Don’t be fooled by the slender look of this book–despite being only ninety-five pages long (without notes), it is a remarkably thorough appraisal of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.  Friedlander does an outstanding job of showing how aesthetic judgment mediates between some of the fundamental dichotomies of Modernity. Though not for casual readers of Kant (assuming such persons even exist!), Friedlander’s elucidation is uniquely accessible to scholars and students alike. He insists that aesthetic judgment illuminates both “the significance of artistic and critical endeavors of romanticism and modernism,” and he succeeds in doing precisely this–namely, demonstrating how a dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity, art and nature, the individual and the communal,  etc., is made possible in the mediating power of aesthetic  judgment (xi, my italics). Essentially, Friedlander makes good on his promise to show how “the beautiful engages the mind’s faculties,” characterizes “what in the object is revealed by this play of the faculties,” and defends the overall unity of the Third Critique as “the completion of [Kant’s] critical enterprise” (39 and 6, respectively, his italics). 

Anyone familiar with the Third Critique knows that Kant accounts for the intelligibility of beauty by analyzing judgment–arguing that, when it comes to judging something as beautiful, it is not merely a matter of perception or individual experience.  Or, as Friedlander puts it, aesthetic judgment is “not an immediate reflexive relation of the subject to itself that closes it off from the world. Rather, [the judging subject] is the very sense, the feeling, that a faculty, a power, is revealed in judging that becomes the measure, the internal standard for the rightness of the judgment” (19-20). Another scholar once referred to this as, “a subjective certainty.” [Reiner Schurman, New School for Social Research, 1992.] If that is so, what makes this possible? More specifically, how can the experience of “pleasure,” what “pleases” or is “agreeable,” be anything other than subjective if not deeply personal? The simple response is, “Mediation”–namely, the means by which “a bridge is constructed between two wholly distinct realms” (10). Moreover, “with judgment, each of those two sides, the subjective and the objective, gets a field of its own” (11). What makes this possible is the activity of the imagination, insofar as it opens up a space for such mediation, for “beauty exists only in the space opened by the subject in being responsive to the object” (21).

In addition, Friedlander consistently reminds us that, for Kant, the aesthetic in no way refers to a realm beyond nature and freedom (or culture). Rather, “It is to be conceived as a mediating field” between the two (74, my italics). Aesthetic judgment not only mediates between these but dualities such as, “free and dependent beauty, ideal beauty and the pure judgment of taste, the genius and the judge of taste, natural beauty and art,” and so forth (12). The reader is also repeatedly reminded that judgment is not a matter of knowledge, involving the application of rules, but a capacity that must be exercised“–it is a “distinction between what can be learned and what demands talent” (2-3, his italics).  However, Kant and Friedlander continue to insist that the beautiful “pleases universally.” So, once again, how is this possible–that is, how is “subjective universality” possible, especially “without an objective subject matter to agree upon”? (24)

What is first required is “attunement”–that is, one must “be attuned to the potential in the singularity of beauty” (25). This does not mean we all respond identically to a work of art. On the contrary, “the multiplicity of takes…is precisely adequate to its nature” (26). Though attunement is a necessary condition it is not, in itself, sufficient. This is where “a community of taste” comes in–one in which “there is agreement in being equally attuned to the singularity of beauty and thus attuned to one another by way of the beautiful” (26, my italics). This is what enables judgment to avoid becoming lost in a “stream of private associations” thereby losing its potential for “universal agreement” (42-43). In other words, taste allows us to objectively say when beauty “pleases” or is agreeable by grounding taste in the unity of the senses recognizing that “what it is that is beautiful, is revealed by the gathering power of beauty” (43). Differently put, “[The sensus communis] is the capacity to sense the inner systematic relatedness of that imaginative involvement in the object experienced” (43, his italics).

So, there we have it: A systematic account of the beautiful as that which engages the subject and is found in the act of judging. This aesthetic dialectic should surprise no one who has read Kant’s moral philosophy in which there is a similar kind of mediation involving duty–one in which duty is both the reason for the act (motive), manifest in the act itself, and performed for its own sake (end). Thus, a bridge is constructed between means and ends, the judging subject and the object of judgment. Again, they are brought together while remaining distinct, with each side getting a “field of its own” (11).This focus on the dialectical systematicity of Kant’s work, whether it involves the beautiful or the dutiful, is something that both intrigues Friedlander and provides a guiding thread for this compelling text. After discussing the horizon of mediation in terms of the “the beautiful” (Part I), Friedlander does the same for morality and the “dynamically sublime” (Part II), “nature and art” (Part III), and “extremes of judgment” (Part IV).

In Part III, Friedlander shows how Kant “explains away the dilemma of the work of art” by explaining how the concept of “genius” mediates the fundamental tension between nature and culture. (66) This is possible because, although genius is a “capacity which can never be lucid about itself,” it “provides the rule in art” (66). However, we must be careful not to confuse this “rule” with knowledge or some sort of rubric which can be taught or learned. Rather, genius “is possible only as a gift of nature, as a talent” and “does not know what it is doing” (66, my italics). On the other hand, it provides “a gathering point or standard for taste” (67). As Gadamer puts it, for Kant, “the work of art was, by definition, a work of genius.” [Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 94.] What makes genius the ground of mediation is that, “the work of art truly contains nature through the agency of genius” (67, his italics). More concretely, the distinctive “genius” in a work of art “was proved by the fact that it offered to pleasure and contemplation an inexhaustible object of lingering attention and interpretation” (Gadamer, 94).

Friedlander makes similar claims about “taste” and the work of art to show how it too mediates between nature and culture. For instance: “There are two threats in the constitution of culture”– first, there is “the resilience of brute nature;” second, is “too much refinement, to the point of utter artificiality” (71). What taste allows us to do is, “remain true to the innocence of nature” and “be a force in the constitution of culture.” Thus, “the work of art teaches us that nature is always there, always available to put to shame our artificial excesses” (71). Lastly, after formulating an “antinomy of taste”–one side stressing its “natural character,” the other its “intellectual side” (73)–Friedlander concludes Part III with a hermeneutic circle of sorts. One which is suggested when he invites the reader to consider “an intuitive intellect” that “thinks by way of the primacy of the intuitive whole to its parts.” Specifically, “In acting we have from the start an idea of what we ultimately want, for which we determine the means to best achieve it in given conditions. But such primacy of the whole over its parts requires for us the concept of an end” (76-77, his italics). Here, we find both the teleological and systematic character of Kant’s work.

Finally, when discussing concepts like talent, taste, genius, objectivity, universality, and so forth, scholars are often accused of elitism. Is this accurate or fair? While Friedlander doesn’t directly address this problem, it is a common charge. In fact, philosopher Richard C. Richards asks this very question in the context of his work on humor. After describing and analyzing “the sense of humor,” he explicitly wonders whether his account is “elitist.” To which he immediately replies, “A well-developed sense of the aesthetic takes effort and time,” as does “a well-developed sense of humor” (Richards, 145). I believe Friedlander would concur. I would also argue that both of these “senses” are worth cultivating.

In sum, Friedlander has clearly and elegantly shown how aesthetic judgment is neither objective and absolute nor subjective and relative or, rather, that it operates in the space between these realms. And, there is a unique sort of beauty in the activity of that very dialectic–something we can thank Friedlander for illuminating!

© 2015 Camille Atkinson

Camille Atkinson, PhD, Bend, OR