoids: Pynchon and the Principles of Politics 353
III. Common Ground: Categories and the Space of Reasons 359
1. The Universal Ground 359
2. Hierarchy and the Categories 360
3. From the Feeling of Threat to Rational Respect 364
4. The Thing-In-Itself and The Social Contract 366
5. The Space of Reasons 370
6. The Reason for Space: Irreducible Incompatibility and “Social Distancing” 373
IV. Genuine Aesthetic Disagreement: The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Artistic 375
1. The Necessity of Simulation, Reconfirmed 376
2. Revisiting the Judgment of Taste 378
3. Deciding the Undecidable: How are Genuine Aesthetic Disagreements Possible? 381
4. The Sublime and the Artistic 384
Works Cited 388
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